Henry wakes up with a fever, so I let him stay home from school. He’s still in his footed reindeer pajamas, playing downstairs with Aaron in our room, when the hospice nurses arrive for their daily visit. While they change the sheets and clean him up, I take my first shower in days. I come out in my bathrobe, my hair wet, and stand near the head of his bed while they finish. He’s in his bathrobe, too, bright red. The nurses tuck the blanket up to his chest. He opens his eyes wide enough to see them: the nurses, they’re here. It’s safe to go. “It’s okay,” I say. “I’m here.” His breath is wild and ragged, trying to get out. I have heard about the death rattle. “Is this it?” I ask them. They don’t answer, but retreat, slowly, toward the doorway. My hand is on Dad’s shoulder. The nurses draw the door closed. I lean close to his face. He takes a big, brave breath, and then he lets it out. His tongue rests against his teeth.
For a few moments I stand with my head on his shoulder, quietly crying. I kiss his wrinkled forehead, his snowy white hair.
Through the door, I hear one of the nurses ask, “Do you want us to get your husband?”
“No,” I say. “Thank you.”
I don’t want him here yet. I don’t want him to intrude upon this space. I climb into bed with my father and I cry into his bathrobe. I tell him, “Thank you,” again and again. I tell him, “I’m sorry” and I tell him, “I love you.”
After a few minutes, I step out of the room. The nurses are standing silently in the kitchen. I hug them. They help me make the next arrangements—the undertaker, the social worker, the cremation service. I thank them.
When they’re gone, I go to the bedroom. Henry is jumping from the bed to the floor. Aaron has his foot propped on the bed, looking at something on his leg.
“I have something sad to tell you,” I tell them. “Papou just died.”
Aaron is wild with grief, loud with it. Henry wants to see him. “You don’t have to,” I say, but already he’s running past me and up the stairs to Papou’s room, bursting through the door. There Papou lies, half-propped up in the bed with his eyes closed and his mouth open. He might have just fallen asleep, as he did every night watching TV, but he looks like he’s made of stone.
Henry takes one look at him and howls. He leaps into my arms. Aaron comes up the stairs behind me, crying. He goes to Dad and touches his arm. “Oh, Papou.” Henry watches him cry.
We call the boy’s school and ask for Nico. Does he want to come home? Yes, he does. Aaron puts on his shoes, puts himself together, gets in the car, and goes to pick him up.
But Henry is scared to be close to him. “Papou looks freaky,” he cries. He runs up to the loft, and I go after him, and while we wait for Aaron and Nico to return, we sit on the floor and we cry. I let him climb inside my bathrobe like he likes to do, and belt him in. He lies curled against me in his pajamas, our faces wet with snot, our glasses steamed with tears, Henry looking up at my face to see my crying, to show me his.
When Nico comes home, he, too, cries over Papou. We stand with him and watch him.
Henry’s cries have slowed to a whimper. “It was weird when Dad kissed Papou,” he declares.
“Well, I love him,” Aaron says. He has calmed, too. He puts one hand on Henry’s shoulder. I reach for his other one. “And I respect him more than anyone.” He makes a chuffing sound. He has realized something. “I didn’t cry for my own parents when they died.”
Something sometimes happens when someone dies, though. You’re crying for the loss of that person, but for all the people you’ve lost before that, too.
“We have no more grandparents now,” Henry says. “It’s not fair.”
Maybe Aaron is crying for his parents. I am crying for them. I’m crying for my mother. I’m crying for death, because our fear of it has made freaks of us.
Orphaned, we’re the grown-ups now. We have survived, and it’s time for lunch.
SOLSTICE
The morning of the last full moon of the year, I wake up to rain. I’m braced for it, the Cold Moon, though it’s warm enough to be raining. The last twelve nights, I’ve slept on the mattress in the loft, one child nestled under each arm. “I need them,” I told Aaron, and he said he understood. But this morning they’re not there. I go down to the kitchen. The flowers are everywhere, and dying. The Christmas tree’s white lights have been on for a very long time. My father’s ashes are in a white cardboard box on the shelf, next to my mother’s ashes. Hers are in the wooden box my father brought with him when he moved in with us. In the funeral home, my father had balked at the expense. He would have been pleased to know that I’d found a discount cremation service that didn’t require a wooden box. Only half my mother’s ashes were in that box. The other half had been scattered in the mountains of Vermont. The plan was to have a memorial for Dad in the summer, in Vermont, and to scatter half his ashes there with Mom’s. Then we figured the rest of his ashes could share Mom’s wooden box.
“It’s the way they would have wanted it,” I said. “The economy edition.” Why take up more space than you had to?
Other than the rain, the house feels haunted with quiet. It’s a Saturday morning. Winter break. On the kitchen island is a note from Aaron: Took the boys to Denny’s! With a cartoon face. Full moon, and Aaron feels well enough to drive.
In my dad’s room, his desk is still scattered with inhalers, an unused bed pan, his navy cap. His bifocals, spotted with fingerprints. Everything has changed; nothing has changed.
And then it occurs to me, as I look up at the crooked Christmas tree, its dumb, patient wings: the reason why I feel so strange in my body. I have never been alone in this house.
* * *
By the time the moon is out, Aaron’s skin is glowing that eraser-burn pink, and it’s raining parasites out of every orifice of his body. Little moth-colored shells spill from his mouth. From a distance they look innocent as sunflower seeds. He digs in his pointer, pulls out a fingertip full. Collects them in a little clear plastic box he used to keep baseball cards in. They make a dry sound when you shake them. Others are larger, the size of a pumpkin seed. Under the lens of an iPhone camera, they are shaped like an oblong blade, or a fish. And then, in one video, in the bathroom sink chalked with our kids’ toothpaste, the thing leaps like a fish in a frying pan. “Play it again,” I say, and for once, I’m transfixed. It leaps, shakes, struggles in the sink.
“Flukes,” Aaron says. He is calm. He has done some research. “At least that’s what they look like.” I pull up Google. A kind of tapeworm. It’s worse with the full moon, when they spawn. But they’re there, all the time. “I’ve been puking and shitting these things for weeks.” I don’t ask to see these pictures.
It’s the Alinia. Arguably the most powerful antiparasitic on the market. So powerful our insurance wouldn’t cover it. When I first called the pharmacy to check on the prescription, the woman on the phone gasped.
“What is it?”
“Oh, my.” I could hear her tapping a keyboard. “The copay is … quite high.”
“How much?”
“Eight thousand dollars.”
I shouted out a laugh. “I love my husband,” I said, “but not that much.”
The doctor switched Aaron to Flagyl instead, which our insurance would cover. Not my favorite drug, Laura told me. It doesn’t kill the eggs. But it will do.
But then, a few weeks later, picking up his other meds at the pharmacy, there was the Alinia, waiting in its little plastic baggie. The insurance company, apparently, had cleared it. No copay. I didn’t ask questions. I signed for it.
And it worked. Oh, it worked. The next day, Aaron hands me his phone and plays a video of a bug. There’s no other word for it. A two-year-old would look at the thing and say: “bug.” It is roach-brown, segmented, legs kicking, antenna swimming, and it has come from my husband’s testicles.
Hundreds of them, he says. “They sting like you wouldn’t believe.”
I hold the lonely bug, the size of a garden ant, in a
Ziploc bag. Still it faintly moves, just enough to say “I am alive.”
* * *
Between Christmas and New Year’s, we have two phone consults—one with Dr. Bernard, the Lyme doc; one with Dr. Savely, the Morgellons specialist we met in Germany. Aaron describes the parasites. “There’s, uh, a large amount of stuff coming out.” Interesting, Dr. Bernard says. We’ll retest for parasites. Dr. Savely diagnoses him over the phone with babesiosis and neuroborreliosis. I drive to campus to take care of the paperwork, email one office the release form to send records to the other. In the car, last rainy days of December, I listen to a Radiolab episode on parasites. It is jokey and voicey, with an intro about Alien and fake horror music. But then: there is a parasite called a blood fluke. I turn up the volume. In certain rivers in Sub-Saharan Africa, it burrows into a human ankle, then swims through its blood. Then the male fluke will wait for a female fluke. They will mate. This is no one-night stand. Parasites are generally monogamous, and they stay with their mates for a lifetime. The male fluke will form a groove the length of its body, and the female will fit into it. The male will feed her and keep her safe and warm. They will stay in that position, the Radiolab scientist says, for perhaps forty years, spooning in the tide of a human’s heart.
* * *
In January, we drive to D.C. to visit Dr. Savely. We stay with Sam and Keri. We bring Sam Dad’s good loafers. Keri, bless her, watches the kids. The morning of the appointment, Aaron and I get in a fight in the car over the GPS. I yell at him to turn it off—it’s interfering with the directions on my phone. Aaron throws an open bottle of medicine into the back of the car. Pills spill everywhere. We’re driving through the lettered streets, yelling at each other through yellow lights. I miss the turn. We’re tense.
We find a parking garage, a Starbucks. Aaron takes a walk. We make up on the street corner, slushy with overnight snow. “I’m sorry,” he says.
“I’m sorry,” I say. “I just want this to go well.”
Does it go well? I think it does. Dr. Savely spends two hours with us, going over the records, taking Aaron’s history, asking after symptoms. She takes out a scope—a bigger, corded version of the scope that we didn’t ask to use in Germany—and presses it to Aaron’s arm, and on the monitor a giant, graphite-colored filament blooms. Oh, yeah, she says. That’s a good one. She adjusts Aaron’s meds, adding another antibiotic, another antiparasitic, and three new meds for sleep. You can’t get well if you can’t sleep, she says.
She looks at the photos on Aaron’s phone. The electric red and green filaments. The black flake. The creamy hands. She nods, impressed with Aaron’s photography but not moved. I don’t mean to sound jaded, she says, but you can’t show me anything I haven’t seen before.
I take this as comfort. We’re in the right place. Aaron takes it as a friendly challenge. What he remembers most about the Morgellons conference is that man asking about worms, Dr. Savely’s insistence that Morgellons isn’t parasitic. He scrolls through the hundreds of photos on his phone until he reaches the recent ones: the fluke, the bug. Tell me that isn’t a bug, he says.
She shrugs. It sure looks like one, she says. But Morgellons takes lots of forms.
Before we leave, she gives us an armful of free samples of Mepron, the new antiparasitic. She may not think that bug was a bug, but for some reason, she says again, Morgellons patients respond best when antiparasitics are in the mix.
This isn’t quite enough for Aaron. The ride home is as tense as the ride there, but tense with quiet. It feels like an immense waste—not just the trip to D.C., but the trip to Germany, too. “Seriously?” he says after a while. “She looks at that picture and doesn’t see a bug? Why is everyone so afraid to say parasites?”
“Does it really matter?” I’m still clinging to the hope we can frame this as a new chapter. At least a new page. “She gave you the parasite drugs.”
He says, “I just want to be seen.”
“She looked at you!”
“She looked at me,” he says. “But she didn’t see shit.”
* * *
A week later, the Super Blood Wolf Moon. On Saturday Night Live, they make a joke about it. Aaron is in a jokey mood, too. The morning of the moon, he comes upstairs and takes a seat at the island on a stool. He tells me he started to bleed from his stomach in the middle of the night. Blood just appearing on his skin. He thinks parasites are dying inside of him. He has made peace with them today. “I don’t even care anymore.” He addresses them, his unruly roommates: “Just don’t put fish in the microwave and be in bed by nine.”
He carries around these little electronic music makers, gadgets that look like calculators but make arcade sounds. In another life, he says, he would write music for Miami Vice. He starts to make up a song about Fluke Skywalker.
“What will my tombstone say?” he wonders. “He meant well.”
* * *
The next day, he can’t get out of bed. The coldest day of the winter so far, and he feels it. Pain shoots through his feet. He sleeps all day, and the next. He calls the hotline. His tears are hot on his face. Our room has begun to smell like the cafeteria at the VA hospital. He’s forgotten his meds; he’s spilled ink on the bed. “Jesus, Aaron,” I say. “Get it together.”
“Leave me alone,” he tells me. His eyes are dark with disgust.
So I do. I give him space, rage-wash the dishes, rage-wash the laundry. I don’t want to be anywhere near that room, anyway. It has become his room, not our room. Worse, it has become his father’s room. It is the room of a sick old man. All it’s missing are saucers of dried cat food on the floor.
“I’m sorry,” he tells me later, stumbling from the room. He’s been stumbling lately. Falling. His balance is shit.
“Okay,” I say. I float past with my laundry basket, the boys’ clothes stacked in two towers. I don’t want to talk about it now. The boys have come home from school on the bus, and I need to make them a snack. Nico’s best friend is with them. He’s recently moved back into our school district after his mother, our friend Demitra, separated from her boyfriend, and she found herself needing afterschool care. The boys are buzzing with joy. I rage-butter their bagels. Then they play Fortnite while I work on an article in my office. All I have to focus on is the screen, the words appearing line by line.
I don’t realize how much time has passed—an hour? two?—until Demitra texts. “On the way.”
“OK!”
Not much later, from an upstairs window, I see the SUV coming up the long, snowy driveway. It’s not the usual white SUV, though; it’s maroon. I’m downstairs by the time it’s at the top of the driveway and my husband, who I thought was sleeping, steps out of the passenger side in the bright yellow parka he bought in Germany. He thanks the driver. He comes to the door.
“Who was that?”
“Oh, that’s Samantha,” he says, a polite cheeriness in his voice. He kicks off his snow boots. “She was nice enough to pick me up.”
He’s been out walking. How long has he been out walking?
“I went that way,” he says, pointing away from town. “I must have gone four miles!” He sounds proud of himself. His teeth are chattering.
I close my eyes. “Aaron, it’s literally zero degrees outside.”
He shrugs. “I needed to walk.”
“Why didn’t you call me to pick you up?”
“I didn’t have my phone.”
“You didn’t bring your phone? While you were walking four miles in zero degrees? You can barely walk up the stairs, and you thought it would be a good idea to take a fucking walk?”
“You didn’t want me here.” His voice is small; it could fit in a box.
“What?” I want to wrap his shaking body in my arms. I want to smack him.
“You didn’t want me here. I tried to apologize. You just walked by me like—” He makes the face he makes, cold and angry, when he’s imitating my face.
“Don’t do that,” I say. “I have to check on the b
oys.”
I knock on Nico’s door. The boys are sprawled over the beanbag, intent on the TV screen, oblivious. “Your mom will be here in a minute,” I say to his friend. “Start packing up, okay?”
Aaron is coming up the stairs, still in his puffy yellow coat, when I start going down. He says quietly, as though telling me that the dishes in the dishwasher are clean, “I just took a fatal dose.”
He walks into my father’s old room and lies down on the couch.
“Aaron. What does that mean?”
His eyes are closed. He won’t answer me.
“Aaron. What did you take?”
He shakes his head.
“Don’t do this. Don’t do this.” I whisper loudly in his face. “The kids are right here. Right here! Don’t do this. What did you take?”
He shakes his head. I pull out my phone.
“What are you doing?”
“Calling 911.”
“Don’t.”
“Of course I’m fucking calling 911. You think you can tell me that and I won’t call 911?”
“Don’t.”
“I am.”
I make the call. My husband may be overdosing. I don’t know what he took. He won’t tell me. I give the address. I hang up. What I feel is fury, disbelief, panic. My brain is expanding, shooting out of my ear, that part of my brain watching the scene on the couch.
“Call them back. Tell them not to come.”
“No.”
“It might not be enough,” he says.
We are in the room where, a little over a month ago, my father lay dying, where for days I lay beside him in the hospital bed. I thought he was barely conscious, but one day as I cried into his shoulder, he patted me gently on the back. “Oh, honey,” he would say if he were here right now. He would pat me on the back.
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