“Was I ever on a plane, Mommy?” His voice was New Jersey through and through: evva onna plane.
“Ayj, you know you weren’t,” she replied. “Did you say hello to your uncle Jamie?”
“No.”
“Why not?”
“He said the F-word.”
Deirdre exhaled wearily. “Off to a great start.”
“It was self-defense!” I threw my arms apart, exaggerating a plea for mercy, trying to keep things light. “I was attacked by the rear end of this high-octane death machine.” I turned around and looked at AJ. “Come on, kid. Don’t give your mother any ammunition against me.”
Deirdre sighed again. “Just watch your mouth around him, Jamie.”
AJ had already grown since the Christmas photo Deirdre and her husband, Andy, had mailed me; dressed in a shirt and a tie and framed by an evergreen wreath, he’d seemed prim and well behaved. He looked more playful in person, rolling a multicolored rubber ball from hand to hand, but I guessed he was kept pretty tight under Deirdre’s thumb. “You can fly on a plane to California. That’s where I live,” I said to him.
“I don’t know if I’m allowed.”
“You can go when you’re ten,” Deirdre said.
“That’s two times my age,” AJ protested.
“He has Andy’s knack for numbers,” Deirdre whispered.
“Five years is a long time. We’ll work on her, AJ.” His eyes twinkled back—a lovely moment, a little reward for my efforts to befriend him, but one that evaporated quickly as Deirdre spoke again.
“You’re still smoking.”
“I’ve cut back quite a bit,” I said.
“Cut back isn’t the same as quit.” She sounded like a mother lecturing to a teenager—like our mother, who’d once caught us sneaking cigarettes in the attic. How old were we then? Mom died when I was seventeen and Dee was fifteen; this would have been a couple years before. I’d taken the heat that day, “confessing” that I’d pressured Dee, when in fact it had been little sister who wanted to get in on big brother’s bad habit. The whole episode had ended in some kind of punishment for me when Dad got home.
“Look, I’m a very civilized smoker,” I said. “I sit next to an open window when I smoke in my own apartment. I’m not some chimney you have to tolerate under your roof.”
“You’re not staying under my roof.”
“Where am I staying?” But I knew before I’d completed the question: at my father’s house. About a half mile ago we hadn’t turned right at the middle school, which would have taken us to where Deirdre, Andy, and AJ lived on the other side of Greenlawn. Instead we had continued straight on, toward the house where we grew up.
“I need you to keep an eye on Nana,” she said.
Our grandmother had been living with our father, her only son, for the past few years, taking care of him through his illness. I had no idea what state I’d find her in, what kind of help she needed. I tried to remember the last news I’d gotten about Nana, in one of Deirdre’s monthly phone calls. “How is she?”
“Well, she’s eighty-five years old, and she just watched her son die,” she said, turning the van into the driveway. “Think about it.”
A tightness took hold of my stomach, the awful feeling of returning to a place reverberating with old hostility. The yard looked barren. The spindly oak tree that had stood near the sidewalk was gone, opening up the view to the house—two stories and an attic covered in pale, sooty shingles. The place had always looked its best in the summer, surrounded by green grass, leafy oaks, flowering honeysuckle and azalea bushes. In the winter it resembled some kind of Gothic rooming house, all cold doorknobs and creaky floorboards, a block of grayish white not so different from the grayish white winter sky above it. I thought of what I’d find inside: canned beer in the fridge, a thermostat not turned up high enough, lights flipped off in every empty room. The thrifty way Teddy Garner kept house. Then I remembered what I wouldn’t find: Teddy—my father—at the center of it.
For years everyone had referred to my father’s condition as Alzheimer’s, though it wasn’t exactly that. He suffered from a particularly virulent form of what the doctors labeled nonspecific dementia, akin to Alzheimer’s but ultimately not diagnosable without a brain biopsy—something my father, with his fear and loathing of the medical establishment, did not allow. The label made no difference; the nerve connections corroding inside his brain, nonspecifically, from the time he was in his mid-fifties, made all the difference in the world. He was dead before he turned sixty.
I had ceased contact with my father five years earlier. Had cut him off. Deirdre periodically pressured me to come home. Her most recent plea came ten days before, when she warned me that this hospitalization would likely be his last. But he was brought in just before New Year’s, 2000, the turn of the millennium, a time when even the most rational people were spooked by dire apocalyptic scenarios: computer networks powering down, electricity fritzing off around the globe, passenger jets falling from the sky. No one was flying then. I’d personally stocked up on batteries, canned food and bottled water, just in case. It was a distracting time—neurosis on a mass scale. Y2K. A compelling reason to stay away.
But even if I had simply taken the first available flight to New Jersey, stood alongside my sister and brother-in-law, my grandmother and my aunt, claimed my belated membership in the vigilant inner circle, it wouldn’t have changed one basic fact: My father lacked the faculties to recognize me. The moment for restorative visitations had passed long ago. Woody had urged me to hurry back for my own sake, for a sense of closure, but I didn’t take much stock in this. “The case has been closed for years,” I told him. For five years, to be precise, since my father and I had our last argument—what I decided would be our final argument.
Deirdre’s call had come during an unlit early-morning hour while I was deep in sleep. “It’s over,” she said, sniffling through tears. “You didn’t get to say good-bye.” I couldn’t tell if she was angry or felt sorry for me.
I propped myself up, half awake, tented in blackness, fumbling for something to say. All the usual sentiments seemed wrong, inappropriate to our family’s situation, our strained relations. “What happens now?” I asked.
“There’s a lot to do,” she said. “I’m going to need your help.”
I found myself struggling to recall if I had any freelance work lined up for the next couple days; how difficult it would be to meet with Anton, my pot dealer, before I left San Francisco; which of my overburdened credit cards had room for a last-minute cross-country airfare. “I’ll probably need a little time to get myself together,” I told her.
“Sure, just take your time,” she said, sobs sucked up into steely sarcasm. “See if you can fit it into your schedule, you know, before he’s fucking buried.”
This caught me off guard. I can see now that it shouldn’t have; estranged or not, he was my father, this was his funeral. But on the spot, I thought, I hoped, that I could just show up at the last minute, shake a few hands, and move on—like any other far-off acquaintance. I was wrong.
When we were children, Deirdre and I used to push past our parents and race each other up the stairs of the apartment building in Manhattan where Nana lived. We’d find our grandmother standing ramrod straight in the doorway, wearing an apron over a fancy dress, a potholder in her hand. We’d throw ourselves at her, and she’d always say, in her heavy Irish brogue, “Smelled the cooking, did you?” as she shooed us inside to eat something hearty like baked ham and boiled potatoes. The ritual changed over time—we got older and less demonstrative, and Nana spent far fewer hours in the kitchen after her husband, who we called Papa, died—but I still thought of her that way. Welcoming.
There