Daisy
I go to the window and look into the garden, watching them, unable to stop myself from smiling. The land for miles around is scorched dream-earth, unimagined, but that doesn’t matter to me. All that matters to me in this whole world is down there, playing in the yard. Hound—Henry, now; he was Hound a long time ago—is picking our child up over his head and flying around the yard with them. The child is neither a boy nor a girl, not yet, but they are laughing and shouting, “Daddy! Daddy!” I tug my apron on and fry the bacon, taking great pleasure in the methodical movements. I’m no cook, I warned Henry long ago, but I can fry some bacon and butter some bread, squeeze ketchup onto the crispy meat. When I carry it out to them, Henry’s hair is a mess around his face, and his ice-blue eyes are alive with life. He takes the sandwich from me and devours it in two bites. After giggling, our child does the same. Then we’re all rolling around the freshly-mown grass, fighting, playing, Henry laughing, our child laughing—
I’m woken by a nurse nudging me in the shoulder.
“Excuse me, Miss Dunham? Miss Dunham?”
“Yes? Yes? Sorry.” I rub sleep from my eyes and look up into her face: fake-tanned, tightly-drawn features, a no-nonsense look about her. “Is he—awake?” I almost asked if he was dead for a second then. I’m surprised to find that the world has turned dark, the light shining in through the windows streetlamps and moonlight. “Or…”
“He’s awake,” the nurse says. She gives me the room number where I can visit him and then walks away to deal with somebody else.
I’m nervous as I walk through the hospital, afraid of what I’ll find when I enter Dad’s room. They were working on him because his injuries were serious, which means he must look pretty bad. I catch myself thinking this and wonder if that’s the sort of thing you should be thinking in a situation like this. But when you’ve spent your entire life trying to avoid one particular thing, the prospect of being met with that thing doesn’t exactly fill you with hope. But I can only walk slowly for so long until I’m standing outside the door. I feel tears well in my eyes and force them back down. Pregnant, the father possibly involved in this, my own father coughing behind a hospital door.
I force away the tears and then open the door, telling myself to be strong. When Mom had cancer, she was strong, right up until the end. She never complained. She never let herself cry, at least where I could see her. She was strong for the people around her and that’s what I have to try and be. But it’s easy to promise yourself that before you’re met with cold bloody reality.
Dad’s face has ballooned to twice its size, covered in stiches and bandages, his body splayed out like a collection of meat and bones. IV drips feed into his veins, and a urine bag is attached to the side of the bed. His finger hovers near a Call Nurse button. When I enter, his eyes turn to me, but his head doesn’t. His head is propped up like a baby’s.
“D-Daisy?” he manages to say, thought it comes out more like Dassheee, because of his swollen lips. “Oh, th-th-thank God!”
I sit beside the bed, moving to take his hand before I see that it’s all swaddled in bandages. Seeing him like this is almost too much to handle, but I’m surprised to find that a big part of that doesn’t come from love or sadness, but from anger: anger that he would let this happen to himself after I’ve done so much to try and avoid it. Even as the anger grips me, I know, on some level, that it’s selfish. But it’s all too much to handle: the baby, Hound, and now this. I feel like screaming, I feel like hitting something.
“Where were you?” I ask him.
“I can’t say,” he replies. If he talks quietly, barely moving his lips, his voice is clearer and it seems to cause him less pain. “I wish I could, but, not yet, not yet…”
“Who did this to you, then?”
“I don’t know.” He winces. “I can’t remember. I don’t think I was facing them. I was—I was getting into my car, I think. I’ve talked to the police, but you know me, Daisy. You know I can’t really talk to the police.” He winces again, and then says. “I’m glad you’re here.”
A pause lengthens between us and I realize, with a terrible sense of failure, that we have nothing to say to each other. We’ve never talked, not properly. Our lives for the past decade has just been Dad spending the money I make him. We haven’t had time to talk. I wonder now, as I sit here with the silence growing more and more uncomfortable, if what I’ve been protecting all these years isn’t Dad, but an idea of Dad, or the man he was when Mom was alive, or some other phantom that was never realer than fog.
“I hate seeing you like this,” I say, and I mean it.
I mean it. Or am I just trying to convince myself? Is it that I hate seeing Dad hurt, or that I hate feeling like I’ve failed him—failed myself? I look up and down his bloodied, bandaged body and feel a profound sense of loss, but I’m not sure if that’s loss of Dad or loss of myself. If I can’t protect Dad, what am I? What have I spent these past ten years doing? Wasting away my twenties dealing with assholes at the Shack, never really even trying at anything better, using Dad as an excuse when in the end I’ll fail anyway? Is that all I’m worth? Is that all my baby’s worth? I tell myself I’m being selfish, but even if that’s true, it doesn’t change the way I feel.
“What is it, Daisy?” Dad asks, his eyes looking small as they turn to me in his bumpy face.
“I—” My fists are clenched. I’m shaking. I need to get myself under control, but my anger at Hound and my anger at myself and, yes, my anger at Dad is making it too difficult. “I—You should’ve been there for me.” I speak the words softly, decades-long-withheld words, words which have always lived between us but which neither of us have ever acknowledged as being alive. “You should’ve been there for me!” I repeat, voice cracking. “I was a child, Dad, I was a child and—and—oh, it doesn’t matter.”
“No!” Dad shouts. He collapses in pain at the effort. “No,” he wheezes. “You need to say this. I owe you that much, at least.”
“I just…” I take a deep breath. I don’t know how we got here. I was supposed to come in and play the good, supportive daughter. The elephant in the room was supposed to stay hidden, as he’s been for ten years. But we’re here now, so…“I used to hate you, Dad. I really used to hate you. Hate you with, like, a hatred that scared the shit out of me. I used to lie awake at night thinking of Mom and wondering how she would react to what you were turning me into. Oh, no, you didn’t make me drop out of school. You didn’t make me start working straightaway. No, you didn’t force me, or hit me, or anything. But you manipulated me, I’m sure of it. I’ve been sure of it for a long time.
“I remember a couple of weeks after Mom died when you were drunk sitting on the couch, getting more and more drunk, when I came to sit with you. You turned to me with red eyes, looked me right in the face with those red eyes, eyes I still see every time I look at you, and you said to me, Dad, you said: ‘They’re going to kill me if I don’t start paying. If I don’t get them their money, they’re going to kill me. And I can’t work! Nobody will hire me!’ And when I told you how I was doing at school, you’d grunt and shrug. But, oh, when I came home one day and told you I’d gotten a job, you jumped up and wrapped your arms around me and told me you were the proudest you’d ever been!”
I pause, wiping tears from my cheeks. Dad just stares down at his feet. I think he’s crying, too, but it’s difficult to tell with his puffed-up eyes.
“Do you have any idea what that does to a daughter? Do you have any clue what it’s like to come home with your homework and have your dad grunt at you like an animal, and then have him all but push you into a job? Do you have an idea what it’s like for all your friends to be graduating and going off to college until you don’t have any friends left, not really, and you look back and wonder, What the hell happened to my life? You never supported me, Dad. I know it hurts to hear. I know it must really upset you. And I know I’ve kept quiet for too long. But it’s the truth. You killed a part of me the first time you took my money. It died. Because all I could think was, Shouldn’t he be protecting me? Shouldn’t he be the strong one? I never even got to grieve for Mom. That’s what it feels like.”
I wipe the tears from my eyes, but there are so many now I’ve no sooner wiped my cheeks that they’re soaking again. Dad is trembling in bed, wincing in pain as his tears sting his bruised eyes. I grip my belly, thinking I might be sick, trying to get a hold of myself. All the pain of unvoiced anger, resentment, rage, self-loathing, washes over me, crippling me. A thousand memories of Dad snatching an envelope out of my hand whilst avoiding my gaze hit me. I remember asking him once if he wanted to go to the movies, and he agreed, but then he spent the whole time checking the time on his phone and tapping his foot. At the end, he jumped up and paced out of the theatre as quickly as he could. He didn’t want to hang out with his daughter. He wanted to party. He wanted to get away from his daughter as fast as he could, never mind that she was paying for the partying.
“And I never really considered stopping,” I say. “I never truly thought that it was time to stop paying your way. I never wanted to see you hurt. And now—and now look at you. So what’s the point of it all, Dad? I wasn’t helping you. I wasn’t making you better. I was enabling you. That’s the truth. I was making it so you never had to get better. I was making it so you never needed to stand up and do something.”
We both cry for ten or more minutes in silence. As time goes on, I find myself shocked at my words. But I also find that there’s far less tension than there usually is with me and Dad. There’s no longer a collection of unspoken agony between us. It’s all out there, except for one thing…
“I’m pregnant,” I tell him. “I can’t tell you who the father is, not yet.” Why not? Maybe because I’m not sure about Hound; maybe because I don’t yet know if Hound has anything to do with this. “You’re going to be a grandfather.” I should leave it at that, but I can’t. “Let’s hope you’re better to your grandchild than you’ve been to me,” I add bitterly.
Dad breaks down, weeping violently for around a minute, and then manages to calm himself down by breathing steadily. “Oh, Daisy,” he moans. “Daisy, Daisy. Fuck, I’ve been—I’ve been a horrible father. It’s true. You’re not wrong. Everything you’ve said is right. I’ve been a coward. When your mother died, I just—I froze, I guess. I froze and I stopped thinking of the next day or the next week and all I thought of was now, because at least now I didn’t have to think of her. But then what about you? I’ve been the world’s biggest coward, hiding from my problems. I hate myself!” He spasms in bed. I think he’s trying to punch the mattress, or the railing, but he’s too injured. He cries out in pain and slumps down. “I wish I was dead. I should’ve died, and your mother should’ve lived.”
“Don’t say that,” I whisper. I touch his hand softly, careful not to hurt it.
“Why not? It’s true. We both know it’s true.”
“Maybe it is. I don’t know. But don’t say it.”
He shakes his head as much as his bindings will allow. “I’ve always promised myself that tomorrow I would be better. I always did that, Daisy. I would lie awake, drunk and wheezing, and promise to myself that tomorrow, I would clean it all up. No booze, no poker, no blackjack, no anything. Some days I would even get to around four pm, but then I would start to see her, sitting sweaty after giving birth to you, or when we first met, turning her head to smile at me, and—”
But he can’t go on. He starts crying again for a long, long time.
“A grandfather,” he says. I start, sitting up. I thought he was asleep. “Me, a grandfather. Maybe if this thing works, it won’t be so—But life isn’t built on maybes. Whatever happens, I’ll be better. I can be better. I know I can.”
“I hope so,” I say. “I really do hope so, Dad.”