My Own Man – Chapter One

Seeking: June 2006

The light is on, but you are not at your usual spot: the stool at the breakfast bar next to the kitchen.

Of course, it’s like that sometimes. I’ve seen it before, looking from my car into the front picture window on other nights when I’ve surveilled you. You may have gone up to the bathroom. Or maybe you’re out of sight, in the kitchen, fixing yourself another drink.

Or perhaps … something else.

My heart races when I think of this something else. Is today the day? I conjure scenarios: You’re on the carpet at the foot of the barstool. You’re lying, still and cold, halfway up the stairway to the second floor. No matter what I depict in my head, though, you have not suffered at the end. I never wanted that, not even on the worst days of our relationship.

Instead, you have simply ceased to be—for real and finally.

I forward to a CD track on my car stereo—a slow piece by Tchaikovsky—and drive around the block a few times, thinking about what I might find if I venture inside and what it will mean for me going forward: at the very least financial independence, autonomy, the chance to crawl out from under your shadow. It will herald a coming of age for this forty-three-year-old man who should have reached that pinnacle decades earlier but, for reasons over which I can only blame myself, I have not.

The string arrangement blaring from the speakers fairly drips with pathos now, and I breathe in time with the swooping dives and crescendos. Whatever Tchaikovsky drew from his own personal experience to create his song is immaterial in this instant. I’ve incorporated it for my own use tonight. It is to be the soundtrack for a bittersweet discovery.

Three more passes by the front window, and still you are not back at your barstool. I drive around to the next street that runs parallel, where I park and peer between two houses for an alternate view through the sliding glass entrance at the back patio.

Again, I can only make out that the stool is empty.

I get out of the car and creep between the houses and into your backyard. I know this neighborhood. I know that people tend to go to bed early. And even if a neighbor were to see me, they likely wouldn’t think anything of it. Most of them have known me since I was a child. I ran around in their yards and my own throughout the 1960s and seventies.

Besides, they also know that you are now old and unsteady. That you drink too much. That you’ve lived alone since Mom died three years earlier. My presence in the night wouldn’t be considered strange. Just a good son checking on his ailing father.

From the back window, I see you are not lying on the floor. But you aren’t standing in the kitchen either. So why are the lights still on? I fumble for my keys, find the one for your kitchen door, and let myself inside. The place is a mess, though someone who didn’t know of your former knack for neatness might charitably call it a lived-in look. The deep kitchen sink is now a receptacle for garbage: junk mail envelopes, crumpled paper towel scraps, anything you can toss over the short distance from your perch at the barstool next to the kitchen counter.

The plastic oxygen tube prescribed to ease your COPD-ravaged breathing hangs looped over the backrest of the barstool, unused as usual. A tumbler on the breakfast bar holds the remains of your whiskey and Seven-Up. The ice cubes have diluted the liquid and lightened the amber color of it as they’ve melted. Your near-empty pack of Pall Malls sits there as well. There are no dropped cigarettes burning down on the floor tonight, although the carpet shows a cross-hatching of burns made by earlier drops.

Apart from the hum of the refrigerator, the house is silent. I stand in the kitchen, straining to hear some other sound before I start my search of the basement, the lower-level family room, the upstairs bathroom.

Then it begins: your apneic snore kicking in from upstairs—the same brattle of chokes and stops that terrified me as a kid, back when I still feared the prospect of your dying, of your leaving me behind to find my own way in a scary world.

But that was then.

I sigh and turn off the kitchen light, not quite sure what to think about what has just happened, or more importantly, what has not. Because even with the many justifications I can offer for this ghoulish, late obsession of mine, there is always the guilt that hangs about it.

I lock the door as I step outside and cut through the neighbors’ yards again to get to my car. Driving back to my apartment, I switch to another song on the CD. I don’t need the Tchaikovsky dirge anymore.

Today is not the day.