was asleep again.
The man sat back in the chair and sighed. He returned the picture to his suit coat and removed from the same pocket a business card. He turned the card over and jotted down his cell phone number. Then he realized there was no good place to set the card. The room was bare but for a small table affixed to the wall beside the bed. He decided to leave one there and to put another in Tim’s sleeping hand. Then he walked out of the room, pulling his oxygen behind him.
He sat unhurried, not easily distracted, as if he had no plans or set arrangements and life was only a profligacy of time. It was a little past midday in Tompkins Square Park and other such men were on similar benches strung along the footpaths, unafraid to fritter away the day’s frugal hours with the mildest curiosities.
Becka had brought her baby to meet his grandfather for the first time. It was an unplanned pregnancy but one that had given her mother a great deal of joy in a short amount of time, and Becka was grateful for that. She was curious about how he would react. She had gotten used to the idea that he would never return, would never meet her son, because he had not sent an email in months. He had given up, she thought, or he had died trying to reach her mother before she did, and in neither of those instances did she know how to find him, or how to be angry, or how to mourn. She went days and weeks without thinking of him at all, and on those occasions she did think of him, it was with an abstract sadness that transmuted disappointment, concern, and compromised love into a final resignation that as far as fathers were concerned, this—silence, mystery—was all life would have to offer her.
She stopped when she saw him. She moved off beside a tree under which a terrible pink fruit lay trampled, fouling the air. Jack was in the carrier, facing forward, and suddenly he moved his arms and legs in synchronicity while letting out a little squeal. She smoothed his pale hair as she stared into the distance.
It was sad to see her father so docile and inexpressive, and so thin. Much thinner than he had been when she saw him in Portland. He had explained in a totally unexpected email that he had been in the hospital a long time and now he was out, but he gave no specifics, made no inquiries, and requested nothing. She had had to arrange this meeting, though he chose Tompkins Square Park, where now, under a linden tree swiftly shedding leaves in the wind, he sat, as unremarkable a feature of the city as the park bench. She found herself lingering. She needed a moment to take him in so that she could greet him with a familiarity that would not betray any trace of the pity that had pierced and then repulsed her when he first came into view.
Jack was still doing a noisy dance of the limbs when she approached and yet her father didn’t turn at the sound of her footsteps or their sudden halt nearby. “Daddy?” she said. He turned to her then, and in the long seconds that passed before he said it, she believed he had forgotten her name.
He had lost his way somewhere. He had forgotten why he had pushed and pushed to come so far. It seemed to him just another battle in the war.
Becka was carrying a baby in a harness. His grandson. It didn’t touch him. She sat down on the bench next to him and introduced them. He repeated the boy’s name and reached out and with one of his fingers gently lifted the child’s soft pink foot. A small smile animated the weathered gray lines on his face, but that was all. Then they set off. Becka’s apprehensions and warnings on the way there didn’t touch him. Much more important was the matter of rising off the bench and starting off again and getting to where they were headed in one piece, with the pain under control, stopping for water or food if necessary, and making an end that got him out of the weather. He hoped not to be taken away by a walk, but otherwise nothing much else. And if he was taken away, there were other days to do this. It