Happy Family

by Tracy Barone

  Dr. Marlene Vega leans forward in her chair. “Why did you come here today, Cheri?”

  “Honestly, I need more Ativan.”

  “I can give you a script but that’s not going to resolve anything, and I think you know that. Underneath the anxiety is loss. You’ve got to grieve; if you don’t, it will keep showing up in other ways. There are no shortcuts. The only way to really address what’s going on with you is to acknowledge it and talk about it.”

  Cheri hesitates, contemplating what lurks behind and beneath her usually impenetrable facade. Giving it form makes it more powerful. “I have all of this knowledge,” she finally begins. “You want to know about ancient funeral rites—in any culture—I’m all over that. I can talk about death mythically, religiously, contextually. But when it comes down to dealing with it in a real person—my husband—I don’t know where to begin.”

  “Your father died unexpectedly. How did you deal with his death?”

  “On a literal level? Great. I identified the body, made the funeral arrangements, coordinated with the executor of his will. My mother was a wreck so I handled everything. Crisis brings out the best in me. What I couldn’t figure out was what to do about his other family. I spent years keeping my mouth shut to protect Cici; I didn’t want it all to blow up now. How would they even know he died?”

  “You didn’t tell me the details, only that your parents were happy together at the end. Do you think Sol ended it with the other woman?”

  “I didn’t know. How would I? After I outed Sol I wanted nothing to do with him or my parents’ dysfunction. All I knew was that the last three years of their marriage was a glorious revival. Sol stayed home with Cici and served the Great Unwashed by volunteering at a walk-in clinic. I assumed he’d broken things off with Catherine. That’s her name: Catherine Webster. I looked up the title of the house in Rye after Sol died—it was under her name. I thought about writing to her and her son over the years but I never did. Now, I had a real reason to contact them. I even paid to get their e-mail address; I thought it would be less invasive than a phone call. But what could I say? ‘Hi, there, I’m your half sibling. I’m sorry to tell you but Sol Matzner just dropped dead carrying a turkey across Eighty-first Street.’ Maybe they didn’t even know him as Sol Matzner. These are the things you have to think about with someone who led a double life.”

  “So you didn’t contact them.”

  Cheri flashes on the image of the little boy in his snowsuit reaching his arms up to Sol. “I cut out the New York Times obituary, put it in an envelope, but at the last minute, I didn’t send it. Maybe if I had been a better person I would have, but I didn’t think it was my burden to bear. I looked for them at the funeral. The boy would have been in college. Ironically, he’d have been twenty—the same age I was when I saw Sol shoveling snow that day. I knew I’d recognize him. They didn’t come. That’s when I felt this deep pit of…I don’t know, longing. I’d never wanted to know them,” Cheri says, “but suddenly I wished I did.”

  Dr. Vega gives a consoling nod. “You may have been an adult when you discovered Sol’s secret but you were also his child. All children long for a sense of family. However fractured yours was, these people were connected to you. They were the other piece of the puzzle.”

  “I was really worried that Sol might have mentioned the other family in his will. I wouldn’t have cared about the money, but my mother still didn’t know anything about them—she’s always lived in Ciciworld. She had her fantasy about our family; it was all she had. I wanted to protect her.”

  “And were they in the will?”

  “No,” Cheri says, remembering her meeting with Sol’s attorney, how he chose his words with the discretion of a man used to carrying other men’s secrets. “But he took care of them financially, in a separate arrangement, neat and clean so Cici would never find out. But Sol’s lawyer clearly knew that I knew about the other family because he went out of his way to tell me that Sol had ended his ‘other relationship’ but had insisted on honoring his obligations. It’s not like I wanted to know the details, but I was glad that he’d provided for his child. It wasn’t that poor kid’s fault that he was born to Sol any more than it was mine that Sol adopted me.”

  “So Sol provided for his biological son and he didn’t provide for you? Only for Cici?”

  “No, actually. His will was extremely complicated, but bottom line: Cici got all of his assets—the house, the apartments, the jewelry—but he left me his patents in a separate trust.”

  “That’s interesting,” Dr. Vega says noncommittally, “let’s get back to that in a minute. You said you’d had a moment of wanting to know Sol’s other family. Have you thought about contacting his son? Do you know his name?”

  “Thinking about him is like thinking about my biological parents. If I contacted him, then what? I’m not going to get to know him as a sibling. What’s the point? I can assure you that his version of Sol—the one I saw shoveling snow that day—would be very different from the version I grew up with. He’d say how loving and supportive a father he was, and I’d be like, Well, not really, kid. And what would that say about me? Plus, he won’t know why Sol led a double life any more than I do. Truth is, we see our parents only as our parents—that one particular role—and whatever damage they do in that capacity is permanent.”

  “That may be true, but you’re also suggesting that Sol’s biological son would see his father in a purely positive light, as opposed to what you experienced. And that this would say something about you. What would it say?”

  There is a long pause. Cheri looks down and takes a deep breath.

  “That I wasn’t good enough,” Cheri says quietly.

  “And this other child was?”

  “That’s what I felt when I found out about him. Jonathan.” She rarely even thinks of her half brother by name. Nor does she wonder where he lives or if he’s married or whether he has a family of his own. These things would all make him more real.

  “But you also said that Sol left you his life’s work, his proudest accomplishments. Not just his money, but his patents.”

  “His lawyer couldn’t believe I wasn’t thrilled. I’d never have to work again,” Cheri says. “But it felt like a payoff for my silence.”

  “Maybe it was Sol’s way of making amends.”

  “I don’t think so. I think he knew it would piss me off.”

  Dr. Vega raises an eyebrow. “You were talking about how you’d felt as a child. It was very vulnerable. Then you went right to anger about the will. Anger’s a lot easier for you, but underneath the anger there’s a lot of sadness, the little girl in you who doesn’t feel worthy of her father’s love. Growing up, you didn’t feel safe. You haven’t known many safe places where you can be vulnerable, have you?”

  There is another long pause. “No, I guess I haven’t,” Cheri says.

  “Dealing with Michael’s cancer puts you in a vulnerable place. You’re safe here to be in that place.”

  “What if I don’t want to be vulnerable,” Cheri says, crossing her arms over her chest, her voice returning to its usual volume. “I feel like a child having a tantrum, but I don’t want to deal with this shit. I. Don’t.”

  “Our work is to forgive ourselves first. For all the anger, pain, and disappointment we lug around every day. For not doing enough or being enough. Then forgive others: Michael, Sol, Cici. You know the list. And take responsibility. We create our own reality with our choices in relationships, what we say about ourselves to ourselves.”

  “I can take responsibility for choosing Michael, but not for Sol. I didn’t have a choice there.”

  “It has no bearing from a psychological standpoint, but you probably know there’s a school of Buddhist thought that says we choose our parents before birth.”

  “It would be very screwed up of me to choose birth parents who gave me up, and then Sol and Cici—a real glutton for punishment,” Cheri says with a smirk.

  “It could also be a per
fect lens through which to view the lessons you’ve learned, and are learning. We can look at everything we go through without judging it as good or bad but as an opportunity for growth. Our parents all leave us in the end; we start separating from them from the moment we’re born. Forgiveness won’t change the past, but it can change the future.”

  “‘It is in pardoning that we are pardoned,’” Cheri says. “If only it was as easy as you and Saint Francis make it sound.”

  While Michael’s engaged with Bertrand and his edits during the day, Cheri retreats into the solitude of her den, noodling with Peter’s photocopies. Translating is an occult connection between worlds, a crossed wire that allows her to communicate with a scribe in old Babylonia, a man who, thousands of years ago, pressed his stylus into wet clay. What was he saying? She seems to have found a fragment of a letter that pertains to a funeral in the ancient city of Hebron. Genesis has Abraham born in the Mesopotamian city of Ur and being buried in Hebron. Since the discovery of these tablets eleven years ago, rumors swirled in archaeology circles that they could prove the existence of the biblical patriarch Abraham. The fragment mentions a funeral procession accorded to a man of great stature and respect with his two sons in attendance, though there are no name identifiers. Could this be the kind of evidence that fueled those rumors? The kind of once-in-a-lifetime find every scholar dreams of running across. Of course, it’s all wild speculation and conjecture without the pieces of the Tell Muqayyar tablets in Baghdad.

  Are you Isaac or Ishmael? It occurs to her that in all her years of posing that question to her students, she’d never applied it to herself. Cheri has always identified with Abraham’s outcast son, Ishmael. But her conversation with Dr. Vega about Sol’s will has made her rethink her family mythos. She heeded her call to become a cop. Like Ishmael, she couldn’t have gone farther afield from her father’s kingdom. She would have cast Jonathan as Isaac. She suspected he’d be a doctor, a chip-off-the-old-Sol block in his tennis whites. The Chosen Son. Biological progeny trumps adopted misfit. But then why did Sol leave her his patents? Was it atonement? She remembers their lunches when she was in college, how she’d glimpsed who Sol was before he was her father. Sol had also been an Ishmael. He heeded the call to marry Cici and was disinherited, exiled from his tribe. Did he leave her his patents so as not to do to her what his parents had done to him?

  It’s the afternoon and she hasn’t even had breakfast. Is this the soiled linen of working at home? Too much time to think, wearing the same clothes for days, forgetting to do up her belt after going to the bathroom and then thinking, Why bother? Soon she’ll be that woman at the post office dressed in black jeans and a work shirt, middle-aged with no husband or kids, just parcels to post. She looks out the window and is startled to see Michael at the far end of the lawn. It is sunny but cold, and he’s wearing sweats and a wool cap. His arms extend above his head, palms facing each other, fingertips reaching toward the sky. He goes through a series of poses: bending over in a swimmer’s stance, leaning on one leg, standing with his hands folded as if in prayer. She’s seen him do yoga hundreds of times, has come to think of it as yet another practice that leads to avoidance rather than integration. Yet here he is, alone on a cold winter’s day, saluting the sun. He stands in this moment, on this day, in gratitude, humility, in spite of. We are capable of such great acts. We rise up even when our legs are almost too weak to hold us. We claw our way out of darkness and isolation with just the memory of light to guide us. We find ways to practice our faith even when we’re hunted because of it. We are all so vulnerable, so close to nothingness, and yet we survive.

  It fills her with a reverence for the terrible and beautiful experience of being alive. She closes her eyes and thinks she can see the daisy chain of all beings, trees and wind and sea, sunlight and the reflected light of stars that burned out long ago. She imagines lines like arteries and veins, the spinning helix of DNA forming an infinite superhighway of energy running through her hands and into Michael’s and up beyond space. Michael loses his balance and folds himself into the child’s pose. Cheri is ashamed of how quickly she goes to judgment. She’s ashamed of all the conceptions—right and wrong—she’s ever had about this perfectly familiar and yet still unknown man. Oh, Michael, she thinks, I’m sorry.

  Michael

  The thesis of The Palmist was turning out to be true. Nobody was able to tell Michael when he was going to die. He had proven his doctors wrong and outlived their prediction by three months without chemo or radiation. Whether this was due to the Gonzalez regimen, an act of sheer will, or a fluke of nature was anyone’s guess. But it was getting harder and harder to manage his pain—the latest episode landed him in the ICU. A foul hospital patient, Michael was sullen and snapped at the staff. He turned his frustration on Cheri, yelling, “Just get me the fuck out of here.” The doctors made it very clear that Michael had only two options: he could stay in the ICU with IV nutrition or go home with hospice care. Michael had already made his medical directives clear and given Cheri power of attorney. As much as it frightened Cheri to leave the safety net of the hospital, she knew she had no choice but to get him the fuck out of there.

  Cheri was ill-equipped to be a nurse. As a child she’d fantasized about being a ninja warrior and leading underground revolutions against Orwellian forces. She was physically fearless, but being a nurse required facing very different enemies, the kind Cheri’s time as a cop didn’t prepare her for. Some people were natural caretakers, fluffing a pillow without disturbing the sick person, never saying things like, “Well, if I’m doing everything wrong, why don’t you get someone else to wipe your ass?” But she was flummoxed by Michael’s impatience and demands, all of which made her feel incompetent. In the hospital she was always in the way of someone else trying to do his job. She dropped ice chips on Michael’s chest and had missed the lesson on how to properly apply a cool compress to the forehead. She wouldn’t want somebody as clumsy and clueless taking care of her. So when the option of having a full-time nurse was raised by the hospice administrator “for an extra fee, of course,” she said, “Yes, whatever it costs.” Michael was right; perhaps she would have been a shitty mother. But at least she could make sure Michael had everything he needed to be comfortable. He had to know she was dipping into her trust fund for all his medical expenses, but he never asked where the money was coming from. Michael’s silence on the subject was an undeniable sign of just how bad things were getting.

  The nurse, Robyn, came with an electric hospital bed, an emergency kit, and a Japanese husband who was a paramedic and a former chef who worked alongside Robyn in his off-hours. Robyn told Cheri, “I’ve got five minutes to win your trust. That’s an established fact in my line of work. I am here to make Michael comfortable and help him transition with dignity and peace. That means keeping him out of pain and managing his symptoms.” She pointed to a small silver cylinder with a black button on top—it looked like the clicker Cheri used to use to move through slides while lecturing at the university. “This pump will deliver medication at higher doses than they give at the hospital; Michael will control how much morphine he gets and when. Now I want to set things up, so show me whatever room he’s most comfortable in and we’ll get started.”

  In no time, Michael was set up in his former office, which Cheri now dubbed HMS Sickbay. Cheri knew Michael would want to spend his last days in the place where he was the most creative, surrounded by his movie posters, The Palmist art, Indian rugs, Sit with your fear and find your love notecard, guitar, and photographs from various decades, including several of Michael and Cheri. With Robyn around and his finger on the morphine joystick, he and Cheri finally slept through the night. Robyn was Mary Poppins and Nurse Jane Fuzzy Wuzzy rolled into one six-foot-tall dreadlocked black woman. She briefed Cheri on the IV lines and the emergency kit filled with drugs to combat nausea, anxiety, fever, and pain, and told her what to expect in Michael’s last days. Cheri was well aware that in other centuries people had rituals a
nd customs for dying, written guides to ars moriendi. The Sumerians had a checklist of things to do before burying their family members underneath their homes; they had incantations to sing, grave goods and offerings to gather, rituals to perform. All Cheri had to rely on was A Caregiver’s Guide to the Dying Process. She relished the irony that you would never be able to recall the two largest events of your life: your own birth and death. The descriptions of the most elemental transitions of existence were lost between worlds. There were near-death experiences of going into the light, but those sounded too much like alien abductions for Cheri’s taste.

  The house was now ensconced in the dome of illness; visitors—the few Michael wanted to see—seemed to automatically lower their voices. Cheri’s world revolved around Michael’s bodily minutiae while the rest of the world spun on and had larger life-and-death issues. The war in Iraq was days away.

  Cheri has stopped waiting to hear from Samuelson about the review board’s “findings”; their endless deliberations have dragged on week after week. She is in the kitchen making herself and Robyn coffee when her cell buzzes. “I only have a moment. But I wanted to be the first to tell you.” Samuelson’s voice is laced with self-congratulation and muffled by sounds from an airport. “The review board did not find sufficient merit for discrimination. Your faculty suspension is relieved.” Cheri can barely process the news before Samuelson goes on. “However…” He pauses, and Cheri waits for the other shoe to drop. “You will be required to restructure your curricula and have it approved by the committee before resuming your teaching duties. We obviously don’t want further complaints of this nature. A detailed report is forthcoming.” As he is rushing off the phone, Cheri just manages to ask about what’s been done to protect the museum in Baghdad. “We have warned the DOD. I have told them in no uncertain terms that the museum is the number-one site they must protect. They have assured us that troops will be placed throughout the city as soon as it’s been secured. The museum is closed so we aren’t likely to get further communication for a while. I will keep you informed.”