Island by Patrick Downes

Author:Patrick Downes
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Groundwood Books Ltd
Published: 2019-02-26T19:46:22+00:00

FIVE

Imagine a person struck with a deadly sickness, an awful cancer. And, then, to everyone’s surprise: remission. Happiness. The sick one wakes up full of life, better than ever, and they act as if they haven’t just been suffering — or that you weren’t suffering with their suffering. They get up, walk, eat, go to work, see a movie. They don’t want to talk about what they missed. They don’t want to talk about the pain. They don’t want to talk about what will happen if they get worse again. They want to live.

My father didn’t have cancer. He wasn’t terminally ill. He had made a choice.

He decided to give up on life before my mother died. After my mother died, he didn’t change his mind. He didn’t say to himself, “My wife is gone. My children need me. My house needs attention. I’m up for it.”

Nope.

The house fell into disrepair. Little things at first — dripping faucets and loose doors and scummy walls, a blackgreen bathroom, the annoyances and blemishes and dirt and grime people put up with without much complaining, aware that it all should be better, but with no real motivation to keep up, especially when at the center of the home there’s a sense of hopelessness.

Our house, now a dangerous eyesore, an embarrassment among the five other houses on our neat dead end, wasn’t always that way.

Neglected. On and on, slow decay.

When the roof started to go, three years after my mother died, when Key and I were twelve, when the weather came in, dripping and streaming down through rotten shingles, overhead lights, and seams in the ceilings, and when my brother and I lost our limited ability to keep up with cleaning — Key and I only did the laundry and cooking without knowing what more we should or could do — we confronted my father. It took all our courage, but he surprised us.

Our father seemed to want to live again.

You wouldn’t call our father a handy man, but he was no fool. Over three or four days, he read from a book on home repair. He stripped and patched and retiled the roof. And this somehow returned him to us for a spell. He moved around the house from this repair to that, cleaning, tightening, scraping, scrubbing, hammering. Doing. He made dinner once. A couple of times he drove Key and me to school or work, on errands here and there.

Key went to my father like a kitten to a bowl of milk. But I held out.

Once, as if he knew he had Key in his hand, my father put his hand on his shoulder, a gesture that passed for affection, and said, “Key.” Almost like he might have said, “I love you.”

“Where you going now?” Key asked him.

“Rehang the basement door.”

That door hadn’t swung right since the house had begun to collapse and the foundation give way.

“Does it make any sense?” I asked my brother when we were alone.

“What? Dad?”

“He just shows

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