“Father,” Dad said, finishing the word in his thin voice. “Raymond. Her first husband. the father of Gary. He came in through the back door at night after Gary went to bed, Chrissy, wearing a ball cap pulled down. I did not see his face the first time. But I heard her whisper, ‘Ray, be quiet, the old man is awake.” He gripped the edge of the blanket with both fists. “And Ray said, ‘He will not be awake much longer, and then they both laughed.” I sat very still on the edge of his bed with my hands in my lap. Twenty five years in intensive care, and I had never once felt like a patient.
I gave the story to Mrs. Thibodeau, who gave it to a detective in the Bangor police named Fitch, a quiet man with a salt and pepper beard. He pulled the file on Raymond Gagnon in an hour. Convicted of identity theft in 2009, served three years in Maine State Prison, released, and then vanished from every record. The address on his last parole form was a motel in Brewer. Detective Fitch drove there himself on Saturday morning, found Raymond in room eleven, eating cereal with a plastic spoon, and arrested him with the laptop still open.
The laptop held everything. The online applications for the three loans, filled out with the Social Security number of my father, the date of birth of my father, and a photo of his driver license taken on a bed with a flowered quilt. The accounts opened in his name at four more banks. The emails to a company that sells burial insurance, asking how much the policy would pay if the policyholder died of natural causes in a cold climate. Detective Fitch turned the screen toward me, and I read the question twice.
A father cold in the dark is brought back by a daughter who simply refuses to let him go.
Bev was arrested at the house of her sister in Portland, sitting in a recliner with a bowl of popcorn and the cat on her lap. She cried loudly and told the officers she had only been trying to help her son. The detective asked her whether helping her son included unplugging an electric blanket on a night when it was nine degrees outside. She did not answer. She asked for a lawyer, a glass of water, and, absurdly, for someone to feed the cat.
Gary came to the hospital the day after the arrests. He stood in the doorway of the room of my father with his coat on and could not meet my eyes. “Chris,” he said, “I swear I did not know about my father.” I looked at him for a long time. “Gary,” I said, “I believe you. But there is something I need you to understand. I asked you about the blanket, and you did not answer. A man who has nothing to hide can answer that question.” He nodded slowly and left, and I never saw him cry about it.
The loans were canceled by all three banks as fraud. The four other accounts were closed, and the credit bureaus were told to remove every trace. Raymond pleaded guilty and received twelve years, Bev six. The judge, a gruff woman with a Down East accent, addressed my father directly. “Mr. Dunbar,” she said, “I understand you paid cash for your boat in 1971.” “I did, Your Honor,” said Dad. “Then,” she said, “it is the least this court can do to see that you never pay for anything you did not buy.”
I filed for divorce in December. The house on the hill was sold in the spring, a sad large house with too many empty rooms, and I bought a small cape with a stone chimney in Hampden, a ten minute drive from the harbor. The sunroom on the back, I tore out myself with a crowbar and a pickup truck. Dad stood at the edge of the lawn in his wool cap and cheered every pane that fell. He said he had hated that room since the day Gary built it.
He has a real bedroom now, with a real woodstove that I installed with the help of two firefighters from the station on Broadway. In the evenings, he sits beside it in his rocker with the photograph of the lobster boat on his knee, and his old cat, a gray stray named Skipper who moved in uninvited, curled in his lap. He says the stove smells like the kitchen of his mother. He says it is the best seat on the coast of Maine.
I took a staff position in the intensive care unit at the hospital in Bangor, day shifts, no more contracts, no more airports at three in the morning. When I come in, he is waiting at the window. He lifts his hand in the old lobsterman salute, two fingers off the brim of his cap, and I wave back from the driveway like a girl. On Saturdays, I drive him down to the harbor in Stonington, and he sits on a bench for hours, watching the boats go out.
On the first fine day of June, one of the old captains, a man named Phil Beal, hailed him from the float. “Walter Dunbar!” he shouted. “Is that you? I thought you were dead!” Dad stood up straight, planted both hands on his hips, and shouted back across the water in a voice that rang off the pilings. “Not yet, Phil,” he said. “Not for a good while. My daughter will not allow it.” The whole harbor laughed, and I laughed too, and I was crying, and I had never been so happy in my life.
