The swing stood beneath an old hawthorn tree, and during May, the small white circular petals of the tree’s flowers drifted down like confetti, settling over everything below. Adele would lie there, undisturbed, while hundreds of delicate petals collected in her teacup, in her lap, in the crooks of her folded chubby arms, on her eyelids, and in her bright red hair. Several times Cathy had looked out late in the evening and seen her mother sitting on the swing, her head tilted toward a dark or a moonlit sky, with the petals falling silently over her pyjamas and bathrobe.
“The Abominable Snow Mother,” she said quietly to Richard, who peered over her shoulder one evening.
“One too many adjectives, Cath,” he said, continuing down the hall.
On the evenings when she was home alone, caught in the grip of the stillness, Cathy took to eating bowls of puffed rice for dinner because the rice slid silently into the bowl and didn’t crunch when she chewed. She carried the bowls up to her room, where she sat on the foot of her bed. From there she looked out the window at the falling summer twilight, or the nearly impenetrable winter darkness, watching the road, waiting to spot the slow-blinking yellow turn signal of her father’s approaching car.
She always wished that there were some way to warn him, to tell him that tonight wasn’t a good night to come home, that it had happened again or that the silence from yesterday or the day before still hadn’t gone away. For years, she had imagined signalling to him somehow, warning him away. Hundreds of times, she had imagined exactly how the car would crawl past the end of the driveway without stopping, how the red tail lights would disappear into the dark.
But she never spoke to him about a secret signal. He would never risk being found working in league with her against Adele. Her father never resisted Adele. All her life, Cathy had witnessed her mother repeatedly beating him across the head and shoulders with one of the throw cushions from the living room couch, screeching at the top of her lungs that he was a fool and a failure. With each blow, brown and white chicken feathers jetted out of burst seams in the cushion, moving in curious contrast to the surrounding violence, gently drifting to resting spots atop silk lampshades and in the crannies in the ornate frame of the mirror that hung above the couch. Her father barely ever even raised a hand to shield himself. Instead, he simply removed his glasses and sat still, with his eyes lowered to the floor.
Cathy couldn’t remember a time when she didn’t want to run and wrap herself around her father’s head to spare him the blows. But as a small child, she had learned the one and only rule of engagement—you never, ever challenged Adele. And so she would walk past her father’s bowed head, go up to her room, and close the door against the horror. Afterwards, she would watch for a moment when she could climb up into his lap and lay her head on the soft cotton of his shirt and feel the warmth of his body. And as long as Adele wasn’t around, he would let her stay there as long as she liked. But then, one day, he had suddenly said, “No,” and pushed her away. She looked up in time to see his eyes flash up to the doorway. Her mother was just stepping into the room.
“Get outside and ride your bike,” she hollered. “You’re too big to be sitting in your father’s lap. That’s for babies. Get going. And you! What are you trying to encourage, huh? Keeping that child a baby until she’s thirty years old, sitting around on your lap like a pet, for God’s sake. If you want something to moon over get yourself a dog.”
From that day forward, her father either shooed her away or made himself inaccessible behind his newspaper. She had become just one more danger to him, like mud tracked in on the carpets.
Cathy never stopped trying to win him back, though. On nights when she could hear her mother snoring loudly from behind a closed door, she often tiptoed through the house to meet her father at the back door. It pained her greatly to see how tentatively he stepped through the laundry room door at nine-thirty in the evening, shoulders drooping, a pitiful uncertainty about him as he tried to gauge whether or not he was welcome in his own home that night. In silence, she helped with his coat, took his damp gloves and set them on the hot water tank, held his grey fedora while he bent over to take off his rubbers. Too often, after removing his shoes, loosening his tie, and finding the bedroom door resolutely closed against him, she would see him return quietly to the kitchen to stand alone in the wedge of yellow light that sliced into the dark room from the open fridge and eat a piece of cheddar cheese and drink a glass of milk. And it was there, as she asked in a whisper if there was anything else that she could get for him, that his beseeching blue eyes found her.
“I can’t take too much more of this,” he’d say, in a low, unhappy voice. And when he’d stop chewing and turn and look directly at her a knife would slice through her heart. Every time he came home late to find the house shrouded in a dark silence, without any supper set aside for him, she felt as if she’d let him down. No matter what the catalyst had been, she felt as if she should have somehow been able to prevent her mother’s rage.
“I can make you a tuna sandwich, Dad, instead of just that piece of cheese? And a nice cup of tea?”
“I can feel tachycardia starting up again,” he’d say, turning back to stare into the open fridge.
The first time he had used the word “tachycardia” she’d been eleven years old and hadn’t known what it meant. But she had looked it up, painstakingly substituting each vowel with another until she hit upon the correct spelling, and now she knew that it meant an irregular heartbeat. She also knew by the lifelong absence of a paternal grandfather and several uncles that the men in her father’s family did not live into old age.
“Your grandfather was dead and buried of a heart attack long before you were even thought about, missy,” her mother had told her. “Nobody in that family has ever made it past sixty-five. So get used to it.”
She knew the story about her grandfather calling the house the night he died. It was before Richard was born. Her father said he could only hear gasping on the other end of the line. But he recognized the sound from having heard it before. That’s how he knew to call the ambulance. When her parents got to her grandfather’s house, the ambulance was just pulling out of the driveway, so they followed it to the hospital. Her grandfather died four hours later, at the age of sixty-four.
For years, Cathy had been counting and recounting the number of years that remained between the present day and her father’s sixty-fifth birthday. At night, before falling asleep, she added sixty-five to her father’s birthdate over and over again, never able to be confident that she had added the numbers correctly. According to her calculations, he would turn sixty-five in 1985. She would be thirty-seven by then. Richard would be forty. But her father could die anytime between now and then. If he lived to his maximum age, he had twenty-two years left. That was a little over two decades, but it was spread across three decades: the rest of the sixties, all of the seventies, and half of the eighties. Medical science might have time to make a breakthrough and be able to save him. Or she might.
For most of her life, Cathy had been preparing herself to outwit death and save her father from his inherited fate. For years she had been watching him, secretly staring intently at the side of his face in church on Sundays, or when she found him asleep in a chair at home, studying him for any slight change.
“Your grandfather’s blood was so thick the night he died they could hardly get it up the needle,” her mother had said. “Saw it with my own two eyes. Black as tar.”
Cathy was convinced that thick dark blood would be visible in the skin, and that she had come to know her father’s skin so intimately she would notice it darkening even before he did. But her hope of saving her father faded on the evenings when he stood drinking milk by the light of the fridge and she saw how he had aged. Lately she had noticed that, although he was only forty-three, the flesh at the base of his throat was beginning