Mendocino Fire - читать бесплатно онлайн полную версию книги автора Elizabeth Tallent (Briar Switch) #10

Briar Switch

“Sure you want to go out in that?” he asks from his side of the counter, and in her frustration with his slowness to hand over the keys she says only, “I’m sure.” He says, “Because it’s really coming down,” and she says, “My father is dying,” immediately sorry to have marketed as explanation this truth no one should be able to bear, not her, not this stranger whose answer comes after a pause: “I’m sorry.” After another pause he says, “Lost my dad last year.” How distraught does she appear to his eyes, how likely to end up in a ditch? She discovers the necessary next utterance: “I’m sorry.” He says, paging through her paperwork, “Yeah, a year ago.” Mine is going to die tonight, and you’re keeping me from getting there, she thinks and does not say. Ten minutes earlier she stepped from the flow and thumbed her phone awake while disembarking passengers jostled past. She’d stood stock-still, taking in No messages, good news with a loophole, since it’s unclear, if he does die, how much time would elapse before her brother or sister would remember to call her, and if worst comes to worst — a phrase of her father’s — there will be an interval when the last-minute reconciliation she desires no longer has a chance of coming true, though she rushes toward it unknowing. Of all the catastrophes this night can conceivably hold, to fly toward him when he is already dead is the most desolating, and she has no means of ruling it out. The agent says, “Lung cancer,” and she wills patience into her response, saying, again, “I’m sorry,” then, meaning it, “Lung cancer is terrible,” suppressing What my father has, too, but maybe he detects their almost-comradeship in the bitterness with which she pronounced lung cancer, maybe that semblance of a bond appeases his doubt about her, because what he says next, left thumb anchoring the clipboard while his right fingertips pivot it to face her, is “Please sign by the X,” his voice spare, his professional affability chastened by cancer-awe and remembrance of his father, and she likes him for letting sadness show, thinking Not such a bad delay, scribbling her never-liked first name and the surname belonging to her father, not so much time lost, and if his questions have exceeded the normal agent-customer regimen, he must have felt obliged to rule out the intoxication implied by her haywire demeanor. She finds she’s relying tonight on the words and turns of phrase her father favors — or does she always, forgetting the language was his first, and what she owes? Haywire is a pet indictment of his, more than once aimed at her, and was it especially intractable to work with, the wire used to bind hay? They stand there ruled by the jolliness of Christmas music, between them, easily within her reach, the counter where the document packet waits, and the fob with the keys, and her California driver’s license with a ten-years-younger her, the red hair she had then causing people in his position to have to glance from the forty-three-year-old professor to the photo and back again, her credit card with its holograph of a dove whose wings, when the card tips one way, splay open, and when tipped the other, snap shut, an endlessly replicable optical caprice that had fascinated her sister’s son on her long-ago last visit when, for fear of seeming an intolerant, starchy aunt, she hadn’t stopped his rummaging through her wallet; he’d been set on keeping the card, and her sister had a terrible time getting it back from him, and the credit card’s each and every use recalls for her the fluster of her sister’s embarrassment and her own realization that she had set the boy up to get into trouble. The agent says, “I used to hide his cigarettes when I was a kid. Stop him smoking, was my plan. Like there aren’t a million boxes of Marlboros in the world.”

She has no time, and why is it her business to contradict the derision he directs at the futility of hiding those cigarettes — no, immodesty, that’s more precisely what he’s scorned, the child’s narcissism in believing he can save the father. But what is less deserving of scorn than a child’s desire to stave off death? If he could tolerate her saying such a thing aloud, she would say But that’s what I feel, why I need to get there, because I’m the one who can keep him from dying, they don’t think so but I’m the strong one, me, it’s me he needs, but no one hearing this would accept these as the truths of a person sane and competent, though they are, she insists on believing they are. She tells the agent, “You were just trying to help.” He takes off his glasses and then doesn’t know what to polish them on and so puts them back on again and regards her through them (possibly they are both suddenly a little bit aware of his glasses) and shakes his head to (she thinks) disavow or apologize for the nearness of tears, and because of those tears she is constrained to try to connect with him again, saying, “I am very sorry for your loss,” strange how the imperative for social accord persists in an emergency, she thinks, or does it only persist for women, and he says “Last winter,” and then, impressed, “Gosh, this is strange. A year ago today,” and she says “No” brightly, credulously, and he says, “That’s — I’d forgotten today is the day.” She says “My dad is down to hours” and hears how that sounds like a trivial and even heartless confirmation of the coincidence, allowing it to overshadow the individuality of the two deaths. The last thing her supremely private, exactingly rational father would want is for his death to be marveled at publicly, as half of a coincidence. Her father has never held back when offended, and two years ago rebuked some flippant political remark of hers with “You have a smart mouth on you,” the resulting lull broken by the clink of knives and forks laid against plates down the length of the Thanksgiving table, nobody willing to transgress against the stare he was directing at her by the assertion of immunity implicit in taking another bite any more than gazelles would have stuck their noses back down to graze after hearing a rustling in nearby grass, and when he said, “It’s amazing you ever got anywhere with that smart mouth,” their distress — her mother’s, her brother’s, her sister’s and sister’s husband’s and even the children’s — was more readily identifiable as an injury inflicted on people who did not deserve it than her own panic was, both because that panic, clenched, inarticulate, left her ashamed, and because whenever he believed she’d done something wrong some treacherous sliver of self sided with him and accepted his contempt, whereas she didn’t believe that the others at the table deserved what he was dishing out. Their quashed enjoyment of what was after all Thanksgiving prompted her to resistance — why should they feel afraid at their own table? — and returning his stare she had said, referring, as he had, to her recent hiring by a California university, suddenly hopeful, trusting that if she claimed the achievement with unabashed boldness he would have to concede its worth, “I did get somewhere,” and he had said, “And how long before you mess that up,” and the silence at the table extended two years, and could have lasted indefinitely, no word from her father (or mother, or sister, or brother), no word from her to anyone at home ever again (because couldn’t someone have said Dad, don’t? — weren’t they her family as much as his?), if the hospice worker had not called to tell her that her father had less than twenty-four hours to live. Whose decision was it, to call her at the very end, when, the hospice worker told her, He’s been fighting for a year? Again the screen of the phone she fishes from her pocket affirms: No messages.

The agent turns aside to the computer, clicks in swift bursts, swerves the mouse, replaces the keys on her paperwork with a different set, nods at her to take them. She does, and he says, “Upgraded you.”

“What?”

“Best vehicle we’ve got for snow like this.” He says unhappily, “What I should have advised you to take in the first place. So.”

But she ought to have known to request their best car for snow; it shouldn’t have been up to him to remedy her oversight. “Do you need my card again?”

“No, no. No additional cost. Just, this big guy is gonna get you there safe.”

Given his no doubt superior prowess at driving in snow, he’s offering to drive, his empathy turning proprietary, and she is about to protest when she gets it. This big guy is the vehicle. Embarrassed, she says, “Okay, thanks.” When that seems inadequate: “Really, thank you.”

“Good news is, the plows are out.”

Now that she’s holding the keys she risks asking, “Cars are getting through?” Earlier, in answer to one of his questions, she’d told him her destination, the small city her parents retired to.

“You have a shot,” he says. “Ever driven in a blizzard?”

“I grew up here.” She suppresses an impulse to account for turning up at his counter looking like she’s never heard of winter, in the shirt she was wearing when she answered the phone and it was the hospice worker, in the same black suit she’d worn teaching her seminar, ankle boots whose three-inch heels will be tricky in snow, no gloves, too-light raincoat. She says, “I learned to drive here. But it’s been a while.”

“You’ve got a full tank of gas,” he says. “Say you do get stuck, you’d run the heater for fifteen minutes, get nice and warm, then turn it off, wait till you couldn’t stand the cold before starting that engine again, and you’d want to watch the clock all night long, getting out once an hour to clear snow from the tailpipe — remember, once an hour. Highway patrol will reach you soon as they can.”

What they’re both thinking is, her father will die while she’s stuck in the snow, and she takes out her phone, bows her head for privacy, taps twice. No messages.

He says, “Hang on just a sec” and rummages under the counter before tearing the wrapping paper from a box and holding out a cap knitted in shambly stripes, olive and turquoise and pink and yellow and purple, saying, “So your ears won’t freeze off,” and she says, “You knew it was a hat?” and he grimaces and says, “Saw the work in progress,” and she says, “But somebody made this for you,” and he says, “If I wear it it’ll just encourage her,” and she dislikes this joke at the expense of the knitter, his coworker presumably, whose not-bad prank, the hat’s whimsy a comment on his sturdy blond, blue-eyed humorlessness, just lost its chance. The knitter, whoever she is, isn’t going to get to say Put it on! Oh come on! Put it on! He must pick up on her reluctance to accept the hat, because what he says next is “Take it for luck.” She makes the face you make when someone says a thing wrong enough to make you doubt all the right things they’ve said up till then, and he says, “I’m sorry, there’s no such thing as luck on a night like this, is there. I just mean—.” There’s a disconcerted tension between them before she commits, pulls on the hat, gives him the goofy smile he was supposed to give the knitter, and how could she do that, she asks herself, smile when her father is dying, and walks away fast while hidden speakers sing Angels we have heard on high—her phone, drawn again from an inside raincoat pocket, maintains No messages—and from his readiness to part with the hat, she guesses she’s done him a favor, because it suggested the gladness of a person shucking off an entanglement, a gladness whose unwilling witness she has been more than once, the most devastating occasion just last spring, sitting up in a hotel bed as her lover turned toward her from the window with a phone clasped to her ear while saying, promising, really, lightly, naturally promising into the phone I’ll be home tomorrow, and if her lover had only stayed looking out the window at the lights of the city where neither of them lived, the particular pain of being gladly forsaken would never have been driven through her heart — and what’s uncanny, what is really staggering, is the immutability of the shock of loss, and the way no matter who the lover was, however singular, the loss has something in common with previous losses, as if a single never-ending shock runs from beginning to end of her life and she gains access to it only at rare intervals. And when she imagines the grief she will feel at her father’s death she imagines it as another interval of that shock, which isn’t to say more of the same because for it to feel “the same” she would have to have adapted to it and that’s not possible, there is only living through it without understanding, there is only barely living through it. And already there is the next loss, lying in wait in the next several hours, though he — her father — would hate it if he knew she conceived of the loss of him as next, his psyche or character is such that he needs to believe he is the only, and she could be mistaken, maybe the rental agent or any person who has gone through the death of a father would warn her not to conjecture from what she’s previously lived through, and it comes to her, she can turn around, walk back and ask him How did you get through this? and the good agent would grope for an answer, needing some time, maybe, to adapt to these new, higher stakes between them, and she would be almost as comforted by his diligence in seeking the honest answer she needs as she would be by his tendering some useful description of how grief can be borne — only are use and usefulness irrelevant now, is there any human thing you can hold onto, going to meet grief, or is it saner to walk into it with a bare heart, the sliding glass doors parting and wind booming in, her hair writhing up around the tight knitted cap and slashing across, catching on her chapped lips, the animal in her tuning in to the emergency of zero-degree night. The world takes a giant step closer. All of this is really going to happen. For a stunned instant she can’t move, and the doors slide closed again. In the glass-box hush she tells herself You have to, and though she’s not aware of having moved, the doors slide open again.

California girl is what her brother sometimes called her, meaning lightweight and out of touch, no longer adapted to harsh Iowa-caliber reality, and she can’t turn out to be what her brother implied she is, a California abandoner, an escaper and eluder of responsibility, the only child not there the night her father lies dying, she can’t bear that, the parking lot’s raw cold ablaze in her chest; it sets her coughing. Her raincoat is gauze, and when she looks down, each button sports a crescent of snow. If only the knitter had knit mittens, too, her hands would be cozy striped paws, not fisted, freezing, in useless pockets. Inside her stupid boots her toes begin to sting. Behind, the low-slung terminal sends out its diligent, snow-defused radiance. If her father is still conscious he has observed that her brother is there and her sister is there and she is not. But they live here. All her sister had to do is drive across town. Her brother lives in a different but nearby small town and would have had to drive for twenty minutes, but what is twenty minutes earlier in the day when the storm had barely begun compared to these wheeling veils, the white sky’s swept and shuddering slow-motion dump? She’s no longer capable of driving in snow like this, if she ever was. Here comes shame. Let it come. Shame is better than getting herself killed. Sure you want to go out in this? Give in, turn back, walk through those sliding doors into warmth, into refuge, choose the chair on the end of a row of chairs, drop your bag, slouch down, cover your eyes, see if you can sleep, but no, to spend the coming hours sleeping in the impersonal haven of the terminal would be the most terrible mistake she’s ever made in regard to her father. No messages very probably means he is still alive, and if he is conscious and can recognize her, then he will feel forgiven, and it will mean something that she rushed to get to him. Her fucked-up family. As for anger at their withholding news of his cancer, delegating the call to her to the hospice worker, that’s going to have to wait. She can see the front door of her parents’ duplex as clearly as if she’s facing it, and the door is numinous in the way of doors about to open, and she’s destined to stand there facing it and waiting for it to open. It seems a minor matter, the distance between where she is now and the actual location in space of that door. Breath pluming, hers the only tracks in the Arctic, halogen lamps blurring and refocusing, car after car, hard-candy colors dimmed, each car a neutral platinum glaze frozen around a core of essential dark privacy. Wonderful, in a way cars rarely are — she never sees cars, really. She’s not a person cars matter to, but these do, now, set apart by the storm, they matter like musk oxen would matter, besieged in their fortress bodies, hunkered down to endure, her aliveness called to by theirs, the aliveness of cars which of course does not exist. Still, it is fantastic, the vast field of empty, gallant vehicles. Not too long ago, someone must have shoveled around them and done some scraping of windshields. When she reaches the SUV he chose for her, the big guy, she cuffs snow from its windshield and packs it. The snowball flies soundlessly through falling snow. Isn’t that beautiful? Why is it? — something about the opposition, the pure, moving focus of the sphere piercing tall flexing vertical wave after wave of cascading, blown-back snow. The SUV beeps its response, and she hears the thunk of its locks unlatching. Under the dome light whirl the bright particles gusting in behind her. The messenger bag, her only piece of luggage, plops into the backseat, snow fanning out, sparkling across the upholstery. Then comes the chill hospitable order of the new-car interior, the dashboard requiring several minutes’ concentration to master — the embarrassment, as if anyone is watching, of not right away grasping how to work stuff like this, or maybe it feels like one’s technological prowess is continually being assessed these days and no fumbling with a machine is ever truly forgivable, just as language is an inherently social endeavor and mistakes in figuring out language carry a special, outcast charge of humiliation — and gradually they acquire meaning, the icons below the dials, the knobs precipitating out from inscrutability, wipers, heater, the setting for defogging, the angles of the various mirrors, the rumbling of the big guy that will get her there; then, ludicrous or not, the self-salute to her bravery for being about to drive alone through the falling-snow world that holds her dying father. The massive calm vehicle she controls, which she can make do anything, backing and churning down the broad lane hemmed in by the blind backs of other SUVs, is lovable. She loves this car more than she loves anyone in her family. For this comparison, she apologizes aloud: “Fucked up.” A cloud of breath. Does her father know he has only hours left, is he terrified or does he, as her mother has long prayed for him to, believe at last in a life after this, can he still think, to what extent is he still himself, she wonders, understanding in a distracted way (distracted because she is beginning to comprehend the lag time snow interposes between her steering and the vehicle’s response) that she would give anything (now, navigating cautiously between parked monsters) to feel the love that figured in the word dad when the car-rental agent pronounced it: love that ought to be in her heart and isn’t. Did she love that way as a child? She must have. Everyone does. Was it not just some gift allotted to you, was it finally your job to love that way, should she have fought harder against her own hard-heartedness to still be able to love like that, how serious was her crime in not calling for two years?

The big SUV lumbers down the lane between parked vehicles as she tries to get the hang of steering in snow. She can’t help it: to think of him is to tinker with consuming narcissistic calculations whose aim is to prove either that he was at fault in their rift, or that she was. She wonders if he would ever under any circumstances have come running to her like this — no. That no seems to lift the SUV and swat it through a weightless circle with snow falling all the way around it, shades of gray accreting to suggest a presence looming toward her as in fact a glazed black panel buckles, crunching, and her SUV rebounds, skidding through another destined arc into a second surreal panel flashing and popping with reflections, the accident playing out in fractions of fractions of sliced panic until a fresh fraction conveys the news that her SUV is still riding through a languid circuit terminating in the light-mirroring mass of yet another parked vehicle, which flicks it away. The world comes to a stop.

She thinks I am not hurt. She looks out through the windshield. No alarms are going off. It is so silent, the widely spaced lights mooning through obliterating snow and the beauty-shock of albino dunes slung and saddled with blue shadow. Either the impacts were too glancing to trigger the air bag or this car has a defective air bag — in which case, it crosses her mind, she can sue the car-rental agency. Or could if she was hurt. She twists against the seat belt to study her wake. The ranks of cars look the same as before, none jolted out of line. But surely that first impact shattered a taillight, or worse. She ought to get out and check; she owes it to the rental agent not to drive away without inspecting the other vehicles, wiping snow from a bumper, a taillight, if she has to, and she’ll have to because it’s avalanching down, and walking back to the terminal to take responsibility. And then what? Questions. Lines to sign on. Paperwork. Taking how long? Her father will die while she’s doing paperwork. She tries to make out the damage she has done but none can be seen, really, not through the falling snow, not unless she gets out and walks back and looks, and once she’s done that she’ll have to slog back to the terminal, to his counter, and if he’s even still there she’s going to have to explain, and he may well say he needs to come back out here with her to assess the damage, and then — forms, questions, lines to sign on. She thinks fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck. All the while the SUV is idling as smoothly as ever.

It continues, the emergency clarity of this falling-snow world, the way the snow knows about her dying father and roots for her to get there on time, arrows directing her to the on-ramp, signs that blaze up through falling snow, a conviction of rightness, the highway remembered not from childhood but from adult visits, summers when she had flown out to spend a week, a week turning out to be too long, the burdensomeness of her presence dawning on her father and her mother and on her, too, as well as hatred of herself for not being their irresistible guest, the daughter they would hate to see leave, but — in her mother’s telling she was born repellent, sporting a full head of straight black fur, her skin crisscrossed with furious scratches she had inflicted on herself in utero, if her mother’s account is to be believed, and if her young mother turned from her with instant loathing there was nothing the nurses could do, they could only bring the baby back again and say Here’s your baby, don’t you want to hold her, and her mother couldn’t stand to look and had no feeling for that baby except hatred that she was being thrust at her, and the nurses tried again and the young mother said no again, and at last the nurses slicked the black hair into a Kewpie doll spit curl and tied a bow on it and carried her in and the bow did the trick and her mother took her, and that was the story her mother told her and who is to blame in that story? if the young mother didn’t feel what young mothers ought to feel whose fault is that? and once when she was eleven she asked where was Daddy for those two or three days when the nurses could not get you to take me, and was told, well, fathers didn’t get involved in things like that then, not in those days, it was different, fathers were not expected to, and he was at work, he had to go back to work, and what she’d really wanted to ask was did it bother him that you refused to take me or even look at me, did that concern him, wanting him to have been on her side. If it’s any consolation, she can tell herself it could easily be true, he could have wanted to come into the nursery where the bassinets were lined up and lifted her baby self out and held her, if fathers did that then, but fathers didn’t, fathers then looked through glass.

Snow falling, her ticking-clock concentration pierced by appreciation of the fact that she’s in over her head, not skilled enough for a night like this, but what can she do except drive. A motionless mass up ahead casts a beam the wrong way, across her lane, what she thought was her lane. Then a fresh S-curve in the snow terminates in the long, dim, intricate underside of an overturned semi, the trucker stamping his feet while he justifies himself to his cell phone, lifting an arm as she slows, not to halt her but, it turns out, in thanks for her being kind enough to slow to see if she can help, or at least that’s how she construes it, his wave and the tilt of his head conveying Sure, keep driving. You might make it. Signaling, too: Good luck. Or so she interprets it, and how desperate she must be, how fucked and despairing, for that quick sideways tip of his head to mean so much — for her to derive from that stranger’s gesture the confidence she needs to continue driving, how ridiculous; yet it changes her mood to have had her striving recognized, her desperation saluted and encouraged, and who cares if it’s a stranger who does that for you? Angels we have heard on high plays on her mind’s radio. Sweetly singing o’er the—what? In the cinderblock, abstract-crucifix interior of the Methodist church of her childhood she and her sister share a hymnal, singing o’er the—, o’er the—. She skips ahead to the line the two sisters can barely sing without giggling: Shepherds, why this jubilee? She repeats it until the rhyme arrives: Why your joyous strains prolong? What the gladsome tidings be— Skips further to Come, adore on bended knee, and she has it whole except for whatever it is the angels are singing o’er, the two sisters in the backseat of the car on the drive home teasing their stoic little brother, Shepherd, why this jubilee? until, crushed by their ruthless repetition of the baffling question, he shouts Because! After that, a lonely hour with no sign of another vehicle, no one else out in this.

Far down the headlights, snow flings and agitates in an opaque onslaught, but closer, maybe only a yard or so in front of the SUV, there’s some kind of boundary where snow detaches itself from the prevailing chaos, seeming almost, fascinatingly, to freeze in a vortex before zipping at her in extreme close focus, detailed down to individual flakes — a trick of vision, thrilling enough that she has to remind herself to look away from the borderline where the snow changes, back out to the farthest reach of the lights nudging into whiteness, the core of the halogens steadily dazzling, probing deeper but never gaining, not giving her much to go on — and it’s tedious staring steadily at those few yards of lit world, which might as well be the same yards over and over again, and there it is, plains. Sweetly singing o’er the plains. For some reason the acuity of her father’s glare two years ago comes back. Her own eyes in the rearview — a fraction of an instant’s assessment — are nowhere close to his in intensity. Nonetheless he hated her holding his gaze. Don’t you look at me like that was a thing he said fairly often. Not from boldness, but out of the need to understand him—the unrelenting need of her childhood — she wanted to keep looking right up until she transgressed, to look at him as long as she safely could, but the line was never where she thought it was. When she tilts her head, the bobble on top of the hat adds its mote of weight to the tilt. If she didn’t know this highway runs through flat fields, would she still sense, through the fast-falling snow, the vacancy stretching away on every side? How many die of exposure every winter in this county? Not only the homeless, not just drunks, but farmers who go astray between house and barn, whose tracks instantly fill in, according to her father at the dinner table of her childhood, and he was moved almost to tears by a farmer’s no longer being able to make out the lights of his house, and none of them knew what to do for him, or how to care more, as it seemed they should, for whoever had fallen asleep in snow.

From the far side of the snowfield that is the median, blades of light oar intermittently, the snowplow outlandish as a satellite eking out its transit.

There was a calculation to what the hospice worker had said, a methodically staged breaking of bad news. She had explained who she was and that she’d been staying in her parents’ house for two weeks; then the kind of cancer, the multiplicity of tumors and their aggressiveness, the gamut of treatments her father has been through; and then that nothing more could be done, medically, as her father was down to his last twenty-four hours and the palliative care was straightforward enough to be handled by the family; and then she had said, “He would want you to come.” Would has to mean he didn’t definitely say, but he was not yet, at that point, unable to speak, and he could have said Tell her to come, but someone gave the hospice worker her number and instructed her to call, and that someone, who could only be her mother, or possibly her sister, but who almost certainly is not her reticent, laconic brother, is likely to have a realistic grasp of her father’s wishes, and could have been moved to request that the hospice worker make the call by some pained, inarticulate gesture or even expression of her father’s that could be interpreted as the desire for the absent child to appear. Whoever this hospice worker is, she’s kind. Not detached, as might be expected of a person who often witnesses death, but speaking knowledgeably of the dying man’s temperament and wishes — how did she gather all that? When she hadn’t responded right away the hospice worker had said, “I know he wants you to come.” I know. How long has it taken for the hospice worker to become so proprietary? Not long. But it has always been like that with her father. He just somehow matters to people. He’s one of those individuals who seem, right away, significant, whose good opinion even strangers solicit, and however it happened he had sufficiently endeared himself to the hospice worker that she took a moment to regale his daughter with his quirks as a patient, to say Your father likes this, about some measure of extra attentiveness taken in his care. What was it? A detail was confided to her and she’s forgotten it. But the hospice worker had figured out some preference of her father’s, and had gone to the trouble of making sure whatever it was was done the way he wanted, and she’s right about that, the hospice worker, nothing gratifies him more than prevailing over customary routines by mischievous insistence on a whim. Still, the possibility exists that the hospice worker was inadvertently misrepresenting her father’s wishes in regard to her. This could happen all too easily. Theirs is not a family whose wounds are obvious. As individuals and as a family they’re more oblique in their manner, harder to read, than most people are, and on top of that, of course, they dissemble. They want to look like a family that works, because any other kind of family — a family that really could shatter, in which sister and brother and daughter or even mother, even father, do not name reliable or lifelong presences — is a source of shame, and if that’s your family, you keep it to yourself, and all of you, for once in genuine accord, keep it to yourselves.

Somebody’s gotten through, not long before. Somebody out in front, whose tracks are not snowed over.

The hospice worker had said, “You need to prepare for his being pretty far gone. It’s been a steep slide down for the last ten days. He’s lost a lot of weight.”

Visible through the roiling snow, a frayed blush — taillights.

What counts as preparation for his being far gone? Where do you start? Do you warn yourself that where you are used to strength there will be frailty?

Veiled rose coalesces into emergency red.

Or that he may not recognize you?

The taillights slew through a long arc that carries them well out into the median, and when it has slid sideways as far as it can go the car spins around, snow jetting from the drift it shears through, spurts flaring as it scrapes deeper into the drift and is locked in place, neither the skidding spin nor its concluding jolt hard enough to have injured anyone inside, she hopes, but probably they’re going to spend the night there, and she hopes they have a cell phone and with luck even a blanket and that they know about clearing the tailpipe every hour, the car already fading as she passes, its outline obscured, its headlights like holes torn through to some other, radiant world.

Last thing I need you to do, big guy, she coaxes the SUV, is sidle in close to the curb to be out of the way of the plow. Her brother’s and sister’s and sister’s husband’s snowed-over cars, and a fourth she doesn’t recognize, hospice worker’s or minister’s, occupy the driveway, her parents’ duplex, on the left-hand side of the shared facade of ocher brick, untransformed by the fact that her father lies dying within. Her cell tells her No messages, and she calls 911 and explains to the dispatcher where she saw the car go off the road into the median an hour ago, and the dispatcher says Thank you, ma’am, and she says Did anyone find them yet? and the dispatcher says I don’t know about that ma’am, there’ve been lots of calls tonight as you might imagine, and as she climbs down into the street, striped hat on and her bag slung over her shoulder, her stupid too-high heels wanting to skid out from under, she remembers her spin in the rental-car lot and brushes snow from the bumper, exposing several long scratches, and when she straightens up she tucks her freezing hands in her armpits and remembers her father scooping snow from the windshield of their station wagon, dropping it into the cupped hands of her five-year-old self, her father saying Pack it good and tight. Now throw.

Cold that can freeze the tears in your lashes, though there are no tears in her eyes, not then, facing that door. In three previous, widely spaced visits to this place where her parents have lived for the last ten years she conceived an aversion to the doorbell, garishly loud in contrast to the mutedness within the duplex, whose only raised voices are those of talking heads disputing on political programs, The Situation Room and Inside Politics, her father an obsessive follower of matters political, such programs his particular passion, if passion is the word for an interest so relentlessly lucid. He was an assistant secretary of agriculture, and once said in her hearing that though he’d never risen as high as he’d hoped to, nonetheless he had his view of the Washington Monument, and when on one long-ago visit to his city, she had stopped by so that the two of them could go for lunch, she had been led from the secretary’s antechamber into his office and left there to wait, her dad having been detained elsewhere, and it was like childhood again, like the secret times the child-you gained access to your father’s public existence. He was expecting her, of course, yet she felt a sense of trespass at finding herself alone in his true habitat, gazing out of his window because that was the view he gazed on daily, only gradually realizing that the Washington Monument was not visible from that window, and turning to the office’s only other window, discovering she had to jam herself against one side, cheekbone to the casing, in order to make out not the whole monument, but only its sharp vertical edge. When she sets her thumb against the button, the gloomy, whimsical notes toll on the other side of the door, and to her surprise they are hard to hear — but now she, at least, has made an overture, and she wants this last minute of her apartness from them to unfold slowly, the snow falling, the tears freezing in her lashes, for finally there are tears. No matter what happened between them she has always been guilty of believing she was responsible for him, and that was puzzling, not only because she was the child and he was the father, but because he was a vigorously self-reliant, hardheaded person, and it is hard to imagine what he might have needed protecting from. There was one story, though, she thinks, blinking her icy lashes, the bell’s notes announcing her arrival to her father if he is still conscious and can put two and two together. I’ll never get out of this world alive, her father used to say, or sing, maybe that was from a song, he had often sung snatches of old bluegrass or hillbilly songs and done a sloppy shuffle in his scuffed leather house slippers, his knees swinging out, then in, a bandy-legged shambolic dance, hands in his pockets, grin widening as he sang Rolling in my sweet baby’s arms—

Or, what was it, Gonna lay around that shack

Till that freight train comes back

— can those be the words?

The story is set in his childhood, in Tennessee, one spring when his mama had done a favor for a friend of hers, a sweetly interfering Baptist lady, driving deep into the mountains, finding the cabin belonging to the elderly bachelor uncle of the Baptist lady’s only after many wrong turns on dirt roads whose relentless switchbacking began to wear on his mama, as he could tell by her protestations to the Baptist lady that this was no trouble, no trouble ’tall. “Winter was bad back in here, Homer used ever’ last stick of kindling,” observed the Baptist lady as his mama parked the Model T on the scrap of cleared ground where the woodpile once was, overlooking a steep drop at whose base ran a crick high and fast with snowmelt, an erratically sparkling strand whose cool resonance lured a mockingbird into trying water sounds, the boy in the backseat bored, counting the june bugs pasted to the windshield or picking at his toenails, barefoot as usual since he was not a boy you could keep shoes on, his mama in the front seat tending to her own thoughts, an unusual woman if he could have known it then, an exception to the rule that women did not drive, and if she didn’t seek to ameliorate the monotony of their long wait for the Baptist lady to finish with her visit, the relation of adults to children was different then, formal, the adult under no obligation to try to amuse a child, no question of the boy’s being allowed out to play, either, since the elderly bachelor uncle was no kin of theirs and good manners required him and his mama to remain confined in the car, and the knot at the nape of his mama’s sunburned neck was boring to the boy, as was the set of her broad rounded shoulders in the floral print of her one nice dress, navy rayon with daisies detailed down to leaves and stems, and that bothered him, the messily yanked-up, strewn appearance of the daisies, and maybe partly due to his aversion to it the print would prove indelible for him, enduring as long as memory was capable of generating internal visions (this may be over for him now; she blinks); when he wanted more to ponder he had bent forward and studied, through the windshield, the crick glittering a stony near-vertical eighth of a mile below, flashing between toppled boulders, through a litter of sun-starved trees, and he was watching the crick when the car lurched against the caterwauling resistance of the failing hand brake, evergreen branches whisking past as it tipped over the brink and bolted down, jarring rocks free as it went; there was a quaking pause; his mama threw open her door and abandoned the car; whatever the impediment had been, it whiplashed free, sending the car skidding, battering, threatening to topple end over end, door banging, the steering wheel yanked back and forth, stones flying past its windows, the car a viciously shaken tin can, the boy tossed from roof to floor, hearing the shrill screeeeeeeeeee of an adamant object raking along the undercarriage as the car reared up and balked, its windshield full of amazed blue sky, stuck with the same dead bugs as ever, the engine ticking and a front wheel revolving, some stick or branch snared in the wheel well issuing a series of decelerating thumps, above that the boil and sluice of trammeled snowmelt. When the boy ducked out the canted door and jumped, clay squelched between his toes. If he’d had a fishing pole he could have cast his line in from here, not that there were any fish in that churn. He squatted to inspect the twilight beneath the car: a stump jammed into the front axle held it in place. He waited, swatting at gnats drawn to his terror-sweat, his mama and the Baptist lady calling his name. Alerted by their agitation other parts of him spoke up — bruises, scrapes — but his voice refused. He had used it up screaming on the way down. From a chink in oil-spattered moss emerged a salamander, arraying its tiny impeccable fingers handhold by handhold as it clambered to the stump’s crest and undulated from view. Once it was gone he felt the wreck was over, and getting to his feet he started back up the mountainside, following the zigzag course razed through the woods, the women’s cries unceasing till he stepped back out into brightness.

A woman she doesn’t recognize opens the door and says “You made it” and then “Come in, come in,” and then, when she steps inside, “If you’ve been waiting out there in the cold I’m sorry, your mother had your brother dial down the doorbell so as not to disturb your father when he’s resting, there’ve been a lot of visitors, your pastor’s been by twice today, to pray with your mother, in fact the last time he rang the bell we all thought it was you, and of course since then the storm got much worse,” pausing, reaching to clasp her hands between her own, “Your poor hands! Your poor hands! Cold as ice!” and then, without letting go of her hands, “I’m the one called you,” and then, letting go at last, “Well, you best get out of those wet things,” and as she bends to unzip her sodden suede ankle boots and set them next to the rabble of boots, adult- and child-sized, on the old towel spread over a layer of newspapers along the entryway’s far wall, the faded blue of the towel summoning the backyard clothesline the towel had once been pinned to, rumpling when the breeze off the lake caught it, a much brighter blue then, blue almost as the lake only fifty yards or so from this cottage they stayed in every August, one plywood-walled cubicle for her sister, one for her brother, the farthest bedroom for her parents, no doors to any of the rooms, only frayed floral curtains that could be tugged closed along tight-strung wires, making it possible for her, a thirteen-year-old maddened by her family’s infinite shortcomings, stretched sleepless on the couch whose prickling nap was so saturated with other people’s suntan lotion and cigarette smoke that she could hardly bear contact with it, to overhear, incredulous, her mother mewing in wrenched, ascending, greedy ecstasy. She unzips her raincoat but hesitates to shrug it off, unwilling for the hospice worker to continue playing hostess by taking her coat from her and hanging it up, but realizes she probably appears forlorn, standing there in her California girl’s coat, and the hat, the foolish hat that she rips off, static electricity causing her hair to trail after it, and sticks in a pocket of the raincoat. “I was just about to leave, myself,” the hospice worker says. “Everything that’s left to do for him, medication for the pain, your mother can handle, she’s precise, your mother, she would have made a good nurse, and I was just about out the door, but I’m so glad I got to meet you,” and taking a down coat the size of a sleeping bag from the closet the hospice worker says, “He’s been holding on till you get here,” and peering down, fidgeting the zipper’s parts into alignment, she says, “They do that, they hold until the missing one returns,” zipping, wrapping a scarf around her throat, nodding at her, the missing one, and she minds the hospice worker’s relegating her inassimilable father to a category, they, the dying, but come on, she tells herself, the hospice worker is making the best of a bad situation, surely she’s picked up on the strain whenever people refer to her, and even if all they’ve said is that she is coming from California, the hospice worker would have noticed the unnaturalness of tone that attends estrangement in families, and rather than proceed delicately, as others in her situation might have, the hospice worker votes for ebullience, radiating welcome, doing everything except throw her arms around her, and if for her this excess serves to underscore the vulnerability and shame that shadow her arrival, still, the hospice worker has acted from kindness, who could do her job except an innately kind, life-force sort of person, and whether she trusts her or not, the generous rejoicing in the hospice worker’s voice as she says “You made it in time” causes her to hope.

At the other end of the closet is her father’s overcoat, and it stops her, his overcoat simply hanging there, not an overcoat she has any special associations with except that by virtue of being his it evokes the first overcoat she knew him in, no cold like the winter cold borne in with her father’s overcoat, coldest in its folds, but also, all over, distinctly cold, and as if the cryptic eyes your father turns on you were not mystery enough, this ghostly cold comes as a sly erotic assault, a little squall for your child’s senses when that coat shrugs its way down to you, you given the job of hauling it over a hanger, shoulder by father-shaped shoulder, fitting the wire nose into the silk-sutured cave, reading as you always do the secret word hidden within, the word worn by your father, fabled Menswear in tapestry script surrounded by a golden lasso, as if everything to do with men, fabulous and wild, needed to be lassoed before it could be contemplated, and the child-you would throw a golden circle around him here, now that he stands smiling down at your struggle with the coat, and only when he turns away do you hold the coat to your nose, and you close your eyes to live completely through the skin of your face caressed by the slippy, male-scented lining of the coat, which has been worn into the ominous, radiant center of the universe, called work, that day, that very day, worn into the innermost circle, nearest god, nearest the president, and returned, marvelously intact, an unscathed overcoat that seems, like your dad, an adored visitor whose stay will be brief, whose real life is incalculably distant, rife with unforeseeable demands, calling for him to always be leaving.

In the immaculate kitchen, at the rickety table her parents had shipped from Iowa to Washington when her father was appointed assistant secretary of agriculture, and then shipped back on his retirement — (she can summon the sound of her baby spoon ringing against its Formica) — sits her kind, ungainly brother-in-law, hands clasped, explaining death to his two older children, the son and daughter who have inherited his Norwegian fairness and height, his braininess, too, the air of somehow genial uncompromisingness that wins trials for him. The two of them have always liked each other. He is the only one of the adults in this house whose affection she feels sure of, and she hopes that he will glance away from his children and nod, but the explanation he has embarked on absorbs him completely, and holds his two children, whose backs are to her and whose heads don’t turn, in thrall. Well-mannered kids, they are too unspontaneous for her taste; she can’t love them as she is meant to. But she envies them there with their father, who is doing them the honor of trying to tell them the truth. Do they have any idea how unusual that is? If your father has been honest with you your whole life, how different is the love you feel for him from the love she feels for her father? Is it deeper or merely different in tenor, more trusting? How her brother-in-law mediates between the atheism she suspects him of and the Methodist certainty enforced by the rest of the family, she would be curious to hear. Everyone else must be back in the guest room, and she doesn’t want to go any farther into the house unaccompanied. Previous visits, few and far between as they were, had enlightened her about her mother’s resistance to her, or possibly to anyone’s, crossing uninvited from the impeccable living room and dining room into the equally fastidiously maintained but more private sanctuary of the back hallway leading to the bathroom and the bedroom shared by her mother and father, which has its own bathroom, and the guest room, previously her father’s office, where he lies dying. For her mother, boundaries of all kinds are fraught. Her mother must be in the guest bedroom. Her sister and brother must be in the bedroom as well, and her sister’s youngest child, a solemn intractable boy of seven or eight, she can’t remember exactly. Not too young to be present for his grandfather’s death. The strangeness of her family strikes her: the forlorn mutual incomprehension of delicate signals continually misinterpreted, and then these sudden astounding streaks of guileless transparency, as if nothing has ever been kept from any of them, when it has, she protests, when almost everything has been kept from me.

What she needs from him: a last-minute sign that she is loved.

Where she is: the hallway that leads to the bedrooms. The door that is open belongs to the guest bedroom. Another door, nearer, is open as well: the bathroom. From this doorway her brother emerges, his back to her, his head ducked or bowed toward the bundle in his arms, and pity suffuses her before she understands that the long spindly white objects lolling over her brother’s arm are her father’s shins, that her brother’s arm supports her father’s knees and those are her father’s bare feet hanging in mid-air, jostling with her brother’s careful steps, that is what you see when a child is carried, those sleeping feet, and can that really be her father, is he no more than an armful of bones, light enough for her brother to carry the rest of the way down the hall to the guest bedroom, in whose doorway he turns sideways, ensuring clearance for her father’s dangling feet, for, tipped up against her brother’s other arm, the big gorgeous vigilant head ransacked of every bit of expressive flesh, the sockets of his eyes harsh craters of shadow much too big for the puny bulge of the closed lids. She stands at the other end of the hall from them. For her father to submit to being carried is a blow as terrifying as the annihilation of his male grace and authority. If she turns around and leaves, none of them will ever know she was here. But her brother, in turning sideways in the doorway, has looked down the hall. He has seen her. His grimace means Give me a minute to get him settled, or so she interprets it. With her father in his arms her brother disappears, moving toward the bed, she supposes. The door is ajar, or she would be able to see who else is in the room.

She goes down the hall toward the doorway, and knocks on the jamb, watching her brother lay her father down in the twin bed, her brother seeming almost to unfold her father’s body, stick by stick, from the bundle it had made in his arms, the big skull with its silvery white swept-back hair tipped upright on two pillows turning toward her knock, eyes staring from the sinkholes of their sockets, lips drawn back from teeth that seem too big for the face, stubbornly recognizable teeth, the idiosyncrasies of the individual teeth, their degree of discoloration, so familiar that in her mind she greets them, she experiences his teeth as a revelation, yes this is her father whose bone-arms with their outsize elbows and wrists thrash at her startled brother, the squalling moan from low in his throat, from, almost, his chest, Aww awww aaara eeere, disrupted by a violent hard-won jerk of his head, the moan resumed, Awww aaarragh. Go away, she hears, go away, and backs through the doorway, and listens from the hall as her brother calms him, Dad, it’s okay, Dad, it’s all okay, and she does not know what to do except stand there listening, understanding from some progression in her brother’s reassurance that her father has relaxed back into the pillows.

Where has her brother-in-law gone, has he taken the kids out to eat, maybe? In the kitchen she makes herself a cup of tea. A stain in the porcelain sink bothers her. She can’t have caused that. She only just got here. From under the sink she retrieves her mother’s old-fashioned scouring powder and a pair of her gloves — pulling these on makes her feel closer to her mother than she had, seeing her face. She scours until the stain fades and vanishes. She’s not an irresponsible person. In the morning she’ll call the car rental agency to find out how much damage she did.

On the striped couch in the living room she drinks the cold tea. She feels almost at home on this couch. In an inexplicable break from her chaste aesthetic, her mother had ordered the striped fabric as a daring contrast to the room’s pale monochrome. When the reupholstered couch was delivered, its pattern loomed much larger than she had expected, swaggeringly, flamboyantly huge, and her Depression-traumatized mother, who wrings the last minim of use from every frayed and stained and unraveling possession, had resigned herself to wincing toleration of the beast until it wears out. When her daughter strokes its arm, the striped velvet seems good as new — the couch has a long way to go.

Other pieces of the story had been confided, when the mood struck her father. “You know that churchgoing woman took credit for me being alive,” he’d said, amused. “Claimed she got down on her knees there at the edge of the drop-off and Jesus heard her.” A month after the wreck of the Model T, the Baptist lady had charmed his mama into laying back in the preacher’s hands and letting the river flow through her hair and over her closed eyes; after she walked out of that river, her father said, it wasn’t just his mama’s sins washed away, but the old, easygoing life the family had led. Strictness clamped down, no taking the Lord’s name or running around in the woods with neighbor girls. No dancing. Whippings whenever his mama took a whim, as she did every washday, her fury blushing her wide cheeks with a rosiness in other circumstances he’d have found pretty, wrath pinking her throat and the heavy arms bared for thrusting into harsh-smelling soapsuds. Out of her four children it was nearly always he who caught her eye. Impudence, she believed she read in his face, and in a strong voice she’d call to him to find a switch in the woods, and when he came back with the switch she told him to let his pants down and turn around and used it to administer a series of slashing strokes. Finally one day when he was told to go find a switch he searched the woods for the worst he could find, choosing a briar cane whose savage thorns would dissuade her from ever applying it to his skin. He tested their tips with his thumb, and grinned. Inconceivable that she could bring herself to lash him with an instrument so wickedly equipped to draw blood, and he carried it back to the yard where his mama straightened from the tub, wiped her hands down her front, and assessed the briar switch, figuring out at once what he was counting on — he should have remembered how hard she was to fool. “Made sure I’d never forget that briar switch,” he said.

Sounds from the kitchen wake her: her sister making a sandwich for her younger son, who sits in a chair drawn up to the table, playing with her mother’s salt and pepper shakers, clicking them together in a monotonous yet random rhythm. For all she knows he could be clacking out a Donne sonnet in Morse code: the boy, who falls mute at the least contradiction and can go days without saying a word, is also arrestingly brilliant, and homeschooling him has been her sister’s consuming years-long project. Her sister comes out and sits at the other end of the couch and says, “It’s just after midnight. I’m glad you got some sleep,” and then goes back to the kitchen to sit and watch her boy eat. “Any change in Dad?” she calls to her sister, and her sister says, “Just one time he came awake enough to feel pain, Mom gave him more medicine, and since then he’s been peaceful. Mom has been a rock.” The hospice worker, after opening the front door, had said much the same: Your mother’s been amazing. “John took the kids home. I’m going to get this young man home to bed, too, if he will only finish his supper.”

Her boy says, “I want to stay.”

“You’re so tired you can hardly see straight,” her sister says — a phrase of their father’s.

Her son says, “I want to stay.”

From the couch she calls, “He’s not going to jump out of the car.” In the past her sister has more than once pointed out the bafflement her teasing riddles and non sequiturs inflict on her niece and nephews, and when her sister’s boy says, “What car?” she says, “A story your grandfa—”, her sister interrupting, “How Grandpa was saved by the stump the runaway car snags on,” and with his strict adherence to accuracy her boy says to her, his aunt, “I am not in that story,” an assertion his mother confirms, formally, “No, you’re not,” and sorry to have caused this peculiar trouble she runs her hand over striped velvet, thinking So he told that story to everyone, then Why did I think it was only me, hearing her sister tell the boy, “This is hard for you, I see that, really hard, and I understand you want to help all you can, but Grandpa can’t see or hear any of us anymore. He’s not aware anyone is in the room with him, not even you. That part is over, when the sound of our voices gave him some consolation,” and she thinks it’s extraordinary, the honesty with which the mother talks to son, the depth between them, trust accruing from a million tiny proffers of truth, not an experience, probably, any child of a previous generation of their family has ever had, and who is it whose place she would take if she could, her sister’s or the boy’s? She wants to be them both. That’s what her sister has always seemed to distrust about her, she guesses: the taint of envy in her approach to her sister’s children isn’t lost on her sister, and down at the primal level where even the faintest, most imaginary threat to a child meets with a parent’s hostility, her sister can’t help but be angry with her, and to want to screen her son from her — or is she misreading the mother’s understandably amped-up solicitude toward the difficult boy, does it really have anything to do with her? After her sister bundles the boy into his snow jacket, she bends to retrieve something from the boots jumbled on the closet floor, then tugs the striped hat down over her boy’s ears before asking, in an exhausted voice, “Is this yours? I guess this is yours,” and when the boy says nothing his crouching mother says, “Whose else would it be,” and the mistake feels right to her, and she watches the mother usher the boy in the charming striped hat out into the night. She thinks that, to most seven-year-olds, the word consolation would probably be a mystery.

About two in the morning her mother comes out to the couch and calls her name and she wakes and stands up. The two of them hold each other briefly. She says, “How are you, Mom?” Her mother says, “Just fine.” Then, “I’m taking a break. Do you want to go in?” “Is it all right?” “Of course it’s all right.” How does her mother understand what happened when she appeared in the guest-room doorway? She would like to ask, to have her terrible interpretation negated by her mother’s superior understanding of her father. From the kitchen table where he has been drinking a cup of coffee, her brother says matter-of-factly, “Go on in. You came all this way.” Then, hearing the grudgingness of that, he says with exhausted gentleness, “I know it was bad before. But I know he would want you to try again.” In the guest bedroom she is alone with her unconscious father, as slight, under the sheet, as he must have been as a skinny boy in Tennessee. Is she wrong to want to be here? His last exertion on earth was the thrashing meant to drive her away. What would a person who understands love do, if he were her? His lips are parted, his breathing an irregularly timed ruckus. Something should have been done to ease it, it shouldn’t have been let get so arduous, should it, his breathing? Before now she has had no idea of the strenuousness of the act of dying. His lungs will fill, the hospice worker explained when she asked what the actual cause of his death would be. “He will drown.” But she hadn’t understood. Drowning was rivers. It was the sea. Not the body on its own. Not within. Not welling up from inside. The untouched order she associates with the guest room is intact around this central disturbance, the grappling, stopping and starting hazard of his breathing. There is no more smell of torment in the room than if a freshly bathed child rested in this bed, and like that child’s his body is unadorned, neither tubes running into his nose, nor any intravenous connection, and again, all over again, but more forcefully, as if she had not fully grasped it before, it comes to her that what she was told is true, and he really has sailed beyond help. Apart from the central hollow formed around the heaviness of his immobile head, the pillowcase is crisply devoid of creases, his only covering a sheet pulled evenly across his upper chest, with, under the sheet, his arms arranged parallel to his distinctly outlined torso, no hand she can reach for with her own, and she is relieved not to be responsible for the coldness, the affront to his better self, to consciousness that may still exist as a strayly glimmering, not yet snuffed-out ghost in the largely abandoned comb within his skull, of not taking his hand if it had been lying out in the open, and below the arc of his rib cage a well, a famished sunkenness, his belly gone, his hips dwindled to a stark cradle, the close lie of the sheet outlining the heaped mess of his genitalia, and the torque of the parallel femurs in the shrunken thighs, and the perched eggs of the kneecaps, and the feet tenting the sheet in peaks. She searches for proof he is hers. The ear. The lobe ample, the rim a smoothly continuous curve, the cloistered yellowy, flushed-pink branching and whorls lustrous, the aperture a specific dab of shadow that absorbed her first words. His browbone protests his gauntness with the familiar challenging thrust. Laid across the wan skin, his eyebrows are meticulously themselves. The stitchery of the lashes of his closed eyes is dearly known. But this has never been possible before: she can see how he is made. His temple is a hollow whose bottom shivers across with an arterial quaking. The puzzlework where mandible intersects skull is exposed. Under the jut of the cleanshaven jaw — the throat, too, shaved fastidiously close — the central column obtrudes, interrupted by the cobble of the adam’s apple, braced at its base by a wishbone of tendons straining against the skin. His inhalation snores harshly and hits bottom with an echoing phlegmy gargle, the contact of breath and destroyed tissue as liquid as well water echoing to a dropped stone, followed by the hoarse slow shallow exhalation, amplified by his slack throat almost to a roar. She bends close and says, “I’m here. I’m right with you, Daddy.” After a long lapse he takes another breath, takes, that’s the word, it’s never been truer, the breath grabbed from the air of the world he is forsaking, dragged in through parched lips incised with minute cuts, sucked down to the lungs drowning in the still-wide chest. Then, nothing. Can you die on an in-breath? She leans close to the face silence has seized, to the parted lips. She holds her breath with him, but he outlasts her.