by Tracy Slater
The morning before Otosan’s move, I covered the walls of his tiny sterile-clean new room with a dozen old family photos, as if they could distract him from his loss of home. Toru felt relief and also a deeper kind of guilt, but for me, the daily visits had become much simpler. No cleaning, no struggling with the wheelchair ramp up the steps to Otosan’s apartment. Now, I’d push the chair through the spare, gleaming care house lobby and bow my head to the row of receptionists behind the desk, and they’d flip some switch behind their counter that opened the glass doors to outside. Then we’d walk along the streets of Shinsaibashi and watch the people watching us, or we’d stare into shop windows or restaurant displays, their plastic models of faux udon or curry angled toward the sidewalk, all glossy with shellac.
Sometimes at night, I’d sit with Toru’s father in the care house dining room while he had dinner. The facility was still new, Otosan’s floor not yet filled, and around us, four or five other men would sit alone at tidy tables, bowing their heads slightly when the white- or pink-clad helper-sans brought fish and rice and vegetables. They’d stare at the wide-screen TV while they ate, and I’d sit nervously next to Otosan, wondering whether or how often to help him lift the spoon to his mouth, not wanting to embarrass him, not wanting the staff to think me cold, then praying they wouldn’t try to talk to me in Japanese. After he finished eating, a helper-san brought Otosan his medicine, a little clear packet with his name printed in black, and below that, a pink Hello Kitty figure winking out at us with her huge eyes and absent mouth.
One cold afternoon, I tried to turn on the heating unit in Otosan’s room, which was tucked between a wall and the ceiling. “Why is this closed?” I asked in Japanese, forgetting the word for “turned off.” Otosan just shook his head. I grabbed the remote and stared at its buttons, each one labeled in kanji. The unit had options for cooling, heating, fan, timer, and the like, but I couldn’t tell which was which, so I pushed various buttons, and Otosan and I lifted our heads to watch, hearing beeps that told us nothing, seeing lights change in indication of who knew what. “Gomen, Otosan,” I said, “Sorry,” and then I lapsed into English. “Sorry, but I’m confused!”
“Me, too, To-ray-shee,” he replied.
• • •
IN FEBRUARY, four months past my forty-fifth birthday and with Otosan settled in the care house, I finally took a three-week trip home to Boston. Originally I’d planned to go for longer, but we still didn’t want to leave Toru’s father without a daily family visit, and it was hard for Toru to get off work by the time visiting hours ended at eight p.m. Kei was trying to plan time off from her job in Tokyo that summer, so I intended to go home again in July and August for at least six weeks.
At home, I began to think again about how we could afford to buy a small studio apartment somewhere in the Boston area now that we weren’t going to have a child. I drank coffee every morning and wine each night, went to a hot yoga class and heard my heart beat too fast in my ears, and felt a delicious release at not caring about any of it. When I went running around the reservoir across from my mother’s apartment, my muscles felt weaker than they had years earlier when I jogged three times a week, but my body felt both looser and sharper, as if without the constant hormone treatments a thick haze had begun to burn off.
I even resumed Four Stories, holding an inaugural return event. For opening night, I bought new grayish-blue suede boots and got my hair cut, highlighted, and blown out, and I drank cocktails and laughed and blabbed at the microphone and felt grateful when a crowd once again showed up. Somewhere deep inside I still felt the hollow space of sadness and disbelief that Toru and I wouldn’t have a child. But I also felt my old self coming back.
In Boston, now meeting face-to-face, my shrink wanted to discuss my feelings about the baby-not-to-be. I had nothing specific to say. She raised her eyebrow. I didn’t feel like I was avoiding the topic; I was in a place where conversation didn’t necessarily serve.
Silently, I recognized that my perfect plan hadn’t rolled out exactly as expected, that instead of tumbling into my scheduled first trimester of gut-deep grief, I felt more numbness than anything, despite the melancholy that lingered at its edges. On one hand, I tried to explain, my life was no different than it had ever been: I’d never had a child and didn’t have one now. On the other, I still felt sad and shocked, like I’d lost something, but what? It was all just one more emotional push-pull. Before, the contradiction was between terror that I’d be a bad mother and terror that I’d never get to meet our baby. Before that, it was between wanting to be with Toru and not knowing if I could survive Japan, or even marriage. Now, the friction was between everything being the same and different at the same time. But wasn’t that life? To hold two contradicting truths at one time and to keep on holding them?
• • •
OTOSAN ONLY MADE IT a few months in the care house. One early morning soon after I got back to Osaka, a nurse called. Toru was on a business trip in Hong Kong, and I grabbed the phone from the bedside table, staring through slit eyes at the clock. Just past six-thirty. I knew something must have happened even before I heard the nurse’s rush of Japanese. Within her explanation, I could only understand a few random words. Byoin, “hospital,” and netsu, “fever” (or was she saying natsu, “summer”? But, no, that wouldn’t make any sense, would it?), and then a string of sharp syllables that remained opaque to me beyond the urgency in her voice.
By the time I had called Toru in Hong Kong and he had phoned the care house and then his sister in Tokyo and then called me back, Otosan was in an ambulance. I sped to the hospital on my bike, the March air damp and cool on my skin. I waited almost an hour on the orange vinyl seat of the hospital’s lobby couch, Toru calling back and forth between me and the care house, me trying to explain to the man behind the square information window that I was looking for my father-in-law, then urging my cell phone toward him and pleading with him to talk to Toru as he reared back from the handset thrust in his face by the frantic foreigner. Finally, we realized Otosan had been brought to a different hospital. The one where I waited, where Otosan’s regular doctor worked, apparently did not accept emergency admissions between the hours of eight p.m. and eight a.m. The ambulance had searched for a hospital that both had a bed and took critical patients anytime. Later, as Toru explained all this to me, I couldn’t stop shaking my head into the phone. What, they only take emergencies on a strict schedule in this country? I couldn’t tell if I was misunderstanding the culture or Toru’s explanation. It turned out, not unusually, to be the former.
The bed they found Otosan was in a ward for ten men, their various illnesses rising in a swamp of smells from their parchment skin. The doctors lowered Otosan’s fever from more than 103 degrees Fahrenheit with an IV drip, then diagnosed acute pneumonia. When he opened his eyes, he looked around as if he had landed in another country. He was too weak to speak. Over the next month, we’d explain that he’d gotten very sick, and now he was in the hospital about a mile from the care house, still close to his own apartment. But he’d forget again and again where he was.
A few of the men around Otosan moaned, others swatted at the bars along their beds with mitten-covered hands while scaly or weeping splotches bloomed on their ankles, legs, or forearms. A couple were unconscious, hooked up to beeping monitors. Many had pee bags attached with catheters, the yellow liquid sloshing in clear plastic until someone came around with a bucket to empty them. The other men wore diapers, and twice a day the nurses would shoo me and any other visitors out of the room and close the heavy iron door to change their patients in semiprivacy. Windows along the wall were shrouded with thin, papery-looking shades emitting weak streams of light, which loitered on the ceiling, blotched, like the men’s limbs, with cracks and stains.
“Did they put him in a public hospital?” I asked Toru, when he got home the next day from Hong Kong, joining both me and Kei at Otosan’s bedside. “Not public, just old,” Tor
u said, his eyes bleak. No wonder there had been an empty bed for his father, for who would choose a ward like that? But the doctors were reluctant to move him now.
I spent the next month steeling myself for the ward’s smells and sounds each weekday when visiting hours started. Toru assured me I didn’t need to stay long each afternoon, but Otosan was so confused about where he was, and I got a feeling in my chest like paper being crushed into a tiny crinkled ball when I imagined him alone and bewildered as he woke each day, staring up at a dirty prewar ceiling. The nurses wouldn’t let me use my computer or even my e-reader in the ward because of the patients on heart monitors, even though I explained I’d turned off the Web connection. Mostly, though, they were kind, and I didn’t want to inhibit their desire to care for Otosan by angering them, so I obeyed, bringing books and sitting by his bedside, breaking up the six hours of visiting time with trips to get tea or a late lunch until Toru could rush in from work for the last hour or so. Outside, I’d gulp at the fresh air.
In the hospital, sometimes I’d hold or stroke Otosan’s hand, and when he got a little stronger, I’d help him stretch his bone-thin legs in a vain attempt to prevent a loss of muscle mass. I held his foot in my hand and said, “Push!” and he’d push his toes against my palm with light, tentative pressure, and then I’d push back and try to move his whole leg back and forth, like a makeshift recumbent bike on a speed barely above “off.”
“Thank you, To-ray-shee,” he’d whisper, when we were done.
Toru and I were both so tired every night when we left the hospital, its smells and shadows clinging to our clothes, that we’d have dinner, go home and shower, and then tumble into bed. As we had over the previous half year or so, we tried to figure out when and if my body would release an egg that cycle, but when we only managed to have sex twice that month, we barely noticed.
• • •
WHEN THE HOSPITAL finally released Otosan, on a cloudy Sunday five weeks after he had been admitted, I felt a surge of optimism as we drove back to the care house. Toru’s father was in his own wheelchair on a ramp in the back of the first car Toru and I had ever owned: a tiny van, equipped with a handicapped ramp in place of a backseat. We’d bought the vehicle a few months earlier to bring Otosan over for dinner on the weekends when it was too cold for him outside, but we’d barely used it before he’d been hospitalized.
Back at the care house, the staff lined up and bowed as we brought in Otosan, and then they all called out, “Okaeri,” “Welcome home!” Toru’s father nodded slightly, looking tired and a little confused.
In his room, the care house nurses examined him and found a raw, gaping bedsore spreading from the bony notch above his backside. They shook their heads and clucked their tongues at the hospital’s negligence, then laid him on his side and tried to clean the wound and dress it while Otosan trembled a little, his face to the wall. I turned my back to the bed and stared at the door, and when they had covered Otosan’s midriff again, I turned back around and saw that Toru had turned pale.
After the care house doctor arrived and put Otosan back on antibiotics, the staff encouraged us to go home so Toru’s father could rest. I promised Toru I would come back the following morning, bring my laptop, and sit with Otosan most of the day to help him with the transition back. Then we went home, exhausted again, my earlier optimism turning gray but still not gone completely.
The next morning, the phone rang again at just past eight. It was Toru, calling from his way to work. “My father’s fever is bad again,” he told me. Otosan needed to return to the hospital. This time, Toru insisted the care house bring him themselves and go directly to the correct hospital, where Otosan’s doctor worked and where we knew the care was good—and Otosan could get a single room.
I was waiting in the lobby when the care house nurse and helper pulled up in a taxi with Toru’s father. I rushed outside, but Otosan didn’t seem to recognize me, and he had white foam pooling from his mouth. I tried to wipe his chin as gently as possible while we waited for the nurse to fill out his admissions papers, and I listened to the wheeze of his labored breath. By the time Toru arrived a few hours later, the emergency room doctors had diagnosed acute pneumonia again and a fever of more than a hundred and four.
A few days later, the hospital added an additional diagnosis. One early evening, they called us into the nurses’ station on Otosan’s floor and pulled up some pictures on a screen. By that time, the nurses all knew me by sight, because once again I tried to come every weekday for the full stretch of visiting hours (Toru and Kei took all the weekend shifts), although now I could bring my laptop and work while Otosan slept, and the new hospital was so clean, so modern, compared to the old one that the visits felt like barely a hardship.
At first, each new nurse would come into Otosan’s room to check his IV or vital signs, and almost uniformly, they’d give a little start seeing a foreign woman sitting on the tiny vinyl couch, computer open on her lap. But each time I’d explain I was the yome, “daughter-in-law,” and they’d nod or say, “So, desuka?” “Is that so?” and smile kindly at me. One was delighted by the foreigner on the ward. “I. Love. English talking!” she told me happily when she came to Toru’s father’s bedside, pointing to her own nose, then gently rearranging Otosan’s sheets around his legs.
Now, as I sat with Toru in the nurse’s station, the white-skirted women all averted their eyes while the doctor—also a woman, but in a hospital coat and pants—pointed toward monochrome images on a screen. She spoke in low, gentle Japanese to Toru. I could barely follow any of her words, but I knew a few days earlier they had found a mass during a CT scan of Otosan’s torso, and I could tell the news wasn’t good by her tone and by the white haze on the monitor inside what I guessed were grayer-shaped organs. And by the way Toru swallowed and tried to keep his voice low to match the doctor’s.
Afterward, Toru and I went into the hall and whispered by the door to Otosan’s room. Cancer, Toru explained to me, pointing to his abdomen but shaking his head when I first guessed “stomach.” After I supplied my next conjecture, he nodded, slowly at first and then more rapidly as he searched through his brain to confirm the English word for “pancreas.” It was advanced. Too advanced to treat. “Normal person, they might live three to six months,” Toru said, repeating the doctor’s diagnosis. But with Otosan’s Parkinson’s, dementia, and recurrent pneumonia, his prognosis was much worse.
SEVENTEEN
IN THE MIDDLE OF OTOSAN’S first month in the new hospital, I had some mild spotting—“another early, ridiculously light period”—I reported to Toru. Neither one of us dwelled for long on the topic. Most of our mental space was taken up with Otosan. Though I felt disappointed, I was also relieved that I could get my period without feeling like my chest was being crushed. When my stomach started to feel upset a week or so later, I tried to push away the thought that I might be approaching early menopause. I’d heard the hormone shifts of that milestone could cause queasiness. “Maybe I picked something up in the hospital,” I said to Toru. For a brief flash, I wondered if it could be something worse, but then I pushed that thought aside, too.
I wasn’t sick enough to stop visiting Otosan, who actually seemed to be getting a little better despite the doctor’s dire warnings. He was awake most of the day now, and often the nurses would put him in a wheelchair and I’d push him to the hospital’s roof garden, where we could see Osaka Castle in the distance, and I’d ask Otosan about various buildings, and sometimes he’d remember what they were. It was early June, and the air was warm but not too humid, a brief stretch of gentle summer before the rainy season set in, followed by the killing heat and humidity of an Osaka August. I’d wheel Otosan to the corner of the roof deck that had a slice of sun, and he’d sit in the light and the breeze until he got tired and nodded when I suggested going back to his room. Despite his cancer and the welts that rose like bruised pillows on his arms and ankles from his months on an IV, th
e doctors thought he might even be able to go back to the care house soon.
One afternoon, when my stomach bug still hadn’t gone away, I called Lisa and told her I was feeling too sick for our power walk. Lately, she’d been meeting me a few times a week near the hospital so we could loop around Osaka Castle Park. “I can meet you for dinner, though,” I said. “I’ve been at the hospital all afternoon and really need to eat. Maybe just soup?”
Lisa felt like one of my few remaining lifelines in Osaka, someone I could commiserate and even laugh with over my failure to get pregnant while she complained about her latest boyfriend, a British pilot who came to Japan only a few times a year. Since she had never wanted children, I never had to worry about her prattling happily about kids or inviting me to spend time with a new baby.
When we met that evening at an udon soup place, she asked how Toru’s father was. Then, peering into my face, “And how are you?”
“We’re hoping he can go back to the care house soon. And I’m okay. A little sick. But maybe it’s just stress.”
I ordered a plain bowl of noodles, easy on the stomach, and she ordered soup with tempura. “Can you believe I haven’t even been drinking lately?” I joked. “I’m really shirking on my commitment to nine months of boozing, now the treatments are over.” Lisa raised her beer to me.
“I’m sure I’ll be better by the weekend,” I said, envisioning us in another restaurant, a bottle of red wine between us.
“Poor littlest,” Lisa said, using the nickname she’d given me as the smallest among our circle of expat friends.