My Father’s Dreams
“I know you know how much I love this place, but after Pam went away from me, things are different.” He sat back down at the table and I did the same. “Have you ever said good-bye to someone, someone you knew you wouldn’t see for a long time?”
I took my glasses off and stared in his blurred direction without answering. I thought the question was dumb considering every time I said goodbye to him when I was a kid, I knew I wouldn’t see him again for a long time.
“One night,” he went on, “the week before Pam died, I sat next to her and she asked me what I thought it’d be like to die. Was there something called heaven? Would we find each other and live together in the clouds? She was having a lot of trouble breathing then. It wasn’t the medication, or even the cancer. Nerves, I think. She was always anxious when she was waiting to go some place.” My father giggled to himself. “At that point, Pam was waiting to leave me and go wherever we go after we leave this place. Anyway, she looked at me and told me she wanted to die. She didn’t want to wait anymore, so she asked me to help her kill herself.”
I started rubbing the bald spot on the back of my head. I’m not sure why I do this—I still do when I don’t know what to say. “What did you do?” I finally managed to ask.
“I told her I couldn’t and I remember she turned away from me, and I was scared she was mad. I reached out and ran my fingers along her shoulders—they were so bony by then but I still loved them.” As he spoke, my father raised his hand as if trying to show me with his veiny old-man fingers just how beautiful his dead wife’s shoulders had been.
“So what happened?” I asked, still rubbing my head.
“She never said anything about it. It didn’t matter. A week later she was dead.” My father’s hand then dropped to his lap. What only a moment ago had seemed to me a beautiful expressive hand now seemed to be as lifeless as his wife. “Hijo, I know you won’t understand; you’re like your mother—practical.”
I stared at him, waiting for what he had to say next.
“I have dreams,” he said, finally.
I still didn’t say anything.
“It doesn’t happen that much. But once in a while, I wake up and I feel this calm, peaceful feeling—all over my body. That’s when I know. I knew I had to leave your mother and move out here because I dreamed it; it’s how I knew I should marry Pam and that she’d die before me.”
“You’re trying to say you’re psychic?” I asked. “You hear voices and that’s why you left me and mom? Jesus, dad, are you on medication?”
“I don’t need that. Things happen the way I dream them, and now I’m dreaming about you.”
I knew then my father was crazy, and you can’t blame crazy people for what they say.
“She’s not right for you. You’ll be unhappy like your mother was,” he said.
I told him my mother was unhappy because he’d left her.
“She wasn’t happy when I was with her either,” he said.
“That’s why I left.”
”I thought you left because one of your dreams told you to.”