Deer and Lemons

Two days before my father was scheduled to die, a Junk King dumpster was delivered to his driveway. I heard the metallic clang of its arrival. I braked in the street while the driver rolled over Dad’s curb, straightened, and then waved his thanks for my patience.

The dumpster sat crookedly, leaving no room to park on either side of it. I crawled forward until my front bumper neared it and came to stop with the car’s back end hanging a foot into the street. Years earlier, Dad had paid to have this driveway widened to fit six cars. He only had me and Kim, so it was an improvement with no utility. The closest it had ever been to its maximum capacity was the day I first drove over to see it. “Look, I’m a full-sized truck,” he’d said, slowly moving down the asphalt pad with his arms spread wide. “Now I’m another truck behind the first one. And a third behind those two. Come beside me, Dale, and do your arms like this. We’ll fit three more beside the ones I just showed you.” Despite his no longer having a car, or even a license, the driveway came up any time he got to talking with someone in line at the bank or hardware store. Once, I asked him why he only ever broached the subject with men, never women. “We’re talking driveways, boy,” he’d said. Only this, as if the statement’s logic were clear and watertight.

I peered over the edge of the dumpster as I passed it — empty other than the few paper sandwich wrappers that were affixed to the bottom by an unknown sticky substance — before continuing up the walkway.

“Dad?” I called from the foyer, “what’s happening in your driveway right now?”

There was a shuffling from the hallway. I stayed put in the foyer as if a wrong answer might cause me to abandon him during his last days of life.

He appeared in the living room. “What about the driveway?” His concern was tangible.

“The metal container? It’s blocking the whole thing. See for yourself.”

He undertook the walk to the foyer, a distance which had become difficult for him. His expression suggested I must be mistaken, that what I had taken to be a huge metal dumpster was surely only a pebble or a leaf. “Blocked?” he muttered. “That driveway is two hundred and eighty-eight inches across.”

“Yeah, well, they dropped it all cattywampus. Do you remember when you gave me power of attorney? Shouldn’t I be involved in the decision to rent a dumpster?”

He moved past me, peered through the storm door. “I’ll be darned. That thing is huge. ‘Modest,’ I told them, ‘a modest-sized dumpster.’ I fibbed and said it I needed it for fire damage and that I was offsite at a hotel, so just drop it with no signature. I wish I hadn’t said that now. I would have raised hell.”

I looked out with him. “Why didn’t you talk to me first? I’m not ready to clear this place out yet. I probably won’t be for a while still.”

He sniffed, cleared his throat. “It isn’t for that. It’s for a project I’m working on. I expected the dumpster would be smaller.”

“Dad.”

“Oh, back off, Dale.” He started away from the door. “It’s my last hurrah.” He headed in the direction of the hallway. It was slow going.

I paused before speaking, a tactic I’d learned from therapy to help me navigate the parental role I now held in my father’s life. “It’s just that it’s already Thursday.” I left it unsaid that he would die on Saturday.

“The project is small, a personal stamp I want to put on this place before I go.”

“What stamp, though, Dad? Show me.”

He turned a few steps until he was facing me. “I would’ve. I just wanted to be further along first.”

I held his gaze until he dropped his head and motioned for me to come along with him. “The hallway,” he said. “It looks worse than it is.”

At the mouth of the hallway, I saw a sprinkling of drywall dust on the floor. It grew to near-complete coverage a few feet ahead, with imprints of Dad’s footsteps dragging through it. I noticed this first, before the rectangular hole he’d cut out of the wall beside the bathroom door. It rose from the baseboard to the height of his chest.

“Christ, Dad!” I said, forgetting myself.

“Remember that you’re seeing this at an inopportune time. I’ll sweep the floor, cover this hole, and it’s like nothing happened.”

I was unable to look at him, but I managed to keep my voice calm. “What exactly did happen, though? What was the plan here?”

“I’m going to be straight with you, Dale: I’m putting in a secret room. I pictured it bigger, truth be told, but I didn’t account for how shallow this wall is. If I went any deeper, I’d bust through into the bathroom, and then where would we be?” He squinted into the hole he’d made, appraising its inadequacy when compared to his vision. “It’s going to be more of a secret closet, I suppose. I think that’s acceptable, though, given the time constraints.”

I stood at a distance, examining the hole. I knew that drywall work was best done by a good mud-and-taper, but I could probably replace the panel myself, do the job well enough to put the house on the market. What mattered now was making happy memories. “So, tell me about the project.” I managed to smile when he looked up to meet my eyes.

“It’s just that I’ve lived in this house since I was younger than you, Dale. I was a newlywed in this house, and a new father, and an empty nester. I took care of your mom here when she was sick, and I got sick here too. Sooner or later, you’ll sell it, and all those years get wiped out. The whole place resets to some stranger’s timeline — and that’s good; I don’t want it to burden you. I just figured I should leave something of myself behind.”

“You’ll leave the driveway.”

“The driveway’s for visitors — friends and family. I’m talking about leaving a mark on the house itself. Maybe it’s arrogant, but I want the next family to wonder about me. Not just when some junk mail gets delivered with my name on it. I want them to wonder who I was as a man. Discovering a secret room in the wall would do that, I think. Their kids will still be telling the story to their wives or husbands, and then to their own kids, decades after I’m gone. I like that idea. I didn’t say anything on account of how silly it must seem.”

I squeezed his hand. His skin was cold. “It’s not silly, Dad. It’s understandable. So, what are you planning to put in there?” I pictured my parents’ wedding photo outside the courthouse or knickknacks he’d made over the years in his garage woodshop. Maybe even a childhood photo of me and Kim.

“I’m thinking a clown mask, a headless doll, a candelabra, and one broken roller skate. That’s the vibe, anyway. Some of that might be hard to source in the time we have. We can brainstorm, but it should be stuff that gives them a good spook.”

I snorted and hugged his brittle body. Dad wasn’t a fan of horror, but he was a man who liked to do things right, and, by rights, finding a secret room in your home should be hair-raising. He was several times the carpenter I would ever be, but I was able-bodied with steady hands, and I could see from the jagged cuts he’d made in the drywall that I could be of use to him. “How can I help?” I asked.

* * *

In 1997, two years after Mom died, Oregon passed the Death With Dignity Act, which made it legal for terminally ill residents to end their lives. Her cancer had been slow and difficult, and she was young when she died, not quite 40. Dad had parlayed his grief into anger and action, and he had become an activist in support of the act. He made signs and attended rallies and even paraded Kim and me out for display as examples of how the undignified death of a mother can negatively impact her children. I was newly in high school at the time. Kim was in the sixth grade.

His activism ended many years ago, after the law passed. Whenever I heard someone talk about the DWDA, I didn’t associate it with our family. It was a law to help the desperate and unfortunate, and our desperate, unfortunate years were behind us. That’s why, when I took Dad to the doctor about the blood in his urine, and the results came back fatal and inoperable, I was caught off guard when he responded with a request to die. “I won’t go out like your mother,” he’d said to my objections. “I wouldn’t do that to you and your sister, and you shouldn’t do it to me either.”

Petitioning to die was, rightly, a drawn-out process — multiple oral and written requests to Dad’s general practitioner, plus all the bureaucracy of putting his affairs in order. I’d dutifully helped him with all of it.

A week ago, we cleared the final bar, and the same doctor who once plied me with candy during my kindergarten vaccines handed me a prescription that I would use to end my father’s life. It was in his bathroom cabinet now, next to the Advil and the denture adhesive, a small white box that would get any M.D. unlicensed if they gave it to a patient themselves. It had a remarkable gravity, drawing me to that cabinet every time I set foot in his bathroom, forcing me to open the mirrored door to contemplate the very existence of such a thing in the world.

“Is it a shot or a pill?” Kim asked me over the phone. I was in the parking lot at Lowe’s where Dad had sent me for secret closet materials.

She lived across the country now with a family of her own. She called him often but hadn’t visited since his diagnosis. She would fly in on Friday, a few days later than originally planned, because one of her kids was sick with COVID.

“Pill.”

“Well, at least we don’t have to give him a shot. What drug is it?”

“I couldn’t pronounce it. Something -flaxen, I think. It’s one of those standard-sounding drug names.”

I had a flash thought about those Ask Your Doctor About… drug ads.

Kim did too. “It would be funny if it had one of those drug commercials where the side effects seem counterintuitive. Like when depression medicine can increase your risk of self-harm. ‘Death-o-flaxen: side effects may include prolonged life and improved health and wellness.’” She snorted. I smiled.

A moment later, she was audibly crying. Such was the nature of loss. I didn’t console her. It was better to let those feelings out. Eventually, she asked, “How is he though, really? He seems normal on the phone, but he’s got to be putting that on, right?”

“No, he seems okay. Same as ever. Except he’s taken to musings lately, asking me big questions with no answers, like he wants my take on every bizarre thought he’s ever had.”

“What do you mean? Give me an example.”

I drummed my fingers on the steering wheel as I considered. In the distance, a man and his young son were crossing the parking lot. The man was toting a tall appliance box on a flat cart. He was pretending to let the boy navigate. “Oh, I’ve got one,” I said. “The other day, we were watching TV, and he asked me, unprompted, if I’d ever thought about mermaids’ breasts.”

“Oh my God, Dale, you’re kidding me!”

“I’m not. I took it the way you just took it. When he realized, he scolded me for having my mind in the gutter. It turns out, he meant the evolutionary implications — like, they were fish, made it to land, became mammals, then headed back to the water, regrew their tails, but kept their breasts. His point was that it was implausible.”

“I mean … whales did it.”

“Right, but whales don’t have breasts.”

“Would you think about them if they did?”

“I’m going now, Kim. Goodbye.” I ended the call and got out of the car, grabbing a stray cart from a parking space on my way.

Dad had providing me with a detailed list of everything he needed to complete the closet. He’d gone over it with me item by item, providing physical descriptions of each part, along with the aisle where I would find them. “You got it?” he asked me before I left. “What’s your level of confidence that you’ll find it all?”

“Sky high,” I’d said.

I pushed my cart through the automatic doors now and handed the list to the first kid I saw in a red smock. “I need all this,” I told him.

* * *

As it turned out, it’s surprisingly simple to build a closet. We lined out the sides and back with particleboard and then cut the doorframe and shelves out of plywood. We had the little room built in under three hours. I managed not to complain or question him, accepting that I was a mere laborer, Dad’s surrogate hands and back. I didn’t say a word until it came time to craft the door, which he wanted me to cut out of the same rough particleboard we’d used for the walls. “We can’t paint this to make it match the wall. It has too much texture. It will be obvious.”

“We’re not painting it. We’re papering it.”

“Dad, do you know how expensive wallpaper is? And what a bitch it is to put up? Let’s just go to Lowe’s and get a smooth wood for the door. They’ll even cut it for us.”

“That’s not the plan. Do me a favor and run into the kitchen. You’ll see why.”

I gave him a long, appraising stare and then rose from the small closet and started down the hall. On his kitchen table, I found two long, dusty rolls of identical wallpaper. They were a deep forest green with two repeating motifs: a single deer with long branching antlers, and an oversized, stylized lemon. Taken together, the images were confounding. I took one roll under each arm. Even before I’d left the kitchen, Dad called, “That’s the original paper from when we bought the house. We took it down on account of your mother hating it.”

“That’s because this is the ugliest wallpaper I’ve ever seen.” I leaned the rolls on the wall. “It looks like a mistake, like they grabbed the lemon stamp when they wanted a tree or a pond or something.”

“It’s the cycle of life,” was all he said.

I squinted at the incongruous pattern, trying to make sense of what he was saying. This was surely one of his end-of-life musings, like mermaid evolution, and I resolved to see it through his eyes. After a moment, I said, “Okay, I think I get it. The deer leaves scat which makes the lemon tree grow. The lemon tree grows lemons, which feed the deer and continues the cycle. Is that it?” I was skeptical that deer lived near, fertilized, or ate from lemon trees, but it was the best I could do.

“That’s an interesting reading, but that’s not what I meant. I was just saying that I want to put these walls back the way I found them. I pulled down this paper to signify that it was my time here. Now my time’s over, and the next guy deserves the same opportunity. I’m leaving it the way I found it, not counting the secret closet — which they’re sure to find, because there’s no way his missus is going to keep this ugly paper in her hallway. What are you laughing at?”

“Nothing. It’s just funny how far you’ve thought this through. Where’d you even find these rolls?”

“In the crawl space, years ago. I was under the house fixing something or other. They were half-buried, like someone was trying to hide evidence of a crime.” With that, he clapped me on the back and told me to get to work. We measured and cut the door, including notches for recessed hinges that would keep the doorway flush with the wall. By midafternoon, the closet was complete.

* * *

In the car, on the way to the Salvation Army, The Ronettes’ “Be My Baby” came on the satellite radio. It was one of Dad’s favorites. When I looked over at him in the passenger seat, he was staring at the display screen, his eyes wet and serious like the universe had played it one last time in his honor. We kept silent from Hal Blain’s iconic drum intro through to the fadeout of Ronnie Spector’s sultry voice.

“A hell of a tune,” Dad said when the next song started. He was staring down at his lap.

“It is.”

“Phil Spector was a genius.”

I nodded.

“Strange to think that he was a murderer.”

I agreed that it was a shame.

After a pause, he said, “You know, Dale, I can’t tell you how many times I’ve listened to that song in my life. Hundreds, surely. And that’s just me. Imagine all the people who’ve enjoyed it over the years.”

“It’s a classic.”

“So, if you consider all the enjoyment this song has given people through the decades — not to mention his other hits — do you think their joy is worth the sacrifice of that poor woman’s life? Is his body of work a fair trade for one soul?”

“I doubt she would say so. Her family wouldn’t.” I pulled into the Salvation Army lot and parked in a free spot closest to the entrance.

Dad sat for a moment, his face turned away from me, staring out the passenger window. “I didn’t know that woman, Dale. I can’t even remember her name. As much as I love that song, though, I’d like to think of myself as the kind of man who’d do away with it if it meant keeping her from getting killed. I don’t know for sure that I would, though. I’m not going to miss facing conundrums like that.”

I debated whether to respond. I decided on, “Life’s unfair, Dad. It’s not a crime to take joy where you can find it.” I hoped it was the right thing, but he didn’t signal either way.

* * *

We bought the creepiest things we happened upon, walking out with a badly abused Speak & Spell, a pack of red tea candles, a China doll, a pair of over-the-shoe roller skates, and a Santa cap with a tinkling bell at its tip. Outside the building, dad threw away one of the skates and ripped off the bell from the cap and pocketed it. The cap itself he returned to the donation box. We grabbed some fast food before returning to his house.

He found batteries for the Speak & Spell in a kitchen drawer, and we quickly learned it was broken, spitting random electronic burbles and nonsensical groupings of letters, whether we were touching it or not. “I had my reservations,” he said, “but this was a good find. If you sell this place quick, there could still be life-enough in these batteries to give the next guy a hell of a scare.”

We arranged the diorama, then briefly burned the candles to sell the illusion of the closet’s dark ceremonial past. “Near perfect,” he said. I took a final look before closing the door.

We ate our dinner in front of the TV. The day had exhausted him. When he was through with his dinner, he went to the bathroom, where he stayed for a long time. I was close to checking on him, when he appeared at the entrance of the hall and said, “Dale, I really wanted to have this paper up before Kim arrives, but I’m spent. Can you come over early to get a jump on it?”

Behind him, the muted Speak & Spell said, “A-N-F-K-I-N-S-D-P-J-X-J-J-J-J.”

“Sure, Dad. Go to bed. I’ll lock up.”

He gave me a partial wave before disappearing down the hall.

I stayed on his couch for a long time, then I returned to the hall and got to work.

* * *

I slept on his couch. When he came out and saw the completed wall, he only nodded at it and said, “Oh. Oh, okay. Yes.”

Kim’s plane was due at nine, so I called Junk King, asked them to pick up their dumpster at their soonest convenience, and then we went to meet her at the airport.

We’d planned a full day — lunch in the park, a trip to the museum where he and Mom used to take us as kids, a fancy dinner at the restaurant where they’d gone every year on their anniversary.

It was a nice. Somber in moments, but good. And, just like that, it was over.

I was carrying Kim’s bags into her childhood bedroom when she noticed the wallpaper.

“It’s vintage,” I told her.

“It’s hideous. Was the guy drunk when he put it up? Look at those seams.”

“It’s proper,” Dad said, and nothing more. He gave each of us a long hug, thanked us for the day, and then he went to bed.

Shortly after, when Kim and I were talking on the couch, the hallway said, “H-J-D-S-U-A-A-S-A-D-D-D-O-D-O.”

“Did you hear that?” she asked.

I looked at her like she was crazy.

“Long day. I’m losing it. This really sucks, right?”

“Mm-hmm.”

“Did you two talk about what time tomorrow?”

“Not specifically.”

“Are you giving it to him. Or … am I?” She sounded horrified at the prospect of having to administer the pill that would kill our father.

“We haven’t talked about that.”

“How could you not have?”

“How was I supposed to?”

She had nothing. I stuck around a while longer, catching up with her, hearing about her life and her family. Every topic but Dad.

The hallway said, “V-V-V-V-R-X-Y.”

“I swear to God I’m losing my mind.”

* * *

Kim called in the morning to tell me Dad was dead. He’d taken the pill when he went to bed, sparing us any discomfort. Also, she said she was sure his house was haunted.

I said I’d be over.

Maybe I would tell her about the closet, but maybe not. If I did, I would say how I’d opened it one last time before papering over it and found that Dad had added to the diorama. Sitting in the lap of the China doll, I’d found the white box from his fatal pill, his name and address on the label, the drug’s unpronounceable name above it. The vial was gone. In its place was a rolled-up picture of him and Mom from when they were young, and the house newly belonged to them. On the back, he’d written, This house was good to us. Be good to her too. I wouldn’t tell Kim that I’d suspected he would do this without us, even as I’d watched him shuffle off to bed. I would like to think of myself as the kind of man who let that suspicion go unvoiced to honor his wishes, rather than because his decision would be easier for me. But I’m not sure that’s true.

I got dressed and drove over. The dumpster was gone when I arrived, and as I pulled up to the garage, I pictured six cars in that driveway, a big happy family in my own family’s haunted house, just like Dad wanted.