Haywire by Brooke Hayward (android based ebook reader .txt) 📕

I stood at the front door, I felt as if I’d been driving all night. Lucio, father’s young Italian butler, opened the door immediately and grasped my hand.

“I’m so sorry,” he stammered.

“Lucio. How is he?” Although I already knew the answer from the expression on his face.

Lucio gripped my hand tighter.

“Is he still alive, Lucio?” I wanted words, not touch.

“Ten minutes ago …” he began.

The familiar hallway melted around me, pulling me in. I fought numbly against its perfume, its plush burgundy carpet, its diffused light—as carefully regulated as a greenhouse thermostat—illuminating the colors of a painting here or a bowl of flowers there, and playfully flickering across the scintillant feathers of the two silver fighting cocks as they sparred in mortal combat on their tablecloth of rich rose velvet; a hum of conversation in the living room beyond, the phone ringing; was I really too late?

Pamela, in a coral silk caftan shot with gold, came toward me with a fresh whiskey sour in her hand.

“Would you like to see your father?” she asked cordially, as if nothing had happened. I nodded uncertainly and followed her down the hall.

Father’s bedroom was located at the far end of the house, so I had plenty of time to hypnotize myself, by riveting my eyes on Pamela’s robe floating from side to side a few feet in front of me. Nevertheless, when we entered the room, I managed, without looking, to see everything in it at once. The room was octagonal in shape; it had been designed by Father and was his pride and joy. Now its contents were suffused with the light I associated with small chapels. Otherwise everything seemed normal, except that on my right, along the side of the octagon where Father’s bamboo bed had always been situated, was the intrusion of a hospital bed. Its covers formed an unbroken line over the body in it. I stared straight ahead. Okay, I told myself, this is it; on your mark, get set. Pamela was delivering me into the outstretched hands of Brother Paul. Brother Paul, she said, was a member of the Franciscan order and also a male nurse, who, luckily for us, had been taking care of Father since she’d brought him back. Brother Paul told me what a wonderful man Father was.

“May she see him now?” Pamela asked him.

He hesitated. “It might upset her,” he said.

“Why?” I asked, suddenly wanting to reclaim control over what was happening to me.

“Because I’ve had to bind him up.”

“What?” Strange horrible images flitted through my mind.

“A handkerchief—” He made a wrapping motion around his head.

“Did he hemorrhage? Is there a lot of blood?” I asked, terrified.

“No, no,” Brother Paul gesticulated awkwardly. “We have to do that—it sets so quickly.”

Then I understood. And at that moment, for the first time, I truly realized that Father was dead. I took a deep breath.

“Please,” I said, letting it out. “He’s my father and I want to see him.” Not that I’m brave, I thought, because I’m not, but squeamishness aside, there’s something else: I have to see for myself. Now. No obituary tomorrow or funeral in three days can have the same meaning. Arid how dishonorable it would be if I walked away without saying goodbye. Properly, face to face.

He nodded, and Pamela left the room.

We went over to the bed.

Brother Paul folded back the sheet. The only dead body I had ever seen before was an anonymous corpse being dissected in the morgue of the Roosevelt Hospital. I hadn’t been allowed to see my mother or sister. Now I steeled myself to look down, thinking, I must be sure; this time I must know. I knelt beside the bed.

The most shocking sight, as Brother Paul had warned, was the blue handkerchief tied all the way around Father’s head to hold his jaw in place. After I got over that, I forced myself to look at his face. Amazing, I thought, trying to stall my emotions with clinical detachment, the accuracy of every description, however trite, I’d ever read. I put my arms around his head and lifted it up. Amazing the aptness of hackeyed phrases like “deathly pallor” and “dead weight.” Amazing how quickly life goes when it goes; how quickly everything empties, body temperature drops, flesh implodes into matter, skin becomes as hard and cold as a sea shell.

I looked down the length of his body: it, too, had altered. It was smaller, shrunken; his stomach, distended for so many weeks as if pregnant, was flat. He had borne his death and was free.

I imagined him traveling through space faster than the speed of light. Grounded far behind, I envied him. I wanted to let go of his head and follow, like a speck of dust, up past the moon and the sun. Where were Bridget and Mother at that very moment, I wondered, reaching out to him over the edge of some distant star? What address should I write in my telephone book after the name “Hayward, Leland”?

His head was very heavy. I cradled it against my chest and ran my hands over the stubble of his hair. Even it felt dead. I began to weep. My tears drenched his face, glazing it like ice. They soaked through the blue handkerchief and trickled in chilly rivulets back onto my hands. I sobbed and sobbed, soundlessly so that Brother Paul couldn’t hear, holding on to Father’s head with all my strength as if it were the last thing left in the world. I wept for my family, all of us, my beautiful, idyllic, lost family. I wept for our excesses, our delusions and inconsistencies; not that we had cared too much or too little, although both were true, but that we had let such extraordinary care be subverted into such extraordinary carelessness. We’d been careless with the best of our many resources: each other. It was as if we’d taken for granted the fact that, like our talents and interests and riches, there would