After my parents had the car accident. Daddy went to therapy to learn how to get around in a wheelchair and take as much care of himself as possible. Grandmother Emma said it was taking longer because he wasn't being cooperative. When it finally came time for him to come home.
Grandmother arranged for his bedroom to be downstairs rather than have one of those chair elevators installed. She said she would never mar her beautiful stairway and hand-carved balustrade with some modem mechanical thing.
I heard Felix mumble to the closed door. He waited and then it opened and he spoke again. He picked up the suitcase and started back toward me.
"He'll be right along," Felix said. "I'll go and put your suitcases in the car."
I waited for what seemed like a long time before my father came wheeling out of his room. I was afraid to move, even to sit. The grandfather clock in the living room bonged ten times. To distract myself. I played the same game with the shadows Ian often did. This one looked like a humpback whale, that one looked like a tiger about to pounce, and another resembled a giant hawk.
When my father finally appeared, he was in his bathrobe and barefoot. His hair was as wild as it would have been had he just woken, and his eyes looked swollen and red. He used to attend to his personal hygiene closely and some days even shaved twice. He always smelled good. This morning he looked like he hadn't shaved for a few days. He had a paper bag in his lap.
"Kimberly is in the shower," he told me, as if I cared whether or not his girlfriend said good-bye to me. "You have everything you need?"
I didn't know what that meant. If I'd had everything I needed. I would have had my mother, but I nodded.
"Well, okay. You be a good girl. As I said, we'll come visit you soon. I've finally given into this idea of a specially designed automobile for me to drive, so maybe I'll test it out with a ride out to see you and Aunt Frances."
Of course. I thought he'd be coming not because of a burning desire to see me but instead to test-drive a special car. Again, I just nodded.
"You know," he said suddenly, tipping his head to the side, "until this moment. I've never realized how much you look like your Grandmother Emma. Something about the way you purse your lips. Jordan. You know both she and Frances were pretty goodlooking young women in their time. You have good genes and resemble them both.'
Ian often talked about our genes. He seemed afraid of what he had inherited from Daddy.
"Are you going to see Ian soon. Daddy?"
"Soon," he said, but without any real
enthusiasm.
"Would you please be sure to tell him where I am and please ask him to write back to me when you do see him? I gave you the letter for him. You will give him Great-aunt Frances's address so he can write back to me, okay?"
"He has written to you," he said.
I would swear my heart stopped and started. "He has?"
"That's what this bag is full of," he explained. "His letters to you. I found them in the office just yesterday, rummaging through the files, looking for some legal tunnel to escape the prison your grandmother and her attorney have put me in."
"Ian's letters?"
"Yeah, your grandmother in her godlike wisdom decided not to give them to you, not that you or anyone normal could make head or tail of what the hell he wrote anyway. I read two and gave up. Kimberly even read a few and was just as lost. Maybe they'll amuse you," he added and handed the bag to me.
I looked in it, surprised and elated over how many I saw bundled with a rubber band.
"Will you ever take me to see him. Daddy?" I asked.
"Sure, sure." he said, waving my request away just as he used to wave away my mother's.
I would ask him to promise, but Daddy's promises were like scattered flowers, beautiful for a short time, and then quickly drying and fading until they crumbled and disappeared in the darkness of the earth, just like people.
"Okay. Give me a kiss and get going," he told me.
I leaned over his lap and kissed his cheek. He grunted something I didn't understand and spun his chair around. I watched him wheel himself down the hallway toward his room and recalled how he used to lumber down the hallways with his boots tapping the tiles, his head high, moving like the prince he was supposed to be, and for the first time all morning, I thought I wouldn't be able to stop myself from crying.
I did, though. I imagined Ian standing at the top of the stairway looking down at me, mouthing. "Remember. Be like Grandmother Emma, Don't cry. Ever."
I clutched the bag of his letters to my breasts, vanquished the throat lump, turned and walked out.
It was a beautiful late August day. Over the horizon, a stream of milky white clouds seemed glued to the sky. Otherwise, the blue extended unstained in every direction. A warm breeze lifted the flower blossoms in Grandmother Emma's beautifully manicured gardens but barely stirred the branches of trees or combed the blades of grass. Felix stood outside the car beside the open rear door, waiting for me the way he often waited for Grandmother Emma. Ian used to say he expected him to snap his boots together and salute when she appeared.