“I don’t think she’s breathing!”
It had been the dining room before they had installed the hospice bed, had scurried in
with the paraphernalia of a sick room, had hoisted a dying woman carefully but without
ceremony onto the sheets and covered her in blankets. Little non-decisions taken by the
family over a couple of days divided the awkward rectangular room, now a bedroom for
dying on one end and on the other a den-like space for waiting. By the time I got there,
the room held a couch, a piano bench, a dining chair. It held a bedside tray, a basket of
ointments and drugs, an old woman stertorously breathing. Her mouth hung open and
each breath exited with a wheeze, entered with a rattle, fought to keep the air coming in
even as the rest of her body from glands to kidneys gave up the fight.…
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The children finally fell asleep. The parents tip-toed to the closet,
unlocked the presents and positioned them under the tree with its
delicate glass balls and constellations of colored lights. Alongside it the
window framed the big oak in the garde n with the children’s swing.
Faint stars shone between the black branches. No danger of a white
Christmas, the children’s wish. The children thought in terms of
snowmen, not of fatal skids. The parents finished the second bottle of
champagne and went, unsteadily, to bed.
The wind woke them briefly at 2:36. At 3:18 he mumbled: “Blowing
hard.” At dawn the house shook them stark awake. In the grey light
outside they saw that the big oak with the swing had fallen a few yards
from the house, a chaos of broken branches.…
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We were in Rocky Point smoking rocks when Morgan jumped from the balcony. He
had this perfect running start from atop the bed and his inertia was enough so that all we
could salvage was his Hawaiian shirt. I clutched that cotton in my fist for hours. His
summersault was faultless, and he was smiling. Two seconds into his heroic leap, his skull
smashed against the sand-strewn concrete beside the ATV rental palapa. Being sunrise,
the blood was dripping tangerine and purple toward the beach and a crowd of
expressionless Mexicans huddled around the corpse.
¨Pinche pendejo güey!¨ locals said.
The policía paraded us through the streets. It was beautiful. Morgan with his head
cracked like a huevo ranchero, seasoned with ethereal leisure.…
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“It’s summer again, Papy,” we yelled in his ear. “Where to this time?”
Every June 21, his birthday, it was the same thing. Most of the time
we didn’t get through or when we did we couldn’t understand him and
we’d wheel him around the park, telling him what the flowers and the
sky looked like.
This time he said “B-bordel” and we laughed and poked him, very
gently, and yelled, “Where else do you want to go, Papy?” After a
while he said, “C-craix. B-boat.” He used to talk about it years ago
when he could still talk: young, stripped to the waist in the sunshine,
drifting past nice things. That was way back, before the war.
So we placed him in a rowboat at Craix.…
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We were huffing rubber cement behind the hunchback of the art teacher when the
principal opened the door and told me that Dad was dead. She whispered
something into the purple ear of the teacher and ushered me away from my
table. A few minutes of commiseration beside the kiln, the smell of onions on
wrinkled lips, warm against my pimpled flesh, she told me Dad died in a plane crash.
The kids could not see me. Their laughter was subdued because the ominous
ponytail of the principal loomed: its coconut shampoo sculpting atoms. I could smell the
bagel she was digesting from lunch, her deodorant, the cream cheese. Obstinate sesame
seed was lodged between her upper incisors.
I insisted on returning to class, and upon my arrival, hit the bottle hard.…
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One November day, just after he’d bedded Emily, his wife timidly suggested
planting a walnut tree. He was the one who planted, tended and knew.
He consulted his specialized books and explained, in simplified terms, the factors
that ruled out the operation: inappropriate soil, early frosts, the voracity of
squirrels, the walnut prone to sixty-four diseases. Anyhow the garden was too
small for something that size. Marie-Louise, Albertine, Agnes, Madame Hardy and
all his other precious sun-loving old roses (he called them “my ladies”) would take
umbrage at the intrusion.
His final argument was that the walnut took fifteen years to bear. He didn’t add
that with his heart condition he’d never taste one of the walnuts, unlike her, ten
years younger and never so much as a sniffle.…
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They are piling leaves and dirt from the desert and all day we watch from the
hospital out this window with this view of the hill and the saguaros and these men with
seven arms shoveling the fallen earth into ashy pyramids. Every now and then these
workers will look at the sky and shake their rakes toward the cumulonimbus. We wait in
the locked room till the doctors can decide what to do with us. We have already convinced
the psychiatrist of something.
The nurses are peering through the rectangular glass. They check our piss, ask the
simple questions: Where are you, what is your name, phone number? Why is your face
covered in paint?
We must have messed something attempting to go the extra mile.…
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