Still Time

  “Games.”

  “Not like games for kids—grownup stuff.”

  “Worse and worse.”

  “It fits with all the things I love,” she pleads, “art and stories, imaginary worlds, people, and how they think. Remember how I used to make those lists back when I was a kid—people’s names, with all kinds of facts about who they were and where they lived and what they did? Character profiles, you called them. I had whole notebooks full of them. And remember how I was always drawing pictures—people, landscapes, maps of made-up places? It’s like now I can harness all of that. I’m not a good enough artist to do more than sketch concepts, but I do think I’ll be good at helping to design quests and imagine worlds. It’s hugely collaborative, and—”

  “A girl … keen, as you.”

  “I thought you might at least be glad I’m going to college.”

  “I would be. If … you were.” He knows a rise of pride at the aptness of his reply, but when he glances at the woman sitting next to him, he sees her visage sag as if she were aging before his eyes. He feels an unexpected twinge, though when he tries to think what he might do to slow her aging and ease his pang, he becomes so entwisted in a complicated narrative of motives, plots, and damages that he has to let the whole thing drop.

  They sit in silence, like strangers waiting for the next stop.

  “I’ve been thinking, about green worlds,” he offers eventually.

  “Oh.” Her tone is empty.

  “In the plays.”

  “Of course.”

  He shoots her a sharp look, but his voice is mild when he says, “Like The Wizard of Oz. Only, richer, of course, denser, more … true. In the comedies, and in the romances, too, how the characters leave their normal worlds, their courts or … cities … behind, and then come transmuted—transformed, I mean. As illogical, and in … evitable, as the change from caterpillar to … butterfly. It’s a question of what triggers all that … change, or enables it, perhaps. I was thinking about art, but there’s also, nature. Though always it seems, it takes … a tragedy, some split, or vast … calamity. Regeneration, too, and seasonal.”

  He sighs. Giving her a wry grimace as if to apologize for his inability to capture his thought and bring it back alive, he says, “The Green Man was a trickster. Don’t, forget.”

  “Okay,” she answers cautiously, her voice nearly curving the word into a question.

  “Here, look, Dad,” she adds, suddenly thrusting the brick of the book she has been hugging in his direction, “I brought you a present.”

  It is a gaudy thing, he sees when she sets it in his lap, bound in maroon leatherette, embossed with gilt lettering. A copy of the Chandos portrait—what they used to call the sexy Shakespeare—decorates its cover. John studies the sitter’s features, the wise and wary eyes, the balding forehead, tidy beard and jaunty earring, the sensitive, sensual lips—lips for speaking, lips for kissing—lips that seem nearly ready to indulge their own Mona Lisa smile.

  “Well, well,” John murmurs, feeling once more that wistful tug, his wish to know the man who may have owned that face nearly erotic in its pull. “Will.”

  “William Shakespeare,” the woman offers eagerly, pointing to the golden words, “See, it says here—Complete Works.”

  “Complete,” John echoes, scrutinizing those inscrutable eyes and reflecting that it has always been no more possible to name their expression than it has been to pin down Shakespeare’s own opinions in his plays.

  When he makes no effort to open the book, Miranda retrieves it from his lap. Opening it herself, she pages to the table of contents. “What was your favorite play, Dad?” she asks, scanning attentively down the list. “What is your favorite, I mean.”

  “Favorite?” After a long moment he adds, “Someone said picking … one play.” He gives a slow sad sigh, “Is like choosing a favorite, child.” A frown passes across his brow, followed by the tremble of a smile. “But I only ever had … the one.”

  “Which one?” she prompts, and seems to hold her breath.

  He is quiet for a long while more, looking out the window to where roses blow in the summer air, where soldiers are gathering for battle, and young women are dressed as boys, where tempests are brewing, and lovers are swearing their fervent vows.

  “Love’s Labor’s Won,” he announces at last, with a finality that makes it seem that something of great import has just at that moment been settled.

  “Love’s Labor’s Won?” Miranda echoes. “Oh. Your favorite play.” Running her finger dutifully down the table of contents, she adds, “Funny—I don’t see that one here. Here’s Love’s Labor’s Lost,” she offers, “in the comedies. Do you mean Love’s Labor’s Lost?”

  “No.” He shakes his head. “Won.”

  “Love’s Labor’s Won? Are you sure?” She bends back over the book. “I don’t see Won here anywhere.”

  He gazes into the garden for so long it seems he’s vanished into whatever’s left inside his head while she closes the book gently and sets it on the dresser. A small while later, he speaks again. “It’s lost.”

  “What’s lost?” she asks, “You mean, your favorite play’s Love’s Labor’s Lost?”

  “No, Won—Love’s Labor’s Won is lost. It was registered. But no copies … appear. It’s lost,” he repeats. “Gone, and … forgotten. Dead and,” he sighs, “rotten.”

  “Oh. Well, wow. So Love’s Labor’s Won was lost, but it’s your favorite play?” she asks, leaning towards him as if her question might help keep him in the room with her.

  “Yes.”

  “But why, Dad?” After a quiet moment she offers, “Because love won?”

  “Because,” he says impatiently, “it could be anything. It’s what we don’t … have, what we can only imagine. The … possibilities.

  “But you look good,” he says, returning from his musings to look at her directly. “I like your …” his hand circles on his wrist as though he could conjure the word from midair. “Excrements,” he offers at last. “Your shorn locks,” he explains, gesturing toward her hair.

  “My hair?” she gives a nervous laugh, lifts her hand to brush the crown of her head. “Oh, well. Thanks. I—”

  “Purple is a noble color,” he announces. “But not for hair.” After a moment he adds, “It’s good to see you.”

  “It’s good to see you, too, Dad,” she answers swiftly, “I’m—”

  “It was good of you, to come.”

  Emotions flicker across her face like the shadows of racing clouds.

  “Dad?” she says at last. Her voice is nearly shrill. “Last time you asked me what I wanted, why I was here. And I said that I only wanted to see you. But maybe that wasn’t entirely true.”

  “Nothing ever is,” he tells the cat who sits sphinxlike in the sun.

  “I wanted to see you again, of course. But also, I wanted to talk, to … try to get things straight.”

  “Straight,” he speculates, testing the word, sounding it, weighing meanings, inviting associations.

  “I didn’t want to leave things like—the way they’ve been between us. I wanted—I mean I’d like to—”

  “To come to terms,” he offers.

  “Exactly!” she announces. “To come to terms.”

  “Okay,” he agrees. Looking fully into her face, he adds, “all right.”

  For a moment their eyes seem to hold an entire world between them. Then, giving her a friendly nod, John returns his attention to the cat who has begun to clean its nether end, one leg lifted off the ground with the precision of a dancer.

  Leaning toward him, Miranda waits, but when he fails to add anything more, she finally opens the silence to suggest, “I’d like to talk about what happened in London—to tell you what really happened, I mean, to me.”

  At the sound of her voice suddenly so tight with pain, an ache seizes John’s chest like the cramps he used to feel as a kid when he’d run too far too fast. He studies the cat carefully, in hopes of not upsetti
ng the precious concord he and she have so lately agreed upon.

  “I know I said some pretty strong things to you,” she persists, “and I’m sorry about that. But I think you might understand more if you knew what happened from my point of view.”

  He has no idea what she is talking about, but her devastated expression puts him in mind of Troilus and Cressida. “‘Understand more clear,’” he intones dolefully, “‘What’s past and what’s to come is strew’d with husks And formless ruin of oblivion.’”

  It’s a grim, sad line, he knows, and, in an attempt to cheer them both, he asks, “Who’s that? What play?”

  “I don’t know, Dad,” she sighs. “I thought we were talking about us.”

  “We are,” he quips. “We’re talking as we … speak.”

  “But can’t you please just talk plain English, instead of quoting Shakespeare all the time?” Her voice sharpening, she pleads, “For once, can’t you please just speak for yourself?”

  “Shakespeare,” he says with quiet dignity, “speaks for all of us.”

  She takes a quick, sharp breath. But in the next instant she seems to catch herself. Exhaling as carefully as if she were trying to keep a candle flame alight, she suggests, “But what I want to know has to do with you and I, not Shakespeare,” she suggests.

  “You and me,” he offers not unkindly. “You want the … objective case.”

  “Oh, Dad—” she gasps.

  “Should we go?” he interjects.

  “Well, not right—”

  “We don’t have much time,” he frets, twisting in his seat to glance at the open door.

  “I’m sorry, Dad,” she answers wanly. “I’m afraid I just don’t know.”

  “You’re sorry?” he barks, instantly incensed. Turning to look her full in the face, he thunders, “You just don’t know? Here I’ve been waiting all this time, waiting for you to come—waiting and waiting and waiting—and now that you’re here, you just don’t … know?” Waving off her remonstrations, he hisses, “It’s too late now. It’s over. Dead and, rotten. You ruined everything.”

  Outside, Randi stands on the white sidewalk, still stunned by the weight of the July heat that met her the instant she burst through the building’s heavy front doors, and stunned, too, by the size of her disappointment, by her foolishness for being there at all. She’d known better than to risk another visit. She’d reasoned her way back through the whole sorry story so many times, and every time she’d come to the same stark conclusion. The man who was her father was already gone—both the daddy who’d teased her and taught her lines from Shakespeare, and the father who’d excised her from his life for being such a messed-up teenager. When she’d tried to visit the husk that remained, it had only agitated what little was still left of him. He was right about that, at least, she thinks with a bitter smirk—it’s too late now.

  That first visit had been hard on her, too, harder than she’d expected, rousing longings she’d hardly known she still harbored, conjuring shames she’d thought she’d put to rest, filling her dreams with images that troubled her for days—bleeding books and leering boys and sharp-toothed rodents with weeping human eyes. She’d decided back in April that nothing would be gained by visiting him again, that little would be lost if she never returned.

  It made no sense to add to his confusion and her disappointment by forcing him to endure another meeting. Even if it did occur to him, in some brief lucid moment, that although he’d once had a daughter, his daughter never visited him anymore, she doubted he would care all that much. And if he did sometimes feel a pang—if he missed her for a moment or even yearned for her for a day or so—wasn’t that a kind of justice? When she was ten and twelve and sixteen and even eighteen, the ache of his absence had been as constant as an ulcer, as impossible to ignore as a grain of sand in her eye. If he missed her occasionally now, wasn’t that only fair?

  “More than fair,” Mink had agreed back in early June when she was still trying to justify her decision. It had been the evening of another unseasonably hot day, and they were sitting in the kitchen, courting any wisp of breeze that might waft through the open windows. She’d been home from work only long enough to open a Coke and trade her coffee-scented uniform for a tank top and a pair of running shorts. Mink was working on a chart of types of stars for his summer science class, while she sat facing the window, idly rolling the icy can across her neck and chest and staring at the tangle of black wires, leaves, and branches that blocked her full view of the darkening sky.

  “It’s called logical consequences, Ran,” Mink said, glancing up from his work. “Especially since your dad was the supposed grown-up when things went south, I’d say your biggest responsibility now is to protect yourself.”

  It was what she had been telling herself all along, but coming from Mink, it suddenly sounded wrong. Setting her lips to the opening of her can, she took a slug, welcoming the tangy sweetness, the carbonation widening in her throat. She sighed, “It’s just that I keep having this superstitious feeling like I’ll be missing out on something important if I don’t go back. Though frankly,” she added with a dark laugh, “I’m not sure I’d know what was important even if I was there to see it.”

  “Whaddya mean?” An open bag of corn chips sat on the table between them. Setting down his marker, Mink rustled in the bag for a handful.

  “He went in and out of focus so fast. How could I ever know for sure what was him talking and what was his—” Randi held out an empty hand, “—condition? I swear there were moments when he was all there, when we seemed so close to really being connected. But the next minute he wasn’t making any sense at all. Not like he was in a fog, but like he was a fog.” She took a swallow from her Coke, “Like my father was nothing but fog.”

  “Actually, he’s not fog, he’s bacteria.”

  “Huh?”

  “We all are. Our bodies are twenty times more bacteria than cells. It’s true.” He grinned at her grimace. “My class went ape when I told them that. Twelve-year-olds love that kind of shit.”

  “Stuff,” she offered, shaking her head at the wackiness. “You’ll have to learn to clean up your language if you want to keep that job.” She pulled a chip from the bag, but as she lifted it toward her mouth, it suddenly looked so stiff and flat it was hard to recognize it as food. She set it on the table instead. “I keep thinking he just needs defragging.” She crushed the chip against the table with the palm of her hand.

  “Ran,” Mike said quietly. Reaching across his work, he placed a fingertip at the corner of her eye, and then, tenderly, he traced the path a tear might take down her cheek. “People can’t be defragged.” He let his hand fall from her face to cover hers where it lay empty on the table.

  “I know,” she said flatly. “It’s game over. My dad’s already gone. For better and worse, no one gets to respawn.”

  “Fathers come in a lot of flavors,” he added gently. Picking up her hand, he pressed its knuckles to his lips, and then, returning her hand to her, he swept the chip crumbs off the table and popped them into his mouth. “Sometimes you just get a dud,” he said nearly cheerfully. “A dud dad—like mine.”

  “I know about dud parents. Look at my mom, for fuck’s sake. But with my dad,” she sighed. “I’m not so sure. For a long time I actually believed we would have another chance someday, that somehow there would still be time.” Outside the open window, she saw a tiny shine amid the tangle of wires and branches, the night’s first star. She wondered how old that light was, light from some deep past, light that would travel on and on, long after the star itself was gone. She said, “Stupid me. All that ever did was keep the pain alive.”

  Gently Mink said, “What happened in London was not your fault.”

  Despite the tenderness of his tone, his words reached her before she was prepared to hear them. She winced, then shook her head so fiercely it was as if she were trying to shake tears back inside her eyes. “My dad used to say if you’re any good at all, it’s your
own damn fault.”

  “I think Hemingway said that first,” Mink replied wryly.

  “Not Shakespeare?” she answered with a grateful smirk. “Anyway, I would rather be my own damn fault than someone else’s victim. You would, too, if you’d grown up with my mom.”

  “So there we are,” he’d answered gently, taking up another marker and returning to his poster, “back to my point exactly. The best way to keep from being a victim is to write your own terms.”

  It sounded right at the time. That evening, as other stars assumed their places in the sky and the day’s heat dissolved into the balmy night, it had made sense to cut old losses, made sense to protect the new self she was laboring to become. It seemed right to let her father go, for good and all.

  But last week the landline rang as she was leaving for work, and she’d scooped up the phone to find Sally on the other end, saying, “I’ve been thinking it would be good for John if you and I staggered our visits.” Randi stood at the kitchen counter in her black slacks and clean shirt, staring at the peels and shells and grounds in the overflowing compost bucket, as Sally went on: “I’d be happy to work around your schedule.”

  “I’m not going back,” Randi blurted, suddenly regretting that she hadn’t called Sally to tell her that, ruing her sense that she now owed Sally something.

  “Not going back?”

  “I don’t think my visit did him any good. He was pretty upset by the time I left.”

  “Really?” Sally’s puzzlement sounded genuine. “The shift nurse said John seemed much happier after you left, and when I asked him about it later, he told me he was glad you’d come, that he wanted to see you again.”

  He’d driven down to Santa Cruz to see her, not long after he and Freya returned from Spain, when the fallout from her misadventure in London was still spreading like a silent poison through her entire self and soul, even as she strained to pretend that what happened had really been no big deal.

  She’d given her mother the same streamlined version of events that she’d outlined for her dad, only, unlike him, Barb had been entirely sympathetic with Randi’s point of view. It wasn’t Randi’s fault she’d gotten lost, Barb said indignantly. It wasn’t Randi’s fault that her dad’s little Shakespeare thing just happened to be the next day, and it certainly wasn’t Randi’s fault that John always believed that whatever he did was so much more important than what anyone else was doing. Her father was a pig, Barb announced. She’d been saying so for years, and now that Randi was older, she could see it for herself. Her father should be sued or shot or put in jail for sending Randi home when her only mistake was getting lost and staying out a little too long.