Daddy |
Issue 16
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The moon is only a white disc, pulsing, like the edge of a thumbnail imprinted in the sky. Daddy’s wind chimes move with the breeze, as if to whisper how far away he has suddenly become. Somewhere in another time and place, I feel as though I will see him again, and all this time that has passed will mean nothing. It will be like he was just sleeping, like I was.
He died February 17th. His tombstone would later read the 18th, since it was after midnight when the coroner arrived at our house to pronounce him dead, but he died the 17th. It wasn’t a surprise to anyone but me, though I thought I had prepared myself for it. He fell ill in late September. It was a metastatic tumor that originated years ago in his colon, but had now attached itself to his brain. By October, it had destroyed his ability to walk. He was confined to a hospital bed that we set up in his and my mother’s bedroom. He wanted to die at home. By November, half of his memories were gone. He spoke of things no one understood, of people he had never actually known. He began to hallucinate, to lie on his back and grab at the air with his hands, as if something was floating there and he was trying to catch it. He spoke of a man named Charlie with big legs, said he saw him outside the window walking through the field, or sitting in the rocking chair beside his bed. But no one else did. By December, we were told he could die at any time. The doctors could do nothing else for him. The tumor was inoperable and it had long stopped responding to chemotherapy and radiation. The cancer swam from cerebellum to cortex, eating and eating like a shark. I was a freshman in college and living in a dorm at the university I attended on the opposite side of the state. I kept telling myself that he wouldn’t die. It wasn’t even a possibility. Cancer was nothing new to my father. In the past seven years, he had undergone countless surgeries and rounds of chemotherapy and radiation to combat tumors in his colon, his pancreas, his neck. It had even showed up in his brain exactly one year prior, though that time the surgeon was able to remove it. Each time the cancer resurfaced, we experienced months of sadness and worry. But each time he got better and there was hope again. I kept telling myself that this was no different, that the cancer would go away this time like it had gone away in the past. When I came home for Christmas break, I saw how bad things really were. I spent the month home from school helping my mom take care of him. I saw how much work Dad was, how she had to lift him in bed and bathe him, shampoo his hair, put him on the bedpan, change his diapers. He had never been this sick or unresponsive. Sometimes he didn’t recognize me. My mother took a leave of absence from her job to become his full time nurse. He had become bedridden in early October and he died in February. My mother did not leave the house once until after his funeral. Not to buy groceries. Not to pick up the mail. Not to go shopping. Not even to go for a walk. I don’t know if she was scared to leave him or if she felt guilty. If he couldn’t leave, she wouldn’t either. Our family helped as much as they could. My brother ran my mother’s errands. My father’s sisters brought covered dishes of food so Mom wouldn’t have to cook. When I was home, I did the grocery shopping. I picked up mail from the post office. I bought her cigarettes, even though I hated her smoking. By then, I felt like that’s all she had left. She sat in the kitchen staring off into nothing, sucking and sucking the cigarettes until everything she felt burned out into a pile of ash. Mom didn’t want to put up a Christmas tree that year so I did it for her. It was small and sparse with gaping bald spots between the branches. Traditionally for Christmas, she and I would spend days decorating. We would drape garland around the front porch columns and along the mantle. We would tape Christmas cards sent from our friends and family around the doorframe that separated the kitchen from the living room. There would be fake snow on the coffee table and candles shaped like little fat snowmen and Santa and his elves. There were other candles on top of the piano, tall skinny ones that were red and green and gold. The tree always had the same ornaments and we hung them together onto the branches while we sang Christmas songs and baked sugar cookies that tasted horrible, but we ate them anyway. Every year it was comforting to pull out that box of ornaments and resurrect forgotten memories. There was the paper apple my brother made when he was a child, the little fat mouse wearing a Santa hat given to me by my old babysitter, the crystal snowflake that changed colors when it caught the light. But my favorite was a little blue stocking. I had made it out of clay in my third grade art class and couldn’t wait for my parents to see it. When Dad picked me up from school that day, I unzipped my backpack to show him, but it fell onto the ground and the tip of the stocking broke off. I stood there crying and wiping my eyes on my sweater as he gathered up the pieces. He glued them back together when we got home. It didn’t look as nice as it originally had, but it held together, and it holds still. That’s the only ornament I put on our tree the year he was dying. Daddy couldn’t get out of bed to open presents on Christmas morning. When I was a little girl I would wake first, run out of my room to see the presents scattered all around, and then rally everyone else to come gather around the tree. Dad was always the last to stir, taking time to make his coffee, but we never started without him. This year we didn’t have a choice. It was just my mother and I that morning, and she had been awake long before I was, watching infomercials on television about makeup that could reduce the appearance of fine lines and wrinkles. “Merry Christmas,” I said, sleep still in my eyes. “Merry Christmas.” I didn’t ask her if she was ready to open presents. For the first time in my life I was actually dreading it, and I could tell she was too, but she stood up from her chair and sat down on the rug beside the Christmas tree. I sat across from her in my usual space. Dad’s chair was empty. The room was awkward and quiet. The oxygen machine hissed and beeped through Daddy’s open doorway at the end of the hall. I kept waiting to hear the wooden floorboards creaking and to see him walk into the room with a cup of coffee in his right hand. We didn’t get out the video camera like we normally would have. We just opened our gifts in silence, thanking each other when appropriate. It was over very quickly. By the time we finished, neither of us could remember anything the other person had bought for them. We sat there for a moment among the discarded wrapping paper and empty cardboard boxes, our minds someplace else. Later that day, after my brother had opened gifts with his wife and daughter, they came to our house. We took all of the gifts we had for Dad into his bedroom to show him. He couldn’t open them on his own so my mother did it for him. She made a fuss over each one. “Look at these new pajamas!” she said, holding them up in the air so he could see. It was the same way she pointed out presents to my niece at her first birthday party. After the second present, Dad didn’t even look at her anymore. He just stared out the window and everyone cried a little bit without acknowledging it. We were all thinking the same thing—that he would never be able to use any of the presents we had bought for him, but I kept praying that things would turn around. Maybe he would wake up in the morning and be able to walk again. Maybe he would smile or call out our names when we walked in the room. Maybe he could be Daddy again, and not the man lying in bed who sometimes knew us and sometimes did not. Classes started up again at my university on January 14th. I drove back to school the day before to settle into my dorm, leaving Mom at home alone to care for Dad. My roommate had decided not to return to school that semester, so I had the room all to myself. I thought I would like the privacy. I had plenty of space to store all my things. But once my clothes were hung in the closet and there was nothing else to do, the loneliness set in, along with the regret. I lay in bed staring at the concrete walls thinking of Daddy. It was hard sleeping that night and even harder to wake up and get ready the next morning. I only had two classes that day, but I didn’t pay attention in either of them. I went back to the dorm and lay awake all night. I thought about my mother taking care of Dad on her own again, struggling to lift him, sitting in the kitchen smoking cigarettes. But more than that, I thought about that blank look in his eyes, the way he couldn’t carry a conversation, the way he couldn’t speak at all. Early that next morning, instead of going to class, I packed everything I could fit into my car and sat down on the front steps of my building. The sun hadn’t been up long and the sky was gray and cold. Nothing moved. It was as if I was the only person awake in the world. I got into my car, started the engine, and drove home for good without calling to ask Mom if it was okay. It was the first grown-up decision I ever had to make, but I didn’t hesitate. I enrolled in our hometown community college on January 17th. Daddy died exactly one month later. I hated taking classes at the community college because most of the people I’d just graduated from high school with the previous summer were enrolled there. When I was at the university, I felt like I was far away from home and doing something admirable, making something of myself, surviving on my own. But sitting in class next to the same old faces and same old names, looking out the window at the same sad stretch of lonely highway I had lived along my entire life made me wonder if coming home was the right decision after all. As I drove home from class snow was beginning to fall. Thin and light as powder, it dusted the tops of the mountains and limbs of the trees. My mother was sitting in the living room smoking a cigarette and watching soap operas. She asked me about class. I asked her about Daddy. Before she could answer, he groaned from the other room, calling out for her. She didn’t move. “He’s been asking me to pray with him all day,” she said. “About what?” I asked, dropping my purse onto the couch and taking off my coat. She didn’t answer for a moment, like the words were stuck in her throat. I realized she was trying not to cry. “For it to be over.” She exhaled and wiped her eyes. I wanted to ask her what—for what to be over—and then I realized. I wanted Mom to stop talking. I wanted to run. Like that time when I was ten and I found my kitten dead in the garage, or the time I was fifteen and my first boyfriend broke my heart. I wanted to run away, and fall asleep someplace safe, and wake up again like nothing ever happened. Like it was all a really long and really horrible dream. But I heard Daddy calling her name again and I knew that running away would solve nothing. He was dying. He was ready to. Even though he was asking for Mom, I went to Daddy’s room to see what he needed. I walked down the hall and turned the corner. He was lying among the bed sheets, his hair matted and his eyes wild. “Hi Daddy,” I said, trying my best to appear calm. He looked like a scared animal, like the baby deer my aunt had rescued from the woods behind her house after its mother had been killed by a car. Those same wild eyes, haunting and afraid. Not my Daddy’s eyes. I sat down on the corner of the bed, taking his hand in mine. He was shaking. “How are you feeling today?” I asked, not sure if he even knew I was his daughter. He didn’t answer, but his hand stopped shaking, so I just held onto it. He laid his head against the pillow. There was a glass of water on the nightstand beside his bed and I held it against his lips for him to drink. He tilted his head back and I wiped the water from his chin. When he was finished, he reached his shaking hand out for me to hang onto. He was so helpless. I had the urge to run away again. If I ran away none of this would be real. I watched his shaking fingers dance in the air, and I grabbed onto him, remembering all the times he held my hand when I needed it. When he taught me to walk, to hold a fishing pole, to ride my bike. He had always been there for me when no one else had. He was always the one to comfort me when something had gone wrong. And I was suddenly filled with the fear that this time would be the last. I started to cry but I didn’t let him see. I needed him to hold my hand more than ever, just as much as he needed me to hold his. The next morning everything was covered in snow. I couldn’t sleep, the beeping and hissing of Daddy’s oxygen machine keeping me awake. I got up, put on my coat and boots, opened the back door, and walked outside. The sun was barely waking. A dozen elk gathered in the meadow beside our house, grunting and snorting. I watched them, mouse brown and knob-kneed, bending and shoving their noses under the blanket of snow, searching for life. One mother with a child looked over her shoulder, the breath from her nostrils spilling out into the air. That same cool air filled my lungs. I was so numb. The cold wind gave me the breath that I needed, the sharpness to make me feel. I stood on the porch until my nose started to run and my face began to hurt. I didn’t want to go inside. Behind me I heard the door open and my mother’s voice interrupted the stillness. I must have looked crazy to her, standing out in the freezing morning air, tears streaming down my face. “Get in here before you catch cold and I have to take care of you too,” she said. The snow lasted for days, clinging to the earth, refusing to be shaken loose. Daddy’s health continued to fade. He could no longer speak. Like an infant he did nothing but sleep. He wouldn’t wake up for meals. My mother couldn’t even force the food down him. Hospice nurses came and hooked all sorts of new machines to him that made noises to remind us how sick he was. He lost more weight. His arms were thin and sharp. His legs were only bones beneath the sheets, like a canvas draped over tent poles. It hurt so badly to look at him, I stopped going into his room unless my mother needed my help to position him in bed. I was getting sicker too, falling deeper into a depression I wasn’t even aware of. I mimicked Daddy’s behavior. I wanted only to sleep. I didn’t study. I didn’t eat. I didn’t speak to anyone. I pulled my bedroom curtains tightly together and refused to come out of my room, while my mother sat in the kitchen crying because she was losing both of us. Soon people I had never seen before were coming by to visit Daddy. Our house was more crowded than it had ever been. Each day a dozen aunts, uncles, and unfamiliar people claiming to be long lost friends or distant cousins popped in with baskets of fried chicken and bowls of spaghetti and cakes and cookies and cheese platters that my mother and I did not want to eat. They would gather in my father’s bedroom, one or two at a time, and stare as if he were an exotic animal in captivity at the zoo. It made me angry. I didn’t come out of my room to say hello to anyone. I couldn’t stand them all huddled together crying, tissues balled up in their fists. Even worse were the ones who didn’t cry, but came instead laughing and smiling, telling stories and pretending everything was going to be okay, that Daddy would make a full recovery, wake up, and laugh along with them. Like he had been playing a horrible joke. Like he would throw the covers back, jump up from the bed, and exclaim, “Gotcha!” I stayed in bed and put the blankets over my face and stuck my index fingers in my ears to block out the sounds of laughter. “Where’s Jessica?” I could still hear them ask, as if it was some sort of party or family reunion and I was supposed to be present. Like I was the hostess. Like any of them had been invited in the first place. I felt so sick and angry. They were all stopping by our home to do their good deed for the day and I was supposed to be there at the front door with a big smile on my face just waiting to welcome them in to see the dying man. “Come on in! Get a good look! There he is! Touch him one last time! Say your goodbyes now, folks! Today might be the big day!” Only now do I realize how negative I was. I don’t know if my father knew people were stopping by to see him, but he would have wanted them to. He would have been flattered and appreciative of all the people who cared. I resented them all because I knew their presence meant he was dying. I was scared their presence would let death know it was his cue. My first boyfriend, Andy, had told me about something he called “the death rattles” when we were sophomores in high school. Apparently, every member of his family to die in the last half-century had gotten them a day or two before their lives were over. “It sounds like they’re choking,” Andy told me. “This horrible sound comes from their lungs. It’s like when you drink from a straw and all the liquid is gone, but you keep sucking anyway. As soon as you hear that, there’s nothing you can do. They’ll be dead by morning.” I only half believed him. It reminded me of the horror stories my cousins used to tell me when I was a kid, superstitious things about werewolves and vampires that didn’t really exist. So I forgot about it altogether, until I heard them for myself. On the morning of February 17th, the snow had finally started to melt. Patches of grass poked through the whiteness and it comforted me to see them. But it terrified my mother. “I wish it would just stay snowy for a couple more days,” she said, nearly in tears. I didn’t understand why. My mother hated snow. She despised it. When I was in third grade, she went out to pick up a special Christmas present for my father. Somewhere on highway 15, she hit a patch of black ice. Her car flipped three times end over end. It smashed through the guardrail and collected mounds of earth and dirt and ice along the bumper. The windows shattered. Somehow she was unharmed. Since then, she hated winter. She watched the weather channel religiously. Even the slightest hint of snow would send her into a frenzy. Now she was wishing for it? I thought being cooped up in the house for so long was finally getting to her. Classes were in session at the college that morning, though the roads were not completely free of ice. My uncle Lonnie offered to drive me to campus in his truck. “I’ve got some business to do in town today,” he said, “so I’ll just swing back by when you’re done and pick you up.” On the ride to school, I was glad that he didn’t want to talk about Daddy. He asked me about my classes instead in a vain attempt to break through the heaviness that hung itself around our entire family. He dropped me off at the front door and told me to meet him in the same spot at two o’clock. I walked into the classroom and only one other person was there. She sat in the back row reading a beauty magazine. I unpacked my books from my bag, took off my coat, and settled into my seat. The professor came into the room, looked at the two of us, then out the window at the icy mountain road. “Looks like this might be it,” he said. On the drive home that afternoon, my uncle asked me if I would like a part-time job. My other uncle had recently opened a carpet store and was in need of someone to answer the phone. I’d never worked anywhere before and the thought of doing so excited me. He told me they would make some arrangements and he would let me know when I would be starting. I thanked him for the ride, climbed out of the truck, and waved goodbye. I walked in the front door and saw my mother sitting in the chair crying. The happiness I felt dissolved as quickly as it had come. “What is it?” I asked. “If all this snow melts,” she said, “and the water rises and the creeks flood all the roads, then…” “Then what?” “Then how are we going to get him out of here, if he…” She started crying harder now. I sat beside her on the arm of the chair and lay my head against hers. Outside the window, the sun poked through the clouds. The snow was receding faster and faster. The big maple tree in the front yard was completely free of it, her naked branches twisting toward the sky. Later that night while Mom took a long bath, I gathered the courage to go and check on Daddy. Before I even entered the room his breathing arrested me. It was deep and hollow, as if the air couldn’t make it through his lungs, but had gotten lost in there, rattling. Daddy’s body was bent over in the fetal position, his hips jutting below the blankets, sharp as the mountains outside. I sat down on the spare bed too scared to go closer. Everything was dark except for the bedside lamp, which lit one side of his face only. He looked helpless. For once I didn’t want to run away. I sat there in silence for over an hour, the most amount of time I had spent in that room with him in months. I didn’t know if he could hear me, but I started speaking. “I had a good day at school today, Daddy,” I said. “I’m learning a lot of new things. And I might be working for Uncle Butch at his carpet store.” I began to cry but I kept talking between the sounds of the oxygen machine and the rattling of his breath. “I’m glad I decided to come home this semester. I know I probably haven’t spent as much time in here with you as I should have. It’s just been very hard, you know, to see you sick and everything.” Tears ran down my face, across my jaw, and onto my neck, but I didn’t stop to wipe them away. I stood up and sat down beside him on the bed and took his hand in mine. It wasn’t shaking this time, but I held it anyway. His breath rattled and the oxygen machine hissed. “You’ve been a very good Daddy to me,” I said, barely able to speak now. “Better than I could have ever asked for, and I just want you to know that. I love you more than you’ll ever know.” I kissed him on the cheek and lay my head against his for a long time. I kissed him again, told him goodnight, and went to bed. Before I was even under the covers, I heard the front door open and my brother’s voice. And then my mother sobbing. It had been less than ten minutes after I told Daddy goodnight. Someone knocked on my door. I opened it to find my mother standing in the hallway next to my brother. He was leaning against the wall with his face in his hands. She put her arm around me and whispered, “He’s gone.” When I was a little girl, one of my favorite things to do was make my father’s lunch. He was the night shift foreman of a coal mining company. Every evening after he picked me up from school, I got the cooler out of the back of his truck, took it into the kitchen, and made him a sandwich. He liked bologna the best, with mustard. I assembled the sandwich with love and secured it into a plastic baggie, then placed it into the cooler with an apple, a soda, a few of his favorite chips, and a couple of miniature candy bars, because he always craved something sweet at the end of each meal. But what he loved most was the note that he would find. Each day it would say something new, usually the result of a ten-year-old’s brave attempt at writing poetry. No matter what I wrote, I always used the same ending: “I love you more than numbers can count, and numbers never stop.” I was very proud of that revelation. The idea that numbers would just go on and on forever without anyone being able to measure or contain them was the best way I could think of to express how much I loved him. I thought about that the night he died, laying my head on the kitchen table while all of my aunts and uncles stood around me weeping. I had cried so hard I thought that I would die too. Or at least I hoped I would. My mother’s sister sat beside me running her hand along my back. I wasn’t allowed to go into Daddy's bedroom. No one went in besides my mother and the coroner, a bald man with dark eyes. I didn’t want him to take Daddy anywhere. I couldn’t stand the thought of him being strapped to a stretcher, shoved inside a hearse, and driven away into the night, all alone. Didn’t anyone else see that he needed us? He needed us to take care of him. I would have volunteered to go with him, to lie right alongside him in the hearse, into the morgue, into the coffin, into the ground. They had planned to take Daddy out through the back door because the stretcher wouldn’t be able to make it up and down the front steps. My aunts took me onto the front porch so I wouldn’t have to see him being taken from the house. It was colder than I remember any night being. I wasn’t even wearing a jacket until someone else took hers off and draped it over me. I looked out at the snow that hadn’t quite finished melting. My mother received her wish. We didn’t speak because none of us had words. There was no sound except Daddy’s wind chimes, the ones I had bought for him, singing out into the night air as if to say I’m sorry. That sound cut me deeper than the wind itself. But I couldn’t cry any more. The funeral would not take place until two days later. There were so many flowers and so many people. It was so crowded that not everyone could fit inside the church. Some had to stand outside without a chance to see Daddy at all. I sat in the front row between my mother and brother, neither of us fully present. Daddy had on a blue shirt and black trousers that we made a special trip to buy for him the day after he died since he had lost so much weight. We didn’t put shoes on him, just dress socks, and as he lay there in the coffin, I couldn’t help but worry that his feet would get cold once he was inside the ground. He looked nice, but he didn’t look like himself. He wasn’t wearing his glasses. His nose looked as though it was made of plaster, hollow and sharp; a skeleton. His hands were powdered over and smooth. I held out my fingers and touched him before I took my seat. He was cold. It wasn’t Daddy. I heard someone behind me whispering how I was holding up better than they expected. Everyone knew how close my father and I had always been. I didn’t cry until my cousin Kathy sang an old country song called “Daddy’s Hands” and I collapsed into my mother’s lap like a child. Everything after that was a blur. After the service, the closest family members drove out to the graveyard in a long funeral procession. Dozens of cars snaked throughout the winding mountain roads. I sat in the front seat of my mother’s car, directly behind the hearse. I wondered if Daddy was lonely in there. I wondered if he was proud, looking back on all his loved ones spread out across the hills and valleys, following him to his final resting place. The snow had melted and it was raining hard. The floods were coming that my mother had feared, though Daddy was being buried now high up on a mountaintop above Homeplace Clinic, in a wild stretch of rolling bluegrass colloquially called “The Upper Land”, my favorite place to play as a child. We all sat under a funeral tent in fold-up chairs. Daddy’s casket lay before us, cloaked in fat, orange flowers. The casket was closed now. I waited for Daddy to open the heavy oak lid, crawl out, laugh, and hug everyone. Then we could all go home. Then we could all pick up where we left off before the cancer went to his brain, before he lost the ability to walk, before he couldn’t form words or recognize my face, or remember eighteen years worth of memories we created together. I kept waiting, but the rain kept falling. My high heels pinched my toes and sunk into the wet earth. I held one of Daddy’s handkerchiefs in one hand and a tiny white dove someone had plucked from the flower arrangement in the other. I twirled the dove by its plastic feet, looking deeply into its black, hollow eyes. Someone had glued miniature white beads to its wings. It could not fly, even if it wanted to. I traced the wings with a cold, wet finger while the preacher gave a long, heartbroken prayer. I wished we could both fly somewhere, up over the trees, out of The Upper Land, over Troublesome Creek, deep into the fog that blanketed the mountains, a hundred shades of bruised purple and gray. I wanted to be anywhere else. Any world was better than the one in which my father no longer existed, a world where I was no longer his daughter. I was already someone else, sinking into the mud, holding a dead man’s handkerchief, unable to tell whether the water streaming down my face was tears or rain. After it was over, the prayers and goodbyes were said, and we went home. It hurt being there without him. My aunts, uncles, and cousins had come to our house with food. I didn’t want to talk to anyone. I went into Daddy’s bedroom, lay down on his bed, and cried until I fell asleep, his handkerchief still clutched in my hand. **
A lot of time has passed and the grass has finally grown in. For a long time, there was just a mound of dirt in the shape of a casket at the end of your headstone. I sit here plucking the weeds away from the grass. I wipe the dust from the headstone, set your flowers up straight, touching the ground like you’re really inside here, like you can really feel my fingers when I place them on the earth, your earth. Everything is quiet except for a few crows that scratch at the trees in the distance, their wings flapping now and again. The gate creaks when the wind blows. I sit here talking for a long time like you can hear me, and I don’t know if you can, but I hope so. I tell you about all the things that have passed since I came here last. I tell you I’m back at the university now, that I just turned twenty, that I changed my major to English Literature. I feel you more in the sun that breaks through the clouds in the distance than I do in the earth, and I know that is where you really are. Not here. And I cry for a long time before I stand up and dust off my pants, my eyes blurry and filling up with tears. I lock the gate behind me, say a prayer or two, and make my way down the hill to my car among the falling leaves, the crows never stopping to notice me.
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Jessica Knuth is the author of Animalia, a novel seeking publication. She holds an M.F.A. in Creative Writing from Antioch University Los Angeles. Her writing has appeared in literary publications such as Pictura Journal, Phylum Press, Sky Island Journal, and The Manifest-Station, among others.
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