Late Migrations

by Margaret Renkl

  I never saw the one that rose up behind me, the one that crashed over my head, knocked me over, and snatched our baby from my arms. I remember clearly the sudden silence beneath the brown water, though surely a churning ocean could not have been silent. I remember my own hair dragging the sand through that murk—however improbably, decades later, I still see my hair swaying against the floor of the sea.

  When I finally found my feet, when I finally pushed my streaming hair away from my face and wiped the stinging water from my eyes, the absurd swimsuit had done its job, if poorly: our boy had risen, too, but yards away, bobbing upside down on the surface of the spent wave as it pulled back from shore, his white legs scissoring the air.

  My husband reached him first, swim-team strokes of decades past closing the gap in a moment, and scooped our baby up and carried him to shore, those small lungs coughing out all the water in the world.

  By the time I reached them on the sand, they were smiling. No tragedy had touched us, no catastrophe but the near loss I still carry—the shadow that, even now, I cannot set down.

  All Birds?

  NASHVILLE, 1999

  Except for the splayed wing feathers, the robin in the street was unrecognizable. “What dis?” my three-year-old asked, squatting to peer at it.

  “That’s a bird,” I said.

  Toddlers are severe enforcers of norms, and my middle child was not having this explanation. “Dat not a bird,” he said. “It not flying.”

  “It’s a dead bird,” I said. “It can’t fly anymore because a car ran over it.”

  “Dat bird dead,” he repeated. “Have a little trouble flying.”

  Every day, for nearly a week, we had to walk down the street to look at the tatters of this unlucky robin. My boy was clearly trying to work something out, but he didn’t ask any more questions. He just looked at the bird for a bit and then walked on. “You dead,” he whispered once, squatting in front of the bird. “You dead. You not a bird.”

  Then one day he looked at me. A new thought had come to him: “All birds die?” he asked.

  I tried to put the best possible face on a hard truth about this lovely world. “All birds die, but first they build a nest and lay eggs and feed their babies worms and fly and fly and fly.”

  “All birds die,” he repeated. His eyes filled up with tears.

  A few days later he was lying on the floor beside our dog. “Scout will die?” he asked, almost absently. I told him Scout would die one day, too. The next question came immediately: “All dogs die?” And then he was off. Every day became a crash course in the reach of mortality:

  “All fish die?”

  “All squirrels die?”

  “All teachers die?”

  “All dese people in the grocery store die?”

  “All mommies die?”

  I answered his questions without hedging. I didn’t want my three-year-old staring into the abyss, but I wouldn’t lie to him either. But then he asked the question that made me want to lie and lie again and keep lying forever: “I will die?” he said, his voice quavering. “I will be dead?”

  Metastatic

  BIRMINGHAM, 2000

  A starling lifts itself from the wire, and a thousand starlings follow, spiraling into the sky. They are pouring in from the treetops, from the roofline—the sky is roiling with wheeling birds, each one an animate cell.

  In spring the bush honeysuckle shelters the bluebird fledglings and the brown wrens. In summer the honeysuckle flowers open to the eager bees. In fall the honeysuckle feeds the cedar waxwings, who cling to the bending stems and pass the berries to flock mates who cannot reach. In winter the honeysuckle waits, gathering itself to spring forth, to wrap its roots around what rightly belongs. To choke it out.

  Behold the fearsome lionfish, its spines fanning out like a mane, its stripes an underwater circus act, its translucent fins an exotic veil. Behold the gorgeous lionfish floating unmolested in foreign waters, passing near the small creatures at home here and gulping them down, whole.

  The lymph nodes are clusters of grapes, ripe, though there will be no wine. They swell and swell with cancer, malignant cells spilling over and spreading, clinging and growing, spilling and spreading and clinging and growing and spilling and spreading and spreading and spreading.

  Death-Defying Acts

  NASHVILLE, 2003

  Terminal illness was perched on the house like a vulture. We walked beneath its hunched presence as though it weren’t there, the way you try not to make eye contact with a stranger who’s openly staring.

  Need governed our days. My father needed help, and my mother needed help with the helping, and I needed to help in a way that allowed me to do my work and also take care of my family. Dad had chemotherapy every other Wednesday. On Thursday, Mom would pack the car and drive them to my house, 182 miles away. My oldest son would sleep on the futon in my office, my husband and I would sleep in our son’s double bed, and my parents would sleep in our room, the only room in the house with its own bathroom. Twelve days later, Mom would drive them home. They would sleep in their own bed and wake up in time to head to the clinic for another round of chemo. The next day it was back to my house again.

  During one of those visits, Dad suddenly remembered that the circus was coming to town. Not to Nashville, the town where I live, but to Birmingham, the town where he lived.

  “You know, I’ve always wanted to go to the circus,” he said one day, out of nowhere.

  “You should go, Dad,” I said. “Of course.”

  “The boys would love the circus,” Dad said. “You know how much they would love the circus.”

  Oh.

  This wasn’t part of the last-chance bucket list at all. This was another trope, one that involved indelible images of grand-fatherly largesse. It was a hedge against oblivion, a way to be remembered.

  I spent much of my father’s final illness in a state of exhausted resignation, but the flip side of resignation is fury, and fury sometimes found its way through the cracks in my splintered life. My husband, my children, my parents, my siblings—they were the entire bounded universe to me, and one of them was being pulled away forever. But lying under the covers in my own bed, the bed I almost never slept in, I knew my beloved father was asking me to give up two of the only four days every month when I had my own little family to myself. He was asking me to give up my only near respite from cancer.

  “No.” I said it flatly, a belligerent word left over from toddlerhood or the year I was thirteen. “I’m sorry, Dad. We can’t go to Birmingham to see the circus two days from now. We have stuff to do here. We have plans.”

  “Oh,” he said, sounding slightly surprised. “Oh.” Then, recovering, not quite pleading but trying one more time: “You know the kids would love the circus.”

  “I know they would, Dad, but I wouldn’t,” I said.

  I was forty years old—a writer, a wife, a parent—but I still thought of my father’s love, of his unshakable belief in me, as the surest protection against my own inconsequence. “You can always come home,” he had said. “Even if you marry a bastard, you can always leave him and come on home.” But that home had long since ceased to exist, reduced to a sour-smelling shell holding whole shelves of medication and a trash can for my father to cough into as phlegm built in his throat. Becoming responsible for his care and my mother’s equilibrium probably meant I had been hauled into a new kind of adulthood unaware, even if I wasn’t behaving like an adult. “No,” I said. “I don’t want to go to the circus.”

  At the time, I still thought I could find a way to bear the idea of a world without my father in it. What I couldn’t bear was any more suffering. I wanted my father to act like my father, damn it, even to the end. Was that my reason for refusing to let him take my children to the circus? By acting like a child myself, was I trying to force him to become my vibrant father again and not a frightened old man who wanted only to be remembered as a hero by his grandsons?

  “Well, put it o
n the calendar for next time then,” he said, backing down. “The circus comes back in two years, and I want to take the boys next time.”

  Next time.

  For my terminally ill father, there would be no next time, and I knew it. And he knew I knew it. We were going to the circus.

  In Praise of the Unlovely World

  Teetering between despair and terror, alarmed by the perils that threaten the planet, defeated in imagining any real way to help, I’m tempted to turn away, to focus on what is lovely in a broken world: moonlight on still water, the full-body embrace of bumblebees in the milkweed flowers, the first dance of the newlyweds, whose eyes never leave each other in all their turnings on the gleaming floor.

  But even destruction can remind us of all the ways the world has found of working itself out. Someone steps on a cockroach on the dark sidewalk, and by morning the ants have arrived to carry it off, infinitesimal bit by bit. A car hits a doe on a country road, and the flies share it with the glossy vultures. A beer can tossed carelessly from the car window glints like treasure in the sunlight. Even in its shining, it is already in the long grip of corrosion—eighty years, a hundred—that will take it down to fertile soil.

  Chokecherry

  BIRMINGHAM, 2003

  When I think of the first time my heart broke, the summer I was fourteen, I don’t think at all of the boy who broke it. I think of walking around and around our block, desolate among the ubiquitous dogwoods, weeping as though I had invented heartbreak all by myself. I think of my father, standing at the end of the driveway, cracked where a chokecherry root had pushed up the concrete so it buckled like a fault line, waiting for me to come home. Each time I passed, still crying, he would kick his toe against the break and try to look as though he were considering the maintenance problem at hand. He’d smile at me, and though I couldn’t have known it then, it was the smile of someone whose own heart was breaking too.

  On the night my father died, he was lying in the big bed in the corner room where he had slept for thirty years. Listing beside him was a slanting bookcase he had built himself, and on one of its shelves—right at eye level—was a picture of my mother on their wedding day, and one of me in my First Communion gown, and pictures of my brother and sister, of the commonplace life of our family. All through the long night it took my dying father to die, I lay beside him, holding his hand and looking at those pictures.

  He was long past seeing by then, and each breath was a gasp that shook his whole body, but still the breaths kept coming. Please die, I thought, every time there was a pause between the shuddering exhale and the next desperate, grasping breath. Please die. Please let this be the last one. Please die.

  I didn’t see it when the last breath finally came, when my strong, sheltering father ceased for the first time in my lucky life to be my father. I didn’t see it because I had lifted my eyes from his face just once, turned for only a moment to the window on the other side of the room, wondering when the light would come.

  He Is Not Here

  One year, helping me in the garden in early spring, my middle son inadvertently uncovered a cottontail nest tucked beneath the rosemary. The baby rabbits seemed hopelessly vulnerable: thumb-sized creatures, eyes still closed, without any shelter from the cold March rains.

  And yet their nest under the rosemary plant was a snug nursery. Their mother had scooped out a shallow hollow in the soil and lined it thickly with her own fur; more fur lay on top of the babies; and on top of that was a final layer of leaves and pine straw and dried rosemary needles. It was impossible to distinguish the nest from the jumble of dead vegetation that had piled up during fall and winter. And as my son pointed out, the location of the nest was ideal: to predators it would smell exactly like rosemary and not at all like rabbit. We tucked the babies in again and left the bed unweeded till they were safely out of the nest and on their own.

  I’ve been desultory about weeding in springtime ever since. Spring is the time, Gerard Manley Hopkins noted, “when weeds, in wheels, shoot long and lovely and lush,” and there’s another reason for waiting to clear out my flower beds: the neighborhood bees are busy among the flowering weeds long before the perennials bloom. Who can resist the names of wildflowers—fleabane and henbit and purple deadnettle and creeping Charlie?

  Finally, though, the day comes when there can be no more waiting or the weeds will choke out all the flowers I planted on purpose. That day came one long Easter weekend. My reliable garden helper was away in college, and I worked alone, gingerly, careful to watch for signs of a nest. There was nothing beneath the rosemary but mock strawberry vines. Moving from bed to bed, I hauled away weeds by the wheelbarrow-load.

  Then, in the next-to-last bed, I tugged up some purple deadnettle growing around the fragrant skeleton of last year’s oregano, and what came away in my hand was a tuft of rabbit fur. The nest was empty but so newly vacated as to be entirely intact, an absence exactly shaped to denote an ineffable presence.

  Hypochondria

  NASHVILLE, 2003

  On another day I wouldn’t have noticed the lump. My breasts have always been bumpy, and my doctor has never seemed concerned—“busy breasts,” she calls them. I didn’t even bother checking them in the shower: If everything’s a lump, then what’s the point?

  That day I was anxious but also bored. We were waiting for the test results that would tell us whether a hellish bout of radiation and chemo had killed the cancer growing in my father’s esophagus. Pacing the oncology hallway, I picked up a plastic card that explained how to do a breast self-exam, and I was still holding that card when the doctor came into the examining room and clipped some scans onto a light board. He pointed to a cluster of ghostly white orbs that were swollen lymph nodes. He pointed to a dark spot on my father’s liver. The cancer wasn’t gone. The cancer was spreading.

  Being in the presence of death can transform otherwise reasonable people into augurs, bargaining with the cosmos: “If I stop being blasé about my health, will you promise not to kill me?” Holding that card, I vowed to call for an appointment the moment I got home. If I didn’t want my own children to face the agony of losing a parent too soon, it was time to let a medical professional decide which of the myriad lumps in my breasts were normal and which were not.

  The nurse practitioner was kind. As she gently rubbed and prodded and kneaded, I told her about my father’s illness. Dad had always been the one person who could make me feel both completely protected and certain of my own strength. It was hard to separate what was happening to him from what was happening to me. I was surely wasting her time, I said, but I wanted to be safe.

  She nodded. Then she said, “Oops, there’s a mass.”

  A word like “mass”—just by itself, not even to mention the dying father taking up the dread chambers of the mind—has a way of stripping all logic from a conversation. The nurse told me, repeatedly, that this mass did not feel to her like cancer, that 80 percent of breast lumps, even suspicious ones, turn out to be nothing, that it was not time to start planning my funeral.

  To a person with a mass in her breast, a word like “funeral” is a dirty bomb, exploding into cutting fragments that lodge deep in the reptilian brain. By the time I’d had a mammogram and an ultrasound and a biopsy, by the time I’d met with the cheerful surgeon who said he wasn’t worried but still wanted to see me again in three months, I knew I was dying.

  Over and over again during my father’s illness and for more than a year after his death, the pattern was both primitive and modern: a lump, an inconclusive test, more doctors, more tests. Each time the mammogram was stable, the ultrasound fine, the biopsy normal. I was not relieved. I would brood about the cancer they didn’t catch. My father was dying, and I was surely dying too.

  When decorations went on sale after the holidays, I would think, I might not live to see next Christmas, and buy nothing. Every headache was a tumor, every bout of indigestion stomach cancer. Stress and grief colluded to produce ever more symptoms, and e
ach new symptom required a test: ultrasound, colonoscopy, endoscopy, colposcopy, EKG, blood test after blood test after blood test. They all turned out fine, but I knew I wasn’t fine. I was dying.

  When I didn’t die, however, and then didn’t die some more, I came one day to understand: I wasn’t dying; I was grieving. I wasn’t dying. Not yet.

  The Shape the Wreckage Takes

  NASHVILLE, 2003

  Barefoot and still in her nightgown, my mother comes into my kitchen at lunchtime and looks down the steps to the family room. Her eyes are swollen and red, as they have been for all the weeks since my father’s death. My four-year-old, the youngest, is playing on the wooden floor alone. He is pushing small metal cars off the bottom step and watching them crash into each other. This game requires all his concentration. He seems to have some plan for the shape the wreckage must take. He does not hear, or at least does not acknowledge, his grandmother. “Hi, honey,” she says.

  “Hi, Wibby,” he says, not looking up. Then, “Granddaddy played cars with me.”

  Whenever my mother told this story in the years to come, it was meant to be an example of how God had made a terrible mistake. It was another reason in the long list of reasons she always marshaled for why, if she and my father could not have gone into the next world together, then at least she should have been the one to go first. Confirmation that a bad bargain had somehow been struck.

  But my four-year-old’s remark was not a rebuke. It had nothing to do with her. He was a little boy, and he was still finding out all the places where his grandfather had been but would be no longer. This new absence was a missing tooth, the hole he couldn’t help probing with his tongue. His grandfather had played cars with him. His grandfather had read books to him. His grandfather had walked around the block with him, holding his hand.