October 12 - A summer memory

I never liked going back home after that.

“When will you come?” Mom would ask, but I would invariably make up excuses. Work was this, Dave’s business kept him busy at that, the kids, while they… you understand. Kids were a great excuse, even though Janie and Matt’s lives were infinitely simpler than my own.

“When will you come?” Mom would pester, and I held the phone with disinterest away from my ear, letting out a rhythmic “um hmm” wherever appropriate, but not really listening to her stories of which neighbors had adopted a puppy and which had just seen their last child move off to college. (The horrors! her tone seemed to say. Empty nesters!)

It was a Sunday morning when I received a different kind of phone call. It was funny how I knew, even just listening to the ring. It was not that the phone rang any differently. It didn’t let out a siren’s blare or a shrill tea-kettle whistle, or a maniacal jackal’s laughter. It was still just an ordinary phone ring. But somehow, I knew before Dave’s hand found the receiver.

“Hello?” he mumbled, still half asleep. He thrust the receiver onto my pillow. “Babe, it’s your mom.” Dave had never taken to calling my parents Mom and Dad, even after eighteen years of marriage.

“Mom?” I asked, sitting up, understanding that the news meant sitting propped against my pillow, not lying languidly on it.

“Debra. We need you to come home.”

I yawned. “Mom, you know we can’t. I’m running this new case at work – big client – and the kids, the kids! You should see Janie and Matt’s schedules!” What an easy excuse it was, to be a parent.

“You don’t understand,” Mom said through the phone. “We need you to…”

“Mom, you heard what I said, we need…”

“Your father has cancer!”

The yell was brutal. It shattered a Sunday morning.

I packed a bag and booked the next flight to Phoenix. “You want me to come?” Dave asked for the tenth time, hovering over my shoulder like a thought bubble. I brushed him aside, said it by rote: “You need to stay here and look after the kids.” The truth was, I didn’t want anyone else to see what I was going to see. I knew, just like I knew when I heard that ring on the phone.

It felt strange to land in Phoenix, after ten years away. The dry heat scratched my skin, made my body thirst for the humidity of a New England summer. The house was still the same, white adobe with blue-trimmed window casings, but the yard looked different. Of course it was different, I scolded myself. Mom wouldn’t have kept it the same for ten years. The prickly cacti lined my walk to the front door. I knocked, a stranger at the stoop.

‘”Iced tea?” Mom asked, instead of saying hello, because hello felt too strange after ten years.

“Iced tea would be great,” I allowed.

Dad was sitting in the living room, his feet up on a sofa, and he started to rise when he saw me.

“Debra!” he called out in a voice that had once been a deep bass. This sounded like a wheeze, a sniffle, a sigh.

“Dad,” I said. I sat on the chair next to him, pressed his body back down against the leather expecting a fight, but his flesh gave no resistance, melted back into the cushions. “Dad how are you?” It was the wrong question.

“I am a step away from Death!” he chuckled as if it were some merry joke whose punch-line I had missed. “But He hasn’t tripped me over the threshold yet.” I laughed feebly alongside him. I turned at the tap on my shoulder, took the iced tea that Mom offered silently. The ice crackled as I lifted it to my mouth for a sip. When I turned back, Dad was asleep.

“He does that,” Mom explained, and I could tell it frightened her. “Falls asleep between one sentence and the next. Sometimes in the middle of a sentence.”

“Why didn’t you tell me sooner?” I asked, accusatory. Mom shook her head.

“Would you have come?” She left me there, watching Dad’s drooling, snoring face. He looked old, I realized. Wrinkled like a prune. I held his hand.

In the morning, Dad wasn’t in the house.

“We had to call for the ambulance first thing,” Mom explained. “His blood pressure… alarming…” She choked around her sentence and pushed herself back from the kitchen counter. “I’m going to the hospital, you’ll come?”

Of course I would come. I thought of phoning Dave and the kids, but then thought better of it.

Dad was in a room with beeping monitors. He looked lifeless, pale against the white sheets, and I thought wryly that Death had brought him right up to the doorstep this time.

“Daddy?” I said, using the affectionate term that hadn’t crossed my lips in over twenty years.

“Angel Cake,” he said right back.

We were silent for a long time.

“Do you remember that summer?” I asked, because it was the only thing that made sense to say in that moment. “When you taught me to swim?”

Dad laughed, wheezed, rather.

“Taught you to swim!” he cackled. “Threw you in was more like it.”

We were at our neighbor’s pool, one of those dry, dusty summer days that no amount of iced tea or air conditioning or ice cream could shake from your bones. The sun slammed onto our heads, and the ladies fanned themselves with the edges of their caftans, and the husbands drank ice cold beers one after the other until the bottles made a pattern around the rim of the swimming pool. The other kids were swimming blissfully, splashing in the seventy degree liquid while I sweltered in the one-hundred degree dry.

“Go on,” Mom scolded, but I stubbornly shook my head, as always. Ten years old and too afraid to swim. Mom threw up her hands, addressing the neighbors, or the empty beer bottles, or whoever would listen. “A coward, this girl! She’ll never learn.” I bit my lip and continued to sweat. Mom wouldn’t stop moaning about it. “Afraid of this, afraid of that…” the words floated to me, until Dad, always so silent, stood from his lounge chair with a loud, “God dammit already, Maria.” He strode to me across the patio, picked me up in his beefy arms, and heaved me into the deep end.

With a gurgling gasp, I rushed towards the surface for air, spitting and choking,

“Help!” I screamed, while the neighborhood kids watched in horror and the mothers froze with their caftans in mid-sweep.

Another father took a step forward, but Dad thrust out an arm, stopped him cold. “Don’t,” he said. “This way she’ll learn.” I floundered some more, sank, watched Dad grow into a shimmering figure through a layer five feet deep. On impulse, I heaved myself to the surface once more. This time, gasping for air, I stayed there, treading water.

Dad nodded smugly. “You see? You give her no choice, she’s not afraid anymore. She confronts her fear.”

There was a moment of stunned silence, then the neighbors around the pool broke into a round of tentative applause. I continued to cough, at which point someone else’s dad, thankfully, heaved me out.

“You remember, Dad?” I asked now, pressing his hand against the hospital bed, and I could tell from his soft chuckle that he remembered.

“You told me not to be afraid.”

“You weren’t afraid,” he said. “You just needed a push.”

I nodded. He looked at me, looked around for Mom, didn’t see her and sighed. “Don’t be afraid to push me now. I know when it’s time to dive in.”