CONTRAILS
Jean’s sister Erica, the one that wasn’t a nurse, but the one that was the oldest, called the doctors to demand home hospice care be provided for their dying father. Well, maybe that wasn’t a bad idea. But just as likely, it was an automatic “big-sister-in-charge” response. Erica earned her nickname in the family–Bossy the Cow–over the course of many years and many decisions. She was the person who made decisions all right, and everyone else be damned. Well, Erica called the whole family, issued a rallying cry for help, and Jean showed up.
As she entered her parents’ home, Jean’s nose caught the sickening sweet odor of a body breaking down, a smell she was familiar with after hours spent visiting her father on the oncology wing. It irritated her to smell this in her parents’ home. They always were people who needed something the minute you walked in the door. Or rather, her mother was the perpetually unfilled well. Jean knew well enough that, while she could never count on her mother’s helpfulness or support, she could count on her mother’s neediness and her attitude of entitlement. And now this, a set of circumstances that called on Jean to put her own needs aside to perform the role of dutiful daughter. Jean knew the circumstances were legitimate even as she knew the emotional blackmail that lived behind this family obligation was not.
They were in the bedroom, her sister, her mother, her father. The women were helping her father get out of bed. Erica supported him about the waist and her mother stood facing him, supporting his forearms. Jean stood in the doorway and watched. When they finally got him to his feet, her mother helped him into his red plaid robe, and only then did the two women in the bedroom become aware of her presence. Erica looked surprised, unpleasantly, to see her, but tried to set her face into neutral —unsuccessfully. “Hi,” she said, not taking her arms from around their father’s waist. “When you didn’t call me back, I wasn’t sure you got the message.”
Before she could respond to Erica, their mother said, “Jean, I’m glad you finally got here. If I’d known you were coming for sure, I would have saved the laundry for you to do. Erica and I have been working like dogs.” The women began to move the drugged man inch by inch away from the bedside.
Jean ignored her mother’s tone. “I told you I’d come today, Mom. I told you that I’d drop the kids at the sitter’s after work and get here as soon as I could.”
Jean walked into the room and picked up the comforter that had slipped off the bed and fallen onto the floor. She folded it in half and then folded it again into a perfect square, and placed the quilt on the bed, centering it at the bottom between the bedposts. “Has Jolene been here, or Eric?” she asked, trying to keep her voice even, void of expectation. Jean was glad her mother’s face was turned away from her and toward the sick man she was leading slowly along the carpet.
“Your sister’s been asked to work a double again at the hospital and your brother’s in the middle of his busy season at work. Erica’s been here all afternoon. I guess you’re the one who’s going to have stay tonight,” her mother said. It was not a request. She added, “Come closer. Here. Help us get your father into the bathroom.”
Jean noticed the dark circles under her mother’s eyes, her uncombed hair, the familiar cowlick sticking straight up in a curly salt and pepper knot at the back of her head. Jean supposed she should feel sorry for her mother, but she did not. Aloud, she said, “Mom, why don’t I help Erica guide dad and why don’t you walk on ahead and be sure there are no rugs to trip on or anything? “
It was uncomfortable, being this close to Erica. As they arranged themselves around the sick man, Jean’s hands touched Erica’s accidentally and they both pulled away from the contact. Jean felt the current between them, a powerful, repulsive force. They stood, one on each side of their father. Erica’s arm went around his waist and Jean wrapped her arm around him above that, at his upper back. Each sister placed an arm of the sedated man over her shoulders and together they slowly shuffled him into the bathroom. When they got him positioned near the toilet, Erica lifted up their father’s robe and said, “I’ll steady him while you pull down his pajama bottoms. Then we’ll lower him to the seat.”
Jean felt herself automatically, horrifyingly, doing just as she was told. When she carefully got the bottoms down over the emaciated man’s buttocks, when she saw his penis, swinging small, pink and sad beneath his pajama top, tears sprang to her eyes. She didn’t mind when her older sister was the one to break the tension in the awkward tableau. “Don’t you wonder how it came to this, Dad? We all wonder. And we all come to this.”
Her sister’s words were surprisingly gentle, she thought. When her father said he was finished, Jean looked up sharply and saw her sister had done the same. Jean saw her own fear mirrored in her sister’s eyes. It was just a look, but it told Jean that the tone of dread that sounded within her was also resonating within her sister. The man had not urinated a drop. A few days earlier, Erica had relayed to Jean and her brother and sisters the hospice nurse’ very specific list about what to look for as the end approached. Their father’s body was shutting down.
After she and Erica helped him stand and rearranged his pajamas, Jean wordlessly reached for Erica’s hand and her sister did not pull away. They gently maneuvered the weakened man, encircling him within their arms. With joined hands, they guided him back to his bedroom. “I want to sit up for a bit,” he whispered, so the daughters helped ease him down to rest upon the sturdy top of the cedar chest, positioned as always at the foot of the parental bed. He set his palms flat, one beside each shrunken thigh, to help steady himself. Erica retreated to the kitchen, “for coffee,” she said, calling over her shoulder. Jean sat down next to their father.
Later, she would deal with his loss, the loss of the only man who ever comforted her, put his calloused hands on her back and cried into her hair. Her father was the one to whom she turned when her husband left her and her young sons high and dry. It was her father who made the boys laugh again, when, sitting across the table from his sullen grandsons at supper one night, he suddenly screamed, covered his face and yelled, “Oh, my eye!” Then, before they could react, he pulled a large, fake eyeball out of his flannel shirt pocket and rolled it across the table. It worked. They all howled with laughter and it seemed amazingly possible at that moment that, just maybe, the family could survive. And months later, after the divorce was final and she started dating, it was her father she called to pick her up after her first DUI. He listened as she poured out her hurt, told him how she would never, ever again allow herself to love the children of a man she was dating, never again remember his kids’ school events, remember his kids’ favorite colors, would never give so much again unless that man could remember at least as much about her.
In the months after his death, she would think back to his funeral and barely remember giving her part of the eulogy. The bourbon saw to that. And she’d recall overhearing her brother’s comment, “Jesus Christ. That bitch can’t even come sober to her own father’s funeral,” and she’d think, Well, screw him, what does he know? Where was he after her divorce, when she needed money to keep a roof over her kids’ heads? It was their father who loaned her the money to buy the little house in the better neighborhood, their father who promised her that she need never again plant flowers into the earth of a home she did not own.
And one summer night, with the glow of a pastel sunset settling on the lawn, it was to their father she revealed her deepest secret as the two of them sat across from each other at the picnic table in her small backyard. The sweet tobacco from his pipe knocked gently at her locked heart, giving her courage, and she told him of the abortion she had in high school. She told how her boyfriend Bobby stole the $600 from his father’s gambling money to buy the tickets and pay for the procedure; how she forged a parental excuse and boarded a bus instead of going to her classes; how she rode the fifty-five minutes into the city, and how the cabbie at the terminal took one look at her and knew where she was headed before she even gave him the address of the clinic. She told her father how ashamed and scared she was, and how she was afraid that he and her mother would take one look at her face when she walked in the door after school and know immediately where she was all day and what she did. And then, when nothing was noticed, how heartbroken she was. Hearing her story that night, he took her in his arms and though it had been so many years since she boarded that plane, the acceptance of his embrace and his whispered words, “Oh, honey, oh, honey,” over and over, melted her frozen grief and she cried until the despairing woman inside her and the child who no longer was made their sad peace, finally.
But now, as she sat next to the dying man, Jean reminded herself to stay present, and she studied her father’s face, trying to memorize it. In the coming weeks, when a letter would come from her mother, a letter that would call the loan due and she’d feel her life so bereft that she was sure her spine was cracking, she would recall this brief moment of lucidity, on this last day, this moment when her father slid his hand across the mahogany surface toward hers until their little fingers touched, then hooked together. She’d remember how they sat just like this, content in the dimming light.
~ The End ~