Running Home Read online

  How, I wonder, did Dad ever let us go?

  * * *

  —

  The next morning, Lesley and I take Dad to an appointment at the hospital in Warrenton. A friend recommended a doctor there who specializes in late-stage cancer and has arranged to meet Dad to see if he might be a candidate for chemo after all. It’s a long shot, but Dad agrees to go, whether out of weary submission or his own last stirrings of hope.

  It’s the first of December. Rain streaks sideways, the charcoal sky sinking down on us. Just like the deliveryman said, a new month has arrived. Time is not on our side.

  Lesley and I help Dad down to the car. It’s just the two of us supporting his weight today, and it’s much harder. We put him in the front passenger seat and I get in back, as I did for so many years as a girl, Maisy in her car seat beside me. The rain falls in dreary conspiracy with our mood. From behind, Dad is a hunched back, inconceivably still, facing straight ahead. When we turn onto the county road, he pivots his head slowly to look at the Blue Ridge Mountains, frozen and bare and beautiful. I can’t see Dad’s face, the pain of loss or fear scraped across it, but in the stillness of his shoulders, I know I’m watching him watch his world for the last time, and I know he knows it, too.

  At the hospital, Dr. Ali is bright-eyed and boyish, younger than me, with a soft smile that puts us at ease. Dad summarizes his recent medical history, and when he’s done he says, “Well, that’s my sad story.”

  “I don’t know if it’s a sad story, but it’s your story,” says Dr. Ali. He’s right. It is Dad’s story. He’s accepted it, and now it’s up to us to do the same.

  “How much time do you spend in bed?” asks Dr. Ali.

  This is the question that sinks us.

  “Almost all day,” Dad says. No sugarcoating, no heroics.

  Dr. Ali puts his hand on Dad’s forearm and holds it there for an extra beat. It seems an act of exquisite compassion, in light of what he says next. “An infusion of liquids will hydrate you and help you feel better, but I’m afraid you’re not a candidate for chemotherapy.”

  I sit with Dad in the chemo room while a nurse inserts an IV drip of saline solution into his veins. The vinyl lounge chairs are filled with patients in various states of infirmity, but Dad is by far the grayest and ghostliest. He pats my hand and says, “Thank you for all your prodding. Thank you for stepping up.”

  “I’m glad I could be able to,” I say.

  “I’d give anything to be in your condition again.”

  “I’m so sorry you have to go through this, Dad.”

  Soon Dad nods off, and I slip out to nurse Maisy. When I come back, he’s been loaded into a wheelchair. He wants to come out to the curb to wait with me for my ride to the airport. The wheelchair, wide enough for two large men, dwarfs his shrunken frame.

  I bend down and give him a long hug, feeling his bony shoulders and the heaviness of his fatigue and my own, such overwhelming weariness.

  “I don’t want to leave,” I say.

  “You have a life to go back to,” he scolds me gently.

  “I know, Dad. And you’re part of it.”

  Merrill pulls up in her Volvo to drive me to Dulles. I sling Maisy’s car seat over my arm and look at my father. Surely this won’t be the last time.

  I raise my hand, like I’m taking an oath. “I love you, Dad.”

  We’ve said so many goodbyes, but this is the only time I can remember saying those four words all in a row out loud. It always felt like giving too much away, like plunging into a November creek in nothing but my underwear, without even the bravado of a dare to hide behind.

  Goodbye in train stations, Dad propping one khaki leg on the bottom step of the train, half in, half out, coming and going, always this way. Goodbye in front of the junior high. In airport terminals, back when you could walk passengers right to the gate; Dad always parked and came in with us, even when we were old enough to go alone. Goodbye in the driveway at Huntly, leaning through the open window for one final assessment. “Allllright,” he’d say, in his dieselly rumble, preparing to send us off. So much contained in that one drawn-out word. I love you. Be good. Be safe.

  It was the same repertoire every time: “Watch the median. Be careful pulling out on that blind curve. Don’t drive too fast.” Then he’d step away from the car and lay his arms by his side and we’d ease away and he’d raise his hand and hold it up in a prolonged, slow-motion wave until we were out of sight. Until we’d dropped down the steady pitch of the driveway, steering the wheels carefully through the gravel ruts, out to the main road, the scent of rotten apple hanging in the air. Necks craning right left right to watch for cars, obedient daughters to the end.

  Goodbye now to the home hills on this sleeting day, tree branches bristling the hillsides like fur.

  Then I am waving to him through the window and I am gone.

  11

  Darkness

  PHOTO: DAVID L. ARNOLD

  Rappahannock sunset, 1998

  I have this idea that once I get back to Santa Fe, I will be able to think more clearly. I’m not sure why I think this. Waiting for me is rambunctious two-year-old Pippa, who turns the bed into a trampoline the minute I start nursing Maisy. I’m behind on the laundry and deadlines. I haven’t even started thinking about Christmas. But still I’m hopeful: Maybe when I’m out on my trails, I will flush the fear from my brain and the soreness from my body and I will figure out what I want to say to Dad while there’s still time.

  On the first Saturday in December, I run across a mesa a few miles northwest of Santa Fe. From the scrubby doubletrack trails of La Tierra you can see twenty miles to canyons on the far side of the Rio Grande, the earth wadded up like a napkin. Behind them, the buildings of Los Alamos National Laboratory dot the flanks of the Jemez Mountains, metal roofs gleaming in the sun. I pick my way along the rocky ground, not thinking about Dad dying or my aching neck or the worry that thrums inside me. I’m just listening to the pebbles beneath my feet and watching the rising sun bring the mountains to the west into sharp relief, when suddenly I feel my own relief.

  I know what I’m going to say. Of course. I love you, Dad, and I know you love us. But how could you have left us? HOW? And what I want him to say to me. There’s only one thing, really. I’m sorry.

  I have to get back to Huntly soon so I can say it in person.

  * * *

  —

  Two days later, the jangle of a distant ringing phone wakes me before dawn. It’s the worst sound in the world. I leap from bed, sprint to the kitchen, heart in my throat.

  It’s Lesley.

  “I think you should come,” she says.

  I hold the phone to my ear, filled with a horrible foreboding that this is the last day of my life I will wake up with my father in it.

  It’s Thursday, December 9, 2010. When was the last time I heard Dad’s voice? A week ago on the phone, when he confessed, “I’m weak as a kitten.” He was quiet for a while before he said, softly, “Is this because of some kind of character flaw?”

  My heart splintered. This was it, the big question, the one he’d been too afraid to ask. Was cancer his payback, his penance?

  “Oh, no, Dad. No,” I said quickly, trying to keep my voice light. But for a split second part of me wondered it, too.

  The next night when I called, Dad spoke to me for only a minute before he said, “I have to get off the phone.” He sounded lower than I’d ever heard him. On Tuesday, he was too groggy to talk.

  Just yesterday morning, he snapped nonsensically at Lesley and Merrill, at his bedside: “Stop talking about pigs! You’re supposed to be taking care of me!” To the hospice nurse who arrived later, he announced crossly, “I’m not going to try to sit up anymore. If I want to lie down, then let me!” He would have said this in the pinched, disapproving voice that he rese
rved for only the most trying of situations. This was the voice you never wanted to hear when you were growing up. The voice that sounded like it had been slammed shut in a door and then stretched thin like chewing gum. Sometimes it was deserved, but mostly it came out when he’d good and had it and needed space.

  The nurse dutifully removed a bolster, helped arrange Dad’s head and shoulders low on the pillow, and retrieved an anti-anxiety pill from her kit. The medication might make him woozy for a few hours, she told Lesley as she put it in his mouth, but then he’d pull out of it.

  Dad didn’t pull out. He just sank deeper into some distant, beckoning place. Now, Lesley tells me, he is unresponsive, his complexion wan and his breathing jagged, with a horrid, rattling cough.

  “I should warn you,” she says, “you might not make it in time.”

  I hang up and crawl back into bed beside Steve and whisper him awake with the news. What I do next I do without thinking: call Meg, call the airline, beg for a bereavement fare on the next flight out. Open drawers, shove clothes—my own and Maisy’s—into a suitcase. Diapers, pacifiers, swaddle blanket. Set the day in motion, say our goodbyes, we’re out the door.

  * * *

  —

  Maisy and I meet Meg on our layover in Denver. Never have I been so glad to see my sister. Our flight to Dulles is delayed by an hour, and we frantically pace the terminal. I’m relieved when the airplane door closes and I have to turn off my phone. This means I won’t have to know. Maybe we will get there in time. Please let us get there in time.

  I press my face against the window as the plane takes off. Fresh storms have passed to the east, pasting the land white with new snow. Even the square farm grids seem softer, less precise, as though we’re floating through a woolly sort of dream state. I pull out my notebook, open to a blank page, and begin: Dear Dad. All the words I’ve wanted to say pour out of my pen. I stop once, to nurse Maisy. Beside me, Meg is trying to read. So much has changed since we were girls on the train, but so much is the same. I’m still writing when we touch down in Dulles two hours later. With trepidation, I turn on my phone to check for missed calls and messages—none—and silently beg it to stay quiet.

  Merrill’s waiting for us at the arrivals curb. Still no news. An air of jubilation fills her car. He’s not dead yet! As though by managing to outrun the imminent all day, we might be able to avoid it altogether, forever.

  It’s rush hour in the suburbs, and traffic is crawling. I glance impatiently at my watch. It’s 6:10. If we’d been on our normal nonstop flights, we’d be at Huntly by now. Merrill tells us the last thing Dad said to her before yesterday morning. “I want the girls to be here when it happens.”

  These words have barely left her mouth when Meg’s phone rings. The car falls instantly silent. In the backseat, Meg tells us, “It’s Lesley.” I stare at the wall of red brake lights in front of us so I don’t have to see her face. She says, “Oh, Lesley. I’m sorry.” Sorry, sorry, sorry, over and over and over.

  When we pull up the drive, Huntly Stage glows garishly on its hill. All the lights are on, a too bright beacon over the fields. I’m filled with an intense foreboding. I’ve always been squeamish in emergencies, and I’ve never seen a dead body before. But when I walk into the house, I’m possessed by a sudden boldness. I say my hellos to Lesley and Phillip and go straight to Dad’s room before I lose my nerve.

  There he is, lying in bed, utterly still, a yellowed husk, cellophane skin, eyes half closed.

  “Daddy!” I cry. “I’m sorry I didn’t make it! I tried!” The words come of their own accord, from beyond thought or intellect, from a place so old—or young—inside of me. It’s easy to call him Daddy, even though I haven’t in decades, because he is. Still my father. It’s not terror I feel, but a queasy sort of marvel. I am not afraid.

  I climb up on the bed beside him, touch his hair, the deep hollow by his temples. I find his arm beneath the thin red cotton bedspread and place one hand upon his chest and feel only bone, no beat, his rib cage so thin. Already his skin is cooling, but his fingers look like they might grasp mine at any moment, and I expect to see an eyelid twitch or the blanket rise just a breath, expanding with his chest. But it doesn’t. Not even a little bit. All the life that had filled his lungs and animated his body has been sucked out of him, whooshed away to another world.

  He does not look like himself, and he looks exactly like himself. I study him closely, trying to make sense of the optical illusion. All his features are the same—his thin lips and droopy earlobes and straight nose. The difference is one of dimension: He’s as flat as plywood. His face has fallen in on itself, an ashen mask, strangely naked without his glasses. Lesley took them off yesterday because they’d begun to rub sores on his nose. The hospice nurse gave him a bath while he slept and swabbed his mouth with Listerine so that he was tidy for the hard work ahead of him.

  And yet the sight of his body in repose calms me. How many times have I stretched out beside him—his socked feet sticking up, his hands clasped peacefully across his stomach. Playing Morsel in the cabin he rented in Maine. My grandparents’ condominium in Pennsylvania, the winter of 1980, where we lay on our backs on the shag carpet, watching Team USA beat the Soviets at Lake Placid. Meg’s trundle bed at Legation Street, where he read us Time of Wonder after our baths. Despite his overwhelming physical absence in my life, he’s occupied an enormous, indelible space.

  I can feel him here in the room with us, his essence intact and hovering somewhere just overhead. For a few moments more, at least, he will still be Dad, outstretched, with long lines and edges, knobby joints and furred and freckled knuckles.

  “The end was peaceful,” Lesley says, breaking the silence. Philip read to him aloud about the whaleship Essex while he lay unconscious, and she touched his feet to see if they were cold—the nurse had said that would be a sign that he was close—but they were still warm. In the late afternoon, as the light leaked out of the sky, she told him it was okay to let go, and he rattled one last inhalation, and she thought to herself, That’s it, and it was.

  My father is dead, but my body is making milk and Maisy is hungry, so I sit in the rocking chair by his feet and nurse her. It feels natural to do this, as I had all fall when he was sick. The angle from here is less flattering, though. I can see into him, into the space he’s just recently vacated: beneath his eyelids, into his dark nostrils. His half-parted lips make a faint grimace, pulled upward by the jagged last breath. How does a body just stop after a lifetime of motion?

  Later, after I’ve put Maisy to bed and Merrill and Philip have gone home, I go back into the room alone and lie next to Dad. His face in death is already familiar. I kiss his cheek and read him what I wrote on the plane, things I’ve wanted to tell him for days, weeks, years: I love you. Your creativity lives on. You did your best. I’ve lived my life trying to make you proud.

  And I feel certain that he hears me and that I am not too late.

  * * *

  —

  The undertaker arrives right on the dot of nine, in a gleaming black Yukon with tinted drug-dealer windows. It’s bigger and more discreet than a hearse, and only slightly less sinister.

  “I’m Chris,” the undertaker says at the front door. “I’m so sorry for your loss.”

  He’s portly, dressed neatly in a pressed black suit, with fair, thinning hair and a young face and a soft, kneading handshake. To think that as Dad lay dying, Chris was probably sitting on his couch, watching TV; then his mobile rang and it was time to get presentable. Someone has died. For Chris, it happens all the time. Maybe every day.

  We lead him inside to the living room. He and his associate, also young and balding, settle themselves on the couch, like guests at a cocktail party, to discuss Dad’s arrangements (or, as Dad would say, Arrangements). “Perhaps you’ll be more comfortable waiting here while we remove Mr. Arnold from the bed,” Chris says. This is gentl
e funeral-home-speak for This is the disturbing part: watching someone manhandle your loved one and take him away for the last time.

  When they go outside to get the gurney, Meg pulls me aside. “You don’t want to watch this,” she whispers.

  But I do. Dad’s death doesn’t scare me now. Maybe if I pay close attention, it will make more sense, maybe it will mean that I hadn’t missed it after all, his very last act, that I was here, that I saw it and took notice, just as he always had. Because he couldn’t.

  I hover outside the room, listening to the shuffling and rearranging, the clack of a metal apparatus opening, quiet grunts of exertion. Then Dad wheels by on a gurney. He’s in a maroon bag that looks like a giant felt overcoat, mohair maybe, oddly proper against his faded red sweatshirt, and the undertaker and his partner are moving fast for the door, as if they want to get out before we lose it.

  As they push Dad outside, Chris places his business card discreetly on the table, patting it as he would someone’s hand. “Call us anytime,” he says.

  I stand at the window for a long time, watching their taillights disappear around the curve of the driveway, not knowing whether to wave or cry. So I do both, tears streaming down my face, flapping my hand back and forth the way Dad always used to do, until the SUV is out of sight. Then I go into the kitchen and pick up Chris’s business card. His name is typed in an ornate, swirly cursive, and below it, in the same dignified font: INTERN. I feel a smile tugging at my mouth. Dad would chuckle at this, being carried away by an apprentice mortician. He would not do this meanly or out of superiority, but because it was the best and most bizarre detail of this long, strange day—that one word, so unnecessary, really, yet so proud, so full of hope. For the first time in weeks, maybe months, I laugh.