I didn’t want to appear sappy. Still, I wanted him to understand what this meant.
“You are too kind,” I said, like we were at some stuffy bridal shower. “You shouldn’t have.” I shouldn’t have. I shook my head at myself.
He didn’t seem to care. He was smiling for real.
“You like it?” he asked. “It’s cool, isn’t it?”
“Yes,” I said. “It’s so cool.” I couldn’t help it: a billion miles an hour of enthusiasm came through in my voice. I tried to take it back.
“It’s nice,” I said then. Aunt Lou said that
nice
was the worst word.
Nice
got you nowhere.
Nice
meant “not pretty.” “If a guy says you’re nice,” she’d told me, “you can just about forget it.” I should have said
brilliant,
I decided. My mother used that word and it rolled off her tongue like a cherry pit.
We sat down and I paged through it. I knew the paintings. I’d been to exhibits. I kept a catalog of his work on my desk. In the middle of the book, I stopped. There was a postcard. I picked it up and showed it to Blot, thinking I’d found it by mistake. He nodded. It was for me. It was? It was a painting, a black outline of a man’s head and neck. Where his brain should have been were clouds. I flipped it over.
I knew the poem. It began:
“Can you see the wound I carry / from my throat to my heart?”
Nervously, mindlessly, I started itching my arm. I couldn’t help it. The pain roused easily, like waking up a cat. But I’m an idiot. I hadn’t remembered to put on Band-Aids this morning. I ripped off some scabs from the razor. I had blood on my fingers.
“Shit,” Blot said. “Are you all right?” He didn’t even go for the book to clean it off or anything like that. He wanted to touch me. “Let me see,” he said.
Before I knew it, I was standing up. He stood up too.
“Don’t.” My face got hotter than hot. I was dizzy, full of something runny, like yolks.
Not again,
I thought. My arms had been hidden. Everything was hidden. I wanted to turn myself inside out. It was nothing. I yanked down on my sleeve.
“It’s nothing,” I said. “We have a kitten.”
He looked down at the book, now half mangled on the floor. I couldn’t fix it. I couldn’t even move. I felt like I might spill.
“I love that poem,” he said. I didn’t look at him. He didn’t say it like he knew.
“Thank you” is what I managed to get out.
“It made me think of you,” he said, picking up the book and holding it open in his arms, and I jerked forward, a response to a surging of something in my heart.
“Think of me?” I said.
I realized then that, with the other hand, the safe one, I was holding the postcard to my chest. I looked down at the book. In the corner of the page was a painting. A woman in a striped skirt looked out a window onto the sea. There was a dishtowel by her side.
I took a breath. He wasn’t acting as if he knew. If he knew, I thought, he’d look different. He’d say something. He’d say more. I could be normal.
“Bad kitten,” I said, trying to laugh.
He laughed too. “Oh,” he said. “I get it. We grew up with Maine coons.”
I stood there, unmoving. I’d been right.
“I have to go downstairs,” he said. “Why don’t you come? You can use the staff bathroom, which smells better than the others.”
For a moment, my feet were unresponsive, like something blackened and stuck to the grill.
“Come,” he said, and I thought of his sister. I wondered if letting him help me would be doing him a favor as much as me.
“Come,” he said again. “I really have to pee.”
I fell for it, but he didn’t pee when we got downstairs. We went to the lounge area for the workers—green scratchy-looking couches, a small fridge, the kind of instant coffeemaker that my mother loathed, and lots of lots of boxes of books—and I put the postcard in my pocket, keeping my other hand over my wrist in my sleeve, out of sight. I could feel it getting sticky, like dried milk.
Blot pulled out a chair and told me to sit down. He pulled out one for himself. Then he opened a closet and took out a gigantic first-aid kit in a white metal box.
“First things first,” he said, sitting down, unlatching the box, and rifling through it. He opened two alcohol pads and held them up. I was supposed to show him my wrist, but I couldn’t move—or I wouldn’t move. I wasn’t sure which.
“Come on,” he said, but he wasn’t impatient. I remembered my mother sitting me down on the toilet once, years ago, to clean up my knees. I’d fallen off my bike. The gravel felt so good that I ground my leg back and forth against it like a saw. When I got home, the blood was dripping down, and my mother hustled me off the carpet and into the bathroom. She crouched in front of me only long enough to look like she’d eaten something very sour. Then she called for my father. “Paul!” she shrieked. “Your daughter!”
The funny thing was that she hardly ever got queasy. She could skin a rabbit—piece of cake. She’d nail through an eel’s head, easy as pie.
“Lemme see,” Blot said and opened his hand for mine. Before I knew it, I had given it to him, and looked away. I didn’t need to pretend that it made me weak, that I couldn’t bear to watch. I couldn’t.
First came the alcohol pads, cool and sort of tart-feeling. He cleaned my hand thoroughly. He used a cotton swab to get beneath my nails. When he was done with that, he sighed. I wanted to tell him to stop, but before I could gather my courage, he was taking care of my wrist. His movements were slow and circular, like he was stirring thick stew. He brought it up to his face, as if searching for shards of metal, and I almost explained, but then I felt his breath, a strong, cold stream.
“Does that help?” he asked.
I nodded my head yes.
Eventually, three pads later, I snuck a peek at him, looking for signs that he might suspect me. If he did, he wasn’t letting on. He blinked at a very normal pace. I didn’t know how much cleaner my wrist could get, but I had the feeling he was warning me against getting hurt again. All this work shouldn’t go to waste.
“What do you think?” I asked him finally. I kicked the trash can that he’d thrown the pads in so the bloody things fell to the bottom.
He was opening a tube of ointment and reading the instructions on it.
“Ouchie,” he said, like he was hurting for me. That’s when I thought of my father, who’d done the same thing. “Ouch, Lorca,” he used to say, the pain drawing his features to the middle of his face.
And then it hit me.
“Duh,” I said out loud. “We have to call him.”
I took away my wrist.
“Nope,” Blot said, taking it back. “Hold, please.” And then: “Who?”
“My father,” I said.
He was using a cotton swab now to apply dots of gel that peaked like perfectly whipped egg whites.
“I’m not following,” he said. “Almost done.”
“Duh,” I said again and he looked up only long enough to smile at me.
“Because,” I said. “He was at the restaurant too.”
As Blot cut a piece of gauze into the shape of a triangle and shimmied it along the ointment into the exact right place, it all came together for me. My father: the second thing that made my mother happy. She would have disagreed. She had said that the very thought of him made her want to pan-fry her face, but I didn’t believe her. I’d always thought that her only happy time had been when they were together in New Hampshire before I was born. She’d let her hair grow long and kept herbs in clay pots and made raspberry scones for a local bakery and forgotten to take off her oven mitts when she got in the car. Too, she kept these owls on the little side table next to the couch where she slept. They were from him, although she said they weren’t.
“Lorca,” she’d said when I mentioned it. “Your imagination is something else. I bought these years ago, on that trip when we rafted down the Colorado River.”
Not true. I knew it. The owls had lived on her nightstand in New Hampshire, lined up like soldiers. He made them. I knew he did. One had layers of wooden feathers carved into the oak, like ripples in mud. One had tiny pearls for eyes. One had dried crab apples like tiny hearts in a ring around its base. Some were soapstone. Two were concoctions of shells and pebbles. There were fourteen of them. I wanted to say to her now,
He made those. See? He is someone. He’s something.
I liked to think of her throwing her arms around his neck as he lifted her off the ground. Sometimes, if she was in the mood or if we’d just watched a romantic comedy, she’d admit that there were happy times—but mostly before me.
“Crazy love does not a marriage make,” she’d said once. Her eyes got glassy. I tried to get her to go on but Aunt Lou had to butt in and ruin everything.
“Forget him, Nance,” she said, filing a nail, knowing nothing about anything. “He was never good for you. He was no kind of man.”
My mother nodded, curled into herself under a blanket. Then she looked back at me. She was a turtle.
“Men are shit,” she said. “You’ll see.”
But maybe not. Just three weeks ago, I’d found her in the morning cupping an owl in her hand like a quail’s egg, contemplating its weight.
I hadn’t called my father in two years. The last time I did, the number had been disconnected. I must have redialed a hundred times. Later, I asked my mother about it. We were at the supermarket together, identifying shapes in the swirly sawdust on the floor.
“That looks like a corpse,” she said. “A fallen tree, a padlock, spilled milk, a crow.”
“That one looks like Dad,” I said, and in the same breath, “his number’s disconnected.”
She looked at me like I’d just made fun of her, like I’d ruined everything. We never played the game after that, and we never talked about it. That was that. If you’d asked me, I’d have said she was afraid of me deserting her. That’s why my calling my father felt to her like I’d thrown a strawberry tart with crème pâtissière in her face. But if I told her—and it wouldn’t have been the first time—that I wasn’t going anywhere, she’d get all stewed.
“You called him?” she said.
“Just to say hi—” I started.
“The world is your oyster,” she said. “God knows I’d be the last one to hold you back from your dreams.”
And just like that, I never called him again. With her, a choice always had to be made, but there was only ever one right answer.
“Maybe,” Blot said, “we could get him to come here.”
I was jittering on the inside. It felt a little bit like he’d finished my sentence.
“Dial nine first,” Blot said, pulling my sleeve down over his handiwork and signaling toward the phone. I got up as he put away the first-aid kit.
“My password,” he said, “is g-r-e-t-a.”
I didn’t know what to say, so I dialed the password as if it were no big deal—like he’d spelled out d-i-j-o-n instead.
I called the old number. The first time I tried, the line beeped once and went empty. I didn’t hang up, thinking that maybe someone was on the other end. “Hello?” I said. “Hello?” Then the beeping started again, and louder, so I hung up. I tried again, hopeful. This time: nonstop beeping. When I looked over at Blot, his eyebrows popped up like done toast. I shook my head.
“Try one more time,” Blot said. “Third time’s the charm.”
It wasn’t the charm, and maybe I’d known that all along. All beeps.
Beeeeep.
My father, if he hadn’t disconnected the phone line because of the expense, was probably not home, and if he was home, he was probably outside, carving something out of nothing. And even if he wasn’t making whatever it was for my mother exactly, he was—which meant that he’d never hear the phone ring, hear anything but the beating of his heart as he whittled whittled whittled what he could, what was right in front of him, what he could hold on to with both hands.
“Well,” Blot said. “We tried.”
We,
I thought. To keep from grinning, I pretended to inspect his handiwork on my wrist. It felt very warm and cozy in there. I never used gauze and tape on myself, just Band-Aids. I could go through a tube of ointment in a week.
“That’s more than I can say for myself,” he said.
I thought of my mother, her silence. I stayed quiet so he’d continue.
“This is the week that my parents come to New York every year. Right now. My aunt, uncle, and all the cousins too. I thought about calling, but I can’t. I haven’t called them in a year. But they know where I am. They could call me if they wanted.”
I hoped he’d go on, but he straightened his back, coughed twice, and gave me a big fake grin. I knew all about that expression. I used it too.
“So,” he said. “What else can we do for you?”
I shut my eyes for a second in solidarity. I wanted him to know that I got it.
“Maybe I’ll try again later,” I said. “If that doesn’t work, I guess I have one other option, though it’s tricky. Plan B.”
“Plan B,” Blot repeated, and he nodded, though he couldn’t have had any idea what I meant.
“It’s harder than you think,” I said. I wanted and didn’t want to tell him about my mother, how impossible it was to ask her anything directly.
“No doubt,” he said, and I believed he understood.
I started to make my way to the door. “Hey,” I said. I stopped. “Thank you.”
“For the phone?” he said, smirking, and I laughed.
“Yup,” I said. “For the phone.”
“May the force be with you,” he said. I tapped on the wall for him, twice. Tap. Tap.
And then, like in the movies, he tapped back.
When I was a safe distance away from the bookstore, I pulled the postcard from my pocket. It was flat and warm like a soggy waffle. I’d already melted some of the ink. I read it again and couldn’t believe it. I knew those lines. They were in the book from my father. Of course I had them marked.
I stopped in the middle of the sidewalk to read it once more. I couldn’t help it. I wanted to sit down right there in the street and keep reading and reading and reading it until I understood what it meant to him, for me. It made me think of love. I couldn’t help that either. I moved finally when a stroller whammed into my ankle.
Later, at home, I thought of the last time I’d seen my father.