I Will Wash Your Clothes

On when it gets better

My Dad never zipped up his jacket in the winter. He was from Winnipeg, where the cold was constant and summer was fleeting. I remember watching him on the phone in the snowy garden out my bedroom window, smoking a cigarette in a white t-shirt, his arms bare.

In M Train, Patti Smith pleads, Please come back, you’ve been gone long enough now, I will wash your clothes.

I lived alone with him in high school, and when he would forget about the laundry I would wash it again, the damp smell of mildew rising over the washer as I opened the lid. At night, when he was passed out on the couch, the soft static of the TV casting a cool white light, I would gather up the detritus from his day: the red wine stained coffee mug held loosely in hand, balancing on his chest, the piles of used Kleenex scattered around. It relaxed me, like brushing my hair, to clean up his space. I moved quietly, afraid of waking him. He called himself The Bear, like Dr Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.

“I’m sorry that The Bear came out last night,” he said to me once, his smile skewed into a joking grimace.

After moving out in my third year of high school, I would stop by the house around lunchtime to check on things.

I’d poke around its rooms, once colourful and dirty in a charming, country way, now dusty and bare. Peering into the freezer, my heart sinking at the icy 1L bottle of vodka resting on the top shelf. I would look under the kitchen table for my cat, who was old and sick and nowhere to be found. I’d open the door to my Mom’s closet and smell her clothes. I would check his room for evidence of the ways that he wasn’t taking care of himself. The crimson-stained mugs lining the bookshelves, the piles of Kleenexes. The air heavy and rank with the smells of dog and dirt and damp weed. I’d check behind the TV cabinet, where he stashed a huge milk jug of homemade red wine.

I don’t remember exactly when I learned that he was sick. I was 22, hostessing and finishing school, I think, but I hadn’t seen him in a couple of years. He had mentioned coming down with something since moving back to Winnipeg, and that it wasn’t getting better, but he never said that he was lonely. Days spent shut in with the dog, his knees too bad and the air too cold for him to go far from home. But he was okay, not to worry, he always said. And I let it go. I booked plane tickets to LA, I got stoned and blew my money at the thrift store on beat up shoes and disintegrating handbags, I focused on eating as little as possible, I didn’t do my homework and cried to my professors, I picked my face until it bled. I never went to visit.

From there came the updates on tests and treatment that I didn’t particularly care to ask any more about. He sent me money when I asked and I called him when I needed it.

Then one Sunday morning in January when I was 23, I woke up hungover at 11 am to my iPhone ringing, shoved underneath my pillow. My bedroom was tiny and cold, yellow sunlight filtering in through a narrow slat of window. I was irritated when I picked up the phone and saw his sister-in-law’s contact flash across the screen.

“Hello?” I said, childlike and polite.

“Honey, it’s Rae,” the voice on the other end of the line said. “It’s your Dad.” With that I burst into tears, heaving sobs deep from within, the phone slick to my ear as she said I’m sorry, I’m sorry over and over.

I cried because I knew, I’d always known. I used to look out the window of the school bus, imagining how my Dad would die as I listened to, like, Imagine Dragons in my earbuds, my expression blank.

“How did he think this story would go?” a friend said to me once, after.

Rae continued: “Georgia, I know, but you have to breathe, honey.”

“He won’t go to the doctor. He hasn’t been to the doctor. He hasn’t left our basement in weeks. I don’t know the last time that he took a shower. He won’t eat anything.

Sweetie, he’s going to die. He’s going to die if he doesn’t get help. I don’t know what to do. We can’t help him.

I think — I need you to try to get through to him. Please, please call him. You’re our only hope. I’m so sorry to ask you this. I just don’t know what else to do.”

When she hung up, I slowly rose from the bed, pacing around my attic apartment in my pyjamas. I looked out the window at the naked branches of the trees outside, the grey street below. Then I called him.

He was an alcoholic himself, I was sure, the bartender from the restaurant ten years my senior who I had started sleeping with that winter.

“Slow — slow down, breathe,” the bartender said, his voice low and thick with sleep. “What happened?”

Through gulps of air I exhaled in between words — he was lying to me, I sobbed, he was never getting treatment, he never went to the doctor, he let it happen, he let this happen

This is what he’s like, I continued, drunk on it now, unable to stop — he’s always been like this, he’s a liar, he lies, he’s always lied to me, this is classic him, I laughed manically here, the bartender silent as the words torpedoed out.

Will you come over? I begged. I can’t — that’s all I need right now, that’s the only thing that would make it better.

“I can’t, I’m sorry. I wish I could,” he said, sighing. “You should call him. Let me know how it goes, okay?”

I stopped crying, rubbed at my face. “Yeah, thanks.” I hung up.

When he didn’t pick up the first time, I broke out in a cold sweat. The second time, he answered, sounding tired and fake-chipper.

“I’m fine, Scoop,” he said. “What did Rae say? She shouldn’t scare you like that.”

“Daddio —” I pleaded, my throat tight. “Please, please try, for me, okay? Don’t you want to see me again? You need to be healthy, so you can come visit, ” I breathed low, holding the phone away from my face.

He paused for a long time. “Okay, Scoop.”

I hung up and stayed in that spot, curled up looking at the winter trees outside as the light drifted from morning to afternoon. I blinked and checked the time, it was 4 pm. I don’t remember anything after that.

Until May. I was in LA, in the back of an Uber leaving LAX. I was listening to Habits, Stay High by Tove Lo in my earbuds, watching the hot pink begonias and Spanish style houses pass by out the car window, the flash of the Hollywood sign in the hills up ahead.

You’re gone and I gotta stay high, all the time — the music blared, and then my phone rang. It was his brother, letting me know that my Dad was in the hospital, near me.

“I’m out of town right now,” I huffed, cold and annoyed. “I’ll visit when I’m back in two weeks.”

“Well, I think you should really be with him —” he started, before I cut him off and hung up.

I didn’t know, then, that he had driven straight from Winnipeg, Manitoba to Kitchener, Ontario, with hospital tubes sticking out of his body, his legs thin like weak branches pressed against the gas pedals, To see his daughter one last time, a friend’s Facebook post read on his birthday. My eyes skimmed the words at the office one afternoon, I was eating trail mix scrolling on my laptop. To see his daughter one last time, against all odds and advice.

I stayed in LA for two weeks, smoking weed and tanning, before flying back to Toronto. The hospital had sent him away, with quiet words to get comfortable at home. He was staying in the back room of a friend’s house when I finally saw him. The room was dark and it smelled like piss. I came in and set down a plastic takeout bag of sushi — his request — on the side table by his reclining chair.

“My, aren’t you pretty,” he said, when he saw me. It had been a few years.

“Hi, Daddio,” I replied, pulling up a seat next to him.

He ate exactly two pieces of sushi before setting the tray aside. Watching him struggle to chew, bits of rice falling down his face, his unusually swollen fingers fumbling with the chopsticks, made me feel numb.

His once sturdy body, from a life of walking twenty kilometres a day as a postman, playing electric guitar, working in the garden, riding horses, driving West, was whittled down to skin and bone. He had always been perpetually tanned, even in the winter, with strong arms and calloused fingers. In the stained La-Z-boy chair, he was pale white, his ever-thick brown hair thin and patchy, shaded a faint, weak grey. He looked like Gollum to me, from Lord of the Rings. He wasn’t my Dad anymore. He couldn’t scare me: the fear of God, he couldn’t charm me: laughing until I felt dizzy.

From there, back to the hospital. Then the hospice. Then it was the end. I said I love you one final time over the phone. I didn’t want to be there to see it.

“Do you think, we’ll still be able to talk?” I asked him once. We were alone, just us two, in the hospital room.

“If you’re quiet, you’ll be able to hear me,” he told me.

Almost two years later, on Valentine’s Day. A week before his birthday, which I used to forget. There was a big snowstorm the night before, the streets were white and bare.

I was walking home as the sun set, cold wind whipping against my cheeks, trudging through the snow. Music in my earbuds like always, but that night it was quiet in the dying winter light of day. I heard a faint laugh, I thought I saw him up ahead, his jacket unzipped, hey, Scoop. Please come back, I used to beg. Soft smile, snow underfoot, standing in the garden, smoking a cigarette, the crack of heavy boots on ice. Eyes closed, A Day in the Life. Sweet dreams, I whispered, holding the mug and the tissues, and sometimes he would wake up with a smile and reach for my hand when I did that, and now, now I know, he never wanted me to wash his clothes.