by Ruth Ozeki
The baby drifted off to sleep. Gently, Charmey pressed on her breast to break the suction, then disengaged the tiny mouth from her nipple. She lowered the baby, laying her across her belly. She held out her arm to Frankie, who scooted up the bed beside her. Her nipple was still wet, still secreting moisture. More than anything, Frankie wanted to take it into his mouth and suck it as his daughter had, but he held back. He had taken care of dozens of babies in his various placements—that’s what foster kids were good for—but he knew very little of the intimate business of mothers and infants, what was appropriate, what was not. So he just gazed at the nipple. But Charmey took his hand and cupped it around the soft weight of her breast.
“Go on,” she said. “Try it.”
“Really?” He looked up at her, doubting and amazed. He slowly brought his mouth to the nipple and gave it a tentative lick, then brought his lips around the nub of flesh. There was a mild but unexpected sweetness, like it had been dipped in sugar water, and as he started to suck, it became sweeter still.
Charmey giggled. “How is it?”
He tried to think of what the thin liquid tasted like. He wanted to say something nice, but all he could think of was lukewarm milk at the bottom of a bowl of Frosted Flakes.
“It’s good,” he said, releasing the nipple. He ran his hand along the side of her body, resting it on her hip, careful not to wake the baby.
Charmey sighed.
He took his hand away.
She shifted the baby off to the far side of the bed, cradling her in pillows. Then she took his hand and brought it back against her stomach.
“C’est bon,” she said.
He ran his hand in circles around her navel, small at first, then widening. Her skin felt soft and flaccid, puddling in the basin between her pelvic bones. It was not the taut, boyish abdomen he’d first known, but he didn’t mind. He let his head rest next to her hip. He kissed her hipbone. He felt his body relax a little more. Prison was exhausting. So much had changed, he thought, drifting off. He felt her hand rest lightly on his face, fingering a newly healed scar.
“I want to name her for you,” she whispered.
“For me?” He struggled to breach the surface of sleep. Frank was a terrible name.
“Well, not only for you. But for orphans. For people who have lost their homeland.”
Perdue? That was even worse. You couldn’t call a little girl Perdue. He rolled over, ready to argue, but she was looking down at him with a totally blissed-out smile.
“I want to call her Tibet,” she said.
Tibet.
He nodded. He didn’t quite get the connection—he was never very good at geography—but he liked the way it sounded. He leaned across Charmey’s legs so that his face hovered just above the baby’s. She was all red and squashed. She had a wispy ridge of hair, which stood up along the center of her head like a Mohawk, and a cluster of tiny white pimples across the bump of her nose. Her eyes were blue and still unseeing, but that would change in time. He scooped her carefully off the bed and sat up, cradling her in his arms. She was not beautiful, but he didn’t care. He wasn’t beautiful either. He supported her neck. He kissed her foot.
“Hi,” he whispered. “Hello, Tibet.”
the d word
Buddhists teach that there are only two things in life you can ever be sure of: the first is that you will die; the second is that you won’t know when.
“Is this it? Is it happening now?”
The pulmonary edema is critical. He’s jaundiced. His blood pressure is down.
“Why won’t they say it? Why won’t they tell me?”
He’s listless. Incoherent. In imminent danger of cardiogenic shock.
Cass held my hand. She patted my arm. We stood outside Lloyd’s room in the hallway, waiting for the doctor to finish the examination. “They probably just don’t know,” she said.
Geek was leaning against the opposite wall. The Seeds had been released two days earlier, and they had descended onto the Cardiology Unit, establishing a base camp in the waiting room. They took turns visiting Lloyd, and sometimes I found it a relief to have them back, but other times it was just an annoyance. Now Geek, eager for a chance to console, offered up the teaching. “Buddhists say . . .”
“That’s bullshit!” I said. “They’re fucking doctors. They must know. They see this all the time. They just won’t say it. It’s the D word. They won’t say the D word. It makes them look bad, like they’ve failed or something.”
The doctor emerged from behind the curtain. Melvin followed close behind. The doctor was showing him a notation on my father’s chart. Melvin had cut off his dreadlocks in prison and removed most of his earrings. Now, except for the perforated earlobes, he looked almost normal. He was wearing a crew-collar shirt. He and the doctor conferred.
End-stage congestive heart failure.
A terminal situation.
“Just say it,” I interrupted. “Just say it. He’s dying, right?”
They looked up, surprised, like they’d just discovered a gauche or feebleminded child. A foreigner who didn’t know the rules.
“Right,” Melvin agreed.
What good did that do? I slumped against the wall. Cass put a hand on my shoulder.
“We want to move him to Palliative,” the doctor said.
“What’s that?”
“Hospice care,” Melvin explained. “They’ll be able to make him comfortable. Manage his pain.”
“Hospice?” I turned to the doctor. “You’re giving up on him?”
“Suspending life-prolonging measures . . .”
“Letting him die.” It was like we were playing some kind of strange word game.
“We think it’s time to move him,” the doctor continued after a discreet pause. “But we’ll need him to agree to a DNR status.”
“DNR?”
“Do Not Resuscitate.”
I sank slowly down the wall and hugged my knees like Ocean.
“Wait a minute. I don’t get it. Are you saying he’s got to agree to die?” I realized how dumb I sounded, but I couldn’t help it. I’d always thought it was straightforward. Life or death. Black or white. I didn’t realize there were so many shades of dying. So many different levels. “Does he know?”
The doctor shook his head.
“Well, then, good luck. Last I heard, he likes being alive, and he’s planning on continuing awhile longer.” I was beginning to catch on. It was all a matter of intention. The doctors’ intentions. Lloyd’s. God’s. And whoever else wanted to weigh in on the matter. Death would come when everyone agreed and arrived at a consensus.
“If you could talk to him,” the doctor suggested gently. “Help him to understand, to accept—”
“Me!” I cowered against the wall, holding up my hands to fend him off. “Whoa! That’s your job, isn’t it? You’re the expert.”
“You’re his daughter.”
A simple statement of fact. But so misguided.
“You’re telling me I’m supposed to convince him?” I crouched there, staring at this man in disbelief. I wasn’t even sure who this doctor was, there had been so many. I started to laugh. I threw back my head and howled with laughter. The nurses at the station looked up, alarmed, but I didn’t care. I was a lunatic. Fine.
“Maybe ask him about his wishes,” the doctor suggested.
“His wishes? Oh, wow! You really don’t get it.” I stopped laughing abruptly and swallowed. “My father and I don’t exactly see eye to eye when it comes to making life-and-death decisions.” I let my head fall once more to my arms and rocked back and forth like a catatonic child. “Melvin will talk to him. He’ll be real good at this.”
The doctor and Melvin conferred again. Geek walked over and joined them. Good. Let the men sort it out.
“He’s a farmer,” I heard Melvin explain. “He’s suffering from a paranoid delusion about his seeds—”
Cass hunkered down next to me. “A word from our resident psych nurse,”
I muttered. “Pretty profound, huh?”
“Yummy,” she said, “you need to talk to Lloyd.”
They were all waiting. I held up my hands and surrendered. “All right! You move him. I’ll talk to him. After I have a smoke.”
I guess cowardice just runs in our family. I sat outside for an hour or two, smoking one cigarette after another, getting up occasionally to walk around the block, then returning, trying to think of what to say. When I finally went back in, they had transferred him to Palliative Care. The high-tech computerized paraphernalia of the Cardiology Unit was conspicuously absent here. No more chrome and latex. There were soft pastel colors on the walls. Potted plants lined the windowsills. A pair of harpists were setting up their instruments in the hallway.
Melvin and Lilith sat on either side of Lloyd’s bed. Melvin was cradling Lloyd’s head while Lilith fed him tiny spoonfuls of vanilla ice cream. He opened his mouth to the spoon like a fledgling bird, but his mouth was blue. Blue lips. Sluggish blue tongue. Charmey was sitting on the foot of the bed nursing Tibet. Lloyd watched her, smacked his lips, opened his mouth for more.
He gurgled every time he took a breath.
I threw myself into the chair by the window and planted my boot heels on the radiator. I stared out at an adjacent wing of the hospital, identical in architecture to the wing I was in. With one big difference. There, lives were being saved. Here, in Palliative, they were ending. I closed my eyes. Behind me, soft harp music wafted from the hallway. I sighed and swung my legs around. Lloyd’s wishes. I glanced across the room. Melvin looked up.
“Ready?” he asked.
I nodded. They moved slowly so as not to jostle Lloyd or startle him. Lilith took the spoon from his lips. Melvin eased him back against the pillows and raised up the bed to relieve his sodden lungs. My father looked stricken. He sensed that something was up.
“We have to go now,” Melvin said. “Yummy wants to talk to you. But we’ll be back.”
“We’ll bring you more ice cream,” Lilith whispered, stroking his sunken cheek. “Chocolate next time.”
Charmey held up Tibet in front of him, so he could see. The baby gurgled at Lloyd. Lloyd gurgled back at the baby.
They trooped out of the room. A band of anarchists. A caravan of gypsies. A posse of saints. It was so easy for them to offer comfort, to tap compassion. He wasn’t their father. Silently I cursed them.
“Dad?” I said.
The whites of his eyes had yellowed, and his nostrils flared with each breath. The tip of his nose had turned bluish, too. His extremities were dying. His gaze settled on me, and he gave me the sweetest smile.
“So good . . .” He sighed.
“What’s good, Daddy?” My heart was pounding.
“Ice cream. Most delicious thing . . . I ever tasted.”
Ice cream. Why hadn’t I thought of that? It was hopeless. I would never please him, and I might as well accept it. Really, it was a relief. I felt efficient. A bit brutal even.
“Dad, I have to talk to you.”
His eyes fluttered open.
“Do you know where you are?”
“Of course,” he said. His voice sounded perfectly normal, and for a moment I almost believed that everything was fine, that my father would be back on his feet in no time, and I would be free to run away again. Leave Liberty Falls. I wanted to dash to the parking lot, gun the Pontiac toward home, and get the kids packed for the trip back to Pahoa. Then he spoke again, breathless and gasping. “I’m in the damn hospital. They’re killing me! Get me out of here!”
My heart sank. Not this time.
“Dad, the doctor told me—”
His hand twitched impatiently against his thigh. “Doctors . . .” he said.
“I’m supposed to ask your wishes.”
“Wishes?”
I was doing it all wrong. He didn’t know what I was talking about. But I couldn’t bring myself to say it. Not the D word. Not to Daddy.
He giggled, and the sound unnerved me. “If wishes were fishes . . .”
It was the morphine talking. The doctor had warned me. His mouth opened and closed. A salty tear leaked from the corner of his eye. “Take me home,” he pleaded, and now his voice was so weak and sad that, in spite of myself, I reached out and touched his forearm.
“I can’t, Daddy. You need to be here. They can take care of you better. They can help you.” I really wanted him to understand, but he closed his eyes.
“Melvin will take me home,” he said. “I love Melvin.”
“That’s good,” I said, accepting this information and withdrawing my hand.
“I love Lilith, too,” he confided.
“That’s just great.” Still I waited, but it seemed like that was all he had to say to me. It made what I had to say a whole lot easier. “Dad, you’re dying.”
The minute the words left my mouth, I wanted to snatch them back out of the air. “I’m sorry,” I added.
He opened his eyes wide and stared at me, and then suddenly his body went stiff. I reached for the call button to summon help, but he clutched my arm. “He’s coming,” he gasped, looking wildly around. “My seeds. I have to save them!”
“Who’s coming, Dad?”
He was panting hard, gaping at something that loomed over my shoulder. “Him! The Terminator! . . . I have to save them!”
“Dad, your seeds are fine. . . .”
The delirium subsided, and he fell back. “It’s too late,” he whispered. “Too late.” His eyelids fluttered shut again, and for a while he just lay there letting the breath shudder through him. When he finally spoke again, his voice was so low I had to lean way down to hear.
“I don’t want . . .” he said, but his mouth was dry and gummy, and the words got stuck. He reached out a trembling finger toward the water jug on the side table. I supported his head, held the cup to his lips. The back of his neck was as hot as a child’s. He took a sip.
“I don’t want . . .” he repeated, but still the words wouldn’t come. It was horrible to see him struggle. Of course he didn’t want to die. He couldn’t say the word either.
“I know, Dad,” I whispered, stroking his hand. “It’s okay. You don’t have to tell me. I know.”
He pulled away and shook his head. He opened his mouth, and his wish leaked from his lips like air from a punctured tire. “No . . .” he said. Then, “I don’t want . . . to be a vegetable. . . .”
I looked at him, deflated and waxy against the pillow.
A vegetable?
I might have laughed if I hadn’t been crying.
garden, reborn
The Spudnik was trashed. The sheriff’s department had ransacked it several times, then the state prosecutor’s office, possibly even the FBI.
“They just kept coming,” Phoenix said. “I didn’t know who they were. I don’t think they found anything.”
“That’s because there was nothing to find,” Geek said. He was lying on his back by the Winnebago, trying to track down the damage to the propane line. “Thanks for keeping an eye on them.”
Phoenix shrugged. “I tried. Mostly they told me to get lost. There was one guy who came back a couple of times, who talked to me sometimes.”
“What were they thinking?” Geek said. “That we had heroin stashed in the propane tanks?”
“I believe it was the plastique, dude,” Y said. “The TNT. The blasting powder.”
Lilith giggled. “No, it was the manifestos.”
“The one guy, he kept asking me about dirty pictures,” Phoenix said. “That’s what he wanted. And the computer. They all wanted your computer.”
“Fucking cops,” Lilith said.
“I don’t think this guy was a cop. He seemed kind of old. He was wearing those sunglasses with mirrors, but he didn’t have a uniform or anything.”
“Mirrored sunglasses?” Lilith frowned.
“Well, he didn’t find anything,” Geek said. “Since there was nothing to find. But they sure managed to screw things
up.”
“We gonna have heat for the winter?” Y asked.
“You could come back to Hawaii with us,” Phoenix said. “You don’t need heat there. Mom’s taking us back there as soon as . . . you know . . .”
He kicked at the dirt, sending a spray of gravel toward Geek, who was still lying on his back. “Hey!”
“Sorry.”
“You sad about your grandpa?” Lilith asked.
Phoenix nodded. “He’s all freaked out about his seeds. Mom’s all freaked out about him.”
Geek sat up and looked at the boy. “I know,” he said. “We’re working on it.”
Throughout their incarceration the computer had stayed hidden deep inside a small lava tube on the back acres of the land where the foothills started to crumble. Wrapped in layers of plastic, then packed carefully in a high-impact, shock-resistant, waterproof case, the top-of-the-line Macintosh PowerBook had frustrated searches by the various engines of the law.
As soon as they were released, Geek went for a long nighttime walk through the potato fields and liberated the computer from its rocky nest. He brought it back, hooked it up, and got to work. A few days later he walked next door to the Quinns’ place with the PowerBook under his arm and confronted Will. The two men sat down together in Will’s office.
“Listen,” Geek said, “I want you to know that we appreciate you dropping the lawsuit. We know you don’t agree with what we did, and we can respect that. We don’t even mind the time in jail, because we ended up getting some good publicity out of it.”
Will sat back in his chair. “I dropped the charges out of consideration for my wife. Now, what’s your point?”
“We’re hoping we can put all that aside and do something for Lloyd.”
Will frowned. “You got him pretty upset with all that Terminator nonsense. He thinks it’s real.”