I Was There the Night He Died Read Online Free PDF Page B

me to Thames View so that we can pretend that Dad is glad we’ve come to visit.
    â€œWhy not?” I say.
    â€œTo health and happiness,” Eddie says.
    We clink our bottles, and Eddie’s car joins in with a ping.
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    â€œYou sure it’s plugged in?” Uncle Donny says.
    â€œOf course it’s plugged in.”
    â€œYou’d be surprised how many times I thought my lawn mower was busted and all the time it was just out of gas.”
    Believe me, no, I wouldn’t. I keep pushing buttons on the remote until eventually the television speaks its first words. I turn down the volume—that was Thames View’s only condition of our bringing in a small portable television for Dad to stare at in the evenings: that we keep the volume low, not so much in consideration of the other equally oblivious patients as of their assembled visitors.
    The TV was my idea. Dad without a hockey game on in the background doesn’t seem like Dad. It’s three o’clock in the afternoon, though, and the evening’s first faceoff is four hours away, so I flip. The tiny television set is resting on a metal tray attached to the far end of the bed, Uncle Donny and I sitting on chairs on either side of Dad. Neither of us says a word as one blah-blah-blah channel replaces the next. I stop at a black and white war documentary, Korean War variety, it looks like. “How about this?” I say.
    Uncle Donny shrugs. “I don’t know. If it’s not about Nazis, I just don’t find history shows very interesting.” Just so there’s no confusion about where he stands on the issue of the National Socialist Party of Germany, however, “Those guys were bad news, you know,” he adds.
    â€œI’ve heard that.”
    â€œBad, bad news, believe you me.”
    There’s a soccer game on TSN, but as disparate a lot as we are, the Samson men are united at least in their unspoken but no less firmly held belief that any activity in which men wear shorts but are not permitted to body check one another is not a real sport. Uncle Donny insists I leave it on the match, however, until all of tonight’s hockey games and their times are finished scrolling across the bottom of the screen.
    I recommence clicking. There’s a combination nature/science program on one of the educational stations, and this time I don’t ask, just leave it. Uncle Donny announces he’s got to make a phone call, and before I can ask him who he has to suddenly speak to, he’s gone. The concept of Uncle Donny having a girlfriend crosses my mind and lingers there like a bad smell in the refrigerator that no amount of disinfectant can get rid of. Dad’s eyes, if not his attention, are on the TV screen, and I join him.
    Apparently there’s a parrot that’s been taught a vocabulary of over a hundred words, inspiring several scientists with thick glasses and thinning hair to speculate on the giddy possibility of a bird capable of authentic human conversation. Just what we need: another nattering species to bore us with what they think, with what they’re feeling, with who they really, really are deep down inside.
    I turn off the TV. Dad stares at the dead screen with as much interest as when it was alive. Maybe not parrots, but people, certainly, are supposed to talk. Most of the time you wish they wouldn’t, most of the time they haven’t got a single thing to say, but that’s what they’re supposed to do. Sometimes, when he could still remember my phone number, Dad would call me in Toronto and ask me who he was. The first time he did it, I thought he was joking, said, That’s the million dollar question, isn’t it? When the line went quiet, Dad , I said. Are you still there?
    You’ve got the wrong number , he answered, and hung up.
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    Two hours of Uncle Donny talking interspersed with two hours of Dad not talking followed by three