It was bedtime when my six-year-old son Eli whispered, “Daddy, I think your daddy is a ghost now.”
I had just tucked him in, and he’d looked around warily before saying it, as if he wanted to keep the words out of earshot from nearby listeners. But it was just the two of us, in a big crumbling Tudor on the Rock River—my boyhood home, now a decaying monument to better times in a dying city.
“There’s no such thing as ghosts,” I told him.
He looked around again, eyes still wide. Then he whispered again, in his childish lisping voice. “But I saw him.” He wrinkled his nose. “I smelled him. It was Grandpa. He smelled like pee.”
I sighed and thought to myself that this was no surprise. It was nearing Halloween, which would mark the one-year anniversary of my father’s death. Eli had seen the old man’s last moments, so it was natural he’d think about him now.
I kneeled next to his bed and took his hand in mine. “Sweetie, your grandpa is gone now. We can keep him alive in our memories. But he’s not here.” I kissed his hand. “Close your eyes and go to sleep.”
He set his head down on his pillow and closed his eyes for a moment. But he opened them again. “I heard him,” he said. Then he took a slow, congested intake of breath while gargling spit in the back of his throat, creating a wet sucking sound. He continued the choked gurgle for a few seconds, then said, “Like that.”
I felt a jolt of dread as I realized that he was mimicking the last sounds my father ever made—a kind of moist snuffling as he struggled to breathe and the life left his eyes. Eli’s imitation made my own lungs tighten, as if I’d been dowsed in cold water, and I felt myself begin to swoon, the ground seeming to tilt beneath me.
But then I remembered my role as a father: sometimes you have to fake it, I thought. For his sake. So I put on my most composed voice, looked into the boy’s eyes, and said, “You must have been hearing things.” Then I smoothed his wavy hair across his forehead. “Shhh,” I said, as he snuggled his face into his pillow.
I stood there and held his hand a little longer. Just before he closed his eyes, he looked into my eyes and told me, “You’re the best daddy in the whole world.”
I patted him on the head and gave him a kiss.
As I crept out of his room, I felt proud of how far I’d come. It was just me and Eli now, but we were doing it together. I’d had a little slip-up right after we’d moved in here—a two-month relapse when I started juicing pretty hard after spending the previous nine months sober. But I’d righted the ship. I was back in AA meetings, and was coming up on 337 days without touching the poison that had killed my father.
But as I left his room, I heard Eli rouse, then speak, again in a stage whisper.
“Your daddy told me only I could see him now. . . .“
He trailed off and paused a moment. Then an icy chill gripped my heart as he finished his sentence.
“. . . But he said you’d see him later.”
#
We’d moved into my father’s house the previous August, the weekend before Eli was supposed to start kindergarten. I was 270 days sober then. Eli’s mom had left the two of us high and dry, so I was out of work, a single father, and a recovering alcoholic. As fate would have it, my stepmother left my father at around the same time and my father insisted I move in with him. “I know Eli’s mom is out of the picture. The two of you can live here rent free while you figure things out,” he said. “You can contribute by helping out around the house.”
I was wary, but I was also broke, jobless, and out of options. So Eli and I loaded up the trunk of my beat-to-shit Civic with the remains of our pathetic little lives in the big city and moved back into my father’s house.
He lived on the grand riverside street where my grandfather, an industrialist, had settled in among the other town plutocrats. As I drove up to the house, though, I could already see how my father had let the once-proud family home fall into decline. The steeply pitched roofs of the house’s multiple gables were mossy and bleached in spots, as if ready to cave at any moment. The green-painted trim was peeling and weather-stained. The once-grand lawn, in my childhood trimmed to a green, even stubble where we would play lawn bowling or croquet, now grew wild with crabgrass and jagged, vinelike weeds. Clucking flocks of pigeons roosted in the upper area of the coach house, leaving the driveway beneath caked with their white droppings. And the red-hued masonry was now decaying, crumbling mortar leaving the bricks exposed to the elements, like rotting teeth in eroding gums.
My father had fallen into a similar state of decay. He’d been a robust man throughout my youth and adolescence, moving with the easy swagger of the lifelong athlete and keeping trim with days spent golfing and playing tennis at the local country club. Now he was stooped and withered after decades of heavy drinking. His bones had become so brittle that his vertebra had collapsed under their own weight, and he slumped forward now despite his wearing a bulky back brace for support. He wore a fraying and cigarette-burned sweatsuit, the hooded sweatshirt draped over bony, fleshless shoulders, his pants hanging from his pronounced hipbones, his ass and thighs having melted away into nothing. Even his skull seemed to have shriveled—it looked translucent and fragile, with long wisps of his once golden hair now sticking out in gray, matted tufts. A thick and ungroomed beard, stained nicotine yellow, sprawled in wiry tangles from the corners of his eyes to the base of his neck.
When we arrived, we found the River Room—the heart of the house, with a panoramic view of the Rock River through a long, wall-spanning window—in a disgusting state of squalor. Most of the furniture had been cleared out, but Dad’s old recliner chair, worn shiny and fetid, sat in the center of the room. A nearby end table was stacked with bottles of antacids and ibuprofen, along with various creams that he smeared on the boils and skin rashes that had erupted across his face and arms. Glass tumblers stacked near his chair were full of cigarette butts drowned in the dregs of his drink of choice, Cruzan rum and Diet Coke, the liquid dyed a dark yellow from leached-off tar and nicotine. The recliner was surrounded by a semicircle of old pills ground into the floor and ashes from his constantly burning cigarettes. Nearby, a bucket that he’d been using as a makeshift toilet stood nearly full of dark, tea-colored liquid. The room was filled with the thick miasma of cigarette smoke, stale booze, body odor, and old urine.
As Eli and I walked into the room carrying our suitcases, I took in the decay and tried to disguise my sense of shock and revulsion.
I lit a cigarette to cover up the stench. I avoided addressing his condition, and instead asked, “What happened to all the furniture?”
My father was staring at a massive television that he’d interposed between his recliner and the sight of the great river that ran behind the house. “Your stepmom took it all from me,” he grumbled. He groaned as he pulled himself up by his walker, then lurched into the kitchen to make his drink of choice – a huge tumbler full of ice and rum, topped with a short splash of diet soda.
I looked down at the other remaining pieces of furniture – a small loveseat flanked by two more end tables, and a matching coffee table. I pushed two empty bottles of rum over on the loveseat to make room, then took a seat, trying to avoid looking at a stack of moldy old microwave dinner trays that had been piled onto the coffee table. I watched nervously as he wheeled back to his recliner, his steps looking choppy and unsteady even as he leaned his weight on his walker.
I finally mustered the courage to speak. “Dad, I can’t stand to see you like this. We’ve got to get you some help.”
Grimacing, he dropped back down into his chair. Then he lit a cigarette and jabbed it at me. “Help? That’s what you’re here for. Not to tell me what to do.” He took a long gulp of his drink and muttered, “Think you’re better than me.” Then he turned back to the television.
A few seconds later, Eli returned from exploring the adjoining kitchen and began to run around the River Room, ignoring the stench and squealing in delight at the empty, cavernous room. My father ignored him, staring vacantly at the television and nursing his drink. Finally Eli grabbed the old man’s foot and started shaking it. “Grandpa, Grandpa, Grandpa, play with me,” he cried, looking up at his grandfather and grinning.
My father snapped his face away from the television and then closed in just inches in from Eli’s grinning face. Then he bellowed, “QUIET,” baring his teeth, which were somehow still white and intact even amidst his physical disintegration.
Eli went silent. His excited smile turned into a stricken expression, as if he’d been slapped. He looked up at his grandfather, lower lip trembling. I felt a rush of anger fill my chest. But I kept my voice even and said, “C’mon, Eli, let’s get your toys out of the car.”
Eli stared up at his grandfather for another moment. Then my father reached down and ruffled Eli’s hair. “Go ahead, Eli. Listen to your dad.” Then he turned back to the television screen and took another long pull from his drink. I glared over at him as we headed toward the door, but he was absorbed in his television and drink now, oblivious to our existence.
As I walked with Eli back out to the car, I thought about the good times I’d shared with my father. Ice-cold beers together at baseball games in the City. The refreshing bite of gin and tonics after we’d finished 18 holes on a sunny summer day. Manhattans and red wine over porterhouses at his favorite steakhouse, wood paneled and fragrant. Bloody marys over hours-long, boozy brunches. Dad had always been the life of the party, always with a drink in his hand, urging others on – more, more, there’s plenty for all.
But with each passing year, the good times became fewer. Witty repartee turned to slurred recriminations. Playful debate devolved into dire accusations. Discreet flirting became obscene and drunken come-ons.
Now all the good times were over, I thought. Only the booze was left. And, I realized, the kind and loving father I’d known when I was a boy was gone. All that was left of him was the gray and withered figure I’d seen inside, swilling rum in his squalid mansion.
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