6
BREE LAID A FEW NAPKINS OVER THE MESS, SOPPING UP
THE WORST, then followed her mother down the hall. She hadn’t heard
a thing, but her mom was hypersensitive. She passed the den, then
her old room, the bathroom she’d used, and the spare room her mom
kept for sewing. Her parents’ bedroom was at the end of the
hall.
Pretty lace curtains covered the big window
facing the large back garden, where the grass was green and
overgrown with the recent rains. Her dollhouse stood in the corner
by the back fence, though it wasn’t really a dollhouse. As a child, she’d been able to stand
fully upright in it. Her father had built it for her eighth
birthday. Its shingles were pink, lemon yellow scallops edging the
roof and window like a gingerbread house. The bottom of the yellow
siding was painted with a border of pink and red flowers, the
colors still bright as if it had been touched up in the recent
past. As if her father had been out there taking care of it.
Bree clenched her hands into fists and turned
away from the sight. The sky had turned cloudy, casting shadows
across the bedroom’s worn beige carpet. The room’s air was stale
with bad breath, medicines, and the scent of a body that hadn’t
been washed well.
A small wheeled canister of oxygen sat beside
the bed, but her father hadn’t been using it while he was napping.
He didn’t need the oxygen all the time, only when he’d exerted
himself with too much activity, like now, as her mother struggled
to pull him up from the queen-size mattress, straining with two
hands on his arm.
“I gotta pee,” he said in a longtime smoker’s
gravel, phlegm bubbling in his throat as he breathed heavily.
“I’ll help you, dear,” her mom was saying, but
he batted her aside, muttering curses. “He’s not himself,” she told
Bree.
Not himself? The lung
cancer was starving his brain of oxygen, and his mind was
definitely going. Last weekend when she was leaving, he’d asked her
where she lived. But this, the belligerence, was exactly like him.
Bree went to his other side, grabbing his arm,
and together, she and her mom pulled him to his feet.
“Goddamn, see what I have to put up with,” he
groused, steadying himself with his hand on Bree’s forearm.
See what her mother had
to put up with. The oxygen deprivation was like Alzheimer’s,
bringing out his mean streak. What was already there got
exaggerated.
“The mattress is too low,” she told her mom. “We
need to have hospice bring in the hospital bed so it’s easier to
get him in and out of it.”
“I don’t need no fucking hospital bed.”
Bree ignored him. “Come on, you have to walk. We
can’t carry you.” She tugged gently on his arm, and with her mom
steadying him on the other side, they shuffled over the
carpet.
He stumbled on the rug leading into the master
bathroom, and Bree almost lost her grip on him.
“Goddamn,” he said again. “I’m gonna piss myself
if you don’t get me there.”
Her mother tsked.
“You’re doing beautifully, dear, just a few more steps.”
Dear. Bree felt an
irrational anger at her mother’s tone, as if she were talking to a
petulant child, not a man who had so often treated her like
dirt.
The bathroom was small, but the tub was huge,
taking up a good portion, and Bree ended up sidling him closer to
the toilet, her mother having to step back.
“You have to unzip him, dear.”
Why do I have to do
it?
Bree wondered how her mother had managed to
dress him this morning, every morning. She hadn’t realized how weak
he’d grown. Just last weekend, he’d still been walking under his
own steam. But there was no time for guilt or blame. Or anything
else. Letting him lean slightly against her body to keep him
steady, she unzipped his pants, feeling queasy with the
chore.
“You have to take it out, Father.”
He fumbled, and there it was. Like a worm.
Swallowing back the bile that had suddenly risen in her throat, she
closed her eyes to let him do his business.
“Bree” her mother shrieked, “he’s getting it all
over.”
He was peeing on the bathmat, the seat, the
tank, even the little row of flowered plates her mother had hung
above the toilet. It was everywhere.
“Bree, you have to hold
it.”
Please don’t make me,
Daddy.
She wanted to scream at her mother. But she
grabbed his shriveled penis, forced it down, held on until there
were only dribbles into the toilet water.
She was going to be sick all over the
floor.
“Help me zip him up, Bree.” Her mother was now
close enough to shove him back in his pants, and Bree held the
bottom of the zipper as her mom tugged up the tab.
“I’ll clean up the mess,” her mom said.
Then her father turned, as if suddenly he was
going to move under his own power. And his foot caught. On her
mother’s shoe, the bath rug, who knew? He started to go down, and
Bree grabbed, pulled, but he was like a dead weight, and her mother
was shouting, stumbling back herself, knocking her hip on the
countertop. Jesus, Jesus. Bree couldn’t
hold him; she just could not hold on, and they went down in a
tangle of limbs, his knees cracking on the floor, Bree’s back
slamming into the edge of the porcelain bathtub.
Her mother was crying. “Oh my God, oh my
God.”
He was half on her legs, and Bree couldn’t move
him. Was he dead? Had she killed him, letting his neck snap when he
went down? God, oh God. She wanted to lay
there and die, never get up, let it be over. Please, please, God, I can’t do this.
Then she heard him curse. “Goddamn
bitches.”
And she would not let him beat her.
“He’s okay, Mom, we’re okay. We just need to get
him up.” Once he was back in the bed, she would never let him up
again.
She pushed his legs off hers, got to her hands
and knees.
It took fifteen minutes, her T-shirt was
drenched with sweat, and her father’s breathing was labored, but
they got him back into the bed.
“Have some water, dear.” Her mother bent over
him, putting a straw into his mouth. He sucked like a child with a
sippy cup. When he was done, she fit the oxygen tubing into his
nostrils and turned on the canister. “You rest.” She patted his
arm.
What about me? Bree
wanted to shout at her mother. What about how I
feel?
Her heart still pounding from the ordeal, the
terror of that moment in the bathroom, she followed as her mother
tiptoed out of the room.
She was so good to him, so patient. Bree didn’t
know how she did it. Sometimes, she almost hated her mother for
always doing everything he said. For always taking his side. For
always making excuses for him.
But she couldn’t expect her mother to change
now. That was the past; it was all over. Now, she was the one to
blame for leaving her mom all alone with him. Her mother was simply
coping the way she’d always coped, and Bree was the shitty
daughter.
“I’m sorry,” Bree said in the kitchen. “I didn’t
realize how bad it had gotten.” She hadn’t wanted to believe when
her mother kept calling to say he was going down fast.
Her mom patted her arm just as she’d patted
Bree’s father in the bedroom. “It’s all right, dear. This whole
thing has been very fast. You’re right, we need the hospital
bed.”
“And a bedpan. Even between us, we can’t get him
to the bathroom.”
“What about a walker?” her mom suggested.
“I don’t know, the carpet could catch on it.” If
he fell . . . Bree hated to think about it happening when she
wasn’t there to help. “We’re safer if he doesn’t get up at
all.”
Her mother squeezed her arm, sniffed away the
last of her fright. “I don’t know what I would have done when he
fell if you hadn’t been here.”
“I’m so sorry.” Her eyes ached, but Bree didn’t
cry. “I’ll clean up the bathroom while you call hospice to order
the bed.”
He was already asleep again when she went back
in there. She pulled the curtains against the afternoon light,
shutting out the sight of the dollhouse, too. Then she stood at his
side a moment. His cheeks sunken, his eyes like big dark pools in
his gaunt face. With the shoosh of oxygen,
his breathing seemed a bit easier after the exertion in the
bathroom. He’d been so strong, such a force. When he spoke, his
voice had been thunder. When he slammed a fist down on the table,
the house shook. When he told you to do something, you did it,
right that minute.
He was a shrunken version of the man he’d once
been. She wasn’t sure he even frightened her anymore.
She was more frightened of how she’d feel when
he was gone if she let her mother do this all alone. It was the
guilt. She’d only avoided it this long by ignoring it. After he was
gone, she’d never get rid of the guilt.
There it was, staring her in the face. The old
man was dying. She couldn’t ignore it, and she wasn’t such a bad
person that she’d leave her mother to handle this by herself.
For a long moment, she simply hung her head, and
breathed in the stale scent of him. Then she went into the bathroom
to clean up the mess her father had made.
IT WAS BARELY TEN O’CLOCK, BUT SHE WAS EXHAUSTED.
LYING IN her old bed in her old room with the rain pattering on the
roof, Bree was slightly woozy from the wine she and her mother had
drunk. After finally getting her father fed, into his pajamas, his
pills taken, her mom using an old piece of Tupperware as a
makeshift bedpan, and all the other tasks Bree had never known
could be so hard, they were drained. He’d fought every step of the
way. When Bree had tried to get him to take his pain pills, he’d
groused and spat them out. When her mother tried to take off his
pants, he’d called her a whore. The language had turned her cheeks
crimson, but she just kept on doing things for him. Like she always
had.
Bree wondered how her mother could still sleep
beside him, smelling his decay, hearing that throaty rattle.
Well, tomorrow, she wouldn’t have to. The
hospital bed would come first thing in the morning. Along with a
portable potty. Jesus, the indignities.
She wanted to go home to her own bed, her own
house.
In the darkness, her cell phone suddenly broke
the quiet. She grabbed it, her pulse racing. Not that it would wake
her parents since they were two doors down. But who the hell was
calling her at ...
Luke. God, it was Luke. He never called her. Yet
he must have known how badly she needed him, so badly she could
feel her heart pounding against the wall of her chest.
“Hello?” She was sure her voice cracked.
“Are you alone?”
“Yes,” she murmured.
“Touch yourself for me and pretend I’m there
with you.”
“I can’t. My parents are down the hall.”
“Do what I say. Just don’t scream when you
come.”
“Luke.” What was she supposed to say? My father’s dying down the hall so I can’t play right
now? She didn’t want to talk about it. When she’d made the
suggestion to him this morning—God, this morning, almost a lifetime
ago—she hadn’t really thought of the enormity of it.
“Do it. You need this, baby.” He rarely called
her pet names, probably because she liked him to call her the bad
names, but this one warmed her inside. “You’ve had a hard day,
haven’t you.” His voice melted her.
It wasn’t a question, and she made a guttural
noise of despair he obviously heard.
“Let me make you feel better,” he
murmured.
For a moment, he brought her close to tears.
Sure it was kinky, but there was a sweetness to it, a caring in his
voice. She so needed that soft, deep, gentle tone that soothed yet
turned her liquid inside.
“No one will hear,” he cajoled. She felt the
rumble of his voice along her nerve endings.
They’d had phone sex a few times when he was
traveling. He’d email when he arrived at his hotel and tell her
when to call. Usually late. She liked it deep in the night.
She needed it now, even with her parents just
down the hall and her father on his deathbed. She needed sex, not
talk. She needed Luke to transport her to a place where none of
this was happening. She needed this, his
voice giving her relief and mindless release.