The Rules of Inheritance

by Smith, Claire Bidwell

  I speed along the freeway, streaming north. Driving is exhilarating. The sky is wide open, the world once again a fast place.

  I exit onto Hollywood Boulevard. The city is surreal. It’s somehow hard to believe that it’s all still here.

  Colin and I go to dinner at a Mexican restaurant. I drink margaritas until my limbs are heavy, until I don’t care anymore that my father is dying. Until I don’t care that I’m no longer in love with Colin.

  Candy comes and goes and when my half brother Eric arrives to visit my dad, I stay in Hollywood for three days. I call the condo every few hours for an update but nothing changes. I don’t know how to be away from my father. I don’t know how to be at home.

  On the third day I wake up early. My head is pounding from last night’s alcohol and I sit on the edge of the bed until the room comes into focus. Colin is asleep next to me, breathing softly into his pillow.

  I crawl out of bed and make my way outside to the back steps. I used to sit out here all the time when we first moved into this apartment. I sink down onto the top step, light a cigarette, and gaze down at Hollywood in the early morning. I let my eyes wander past the Capitol Records Building to where the city spreads out into a blanket of squat buildings, palm trees punctuating the landscape like pushpins on a map.

  I think about my dad in his condo, in his bed. About how we are inextricably linked, even in this very moment.

  This is it, I realize. This is the time in my life I’ve been moving toward all these years. I guess I thought I had longer, that maybe I wouldn’t lose my father until I was thirty. But I know that’s no longer true. He is going to die soon, and I am going to be alone.

  It feels like a choice, even though I know it isn’t.

  Years later I will realize that maybe it really was a choice. Just as stopping at Christopher’s that night in New Jersey was a choice, so was the one to arrive here, in this exact moment in my life.

  Some part of me must know that even now, because of what I do next.

  When I am finished with my cigarette, I stub it out and walk into the bedroom, where I nudge Colin until he opens his eyes.

  I’m moving in with my dad, I say.

  I know, he says, closing his eyes again.

  No, I mean for good.

  He opens his eyes again.

  ON MY WAY BACK to Garden Grove I replay the conversation with Colin. It was short and perfunctory. There wasn’t much to say.

  I’m shaking nonetheless. I’ve been trying to figure out how to leave Colin for years now, and I’m shocked by how easy it was to finally do so. He didn’t fight me. Not once. Admitted that it was over for him too. His eyes were dead and he blew cigarette smoke at the ceiling.

  We agreed that I would move my things out this week. We parted ways at the door and there was a wildness between us, something frightening and alive, fluttering like a bird.

  I grip the wheel of the car with both hands and try to focus on my dad.

  This is it. I’m really doing this, I think, as the car speeds south on the 101. Maybe when this is all over I’ll just move somewhere where nobody knows who I am. I’ll start over, pretend to be someone else, forget about all of this.

  When I walk into the condo forty-five minutes later, I can immediately sense that something is wrong. Two days’ worth of newspapers sits by the front door. Dishes are piled in the sink. The blinds are pulled shut against the noontime sun.

  I see Eric’s silhouette on the deck, the fine trail of smoke from the cigarette he holds between his fingers. My heart races as I make my way down the hallway to my father’s room. The blinds are pulled in there as well and the room is dim. His six-foot-five frame looks somehow small beneath the sheets.

  Dad, I say, taking one of his hands in mine.

  His eyelids flicker but do not open. His breath comes in ragged shifts.

  Dad?

  I let go of his hand, placing it gently at his side and find Eric on the patio.

  My voice is high, loud. What happened to Dad?

  What do you mean? Eric’s voice is flat.

  He’s completely out of it. He’s hardly breathing!

  Claire, he’s dying.

  I turn my back on him and go back to my father’s side. I pull a rolling office chair up as close to the bed as I can and pick up his hand again.

  After an hour his eyes focus, he flexes his feet. I squeeze his hand. I’ve decided not to tell him about me and Colin for the time being.

  After a while he looks over, his face registering my presence. His voice is gravelly when he speaks.

  I wish that I could just go to sleep and not wake up.

  I pull my knees up to my chest and dig my chin into them, biting back the tears. I don’t know how to respond.

  Honey, you have to let me go. You have to.

  Tears drip down into little translucent circles on my tank top.

  You have to, honey.

  Inside I’m screaming. But I know that he’s right.

  He closes his eyes and starts to slip into sleep again.

  I choke out a sob but he doesn’t seem to notice. There are things I need to say to him before he dies. I’m afraid to say them though. Saying them will mean that I’m letting go.

  I think about that night with Michel, about my own night with my mother. Why do we feel like we have to say these things, these simple things that we spend our whole lives saying in one way or another?

  Words. They are like living creatures. They must be honored.

  Dad, I say, squeezing his hand until he opens his eyes and looks at me.

  I love you so much.

  He smiles at me, hinting at a nod.

  I will miss you every day of my life.

  He blinks, a slow heavy one, a nodding blink.

  I manage to say to him, barely discernable through my closing throat, one last sentence.

  If I ever do anything great in my life, it will be because of you and mom.

  He nods at me and I try to memorize the color of his eyes. Gray like quarry stone.

  That’s it. Three sentences.

  He falls asleep, and I remain at his side for hours, watching him breathe and listening to the sound of kids playing in the pool outside the window.

  OVER THE NEXT COUPLE of days my dad pulls through whatever cloud he’d been drifting into and returns to a familiar state, although one in which he can no longer hear. The hospice nurse explains that sudden deafness can be a symptom of dying patients.

  I have to shout to be heard now, and hate the sound of my voice when I do. Sometimes I repeat the questions in my normal voice just so I can hear them the way I meant them to sound—soft and pliant. After a while I make up a series of flash cards that I can hold up instead.

  Are you in pain? Are you hungry? Are you cold?

  Before Eric leaves I spend one more day in Hollywood, packing up my belongings. Liz and Holly are living in LA now and they drop what they’re doing to help me pack. Abby helps me drive it all down and unload it into my father’s garage.

  And that’s it. I now live in a two-bedroom condo in Orange County. I soberly unpack my things into the dresser in the guest room, reluctantly place my toothbrush in the holder in the bathroom. Nobody can tell me how long my dad will live, how long I’ll be doing this for.

  It could be weeks or it could be months, the hospice nurse says.

  That night my father wakes me up every three hours. I stand, slit-eyed against the brightness of the room, at the foot of his bed. I drop morphine onto his tongue and I lift his legs, which he can no longer lift himself, and reposition them.

  The next day he is quiet. We sit together in the room, our reticence forced upon us. He reaches out his hand, and I lean forward to take it, my chin balanced on my knees, my eyes drifting to the corners.

  He fusses with the bedsheets and flexes his feet.

  I don’t want him to die, but I also don’t want it to go on like this.

  Colin drives down from Hollywood that afternoon. We sit on
the patio while my father sleeps and we say things that we needed to say a long time ago.

  We talk about when we first met, about that first summer when we were both so young and so sad. He holds me for a long time after that, and I soak his shirt with tears, my breath hot and childlike on his neck.

  When he leaves, I return to the chair at my father’s bedside. He is still sleeping, so I take one of his hands in mine and close my eyes too.

  I have never felt so alone in my life.

  A FEW DAYS GO BY. Liz comes over every day. She brings me lunch, and we sit on either side of my dad’s bed while he sleeps. Several years from now Liz’s beautiful sister will die of cancer, grief becoming an even deeper aspect of our friendship.

  For now, I am impossibly grateful for her presence. Even though we are both twenty-five, I can’t help but see us as teenagers still, a quality that makes it feel even more surreal to be the only ones here caring for my dad.

  When she goes back to work, panic rises in my sternum. My father is still sleeping and the condo is silent. I pad along the carpet in the hallway and stand in the doorway to his room, watching his chest rise and fall. The oxygen machine hisses in a corner.

  He only wakes once that night.

  The next morning I wake him gently and then sit beside him while he looks around, getting his bearings. I offer him a sip of water but he shakes his head, motioning for me to give him paper and a pen.

  Why? I shout. Can’t you speak to me?

  He insists. I pass him a pen and a small piece of paper, and then watch as he writes a series of numbers down in wobbly handwriting. They trail down the page in a seemingly meaningless order.

  19

  9

  6

  487

  9

  00

  13

  .98

  0.6

  19

  088.7

  I scan the numbers, trying to figure them out. I think about my father’s engineering background, about when he used to help me with my math homework in middle school.

  What are these?

  Here, just write a number, he finally says, and thrusts the paper at me.

  I write down the number three and hold it up for him to see.

  Where do they come from? He has a look of awe on his face.

  I laugh then and he does too. We both shrug at each other.

  I leave the room after a while and place a call to hospice. Confusion in the last days is normal, says the nurse on the phone.

  The last days?

  Your father is actively dying, Claire.

  I AM AFRAID to leave the room now, so I take up residence in the chair beside my father’s bed. I haven’t showered in two days, but I am afraid to be away from him for longer than a minute or two at a time.

  He passes in and out of lucidity, sleeping mostly, his eyes half-open, each breath few and far between.

  My friends come over one by one. Holly sits in the living room reading magazines. Abby comes too, and I finally take a shower after she promises to alert me if anything changes with my father. The scalding water feels good and I stay there longer than I mean to. When I emerge, I find her sitting in the gloom, holding my father’s hand and singing to him. She’d only met him once before, and I cannot fathom how large her heart must be to do what she is doing in this moment.

  After Abby leaves I take up my post in the chair again, my father’s hand in mine. I am determined to be here when he takes his last breath, determined to be holding his hand. I keep thinking about all the ways he’s done this for me. All the things he did for others in his life. The least I can do is be here for him.

  I watch as his mouth widens and each breath becomes deeper. His eyes are partly open, but I know that he is unconscious. The tendons in his fingers jerk, twitching in sleep. I stare at his face and wonder what is happening in his body, his mind.

  I imagine that it’s difficult for the body to stop functioning, for all these organs and nerves and synapses to just cease to do what they’ve done for eighty-three years.

  After a while, I begin to kind of pray.

  “Pray” isn’t the right word because I don’t think I really know how to do that. But I close my eyes and I think about my mother. I think about my father’s parents too. I try to summon their presence.

  Can you hear me?

  Mom?

  Grandma?

  Please, please, please. Can you hear me?

  Dad is here, I whisper to them. He’s ready.

  I picture my mother greeting him, see her pressing herself to him just to feel the warmth that my hands have left in his.

  After a few minutes I open my eyes to find that his are open.

  He leans forward suddenly and puts his hand on my face, my hair, my eyes. I close my eyes and let him. I don’t think he’s touched me like this since I was a kid. When he withdraws his hand, I look at him and see that there are tears in his eyes.

  He talks then, for the first time in almost a day.

  Life is worth living, he says suddenly, sounding more coherent than he has in days.

  Years later, when I look down at the note card upon which I copied these words down, they will never cease to slay me.

  Death and birth are such sweet sorrows, he continues. If there were no death, you would never know how sweet life really is. Somebody was smart enough to put that down in writing one day.

  THOSE WORDS WERE HIS LAST. The few things he utters over the next day are nonsensical, unintelligible. My father is all but gone.

  Colin drives down from Hollywood again that night. We sit by my father’s bedside, not talking, just watching his chest rise and fall and counting the seconds between each breath. The intervals grow longer and longer.

  Past midnight Colin goes to bed, and I pull a blanket over myself in the chair. I am exhausted but I don’t know how to let go of my father’s hand.

  I don’t know how to let go of my father.

  I want to scoop him up like a baby, to run away with him. I don’t want to do this. I don’t want to say good-bye.

  But I know that I must. I know that in order to walk forward from here, I must. Everything about the last few years rises up through me. My mother and Vermont. Colin and New York. Los Angeles and all that is to come.

  I stand and lean over the bed, laying my head down on my father’s chest. I can hear his heart, distant and muddled within all the layers of him. I let my head rise and fall with each cadence of his breath. I want to stay here forever.

  I close my eyes and sink into sleep.

  A few hours later I wake up. Colin is next to me, his hand on my shoulder. I am back in the chair but still holding my father’s hand, my wrist throbbing against the bedrail. My eyes flick to my father’s face.