Rebecca Pastor

Luminary

a personal essay
by Rebecca Pastor

My father's dying makes me close my eyes. I am sitting in hospital room, its floor patterned with wide beige and grey squares and dirt. I am staring at the floor. All I can see about this floor is that it is dirty, and the curtains are dirty too. It smells like antiseptic, and it is dirty. The streaked dirt on the walls smells like bleach.

My dad lies in the bed, his deep raspy breath coming out like a hoarse, cold laugh. I watch his face, increasingly narrow as the days go by, his chin pointed and his eyes sallow. When they open, they are winter blue, almost grey, like the floor.

I look away. As soon as I see his eyes flutter open, mine dart away from him. I try not to, I try to force myself to see those eyes, but the jagged, wild rhythm starts pressing against my chest and my breath rattles like his. I see the shadow of his arm rise, and my gaze tracks it.

"Get me that soda," he chokes, and points to the can on the bed tray. "Ice," he further instructs. I am tempted to move meekly, holding my arms close to my body like a cannonball diver. On purpose, I lope toward him, making my movements as wide as they can be without being ridiculous. I want him to see me.

And he does. He is staring at me. Though I have avoided meeting his eyes, I can feel them, and it unsettles me. He's looking at me like a man who is about to lose me. I let my eyes trail along the floor, up the metal supports of his bed, along the side of the thin, soiled blanket, cutting a wide berth around the outline of his swollen body, and, finally, fleetingly, I touch his eyes gingerly with mine. He is looking at my hands though, and I retract my gaze quickly. I pour the Sprite with trembling hands. "Ice," he says again, impatiently.

At home, I've got a print of Van Gogh's Café Terrace at Night hanging on my living room wall. I am always breathless with the contrast in that picture, the endless, violently blue night pressing down upon the inviting glow of the Café, a yellow building, awash with light. Complete night without a trace of darkness. There are people in the cobble-stoned streets, talking, or are they dancing together? They are standing close. They are touching. I imagine that the white puffs in that sky are couples, people who have floated away. There are couples everywhere. Couples at the tables, and one solitary woman. I can't quite discern drinks in these hands, and yet I know they must sip glasses of wine. Sometimes at home I stand so close to the picture, almost touching it with my nose, until the images swirl together and I can hear their laughter and clinking glass rising up in a roar.

I want to slide into one of the chairs, hail the garcon, swallow deeply of a glass of wine. Red, I think. A Bordeaux, Chateau Belgrave, perhaps. Two, maybe three glasses. I want to escape my own thoughts to the cadence of chatter and the gentle, even waves of alcohol, and maybe, later, I will join the dancing couple in the street. I might swing my arms gracefully and gently, keeping my eyes wide open, rocking to the night. Maybe a young man will see me, a man with golden hair like the warm light. He will watch me for awhile, intently. Perhaps he will suddenly put his drink on the table, approach me slowly, study my peaceful face.

"Why is your dancing so sad?" he will ask, startling me.

"It's not," I'll protest, but then I'll look into his night blue eyes. What he sees in mine will tell him everything he needs to understand, and he will, and I will know that he does. Later he will take me home, and gravity will slip away from me as he carries me up his spiral staircase, the two of us like a rising galaxy. I will see nothing but the lights of the spinning night as he murmurs comforting words to me. But first I will dance with him on the street, our linen clothing swaying in the gentle breeze, my hair falling over both of us in waves.



"I need you to close the curtain," he says after a few sips, nodding toward the urine bottle next to the soda can. It has markings along the side in half-ounce increments. Every drop is a source of celebration for us these days, proof that his right kidney is working, promise that the fluids will soon disappear. My dad has the decency to be embarrassed. I don't wish for him to be embarrassed, I just want him to have the decency. I look at him then, straight on, and he winces slightly. I nod imperceptibly, then get up and pull the faded sheet along the track around his bed. I listen to him rustling, breathing hard. Everything is such an effort for him now. I hear the pee hitting the plastic. I look at the curtain.

"Dad," I say, high- pitched. I hate the way I sound. "Dad," I say, lowering the incline of my voice. "Do you.." I trail off. I have no idea what I mean to ask him.

"Okay," he shouts, "I'm done." He has not heard me. I pull open the curtain and congratulate his efforts. Just over an ounce. I call the nurse and tell her he's produced. She comes to collect the specimen, applauding, telling him he's done very well. His pallid skin turns pink, and I glare at her. "He pissed," I say, grimacing slightly at her, and she lowers her eyes and hurries out of the room. I can see he is grateful.



My father has congestive heart failure. He was diagnosed seven years ago, and this means he has already beaten the odds. At first, it was just a diagnosis, accompanied by mild indigestion and some shortness of breath. Over the years, his cardiac output has decreased, resulting in exertion intolerance and fatigue.

Last year, I watched helplessly as he struggled to carry my one-year-old niece from the car to the door. He stopped every five feet, fighting to suck in a breath, daring me with his eyes to come and take her from him, challenging me to speak a word. So we made the trip in five minutes, he, she and I, and I wrestled to keep the fear from my face. Later that day I went to him. "Dad, what are the doctors saying?"

He gestured broadly with his arm and then shrugged. "I don't know. This is what happens with congestive heart failure."

"What is? What's happening?"

"It's going to get harder, Beck," he said, enunciating my name to emphasize, I imagined, the depth of my ignorance. His body began to tighten and his eyes became more slate than blue. I fought my instincts and pushed onward.

"There might be things we can do. I know there are things we can do. Let me call your doctor. Let's get in there, and I'll come with you."

He exploded at this, and as always, I was left wondering what caused the explosion.

And then, days later, my sister called in tears. "His ankles and stomach look like he's pregnant," she said, "and he doesn't want to go to the hospital."

At first he fought us, saying that he had things he wanted to try first. He wanted to quit smoking, he wanted to exercise. He wanted to take vitamin B-12. As the fluid retention increased his misery expanded too, and at last he conceded to hospitalization. There we learned that his kidneys had failed, and his heart output was shrinking. After nearly a month in the hospital, he went home with a dialysis machine, a tube inserted into his abdomen, an inflexible meds schedule, strict dietary instructions, and a caravan of nurses coming in and out.

And then, two weeks ago, he asked to be taken to the ER. He had foot pain, he said, and he was thinking it might be something serious, something related to the circulation problems. His request terrified me.

At the ER, the doctor pulled off his shoe and his sock to expose a toe that was black and shrunken. "Dad," I gasped, "Dad.?" He winced, looking small. "Did you know it was like this?"

"Ooooh," the doctor said, "this looks like gangrene. We'll probably have to remove that toe." She felt around, touching his other toes, his foot, his calf, and I could see that she was thinking the toe might not be enough. She looked at him gravely. "Are you diabetic?" she asked. He winced again.



When I think he is sleeping, I pull out my blood testing kit. I unzip my bag quietly, insert a strip into my machine, cock the lancet device, and press my finger against it. I am about to release the trigger when I see that he is awake, and watching. I press, and even after 30 years, I still wince each time. The small violence of the act still surprises me. The blood forms an obedient pinhead on my fingertip, and I herd it onto the test strip.

"What is it?" my dad asks. His voice is coarse from sleep. I glance up at him, and see something in his face, a shadow that feels old and familiar.

The machine reads 91. "It's good," I tell him. "It's where it should be."

He nods, but he seems reluctant to accept it. His face is heavy with concern, and I feel an overpowering need to reassure him. But I can think of nothing to say.

"A Canadian study is looking for volunteers," he says. "The first diabetic trials have been successful for two years out now, and so they're looking to do more transplants. Islet cell transplantation. They're coating the cells now, to prevent rejection." I nod. I know all of this. I follow it closely. I am surprised that he knows. When I say nothing, he says, "I read about it on Medscape."

I look at him, still wordless. I don't know why it surprises me so much, that he would be following the research for my disease.

"Have you thought about volunteering?" he asks.

"I have, but." I shrug. "It still requires immunosuppressants. I think I'm better off facing the complications of diabetes." I am still struggling with his revelation that he reads about diabetes research. I'm trying to figure out what else he might know about me, or what else I might tell him. This small revelation has opened a window in me, and suddenly I am filled with the urge to talk to him. And yet, I am so scared of his wandering attention. I don't know if he can listen to me while I tell him all I'd like to tell him, and not just about the diabetes. It's always this way with him, I always feel everything or nothing. So I shrug again. And then the desire to tell him anything at all disappears.

"You always do that," he says, and then he is silent while I pack away my test kit. When I look up again, he is studying me intently. "You were just a baby when it happened. I wish you'd think about the research," he says softly. He speaks gently, but his voice takes on an urgent quality.



He surprises me that way sometimes. I don't know how he does it, but I think I know why. My 31^st year was a painful one. I had crossed some private threshold, and mortality suddenly lurked in my consciousness in a way that it simply could not before. I was close to death only once, and I don't remember it. I probably did not believe it at the time because I was far too young to believe in death. Turning 30 had felt glamorous, but 31 meant that I was "in my thirties", and it felt like the upper crest of a denouement. I began an inner kind of grieving for something that I still can't express, but for that year, my world turned a shade darker. It culminated with the ending of a long-term relationship.

Though it was clear that the relationship between Mark and I would not last, I don't know when or if I would have left. Though the relationship lacked true connection, it provided me with a sense of safety and companionship that I craved. And so I ignored the holes, even as the distance between us expanded. The autumn of my 31^st year, Mark left me. Unable to bear the reminders of our life together, and projecting the entirety of my ambiguous and existential grief onto the tangible loss of Mark, I was frantic to move out of our apartment. Feeling traumatized and rootless, I decided I wanted a house, a place that I could begin to own, a place where I could call the shots. A place where I could create my own sense of safety. I knew nothing about buying a home, and even less about maintaining one. I called my father.

I remember sitting in one house, a rent-with-purchase-option place. The owners had seized upon me as a potentially naïve buyer, but my father had assessed the house's strengths and liabilities, and was talking hard facts with the owners. As they talked, my father approaching them amiably but with his razors sharpened. I got lost in the drone of the television that was playing in the background, and in the easy security of letting my father take charge.

All at once a commercial came on the TV, an insipid beer commercial that had become the basis for many jokes between Mark and me. And, all at once, I was swept with anguish and fear and loss. I am certain that my face did not change. I was becoming accustomed to the rise and fall of grief, and I knew how to settle the internal chaos when it pressed forward in the wrong moments. And yet my father saw, or, more accurately I think, he perceived. Perceived some small shift in me, and intuited the larger rift. I closed my eyes briefly, and opened them when I felt my father's on my shoulder. "Well, we'll think about it and we'll call you if we're interested," he was saying to the couple, ushering me out the door as he spoke. On the drive back, he spoke of the house, of TV, of cooking. In keeping with himself, he did not speak of my mood, never spoke, then, of emotions or feelings, but his active and unspoken response gave me something that I deeply needed.



I ache from sitting. It has only been a few hours, but my skin hurts from resisting the sunlight that presses in through the permanently sealed balcony door. What does it feel like, the sunshine, the breeze? How is the soil today? Damp, too wet to dig? Or perfect? Did my hyacinths start to poke through the crust while I've been sitting in this room? My back hurts too, from slumping, from trying not to sleep when he does. I don't want to be asleep when he wakes up. I stand up and stretch. He is awake, and as he watches me, there is envy in his face, and I am immediately ashamed. I sit down again and curl my feet under me, aware that he can't do this, either. He looks at the clock and then looks outside, where the sun is slanting in from the west.

"You can go," he says. "Melissa or Joe or somebody will be here soon."

I nod, but I remain seated. When my sister or one of my brothers show up, I will go. We will trade stories of the day, and mine will revolve around him, and later, I will go.

I will rush outside and gather up the remainder of the day. I will feel guilty later for the vitality of my own body, but I will run, two, maybe three miles, long enough to make myself weary and satisfied. I'll run so hard that I will imagine I'm having a heart attack, and I will gasp, drawing in the slowly chilling dusk through my expanding lungs. I will climb the stairs to my apartment, sweating, and I will gulp a glass of water, then later, a beer. Maybe eat some Fritos, licking the salt from my fingers. I'll test my blood again, adjust my insulin, and stretch out in my chair with a book. Later still, when I urinate, it will come out pale yellow, with no real effort from me. And in this room, my dad's heart will continue fluttering at 35% of its capacity. His right kidney will struggle to carry the weight for his dead left one. This is as good as it will get.

"You don't have to stay here all day," he says, even though I already have.

"Don't you want me here?" I ask, my voice small, and a little angry. I want to yank back the question, but there is no removing it from the room. I think to move on, to say something else. To go find the nurse and see when his dinner is coming. To tell the custodian, again, that the room is unsanitary. Or to beg my dad, once more, to let me move him, transfer him to another hospital. Perhaps I can convince him this time when I tell him that St. Louis has so many reputable hospitals to choose from, that we have access to one of the top ten cardiology hospitals in the country, and one of the top five congestive heart failure research teams in the world. Maybe he will hear me when I tell him that he should be there. My mind races to all the turns I could take now, but the question I put forth has frozen me, and him too. So I wait.

"Don't you?" I whisper it this time, almost whimper it, and he can see that my mouth moves but he can't discern the words. His eyes narrow and he tries to lean forward, one hand out, as if to grab those last two words, and suddenly I remember blowing kisses at him as a child, and the half-hearted way he'd pretend to catch them from the air. I'd blow them faster, and he'd catch them slower, letting most of them slip away. He sighs now, and leans back in his bed, empty-handed. His head falls against the stack of pillows. Finally, he says, "That's not what I meant."

"I know it's not," I say. That's not what I asked, I think. My own head falls against the back of the pink, cracked vinyl visitor's chair. The rippled plastic pokes me in the head. The sudden rush of salt in my throat makes me choke back vomit.



He pees again, the third time in an hour, and this time another half ounce. I've listened to him urinate so often now that I know how much will be in the bottle when he finishes. Suddenly, his breathing shifts behind the curtain, and I tense. The routine has altered, but I can't quite move, doubting my intuitive interpretation of the sounds. I realize I'm holding my breath. And then he calls.

"Goddamn it," he says, and I relax. I almost laugh. Then, less forcefully, "Can you help me?" He says can you? Can I? I don't think I've ever heard him ask for anything.

I go to him then, but I can't touch him. I can't even look at him. "What's wrong with you?" I hiss to myself, "Why are you standing there?" I urge myself to move forward. Why does the helpless flesh of my father frighten me so much? Why can't I show tenderness to him, the same tenderness I show my nieces, my cat, even the lost child at the museum? The capacity has deserted me.

He has dropped the urine container on the bed, and the pee has soaked into the sheets. He is watching my face. The bottle rolls from the edge of the bed to the floor, and its landing forces me awake. Finally, I drag the chair close to his bed, and help him maneuver into it. I think he's trembling but I realize it's me, and I'm weak not from the effort of moving him, but from the intimacy of it. I'm fighting so hard against something I can't even see. I feel captive. And yet, I am in charge. He is like a child in my hands. His slack skin is surprisingly warm, despite the pasty tone and the purple in his legs. As we move, his hospital gown falls open, and I see his back. I gasp. Despite his emaciation, the hollows in his face and the terrible boniness of his arms, he has rolls and folds of fat on his back. Shocked, confused, I stare. And then, I understand. It's not fat. Of course it's not fat at all. It's fluid.

"Dad," I whisper, and touch the pinched ridge of flesh with an index finger. An indentation remains, though I've barely grazed it. I refrain from touching again, pushing harder, poking. I refrain from shoving a finger into it with all the pent up fear and anger and anguish I've been keeping to myself. And I struggle not to stare. I work hard not to tremble, or worse, shudder. I stay just behind him so that he can't see my face, so that he can't feel the pain at my fear and horror. I pull the gown around his back, and it strains across his stretched belly, also full of fluid. I turn my gaze to the floor..



"Goddamn it," he'd shouted at me that day, like every other day. The sweat ran down his face and chest in rivulets, and I'd stared, fascinated and horrified. I'd never seen any man sweat the way my father could, especially not like this. We were in the basement. It was winter and my hands hurt with chill and with the effort of holding them still. He was leaning over a 2x4, gnawing at it with his handsaw. I was helping to hold the horse steady, because this was my job. My sister and I had cracked his vise and his electric saw a week earlier, and it was my fault.

In the coal shed in our basement there were sculptures. My father's earliest attempts at stone and clay, and his only attempts in that medium. They were ungainly, nonhuman things with lumpy flesh and odd peaks like a speckled paint job. Something vaguely in the shape of a woman, granite and faceless, and next to her, something small. It came up to her knee. They were awful, but my parents had kept them in the coal cellar just the same. Perhaps they were too cumbersome to move, or perhaps my father thought someday they could become something. Or maybe he was a little afraid of them too. Had he created them in this forsaken place, this dark dungeon of the basement? What had he thought about? I tried to imagine my father down here, shaping clay. Had he been alone down here? Had he listened to music? Had he brought in lights? Had these shapes truly risen out of some part of him, or were they just a freaky accident? It was as if he'd tried to shape a woman the way he thought he wanted her, the way she should be, and when the clay would not conform, he gave up. Abandoned her. Or maybe he felt betrayed, felt as if she had abandoned him. Maybe it was why my mother had abandoned him, years later -- because he had these things inside him somewhere. The cold stone woman, and the twisted thing next to it, the small thing. Child? Dog?

My sister and brothers and I gravitated to the sculptures, compelled by our terror. As the oldest, I was the most forthright, but it wasn't because I felt courage. I used to tell my siblings that the big one, the woman-ish one, was a live model. And I half-believed myself when, that particular day, I told my sister in a grave tone that this frozen atrocity of rock sat and waited for us, pretended to be a statue in order to lure us close enough. "She knows we're here.." I whispered, letting the words stretch out, and she shivered. She grabbed onto me, and I was glad. Together, we inched closer, each of us prodding the other, each of us keeping one eye on the door.

And then it breathed. I swear I saw the granite shift, the clay ripple, and the lumps where breasts should be, where the heart would lie, heave once.

"It breathed!" I screamed, electrified, and my sister shrieked, her voice shrilly and piercing. We exploded out of the basement, knocking over my dad's electric saw and his vise. When they hit the floor I heard a sharp, long crack, like a streak of lightning splitting the sky. Neither of us dared to look back.

Now I was paying for it. My imagination had indentured me to him for the day, maybe longer. I listened to him yell at me, about me, about my sister and brothers and me. I stood captive.

"You kids need to focus," he spat, and his eyes were beginning to go wild. That terrifying blue became translucent, became flecked with ice. "You play these stupid games and you're never responsible for what you need to be. You need to be productive. You're ten years old. You're too old to be acting this way. You're wasting your life, just like your mother. All you ever want to do is pick flowers, just like your mother. Hold that still, you're wobbling!"

He'd stopped to wipe sweat from his eyes. I'd made a game of avoiding his sweat as it fell on the board I was holding. His rage that day was sharp and pointed, and I knew I needed some strategy to survive it. I slipped away from him, concentrated on those beads of sweat, watching them grow rounder, threatening to drop. I watched for the heavy moment just before they fell, and my skill with subtlety grew as I stayed just a step ahead. I did not want them to touch my skin. I moved my fingers just slightly, and just far enough to miss the fat drops as they scalded the 2x4, and not so much that he'd notice.

"All you want to do is pick flowers," he accused again, almost jealously, as he grasped the saw tightly.

My mind seized on that escape, remembering hard. The flowers I'd picked on my way home from school that day were limp in the kitchen, pale yellow and violet. Wild flowers, weeds, the bright blue of chicory and the delicate, buggy pattern of Queen Anne's lace. Dandelion, which I'd heard you could eat but hadn't wanted to try. Yarrow, which smelled like the Tansy patch at my grandma's. And a few daisies that I'd purloined from between the slats of a fence. I'd thought they were so beautiful, every one of them, and the wind rippled through my hair as I gathered them, and I felt happy.

I walked a different route coming home from school each day, so that no one would know exactly where to find me. I twirled in the wind and I talked to myself, I petted dogs behind fences and cajoled cats from under porches. I tossed my leftover lunch to the birds, I tried to follow the mailman's footsteps, sneaking behind him for a block, and I hugged trees. I gaped as frustrated mothers swatted their children, listened while those children wailed, and I stared while the old woman with the white hair who lived in the corner house picked cigarette butts and bits of paper from between the blades of grass.

When I got home, it would start, and I'd disappear inside myself. It wasn't always the flowers that started it. It felt impossible to predict, but most days, the yelling happened, words I never really understood. They rose out of my dad, hidden someplace, like the mounds in the basement, and they'd take him over. And I'd float into the backyard, guessing where the newest buds would be and whether any of the flower seeds I'd snuck into the soil were popping up. Or I'd listen to the sounds of other children, yelling, and I'd envision their games and imagine playing with them. I spent my childhood that way, visiting safety in my mind. I can't really tell you what my childhood house looked like. I ceased to see as soon as I stepped inside.



I am so angry I could scream, but of course that would do me no good. It would do him no good, either. How many times have we been through this in the last year? I hate this hospital with its dirty curtains and floors and doctors in short coats, I hate the nurse who peered down his throat with a high-beam flashlight, and I hate the growing swell of his belly that testifies to the relative infrequency of his dialysis. I hate that the nurses glibly tell me that he is "not having a good day today," but that they won't tell me anything further, thanks to new HIPPA regulations that are meant to protect patient privacy, and to the general lack of organization at this place. I am trying not to hate him for being here. Why does he seek treatment at substandard hospitals when he has access to - and insurance coverage for - some of the best care available in the country? When I ask him again, he tells me that all of his doctors are here at St. Joseph's, that he is afraid that without the team that knows him, he will be given meds that cause the decay of his remaining kidney.

"Dad," I say, "I can navigate hospitals. I'm a good advocate. Please, just let me make sure they take care of you." His eyes become cold grey, they lose all the depth of their blueness, and he is turning away from me in the same way that I turn away from him. A nurse comes in and punctures his arm with a new hole, drawing blood, despite his two IVs. I see what she is going to do, but before I can say a word, the blood is flowing into her tube and his eyes are closed. These little pains seem to break him. Later he will rail against the hospital and the staff and the food, and I will only be able to listen.

There is nowhere to go with this anger. I take it back inside me, stifling it and my overriding need to act. I am so weary I could fall down on the floor and cry.



Outside, the sky is becoming as grey as the room. Dinner arrives, and my father has a watershed of complaints before he even tastes it, and I want to laugh. We both stare at the indeterminate mounds on his plate. Zucchini in one of them, and some kind of red beans, unadorned and unaccompanied. They might have been dumped from a can. There is also a lump of either fish or chicken. Even after tasting it, he is not certain. He eats in silence for awhile, offering the occasional grunt of disgust. Each one fills me with a giddy hope. This is the father I know.

He takes a bite from the pile of beans. He chews and chews and finally spits them out, intact. I am already laughing.

"You know what I want?" he asks, and I shake my head, though I can imagine it must be just about anything besides what he's got. "Do you remember those beans?"

As soon as he says those, I know what he's going to say, and he's laughing too. He wants the beans that ate his tomatoes. His tomatoes were sacred, the highlight of the year for him, and he labored constantly to nurture and protect them, water them and feed them, and he watched each growing inch in triumph.

The summer I was 11, I had just gotten the hang of composting, and I was giddy with the idea of it. I couldn't believe that trash could turn into tomatoes. I knew it was true though; I'd seen Grandma bury whole bananas and the shells from watermelons in the "dirt pile", and later, things pushed forth, green and sturdy, from the mush.

One day I was cleaning out the refrigerator, my job, and seized upon the idea that I could help my dad's garden. I could help the sacred tomatoes. There was a container of old soaked beans in the fridge, leftovers that had never made it into a soup, with shriveled skins and split seeds. I carried them to the garden, tenderly mulching around his just-established Beefsteaks. When the beans came up, I was ecstatic, though I had no idea what I'd done. The beans were tenacious, and by mid-summer they had strangled each tomato plant.

My dad was angry at first, almost explosively so. But he began to watch the growth of the beans, their hungry spread across the garden and, later, the yard. My dad could somehow tolerate the unwieldy beans, the runners and tendrils that clung fiercely, and so instead of ripping them out, we let them grow. They set seed that year, and we let them dry on the vine, gorgeous scarlet beans with white speckles. We harvested them in the fall, and ate them for two seasons.

"Those turned out to be the best beans we've ever had," he recalls, smiling a little. "And such a weird color and pattern! Weird beans, but pretty." It had not occurred to me that he'd notice such a thing as their beauty.

"You were always getting into something, trying something, never thinking," he says, but he is smiling.

"I'll bring you a seed catalog," I tell him. "It's time to be thinking about that." He looks at me doubtfully, and I insist. "I'll bring it to you tomorrow. You really need to get moving on your garden."

For a while we are silent. When he starts in on the meat again, he grimaces. I am waiting, almost hopefully, for an expletive. Instead he says, "Would you see if you can find me some pepper?"





Before my mother left, mostly at night, he'd play the guitar, and my home was safe. Even his self-recriminating mutterings, when his fingers stumbled over strings, were not frightening. His attention to the music changed our house into a different place. Sometimes he'd play for me. The music soothed away his demons, and ours too. It soothed the creature in the basement, and the black night that poured in through the grey-glazed window down there, and it hushed away all the things that might happen someday. The entire house, then, would be filled with a gentleness that did not belong to my father.

"Daddy," I'd beg sometimes, "play Stars." He played a piece in those days, a piece I have never heard before or since, a melodic lullaby of a tune that evoked in me an unbound sense of space and motion. I felt like it was the song he'd made up for me, though now he can't remember the piece at all. When he'd play it, I'd find a corner where I could not disturb him, and I'd close my eyes and spin to the music, seeing a galaxy of stars filling the living room. Our new, wall-to-wall carpet was a 70's blue, a thick, shag rug, and the walls were eggshell. With the lights turned low, the room took on a curvedness and I imagined the sky above and below me, catching me in graciousness. On and on he'd play, and on and on I'd dance, unobserved, aloft, until I had exhausted myself and he'd exhausted the song. I'd stumble to a spot on the shaggy floor and curl up like a cat. My mother would bring me a pillow then and my daddy would keep playing, different melodies, different gentle moods, until I floated into sleep.

Later, he'd carry me upstairs. I'd feign sleep for fear of disrupting the sudden, uncharacteristic tenderness. I'd keep my eyes shut and let my head rest against his shoulder, breathing him in, smelling tobacco and cedar and, sometimes, fabric softener. I could hear his heart beating, a steady, unwavering pattern then, and I'd press my tiny hand against his chest, flexing my fingers against the immensity of my daddy. I tried to memorize everything in those moments - the number of beats of his heart, the step count and the number of stairs from one floor to the next, but most of all, the feeling. I'd try to recall the feeling the next day, to bring it forth again in the daylight. Those nights, I felt so small, and it was the only time that I can remember that being small didn't feel like being infinitesimal. Small was all I wanted to be. Sometimes he'd even hum Stars, and then I would slip into sleep while he carried me. I could not resist the lullaby. I wanted him then to carry me across the house, across the backyard, across the ocean, I wanted him to carry me forever.



Suddenly the man from the painting is walking towards me, his yellow hair matching the golden light that spills from the cafe. His eyes are the same as I imagined, just the same, deep night blue without darkness or cold. When he gets closer, I can see that they curve up at the sides and that there are tiny smile lines, indelible. He looks at me for a long moment without uttering a sound, and I begin to cry. He comes to me then, and I press my head into the crook of his arm. Where did you come from, I want to ask him, but nothing comes except the soundless weeping. My tears drop heavily onto the cotton of his shirt. He smells like the Rhone. He must be a fisherman.

"I know why your dancing is so sad," he murmurs to me, over and over again, and I try to nod my head but I can't, and it's all right because he knows.

When I wake, my dad is watching me. He is wide-awake, and a gentle glow has settled into the room, filtered moonlight and bright streetlamps. I meet his eyes.

"What I worry about,' he says, "is you."

"What?" I ask, not understanding.

His hands begin to reach frantically, and his mouth twists up, and I leap toward him, alarmed. My face shows the frightened question, and he slows his hands, extending the movement to his arms. He is calling me to him. He opens his hands wide, and I go to them. He is crying. I am not. I put my head against his shoulder, the same shoulder, only this time the fluid under the skin gives, but I don't shudder. He cries and cries and strokes my hair, and I wonder why I am not crying too. But my chest feels heavy, heavy like rock and clay and stone. An ache with no origin, and it won't move. I can't sit still for long. I pull my head away and look at him.

"Why are you worried about me?"

"You know why. I won't be here. You're going to have to be strong." I shake my head, no. "You will," he tells me again.

"I am," I tell him. "But not yet. Not now. Don't worry for me now."

"Maybe," he says, hearing only the first part of what I say, "but you're not strong in the ways you think," he says. "I've watched you, you know. This will be hardest for you." I can't answer him because I know he's right.

He dabs at his eyes, breathes deeply, choking on the oxygen that rushes into his nose. 'Ok, I'm done, I'm done. I'm sorry, didn't mean to cry like that." And, gently, he pushes me away.





My father rejected every gift we give him, and sometimes his laughter turned to rage. I learned to sense this turning in the air, before there were any clues on his face, in his body. The air would become thicker, and things would move slower. Breathing would become harder, and my body would become alert, waiting.

Today when I came, I brought him what I could. I brought a toothbrush, firm, unlike the useless one supplied by the hospital. I brought a Walkman with books on tape, Stephen Hawking and E.O. Wilson, because my father's hands get tired when he holds a book too long. I brought him breath mints and gum for the hours that he is alone and can't move. I brought a soft, Egyptian cotton pillowcase, just washed, smelling of fabric softener and home. I brought him razors, because daily shaving is one of the dignities he can somehow still preserve, and the hospital has given him a single-blade women's disposable razor, and his face is raw from scraping. I brought him the New York Times Book Review from my paper, even though I haven't read it yet.

He is pleased, touched even, but as he rifles through the things, his face slowly changes, and I watch the slow shift. He is like a feral cat - he wants what I bring, he doesn't want it. He tells me the toothbrush is too hard, that he's too tired to pay attention to the tapes, that he doesn't need a good pillowcase in a place like this. He is disappointed that the razors don't swivel. He keeps the mints and the gum, but tells me to take the Walkman back so that no one steals it. He won't read the Book Review because if he found a book he wanted, he still couldn't hold it for long periods. He wishes I had brought some fresh ground pepper.



The days roll by in a series of switch offs. My sister, my brothers, my dad's mother and sister and I, all take turns being with him. Sometimes he wants us here, mostly he doesn't. He has had three toes removed from his left foot, gangrene due to poor circulation due to renal failure due to congestive heart failure. He's falling apart a piece at a time. When he awoke from surgery, in good spirits and, remarkably, pain-free for the first time in a month, he joked: "Just call me Two-toed Joe. I'm going to change my email moniker to that!" Now, two days later, he is unraveling. He suffers phantom pains in the toes that have been removed, and the surgical wounds aren't healing. He has been constipated for four days now, and because of that, the dialysis can't be performed regularly. His breathing is labored because of the fluid buildup, and he is eating less and less. They are doing tests to find out why. There are always more tests.

One benefit of a substandard hospital is that the nurses fail to shepherd out visitors after visiting hours are over. Or maybe they are sympathetic, a thought that terrifies me. It is 9:00 p.m. and he has fallen asleep, and I don't want to leave him like this. I don't want him to wake up and wonder when I'm coming back. I sit in the cracked vinyl chair, my feet curled under me, my body folded and my head lying against the armrest.

At 9:34, the sudden silence wakes me with a start. Everything is black, except for the slight glow coming from the face of the clock, and the green and orange light from the equipment attached to my dad's body. I listen intently to the absence of sound, trying to identify what I'm missing. And then I know. His snoring has stopped. My heart lurches, and I grab for the sound of his breathing. I stand and begin to inch closer to him.

"Are you awake?" The question is a solid object in the fluid darkness, and it hits me hard. I recoil, startled, and then I want to laugh.

"No," I say, "are you?" He laughs, a little, and then I do too.

"Would you turn on the light?" They are all painfully bright, but finally I settle on the fluorescent bar above the unused bed. When I return to my chair, I see that he has raised the bed and is sitting up. He is flipping through the New York Times Book Review. I pull my legs up into my chair and watch him.

"Do you go to church?" he asks me. Once more I am surprised.

"No," I say simply. Then, "Not really. Sometimes."

He flips a few more pages, and then asks what kind of church I go to when I go. I tell him Catholic, and he nods. It's the religion I was raised with, though he'd had nothing to do with that. Quantum physics was his religion. Quantum physics and the paintbrush.

"I go because I like it. I only go when I like it. I like the ritual of the words and the motion. I don't really go to pray or anything," I volunteer after he is silent for a while.

He wants to know why I don't pray.

"I don't know. I guess I don't feel like there is much point, really," I say, and again, he nods.

"I guess we all started out believing in something, but for some reason most of us quit believing when we get older, don't we?" He sighs. I don't know where this is coming from, so I wait.

"I prayed, but I quit praying when you got so sick," he says, keeping his eyes on the page he holds. "I prayed and prayed at first. You were just a three-year-old baby. I begged to trade places, I would've traded places and taken the diabetes for you. I wanted to, and I prayed and prayed."

My throat is aching, and I can only muster a few meaningless words. "No deal?" I ask, feeling stupid.

But he shakes his head vigorously. "No deal. All I wanted was to see you get up out of that bed, healthy, and that's what I said when I prayed, but nothing ever happened." He looks at me, and his voice takes on a desperate note. "Nothing ever happened. You were in the bed and I was standing over you. No deal." His voice cracks. "I almost killed you."

"No, Dad, you can't say that. Why would you say that?"

"No, you don't know. I did. When you first got so sick, we took you to the doctor. You had a fever and you weren't eating and you were getting thinner. The doctor said you had a bad flu, and to give you. to give you." he begins to cry. "He said to give you lots and lots of white soda. You had diabetes and I gave you sugar water. I gave you poison." He cries then, and I cry too.

"How could you know?" I ask, but it's a senseless question. We are both grieving now, a world's worth of things not understood.

"And then when I prayed nothing happened." We cry for awhile longer, I am restless even as I cry. I am never emotional with my dad. We have avoided emotions and closeness, and I don't understand how or why, but it's very hard to find now.

"That's really why you quit praying, Dad?" I whisper.

"I never felt so helpless," he says, as if he's seeking my forgiveness. "I was so scared of you then. Scared of losing you."

I go over to the bed and sit down on the edge. I am not trembling. "There is so much about you that I don't know," I say. There is so much I will never know. I don't say this, but the thought makes me cry. I want to put my head against his chest, but I don't. Somehow, that would be too much. Somehow, it's enough to sit here.

"I'm sorry," he says. "You know, do you know, that love can paralyze? I'm sorry." He puts his hand on the back of my head. "You will have to be strong."

His face is ashen, and suddenly I see how scared he is, not of dying, but of what comes before it. And of what he will leave behind. He's frightened of how frightened I am. "Dad," I whisper, "being scared is not weakness."

He nods, and offers me his hand.

I hold his hand for a long time, for the longest time, and he lets me. He looks in my eyes for a long time, too, and though I sometimes have to fight the urge to flee, I look back.