Families and Other Nonreturnable Gifts

by Claire Lazebnik

  Michael shakes my hand and says good-bye to Jacob, and then he and Mom walk down the hallway, so close that their arms brush against each other. Neither of them moves any farther apart.

  “Wow,” I say, watching as they turn the corner. “There’s nothing like your husband’s having a heart attack to make you feel all young and flirty again.”

  Jacob just sighs, which annoys me.

  “I can’t believe her,” I say. “It’s sick.”

  “She was on a date, Keats. And she’s divorcing your dad. Some women wouldn’t have shown up at all under those circumstances.”

  “Maybe that would have been better than her showing up and being all over that guy.”

  “She wasn’t exactly all over him,” Jacob says. “Come on, give her a break.” Then more gently, “I know this is all really hard on you—”

  “Oh, just be quiet,” I snap, so he stops talking, and we sit there in silence.

  After Mom rejoins us, Dr. Hanson invites her and me into the room, where he informs us that he’s already talked to Hopkins and she’s in favor of the stent procedure, so of course, Mom immediately signs the necessary paperwork.

  Dad mostly seems to be listening to the conversation, but sometimes he closes his eyes, maybe dozing, maybe not, it’s hard to tell. When they’re open, his gaze follows Mom around the room. She’s kind to him, pats his hand, asks the doctor lots of concerned questions about the operation and his prognosis, but she’s very calm and seems more like a fond sister than a wife of thirty years.

  Dad’s eyes are hungry for her under his crazy eyebrows, devouring her features whenever he can keep them open. When she touches his arm, his hand reaches for hers, but he’s too weak to hold on for more than a moment or two, and when his grasp slips, she moves her hand away.

  After the consultation, there’s a bustle of activity as the nurses come in to prep my dad for the surgery. Dr. Hanson wishes us well, promises to follow up with the attending doctor, claps Dad on the shoulder without actually making any eye contact with him, and leaves.

  Mom and I go sit with Jacob again. I wait for her to tell him he should go home, but she doesn’t. He offers to find some coffee for us. She says that would be lovely and orders me to go with him.

  “A walk will do you good,” she says. “There’s nothing more enervating than sitting around waiting for news. And it’s going to be a long wait now.”

  Jacob spots a nurse and asks her where we can get coffee. “There’s a machine in the main hospital lobby, but the coffee in it is pretty disgusting,” she says. “The cafeteria’s closed for the night, but if you’re willing to leave the building, there’s a McDonald’s about two blocks away that’s open until midnight.”

  “Let’s do that,” Jacob says to me. “I could use one of their hot fudge sundaes. Or three. I never ate dinner.”

  “Really?” I say. “Why’s that? Something come up?”

  As we walk away from the hospital, I say, “Do you think Mom’s right, that he’ll be fine?”

  “I do,” Jacob says. “I think it will be a tough few weeks, and then he’ll be back to normal.”

  “Normal, meaning old and frail.” I remember how Dad had needed Jacob’s support to walk into my apartment the other night. His heart was probably already failing then, and we just didn’t know it.

  “They can’t make him younger,” Jacob says. “But maybe they can make him healthier.”

  “Or turn him into a cyborg.”

  “That would be good. Especially if they gave him X-ray vision.”

  “It would be wasted on Dad. It would never even occur to him to look under girls’ clothes.”

  “Which is, of course, the whole point of X-ray vision.”

  We go into the restaurant and order a couple of sundaes and three coffees.

  “Let’s sit down for a few minutes,” I say. “The sundaes will melt if we don’t eat them right away. Mom can wait for her coffee.”

  “I’m not convinced this stuff can melt,” he says, eyeing the plastic container dubiously. But we sit down at a table anyway and dig in.

  It doesn’t seem like a night for light conversation, so at first we’re silent while we eat, and then I say, “You’ve never told me exactly what happened with your parents, Jacob—how they died. Is it rude of me to ask? Do you hate talking about it?”

  “I don’t mind.” He plunges his spoon in and out of his sundae, gazing down at the holes he’s creating. “Basically they—we—just had really bad luck. Mom had some kind of disease when she was a kid—I don’t even know exactly what it was, and she always said it might not have been correctly diagnosed in the first place. Anyway, she got better, that wasn’t the problem, but when she was still sick, the doctors gave her a million X-rays, and I guess it was a podunk little hospital in the middle of nowhere, and they weren’t particularly good at giving X-rays. So she died of leukemia when I was like five. Then when I was twelve, my dad had this pain in his stomach and he ignored it for too long—just kept popping painkillers; he was like that, always Mr. Stoic—and his appendix burst, which would have been bad but not fatal, except he picked up a staph infection in the operating room, which got into his blood and killed him.” He smiles bleakly. “Like I said, really bad luck.”

  “God, Jacob, that’s awful. Who took care of you after your father died?”

  “I moved in with my mother’s brother’s family. It wasn’t a happy experience. I was”—he gestures at himself—“like this. Unathletic, small, nerdy…a little intellectual kid from New Jersey, and suddenly I’m living with these huge, sports-crazy Texans. Football was a religion to them. They’re not mean or anything—they meant well, and my aunt would have done anything to make me feel at home—but I wasn’t like them and we all knew it. And the school situation was really tough.”

  “I’m sorry.” I push away my sundae. I feel weighed down by the sadness of the world, by an old man with a tube in his nose and a teenage boy, smart and sensitive, but stranded all alone in the world. “I can’t believe you can even bear to walk into a hospital, given your history.”

  “I don’t love it. This is my first time in years.”

  “Trust my family to drag you back down into something unpleasant.”

  Jacob looks up at me. There’s a tiny smear of hot fudge at the corner of his mouth. “Your family? Your family is what saved me. Your family is—”

  “Crazy?”

  “Yeah,” he says. “In the best ways. Seriously, Keats, screw the hospital—I’d crawl to hell and back for your parents.” He wipes at his mouth with a napkin, which is a big relief. I was ready to spring at him and get that fudge sauce off myself. He balls it up and drops it in the sundae dish. “Come on. Let’s bring your mother her coffee. And Keats—”

  I’m already standing up and slinging my bag over my shoulder. I stop and say, “What?”

  “Go easy on her, okay? She’s in a tough position right now.”

  It’s annoying and I’m on the verge of snapping at him that he has no right to tell me how to deal with my own mother, but because I was just picturing the lonely teenage boy he once was, I stop myself and just say, “I know,” and leave it at that.

  * * *

  An eternity later, the doctor comes and tells us the operation went smoothly.

  We don’t exactly pop a champagne cork or anything, but Mom and I hug and Jacob looks relieved. I immediately call Tom and tell him. I’ve clearly woken him up but he’s happy to hear the good news and says he’ll come pick us up whenever we want to go home.

  A little while later, they let us see Dad, who’s been transferred to a real hospital room now, but he’s out cold and we don’t wake him up.

  When Tom comes to pick up me and Mom, Jacob says he’s going to stay at the hospital. “No one’s waiting for me at home, so I might as well make myself useful,” he says. “I’m good at sleeping in a chair—I do it at the library all the time.”

  Once again he’s a better child to my father than I am. I wish
I could just be grateful and not feel like he’s showing me up.

  9.

  Dad stays in the hospital for a few more days. He gets stronger by the hour and pretty soon he’s demanding his laptop, which Jacob fetches from the apartment along with some journals and mail and Jacob’s own car, which he left there when he rode in the ambulance. He pretty much camps out in the hospital room, working on his laptop when Dad’s asleep, leaving only when Mom and I ask him to run an errand or when someone wants time alone with the patient.

  I spend most of the weekend at the hospital, and when I go back to work on Monday, Rochelle lets me leave early. Her own parents have had a lot of health problems recently, so she’s pretty sympathetic.

  Tom goes with me that night to see my dad. He tries to be jovial and hearty—“Sounds like you’re going to be just fine, Larry!” But my father responds with his usual dryness—“Such a meaningful word, fine, especially in this context”—and I think they’re both relieved when the visit’s up.

  Hopkins checks in regularly by phone and says she’ll fly out in a few days. “I don’t need to see him while he’s still in the hospital,” she says to me during a quick phone conversation. “There are enough doctors there already. I assume that he’ll move back in with Mom when he leaves?”

  I assume so, too.

  “He’ll go home when he leaves the hospital, right?” I say to my mother when we meet with the cardiologist on Tuesday during my lunch break.

  “Yes, of course,” Mom says brightly. “Back to his apartment.”

  “I meant home, home.”

  She just turns to the doctor. “So when do you think he’ll be released?”

  “I think he’ll be ready tomorrow, barring some unforeseen blip.”

  Then he bids us a cheerful good-bye, clearly pleased with the whole situation: Look, Ma, I saved another life!

  Once he’s gone, I start to say, “Dad needs to be—” but Mom cuts me off before I can finish the sentence.

  “Forget it, Keats. He’s not moving back to the house. For one thing, it’s not his home anymore, and for another, I’m in the middle of trying to sell it. The last thing I need is an old man in pajamas wandering around, looking like death warmed over. People will run screaming out of there.”

  “Gee,” I say. “Some people might call that attitude heartless.”

  “Thanks for being so understanding.” She shakes her head slowly. “I’m not trying to win an ex-wife of the year award, Keats, but I don’t think I’m being cruel, either. I’m willing to help take care of your father, but I don’t want him back in my house. It took me ten years to get him out the first time. If I let him slip back in, I’ll never get him out again. Especially now that he’s ill. Of course, if you want to take him in, be my guest. Don’t you and Tom have an extra room?”

  “You mean Tom’s office?”

  “Your father needs care, and you’re saving space for file cabinets? Some might call that heartless.”

  I hate the way she always twists things around on me. “Come on, Mom—the guy was your husband for, like, thirty years. And you’re not willing to give him a place to recover?”

  “He’s your blood relative, not mine.” She prowls restlessly around the small conference room. I have a feeling a lot of people have been given bad news in here. There are boxes of tissues everywhere you look. Mom straightens one of them now so it aligns with the edge of the large square table, then wheels around suddenly, her skirt twirling. “As I said, I’ll do anything else. I’ll check in on him, do his grocery shopping, pick up his meds, keep him company—but I won’t live with him again. Once he’s back in his apartment, you and I can take shifts caring for him—”

  “What about at night? He shouldn’t be alone at night, the doctor said. Not at first.”

  “Hopkins is coming in a couple of days. She can stay with him while she’s in town.”

  “And until then?”

  Mom folds her arms and looks at me expectantly.

  “I don’t want to sleep over there,” I say. The very thought makes me want to cry. I love my apartment. I love sleeping with Tom. I don’t want to have to stay at my dad’s.

  “But you will,” Mom says.

  * * *

  I bring my overnight bag to work the next day. Rochelle comes to talk to me in my little cubicle and notices it immediately. She’s like that: eyes like a hawk. Nothing slips by her.

  I explain my plan for that evening, and she asks me about my dad. She knows who he is, of course. When she first interviewed me two years ago, the first thing she said was, “I assume you’re related to Professor Sedlak over at that other school?” When I admitted I was his daughter, she peered at me with her unnervingly large and glittering brown eyes and said, “He could probably get you a job upriver from here. Harvard Square’s a much more exciting place to spend your days. You sure you don’t want that?”

  “I want this job,” I said. “If you’ll take me.”

  She studied me thoughtfully for a moment, then got very businesslike, asking me how many words I typed a minute and that sort of thing. She hired me as her assistant and in less than a year had promoted me to office manager.

  After I fill her in on how my dad’s doing, she changes subject abruptly. “Did you get a chance to read Mark’s newsletter draft?”

  “I tried. It wasn’t easy to get through.”

  “I know, right? I love the guy, but you’d think he never took an English class in his life.” Mark Connelly, who maintains our website, is a tech whiz, but every time he has to write any text at all, it’s an ungrammatical and incoherent mess. “Look, Keats, I know it’s not in your job description—”

  She doesn’t have to finish. We’ve had this conversation so many times we now do it in shorthand. “It’s okay,” I say. “I don’t mind.”

  She stands up and a beautiful smell of musk and patchouli wafts off of her. I love the way Rochelle smells. I love the way she looks, too, with her huge silver hoops, silk tank tops, and severely tailored pants: businesslike and gorgeous at the same time. Not many women can pull that off. Rochelle’s not young, either—I’ve heard both fifty-three and forty-seven, from different people—but I guess style is ageless.

  She thanks me, then shakes her head. “You’re too good for this job, Keats. If I were a better person, I’d tell you to go do something more with your life. But I don’t want to lose you. Do you remember Lois? The woman who trained you? She always ran around like a chicken with its head cut off, frazzled, like she couldn’t keep up. And she couldn’t. Nothing was ever done on time. You—you’re always relaxed, chatting with people—but you get everything done and done well. You’re a force of nature, Keats.”

  “Hey, could you tell my boss how great I am?” I say jovially. “Maybe she’ll give me a raise.”

  “In this economy?” She gives a gentle hoot. “Sweetheart, be glad you’ve got a job. I know I am. The pay’s shit and the hours are long, but I’m telling you there are a hundred people who would kill to be in our shoes.”

  “In yours, at least,” I say, glancing down at her gray suede pumps.

  “They are pretty, aren’t they?” She surveys them with a sigh of satisfaction, then moves to the doorway. “Can you have the newsletter rewritten by this afternoon?”

  “Yup,” I say, because it will take me less than half an hour to rewrite Mark’s draft. The sad thing is it probably took him an entire day of wrestling with the words to screw it up so badly in the first place. But I’ll figure out what he was trying to say and rephrase it all, and Rochelle will tell him I did a “light edit” on it, and that’s all he’ll think it was, because it will say what he meant to say in the first place—what he thought he had succeeded in saying but hadn’t. Only Rochelle and I will know that I’ve rewritten every single word.

  I’m barely into it when I get another visitor. Cathy peeks in the opening that’s not a doorway because there’s no actual door. “Got a second?”

  “Sure.”

 
; She enters and leans her hip against the edge of my desk. “Is it true that your dad’s sick? Someone just told me he was in the hospital.”

  People at the office are very interested in my dad’s heart attack. I’m the only person who works there who isn’t over forty, and everyone else already has a sick parent or two. I feel like I’ve just become a member of a club I hadn’t known existed until now.

  “He was. He should be home now.” I look at my watch. “As of about an hour ago, if all went well.” Mom and Jacob were going to drive him to his apartment and get him settled there.

  “Oh, good. I was really shocked to hear he was sick. He seemed so vibrant and healthy at your birthday party.”

  Is she serious? He seemed like a physical wreck to me that night. “Well, the good news is he’s really doing great now.” I switch gears. “Hey, Cathy, speaking of that dinner…After everyone left, I started thinking about how you and Jacob are around the same age and in the same field, and it occurred to me that maybe, you know…” I let my sentence trail off.

  Cathy cocks her head at me. “Is he the guy you wanted to fix me up with? I was wondering about that.”

  I nod. “He’s a really good guy. Seriously, he’s like my brother. Except he’s better than my real brother. Less crazy. I mean, I love my brother, but he’s nuts.”

  “How long have you known him?”

  “Jacob?” I lean way back in my seat so I can prop my feet up on the desk. “Feels like forever. Maybe six years?”

  “Wow. So what kind of girls does he usually date?”

  “I have no idea. He’s never brought anyone to meet us.”

  She twists her mouth. “He didn’t seem all that into me.”

  “That’s only because my father sucks all the attention toward himself. It makes it hard for anyone else to connect. And Jacob’s a little shy.”

  “So am I.”

  “See? A perfect fit.”

  “Yeah, maybe. Let me just think about it first.” She pulls a book out of her backpack. “I wanted to show you this: I found my old school copy of your dad’s book and I’m rereading it. It’s amazing. That whole section about Russia over the centuries—it’s like a disaster movie, where you want to yell at the characters to stop what they’re doing, but you can’t. Don’t you think?”