I was living in Phoenix, on the other side of the country from the rest of my family, when I got a call from my sister. My father, our father, had a stroke. He couldn't walk anymore; he could barely talk. After he got out of the hospital, he was going to have to live in a nursing home. My sister was upset and didn't know what to do. She wanted to know if I could come back east. She wanted to know if I would visit him.

This was something like an earthquake, and I didn't know what to say for a moment. It sounded like the last chance to reconcile with him, and if I ever wanted to, I had better do it now. Despite the fact that we had held each other at arm's length for years, I found myself thinking of times when we had been closer, and things we had shared with each other. In many ways, he was where I had come from, and now that this had happened, it seemed like there might not be any going back there. I told her I would come, at least for a few weeks.

I found myself trying to figure out how all this separation started, and decipher how we had arrived at these places with so much distance between them. I thought back to my childhood and my relationship to my father then. I remembered those Sunday mornings when we would go to church, come home, and he would play Tchaikovsky and Beethoven and Rossini symphonies for me, and we would sit on the sofa together listening to them. I remember how he had taught me how to play chess, and the chess games we used to have, the intensity of the competition, how I tried to beat him, and the feeling of exhilaration when I did. Those memories brought back a feeling of standing on solid ground I had not felt in some time. I didn't realize how much I missed it. Our relationship today seemed so broken in comparison. So how had it all happened?

I think the defining moment came when I was 16, and my mother started telling us about these strange experiences she was having. My sister and I listened, aghast, as she told us she had seen her dead mother in a dream. She was in heaven, mom said, and grandmother was telling her she was alright. My parents had always been very religious, but now she began telling us that God was speaking to her. She said she had felt something one night, while she was praying in bed, like warm water running through her, filling her up from her feet to her head. Then she felt like she was floating out of the bed. She told us that she loved God now, and to me, it sounded like she did not love us anymore. We both looked at each other, as if wondering what was going to happen to us. It was like she was leaving us. She talked my father into leaving the church where we had gone to Sunday school and sang in the church choir, and they joined a born again, Pentecostal congregation. They joined a bible study group and wanted us to join with them, but I refused to go. Then my father stopped playing chess with me, and listening to music. He told me it wasn't as important as God.

I think I wanted my old father back. I was the first in my family to go to college and I took a lot of psychology classes, and I once told him his obsession with religion came from a guilty conscience. He told me what I was studying in college was a waste of time and money. He would read bible passages to me, and I would tell him about Freud and Voltaire. We would argue, and I would leave the room. He would ask me if I wanted to watch the evangelist Pat Robertson on TV, and I would say I had a book to read, and I would ask him if he wanted to go to an Isaac Stern concert and he would say he had a bible study that night. It was like we were painting each other into different corners of the same house until we couldn't stand in the same room together. When I graduated from the local two year college, I got accepted to Arizona State and jumped at the chance for fresh air, and never looked back.

I moved to Phoenix and after getting my masters degree, I got a job teaching English lit and moved into a townhouse in a Phoenix suburb. When I did come home for the holidays, he would invariably start quoting bible verses and asking me what I thought of them, until I couldn't stand it anymore. It was like I was turning myself into something he didn't understand, and I felt increasingly like a stranger around him. I couldn't wait to get back to Phoenix, to my new life. But even in the middle of teaching, in the middle of writing my articles, I had this strange feeling that I had broken with some foundation at the core of me.

After my mother died, I invited him to come out west and see my townhouse and my garden, read some of the things I had written about music and literature, but he would have none of it. When I saw him at Christmas or Easter, at my sister's, he seemed like a monk to me, carrying around his bible, intractable, insisting that I was on the path to damnation. He kept saying how disappointed he was that I wasn't going to church. When I mentioned that I had gotten a few short stories published in a magazine, he told me: "It means nothing, Frank, it means nothing." I got that sinking feeling again, that feeling of standing under a cloud, and all I could think of was getting back to Phoenix.

I didn't know what to say, so I stopped saying anything. I lived my life out in the desert, like a tourist on vacation. I soaked up the sunshine, I watched my garden grow, I wrote. But more and more, I felt like I was waiting for something to happen, like a lightning strike, or an earthquake. Then the lightning strike, the earthquake, happened. I got that call from my sister, and I realized that my father, the person who had given me life, who had raised me, who had been my foundation and compass, might be lost to me. I had to wonder, as I packed my things, if I had lost my last chance to play chess with him. Would we ever listen to music together again? Was he really gone forever?

Oddly enough, it wasn't really that hard to uproot myself from Phoenix and head back east. I had no pets to board out, I wasn't in love with anyone, and I wasn't in the middle of writing a novel or reading one. I had no close friends with plans for hiking trips or backyard barbecues. Leaving Phoenix was as easy as throwing out the perishable food in my refrigerator, packing a suitcase, and locking the front door. I was starting to find myself bored with Phoenix, like someone who had been on vacation too long. I had been free to lecture my students on modernism, go to rock concerts, and drink a few bottle of scotch in the backyard under an avocado tree, but suddenly, none of this had really seemed to amount to anything. None of it seemed defining. I hadn't gotten married. I hadn't been offered a publishing contract. I had dated a couple of the other teachers where I worked, but in the end, after a few outings, we seemed to end up under that avocado tree, drunk, with nothing to say.

At the airport, waiting for my flight, I found myself looking forward to seeing my sister, and thinking about my father. I was remembering all those Sunday mornings listening to the 1812 Overture, all those chess games, the times we had gone sailing together. Life seemed simpler then, straight forward and grounded. I was thinking about asking him if he could play a game of chess, as a way of breaking the ice. I would help him move the pieces. I couldn't help feeling that it might be too late, and I wished I could have something of a relationship with him again, even if it meant reading Psalms together or watching Pat Robertson. I felt sorry that I had never once listened to him, and that I had left the room whenever he had tried to talk to me. In my mind, I saw him lying in that hospital bed and suddenly all the times he had just wished I went to church seemed like a reasonable request from a father.

When I got on the plane, I found myself sitting next to a young man reading High Times, and wearing a Jesus Is My Homeboy t-shirt. It seemed disrespectful to me all of sudden, and it bothered me. The kid sat with his elbows on my armrest, restlessly thumbing through his magazine.

"Do you believe in Jesus?" I found myself asking him. Looking immoveably bored, he replied that he didn't believe in anything.

"What if it turns out to be true?" I asked him.

"What if what turns out to be true?" he replied, looking annoyed.

"Jesus," I said, "What if Jesus turns out to be real? Have you ever thought of that?"

"You're crazy," the young man said, putting on his ipod and giving me a suspicious, sidelong look. I fumed. I'm not crazy, I thought to myself, am I?

My sister met me at the airport in New York. She was crying, and she instinctively ran into my arms. I hugged her back. Alone in that airport, we seemed to have nothing left but each other, and in our isolation and grief, we held onto each other like we hadn't done in years. It felt like a relief to see her.

"How is dad?" I asked her finally, with some trepidation.

"The same," she answered. "They don't think he's going to change much."

"Well, there is always hope," I said, trying to life both of our spirits. She looked at me and smiled faintly. "He's always had a lot of faith. Maybe God will work a miracle for him."

"I hope so," she said, wiping her face. "I would hate to lose him, like we lost mom."

"Has he said anything about me?" I asked her, hopefully.

"He asked me where you were; I think he forgot you moved to Phoenix."

"At least he's thinking of me; that's a start. How about you?"

"It's hard," she said, "Seeing him like that. He was always so strong. It's scary."

"I know," I said. Even though I did not know.

We drove back to my sister's house, and I put my things in my nephew's room, where I would be staying. Steve had a picture of my father on his bureau, standing with his arm around him, smiling, at his confirmation. He looked so proud of his grandson. I sat on the edge of the bed, looking at it for a while. There was a bible on the bureau, and a chess set. Those tokens brought back powerful memories.

When I went into the kitchen, my sister was sitting at the table, crying. I sat down next to her.

"You're not going to fight with him, are you?" She asked me.

"No, I'm not going to fight with him," I said, "I'm thinking of just asking him if he wants to play a game of chess. Do you think he can play?"

"I don't know. He just lays there, staring at you. He looks empty."

"It's the stroke," I said. "That's what that is. Maybe if he could do something, anything, it would give him a little life. When can we go see him?"

"We can go tonight, if you want. Till eight o'clock."

"OK then," I said.

So after dinner we went to go see him. My brother in law stayed home, with the kids, and I just went with Sue. I brought along that chess set, just in case. As we went through the hospital, up to the room, I tried to think of what I was going to say, but I couldn't think of anything. All the years we had spent arguing seemed to tower over me. We had kept ourselves from each other, backed each other into a corner, and now, if we didn't pull ourselves back from the brink, everything that we had once had would be lost.

When I saw him lying in that bed, my heart fell. His right side was paralyzed, so he could only move his left arm and leg. His face looked half frozen. He looked up at me with his one eye, desperate, as if saying; 'what happened to me?' I thought to myself, is this all we had left?

I said hello and sat in a chair beside the bed, next to Sue. He turned his head a little, and kept looking at me. I will never forget the look on his face. It was like being cut off from him by a thick pane of glass, and on the others side, he looked so helpless and lost. He was trying to say something. I moved closer to him, and he raised his hand and touched my arm. I took his hand.

"Dad," I stammered, "I'm so sorry."

He shook his head. He kept trying to say something, but all that came out was this gurgling sound. He squeezed my arm.

"What is it, dad? What is it?" I asked him. He was pointing. "You want a glass of water?" He nodded. So I poured him a glass of water out of the pitcher they had for him, and held the cup up to his lips. I tipped the glass back slightly as he leaned forward, and let a little of the water at a time slide into his half open mouth. It was a struggle, and some of it spilled over his patient's gown. My sister got a cloth and wiped him up. Then I set the glass back down on the table.

He looked up at us, his one eye moving from my sister, to me. He looked so helpless. It was startling. He was so frail now, so impossibly removed from the world, from life, that felt like he had in a way, already left us, that there was no going back. But there was something in his eye, a grateful look, like he was glad and relieved to see us, like he was glad he had us to help him, to be with him. It warmed me.

"Do you remember this?" I said, laying the chess set on the table. He looked at the checkerboard squares on the board, and then he looked up at me, and nodded. He tried to say something else, pointing to the box with the pieces. "Play," he seemed to be mumbling. "You want to play?" I asked him, "I'll let you be white." He nodded. So I set up the pieces and played him a game. He could still move the pieces slowly, with his left hand. I let him take my knight, and then my queen. After a bit, I gave up.

"Looks like you got me, dad," I told him, "Just like the old days."

He looked up at me, as he laid back in his bed, and it seemed to me that he was trying to smile.

"We have to go now," my sister said, "It's time for you to go to sleep. But we will come back tomorrow."

"I'll see you tomorrow, dad," I said. He looked up at us with this pleading look, like he didn't want us to go.

Out in the hall, Sue said to me, "I hate leaving him, like that."

"I know," I said.

The next day, I went back, with the chess set, and played him another game. I poured him a glass of water, and helped him drink it, and opened the blinds of the window so he could look out of it at the flowers in the courtyard below. He looked out of the window with a longing look, one that was hard to see, like he knew he could never really be a part of the world again. I read him some poems, and then I read him some Psalms. I put on Pat Robertson and watched it with him. He couldn't say anything, but at least I was sitting next to him, as he watched it.

The first week went by, and each day I went to see him, I felt better, for some strange reason. It was nice that he seemed so glad to see me, that we could still play chess, at least. We would sit there across the board from each other, and look at each other, as if we had finally realized how much we had in common, after all those years of distance.

One day I sat next to him and leaned over him. "Dad, you know, I never thanked you for all the things you did for me. You know, you were the one who gave me my love of music, who gave me my love of books. You taught me to play chess. You know that?"

He reached out with his left hand and grabbed my hand, and looked up at me and tried to say something I could not make out, but it sounded like 'thank you.' And then, for the first time in thirty years, I gave him a hug. "I just wanted to say thanks, you know?" I told him, with tears in my eyes. "While I still have the chance."

He squeezed my me with his left hand. It was all he had left.

So we had our little chess games, over the next couple of weeks. As soon as I came into the room, he would sit up a little, and try to smile. I would set up the pieces, and we play slowly. I would pour him glasses of water and help him drink them, and we would look out of the window at the world we had once shared. When I told him I had to go back to Phoenix, that school was starting and I had to go back to work, he shook his head.

"You don't want me to go?" I asked him.

He nodded.

I went back to Phoenix, quit my job, sold my townhouse, and moved back east. I got an apartment, and took a job substitute teaching in a local school. When he moved to the nursing home, I went to see him, played chess with him, pushed him around the garden in his wheel chair. It was funny. It was like I had come home again, after running away, for all those years.