“His Pulse-Ox is within normal limits,” she’d told us at two that morning. “Best we’ve seen.”
My father’s lips began moving around what looked like words. I leaned closer. His eyes seemed lighter blue, almost crystalline at their centers, and his skin glowed as if it were backlit. I stretched the oxygen mask away.
“You know,” he told me, sounding surprised himself. “I feel pretty good.” His voice was hoarse but perfectly intelligible over the oxygen’s hiss.
I pulled the hospital chair close. “You do?”
He nodded. “Ready for a few more rounds.”
I laughed for first time since I left my husband and eight-year-old daughter a week ago in Bakersfield. I’m the Assistant City Manager, a job people say I’m good at, a job I like. Here, I dutifully drive my mother and myself sixteen blocks to the hospital and back, talk with nurses, and occasionally a doctor. It’s so mindless that it seems my other life doesn’t exist. March in San Francisco is freezing.
Dad and I watched a football game on the muted TV the way we used to when I was growing up. But instead of screaming at the screen, now he was quiet. His forehead wrinkled as he tried to follow the players’ push down the grid. When I looked again, his eyes had closed. His eyelashes were pale—almost invisible—I hadn’t looked so closely in years. His hand felt cool to the touch. I rubbed the calloused palm and his skin warmed.
He started talking under the mask. I bent toward him.
“I said, I’d like to know who your father is.” His eyes looked sincere.
“My father? Why?”
“I want to compliment him on his daughter.”
It took me a moment to understand and when I did, my throat tightened. Part of me felt happy. Another part, angry. It wasn’t me he’d complimented, but someone he’d just met.
The nurse comes in and places the restraints around my father’s wrists. “We don’t like to use these things,” she says, “but last night he kept trying to get out of bed. Has he ever been—” She stops and studies me for a moment. “Would you be able to sit with him tonight?”
She doesn’t say the word combative but that’s what I expected. Because he has been “combative,” as she put it. And not just here.
My mother got the worst of it. My father never left a mark that I could see, but still scared her so bad that she flinched whenever he came up fast and close. I remember a bloody nose once but don’t remember how it happened. My mind backs away.
Mom wants to visit Dad in the hospital just once a day. She darts forward, kisses him quickly on the forehead, and retreats to the corner like a small white bird. She opens a book, then falls off to sleep.
Me, he was easier on. The fact is he never hit me, maybe because I was a girl. The only girl. But he’d scream, his face so close to mine I could map the broken capillaries on his cheeks. “Can’t you do anything right!” he’d yell. Anything could set him off: missed homework, poorly parking the car, dishes stacked wrong in the dishwasher.
When the house was quiet again, he’d find me in my room. We’d all go out to big, fancy restaurants, The Blue Fox or Alioto’s. There I’d get to order anything, two of something even. Plus dessert. I remember the table crowded with half-eaten cuts of steak, crumbling blackberry pie, soupy ice cream.
I became the good girl, the never-good-enough girl.
“Sure,” I tell the nurse. “I can come back tonight.”
The CCU is dark when I arrive. It took longer than I’d expected to settle my mother down for the night, get her tea with lemon, and click on the rerun of ER. Walking down the hall of the hospital, I pass a mix of real and television sounds coming from half-lit rooms: a voice saying Hello? Hello?, a machine thrumming, the scream of police sirens.
My father’s body looks bigger than this morning, his face younger as if all the oxygen has pushed the wrinkles out. His foot with one sharp toenail hangs off the bed.
The faded Polaroid I’d brought in sits next to the tray of untouched food: apple juice, beef broth, and Jell-O with a dab of hardened Cool Whip. I break off a sliver. In the photo, my father hovers over the Christmas pot roast, seeming to relish the knife he’s holding and the holly-covered apron he has on. His mouth is open, telling a long-forgotten joke.
“Hey Dad,” I say, trying to sound upbeat. “How are ya?”
My father’s eyes flickers, but his hand keeps inching to the right. Now he has hold of the restraint and is trying to work it off. I push his arm away. “Don’t do that, Dad, okay?”
His mouth wrinkles into a frown. I recall the nurse saying if I’m right here the restraints aren’t necessary. I loosen the warm bindings. After a while, he dozes off and I open up my novel.
His leg twitches under the hospital blanket. My father turns toward me, his lips open as if he’s about to talk, then he turns away.
“Want something?” I nudge the mask higher on his nose. The light behind the bed shadows his eyes, and my hand over his face darkens them more.
Sounds of movement come again. When I look up, I see my father has kicked off the thin blanket and is struggling to swing his leg over the bed. His eyes are disappearing circles in his face.
“I’m late,” he says.
“Dad. You’re in a hospital. This is a hospital.”
He swings the other leg over. I put my fingers on top of his. “Go to sleep.” He bats at me with his free arm and misses.
“You’ll hurt yourself, Dad. Come on. The tubing.” I gently press on his chest so he’ll lie back.
“Get away!” The hand flies up again and hits me in the face. My cheek burns. I think, He wants to do this, he likes to do this.
“Get back to bed!” I shout in a voice that’s all too familiar. It’s not just the voice of my father that I heard growing up, but the one I find myself using with my daughter when she won’t do what I say. A voice that sickens me.
Still I scream. “Now!”
My father falls back on the bed, breathing hard.
The nurse rushes in the room, stopping at the foot of his bed. She looks from me to my father, his eyes big and wet and weepy above the mask. “Is everything all right in here?” she asks. Her voice has a forced calm.
I nod quickly.
She picks up the loose restraint on the bed, opens it, and slips my father’s wrist in. “Maybe it’d be easier if we used these tonight?”
I blink as if I have no idea what she’s talking about.
Just Go
Lyn stood outside Lipstick, the fem bar on Harrison, staring at the lot of dead Muni buses next door. Some looked whole except for a crushed window or torn off door, other were just used-up carcasses of aluminum. She pulled out a Camel from the pack she’d just bought, struck three matches before lighting the damn thing, and drew the smoke deep. She finished that cigarette and lit another. Sofia would disapprove, but Sofia would be late. She was always late coming off a shift in the ER. Lyn smoked the second cigarette slowly, ground the butt out on the sidewalk, and headed into the bar.
Inside, Lipstick had its familiar glow, the rows of liquor bottles backlit in blue, the hanging glasses coated pale yellow. The jukebox was softly spinning out “Crazy.”
Lyn leaned back on the barstool, letting her eyes adjust. The oval mahogany tables were pushed together in twos and threes, and gold confetti littered the floor. Last night must have been one long celebration, but right now the place was empty. Just her and this old gal in clean work boots sitting way down the bar. Nothing more depressing than clean work boots, Lyn thought, especially this time of day. It was just two in the afternoon. She would have been gladly at work—pulling wire and installing electrical sockets—if not for that noon appointment at the medical center.
“Tanqueray,” she said to the bartender. “Rocks.” As soon as the gin arrived, she drank it.
�
��Another?” the bartender asked.
“In a sec.” She wanted to feel this one hit first, reach into her bones, fill her breath.
Because she didn’t want to think about something else settling in her bones. She hated the thought of the doctor bringing her back in. “Just a few follow-up tests,” he’d say. “To be sure.” Even a few would be too many. No, she wanted to get out there on the shadowy dance floor, drag the old gal out, too, get the bartender to put on Etta, Aretha, the Gaga woman even, make the music so loud it buzzed their ears. She wanted to dance herself silly, kick and groove and spin.
When the bartender wagged the bottle, Lyn nodded, then danced her way toward the WOMEN’S.
The old gal, who was watching the Giants game on TV, grinned at Lyn as she got closer.
“How’s Zito doing?” Lyn asked, stopping alongside her. She was wearing an orange and black ball cap, her gray hair swept up in it.
“They need to get him out of there.”
“You sure?” Lyn stared up at the screen. “It’s only the second inning. He could work his way out of it.”
The old gal shook her head.
“Anything’s possible,” Lyn said, dancing her shoulders a little in the mirror behind the bar. “This is baseball.”
The woman’s smile got bigger. But when Lyn came out of the ladies room, she was gone.
An hour later, Sofia arrived. “I’m so sorry,” she said, kissing Lyn briefly on the cheek and sounding somehow cheerful. The ER at UC San Francisco was usually crazy, but today, Sofia said, the place was insane: defibrillators going blooey, an old man taking a swing at a security guard, other physicians’ pagers going unanswered and unanswered. At the end of her shift, a two-year-old came in from a car accident. “The little girl had a compound fracture and Mom was already headed to surgery. I just couldn’t leave her.”
“I know.” Lyn downed the quarter inch of gin left in glass, tilting away from Sophia. Her lover had a nose that could pick up day-old smoke on a sweater, much less two fresh cigarettes. Fuck, Lyn thought. For two years, she’d been so good. Followed every one of the doctor’s rules: low fat everything, no more than half a drink twice a week, forget even a single cigarette.
Sofia stared at Lyn but said nothing, settling down on the barstool alongside her. Though they were both thirty-nine, Sofia was the one who looked older, her blue eyes lined with dark wells from working long hours, the curly black hair she almost always kept pulled back patched with gray. Lyn’s brown hair was straight and thick, fully grown back after the chemo. She’d gained back the weight she’d lost, too, her waistline spilling now over the top of her Levi’s.
“Hey,” Sofia said. “How did your visit go?”
“Fine,” Lyn lied. A routine six-month, that’s all it was supposed to be. She knew something was wrong when the technician suddenly got quiet when just the moment before she’d been all breezy.
“Good to see you again, Mrs. Skyler,” she’d began—why did they insist on calling her Mrs.?—she’d never married anyone, including Sofia.
The woman kept chattering as the exam started. “Sorry, I know. Cold. Big breath here. Hold it. Beautiful. Keep holding. Good. Good.” Lyn breathed and didn’t breathe as instructed, watching the gray boom lower over her left breast, her only breast. Out of the blue the tech said, “Excuse me,” and quickly exited. She came back in the room and took another set of films. In silence.
“Is something wrong?” Lyn finally asked her.
“The doctor will speak with you.”
“Can’t you tell me?”
“I’m sorry,” the tech had said, with a weak smile.
Now Sofia asked her. “Did they say anything?”
“Blah blah blah. Have a nice day.”
“I’ll check for you. The results should be up by now.”
“No.” Lyn reached for the glass and remembered it was empty. She wished she felt drunker. “They’ll be in touch.”
They met at a 2010 Giants game, three years ago. Lincecum was on his way up then—Boy Wonder, Freak—and the bunch of them sitting behind first base started high-fiving any hand put up there in the excitement of what might be another shutout. Lyn’s seat happened to be next to Sofia’s and they got to talking about bobblehead giveaways. There’d been Sandoval, of course, looking way too svelte, and Bochy and Mays coming up. Those ridiculous heads and skinny arms, weren’t they great? Weird, but great. After the game, Lyn and Sofia kept talking, talked all the way up the stairs and through the gate until they were standing next to Lyn’s orange Camaro in the parking lot, still grinning. Lyn was attracted by Sofia’s muscular calves and delicate wrists, and Sofia—she said later—by Lyn’s square shoulders, and her easy, sometimes sarcastic, laugh. The red cowboy boots hadn’t hurt. That they came from different worlds—Sofia a physician, and Lyn an electrician—didn’t matter. They both loved baseball, the sheer grace of the game that burst wide open when the pitching went wild. Which it usually did by the sixth or seventh. And they both loved to dance. They danced in bars and clubs all over San Francisco: Badlands, Wild Side, The End Up, partying late the night the Giants clinched the 2010 World Series.
That next spring, they bought season tickets together, meeting up for dinner together at Delancy’s before the game, or heading off to Momo’s afterward, where Sofia nursed one drink and Lyn plowed through three. They discovered Lipstick and hung out there after work.
When Lyn’s cancer hit, their time together suddenly was filled not with baseball and drinks, but doctor visits, MRIs, and chemo appointments, all of which Sofia managed. Glad to, she said. After the surgery, Lyn opened her eyes to see Sofia floating above her. “It’s over,” Sofia told her, smiling. “Your margins are clean.” The next time Lyn woke up, Sofia stood alongside her bed adjusting the IV. Celebratory ginger ale arrived. The next day a steak appeared, overcooked but still Lyn’s favorite cut. After her discharge, Sofia drove Lyn straight to her townhouse to recover.
When Lyn was up and around again, still at Sofia’s but feeling better, she started cooking up a little dinner for them to eat together. Nothing fancy: spaghetti, chicken stir-fry, cube steak, but God, it felt good to be cooking again. Next she fixed the flickering light in the living room. Afterward, Sofia kept switching the thing on and off. “You make that look easy. I just assumed I’d just be stumbling around in the dark forever.”
Sofia stopped and looked at Lyn and Lyn looked back. Neither of them said anything but both of them knew. Lyn returned just once to her studio apartment in the Richmond, and that was to pack up. The place seemed too small, too much a part of the illness that, as the months passed, almost felt as if it had never happened at all.
Two weeks after the latest mammogram, Lyn stood in the kitchen, the room in Sofia’s house she’d most made her own. She had installed two sets of track lighting on the ceiling and hung a stained-glass lamp over the breakfast table. Sofia would just as soon eat Grape-Nuts out of the box or ramen in the dark—habits she’d picked up as an intern. But in this kitchen with its long granite counters and stainless steel everything, Lyn loved to cook. Especially when her mind felt jittery.
She peeled a white onion and forcefully cut it in eighths, then sixteenths, and scattered the pieces in the frying pan. She smeared butter over a roasting chicken with her fingers and pulled out a package of wood-smoked bacon from the refrigerator. Tonight, she was going to eat, and not one bit low-fat. Sofia had arrived home an hour ago from working back-to-back shifts, and was in the shower.
They’d argued. On the phone and again as soon as Sofia had walked through the door. About the results. About what to do next. Everything. Though neither said anything, both knew the shower was just an excuse to get away from each other. Lyn gathered the broken onion skins in her hands and dropped them in the compost pail under the sink. She laid a bunch of carrots on the cutting board and star
ted to peel one with quick, rough strokes.
The next time Lyn looked up, Sofia stood in the kitchen doorway, her hair wrapped in a thick white towel.
“Smells great,” she said softly, unwrapping the towel and spreading it across the top of a chair. “When’s dinner?”
She ran her fingers through her water-dark hair, the curls falling around her hands. Instead of iodine-stained scrubs, Sofia wore a blue T-shirt and plaid pajama bottoms now, tied at the waist with a tight bow.
“Won’t be ready for a good hour yet,” Lyn said more harshly than she’d intended. Not only had they pinpointed a tumor on the left, a spot under her collarbone had been discovered. The oncologist at UCSF, a gray-skinned man she’d never met, sat her in his office and talked about invasive globular this and estrogen positive that, saying the treatment wouldn’t be as easy this time. Lyn felt herself nod, as if to say, Sure, it’d been easy before, exhaustion so bad she couldn’t get out of bed—much less work—skin where eyelashes and eyebrows used to be, just skin, and a scar crawling like barbed wire across her chest, sure, all that had been a walk in the park. When he finished, she’d stood up, and walked out of the room with a strange sense of calm. Which was gone now.
“Lyn—”
“I told you, Sofia. I don’t want to.”
Sofia opened her mouth, then closed it. “But—” she said, pausing again. “Why not bring Webber in? Get his opinion? He knows your history, tolerance levels, everything.”
Webber had been Lyn’s oncologist two years ago, a physician Sofia knew from Stanford. The three of them crowded into the small exam room together as Webber—everyone called him by his last name—said, “Let’s hit this thing hard. Knock it clear out of the park.” Lyn’s nod then had been genuine. Not once during the tortuous twelve months of treatment—chemo followed by surgery followed by radiation—had Webber used the C-word. Lymphocytes, locoregional, lesion, yes. Lead off, strike zone, screw ball, lots. He loved baseball maybe even more than they did. But he and Sofia also threw around all kinds of impossible medical jargon that Lyn didn’t even try to decipher. She’d felt like shit. They were doctors, weren’t they? she’d thought. Let them take charge.
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