Her Father's Daughter

For Emily, it started with the cereal. On the Wednesday morning before Thanksgiving her father slipped while shoveling the driveway and fractured his right wrist.

“I’m just letting you know because I won’t be able to cook,” he said, when they spoke on the phone that afternoon.

“Have you had it looked at, Dad?” This question set off a brief argument, which Emily won—her father agreeing to take a cab to a nearby Urgent Care Center.

Emily had gotten stuck at work thirty minutes longer than she’d intended and it was snowing again. Six inches had fallen since mid-morning and another four were expected by midnight. She stopped at her apartment to pack a bag and to coax her next door neighbor into feeding her cat. The drive across town to her father’s house took fifty minutes; vehicles slid through intersections and sat stalled at traffic lights.

She set her duffel bag and laptop onto the entryway tiles to pull off her boots. “I have a neighbor checking on Calliope so I’m fine to stay until Sunday night, Dad.” Emily hung her damp coat in the closet.

“There’s no need for you to stay the whole weekend.” Her father flipped the TV channel. “You’ll probably get snowed in—the plow trucks have been really slow this year.” His right arm wore a plaster cast from thumb to elbow. Emily rummaged around in the kitchen, making a tuna salad for her father’s dinner, and finding a box of stale crackers and half a block of cheap cheddar for her own.

The next evening she packed leftover turkey and sweet potatoes and buttered corn into plastic containers. They had bickered gently over the fact that Emily ate only the vegetables—this argument was their long-standing Thanksgiving tradition, with her father trying to add a slice of turkey breast or a drumstick to her plate.

Emily peered into the cupboard beneath the sink, but it held only packages of sponges and dish soap. “Oofda, I over ate. Where do you keep the bleach?”

He used his good hand to fold a dish towel. “Don’t have any. You know I don’t like all those chemicals.”

“You were green before it was cool, Dad. You’ll have to get used to using your left. Here, practice opening this jar.”

“I don’t need to practice. Either I’ll figure out how to get things done with one hand or they won’t get done.”

“At least try, please. It’ll ease my mind when I go back to work on Monday.” Emily dreaded the return to her office but that had nothing to do with her father’s injury. She’d somehow found herself romantically entangled with a salesman who had separated from his wife. Their short-lived affair had recently fizzled, culminating with the salesman returning to his wife. Currently, team meetings and lunchroom run-ins consisted of averted eyes and stilted small talk.

She went into the bathroom and returned with her father’s toothbrush. He waved her off. “For criminy’s sake.”

“Humor me.” He’d left the jar of olives open and Emily screwed the lid on.

Her father bared his teeth, pretending to brush with his left hand. “Happy now? You’re bossy like your mother.”

Emily’s hand went still on the refrigerator door handle. Her father shuffled into the bathroom. He proved to her satisfaction he could maneuver himself into and out of a jacket and use both the can opener and the telephone—the cordless phone that hung on the wall in the kitchen; the cell phone she’d gotten him two Christmases ago still sat in its box on his bureau top.

They played a board game, which Emily won, and then they each ate another slice of pie while watching a movie her father chose. Something boring about a war and Emily fell asleep halfway through.

The next morning her father asked, “Do you want silverware for breakfast? I have corn flakes or shredded wheat. Or we could make pancakes like we used to do on the weekends when you were little.”

“Let’s have pancakes,” Emily said, an unsettled feeling falling over her. She reached into the refrigerator for the milk and butter.

It happened again later that day and the next, several times. “The toaster remote,” he said with increasing irritation. “I can’t find the remote control for the toaster,” and “I thought I bought some flowers at the grocery store last time. Ah yes, here they are.” He held aloft a bunch of overripe bananas that were in the cupboard which normally held the coffee mugs. Twice, he called her by her mother’s name.

“Emily, Dad,” she corrected him, and he stared at her blankly and then smiled uncertainly. Emily chewed on her thumbnail. He’d had a simple slip of the tongue, that’s all—he knew he’d chosen the wrong word, like we all did sometimes. “Dad, what did Doctor Hansen say when you saw him on the third?”

“I didn’t see him.”

“It’s marked here on your calendar—yearly checkup at ten a.m. on November third.”

He looked sheepish. “I got lost on the way to his office.”

Emily stood very still.

“They charged me for a missed appointment,” her father added with a touch of asperity.

Lost. Her father had been seeing Doctor Hansen for years.

#

They went to see the doctor the following Friday. Emily had never met Dr. Hansen. Her father had never had any of the usual trouble that so often afflicts the ageing—no high cholesterol or alarming blood pressure readings, no intermittent chest pain or predisposal to diabetes. He was a healthy weight and had just retired from his tax preparation business the previous year.

Emily flipped through a magazine extolling the virtues of daily exercise. The waiting room smelled of rubbing alcohol. A nurse opened the door and glanced down at her clipboard. “Tom’s daughter?”

Her father sat in the molded plastic chair beside the nook where Dr. Hansen sat typing on his laptop. Emily stood next to the paper-covered exam table, staring at a glass jar filled with tongue depressors and another of cotton swabs, a cardboard box of latex gloves. A first aid kit hung from the wall above the stainless steel sink. Her father looked back and forth between Emily and the doctor. In the hallway, somebody called, “Room number five.”

“Possibly some mild dementia,” was the doctor’s unofficial diagnosis, after Emily had described her father’s episodes of forgetfulness.

“But he’s only sixty-three!” He’d been fine when she’d seen him over the summer. Hadn’t he? She tried to think back.

Dr. Hansen said, “It’s less common, but the disease can affect people even much younger than your father. I’ll issue a referral to a neurologist for a full workup and then we’ll have a clearer picture of what we’re dealing with. Ibuprofen as needed and finger exercises, twice daily, for the wrist.”

The first available appointment with the neurologist was five weeks out. Emily’s boss would never approve time off—Marissa was already scheduled for vacation that week, plus they had a group of half a dozen new-hires slotted for training. She pinched the bridge of her nose. TJ, where are you? Siblings are supposed to share the burden. She took the next opening after that and apologized to the receptionist for her sharp tone.

Six weeks later Emily ran up the front steps of her father’s house. “Dad, let’s go! Your appointment is in twenty minutes.”

He fussed with the key in the lock until Emily brushed him aside. “Be careful on the steps, Dad. We need to throw salt down.” And then, “No, get in on the other side,” when he tried to climb behind the wheel. “Hurry up.” She’d told Scott she’d be back at work by two-thirty. She reached past him for the seatbelt and he swatted her hand away.

“I can do it myself, Beth.”

“Emily, Dad.”

Dr. Rhodes was tall and lanky with a short gray and brown beard and reminded Emily of a hated junior high school teacher.

Early onset Alzheimer’s. The disease was chipping away at that once methodical mind bit by bit, cell by cell, day by day. It had likely started years ago, the pamphlets explained—the tangles and plaques silently taking up more and more space within the gray matter.

Aphasia, Doctor Rhodes said, when Emily described how her father had called the car a house, and twice mistaken the mail carrier for Emily’s older brother.

#

Spring had come, after a drawn-out winter that lasted into April. The broken wrist mended and healed, as her father’s formidable mind crumbled. Emily was most concerned about his getting behind the wheel of his Chrysler. What if he ran a red light or a stop sign—or God forbid—backed over one of the little girls next door? But Doctor Rhodes insisted her father was still in the early stages of the disease. Further changes could be documented and assessed in a few months.

“Is it safe for him to live alone?” She’d never gotten past her aversion of Dr. Rhodes, although he was perfectly professional, and her father seemed to like him.

“For now. I’d consider alternate arrangements a little further down the line.”

So she’d have to move in with him, eventually. She couldn’t afford a caregiver. He wouldn’t let a stranger in the house, anyway.

On warm days, Emily sometimes took the afternoon off work to take her father to The Burger House or The Meadow Cafe and then they would walk in the park or around the lake. He liked to fling torn bread crusts or broken cracker bits to the geese and watch as small boys thrust toy boats toward paddling ducks.

#

In June, she sold the Chrysler. On the weekends, she cooked, cleaned and played checkers with her father. He accepted these changes with a quiet meekness.

Emily still worked for TeleSales, now as the customer service supervisor. Her father would often call her during the workday, sometimes as many as half a dozen times in a single afternoon. He couldn’t find his glasses, or he’d run out of peanut butter, or a dog was barking out in the street. What time was his show on—the one with the cocky lawyer? Could she bring some cookies—the kind with the mint cream inside? Emily sometimes neglected to pick up when the familiar name flashed across the caller I.D. screen, later listening to the disjointed requests with the heel of one hand pressed hard against her eye socket.

The semi-married salesman had left for a position at another company. He and Emily had briefly taken back up again, this time while he and his wife weren’t on a break, and the wife had left shrieking, half-coherent voice messages threatening to call Emily’s supervisor if she didn’t break things off.

Her apartment lease was up in July. “We’re sorry to see you go; you’ve been a model tenant,” the leasing manager said, as Emily dropped the keys into her open palm. “Call if anything changes.”

In her father’s kitchen, she unpacked her espresso machine, pestle and mortar, the jars of saffron and fenugreek and galangal. She set out Calliope’s food and water bowls near the backdoor.

“Damn dirty animal.” Her father took two threatening steps toward the cat. The profanity was new. Calliope hissed and fled down the basement stairs.

All the memories that came with the childhood bedroom immediately washed over Emily. Some of these she actively took out of storage, wrapping them around her like the warm and familiar quilt that still lay folded across the single bed, embroidered by someone (Her mother? Aunt Miriam?) with yellow daisies. Saturday night outings to the movie theater complete with buttered popcorn, Sunday afternoon board games after a pot roast or chicken dinner, Halloween costumes designed and sewn by their Aunt Miriam and once—one supremely exciting year when Emily was ten—purchased from a store. Her father had shown her how to catch fireflies and taught her how caterpillars turn into butterflies and how honey bees communicate and the names of many different birds. He’d taught her how to read, how to drive, how to cook an omelet and how to repair a torn hem on a pair of dress pants.

Sunlight slanted across the pale carpet. Emily picked up the music box her father had given her for her eighth birthday. She wound the pewter key but the notes were sticky and garbled; the ballerina failed to materialize.

Other memories Emily struggled to keep locked within the confines of their dusty storage spaces, hidden within their musty trunks and deep shadowy closets. She'd been very little (kindergarten or first grade); she and TJ hovered, ears pressed to the closed bedroom door. She stared at him as he stared back. Her father’s voice: “That’s ridiculous, Beth. It’s a plant, for God’s sake.”

Mom: “I was in the hospital for two weeks, Tom! Water my orchid once a week, northeast light, that’s what I said and you promised. Two weeks . . . ”

Her father said, “I was busy taking care of our kids.”

TJ was two years older than Emily. He had once pushed her into the crawlspace beneath the basement stairs and blocked the door from the outside. She had screamed her terror of spiders and centipedes into the dank dark air, until their father came home from work and released her. He’d gripped TJ’s thin arm to spank him. TJ cried and begged and yelled that he was sorry. Their father’s hand crashed down again and again until Emily, flooded with pity, tugged on the sleeve of her father’s shirt, refusing to be brushed away. Later that evening, while Emily struggled through problems in her math workbook and their father assembled a casserole in the kitchen, TJ whispered, “I wish Mom was here. She’d never spank us.” He lay on his stomach on the living room floor, homework pushed aside. He flipped the page of a comic book. “That’s why they fought all the time—Dad’s an asshole.”

TJ’s freedom had been revoked after that incident, even though he was twelve. He’d been made to spend the remainder of the summer in the shameful custody of their next-door neighbor, Mrs. Cortez, while Emily spent the next two weeks blissfully alone in the house, alternately snooping through TJ’s and her father’s belongings. In TJ’s bedroom she discovered a partially empty package of cigarettes as well as a shocking and much-handled magazine with pictures of naked women. In her father’s, she came upon a folded, faded poem in what appeared to be his own neat square handwriting. He’d written about someone who had hair like spun gold and a swanlike neck and delicate piano fingers and a bright, echoing laugh.

Her father wouldn’t want his new wife to see this if he ever got remarried. Emily buried the poem in the kitchen trash can beneath wet coffee grounds, slimy peach pits and broken egg shells.

Much time was spent fantasizing about various women becoming her step-mother—her pre-algebra teacher, Miss Haney, or the chatty blonde nurse who administered Emily’s weekly allergy shots. The step-mother would take Emily’s side when she begged for a pet—even if just allowing her a hamster or a goldfish. She would take Emily shopping for proper clothes at the mall, not stand stiffly at the front of the JC Penny’s and tell her to hurry up and choose two blouses, two pairs of pants, one sweater and a pair of shoes, like her father always did at the start of each new school year—both of them looking away as the clerk ran her wand over the white cotton training bra Emily had slipped beneath the package of socks.

#

By the time he was sixteen, TJ had been heavily into drugs—meth mostly—for years. A nighttime thud, and then her father’s sudden roar. “Put that down!”

Emily rushed into the living room; TJ and another teenaged boy were carrying the television set through the front door. Her father yelled, “Stealing from your own family! Go to your room. And you,” this directed toward the greasy-haired, glassy-eyed friend studying Emily’s bare legs beneath her cotton shorts, “Get the hell out.”

When Emily was fifteen, TJ packed his things and left in the middle of the night. For weeks after he’d gone, his old childhood friends called the house, asking for him: Slim and Jason and Roy and Little Steve.

“Aren’t we going to look for him?” Emily asked, but her father had that infuriating look he got whenever he’d made up his mind about something, and nothing, no one, would ever change it.

“Good riddance to bad rubbish.” Her father snapped closed the hedge trimmers on a thick branch. Crack.

“Maybe we could put him into treatment again?” She gathered up the cut branches and dropped them into the yard waste bin. The thorny leaves left tiny scratches on her bare arms.

“We’ve tried that, Em. Treatment doesn’t stick to him. Besides, we don’t even know where he is.” Crack. He wiped his dripping forehead with the back of one hand. “I might need to use the ladder for these higher branches.”

Typical TJ—leaving her to deal with their crabby father and all the chores. “He’s a minor,” Emily pointed out. “You’re supposed to report it to the authorities when an underage person runs away.” She’d heard the word authorities on a cop drama TV show she watched every Tuesday evening. Sometimes TJ watched it with her and thinking of that made Emily’s throat feel tight and achy, like it always did just before she started to cry. If their mom was here, she’d be out looking for TJ right now—not doing stupid yard work.

“Fine,” her father said. Crack. But then, “I’ll report it on December second.” December second was TJ’s eighteenth birthday.

“What is wrong with you?” Emily stomped one Doc Marten.

“Grow up, Emily.”

Emily turned away, stung. “I wish Mom was here, instead of you.” Her lips trembled. She stared at a single fuzzy dandelion in the middle of the yard. Her father stalked toward the garage.

At dinner they were coolly polite to one another and by the next evening, everything felt normal again. Except that TJ wasn’t there. He would be back though; it was just a matter of time. He’d run out of money, probably by the end of summer, or he’d finally realize how good he’d had it at home, even though their father was always on his case. He’d come home and Emily would be there waiting for him.

#

TJ hadn’t come home though, that summer or the next, or ever. He never sent his father or his sister a Christmas card; he didn’t call on their birthdays. He didn’t write to ask to for money, or needing someone to bail him out of jail. He never contacted them at all.

“Probably dead.” Her father snapped his newspaper dismissively. Home from college for the winter holidays, Emily stood trembling, waiting for him to say something about TJ taking after their mother. He didn’t say anything though, just went back to the business section.

She spent the next ten days using the newly arrived internet to obsessively try and track down her brother’s current whereabouts, unsuccessfully.

“What is this?” her father threw a baffled look around the kitchen; skewers lay across a serving platter and torn lime leaves floated atop bowls of colorful vegetable soup.

Emily used one oven-mitted hand to pull a pot off the burner. “Tofu satay with peanut butter sauce and Tom Yum soup.”

“Tofu? I’ll just make a sandwich.”

Two days before New Year’s Emily developed a nasty cold and lay in bed, feverish, wishing her mother were there to bring her a mug of chicken noodle soup and slather vapor rub over her chest and back, like she had when Emily was little and had the flu.

The next year, during Christmas break, Emily and her father argued over her choice of a boyfriend. “Careful,” he warned. “I know guys like Michael. There’s no substance there, Em. You mark my words. He isn’t worth your time.”

These words had the effect of causing Emily to wholeheartedly devote herself to Michael. Eight months later, Emily came upon him and his ex-girlfriend—the one he’d dropped when he’d met Emily—emerging from the bathroom in his studio apartment wearing guilty looks and not much else. Dramatic scenes including enraged screaming and impassioned pleas had ensued, with the pair breaking up and making up again and again before finally ending things for good.

Her father’s response was familiar. “I’m glad that loser is history.” He pulled a cutting board from a cupboard and a knife from a drawer.

Emily tossed a package of spaghetti noodles onto the countertop. “It’s your fault everyone leaves, you know! Mom and TJ. It’s why you never got remarried—nobody can stand to be around you.” She waited, shaking, for the droop of the mouth, the wounded flash in the pale eyes.

He glanced up from the yellow onion he was chopping. “You’re still here.”

Her father must have been moderately attractive to some of the women whose taxes he prepared, but there was a coldness within him—a deep streak of some slow and calculated waiting or perhaps weighing. A barrier never to be infiltrated, or even slightly worn away. All his actions seemed deliberate, his words carefully considered and measured. It was a small wonder Emily’s young and pretty mother had married him at all.

#

Emily parked her car in the drive. She lifted from the backseat two paper grocery bags. Her entire life, her father had been in control of all things. He had raised two small children alone, with some help from Mrs. Cortez next door. Now the Winslows lived next door and two of the little girls—there were four, Emily could never remember which was which—were playing in the driveway. They looked up from their chalk drawings to wave as she balanced one of the bags on her hip to unlock the front door.

During tax season, February to April, Emily and TJ had stayed at Mrs. C’s house after school through dinnertime and sometimes beyond. Emily loved Mrs. C’s house because she had really good after-school snacks, including occasionally a frosted donut or chocolate éclair to be split with TJ; Mrs. Cortez worked the early shift at the Au Chocolat Bakery. She had a Lhasa Apso named Henry, who liked to lay with his silky tan head in Emily’s lap while she did her homework or watched TV with Mrs. C.

“You look like your mother,” Mrs. C would praise, tugging a plastic comb through Emily’s snarled hair. Emily took these words and held them very close, sometimes taking them out to hold them up to the light, turning them this way and that. She felt that she was like her mother too—after all, she and her father were nothing alike.

She dumped the bags onto the kitchen table. Her father shuffled in. His hair stuck straight up and there was a toothpaste stain down the front of the threadbare blue robe he wore over winter pajamas, although the house was warm and stuffy. He dug into the bags until he found a box of chocolate cookies. He retreated to the living room, the cookies under one arm.

During the shiny, hazy summers Emily and TJ would swim at Black Goose Lake or play softball at the park or Nintendo at a friend’s house. At noon, they would race their bikes to Mrs. C’s house. Lunch was salami or pastrami on white bread with Miracle Whip or boiled hotdogs or cans of SpaghettiOs, dumped into chipped bowls with a wet slurp. She was called missus but she didn’t have a husband because he had died.

Emily set a can of coffee and a box of crackers into the cupboard. Mrs. Cortez had seemed so old back then, but she couldn’t have been much older than Emily was now, perhaps mid-forties. She too had died, of breast cancer, fifteen years ago.

#

“I want to stay here.” Her father was adamant and neither pleas nor bribes nor threats would sway his stance. In the end, Emily packed his necessary belongings, making a To Donate, a To Sell and a To Keep pile of his clothing, books and furniture. He trailed after her from room to room, often unpacking whatever Emily had just boxed up.

Goddamn you, TJ. Still doing everything by myself, twenty-plus years later. As she stored her father’s coin collection within tissue paper, the phone rang. His voice drifted out of the kitchen. “Yes, this is he.”

She listened carefully to be sure he wasn’t reading off his credit card or social security number. Her father stood in the living room archway, phone held outstretched toward Emily. “It’s TJ.”

She tripped over a stack of paperback thrillers from the nineteen seventies and eighties. “Hello?” She informed the caller that no thank you, they weren’t interested in a yearly subscription. Emily went looking for her father. He was in the laundry room, pushing buttons on the washing machine. She changed the setting to cold and lifted the lid to add soap. She plucked out two white undershirts nestled among the dark shirts and pants.

TJ’s room sat empty and stale. In her father’s desk drawer, Emily found a notarized copy of her father’s will, an end-of-life directive and the deed to the house. She found tucked at the back of his bedroom closet a satin and lace empire-waist wedding gown. Her father she found in the garage, climbing behind the wheel of her Prius, keychain dangling from one hand. A short argument ensued, with Emily finally snatching the fob from him.

“I’m going to Miriam’s.” The stubborn set of his shoulders and querulous bent to his mouth made her want to remind him that his twin sister had died in a car accident in nineteen-ninety-six.

Emily said, “Dad, Miriam’s not home right now. We can call her later.”

“Okay, Beth.”

She steered him back indoors.

#

“Where’s my son?” her father pounded impotent fists against the aide’s shoulders and back.

Emily hovered in the doorway of her father’s room at the Tall Pines Memory Care facility, twisting the ends of her wool scarf between cold fingers.

“I can’t find my son! Someone took my little boy.” Her father stumbled forward. The orderly guided him with one arm around his waist. Murmured words drifted back to her: “Everything’s okay now, Tom . . . Let’s just sit for a minute, why don’t we?”

The surroundings were unfamiliar; he just needed to get settled in his new home. It had only been two weeks. Emily backed out of the room, bumping into an old woman trudging along the endless corridor with a walker. “Sorry.” She touched the woman’s arm and left the building without telling her father goodbye.

#

She came back on Wednesday, after work. Her father poured a can of Coke into two cups taken from the cupboard in the kitchenette. “Where’s your husband? Is he coming to visit too?”

“Chris and I got divorced, Dad. A long time ago.” She upended the basket of clean laundry onto his disheveled bed.

“Oh? Didn’t cheat on you like that bastard Michael, did he?”

Emily turned her face away. She folded her father’s pilled jockey shorts, rolled his faded black socks into neat pairs. “No, Dad. We just grew apart.” Or one of them had, anyway. Emily had cried, “But why?!” as Chris tossed cotton undershirts and silk button-down shirts into the open suitcase lying across their king-size canopy bed. She alternatively accused him of cheating and pleaded with him to stay, while he swept his toiletries into a duffel bag. Chris had insisted there was no one else and that he was sorry, but he hadn’t looked sorry—he’d looked relieved.

People always left Emily. She set the stacks of folded clothes into her father’s dresser drawers and tugged on the fitted bed sheet to straighten it over the mattress.

Her father said, “I was glad when you divorced that Michael. He was a real loser.” He pushed buttons on the remote control, shaking it and then slapping it against the coffee table.

Emily took it from him to flip through the channels. “I was never married to Michael, Dad. Which show do you want to watch? Choose one, please.”

“There’s no call to be snippy about it, Beth. The batteries must need changing. Stop here. Stop, I said!”

“I’m Emily, Dad—your daughter. The batteries are fine—you need to point it directly at the TV for it to work, okay?”

“Okay, honey. Thank you.” Had the Alzheimer’s accomplished what no person had been able to—the marginal softening of her father’s sharp edges—or had he had always called his wife ‘honey’?

The attendant came into her father’s room. It was Shannon, the nice one, not Brittany, who was often impatient and scolded her father for eating too many candies. Shannon set down a tray of soggy meatloaf and mixed vegetables, sickly-looking orange gelatin.

Emily said, “He won’t need lunch tomorrow. I’m taking him to see the audiologist at eleven and we’ll stop at a restaurant after.”

Shannon said, “Oh good, he was complaining yesterday of echoing in his left hearing aid.”

“It may just need an adjustment or maybe a cleaning.” It was increasingly difficult to tell whether he hadn’t heard or hadn’t comprehended what had been said. The door swished shut behind Shannon. Her father lifted a shaky spoonful of carrots and peas to his mouth.

Emily checked the mini fridge and the cupboard—he was low on instant coffee and completely out of milk. She bent to kiss one of the brown spots on her father’s head. “I’d better get going, Dad. I need to go home and feed Calliope. I’ll be back on Saturday.”

“Is that mangy dog still around?” Her father slopped a spoonful of meatloaf into his mouth. “Must be twenty years old, for cripe’s sake.”

“She’s a cat, Dad. She’s twelve.” Calliope had been Emily’s thirtieth birthday present from Chris.

“When can I go home?”

“Dad, you are home.” She’d listed her father’s house on the market—they would need the money in order to pay the assisted living facility’s steep monthly fees. She’d rented an apartment halfway between her office and Tall Pines.

“Beth,” her father called as Emily dug through her purse. Where were her car keys? Oh that’s right, in the pocket of the quilted jacket she’d taken to wearing this week; screeching winds had announced the arrival of November. “What is it, Dad?”

“I’m sorry, honey—for what I did.” He was successfully flipping through the TV channels.

“That’s okay.” She belted her coat. She was due for a haircut and an oil change, too. Had she scheduled Calliope for her annual exam this weekend or was that next week?

Her father’s voice was agitated. “Honey, please forgive me. I’m sorry, but you know I had to do it.”

“Do what?” Emily crossed the room to kiss his cheek. “Here, you like this show don’t you?”

“You know damn well what I’m talking about, Beth.” He glared at her, banging his open palm on the coffee table. Perhaps she should call for a nurse. Twice her father had experienced sundowning episodes and the one Emily had witnessed had been distressing and exhausting. Her father had morphed rapidly into increasingly aggressive behavior, throwing objects at herself and the orderlies as he shouted long strings of expletives.

“It’s okay Dad, I forgive you.” She straightened his eyeglasses.

He peered up at her with watery and red-rimmed eyes, irises the color of clear water rushing over dark rocks. “Beth, I’m sorry I killed you.”

#

“Jacinda and Rick have both issued complaints, Emily.” Scott’s eyes probed her face. She stared at the plaque hanging on the wall behind his desk. TeleSales! Twenty years of exemplary service!

He leaned back in his chair and sighed. “Maybe further training is in order. It can be difficult managing the varied personalities on a team as large as ours.”

“Their work was sloppy.” Emily used two fingers to poke at the ridged flesh on the inside of her left elbow, the patch that never tanned because it was puckered with white scar tissue. She’d pulled a hot curling iron off a table by its cord when she was a toddler.

Scott said, “But it was your approach that was uncalled for. Corrections should be pointed out in private, not on the sales floor in front of everyone. Two people from accounting who witnessed the . . . incident said your voice was raised.” He slid a copy of her official write-up across the desk. She scrawled her signature. Scott would take Jacinda’s side.

He tried to capture her eyes but hers darted away. He said, “I’ll schedule a course or a workshop or something and email you the details. Might be a good idea for all of management to attend.”

“Sounds good.” Emily stood and smoothed her skirt. Back at her desk, an incoming email pinged. It was her old coworker, Jared, the one she’d had an affair with. His sales were down by thirty percent this quarter at his current job—perhaps Emily could put in a good word for him at TeleSales?

#

I killed you. Her father was referring to the orchid, not her mother. Of course he’d felt guilty after she’d died.

Emily could remember very little of that first morning without her mom, of that time period in general. She had been in second grade; they were learning about dinosaurs and how to subtract numbers. That morning, people had crowded the front yard. She and TJ stayed at Mrs. Cortez’s house all day and Mrs. C was crying. TJ stood at the front window, pushing the flowered curtains aside. He jumped up and down, yelling that there was an ambulance in their driveway, and now lit-up police cars parked on the street. “Come look, Em!”

Her grandparents—her father’s parents—had come from Phoenix for the funeral. Emily had been stuffed into a hot, itchy dress and reprimanded for running through the church. The word slippery in her mouth: Suicide.

This morning, her eyes were gritty and a dull ache pounded in her temples. On her lunch break, she called Doctor Rhodes’ clinic from her office phone and was told he was at a conference until the nineteenth. Emily asked to speak with any available doctor and was given the run-around. Two phone calls and one email later, a harried female voice said, “This is Dr. Lin returning your call.”

“Um, hello, my father has middle-stage Alzheimer’s and I just have a quick general question.”

She was made to give her father’ name and birthdate, with Dr. Lin pausing to read through his chart. The doctor asked, “What is your question?”

“Can AD patients mistake things they see on TV or hear about or have previously read about as having happened to them?” Emily picked at an unraveled thread hanging from the sleeve of her blouse.

“Like a false memory?”

“Well, yes, I suppose.” She had prepared a brief story—an offhand remark about a first marriage she hadn’t been aware of and hadn’t been able to verify.

Dr. Lin said, “There’s no general consensus on the matter but yes, it does appear that some individuals seem to recall events that never actually happened, in my professional opinion. I wouldn’t put too much stock into it, if I were you.”

Emily thanked her for her time and stared out the window, unseeing.

#

“How have you been, Emily?” Jared’s paunch was slightly more pronounced than when he’d worked down the hall from her, the hairline pushed back another half inch.

“Good,” she lied. She smiled at the waitress as she refilled Emily’s water glass. Jared raised one eyebrow. He lifted his cheeseburger and took a huge bite. Emily didn’t ask if he was still married.

#

His chainsaw snores grated on her. She lined her eyes and ran a brush through her hair. Shit, she was going to be late again. Emily hurried from the room, looking away from the pale hairy leg hanging over the edge of her bed.

#

“We’re sure seeing a lot you, lately!” the nurses and desk clerks were annoyingly chipper. Emily forced a smile. She held the elevator door for an elderly man with a cane.

She’d been to see her father four times this week, but he had remained stubbornly silent—more so than usual. Today they would be uninterrupted; dinner wasn’t served until five p.m. and he had no doctor appointments scheduled. There weren’t any card games currently in session or movies being shown in the community room he might decide he wanted to join.

She closed the door to his room quietly behind her. She shrugged out of her coat, setting down her purse. Outside, the wind howled like a wild thing confined.

Her father was asleep in his armchair, a thin cord of saliva hanging from his bottom lip. He gasped out ragged snuffles. He looked very old, not like her father at all. Emily plucked the eyeglasses from his lap and set them on the small table next to a folded newspaper. There was a rerun of a popular sitcom playing on the muted TV. She checked her email on her phone. Her father snorted and twitched, staring at her with empty eyes. Her heart thudded and foul-smelling sweat wafted up from her damp armpits. Emily wet her lips. “Tom honey, it’s me, Beth.”

“Beth is dead,” he said flatly and Emily shivered. “She committed suicide in nineteen-eighty-two.”

#

The next afternoon, they played cards. Her father said, “Go fish. Miriam, what was the name of that ridiculous pet snake you used to have?”

“The snake’s name was Adam,” Emily murmured. TJ had found this hilarious.

A long drive on holidays, a cramped and dusty house. Barks and howls pouring from the open windows as their car pulled into the bumpy driveway. Chickens squawking in the backyard amid steaming piles of dog poop. Aunt Miriam fluttering around the humid kitchen, hair tied into a messy bun, stirring and checking and measuring. The couch cushions reeking of moth balls and urine-tang. A smudged glass cage housed an alien-serpent, watchful and still. It was a long leathery patchwork of tan and green and cream, the dark tongue flicking toward the hands tapping the glass.

Emily laid a card onto the discard pile. “I can’t remember, Tom. How old were TJ and Emily when Beth died?”

“Seven and nine. That’s when all the problems with TJ started. Sometimes I worry Tom Junior got Beth’s bad genes. There’s something off about that boy.”

When Emily was twelve, a boy in her Art class had teased her mercilessly after he discovered her making a homemade Mother’s Day card for her grandmother. When she’d been very little, she had made cards for her mom in Heaven, but the idea seemed babyish once she was in junior high. Standing next to TJ, pulling books from her locker, Emily’s shoulders shook. She wiped tears and snot on her sleeve. TJ slammed his locker closed, telling her to toughen up.

He caught the boy as he’d been about to board his afternoon bus and pummeled him. “Punk!” TJ shouted. His closed fists struck the other boy’s defensive hands and arms, again and again. “Loser! Fucker!”

What had that boy’s name been? Shawn? Shane? The fight and subsequent school suspension were held as further evidence that TJ was lacking, with their father grounding him for an entire month, later reduced to three weeks after Emily had pleaded and cajoled on his behalf.

Her father studied his cards. “It ran in Beth’s family. Her own mother was bat-shit crazy, that’s why she ran away when she was sixteen.” Like TJ. He drew a card. “She used to tell me how lucky she’d been, how grateful she was that bum of a guy she’d run off with hadn’t gotten her knocked up but now . . . well, Miriam, I admit I do wonder. Sometimes I wake up at three a.m. in a cold sick sweat, certain the police are at the front door and I get to wondering if maybe she didn’t get pregnant years before she ever met me and if maybe that baby or babies didn’t die of SIDs.”

What in the world was he talking about? Emily’s fingers trembled when she laid down a set of jacks. Was this the dementia talking or . . . ?

He continued, “I’m lucky Beth never had many friends. Sue Vernacki was the only one coming around after, reminding us, and keeping the damn wound open. The three of us wanted—needed—to move on from Beth but there was silly Sue, traipsing through the front door with homemade cookies or a casserole and saying how tall the kids were getting, even if they hadn’t grown at all since the last time she’d stopped by. There’s a word for it now—intermittent, interment?—but we always just called Beth shy.”

Emily whispered, “Introverted.” A tall and broad-shouldered woman called Sue, who had worked with her mother at the candle shop and smelled of synthetic roses. She’d frequently come to visit, until Emily had been ten or eleven, when she’d faded from their lives.

She sorted her card tricks into neat piles on the coffee table. Her father’s voice took on a razor’s edge of pride. “I’ve never taken a sip of alcohol or fallen asleep beside a woman. You’re the one, Miriam, who told me when we were kids that I talk in my sleep. I never fully grew out of it. Beth would laugh in the mornings and tell me she’d always know if I was cheating—she only had to listen to my nighttime utterances.” Had her father always been so voluble with his twin sister?

Emily wanted a sip of water. She held her voice steady. “Did Beth accuse you of cheating on her?”

The yellow teeth flashed in a humorless smile. “Beth accused me of all kinds of things.” There were specks of dust and fingerprint smudges on the lenses of his glasses. He said, “She was giddy that night, in one of her really high moods. Laughing and flirting and dancing. And drinking the wine like it was rainwater and she was a flower in the desert—a rare and brief flower. And Miriam, I was glad she was going to die happy.”

Emily’s hand was frozen mid-air, the three of diamonds pinched between two fingers. Flower. Her father was confused; he was talking about the orchid. He had killed the orchid. Skating along that precipice of pride, she said, “Didn’t the police suspect you, Tom? You must have been very clever.”

“The note, Miriam.”

The note? What note? TJ had told Emily, years afterwards, that their mother had left a note, but in all her snooping, Emily had never found it. She’d never asked her father and he’d never told her.

Her father said, “Have you got a four?” Emily passed it over. The game was finished in silence, the only sound the screaming inside Emily’s head: Tell me!

As she slipped into her jacket, her father looked up from the television screen. “Beth is dead,” he said in an echo of yesterday, very gently, as if reminding himself. Emily inclined her head, the curtain of hair obscuring his face from her view.

#

She’d found nothing when she’d packed up her father’s house, no note. There was nothing left to search now—the sale of his house had been completed last month, with the proceeds going into an account dedicated to the fees charged by Tall Pines, for everything from the monthly rent to the extra Coke her father had drunk in the community room.

Had the answer been tucked inside one of the dime-store novels she’d donated to the VA, or slipped between the pages of the old newspapers she’d set out for recycling? What had he done?

#

“Dad, that’s the wrong way. Hurry up.”

He turned his confused face away at her short tone. Emily grabbed his arm and he yanked it away. She said, “Dad, please.”

He shuffled toward her as she unlocked the door to his unit. Tell me, tell me, tell me. He pulled off his shoes, slid his feet into his slippers. “That Dr. McCary is a quack. I want to see Dr. Hansen next time.”

“He retired last year.” She opened the single cupboard in the kitchenette. “Tom, do you want a ginger snap or a double chocolate?”

“Chocolate. I know the gingers are your favorite—you eat those, Miriam.”

She set the plate on the coffee table and handed him a glass of milk. “Tom . . . did anyone ever find out about . . . Beth?”

“TJ accused me once, when he was in high school, but he was just trying to land a blow. He didn’t know anything, the little shit.”

TJ had accused her father . . . ? The scent of sugar was making her nauseous. “Tom. How could you do that to your kids? Take their mother away?”

His eyes shot wide. “The kids? Miriam, I did it for the kids. You know that. The mother is always favored in a divorce.” Miriam knew? Had her father confessed to his sister? She imagined him pouring out this disgusting story as Miriam lay comatose in the days after the car accident, while hospital machines beeped and nurses spoke in hushed tones. He glanced at her but Emily had nothing to offer him. She would leave this place, this room with its sour-milk stench and its dreary bare walls, and she would never return.

“How, Tom? How did you . . . do it?” A sapphire blue jay with black facial markings and a tall head crest swooped low. It landed on the windowsill, head tilted.

There were crumbs and sugar crystals stuck to her father’s lips. “Crushed up her pills for her headaches and her depression and dropped them into her wine. Ironic, isn’t it? We toasted our children that night.”

She was going to vomit; saliva flooded her mouth. Emily swallowed hard. “Why, Tom?”

“You know why, Miriam! Don’t make light of what she did.” The jay took flight in a blue blur, soaring high and free and far away from here.

“I don’t know!” She lowered her voice. “Why not just divorce her, Tom?”

“Right, Miriam.” His tone was scathing, the look he threw across the table a sneer. “I would never have had a moment’s peace, even less than I do now. Always waiting, always wondering.”

“Tell me about the note. I can’t remember.”

He set down his empty glass. “Just pure dumb luck, but it’s what sealed my fate, and hers. We’d gotten into another fight the weekend before. She was hysterical and shrill. God, I couldn’t stand her when she got like that. I walked out on her. The next morning when I got up for work, she’d left me a note—written on the back of the utility bill, the half you tear off and keep after you’ve mailed in the payment in with the other portion. It said: I’m sorry. I love you. She’d drawn a little heart at the bottom and colored it in with the pen. I didn’t put the note in my pocket. I didn’t touch it at all. I left it lying there on the kitchen table. I left it there to punish her, to let her know she wasn’t forgiven. The police took the note after she died. Her diary too.”

“Where’s the diary, Tom?” Her mother’s diary should have come to Emily; her father had no right to keep it from her.

He plucked another cookie from the plate. “Burned it. After the police gave it back.” It had started to snow. Her father got up to spin the thermostat dial.

Emily asked, “Beth was depressed, wasn’t she?” The crying spells behind the locked bedroom door that lasted for days at a time, while their father cooked and cleaned and made sure they took baths and that they were waiting when the school bus arrived.

“Oh yes, terribly. Everyone told the police she was—Elena Cortez, Sue Vernacki and you, Miriam. She spent two weeks in the psych ward when the kids were little.”

She would call the police, she would report him. There was no statute of limitations on murder. There must be some evidence left even after all these years. Thirty-five years.

When Emily was in high school, she had exhaustively examined every woman of the right age she saw or met for minute clues. Were these the mannerisms her mother would have exhibited had she not taken her own life at the age of twenty-nine? Had her mother dressed in the latest styles or for comfort? Had she been friendly with strangers or reserved, like Emily’s father? Had she preferred cats or dogs, lipstick or a bare face? The few photographs pasted into the thin album offered scant clues. She started to speak, cleared her throat. “Why, Tom?”

He cut an uncertain look at her face but she held herself remote, unflinching. Here it was, then. She braced herself for the predictable tale of cuckolded rage or the sordid story of another woman. Perhaps her mother had caught her father cheating at his business, or seducing an underage girl. Or boy.

He stared at her. “The curling iron, Miriam.”

What? Through her sweater, she rubbed at the ridged flesh on the inside of her left arm. He said, “And the broken fingers. The hospital stays. The endless bouts of flu—diarrhea and sick stomach and vomiting.”

Emily sat very still. The broken fingers had been TJ’s, when he was eight, just before Christmas. There had been no computer records back then, not in the late seventies. No electronic warnings pinging to alert doctors or nurses of a previous injury or illness, no centralized database, no community of shared records between clinics. The bleach, the mouse poison, the scrubbing solutions kept behind locked cupboards, even after she and T.J. were in high school. Her father said gently, “You see?”

Her voice was a single feather as it floated on a random current, adrift. “Yes.”

#

Her father died five months later. Emily did go back, that time and many others. He spoke to her as Beth only once more, a few weeks before he succumbed to pneumonia. Her father had asked her a single question, and Emily had answered, “Yes, Tom. I forgive you.”

#

She has an infant son named Zackary and Mark calls him their miracle baby. “After all,” he likes to say, “Zack’s mom was the ripe old age of forty-four when he was born, and his pops will be in his seventies when he graduates from high school.”

Emily’s concerns for her son are more abstract than Mark’s. Sometimes, she sits quietly rocking and nursing Zackary at midnight or two a.m. with the passing headlights from the cars on the freeway as the only illumination in the front bedroom and Calliope curled up in the corner. As Mark’s snores drift in from the next room, Emily gazes down at her son’s peaceful face, at the soft downy head and the rounded tummy and the perfection of his itty-bitty crescent fingernails. She wonders whose genes within her outweigh the other’s.

Jessica Hwang