He parked in the lot and waited to be buzzed in. As the vestibule gave way to the hall, a red canvas band spanned the width of the hallway at waist height, secured at either end by Velcro. It looked like an oversized winner’s tape, but in fact it was an effective deterrent against escape. Connell removed one end, passed through and felt a creeping sadness as he matched the furry strip in his hand up to its rougher twin.
He found his father in the Crow’s Nest, a small room overlooking the front lawn where the noisier residents took their meals in sequestration so as not to disturb the others, and where they spent the better part of their afternoons. A dozen or so other residents were there. With the meal over and the orderlies somewhere else, wheelchairs abutted each other like bumper cars. His father was moaning a low moan. He registered a small change of expression when he saw Connell standing there, but he hardly seemed to stir out of his hazy state. It was past his bedtime; they had left him there for Connell. The television on the wall was set to the evening news.
Connell wheeled him out. When they reached the canvas band, he stopped.
“I’m going to punch in the code,” he said. “I can tell you what it is, if you don’t tell anyone I told you.”
He waited to see if his father’s eyes would light up to indicate that he’d been longing for this key to liberty, but his father didn’t seem to notice what he’d said. The low, keening hum persisted. He punched in the code and replaced the strip and wheeled him out. He had a feeling of springing his father from jail. After they had been outside for a few moments, his father stopped moaning.
“That’s what you wanted?” Connell bent down to ask. “To go outside?”
His father’s silence seemed to confirm it.
“If only I’d known! It’s a little too cold to stay out long. Besides, we’re going someplace I think you’re going to be happy to see.”
He got to the car and opened the door and got both arms under his father’s armpits to get him standing. He got him seated in the car and secured the belt and put the folded wheelchair in the trunk.
It was the first time his father had been off the grounds in months, and Connell wondered how it felt to him to be driven down the long driveway. The trees were bereft of leaves, and strong winds whipped the denuded branches, which in the reflected glow of the headlights looked like guards reaching their elongated arms out to stop his father’s escape. They made their way down the road, his father slumped against the window, silent, his hands in his lap, his neck at an uncomfortable angle.
“Sit up straight, Dad,” Connell said, but his father didn’t move. He reached over and pulled him upright and turned the radio on. He wanted him to look out the window and see the lights strung on fences in front yards, the candles in the windows, the lawn ornaments, and, in a larger sense, the world outside the confines of the nursing home, the fact of its being Christmas, the fact that such a thing as Christmas existed at all, but it was as if his father hadn’t noticed he’d left the Crow’s Nest. It didn’t matter; when they got home, he would see the house done up for Christmas and be recalled to the seasonal cheer. He would be brought back to his life. It would make Dad happy, but the bigger consequence would be his mother’s joy at having everyone together for one last Christmas at home. She’d mentioned it so many times before his father had gone into the nursing home, and it must have been bitter for her to watch that possibility die. For his father, nothing hung on this trip, but that was because he didn’t know where he was going. Once there, he would understand that Connell had spared him a lonely drifting off in a room whose sole concession to the holiday was a drugstore-purchased Santa Claus sign taped to the door. For the night to pass without any observance, for his father to slip into an ignorant slumber, was too much for Connell to take.
Traffic was light, and they arrived quickly enough that he might almost have been gone that long had he set out in search of a string of lights. The block had filled up with cars and he had to park a little distance away from the house. He had been intending just to walk his father in and guide him to a seat on the couch, but instead he retrieved the wheelchair and wheeled him. As he neared the driveway he saw Ruth McGuire hitting the button on her keychain to lock her car. She must have left Frank at home. Her eyes widened as he approached. She met them at the foot of the driveway.
“What’s this?”
“Merry Christmas,” Connell said, leaning in for a hug, though Ruth was strangely stiff.
“Hi there,” she said to his father, bending down to kiss him. She stood back up. “What’s the deal?”
“I thought the whole family should be together for the holidays.”
Ruth put down the bags of gifts she was carrying. “Your mother doesn’t know about this?”
“It’s a surprise.”
“No.” She shook her head. “Not a good idea. She doesn’t know he’s coming at all?”
“It’s all me,” he said.
“Oh, God.” She seemed to be thinking quickly. She picked up the bags again, made a quick circle, and put them back down. “What to do. What to do?”
“It’s fine,” he said. “It’s good. We’re going to have a nice night. She wanted this.”
“Your mother is under a lot of strain right now,” Ruth said. “She’s not having an easy time of it, and the holidays make everything harder. Believe me, I know.” She gestured toward the passenger seat her husband would have occupied. “I left Frank home with the nurse because it’s just too hard to make it work with nights like this, and I didn’t want to upset your mother. She just wants to get through the night and move on.”
“She’s in a good mood. She’s going to be happy to see him.”
Ruth walked a little distance away and motioned him away from the wheelchair. He locked it in place and headed over to her.
“Believe me,” Ruth said, “she’s doing whatever she has to do to get through it. She’s doing the best she can. Why don’t you take him back to the home?”
“I brought him all this way,” he said. “I don’t want to upset him.”
She gave him a hard look. “You will not be upsetting him. He won’t know the difference. Why don’t you take him back? We don’t have to mention anything to your mother.”
“She’ll be angry at me for disappearing for that long.”
Ruth threw up her hands in exasperation. “Let her be. Don’t make it harder for her than it has to be.”
“But it’s Christmas. She’s going to be happy to be spending it with him.”
“At least go in and tell her what you’re thinking. I’ll stay with your father. Tell her your plan and give her a chance to decide. Don’t spring this on her.”
Ruth went to the wheelchair, put her hand on his father’s shoulder, and patted it.
“I want her to see him in the kitchen,” Connell said. “I want to see the look on her face. I want to see his face.”
He took the handles of the wheelchair and released the wheel lock.
“Would you listen to me? I’ve known your mother for decades.”
“She’s my mother.”
“Connell.” She glared at him.
“I can’t take him back now.”
“You can.”
“It’s cold out here,” he said. “I want to bring him in.”
“At least give me a chance to go explain this to her.”
“It’ll be fine,” he said, but she had already picked up her bags and was heading up the driveway ahead of him. He wheeled his father between the cars to the house. He pulled his father to his feet and they started up the stairs. There was no handrail, so he had to push against the wall with a stiff arm while the other wrapped around his father’s waist as he dragged him up a step at a time. An anxious expectancy rose in his chest. Again his father was emitting that low moan. They advanced slowly toward what felt like a climactic moment, though he hoped it would be more of a prelude to a memorable night and a conclusion on his mother’s part that the holiday had turned out perfect. He felt suddenly queasy. He tugged the screen door open, hoping to catch it with an elbow, but it swung back with a bang as he secured his grip on his father. Then the door behind it opened and Jack Coakley smiled warmly until Jack saw Connell’s father and his expression changed and he held the screen door open and made way for Connell to bring him in, which he did just as Ruth came in from the vestibule with his mother, the two of them moving in a brisk conference punctuated by restive hands, neither looking up as they walked swiftly, and then his mother raised her eyes and saw the two of them there and stopped, and everyone gathered in the kitchen was turned toward him with either confusion or gravity on their faces, and it was only then that he realized that he had made a costly error in judgment. His mother didn’t rush over as he’d expected her to but stood there with her mouth moving silently for what was surely only a moment but felt like a lifetime and would surely last that long in the slow-exposure image his mind was capturing of it. Sergei shifted on his buttocks in his habitual seat, and glasses of punch dangled from fingers as if arrested in their journey upward, and then a quick, throaty sob emerged from his mother as she said, “Oh, Ed,” once with a falling cadence and put her hand to her mouth. He turned to consider his father for the first time since he’d arrived at the home to pick him up, his hurrying having prevented it, though he was starting to feel now that he wouldn’t have seen him even if he’d paused to look. A thick rope of drool hung from his father’s mouth, indecorously refusing to break off and fall to the floor. Connell wiped it off and stood there in an agony of regret as the gathered crowd, led by his mother, converged on his father to pull him back toward the fireplace in the den with purposeful seriousness. The party was over before it had begun. Sergei rose and left the kitchen as if compelled by the heat of wordless gazes. Connell would have to wait for another day, perhaps another life, to feel redeemed. He had never felt so far from his father, who disappeared behind a wall of backs as his mother approached him to deliver the rebuke he knew he deserved.
“Help me with the coats,” she said with a quiet urgency that had no time for rancor. She had spent a lifetime adjusting hopes downward and knew what order to handle things in. “Get some drinks going. We have to make the best of this.”
? ? ?
When he was done, he went out to the front porch and picked up the string he had disconnected from the others and plugged it in. The lights came on at once, completing the outline around the railed fence that his mother had drawn for passing cars and those making the turn into the driveway. It made a neat picture, and he stood taking it in, trying to derive a simple pleasure from the lights, trying to forget that they and the hundreds more inside had not prevented the encroaching of a fathomless darkness. His father was gone, gone.