by Katie Arnold
We set out at an easy tempo along the willowy banks of the Rio Grande. I’d slung my voice recorder around my neck and turned it on. His voice was even, never out of breath, despite the mile-high altitude. He told me about his boozy, life-changing epiphany and his rabid work ethic. Most days, he said, he ran thirty miles before dawn; on his hundred-mile overnight epics, he’d run through the drive-through at Taco Bell or order pizza to be delivered on a street corner and gobble the whole thing while he ran. At his marketing job, he cranked out sets of push-ups and sit-ups between conference calls. He’d written Ultramarathon Man almost entirely while running, dictating chapters into his recorder.
Dean had been on the road for nearly a month, but his enthusiasm pulsed off him in waves. Miles passed as we talked. We reached the halfway mark, at mile 13, and turned around to double back to the start. His inexplicable urge to keep going made me want to do the same.
Four hours after we’d started, the finish line came into view. There was little fanfare—just a white ribbon, which Dean broke with his barrel chest, and a few cheering onlookers, including his wife and two kids, who promptly hustled him into their camper van. Dean didn’t have time to celebrate; he had to be in Tulsa by morning.
After everyone cleared out, I sat on a curb at the finish line in a daze. I’d just run my first marathon, by accident. It was like the Fodderstack, on steroids, all over again. When I looked up, white jet contrails zigzagged like chalk against the blue sky. I’d been looking at the ground for so long, watching my feet and the road as I ran, that I’d forgotten all about the sky. It had been there, huge and bright, all along. It was so easy to forget.
I understood then that I could stay where I was, waiting for something, a sign, and nothing would change. I wouldn’t change. I would miss my chance. The idea that this might happen filled me with revulsion. That’s not too strong a word. Revulsion. It had been ten years since I stood in front of Outside’s owner and rattled off the reasons he should give me a job. Where had that fearless girl gone?
I got to my feet and jogged a few blocks back to my car. My legs felt surprisingly loose and light, as though I could run all day and into the next, the way Dean did. It was ridiculous, really, to think this was possible.
But I knew it was. Dean had told me his secret to running absurd, inhuman distances. “Just run to the next tree, and then the next. You can always go farther than you think you can. You’re stronger than you think you are.”
The sun was bright and warm, and the streamers in the sky were beginning to fade, the planes soaring on to someplace else, like weird messengers of hope. I felt a surge of optimism, and certainty. I wanted go for everything in life, even if it scared me. Anything was possible; all the greatest things were still ahead.
Three weeks later, I quit my job.
* * *
—
It’s late afternoon when we heave the last of the boxes out the hayloft door. Dad has gotten creaky and stiff from the cold, and Meg and I help him back slowly down the ladder. He shuffles across the grass to the overflowing dumpster, rests his elbows on the edge, and peers in, surveying the mountain of stuff bound straight for the landfill: the Tea for the Tillerman LP and the Mexican chicken and the decaying scuba kit. In one hand he clutches his needlepoint National Geographic cover, and in the other a stuffed moose wearing a Santa hat. His face is inscrutable, and for a long while he says nothing.
After I read his letter, I thought that he had been too afraid to commit to us. But now, after hurling the relics of his life out the barn door and watching them sail briefly through the sky—suspended between flying and falling—I wonder if he hadn’t also been afraid to commit to himself. Somehow this is even sadder.
I’m fighting back tears, but when I turn to look at Dad again, the corners of his mouth have curved up into a faint, almost sappy smile. He nuzzles the moose and then heaves it high into the dumpster, a go-for-broke moon shot, and alley-oops the warped needlepoint in after it. Then he turns on his heels for the house. He’s let go of everything. Now he’s free and clear for whatever’s going to happen next.
10
The Short Goodbye
PHOTO: KATIE ARNOLD
Dad and Maisy at Huntly, November 2010
When Steve and I fly out with both girls a few weeks later for Thanksgiving, the sun has gone into hibernation, and the trees on Rattlesnake Mountain are bare and spindly. Dad has pitched off a cliff since the Barnstorming. His skin is the color of dirty dishwater. He can barely eat or get out of bed, his photo project has ground to a halt. Twice a day, Lesley doles out his oxycodone and OxyContin in a Dixie cup, the plasticky rattle of pills momentarily rousing him from his fog.
Sometimes when Meg and I visited the farm as girls, Dad would drive us into Winchester to see a movie. He favored action flicks with rugged heroes and outliers, Superman and Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, or slapstick comedies like Airplane! One of our all-time favorites was the comedy-thriller Silver Streak, in which Gene Wilder plays a befuddled book editor trying to save a runaway train. He wrestled villains on the roof, ducking beneath tunnels and narrowly avoiding decapitation while the cars rocketed along the tracks. Dad’s cancer feels the same: out of control and on the verge of derailing us all with its terrible velocity, only not nearly as entertaining. Even I’ve stopped thinking I can stop it. Now we’re just trying to minimize damage and get out of its way.
The day before Thanksgiving, we call hospice. Dad’s oncologist has informed him he’s not strong enough for chemotherapy; he has crossed some invisible brink from which he will not return. The hospice nurse squeaks across the wooden floor in her rubbery white shoes and settles herself in the rocking chair beside Dad’s bed.
We all know what this means. Time’s up. Hands in the air. She is the face of surrender. Dad lies flat in his bed and stares up at her with hollow eyes, and nothing about her expression says she is surprised, says she hasn’t seen this a dozen times already, three dozen even.
The nurse begins asking us questions. Can he walk to the bathroom unassisted? How bad is his pain? We all start talking at once—everyone, that is, except Dad.
“Maybe we should stop talking and let Dad answer?” I suggest. The wide-eyed look Dad shoots me from across the room is one of pure gratitude.
“Okay,” says the nurse gently, turning to him. “What are some of the things you’d like to see happen?”
Dad answers right away, as if he’s been preparing for this question. “I would like this not to be the norm. I would like to make progress every day, even if it’s only in inches.”
A stunned silence fills the room. I glance at Meg out of the corner of my eye. Her pen is poised in midair like a secretary taking dictation, trying to decipher his comment. We all are. Oh, Dad, I think, do you really think this is still possible?
The nurse dips her chin in a barely perceptible nod. She does not say, “You are too weak to walk. There is no progress left to make.” What she says is “We can make arrangements for someone to come to the house to help you with physical therapy.” To the list of things Dad will need, she adds a portable toilet on wheels because he’s unable to make it to the bathroom on his own.
The next day, a paunchy deliveryman arrives with the rolling toilet and parks it beside Dad’s bed. Dad is awake and propped upright in his charcoal-checked flannel pajamas, which from a distance look like tuxedo loungewear. There are many things in life you do not want to witness; a man delivering a plastic toilet to your father is one of them.
To break the awkward, awful moment, the man gurgles in his thick Virginia drawl, apropos of nothing, “Four more days and this month is over!”
* * *
—
Later that afternoon, I find Dad alone in his room. I pull up the rocking chair and sit at the foot of his bed.
The first thing he says is “Where did you learn
that?”
I hesitate for a second, not sure what he’s talking about. “Learn what, Dad?” I ask, scooting closer.
“That thing you did yesterday when the nurse was here. Just listening.”
This time I don’t have to think. “From you, Dad. I learned it from you.” I can tell by the way he cocks his head that this has never dawned on him before.
Through the windows, soot-colored clouds scud across the sky, west to east, and a turkey vulture glides in long, unhurried circles. Through the ceiling, I hear the scrabble of claws on the shingles. It’s Peacock. Now that it’s cold outside, he’s moved from his roost in the trees to the roof outside Dad and Lesley’s bedroom window, where he sleeps most nights. It’s warmer there and more companionable, the murmur of voices, bodies rustling around on the other side of the glass.
I pick up a magazine and begin reading aloud a story about Louisiana. Dad, listening alertly, interrupts me after the first paragraph to recall a National Geographic assignment he once had driving around the bayou, poking around jazz clubs with sawdusty floors, half-lit oyster shacks. He’s roved so many places, all on his own, a whole distinct life without us. I find this oddly comforting. He’s had so much to love in this world; it’s a relief to realize maybe we won’t be his greatest loss after all.
Dad’s eyes flutter shut, and he slips away, no longer in New Orleans but somewhere far away, his voice slurred and slow. Memories spill out, stories I’ve never heard, like shards of glass catching the light, disjointed and brilliant: waking in the Adirondacks on the morning of his best friend’s wedding—the drummer in his college jazz band—listening to the bride play violin beside a river, the notes drifting up on the breeze to the cabin where he lies in his narrow bed, his own thwarted commitment still on the horizon. His life has been beautiful, tortured, full of love and regret.
Then, abruptly, he’s talking in full sentences again, his words as crisp as ironed sheets.
“Katie,” he says, in his familiar, emphatic old timbre. “Make sure you listen to your body.”
All spring, Dad had been listless. His muscles trembled when he pumped iron on the Bowflex, and walking up the driveway, he fatigued easily. But he hated going to the doctor, so he put it off. By summer it was murderously hot, day after day above ninety degrees, and he blamed his lethargy on the heat. He lay flat on his back on the lawn after the sun went down, wiggling his toes in the grass. One morning he saw blood in his urine. After months of procrastinating, finally he called for an appointment. “A kidney stone,” his doctor declared. “Anemia,” he said. “Take iron.”
But things didn’t get better; they got worse. A lot worse. The rain gauge registered a big fat nada. The grass was turning to straw. One of Lesley’s horses kicked her and fractured her wrist, Uncle Phil fell and broke his hip, and Meg had started divorce proceedings. Still, Dad rallied against his fatigue, his mounting anxiety. Perhaps he knew but didn’t want to know. Perhaps he thought he would just push through, until he couldn’t anymore.
He says it again, louder now so I won’t forget: “Don’t ignore your body. You will know when Something’s Not Right.”
Through the window just above Dad’s head I see a flash of feathers on the roof: Peacock, fixing his glassy black eyes on us, keeping vigil.
* * *
—
There are two baby monitors now. One for Maisy, one for Dad. Hospice brought it so he can talk through it and tell us what he needs when we’re not in the room, though mostly what we hear is raspy breathing.
We live for the moments when he’s cogent. There is so much to ask. Has he written down passwords? Does he want us to call his friends? What would he like? What does he need? These are easier questions to ask than Are you afraid?
All I can think about is having The Talk with Dad, the one in which he tilts his head in a sage, fatherly way and says, “Now, I want you to always remember…” and then proceeds to reveal the Secret to Life as he has come to understand it. I’d even settle for the kind you see in movies, when the terminal patient summons his loved ones to his deathbed, one by one, and, in a flood of truth telling, all the secrets come into the open and the person can die in peace.
Something like this happened in my mother’s family long ago. Her grandfather, my great-grandfather George, had been an only child. It was a lonely life for a boy in small-town Ontario in the 1880s, so he spent as much time as possible with his cousins, a large, boisterous family of children whom he adored. He grew up to become a printer and a semi-professional tennis player and had five children of his own, the eldest of whom was my grandmother Peggy. When George was in his sixties and his mother was dying, she confessed that she wasn’t his biological mother. She’d been unable to have children, she told him, so her sister had given her George, her last-born. The woman he thought was his aunt was really his mother, and the cousins he’d longed for his whole life were his siblings after all. The news devastated him.
I think about Dad’s letter to me. I want to believe that I’m brave enough to finally talk to him about it, but what could I possibly learn now that would change anything?
* * *
—
On Thanksgiving, we roast a turkey and bake pies. Dad’s friends Philip and his wife, Merrill, come for dinner, and we hold out a tatter of optimism that he will miraculously rouse himself and eat with us. But he stays in bed, listening to Brahms’s Requiem on the CD player and slipping in and out of sleep, while we clatter around the dining room, hoping our forced cheer will drift up through the ceiling. It feels less like a celebration and more like a test. We’re practicing how we’ll do this without him.
After dinner, we take our dessert upstairs to eat with Dad. Steve carries two plates of pumpkin pie and I carry Pippa, zipped into her pale-pink fleece sack that helps her fall asleep. At two, she is a flash of legs and arms and teeth and white-blond hair that sticks up like a bird’s nest and a pinhole dimple to the right of her mouth that matches Steve’s exactly.
The moment Pippa was born, I knew I’d given birth to a wild animal. It wasn’t just the intensity of labor, or that she’d arrived with the summer monsoons, lightning shredding the sky and rain gushing through the arroyos. She was a ball of kinetic power, barely contained in a seven-pound body. She had the face of an organ-grinder monkey, the oblong belly of a tree frog, and the limbs of a baby wolverine, taut and wiry, ready to spring. You could never simply hold her or she’d wiggle right out of your arms; you had to wrestle her.
My doctor, Ira, took one look at Pippa’s baleful, inky eyes and exclaimed, “Well, she’s been around before!” He had graying hair that hung in frizzy ringlets around his face and the shaggy beard of an aging Deadhead and insisted I call him by his first name. Beside me, Mom tittered appreciatively. The Episcopalian in her found this exciting, exotic even. No one she knew talked about reincarnation!
But Ira was right. Pippa had an immediate presence that seemed to have nothing to do with Steve or me. How I adored her fierce energy, her determined will. It terrified me a little, too.
We’ve been at Huntly two days, but I’ve been hesitant to bring her up to Dad’s room. I’ve worried that she’ll be frightened by the sight of him, so ghostly and pale, all bones. I’ve worried, too, about whether seeing them together will make the future without him in it seem painfully real. I might have kept putting it off were it not for Steve. “Take Pippa upstairs,” he told me in the kitchen after dinner. “It’s time.” And before I could protest, he put her in my arms.
Now, standing in Dad’s doorway, I pull her close and whisper into her ear that we are going to see Pop-Pop, and I feel her settle, a still weight in my arms, and I settle, too. At the sight of her, Dad perks up, swooning almost. I know it’s partially the drugs, but I see in his eyes a flicker of wonder—for his progeny, for life continuing, for something, perhaps, that he can see but we can’t. He reaches for Pippa, and I prop her up on
the pillows beside him, watchful and grave. And Dad, who’s never been religious, gasps, “She looks like an angel.”
Late that night, after everyone’s gone to bed, I change my flight to stay on at Huntly a few more days. When Meg, Steve, and Pippa leave for the airport the next morning, Dad insists on coming out to the patio to say goodbye. He’s as skeletal as the trees, and it takes three of us to steady him down the stairs. Together, Dad and I watch them drive down the driveway and disappear out of sight, saying nothing. Dad’s gotten more stoic with age and illness. I have the feeling that he’s not holding back as much as holding in, conserving, keeping what little is left of his strength and emotions for himself, so he has some for the end.
After a moment he turns to me. His eyes are tired, his expression muted by pain, but he smiles faintly as he says, “Steve is a very good father. I’m proud of how you two are raising the girls.”
His words aren’t a surprise, but the fact that he makes the effort to say them, as preoccupied and increasingly incoherent as he is, moves me. Steve is a good father, such a different kind of father. I made a good choice. I married the right man. I was smart even when I was scared. Dad and I stand together in the late November afternoon, feeling lonely for our own reasons, saying nothing for a few moments. In the silence, I can feel his approval and admiration, his regret that he hadn’t always been there for us.
After they’re gone, the house feels so hollow, it practically vibrates. I sprawl disconsolately across the sofa bed in the TV room and listen to Dad rattle-snore through the monitor while Maisy hooks her fingers around her toes, gurgling happily. A month ago, she rolled over for the first time on the living room floor as Dad watched, bundled in blankets, witness to her unstoppable progression. Already I miss Steve and Pippa, growing more distant by the minute. I do not want to be separated from them, not even for a few days.