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Note: Again, there are some photos to go with this entry.
Of course, Nan did not ring JoJo. My phone rang at dinnertime.
"Sara, it's Mummy."
"H'lo. Where are you? I think Daddy might be worried that you aren't coming back." I did not want to admit that I was going to tell on her.
Nan sighed. "Don't worry about Daddy. I'm at the boat. But I'm leaving now. I'll be home in an hour."
"All right." I paused. "Um, that was fast."
"I seem." She coughed, started over. "I seem to have forgotten matches. For the pilot light. I can't possibly stay on the boat without any matches..." Her voice trailed off.
"Oh. Should I ask Helga to hold your dinner?"
"No. Tell your father, please, that I would like to go out for dinner." She hung up.
I padded down the curving staircase in my socks. JoJo and I used to play "Bride" endlessly on those stairs. She'd put on one of Nan's flowing white lace peignoirs, and I would hum the Wedding March while Jo slowly descended. I still feel cheated that none of us would ever get to float down that fairy-tale staircase in a real wedding gown.
I hesitated outside the closed double doors to the library. "Daddy?" I knocked lightly, then opened the door. He was reading the Times. He didn't look particularly concerned about the fight. I dutifully recounted the conversation with Nan, and went back up to my room.
The next day, when I came home from school, there was a gift-wrapped package waiting on my pillow. A hardcover book about a girl named Jeremy. And a card with my name on it, written in David's hand. The reward for playing on his team.
...
Two years later, I arrived home after school on yet another afternoon. My seven-year-old brother, Collie, was playing under the porte-cochère, hiding between the cars. He popped out when I walked up.
"Daddy is going to a hospital!" he reported excitedly. I smiled absently at him and went into the house. I could feel the flurry of activity on the upper floors.
I found David sitting at the kitchen table. "Sara-Brat. Close the door." I swung back the heavy stained-glass door that separated the kitchen from the dining room and sat facing him.
"Sara..." he stopped. I looked straight at him. "I'm going into the hospital."
David never got sick. Never even went to the doctor. I knew this was important. "Are you coming back?" I asked.
He didn't answer me. "Sara, honey, you're going to have a lot of responsibility..."
"Does Mummy know you're not going to get better?" Our eyes were locked over the table. I understood what he was saying with every fibre of my being. I could hear the blood rushing in my ears. The roar in my head was so deafening I wondered if he could hear it as well.
"I think she's hoping I will." Mummy and Helga were upstairs, packing a bag for him to take to Sloan Kettering. I could hear the clattering and crashing of dresser drawers. JoJo wasn't home from lacrosse practice yet.
I picked up his pen from the table and twirled it idly. "Okay." I walked around to the other side and sat in his lap. I was too big, at fourteen, to be sitting in my father's lap. He put his arms around me tight and I buried my head in his shoulder. I did not cry.
We stayed that way, unmoving, until we heard Nan coming down the back service stairs with his bag. I stood up before she reached the kitchen, her eyes red-rimmed and swollen, smiling weakly. I wasn't allowed to go to the hospital with them. Someone had to stay behind and tell the kids.
...
David came home once, before the end. Sloan Kettering kicked him out. Said they needed the bed for someone they could save, and sent him home to die as an outpatient. Nan was completely overwhelmed. A passel of children to care for, and now a terminal cancer patient who could not eat.
Nan tried everything. She had meals sent in from Maxim's and La Goulue when he was at Sloan Kettering, and then from the Hotel when he came home. He didn't touch any of it. She cooked endlessly, trying every possible combination of flavours and spices. What we didn't realise was that the cancer had taken away his ability to taste.
One night, he thought he might like some Junket. It was a sort of pudding that his mother used to feed him as a child. Nan ran out at dinnertime to try and hunt some down.
Helga was serving us dinner in the kitchen while my mother was gone. My parents had installed intercoms throughout the house years before, in an effort to avoid having the children scream from floor to floor. It never worked.
We used to shout up and down the stairs, anyway. If we were feeling particularly lazy, we'd call each other from room to room on the telephone. About halfway through the meal, a sudden burst of static came over the intercom that linked David's room to the kitchen.
I smiled at the kids. "I'll be right back," I said, pushing my chair back from the table. "I'm just going to run to the bathroom." I did not want them to follow me.
I ran up the service stairs, through the laundry room, through my mother's sitting room, and into my parents' bedroom. David wasn't in the bed. I ran to the bathroom. Nothing.
I turned back to the bedroom and that's when I saw him. He was between the bed and the wall, on the floor, his head wedged under the nighttable, wrapped loosely in a sheet. I heard footsteps on the stairs, and ran back to head them off. I knew that David didn't want to be seen like this in front of his children.
"Get AWAY!" I screamed at Collie and JoJo. "Go BACK downstairs and eat your dinner!" JoJo's face turned ashen. They were not usually apt to listen to me, but this time they turned and shot back down the stairs without an argument.
I ran back to David. He was unconscious.
"OhGodOhGodOhGod," I whimpered. "Daddy? Daddy? Can you hear me?" I touched his face. He didn't move. I picked him up, gently tugging his head out from under the nightstand. I picked him up like he weighed nothing, and I realized how thin he had grown. He came to enough to balance on his feet while I slid him back onto the bed.
Nan came flying in. "Oh, David, Oh God." She was crying, hard. She fumbled for the phone. I turned around and opened the first door I found, which turned out to be to his closet. I curled up in there, hiding in the dark amongst his shoes and his suits. This time, they let me go to the hospital with him.
I waited all night in the hallway outside the intensive care unit. He had been drowning in his lungs, I was told. I had saved his life. I finally stretched across a row of chairs and passed out. The nurse woke me the next morning and brought me to his room.
He lay in the big hospital bed. He was so jaundiced the whites of his eyes were gold. "Sara-Brat. I have something for you." He handed me a flat box. I didn't want to open it. I knew what was inside.
I tilted back the grey satin lid. A string of pearls, the gold knot clasp loose in the box. There hadn't been time for the jeweller to string them.
I said good-bye to him that morning. It was the last time I saw him conscious. I was permitted to visit once more, after he slipped into a coma, and then I was sent to my girlfriend Jilly's house. All of us kids were sent away so my mother could spend all of her time by David's side.
...
Sunday morning, April 8. Jilly had one of those fake digital clocks that had the numbers that flipped over. I woke just in time to see the clock flip over to 8:15. That's it, I thought. Daddy's gone. And I rolled over and went back to sleep until Jilly's mother came to wake me, her face streaked with tears.
The thing of it was, I never really believed he was dead. Logically, of course, I knew it had to be so. I had gone to his funeral, seen the casket lowered into the ground, shook my uncle's hand off my shoulder when he tried to stop me from shivering.
But in my heart, I believed, way deep down, that if I ever really needed him, if I wished very hard, then he would be there. That there would be some sign. David was magic.
The time came when I finally called for him. Dr. Rose, the surgeon who performed my open heart surgery, told me that my heart would be stopped, then hooked up to a heart-lung machine that would pump my blood for the time it took them to repair my heart. I'll be dead, I thought. I'll see Daddy. This was not a thought I verbalized. I knew how it would've sounded.
I woke up after the surgery in the cardiac intensive care unit of Columbia Presbyterian Hospital in a fog of pain and paralysis. I felt like I had been beaten with a brick. I couldn't speak. I was intubated, a respirator breathing on my behalf. And silently, I screamed for David.
He didn't come. So after thirteen years, I finally accepted that he was really gone, not on an extended business trip. David was dead, and he wasn't coming back.