Hazard

by Margaret Combs

  “Thanks, Mom, for sending his photo,” I said into the miniscule microphone, freeing the photo from my wallet and holding it in front of me. There was Rod, caught in a rare moment on my parents’ back patio, stretched out on a lounge chair. He held a fresh glass of iced tea and for some unknown reason he was looking straight at the camera, making eye contact, and smiling his funny crooked smile. The expression on his face was one of pure pleasure and left no doubt that he trusted the person behind the camera, my mother.

  Mom giggled into my earphones.

  “He’s in hog heaven!” she said airily. The tone of her voice was from the far past, before I turned five, before my brother’s diagnosis fell on her ears. It was full of mirth.

  I laughed. Her voice stirred a memory of my long-ago road trip to Kentucky with my parents and Rod, the stop at Denny’s restaurant where Rod up and ordered his meal like a perfect gentleman. Coming back from the restroom, I had paused, caught by the sight of my mother. Leaning across the table, she was holding both of Rod’s hands, teasing him gently, with a look of sheer delight on her face, sheer adoration—a mother’s love.

  One day, she was going to be gone, and I didn’t know how we were going to tell my brother. How to make sense of it for him; how he would survive that tear in his heart. The only thing that could be worse was for our mother to feel his loss, or the loss any of her children, but especially her first boy.

  “So honey, when are you coming to visit us?” she said to me now. “We’ve got sunshine here, you know.”

  “Yes”—I laughed again—“more than I could ever want.”

  “We need to talk about some things,” she said, her voice turning serious, “about Rod.”

  “Oh,” I said, alarmed, “Is he all right?”

  “Oh yes, he’s fine,” she said hastily. “But your dad and I aren’t going to be here forever.”

  This was a truth I continually ignored—that my parents would someday cease being anywhere on this earth, where I could reach them, visit them, if not this year, then next. We had longevity in my family, meaning we were somewhat spoiled, inured to death. My psyche assumed they would be here as long as I was here and their deaths would be timed with mine.

  “I know, Mom,” I said, reluctantly, feeling the child rise up in me.

  Ahead lay an unknown phase of life with my brother. Like me, he was aging, and from all indications, he would be around for a while. Here he was in his fifties, going strong. My parents had never dreamed he would outlive them. When he was born, the life expectancy of a disabled child like him was thirty years, and because of this, my parents hadn’t planned for his extended life.

  The truth about disability is that it lasts. And it doesn’t get better; it grows worse and more complicated with age. I wasn’t certain I had enough stamina to manage my own aging, much less my brother’s. Recently, I had learned from Cami that Rod was refusing to wipe himself after using the toilet. This was a brand-new development. He didn’t like the feeling of reaching back there with a tangle of toilet paper and risking the chance he might come away with feces on his hands. Now that he was a cranky old man, he was refusing to cooperate. I didn’t blame him; feces on my hands did not appeal to me either, which is why I didn’t want to clean up his. I had no idea how this was playing out during the week at his group home, but my father was running Rod baths when he came home on the weekends, making him soak after every bowel movement.

  Did I have enough love? My worry was no different than any sibling of a disabled adult. After my parents were gone, caring for my brother would be a full-time, nonstop job, without respite. Like a true second-born, I had always seen myself as the backup—the one who could step in and assist, but never the one on the front lines, like Barbara Ann. And in a way, my younger sister was also a firstborn—she had come of age without the presence of her older sisters, and with her older brother needing the same attention as the younger brother.

  As if reading my mind, my mother said, “Say, your dad’s about to drive Rod back to Lake Margaret. Want to say hi?”

  “Sure,” I said, straightening my spine and shifting taller in the seat. I never knew which Rod was coming to the phone: the sweet little brother or the sparring boy. Like all of my siblings, I had learned to brace myself, and then, if a sweet brother just happened to show up, it was that much more sublime.

  A few seconds of rustling and mumbling told me Rod was on the line.

  “Hi, Rod.”

  “Hi, Moss.”

  “I just wanted to wish you a happy Valentine’s Day.”

  “Yaas.”

  “Did you have any of my chocolates?”

  “No!” he shouted.

  “No?” I asked, flustered, realizing too late that I should have asked my mother to brief me before handing the phone to him. I suddenly remembered she had toned down on his sweets.

  “No! Pie!”

  “Oh, I see, you had pie for dinner? Well … that sounds good. What kind of pie?”

  “Rhubarb!”

  No matter how many times we did this, I couldn’t seem to get from hello to goodbye without making Rod blow his stack. Taking in a deep breath, I exhaled, slowly. He mumbled something I couldn’t understand—the static and his grouchiness garbling the words. I wasn’t about to ask him to repeat it; that would send him into a paroxysm. Sighing, I tried another route.

  “Mom sure makes a good rhubarb pie, doesn’t she?”

  “Yaas.”

  His voice softened. He didn’t have to struggle with this answer. My mother’s pies are an indisputable pleasure, her savory fillings just the right measure of tartness and sweet zing. If my siblings and I were there, we’d be jostling for seconds and feebly putting dibs on the last piece, even though we all knew it would be shared by my father and Rod after the rest of us had gone to bed. To stretch out the contentment in my brother’s voice, I dispensed with questions.

  “I hope you liked the card I sent.”

  “Yaas. Valentine,” he said.

  For a miniscule moment I paused. I could come up with something more to talk about but I sensed we had reached a threshold—both his and mine. Better to quit while we were ahead.

  “It’s nice talking with you, Rod. Happy Valentine’s Day.”

  “Yaas. Okay.”

  “I love you.”

  “Okay.”

  “Can you give the phone back to Mom?”

  “Yaas, I will!”

  A loud bang hit my ear, followed by a rattling that told me he had dropped the receiver, leaving it to dangle on its cord. In the next instant, I heard the distant noise of voices, which I realized were coming from the television set. Fox News was turned up high so my father could hear without putting in his hearing aid.

  “Hello, Mom?” I called out, absurdly. “I’m still here.”

  From somewhere in the kitchen a cupboard closed, or maybe the garage door.

  “Mom, are you there?”

  I pictured the receiver, dangling near the floor, calling out with its tiny twangy voice. After a minute more of dead air, I let go.

  Chapter 32

  Little Wing

  Recently, a deep truth came to me, unexpected and unbidden, on a bright winter day in the year 2015. Happily mussed and dirty, I was in the kitchen of my new home on the island doing an ordinary thing—sorting through a stack of books on the kitchen table—when I spotted an oddly made box tucked back in the closet. I’d forgotten it was there.

  Slender and upright, the box itself was a marvel of craftsmanship and engineering, its custom cut panels fit together in a seamless concert of cardboard and packing tape. It must have taken my father an entire evening to fashion it for me.

  Curling my fingers around the handle, an arching twist of duct tape, I lifted. The box floated to the table top, feather-light, as if bearing thin air. Laying it gently on its side, I reached for the Xacto knife and carefully razored away the packing seal, the cardboard lid, and six stitches of scotch tape binding the bulges of bubble wrap insid
e.

  Part by part, Little Wing emerged. First, her stabilizer with its shredded edge; her fuselage, its dark wound soldered beneath a knob of aging glue; and finally her wings, each adorned with red paint, the left with black lettering, wobbly and brave, marching down the center surface.

  Magically and improbably, here she was in my hands, light as breath. All these years after I abandoned her and then fled to the east coast and my adult life, my father had kept her like an heirloom. Through the Seventies and Eighties, she survived the unraveling of the missile defense program, the massive layoffs of engineers, job hopping with my father from Colorado to Florida to Virginia and back to Florida. Each time he found a new job and, along with Roddy and my mother, set up a new home, my father chose a corner for his workbench and mounted, on the wall, his finest models. There, among his beauties, he always hung my scruffy little plane.

  Now, I lifted her to the gray light of the window, turning her like delicate and ancient wonderment. She twirled like a dancer, an acrobat, as if winged with ailerons.

  Far away, in warmer skies, my father’s planes were still winning trophies. He and my mother made the long drive to Pensacola each year and stayed the weekend, officiating and competing for the trophy, my father maneuvering his plane in the sky, my mother chasing after it, tracking its path. When I imagine my mother running through a field smothered in reeds, eyes skyward, beaded on the diminishing speck of plane against a pale hot sky, keeping it in her sights, I see her as an adventurer, as the child she once was, before fever took her down. This brings up a wild admiration in me and a floating feeling of comfort. It has taken me the whole of my life to see my mother—to see that she broke over and over for her boy and yet at the same time prayed with the fervent passion of a disciple for his well-being and for her other children, and yes, for me, her second child, the daughter who was the hardest one to keep close. She was in those stands cheering me on as sure as she was chasing doctors and tutors and struggling to help my brother.

  The air in my kitchen stirred, and the late summer light of my childhood, the heat of the garage, the pinging of moth wings off the garage window entered the room. Around me breathed the warm perfume of oil and tires, the ticking of the Volkswagen engine. I touched the plane’s wingtip to my nose and inhaled the soft citrusy fragrance. Balsa. My father’s scent. His essence.

  Once every year, my father turns away from his planes and leaves them hanging idly on the walls of his workshop. Rather than fly, he travels with Rod to the Florida Everglades on a camping trip sponsored by the Baptist church. He and my brother have been going on this adventure for as long as I can remember. Whenever I ask what in the world he and Rod do there, my father chuckles, “He likes to watch the alligators.”

  I imagined them, father and son, standing together on the bank of a swamp, taking in the slide of reptiles through the water, thrilled by a sudden scaly thrashing. An epiphany rose in me, an uncanny revelation that my father never needed me to be his stand-in son. He already had a son. Since his retirement, my father had doted on my brother, driving faithfully to and from Rod’s group home so he could come home for Sunday dinner, fetching Rod a second piece of pie and sitting with him at the table long after everyone had drifted off, allowing him all the time he needed to excavate through a mountain of pumpkin and ice cream and chastising my mother for not bringing Rod a second cup of coffee.

  My father was no longer the stern man of my childhood. Life slapped him hard and he was a different man now. Fragile. Vulnerable. At least two times in his life he had cried hard—once when he was laid off from his job, and once when he learned about my brother. I didn’t see his tears—he never cried in front of me or any of his children; I learned this from my mother.

  It came to me then, what Little Wing meant to my life. What drew me to my father’s work bench all of those evenings was not ambition, or guilt, or a duty to be a surrogate son. I simply needed to be with him. To feel his steadiness in a home rocked by affliction. As my mother fell apart, and my brother cried and bit his hands, and my sister withdrew to her fantasies of wild horses, I sought the gentle and precise way my father brought a plane to life, the comfort of minute sounds, and the sanctuary of being inside a moment, shaping something beautiful with my hands.

  What I couldn’t understand as a child, I felt now. In the stillness of that long-ago garage, I was piecing together more than an airplane. I was assembling what would carry me through the rest of my life: an inner strength born from my childhood and my family. I was learning to trust beauty, to turn to it when life dealt a hard blow, and to know that if I searched hard enough, it would be there.

  Now, as I held Little Wing up to the light, this companion, this piece of myself, I felt something truly marvelous. Joy.

  Epilogue

  On a crisp sunlit morning in November 2015, I pull my car off Miller Road and park at the Grand Forest trailhead on Bainbridge Island. My aging Honda is the sole car in sight, evidence that I’m the only one foolish enough to venture outside. A raucous windstorm overnight has slapped around the island’s hemlocks and cedars, and now, branches lie shredded and flayed across every inch of wet soil. I crawl over a massive felled trunk and step into the forest. Fingers of light rake down around me.

  Something about the aftermath of a storm has always calmed me: a washing away of the old, a cleansing. A gratefulness that I am here and want to be; I want to see what another day brings. And a renewed sense that what governs life and death is not so much in my hands.

  The main trail is clogged with debris, forcing me to stray left and descend a small embankment, then high-knee it across a creek. I’m happy to be dressed as I am, in a frayed cotton sweatshirt and disintegrating black jeans, red fleece vest sprigged with cat hair, and fingerless yarned gloves that I should have tossed months ago. My feet are clad in square-toed, black leather shoes, which I don’t want to be caught dead in. Grudgingly, I’ve brought along a cell phone on this hike of mine—a safety measure and sign that I’ve let go of my younger habits of disappearing, unplugged, into the wilderness. As a sixtyish mother whose two sons live several hundred miles away, I’ve grown more cautious. Should nature shake loose a branch somewhere high in the trees and spear me, pinning me to the ground, I’ll want to make a call.

  Still, the phone weighs like a stone and I would have left it behind if not for the worried face of my sister in my mind. As I hoof it up a soft bank and rejoin the trail, the phone hums against my thigh.

  “Hi there,” Barbara Ann’s voice sputters and skips across spotty island reception.

  She is in her Saturday mode: taking care of business, likely armed with a neatly handwritten checklist and riding in the passenger seat of the Explorer, her husband driving, zooming from Safeway to Home Depot to Ace Hardware for PVC pipe, chicken feed, and organic fertilizer. Before I can answer, she barrels on.

  “Did you get your key copied yet? I can do that for you. We can swing by now and pick it up.”

  The key she speaks of is the one I have managed to lose again: my front door key. Actually, my entire key ring, gone into the ether somewhere, which means that, once again, I’m down to my last spare key, the one Barb usually keeps on her key ring for emergencies. I’ve borrowed it back to get through the week, and she’s agitated not to have it with her. She no longer wings life the way I do; she’s had enough of life’s surprises and now spends contented hours in her garden, nurturing pole beans and tending to her three chickens. As for me, I’m still taking chances and then throwing fits when it all goes awry.

  “I have it with me. I’ll get it copied,” I say breathily, rounding a bend in the trail and heading uphill. For a moment all I hear is my own puffing and the drum of my high-pressured heartbeat, and wonder if I’ve lost reception. But no, she’s still there, perturbed.

  “Well, I want you to drive straight to me afterward and give me one of those copies,” she says.

  This is my sister’s firstborn bossiness, aroused by my faulty track record, my feisty
life where I misplace keys and spouses at a similar rate. Her insistence that I march directly from Ace Hardware to her front door on the opposite side of the island with a new spare key, no matter what my schedule, chafes against me. Partly because her worry is warranted: I’m liable to misplace this last key at any moment, and then where would I be? Nevertheless, if I were a cat I’d be arching my back against a tree right now and flattening my ears. This is the Combs in me, a peppery independence and urge to say back off, I have a life of my own, a right to order my day in the way my life has never allowed me. And to lose keys, if it comes to that. I’ve earned it, my right to screw up, to drive anywhere, and in any order, on a Saturday.

  But everything stops me. The yawn of our childhood years, the ache of our divorces, our worry as mothers of sons, our melancholy as siblings of a disabled boy, and our shared desire to heal our family, and our families, has rendered us as fragile as we are resilient. What I say to her now in this small standoff is, for my sake, non-compliant, and for both of our sakes, kind.

  Without hesitating, I call forth my brother.

  “Yaas! Okay, Bob!” I bark in into the phone, in Roddy’s voice.

  Laughter bursts from both of us, a bright bubbling sound. It makes me stop and throw my head back on the trail, my laugh echoing through the hemlocks and alders.

  “Okay, Mossie!” Barb shouts back, into my ear. “Have some coffee!”

  I sit down on a freshly ripped stump and laugh all the harder. Inside this moment I don’t care where I am or who happens by or if I lose momentum in life. A mountain biker pops into view, zizzing right for me, but I don’t flinch—I’m laughing too hard. He barely misses my ugly shoes, his knees flexing as he lofts over a massive tree root and lands, niftily, glancing over his shoulder.