by Susan Vaught
Tell them you love them. Tell them it’s okay to go. Tell them you’ll be okay. Forgive them, and let them forgive you.
No.
It wasn’t okay for Dad to go. I wouldn’t be okay. I’d never forgive him. I’d never forgive God or anybody else.
Dad’s chest moved, then stopped, and stopped, and stopped, and moved again. The skin under my fingertips felt warm, but the pulse raced, then slowed, raced, then slowed, then went away and came back.
Tell him you love him.
I leaned forward and kissed Dad’s cheek.
His chest moved up and down, but barely. Up close to his nose and mouth, I heard a faint rattling sound, like Dad had fallen into a well and gone underwater, and he was trying to cough, but he couldn’t.
I kissed his eyelids.
They tasted like Vaseline. He smelled like antiseptic and hospitals.
Death comes too early—or too late. I hated death. It stole things it had no business touching. If death was a person I’d beat it and stab it and smother it and I wouldn’t care if I went to prison for the rest of my life. Sunshine Hospice lied to us. You can never really prepare for death. You can’t be ready for it.
Dad’s mouth came open, and he breathed really fast.
Fish out of water, my brain supplied, straight from the hospice pamphlets I wished I had never read, because if I hadn’t read those words, I wouldn’t have known. I could have pretended for a few minutes or a few seconds that this wasn’t happening, that it wouldn’t happen, that a miracle might be waiting, and my father would sit up and shake himself off and grin at me.
“I’m sorry,” I whispered in his ear, thinking about how I’d ticked him off and let him down these last few weeks, chasing hard after things that happened in the past, and how none of that mattered now, did it? It didn’t matter at all. Nothing mattered.
What was the last thing I said to Dad?
I couldn’t remember.
Did I tell him I loved him?
I started to cry. Mom was close to me, beside me, and she was touching my hair and Dad’s head, and she cried too. Dad breathed fast and stopped. He breathed fast and stopped. The underwater sound got worse. I kissed him again, and his cheek felt cool.
He waved at me from the garden. He said, “I love you, baby girl.”
“I love you,” I told Dad.
“I love you, Marcus,” Mom said. Then she repeated it over and over and over again.
Breathe-stop. Breathe-stop.
“You’re the best, Dad.” I pressed my face into his. “I love you so much. I’m right here with you, and I love you, and I’ll always love you.”
I wanted to believe he heard every word.
Maybe he did.
Maybe my whispers echoed in his heart and his soul, and they went with him to keep forever and forever, because as I said them, as I touched his face with mine and held his hand and cried with my mother, we watched Dad breathe for the very last time.
24
ABSOLUTELY NO GUILT AT ALL
* * *
MOM AND I SAT WITH Dad for another hour until we both finally believed there wouldn’t be any more sounds or movements, that he wouldn’t suddenly sit up and burst out laughing and say he was kidding and cover our faces with kisses and call me baby girl one more time.
The hospice pamphlets didn’t talk about how eerie and wrong it would feel, to see Dad not moving at all, or how alive he’d look, or how we’d finally have to go and leave him alone in that hospital bed, even though it felt like tearing out pieces of our hearts.
Mostly, they leave out how much it hurts. That’s what Dad had said about people who write about wars and civil rights and history—and death, too.
My father didn’t want a funeral, so Mom signed papers for him to be cremated, and the last time I saw Dad, a nurse stood over him in the ICU room, quietly cleaning up tubes and bandages and everything left behind when death comes too soon.
* * *
Mom and I went home, and Ms. Wilson stayed with us, and I went through every basket in the laundry room until I found the still-damp, sweat-stained blue bandana Dad had waved at me from the garden. The one he waved when he said, I love you, baby girl. I put it in the old lockbox in my room, where I kept all my special things, along with Grandma’s journals, and then I slept curled up with Mom. We didn’t talk. It was like we both forgot how.
The next morning, food started to come, so much of it, and every kind, that Ms. Wilson had to stack up foil-wrapped squares and circles three deep on the counters, muttering, “Dear God, Southern people don’t know what else to do for death but cook it away.”
She started a list of who gave us what, and wrote people’s names on the bottom of pans and dishes so we’d know who to give them back to. We had casseroles and soup and turkeys and hams and rolls and mashed potatoes and green beans and brownies and cakes and pies and cookies and enough fried chicken to start a restaurant chain. I didn’t want to eat any of it and neither did Mom. It was Ms. Wilson who forced us into choking down chicken soup and rolls and ice water. The first few bites made me want to gag. After a few minutes, Mom said, “I can’t.”
She pushed back from the table. I followed her upstairs and watched as she went back to bed. Then I went to Grandma’s room and sat next to her, holding her hand and taking her pulse while the Sunshine Hospice nurse bustled around. It was Cindy again, the one with the gigantic thick glasses and short blond hair. Ms. Wilson had called the hospice people and arranged for twenty-four-hour nursing until Mom and I figured out what we were going to do.
A bunch of new pamphlets about Sunshine Hospice’s residential options lay on Grandma’s bedside table. I figured that’s what Mom might decide, to send Grandma to a residential hospice place away from our house until she passed. I didn’t want that. I felt like my father had just vanished, and having Grandma go poof too would be too much.
Does Grandma know Dad died? Does she know he’s gone?
Tears slid down my face. Grandma hadn’t opened her eyes or moved on her own that I knew of, but she might have sensed something, since Dad took care of her every day. She hadn’t been weepy or agitated, and her pulse tacked along at eighty, steady as ever. But I couldn’t say our words. I couldn’t tell her how, sooner or later, we’re all gonna be okay, because I didn’t think we would be.
The doorbell rang, and I jumped.
“Well.” Cindy pushed her glasses back on her nose. “Guess folks are starting to come by to visit, since y’all aren’t having a formal visitation.”
My eyebrows pulled together, and I scrunched into the chair, holding Grandma’s hand a little bit tighter. “What folks?”
“You know—your family, probably.”
“We don’t have family. Mom and me and Dad and Grandma, we’re it. We were it. Now it’s just the three of us, Mom and me and Grandma.”
Don’t cry anymore. Not with Cindy. Don’t.
She gave me a pitying look. “Then your friends and neighbors probably want to check on you and talk for a while.”
I faded in and out for a second, slipping between the ceiling and being in my own self, and wishing I could just cry, hard and loud and forever. “But I don’t want to see anybody. I just want to be left alone.”
“Sorry, Dani,” Cindy said. “Coming by to visit after a few days—and bringing even more food—it’s just what folks do in Mississippi to help after somebody passes away.”
I closed my eyes and the stupidest things to worry about trotted across my eyelids. “We’re out of toilet paper,” I mumbled. “And we don’t have enough ice for visitors because the icemaker’s broken. And paper plates and napkins and plastic cups, we don’t have any of those either, because Dad thought they were bad for the planet.”
“I’ll tell Ms. Wilson,” Cindy said, helpful as ever.
* * *
The next day, Mom stayed in bed, and I went over a to-do list with Ms. Wilson.
Memorial service—Your mom said schedule it later.
&nb
sp; Life insurance forms—Your mom signed them and I mailed them.
Death papers from the military—Signed and delivered.
Toilet paper—Bought, and bought again, along with paper plates and paper towels and Coke and Pepsi and ice and water—oh, and tea. We have to have sweet tea. It’s Oxford, after all.
At some point that evening, I realized Indri was at my house, and had been since—
Since—
Since Dad died—
She brightened up when I looked at her, like she had been waiting for me to notice that she existed again. “Who knew dying was so much work on everybody left behind?” I asked her. “Or that so many people could possibly come to my house? It’s a good thing we got all that food. At least we have something to feed everybody.”
“The fried chicken’s good,” she said.
I made a gagging noise and went to my room, and time trickled away all over again.
* * *
I didn’t see Mac, but I got texts from him.
Thinking about you.
And, Hope you’re okay.
A card signed by him and his parents. “So sorry for your loss.” It had butterflies on the front.
And, Call me if you want to talk.
And, GG’s been trying to drink herself to death. My folks dropped her off at a detox unit yesterday, hope it helps. The press is going nuts.
And, I’m here.
Good for him. He was there. I wasn’t. I spent a lot of time on the ceiling, watching the world go by below me. People from the neighborhood and Mom’s work and Ole Miss and the military base came and went. Dr. Harper often showed up and sat in my grandmother’s room, talking to her about old times. I thought that was sweet, but I didn’t want to see him. I didn’t want to see anything.
When I wasn’t on the ceiling, I was crying, or curled up with Mom, who wasn’t teaching her class anymore, or going to her other job. She said she could decide when to go back to work, or if she ever would, thanks to Dad’s good planning with benefits. That made no sense to me. If Dad was such a good planner, then how did he have a stroke and die?
Some days I felt mad at him, then I felt awful for feeling mad at him, and I wished he had wanted to be buried so I could go visit his grave and yell at him. Dad wouldn’t have a grave. His ashes were in an urn, but Mom said she couldn’t go pick them up yet. I was sort of glad about that, but ticked off too.
Yeah. I was losing my mind.
* * *
Ms. Wilson more or less moved in and slept on the couch. Indri stayed with me in my room, but she didn’t bug me or anything. Mostly, she drew pictures of people’s faces and the steady rain that fell against the windows for almost an entire week, and the cars in our driveway, and Dad’s garden, where everything was starting to grow out of control.
We had like a bazillion tomatoes, so many the vines leaned over the metal stakes Dad had used to tie them up—and there was squash, and beans, and sunflowers, and peppers, and cabbage, and cucumbers, and tons of other stuff I couldn’t even name. Sometimes I’d sit on the bench where I used to watch Dad work in the dirt, and play songs on his iPad, and stare at it all, and feel overwhelmed and guilty.
That jungle out there, it was Dad’s garden. Mom and I should do something. Only, Mom didn’t seem to be up for much, other than sleeping and eating a tiny bit of whatever Ms. Wilson slid in front of her.
* * *
A couple of weeks after my father died, Ms. Wilson was cleaning the kitchen while Indri and I sat at the table.
“Food’s finally slowing down a bit,” Ms. Wilson said. “But don’t worry. I won’t let you and your mother starve between now and when she feels like cooking again.”
“That may be never,” I said, and Indri gave me a sad look.
I was picking at a piece of fried chicken, and it didn’t taste totally awful, even if it was battered with white flour instead of the unbleached whole wheat stuff Dad used when he cooked. My eyes moved to the clock, and I saw it was close to five in the afternoon.
How long had it been since Grandma had a proper meal, with family, like she was used to? Some nurses probably fed her, but she didn’t know them. That wasn’t right.
I pushed back from the table and stood, feeling a little less on-the-ceiling than I had in a while.
“Ms. Wilson, could you find the blender? I want to make my grandmother’s dinner and go feed her. And I need Dad’s iPad.” I smacked my hand against my forehead. “Where did I leave that iPad?”
Indri and her mother gaped at me for a second, then got moving, and about an hour later, we had the folding table set up in my grandmother’s room, and Sweet Honey in the Rock’s “I Remember, I Believe” playing on the iPad, and I was feeding Grandma bites of fried chicken pudding.
“Do you want help?” Indri asked me.
“Nah, I got it,” I told her. She was sitting at the table with Ms. Wilson, but Mom’s chair was empty. We had given the hospice nurse a break, but Dr. Harper was with us, over at the desk against the wall, scribbling away on some paper he was writing.
“It’s a good thing, what you’re doing,” he said without looking up from his work. “Most people these days don’t see to family like we used to in our society.”
I couldn’t explain why, but feeding my grandmother blended-up green beans and mashed potatoes and fried chicken and brownies felt more important than anything else in the world right at that moment. I thought about ghosts and ghost stories—not the scary kind, but the just-a-little-bit- spooky-remembering kind. If I wrote a ghost story about my father, his worrying about Grandma eating enough would be a part of it.
Marcus Beans cared for his mother while she was dying. He fed her real food with a spoon, every day and every night.
A few seconds later, I added, Marcus Beans served his country in three wars. Seeing all that death broke his heart, but it never broke his spirit.
Would I want my father to be a ghost? I gave Grandma a bite of bean pudding, and she mouthed it without opening her eyes. No, probably not in a lingering, haunting, unfinished-business way. I wouldn’t want Dad to be restless. But I wouldn’t mind a presence. A sense of him. One of those “shivers” they talked about in books and television shows and movies about ghosts. Feeding Grandma—it was the closest I had come to feeling anything like that—or feeling anything much at all other than sadness—since Dad died.
The doorbell rang, and everybody in the room sighed. “I’ll get it,” Ms. Wilson said, and she got up and headed downstairs. She was gone a long time, and when the door opened again, it was Mom who walked in. She looked all rumpled in her shorts and T-shirt, with big, dark circles under her eyes, but at least her eyes were open.
Dr. Harper stood up and greeted her with a handshake.
Ms. Wilson came next, followed by Indri, then Mac and Ms. Manchester. She had her dark hair pulled back, and she was wearing a pressed white shirt and jeans with lace on the pockets. It surprised me to see her, but the person who came in last made me put down the spoon and turn away from Grandma completely.
Avadelle Richardson was in my house, in my grandmother’s room.
She looked . . . different, somehow, in overalls and a pressed white shirt a lot like the one Ms. Manchester was wearing. She wasn’t wearing a fedora or using a cane, and her hair had been trimmed and combed into a strange white cap on her head.
Her cloudy eyes met mine—only they were less cloudy, and she nodded at me and didn’t frown.
Mom came over to the table and sat at the place we had saved for her. Ms. Wilson and Dr. Harper stayed back, and Indri got up from her spot and went to stand with her mother. Ms. Manchester came to the table and pulled out a chair for Avadelle, who sat down beside me.
As Ms. Richardson went to my other side and sat in that chair, Avadelle studied my grandmother, her face showing nothing but concern and sadness. She reached out with trembling fingers and brushed my grandmother’s cheek.
“Ruth,” she whispered.
Nothing.
> Avadelle leaned her face close to Grandma’s. “Come on, Ruth. Here I am. Go ahead and pop me one. I know you want to.”
And I swear, my grandmother smiled.
Mom looked around the room, at all of us, at Grandma, and then at Avadelle again. Then she focused back on me. “This whole secret thing,” she said. “You found out what caused the Magnolia Feud, didn’t you, Dani?”
All eyes in the room turned to me.
That was a lot of eyes.
For a weird second, I felt like the whole room and all of Oxford and half the literary world was holding its breath. Avadelle looked uncomfortable, but she gave me a quick nod. Permission. Forgiveness. Whatever.
I glanced from her to Grandma, then at Dr. Harper, his pen hovering above the page where he’d been scribbling. My eyes shifted back to Grandma again.
She was smiling.
“No,” I said, with absolutely no guilt at all.
Before anybody could ask anything else, I turned and faced Avadelle. “I know you weren’t raised in the country, but do you know anything about organic gardening?”
25
SOONER OR LATER
* * *
Excerpt from Ghostology, by Dani Beans, page 1
Once upon a time, my grandmother learned and taught and wrote, and my father came home from all of his wars and showed me that he loved me just about every day. Both of them survived bad things I’ve never had to face because they helped to make my world better.