gaps in our lives

(note: contains sensitive language)

A soft squeak came from my shoe as I entered the hospital room. He turned his wrinkled neck, and with kind gray eyes smiled at me. The sunlight in the room felt nostalgic, aching, old. End-of-life sunlight. The sunlight of thirty years ago. Sunlight of someone receding into memories. I smiled back, and sat in the tiny plastic chair next to the bed. “Hi Dad. It’s so odd seeing you like this. It doesn't suit you.” His eyes seemed to film over as I said this. He looked up at the cream-white ceiling, his mind drifting away to another time.

A long silence ensued. So long, my mind drifted off too. In the small room, disinfectant-perfumed, the hush of nurses chatter outside the only sound, both our minds drifted away. In the salmon-evening light, we thought together of the past.

~

It had been ten years since I’d seen him. Back then, our relationship had begun to wither. I was entering the final year of university, and he was jogging towards retirement. All seemed well in our family. My sister had gone off to New Zealand, to settle into a quiet life as a nurse with her boyfriend. My brother had taken work as an architect in Alabama. Our family felt spread out but yet intimate, as if some sort of invisible thread, much like a soft spider’s web, was connecting us. We’d always had this feeling. As if little family jokes after which we’d all erupt in laughter were only ever a group video call away. As if the feeling of being together in a room, giggling and story-telling, was forever inside us all.

I had that burgeoning feeling, then, as I grew up with this family. That true love was a series of kind sarcasms, warm smiles, gentle cajoling, and loving goodbyes, after which I always found a hot tear trembling in the corner of my eye. The tear of speaking to people you don’t have to try around. The tear of that small group which everyone has, that will love them eternally, no matter what happens. 

Towards the end of university, though, something shifted with my father. Or perhaps the shift lay with me. Either way, something dramatic pushed our relationship slightly off course. Like a plane encountering turbulence mid-flight, our relationship seemed suddenly to bump and rattle.

We both knew the cause of this change. We avoided, of course, saying it. For the longest time at least. Until we had to say it. It was the abortion. That daft event that marked the end of college for me. That seemed like the slate-black cloud interrupting the otherwise pastel-blue sky of my life. It was with a lover I met in the autumn of my final year. After an emotional night with what seemed like the most predictable ending. Realizing the pregnancy a few weeks later, I turned to him to help pay for the procedure. I still remember, and probably will never forget, the long pause on the other end of the phone-line before he answered my request. The silence was cold, dead, hard. As if speaking to someone at the bottom of the Atlantic, five miles deep. 

A sigh came first through the phone. Exhausted and exasperated, despairing and angry. That sigh signaled an eternal shift in how he perceived me, as a man, as a son, as an adult in our world. I felt as empty as the night sky, then. “Oh James. Oh, oh, oh. How could this happen,” he said, as much to himself as to me. 

“I don’t know what to say, Dad. You know what it’s like to be young. I feel stupid and naive and immature. But I fucked up, Dad. I really did. I really did.” My voice trickled away to a murmur. How to explain the unexplainable? Especially to the one person who’s always been on your side. 

“So what do we do now?” he said. 

“Dad, you need to pay for this. I don’t ask for much. But this can’t happen now. Not with my future, not with hers.” My voice was strained. I loathed begging. My dignity felt trampled then, like roadkill scuffed by endless tires on the highway.

He said yes, of course. What option did he have? But then he distanced himself. Like a train screaming past a standing person, his life suddenly seemed to leave me behind. This made me so sad I could’ve died.

~

I met her, the lover enmeshed in all this, in a bookstore. Of all places to meet the person with whom you’ll go through a major crisis. While flicking through dusty books, used and crumpled and stared at by a thousand people, she tapped me on the shoulder. “I know you. We’re in the same Chinese culture course. Our professor has a strange little mustache. Like it grew without him knowing. I always forget his name.” 

She struck me then as tremendously earthy. Golden-brown eyes, pastel-rose lips, a delicate bronze ring through the right side of her tiny nose. I hadn’t yet had a girlfriend in college. I felt entirely hopeless, as if a relationship was still a shadowed ship on the horizon, sailing slowly, and miserably, towards me. But she looked at me differently. A smile danced around her lips. “Are we really?” I replied, smiling widely. “It’s kind of strange seeing people from classes outside, in the real world. You forget your classmates are real people too, just like you. Who go to bright restaurants, and browse in little bookshops.” 

“You’re so right. It is strange” she said with a laugh. “Anyway, sorry, I’ll leave you alone now.” She met my eyes again, quickly this time, as if sending a flash message, and shuffled off.

My heart beat a dry thud for the next ten minutes. My palms felt slippery and cold, like I’d been handling a fish. She likes me, I thought. But what to do about that? 

I pretended like I’d just gone back to browsing, as I eyed her through the bookshelf cracks. When she’d gone to the other end of the store, I took a pen from my backpack. Crouching down in the tiny aisles, I ripped a blank corner of a page from the closest book. In my neatest handwriting, I wrote my phone number. I went to leave, circling round right by where she was standing, absorbed in a book she’d found.

“I’ll keep an eye out for you next class,” she said. Her eyes were so bright, even in the dull yellow light of the shop. I couldn’t mumble a word. My throat had tightened from my nerves. I began to blush. I held out the paper, torn and thumbed. She hesitated, then took it. I pushed past her, tripped momentarily over a stray pile of books, and fumbled out the front-door. 

I ambled back to my apartment through the cloistered university streets. A luke-warm rain, the kind that only falls right at the precipice of smoky autumn, made everything hushed and fragrant. Orange lights began to illuminate the little downstairs windows of the students’ apartment buildings. Silhouetted figures danced around, cooking dinner, laughing with friends. That private love of burgeoning life, of transient student days, of dusky evening rain tinged with sweet melancholy, welled up in me. I found myself thinking something new, for once: I think I’ve found someone lovely. An exquisite, anxious feeling.

The next morning we met at a local student cafe. In the midst of gurgling conversations of exam questions, evening parties, summer travel, we stumbled through some politenesses. I felt I paled in her presence. She seemed larger than life to me then. As we were getting ready to leave, she placed her hand lightly on my shoulder. “Coffee again tomorrow?” she asked. 

We met every morning for the next few days. “We should really do something else sometime,” I said, my shoulder brushing hers as we sat on low stools by a glossy window. Disheveled students hurried by, faces creased in expectation and worry, and lust. 

She held her shoulder against mine for a few seconds. She was thinking. Her eyes lingered absently on two students chatting across the road. They threw their heads back, laughing at some unheard comment. “Yeah, you’re right. Let’s share a bottle of wine tonight. Something red and dry and delicious. It’ll be great.” She didn’t turn in my direction as she spoke. She seemed fixed, absorbed, by the couple across the way.

~

We hunched at her kitchen table, the window-sill next to us littered with white paint chips and smudged coins and fingered cigarette ends. The miscellany of university students. The sun had set long ago. We had watched it together, often in strange silences as we held each-other’s gaze. The breeze through the window smelled of wet bricks and evening laundry. There was something magical about the gradient of light, the transformation of atmosphere, as it sunk below the terraced houses, and out of view. Sunflower yellow it began, melding into bumblebee orange, oozing towards grapefruit red, and finishing with a universe purple, phosphorescent and milky and like being on the moon itself. All the while we watched each-other. Her nose ring winked in the deepening dark.

We seemed to grow closer as the amount of wine in the bottle slipped away. I told slurred stories, we shared splutters of laughter, and nudged our chairs towards each-other. She curled tangles of her hair, splashed more wine, blood-red, in my delicate glass, and put her finger across my lips to hush me when the neighbors in the garden below the window began to chatter. She grinned deviously. Her finger was thin and damp and delicate across my lips, like a stalk of cold asparagus from a sodden summer garden. The bookshop seemed, all of a sudden, like years ago. She felt like an old friend, stuck with me through weathered years of life. Our drunkenness dragged us down, closer to the scratched wooden table. Our heads both now rested on our palms. She was right next to me now. Her scent all I knew. Of fermented grapes and lemon shampoo and musky brown skin. 

“Why don’t you kiss me?” She let the words trickle through her lips. They seemed to come from elsewhere. Like a whisper in my head, a distant memory, sun-warmed and generous and quiet. I took a deep breath in. Rich and heady, that breath. It made me feel hot and heavy, filled with melted butter. 

“I don’t mind,” I said. Our lips met, weak and jolting. A stray hair tickled my nose. The neighbor’s murmurs continued outside, low and deep and never-ending, like white noise. The breeze turned a touch colder. I felt the grooves of her teeth against my tongue. A door clicked close somewhere else in the building. She drew her lips away from mine, tucked her hair behind her ear, and looked right in my eyes. “Come with me,” she said, and grasped my hand with hers. Down the shadowed hallway, over piles of clothes, pushed down on her cotton-soft bed, she kissed me again. More sloppily this time. The room was dead quiet, the only sound the ruffle and slide of our clothes occasionally rubbing together. 

I left very early the next morning. The rising sun just peeking its head above fluffy silver clouds. She was turned the other way in bed, facing towards the window. I could just see a scattering of brown moles on her back. Like the constellations of biology. Like her own little tattoos. They seemed gorgeous in the dispersing morning dark. I tried, then, to internalize this scene. I wanted to keep this memory close. Of waking up next to someone. It was the first time in my life I felt wanted.

Walking home, disheveled hair, clothes perfumed of her, I suddenly remembered the condom. Or, more precisely, the lack of one. Stopping in the sidewalk, halting the student behind me in his steps before he clucked and skirted around, I paused for a few minutes. Idiot, I thought. Too much wine, I thought. Dear God, I thought.

~

“I couldn’t believe it for years, James.” His eyes still looked up, hazily, at the hospital room ceiling. “That’s why I didn’t say a word to you. I forgave you, but couldn’t speak to you. I didn’t want to say something I’d regret.” 

Outside the hospital room door, footsteps rushed quickly down the hall. In that controlled way in which everything urgent occurs in a hospital. Quiet, drilled, concentrated. No room for error. It must’ve been doctors and nurses, rushing to a room down the hall. 

He turned his head towards me. His milky eyes reminded me a bit of hers. Something wise and weathered there. But eternally loving, too. “I asked your mother to tell you to come because I’m not doing so well here. I hope I go home. But maybe I won’t. Either way, ten years of silence is enough punishment for you, James. And for me.” He smiled again as he said this. I smiled back, too. My heart felt much calmer. No point being angry now.

“Tell me, Dad. What was it that you were scared of telling me? What was it that you may have regretted saying?” 

“That it happened to me, too. As a young man. With a girlfriend back then.” He jerked his head back towards the ceiling. His eyebrows furrowed, his expression turned dark, wrinkled with time. “We did the same stupid thing as you. And we decided, together, to have the same procedure. An abortion was the only option. It turned our relationship dusty and fatigued. It no longer felt special, in any way. We had loud arguments. We crumbled together. It finished what we had. I worried I’d cast the same fate on you two, if we’d have spoken. That my story, the fate of my life, would have affected you. You and her seemed so lovely together. I wanted to give you space to process the abortion on your own.” Something glistened on his cheek now. Through the downy hairs, sporadic and overgrown, it must’ve been a tear.

I leant forward from my chair, and grasped his sinewed hand. Inky-violet and bulging, the veins above his knuckles seemed ready to burst. “Oh Dad. Oh, oh, oh.” I sounded like him, all those years ago, on the phone. 

“So did it end, James? I’ve been so curious.” His expression seemed balanced now, between childlike curiosity and the hardness of adult fear. “Tell me some simple mistake like that didn’t cut short what you had, like it did with me.” 

I thought then of the missed calls while I was in class, a few weeks after I’d slept over at her house. I thought of the hurried voice down the line, faltering and sad. I remembered the brown bench in the building atrium, where I’d gently sat, phone pushed hard against my ear. After hanging up, and dropping the phone beside me, I'd put my hands to my cheeks. They felt hot and red. I'd felt deeply empty, crushingly daft, achingly alone. I'd watched, perhaps for half an hour, as students tiptoed past, to classes and meetings and the hubbub of life. How I'd envied their simple lives then. 

“It almost did, Dad. After the procedure, I stayed with her every night. She’d soak my shirt with endless tears. I don’t know how she had so many stored inside her.” We both chuckled a little. A dinner trolley rattled down the hall outside the door. “I’d make her endless cups of tea. We’d put the TV on, ignore it completely, and whisper to each-other as we looked out the window at the rooftops. But, yeah, we stuck together. Somehow, in some strange way, we stuck together. And when the time came for us to move on, it felt like the first day of our relationship again. The air had been cleared. We had been rejuvenated. We both knew that life must go on. That we must swallow this pain, and move forward” 

He turned to look out the wide window. At the cottonwood tree there, as it fluttered in the evening breeze. I held my breath, not wanting to disturb that precious silence. Content with my words, it seemed he’d settled back into his memories. Reconciled, I felt able to go. He had closed his eyes now, lids drooping and fleshy. 

I crept out the door. I walked down the bright-lit hallway, hospital staff swirling around me. Back out into the quieting parking lot, to the waiting car to the left. Opening the passenger door, I fell with a sigh into the seat. She was there, in the driver's seat. A trace of a smile on her lips, she hugged me, warm and with feeling. The wedding ring on her finger glinted in the pinkish evening light.

“Well, how was it?” she asked. “He seemed like a lovely man. I hope he found it in his heart to forgive you, after all this time.”