The Return of Jonah Gray (28 page)

“Half brother,” Jeff said.

“Why do you always point that out?”

“Because it's not the same as full.”

“Do you have any half brothers or sisters?” I asked.

“No, but—”

“That you know of.”

“Hey!”

“So you don't know,” I went on. “I don't hear you doubting Blake.” I had told him about the blood test in the car on the way to Fresno.

“That's different.”

“I'm going to call about bus schedules,” I said and went back inside.

 

I was back in Oakland that afternoon. The man in the bus seat beside me looked out the window as we pulled into the station.

“Watch it when you get off the bus,” he said. “Lots of unsavory types hang out at these stations, just preying on single women, like yourself.”

“I'll be okay. My brother is picking me up.”

“That's good. Family will watch out for you.” The man had spotted Marcus, pacing, just inside the station doors. “Jesus, get a load of that guy. Bus stations are always full of creeps, aren't they?”

“That's my brother,” I said.

The man harrumphed. “I guess you know best.”

“Merry Christmas,” Marcus said when I met him inside the station. “You made it.”

“More or less.”

“How was Fresno?”

“How's Dad?”

“Not so good,” Marcus said.

The hospice nurse, who had begun her visits the week before, called it “active dying.” I hadn't realized that there was such a thing, or that the body could begin to power down a full two weeks before a person stops breathing. All the systems slow. The heart rate drops, the blood pressure drops. The hands cannot keep warmth.

By the time I returned to the house on Christmas evening, my father had already eaten for the last time. We didn't know that yet, but the hospice nurse said it was normal for his appetite to have cut out completely.

“Dying doesn't work up an appetite,” she said. “It's the normal process of things.”

“He's got to eat something, doesn't he?” I asked.

“Or what?” she asked and looked at me. “Child, he's dying right now,” she said more gently.

“No, I mean…” I struggled to find words that made sense, but I came up empty. Was it really happening? Wasn't there anything left to do?

Christmas evening was quiet. We had agreed to skip the gift exchange, though Lori had brought presents for the boys, who seemed unaware, in their excitement, that they were the only ones unwrapping anything.

My mother had retired early, and Kurt and Blake played video games on the computer in my father's study. While my father slept in the den, I dug into a plate of Christmas leftovers. Lori and Marcus sat there, watching me, too spent to say much.

“Dying doesn't make you hungry, but sitting around waiting apparently does,” Marcus said.

“It was a long bus ride,” I pointed out.

Marcus got up to check on my father, leaving me with Lori.

“You've got nice nail beds,” she said. “You ought to try polish sometime.”

“It's not really my thing,” I told her.

“I know you know,” she said.

“Know what?”

“I was very angry at Kurt. I still am.”

“Oh, that,” I said.

“People are always saying what they would put up with and what they wouldn't, but you never know, until…”

“I believe you,” I said.

“And it's not just me I've got to think of. I mean, your mother stayed.”

“She did,” I agreed.

“We're trying to work things out,” she said. “He's not perfect.”

“Maybe you haven't noticed, but you didn't exactly marry into a flawless family,” I said.

“I'll be glad when this year is over,” she said.

“I always tell people I audit that some years are worse than others. It's kind of true, isn't it?”

 

A slow and patient tide was pulling my father out to sea. You can't fight a tide—maybe you can for an hour or two, but not for months. It's larger than one person's will. And this was a tide that the rest of us could neither fathom nor follow. In the days before we lost him, I didn't feel any great calm; I felt helpless. I couldn't do anything that mattered, and what I managed to do, I did poorly. I left the coffee-maker on all day. I burned soup. I locked my keys in my car.

When we spoke at all, he and I, it was of little things. The weather outside, the temperature of my food, the show on television. I held his hand and watched him as he slept. Then I'd leave and Blake would take my place, and after him, my mother, and so on, so that someone was always there.

You hear those stories about people sensing that they're about to die and summoning loved ones to their bedsides to say goodbye. It didn't happen like that for us. There was no more denying what was coming. I could see it in the continued presence of the hospice nurse. I could see it in the length of time my father slept each day, in the number of pills he took each night, and in the morphine drip that was brought in when he could no longer swallow. There would be no reprieve, no last-minute surprises. Death had camped out in our den and waited beside the bed. It was a smell just beyond reach. It filled in the lull when people had nothing more to say.

My father died around eight in the evening, three days shy of New Year's Eve. Eddie and Jackie were asleep, but the rest of us were around his bed when he slipped away. And with that, it was over. The disease that we'd all been focusing on, fighting, talking about, railing against for months, it had won. I wish I could say that I'd said all that I wanted to. I wish I could say that I even knew what I wanted to say. But you live with what you're dealt, and my father died without any cathartic shift in our relationship. It hadn't been easy, but he knew that I loved him, I guess. And by the same token, I knew that he loved me. There are worse ways to go.

If that seems anticlimactic, that's cancer for you. It kills as thoroughly as a heart attack or gunshot, but with an insidious subtractive quality. Little by little, it eats away, sapping strength, then appetite, then memory, then locomotion, a hundred smaller farewells before the last one.

But even I was surprised by how quietly it all wrapped up. Death carries such huge expectations. I thought my father's final breath would grind everything to a halt, that a great, yawning loss would follow it, a chasm I would disappear into. Instead, the next day began much as the day before had, with dawn breaking and the birds out trilling. One's own loss doesn't slow the course of the sun across the sky.

The worst of it happened in smaller, unexpected moments during the weeks and months that followed—seeing a can of my father's favorite beans on the pantry shelf, hearing his voice on the outgoing answering machine message, getting a bill for the renewal of his CPA license. Those little things cut more quickly and more deeply than his last breath. Those little things were what took my own breath away.

I knew she'd been prepared by the hospice nurse, but I was still surprised by how well my mother handled things in the days afterward. She worked with Lori on floral arrangements. She worked with Ed to get notices to the local papers and my father's alumni newsletter, back in Virginia. She chose the music and readings for my father's service. She set Eddie and Jackie to making cookies, so that well-wishers might have something to eat if they stopped by.

What you'll find, if you ever suffer the misfortune of losing a relative during the height of the holiday season, is that you're forced to wait out the festivities. It's a strange limbo to inhabit. Everyone else is celebrating, rattling around with champagne bottles, exchanging gifts, enjoying their vacation time. And you're just riding it out, waiting until January second, when you can give people the specific time and date of the funeral service.

 

My father's service was scheduled for the end of the first week of January. It would be small—first at a local church and then at a cemetery. Maybe it was macabre, but I kept thinking how convenient it was that we lived in California, in an ecological zone that allowed for planting in the dead of winter, whether of live Christmas trees or coffins.

Two days before the funeral, I was driving along the freeway when I was startled by a strong vibration from below. I thought it was a blowout, then maybe that I'd thrown a rod. The car was jerking around so violently, it was all I could do to slow down and head for the shoulder. Up ahead, other drivers swerved and moved off the road as well.

And then, just as suddenly, the vibration stopped. I pulled onto the shoulder and turned off the ignition, my heart beating fast. Another car had pulled over just ahead of me. The driver jumped out and yelled something.

I rolled down my window. “Excuse me?”

“Sure felt that one,” he said. “You okay?”

At that moment, the earth burped again. The man grabbed hold of his car, then gave me a nervous wave before he ducked back inside.

I turned on my radio. “Not sure yet what the magnitude was, but in this office, things were sure sliding around. Let's get someone on the phone. Hello, you're on the air. Tell me where you're calling from.”

“Hello?” a woman said. “We just had an earthquake.”

“We're aware of that. Where are you calling from?” the radio announcer asked.

“San Leandro,” she said.

“And you felt it down there?”

“It went on for a long time,” she said.

My cell phone rang. It was Jeff.

“Are you okay?” he asked.

“I'm fine. A little shaken. You?”

“I'm fine.”

We hadn't spoken much since his return from Fresno. I think he felt guilty for doubting the extent of my father's illness or was embarrassed that, for someone so detail-oriented, he had misread so much about the situation. But I had been focused on events at home and had to admit that I'd barely noticed his absence.

“Where are you?” he asked.

“On the freeway,” I said.

“Will I get to see you before I go?”

For a moment, I thought he meant that he was moving to Fresno. “Go?”

“You remember, the archivist conference. We talked about this before. It's always in early January.”

“I guess I thought you might not go this year.”

“You did? Why? I go every year.”

“My dad's funeral,” I reminded him.

He paused.

I looked out into the highway. Cars were moving but cautiously, as if they didn't trust the earth anymore.

“I gave it serious consideration,” Jeff said. “And if you said that you wanted me to stay, you know I'd stay. But you haven't said that.”

“No, you're right,” I said. “You should go.”

“Can I see you before?” he asked.

“Sure. But I'm going to stop by my parents' house first. To make sure everything survived. The quake, I mean.”

I listened to the radio as I made my way toward Piedmont. Now they were saying 5.8, but a radio caller said it felt way stronger than that. Emergency personnel were reminding people of numbers to call if they smelled gas.

 

“Hello?” I called out, as I walked inside my parents' house. A tremor rolled past just then, and I could hear car alarms along the street sounding. But inside the house, no one answered. “Mom? Blake?”

I poked my head into the kitchen. A few of the cabinet doors had bounced open, and cans of food had been jettisoned onto the counter. Nothing looked broken.

I passed through the den. My father's hospital bed was neatly made and pushed to the side of the room. A few framed family portraits had been knocked to the floor.

“Marcus?” I called. I didn't expect him to answer. He had gone up to Sacramento for a few days, the first time he'd had to himself in a long while.

The sliding door to the patio was open, so I stepped outside. My mother's garden was a shamble of toppled plants and potting soil. The Christmas tree I'd bought was tilted against the house, its trunk bent. As I leaned over to set it straight, I noticed my mother. She was kneeling at the far side of the pool.

“Mom?” I called. “Are you okay?”

She held up a hand, as if to say that she had heard me, but she didn't turn around. I walked over to her.

“I guess you felt the earthquake here, too,” I said, looking around at the mess.

She still didn't answer. She was looking down at a plant she held. Its ceramic pot had shattered, and she was trying to pick shards of pottery out of the roots.

“The stem is broken. It won't survive,” she said.

Then she sobbed, a low, guttural moan that came from deep inside her chest. “How am I going to do this by myself?”