Maine

by J. Courtney Sullivan

  He grunted. “No thank you. I plan to start smoking cigars and eating raw hamburger rolled in salt like my mother used to. Steak tartare, that’s called. I’ll pass on the chanting and all that, kiddo.”

  She laughed, in spite of the situation. She had given him an Irish chant CD a few years back, and he had mocked it mercilessly every chance he had gotten since.

  “Not chanting,” she said. “There’s real science behind it. I’ll do some reading. At the very least, it might make you feel more comfortable.”

  Then she did start to cry, and the tears were fat and fast.

  He hugged her close. “I’m going to tell your brother and sister now.”

  She nodded.

  “There’s one last thing,” he said. “Kathleen, your mother has been through hell in her life, in all sorts of ways. I only ever wanted to make that better for her, not add to it. I’m worried about how she’ll fare on her own. You, too, sweetheart. In my fantasy I picture the two of you helping each other through. That’s how I’d like it, anyway.”

  It was typical of her father to be worried about Alice, even as he stood before Kathleen to say he was dying. She had a vision of the future without him in it and felt like she needed to sit down.

  For as long as Kathleen could remember, he had wanted her to understand Alice. He had confided in Kathleen about the aunt she never knew who died young in a fire, a fact that Alice always blamed herself for. He had been angry when, in the throes of a teenage brawl with Alice, Kathleen had brought it up just to hurt her mother. She had felt terrible for doing it—still did, even all these years later. But she had never told anyone the story, not even Maggie or Clare.

  “I’ll look after her,” Kathleen said weakly. “Even though all we have in common is loving you and being bad drunks.”

  He smiled, shook his head. “You’ll both be surprised.”

  That scared her. Already she had seen too much of Alice in herself—how small she felt on occasion; the way she was quick to judge or to argue or to bully. (How many times had Kathleen pushed Ann Marie to do her bidding? And she was proud of it, which was even worse.) There were certain words she was incapable of uttering without sounding like her mother. Even the earthy, almost sour smell of her skin when she woke each morning was like Alice’s, no matter what soap or lotion Kathleen applied before bed. And the drinking. If they had more than that in common, she would rather not find out.

  After he told her the news, Kathleen stayed up late every night, doing research. None of it made sense to her. When she read “Your pancreas is about six inches long and looks like a pear lying on its side,” she was filled with rage. This little nothing, this sideways pear, would be enough to kill her father, who was everything? It seemed impossible.

  Her dining room table, already piled high with magazines and newspapers and stray socks and Lean Cuisine trays, was now covered in computer printouts about cancer and a dozen library books on natural remedies.

  Over the phone, Kathleen cried to Maggie, who was newly in New York and constantly worried that she ought to come home. Kathleen told her to stay put, though she secretly wished Maggie would return, and many weekends she did, always leaving the overage art dealer she was dating behind, thank the universe.

  Kathleen wanted a drink more than she ever had in her life. She wondered if Alice felt this way too. She could remember the way one glass of wine would dull the edges, how two would make her cheeks grow warm, her thoughts turn rosier, more hopeful. But she also knew she was incapable of drinking just one or two glasses of wine, even though she was occasionally capable of convincing herself otherwise.

  She began going to AA meetings twice a day.

  Kathleen brought her father teas and herbs that she bought from a well-respected healer in Chinatown. She put a jar of polished runes on his nightstand—smooth green stones that she told him were for decoration, though in truth she had bought them because it was once believed that they could bring the dead back to life. She lit chakra candles at his bedside that were said to unblock points of stress in the body and allow for white blood cells to thrive. Every morning, as usual, she meditated for two solid hours, but now rather than concentrating on herself, she focused on her father’s insides, communing with the cancer, willing it to shrink and vanish.

  Her family, including Daniel, made fun of her, and she laughed, too, as if to say, I know it’s goofy, but indulge me. She realized it was probably bullshit, but why not try? Sometimes she even believed that maybe it would work.

  In early October, Alice showed up at Kathleen’s house, a foil-wrapped package in her hands.

  “What’s that?” Kathleen asked, meeting her at the door, annoyed that Alice hadn’t thought to call ahead. She was still in her pajamas and had been out in the back garden in the middle of her morning meditation.

  “A coffee cake I got you at the Fruit Basket. Very moist. Delicious.”

  “A coffee cake you got me, or a coffee cake you and Daddy ate half of before you decided to bring it over here?”

  “You’ve always liked cinnamon swirl.”

  “You didn’t answer the question.”

  “You don’t want it, fine. Truth is, you’re putting on the pounds lately. Understandable given what’s happened, but still, you have to watch yourself.”

  Kathleen took in a deep breath. She had only just begun trying to practice patience with her mother, and already she was failing.

  They went into the kitchen and sat down. Immediately, Kathleen saw the room through Alice’s eyes. She had never been particularly tidy, but since her father got sick she had gotten worse. There were dishes stacked precariously a foot above the rim of the sink. She hadn’t taken the trash out in a week, and the plastic bin was overflowing. When she realized that one of the dogs had peed on the linoleum floor earlier that morning, Kathleen had covered the yellow puddle with a paper towel, planning to deal with it after she’d had her coffee.

  “Can I get you anything, Mom?” she asked.

  “No, I’ll only stay a minute. Your father needs me there.”

  “I’ll be close behind you then,” Kathleen said. “I was planning to come over soon.”

  Alice’s eyes darted dramatically from wall to wall. Kathleen felt her insides tense up.

  “This place is a disaster area,” Alice blurted after a moment. “How do you stand it?”

  “I manage,” Kathleen said.

  “You let people come in and see it this way?”

  “Well, most people wait for an invitation rather than barging in with gently used coffee cake.”

  “Excuse me for not being Emily Post. My husband has cancer.”

  “Oh, really? I hadn’t heard.”

  Alice sighed and straightened her posture and smiled, as if to say that she was gathering up the sort of strength one needs to talk to a lunatic.

  “Actually, that’s why I’m here.”

  “Okay,” Kathleen said. “What is it?”

  “Well, as you know, your father is being very stubborn about the radiation. I’ve been thinking about it a lot, and I am convinced that you are the only one who can talk him into it.”

  Kathleen smiled. “That’s the same thing I thought about you, before I realized he was right.”

  She felt a certain tenderness for Alice then, and put her hand atop her mother’s.

  But Alice pulled away. “What makes you say that?”

  “His cancer is too far gone, Mom. You know that. All that stuff would just make him miserable.”

  “So he thinks,” Alice said. “But there’s always something they can do. They tell him it’s too far gone, but I see him every day and he’s okay. He’s still himself, Kathleen. I know it’s not too late. I am begging you: convince him to do the radiation. If it doesn’t work, what’s the harm? At least we’ll know he tried everything.”

  “I can’t,” Kathleen said. “I want to respect his wishes. Besides, I don’t even think Dr. Callo would do it. All we can do now is hope for the best and try to
make Dad happy.”

  She saw from the look in her mother’s eyes that Alice had turned a corner, so quickly that Kathleen wasn’t even sure of the exact moment it had happened.

  Alice got to her feet. “So you’re telling me I’m supposed to sit here and watch him die? And never set foot in a goddamn hospital room? Just lie next to him in bed and say, ‘Good night, darling. I hope you won’t be dead when I wake up.’ ”

  “I know it’s hard,” Kathleen said.

  “This is you—your doing,” Alice said hotly. “Your ridiculous herbs and all that. You’ve convinced him it’s all he needs.”

  “That’s not true!” Kathleen said, growing angry. “You’re just looking for someone to blame, but this is no one’s fault. And I won’t have this energy thrown at me when we should all be focused on getting him stronger.”

  “Energy! Focus! The man needs drugs, Kathleen. He needs a doctor. If you don’t at least try to talk to him about treatments, I’ll never forgive you.”

  Kathleen shrugged her shoulders, feigning indifference. It was typical Alice insanity, which her mother would no doubt forget by tomorrow.

  But after Alice walked out, Kathleen cried for a long, long time.

  When she drove over to her parents’ house later that afternoon and entered their bedroom, her father was asleep. Everything she’d brought over in the previous weeks—the runes and the vitamins and the candles and the tea—was gone.

  He began to deteriorate fast. His skin turned a sickly yellow, and eventually so did the whites in his blue eyes. He was queasy almost all the time, and couldn’t keep down a bite of food. He shriveled as they watched, helpless. Daniel had always been a cheerful man, but now he grew melancholy for the first time Kathleen could remember. Everyone wanted to see him laughing again, maybe more for their own sanity than for him. To see him somber was nauseatingly odd, like a bone that’s broken, poking through skin.

  They all gathered around him and did what they could. They watched an obscene amount of the Three Stooges and Jackie Gleason on video. Her nephew Ryan sang Daniel’s favorite old Dean Martin songs. Maggie mailed books of Irish riddles and jokes. Ann Marie made more soup than the average person consumes in a lifetime, and she was tender with Alice—bringing her gifts and taking her out to lunch every once in a while.

  He was never alone. They gathered at Alice and Daniel’s house, the house they had all grown up in, for dinner five or six nights a week. They sat around his bed. They looked through old photos from the cottage in Maine—one night, he said plaintively, “I’ll never see it again”—and laughed at all his jokes. They let him talk on and on as he told one of his meandering stories, when they would normally have said, “Dad, would you wrap it up? We don’t have all day.”

  Kathleen wanted to soak up every second with him. Sometimes she wished the rest of them would go away. She thought that this was the worst part of grieving—the limbo phase when the person you love most is still there in front of you, but you know he won’t be for long.

  By the end, he was down to ninety-seven pounds.

  He lived through Thanksgiving and Christmas, and then it became clear that there wasn’t much time left. Just after the first of the year, as Kathleen looked out her kitchen window to see a light snow falling on the driveway, her phone rang. He was gone.

  Patrick and Ann Marie hopped to it as usual, making all the arrangements. She took a rattled Alice to pick out a casket and called the caterers. He reached out to the lawyer to deal with the will.

  He reached out to the lawyer the day their father died. Kathleen still thought of this with disgust: What kind of person?

  Patrick was the one who called her with the news that Daniel had left almost everything—other than the house and the property in Maine and his pension and some savings for Alice—to her.

  “He had three hundred thousand dollars, and he’s giving it all to you,” Pat said. “Clare and Joe get the Caddy. I get a watch of Grandpa’s and Dad’s two-year-old Pings.”

  “Pings?”

  “Golf clubs. It’s a lot of money, Kath. You and Dad, up to your old tricks right till the end,” he said, as if they had been in cahoots. In truth, her father had never mentioned money, and she had never thought to ask.

  Three hundred thousand dollars was five years’ salary for Kathleen—more than enough to pay off her children’s college tuition. But if her brother had thought she would take any joy in this, he was wrong. He and his wife had always cared so much about material possessions. Kathleen only wanted her father back.

  After he died, she took a week off from work. She spent five days in bed, getting up only to pee and drink the occasional glass of water. She didn’t check the mail or turn on the television or eat. She didn’t want to talk to anyone, besides Maggie, who curled up in bed beside her, running a hand over her hair. They didn’t say a word. Kathleen thanked the universe for her daughter, her creation, the only one in this damn family who understood her at all.

  At the wake, Ann Marie wept hysterically, which made Kathleen insane.

  “I want to slap her,” she whispered to Maggie.

  “Mom—” Maggie responded warningly, always the more grown-up of the two of them. But a moment later Ann Marie’s sobs reached a new level, and even Maggie raised an eyebrow. She leaned close, putting her lips up against Kathleen’s ear: “Do you think she’s crying about Grandpa, or the Pings?”

  A hundred people came to the funeral the next day, even though there was a foot of snow on the ground, and more was falling. Kathleen could hardly manage to change into her navy blue dress, the one Maggie had picked because it was the only thing she had that was close enough to black.

  After the Mass, they went to Pat and Ann Marie’s, the house clogged full of people, a stupid tradition. Kathleen didn’t feel like talking to anyone. She hardly recognized most of them. They ate ham sandwiches and lasagna off plastic plates, standing up in the kitchen. Each stranger in their turn approached her and awkwardly said how sorry they were, what a good man he was.

  They gathered in groups and drank and drank and drank, and laughed uproariously. Why did the Irish always insist on turning a funeral into a frat party? A while passed and she wondered how long she had to stay. She knew from experience that it would go on all night.

  Kathleen had counseled teenagers through the deaths of their parents. Her life was blessed, relative to so many others. Yet in this moment, she did not care. She was well aware that she was acting like a child, but what did it matter? Her father was gone.

  When Ann Marie put out dessert and coffee, Kathleen took an éclair and sat on the couch in the den with Ryan and some younger kids she didn’t know, watching cartoons, pretending like she was monitoring the children’s behavior, though in truth, if they had set her hair on fire she might not have noticed.

  She watched the credits roll on an episode of something called Ren & Stimpy.

  “Do you like SpongeBob?” Ryan was asking the other kids sweetly. “He’s up next.”

  “Yes!” they shouted.

  A little boy turned to Kathleen with a huge grin. “He lives in a pineapple under the sea,” he said. At least that’s what she thought he said.

  “Oh my,” she replied.

  Kathleen envied them—so many years away from actually feeling the weight of anyone’s death. They were here because someone had dragged them, unsure and unconcerned about whether this was a First Communion or a funeral or some old person’s retirement party.

  Through the doorway that led to the dining room, she saw Alice standing by the makeshift bar, pouring a glass of red wine, filling the glass to its brim. A moment later, she put it to her lips and swallowed nearly half.

  Kathleen jumped a bit in her seat. She had not seen her mother drink since she was a child, and no sight could have surprised her more.

  She got to her feet and walked out into the hall, looking one way and then the other, for Maggie or Clare. She didn’t see either of them. She walked toward Alice.
r />   “Mom? What are you doing?”

  “I’m having a drink, what does it look like?”

  She was drunk. Her lips and teeth were tinged dark blue. How much had she had? Kathleen had the urge to run and get her father.

  “Maybe we should get you to bed,” she said.

  “To bed? It’s six o’clock. I’m not some feeble old woman, Kathleen.”

  A few people gathered around the table glanced over at them now.

  Kathleen said, in a hushed voice, “I didn’t mean that, I’m—”

  “What? You killed him, and now you want me dead, too, is that it?”

  Kathleen took a step back.

  “Not content to have just most of our money, you want it all,” Alice said, and it took everything in Kathleen not to hit her.

  Instead she turned around and made her way through the crowd until she spotted Maggie and Christopher, and then she pulled them by the backs of their shirts as if they were children who had run into traffic. She yanked them toward the door and out to the car, and only then did she allow herself to speak.

  “I will never talk to that woman again,” she said.

  “What did the bitch do now?” Christopher said.

  Under other circumstances she might have worried about his language, even scolded him, but Kathleen was strangely grateful.

  The next day, Alice called and left messages in an almost gossipy tone, as if the funeral had been the wedding of a distant cousin: “Call me back so we can discuss Mary Clancy’s obvious face-lift,” she said, and “I thought Ann Marie’s deviled eggs tasted almost spoiled, didn’t you?” That comment made it clear that she knew she had done wrong, but she made no mention of what she had said.

  Kathleen went ten months without speaking to her, until they came to a truce brought on by the fact that, like it or not, they had to sit around Ann Marie’s Thanksgiving table with the others.

  But the resentment lingered on, even now.

  A few months after the scene at her father’s funeral, Kathleen met Arlo. The farm in California was his lifelong dream, and within weeks of meeting each other they were talking about it in earnest. By then, she had already vaguely decided that it was time to leave Massachusetts, where all the ghosts of her life remained. Maggie was settled in New York, and Chris was off at Trinity. There was nothing tying her to Boston anymore. The Kellehers thought she was nuts—“using Dad’s money to fund a worm poop farm” sounded like the perfect punch line to one of their Kathleen jokes. What stupid decision will she make next?