One time I was counting up how many people I knew who had died already. It was the summer after graduating from high school so you can imagine my surprise when I realized I was up to seven already and that was only the suicides. I was pouring my father a cup of Postum from the thermos next to his chair that raised him up and down with just the press of a button when he suddenly asked me, "Bea, how many people you know who died?" My first thought was what had happened to his grammar because he was particular. My second thought was that I didn't know anyone dead. My third thought was that my second thought was crazy because no one knows anyone who's already dead. You can know them when they're dying, you can know them all you like, you just can't know them when they're dead. Unless you're crazy, which I am not.

My fourth thought was to start with the suicides, because those were the ones that stuck out in my mind.

"You mean," I started cautiously, careful with the thermos to avoid spilling, "you mean people I used to know who are now dead due to natural causes or due to any causes, any causes at all?"

My father stared at me in what you might safely call a peculiar manner. In the years I had known him his face had hollowed and caved, making it difficult for strangers to discern his exact expression. Even my mother, before she left him for good, even my mother used to shake her head and say, "Ted, I don't know whether you're mad or you're mad." It was her idea of a joke but she meant it too. Maybe it's why she left. I'm saying maybe.

I started listing them off in my head, all the people I knew who were dead of suicide. Pretty soon I realized my father was still staring at me and I looked down and saw I was ticking them off on my fingers without saying them out loud. So I started listing them outside my head for him to hear too. It seemed to pacify him, his peculiar look gradually falling away.

"There was that girl in the seventh grade who they said fell out her bedroom window but anyone who's ever been to Kips Bay - it's where she lived, you know, that apartment complex on Second in the Thirties -" - my father grimaced, he hated the assumption that just because he hadn't been out of the house since 1974 he'd lost all knowledge of the city - "anyone who's ever been to Kips Bay knows the windows are all locked. No way a person could've just fallen out the way her parents said she did. Besides, they fired the school psychologist which was, like, a dead giveaway."

My father, a shrink himself, nodded and grimaced again. "Cut-rate therapists," he muttered.

"And Robert Greenblatt's brother. They found him drowned in the whirlpool at their country house. He left a note and everything. They did an autopsy and it was a bottle of single malt Scotch and a thing of Valium off his mother's dresser. Then Peppy Silverstein slit her wrists and it didn't work so she did it again and it still didn't work so she got her uncle's shotgun and blew her brains out. It was weird because they say how girls are always cowards and don't really want to die and only want to be found and get the attention and it was like Peppy heard that and was determined to prove them wrong. She was always like the stubbornest girl. Remember I told you how she refused to be in the school play in Fifth grade? She had to get a note and everything excusing her."

"Oliver?"

"Yeah. I hated that stupid play. I thought Peppy was really cool. I mean, we were only ten or whatever."

"They were ten," my father reminded me mockingly, "you were nine."

"Yeah." I skipped a grade. My mother always had this thing about my skipping, like she was really proud of it, would find any excuse to drop it into the conversational mix. My father always reminded her it was no big deal to skip the first grade. Sometimes he'd add that I'd only been skipped at her insistence, to save a year's tuition. Later, when I was older, I too would remind my mother of this fact; it always embarrassed her. She'd smile apologetically in front of whatever parent she'd been bragging to and give them a speech about how eager I always was to downplay my own accomplishments. "Am not, am not," I would singsong, hopping from foot to foot and rubbing under my arms like I was a monkey. I wasn't a very nice child. I'm sure it couldn't have been easy for my mother, raising two girls on her own with a sick psychiatrist husband growing deader by the day in his office that was separated from the rest of the apartment by two doors and four locks. My sister was nicer to my mother than I was but then my sister was the one to leave first. She was sixteen when she left me for college. Then it was my mother's turn to leave, which is how it happened I was with my father, like I'm telling you, a year after high school, feeding him Postum out of a lousy thermos and counting up dead people for him.

"You want me to go on? There was old Mr. Supple who had the candy store before it was the shoe repair shop that got sold when that developer bought the whole corner and turned it into The Crystal Pavilion -." My father and I snorted in unison. The Crystal Pavilion was a monstrous skyscraper that had been erected on the corner of Third and Forty-ninth in the late seventies. It towered over the old Steakhouse that had been called Manny Wolf's but was now called Smith and Wollensky. It shaded our back garden so that even the Ailanthus trees grew tall and spindly in their search for light.

"That's alright," my father interrupted. "I was just wondering."

"Yeah." I looked at him. He had the same kind of head I did, the way it filled itself with strange wonderings that had no bearing on the day to day of things but were all the more compelling for it. My sister, in particular, had been subject to the constant questions of my childhood. She was nothing if not patient with me. Eventually I got old enough to be embarrassed by myself and left off asking her useless shit. You could call it a kind of maturity if you want, though I don't see why you would.

"Doing anything nice tonight?" my father asked.

We had lapsed into a companionable silence during which time he had pretended to suck at his Postum and I had seated myself in the chair opposite him, the patient's chair.

"Nah." I shrugged.

"What about that nice Oliver boy?" my father pursued. He was, after all, a child psychiatrist as well a regular shrink. He understood the value of companionship. He knew it wasn't healthy for your average seventeen-year-old girl to spend all her time with a dying person like himself. He shouldn't have felt guilty. It wasn't his fault that he wasn't dead already. It wasn't his fault but it was no secret that people had been counting on it and that it was because he wasn't dead that I'd had to take the year off school, defer college and everything. That looks bad, written down like that. But it's true enough. And I like knowing what's what. He was the same way. Probably it's why we got on the way we did.

See, if he'd died already, there'd have been the insurance money. There'd have been money for tuition. As it was, my sister was barely covering the bills for her own tuition and for my mother's care. Thank Christ, my mother liked to say in her more lucid moments, thank Christ for Francine's looks. Francine, my sister. She models for money which is something of an irony if you know her at all which you don't and I won't bother telling you because it's too long. Just know that Francine is about as private of a person as you can get and when she says she only models for the money, you can believe her.

The point I'm making, he'd been sick so long already. For as long as I knew him. Francine says she remembers a time, way back when she was way the hell little, when he wasn't sick. The way my mother told the story, one of his doctor friends vouched for his health and that's how he got the insurance. Right from the time it was discovered he was going to die, my mother understood that she'd better make arrangements. First the insurance. Then, right from when me and Francine were little, our mother would say how he was dying and we should prepare. "When," I'd ask, eager to prepare, "when is he going to?" My mother would shake her head mysteriously. "Whenever," she'd say. "When," I'd demand, "next week? Next year? Tomorrow?? "I'm telling you," my mother would reply, "whenever." I knew better than to pester Francine on the subject. It was one thing to count on her patience when it came to asking what was for dinner, it was another to count on it when it came to inquiring after our destiny. No point asking Francine when, Francine wasn't interested in addressing questions she did not know the answer to. Francine wasn't interested in lying. Probably it's why we got on the way we did.

"Oliver's away for the summer," I lied. The truth was, I didn't want to see Oliver anymore. I'd let him deflower me at the start of that summer, upstairs in Francine's old bedroom. The deflowering had been my idea but the idea of doing it in Francine's old room had been Oliver's. At first I was annoyed with him when he pulled me in the direction of Francine's room but then I figured what the hell: her room was nicer anyway. Oliver had always had this crush on Francine, that was the annoying part. But I'd been looking for someone to deflower me and had settled on Oliver so the way I looked at it maybe Oliver was the one getting screwed, as it were.

"Where did he go, Oliver?" my father asked. He cocked his eyebrow in that way he had so you were never quite sure did he mean to let you know he was being ironic or was he just exercising a muscle that still worked.

"Europe or somewhere."

"Really," my father replied, arching his eyebrow even higher so there was no way to pretend he was being anything but ironic. " I guess you're stuck with me then." He gave a strangled little chortle.

"Fuck you," I muttered inside my head, hating him for making me feel sorry for him.

"Did you eat?" my father asked abruptly.

"What?"

"Did you eat?"

"I think so."

"Well, why don't you get yourself something to eat?"

"Yeah." I nodded. It was true, I could do with something to eat. He always knew when I needed to eat. Pretty much it was all the time so it wasn't exactly a profound insight on his part or whatever but he was the only person who ever asked. Apart from Francine, that is, but Francine, like I say, was gone by then.

"Why don't you make us some eggs or something? Chop up a little onion, throw in a slice of Swiss, scramble us up some eggs, hm?"

"Yeah." He was being nice. It made me nervous. We both knew that whatever I made, I'd be the one to eat it all. He didn't eat much except for the thermoses of Postum and the occasional pastry I'd bring him from the faux Italian bakery on the corner of Forty-eighth and Second. He liked cannolis so I'd buy him one, watch him lick off the dots of sugar from the bubbled pastry and suck the creamy center out with his tongue. He never bothered with the pastry shell. It was too hard and would always crumble into a billion little pieces that would scatter on his lap and embarrass us both when it came time to pick them off.

"Why don't you call that nice Oliver boy, see if he wants to take you to the movies or something?"

"I told you, he's away."

"Right, right, I forgot." He was getting nicer by the second. I glared at him. He lifted his shoulders as though he would apologize but he didn't get very far before they dropped back down.

"That's right," I said fiercely, getting up. "You want some eggs or what?"

My father nodded, his head down like he was ashamed or something stupid.

It was going to be a scorcher. My eyeballs knew it before I did even, burning under the hot sun that crept through the wooden shutters in Francine's room. I had taken to sleeping there right around the time of my deflowering.

I hauled myself out of bed and to the bathroom. Turned the shower taps on and stepped under the lukewarm spit of water. I was thinking: what would I give him for breakfast, what would tempt his fancy?

The heat had gotten to us. We were sluggish, rising late, going to bed early, listening to the radio in his office in the relative cool of the evening. I would order in, Chinese or deli sandwiches. He ate less and less, barely bothering even with the cannolis I had been buying every day. Used to be I saved them as a special treat. It was the heat, I decided. The heat killed everybody's appetite but mine.

Francine was in Tangiers, shooting the Bonwit Teller Winter catalogue. Bully for her. Our mother's leaving cost a lot; the monthly bills for The Valley Restorative Facility were staggering. Her doctors said she was welcome to leave at any time. They wrote us a letter saying she posed no threat to herself and none to anyone else. My father let me read the letter. Francine was pissed at him for that. Said it was a failure of his parental responsibility, some shit like that. How would you know, I said to Francine, he's the shrink, not you. She looked at me pityingly. It was the worst.

Regardless, our mother preferred to remain where she was. It wasn't that I wanted her back or anything. I just didn't think it was fair of her to decide a thing like that, making the rest of us look bad, something. It was insulting. It was embarrassing. It was, my father pointed out, just as well.

"Hey, you know what?" I was in what you might call a good mood, jubilant even. Given my lackluster awakening, I'd narrowed the possible causes for this to two things: the entire pot of coffee I'd consumed in the face of my father's refusal to drink or eat anything in the way of breakfast, or the check for fifteen hundred dollars we'd just received in the mail from Francine. Fifteen hundred dollars in 1976 was not so bad. Enough for three months worth of Chinese take out and Italian pastries and as many visits as he wanted from Frank the osteopath, a man with a head so bald and so broad I was convinced he was suffering a kind of contained encephalitis. But my father was fond of Frank, so I scheduled appointments as often as he allowed.

My father shook his head. That is to say, he slowly inclined his head first to the left, then to the right. In spite of the heat which usually softened the spasms that gripped his body, he had been experiencing an unusual amount of stiffness, his tight muscles resisting even Frank's and my attempts to knead them soft.

"Happy Fourth of July!"

"The Fourth already," my father mused, slapping at his left thigh that had risen in the air of its own accord and was jouncing and jogging this way and that.

I ignored the spasming as long as I could, until it seemed it would knock him off his chair altogether. It was always a hell of a job getting him off the floor after a fall. "You want me to take care of that?" I asked finally, super casual. It was a dicey proposition, offering help. If you offered too soon, he'd be insulted. If you offered too late, he'd be furious.

I laid my hands on the misbehaving thigh. There wasn't much flesh to it, just a thick femur covered with a scrap of loose mottled skin and a couple of gingery hairs. A little gross, but mostly fascinating. Scientifically speaking, understand. Proof of the biological betrayals to his body. Proof of the possibilities of a long dying. How long could a dying continue until it counted as living again?

"Ach," he said with guttural disgust at the impossible leg.

"Here," I said, seizing upon a two second pause between spasms in which I managed to attach the limb in question back to its proper position. Then I jumped on top of it, to ensure its continued good behavior.

My father grunted. More in surprise than pain, I hoped. There must have been times when I was little when someone had lifted me into his lap.

We were quiet, absorbing the newness of it all. It wasn't a bad feeling.

After a time - I remember the Gershwin program on the radio coming to an end, followed by headline news, a traffic and weather report, and an advisory on fireworks safety - my father said "that's enough of that then," and gave a scoot to the small of my back.

I hopped off and regarded the offending limb warily.

"Don't be ridiculous," my father said, annoyed. "It's quite finished. I'm fine."

It was the "I'm fine" that aroused my suspicion. For starters, "I'm fine" had always been my mother's province, occasionally Francine's, and, once in a great while, mine. It was never a good sign when someone in our house was walking around proclaiming that they were fine. "I'm fine," had been our mother's last words before me and Francine found her half-drowned in the bathtub from a bottle of Veuve Cliquot and a stomach of partially digested barbiturates. So where did my father get off suddenly talking "I'm fine"?

"Well good," I replied, remembering Francine's admonition to 'stay peppy no matter what'. "Do you want to go down to the river later and watch the fireworks?"

"The East River?"

"Duh. Not going all the way west to the Hudson, are we."

"It's been years -" he said.

"All the more reason! I'll get the wheelchair out of the closet and we'll give it a go. We can always come back. No harm done."

He looked at me uncertainly, almost like he was afraid. He'd never been afraid of anything. Which didn't seem an act of bravado but of reason: if you're already dying, what's there to be afraid of? I'd said that to Francine once, trying to make her understand his superior courage, and she'd just snorted and said he had all kinds of things to be afraid of. Name one, I said. Leaving us, she said. Then she looked sorry she'd said it.

So what. If I could get him down to the river, even just down to Second Avenue, well, that'd be something, wouldn't it. A sign of health. An ability to appreciate the fineness of the season. An exercise in rejuvenation. Shut up, I told the inside of my head.

At seven, I went to the back of the invalid closet and began clearing a path to pull his wheelchair through. The invalid closet was in our mother's room. It was where she'd stored all the pharmaceutical supplies: Soma Compound for him, Valium, Lithium and Elavil for her, cough syrup and assorted antibiotics for me and Francine. Also the various vaccines our father had instructed Francine to inject us with over the years; it wasn't dangerous or irresponsible; Francine had excellent hygiene protocols and our father always supervised. When he was still practicing, he got all the pharmaceuticals free from the drug companies. Giant economy-size containers of the stuff as well as the little patient samples. The more sophisticated hardware - the snakebite kit and pressurized gas mask - our mother had to pay for herself, ordering them out of a special catalogue.

The wheelchair was just an old Everest & Jennings, nothing fancy or mechanized like his special chair and the rolling walker that had an automatic brake sensor. "Jesus," I said when I'd finally cleared enough of a path to maneuver the folded Everest & Jennings. There was a stack of stomach pumps to my left, a cardboard box full of ace bandages and assorted hypodermics to my right, and loose piles of items as infinite in their variety as they were irrelevant to our needs: expired Epi-needles (none of us was allergic to anything), collapsible crutches, strips of cotton gauze to be used for tourniquets, temporary splints, an oxygen tank, even a hotel sewing kit that we were to use in case someone needed stitching and all the hospitals in the metropolitan area were - what? Bombed? Collapsed? Overrun with termites?

Dressing him, getting him out of his chair and to the door and into his wheelchair was nothing. It was the three steps up to street level that did us in. I won't bore you with the details. There I am, making it sound altruistic again. I won't bore myself with his patience and my false encouragement as I pushed from behind, steadying his shifty spine, lifting and pushing too hard. I let him make another try after his first fall, though his effort was all for me. He fell again. We dropped together. My hands went out behind me so my own head would not crack. I caught his head, it was what I was born to do. His head bounced onto my hard stomach and then off and I put my hands to catch it again but still his scalp grazed the metal grating that catches the leaves in fall so the drain is not clogged.

I dragged him inside, extricated myself from under his heavy body. He was panting. I prayed a little though Francine raised me as an atheist so I did not even know but I managed. "Alright now, just, please, that's it, kindly, thank you," as I slid my hands under his armpits and counted to ten, gathering breath before dragging him backwards into the dark cool house. In the front hall, I let him down slowly on the carpet. I would get the wheelchair later. Who was going to steal that, old and out of date as it was. A stupid Everest & Jennings.

I pulled his handkerchief out of his shirt pocket and blotted his forehead. The fissure in his scalp was thin but there was blood. "Let me call," was the code. In the past, Francine had always been there to say it. Usually she would already have called for the ambulance by the time she came back to him and said it. "Let me call," and he'd turn his head away. He would not speak. Ashamed. The ambulance would come and Francine would go with him to the hospital. "Why can't I go, I want to go, I don't want to stay home with her," I said one time, right in front of our mother. I told you I wasn't a very nice little girl. "Because," Francine would hiss. "Make her a champagne cocktail, call Jo Jo, see if he can come over and bring some of those special cigarettes she likes." "Can I use an umbrella?" I'd ask, referring to the little paper cocktail umbrellas Francine and I bought on Mott Street and that were only used for special occasions. "As many as you want," Francine would say, and the ambulance would be there, the men entering our house to carry our silent father away. Francine would come home that night, our father a few days after. And a few days after that, our mother would leave. "For a vacation," Francine would say. I don't know what she thought she was protecting me from. Once I even said, "Francine, you're only six years older. It's not that big of a deal." But I knew I was lying. From her silence, I knew Francine knew I was too. But she never said so.

I don't say, "let me call." I say, "are you alright?"

My father nods. "A little, water, perhaps."

I go get him the water from our apartment, which is separated from the office where he lives by a hallway, two doors and four locks. I come back fast. It's not just that I'm worried. There's something I don't like about the rest of our apartment. I like his office and Francine's bedroom and that's it. I've been meaning to ask him could I stay in his office one night, spread out the old orange LL. Bean sleeping bag on his floor and see how I sleep. Maybe tonight would be a good night to ask.

"Here." I hold the water to his lips and mop the spills with his handkerchief, which is a little disgusting from the blood.

He drinks the water and thanks me.

"Maybe a nap," he says, wheezing as I re-insert my hands beneath his armpits and try and raise him to his feet. It's no good. His body is heavier than usual, all bone, no muscle or flesh or fat to feel.

In the end, I have to drag him to his bed. It's a good thing we have that metal gate outside so no one passing can peer through the windows of his office and catch sight of us. We don't look too hot, I'll guess.

Finally, I get him on his bed. It's not really a bed. It's what he sleeps on to be sure, but it's not really a bed. It's his patients' couch. When he grew too ill to mount the stairs at night, he began sleeping in his office. I always wondered what his patients would have thought if they'd known.

His eyes are already shutting. "Come back for me in an hour." He adds, "I'm fine. Really. It was a nice idea. We'll do it some other time."

I cross to the windows and fold the wooden shutters, blocking the late afternoon sun. The last thing he needs is heatstroke. I don't want to leave him but he will be mad if I disobey his orders, so I return to the rest of our apartment, locking the doors carefully behind me.

I come back in a half hour. I know perfectly well he's not dead, but I give him a little poke in the shoulder all the same.

He opens his eyes immediately. "For godsakes."

"Fireworks'll be starting soon."

"Was that really an hour?" he asks, struggling to sit up.

"Half," I admit, getting behind him and pushing.

"Oh, forget it." He flops back down.

"You want some water, some dinner?" I offer. "The Italian place doesn't close till eight. If I hurry, I could get us some cannolis. They have chocolate-dipped and ones with peanut butter chips even. It's new. For the centennial or whatever."

"Just water."

I fetch him a glass from the bathroom.

He looks at the glass a moment before allowing me to help him bring it to his lips. It's the glass he uses to rinse his teeth after brushing. It's not a proper drinking glass. The water isn't cold the way it would be from our kitchen. He doesn't say anything though.

"Can I sleep in here tonight?" I ask while he is still drinking, his enormous Adam's apple bobbing in and out of his narrow throat. "In honor of Independence Day."

His Adam's apple pauses before continuing its bobbing. When he is done drinking, he releases the glass into my hands.

"I don't see why not."

I was worried he was going to ask why. Now I'm worried why he doesn't ask why. Just so long as he doesn't tell me he's fine again.

"Aren't you hungry?" he asks.

I shrug, though I am starving.

"Could you bring me the phone?" he says.

I stare, panicked.

"I'm going to order you some food," he explains patiently.

"But -." I am confused. He never does the ordering. That's my job, or Francine's when she's home. Though Francine's more of a cook than an orderer.

"You have to eat."

"I know. It's just -"

"Here." He hands me the phone.

We go to bed early. Nine, nine-fifteen.

We never go to bed early. We stay up late, listening to the radio, reading, playing Scrabble. Sometimes I rub his back or his feet. Sometimes I take a bath in the little bathroom that adjoins his office before saying goodnight and going to read in Francine's bed until it is one or two or three in the morning.

Tonight, we go to bed early. Nine, nine-fifteen.

I am surprised by how easily I am asleep. I don't have to read, or count farmyard animals, or empty my brain of negative imagery and unpleasant memory the way the magazines counsel. I fall asleep on my father's floor, inside the house that he bought, inside of the orange LL. Bean sleeping bag that he has allowed me to unroll on his floor.

Sirens wake me.

I open my eyes into his. He is staring at me from the depths of his mechanical chair. Somehow, he has maneuvered himself from his bed to his chair. The phone is in his lap.

It is still dark out.

The sirens grow louder.

The phone is in his lap.

From outside, bright beams of light pierce the gaps in the wooden shutters.

"I've called Francine," he says. "She should be home in a few hours."

"I'm coming with you," I say. "Please."

"Yes," he says.

"It doesn't have to mean you're dying. You've been to the hospital before, after all." It is not customary, this direct address of the topic at hand, this direct reference to the state of his dying. Not to him it is not customary. With Francine, with our mother, it was to be expected.

"I've been to the hospital before," he acknowledges. It's what they say to do in all the manuals. Never lie to your child. Acknowledge the truth as often as possible. In situations of extremis or when a child must confront a bizarre reality, remain as honest as possible while doing your utmost to minimize unnecessary detail that could only serve to confuse and/or frighten.

"I'm not a child," I say. "I know things."

"Yes," he says, and for a moment an expression of relief replaces the shame that lies across his face like something rotten.

He didn't die that night.

It was one of the nicest things he ever did for me.

He'd spent so long dying I'd gotten right out of the habit of preparing for when he would. But after that night, I made sure to start again, numbering the days he lived until the one he didn't.