“Enjoy what?” he asks and proceeds, with tragic insight and total lucidity, to add to the list. “I can’t write an opinion. I don’t understand the ones I read. I can’t figure out how to use the phone. And who would I call? People call me to see how I am. I’ve known them my whole life. They have to tell me that. It’s embarrassing. Same with going into town undressed.”
“You were wearing pajamas,” I correct, only then realizing my mistake.
“She told you. Embarrassing,” he says, seeming oblivious to the fact that he’s also wearing pajamas now. “And Lina. Babysitter. I’ll need more than that soon.”
“Not soon,” I argue because I hate this. For all the times he was difficult, this is the worst. He is begging us to understand why he hates his life in ways that would have had me on my knees if I hadn’t been perched on the stairs.
He rumbles on. “I don’t know what I like for breakfast. Don’t know the beach. Don’t know shells. I can’t find clams. I can’t take the boat out.”
“I’ll take you,” Margo offers, on the stairs with us now.
But he’s focused on me, just as I always wanted him to be, though not in this situation. “That little girl plays the piano—”
“Joy.”
“—and I don’t know the names of the songs.”
“Can’t you just enjoy the sound?”
“But I don’t know the names.”
“But we’re all here, Dad,” Margo reasons, “all three of us, plus Joy. Don’t you want to be with us?”
He looks up, seeming surprised to see her. “Where’s your mother? She should be home by now.”
His blue eyes fade as they slip from Margo to me. “Ach,” he says, “the potting shed. Potting.” Pushing himself up from the stairs, he wavers. Margo catches one arm, me the other, and we boost him to his feet. “I’ll talk with her.”
He opens the front door, looks out, then closes it and returns to the kitchen. On his heels, we follow him through the mudroom, but when he lets himself out and, leaning crookedly on the railing, starts down the steps, Margo catches my arm to hold me back.
“Give him time,” she whispers.
“How much?” I ask as he plods unsteadily over the grass.
“I don’t know. But he’s talking with her. It’s all she ever wanted.”
We watch him open the door of the potting shed as he has apparently done many times these last twenty years. We can’t see him once he’s inside.
“What if he tries something?” I whisper, afraid to say it louder.
“Like what?” she whispers back. “We found the gun. It’s gone.”
The words are barely out of her mouth when we hear a sound that can’t be anything but.
Chapter 22
I tear free of Margo’s hold. Yes, we took the gun, but that sharp crack suggests there’s another. What had he said—that any fool can get a gun?
My father is no fool. I race across the grass thinking that if he bought a new one each time he forgot where the old one was, he might own three or four or five. And how many more hidden panels are there?
Always that little bit faster, Margo reaches the door first and screams. Tom is on the floor in a crumple of pajamaed arms and legs, skin white, eyes open and unseeing. Falling to her knees, she shakes his shoulder gently at first, then less so. “Dad?Dad?”
He doesn’t blink or twitch. There is an utter stillness to him. The only sounds in the shed are frightened ones coming from Margo and me.
Having raised a child on my own, I know the drill, but reality is something else. What to do first? I manage to cry,“911.”Then, “CPR!”
Dead weightis all I can I think as we roll him to his back. While Margo starts chest compression, I race back to the house for a phone. After calling 911 from the kitchen, I tear upstairs for my cell, run back to the shed, and crouch on Dad’s opposite side. Margo’s body jolts with each push of her arms, and my own heart is pounding, but he doesn’t move.
“Anything?” I ask.
