The Last Breath

by Kimberly Belle

  And every night, he asks me if I’m certain I want to stay. So far the answer has always been yes.

  I still don’t entirely know how I feel about remaining in Rogersville after Dad’s gone, but I am certain about one thing: I cannot, cannot leave Jake. He assures me every day and in no uncertain terms that he feels the same. Somehow knowing he would pick up and leave whenever I say it’s time softens the edges of my panic at staying. I know I have an out, one Jake has unconditionally included himself in, and that knowledge gives me strength. Strength to face the Rogersville gossip mill, strength to put up with their whispers and half truths and misguided assumptions, strength to stay in a place where I will always be, before anything else, Ray Andrews’s daughter.

  When I tell all this to Fannie, she clutches a pillow to her chest, leans back onto the couch and sighs dreamily. “That there’s the most romantic thing I think I ever did hear.”

  “It is pretty sappy, isn’t it? Too much?”

  “Gracious, no.” She pats my knee and grins. “Let this old lady live vicariously, will you? What else you got?”

  “Well...” I think for a moment. “The other day he told me he wants to take me away for a weekend after...well, you know. He won’t tell me where, only that it’s his second favorite spot in the world.”

  “Why not his first?”

  “That’s exactly what I asked. He said we were already there, because his first favorite spot was wherever I was.”

  Fannie smacks her thigh and whoops.

  I make a moony face. “I know. Gross, right?”

  “Oh, no, honey, not gross. Not coming from a man as fine as Jake Foster. That boy is one smooth talker. And right smitten, too, sounds like.”

  I can’t deny I am just as smitten, and content in a way I never dreamed I could be when I boarded the plane in Kenya. Or maybe content isn’t the right word. Maybe what I’m feeling is something more like blissful. Blissful because my family is back, the protesters are gone and Jake is warming my bed at night. What more could I have wished for, considering?

  Even Lexi seems to have come around. As soon as she gets home from the bank, she plops into an armchair at Dad’s right elbow and stays there until bedtime, coaxing him into conversation when he’s awake, sitting quietly at his side while he sleeps. I don’t much mind that she’s hijacked my chair and his attention. Bo and I have already had our moments with Dad, and I want her to have hers, as well.

  Dad’s bitterness and anger seem to have evaporated, as well, replaced by a calm acceptance of what is to come. I guess his brain has finally accepted what his body already knew, and by some unspoken agreement, he’s decided to make the best of whatever time we have left together.

  This new normal makes it almost easy to forget why I came, why we have all gathered here, in our former home, at Dad’s bedside. And then Dad thrashes about on the bed or screams in his sleep, and I remember. Remember what was lost—Ella Mae. Dad. Rogersville. What is about to be lost all over again—Dad, this time around irrevocably.

  How is it possible to feel so perfectly happy and so heartbroken at the same time?

  31

  ON SUNDAY, THE hallucinations begin.

  One minute Dad is just fine, the next he’s going on about spiders in the TV and giant pills dressed as clowns. I can’t help but find his mistakes mildly amusing, until his hallucinations target us. First Fannie, whom Dad mistakes for his mother, and then Lexi.

  “Sweetheart!” Dad says, smiling broadly at Lexi when she walks into the living room with a beer and a plate of spaghetti. “You’re back, and lookin’ so beautiful, too.”

  “See?” I cross my arms and lift an I-told-you-so brow at my sister. “He totally missed you.”

  Lexi doesn’t look convinced. “No, I think he thinks I’m Mom.”

  I’m about to disagree, when Dad’s expression of pleasant surprise curls into a leer. “Get over here, Rosalie. I got a hard-on with your name written all over it.”

  My sister raises the bottle to her lips, drains it, then looks at me and shakes her head. “Nope. Still not drunk enough.”

  The next morning, it’s my turn. I’ve just come out of the kitchen, where I’d been dawdling while Fannie gave Dad his sponge bath, when he calls out to me.

  “Where you been?” Something about his tone, suspicious and thick with disdain, sends a rash of chill bumps exploding up my arms.

  “I was just cleaning up breakfast.” I point in the general direction of the kitchen, wishing Fannie hadn’t already disappeared upstairs to the shower and Cal hadn’t chosen this morning to meet up with a former client in Kingsport. “Can I get you anything?”

  “I see the way you look at him.” His mouth twists in pain, but something in the squint of his eyes tells me it’s not the physical kind. “It’s the way you used to look at me.”

  I step closer to his bed and into his line of vision, an icy chill hijacking my spine. Who does he think I am?

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about, Dad. Nobody’s looking at anyone.”

  “I won’t have it. I won’t have you runnin’ all over town like a whore, makin’ a goddamn fool of me. People are starting to talk.”

  The realization rips through my veins and chills my very core. He thinks I’m Ella Mae.

  “Dad, it’s Gia, remember?” I clamp a hand onto his wrist, give it a little jiggle. “I’m your daughter. Gia.”

  “Huh?” His eyes focus on me and he blinks rapidly, eyelids fluttering. “Did you count out the feathers, or did the penguins eat them?”

  Good grief. I’ve had less confusing conversations in Swahili.

  Dad slumps back onto the bed, falling unconscious before I can form an answer, leaving me to wonder which part of that conversation was real, and which part was nonsense.

  Later, when Fannie and I are folding laundry, I find we have a new subject to talk about. “Dad’s hallucinations seem to be getting worse, and he doesn’t always make sense.”

  She folds a bath towel in thirds and tucks it under her chin. “That’s pretty normal with cancer patients, sugar. It’s all part of the dyin’ process.”

  “But is it normal he thinks we’re people who are long gone? First Grandma, then Mom, and this morning he thought I was Ella Mae. I mean, I have dark hair and curls, but that’s kind of where the likeness ends.”

  Fannie settles the folded towel atop a neat pile of matching ones and turns to me, her expression filled with compassion. “Sweetheart, your father’s in the active stage of dyin’. Part of his confusion is from the morphine, but it’s also because his body is filling up with toxins. His organs can’t clean the poisons out of his body because they’re too busy shuttin’ down.”

  I swallow hard, my heartbeat heating into a roiling thunder. “How much longer do you think he has?”

  “Hard to say.” Fannie lifts her massive shoulders in a shrug. “Everybody’s different.”

  “Give me your best educated guess.”

  She purses her carnation lips into a sympathetic pout, blinks her crayon eyes. “I’d say two or three days, at the most. I’m sorry, sugar.” She pats my arm, snatches up the pile of towels and waddles off.

  In the morning, I’m leading Jake back down the stairs when Dad’s reality takes another turn for the imaginary.

  “You sneaking off again, Ella Mae?”

  His tone seals my slippers to the carpet runner halfway down. Jake raises a questioning brow, and I hold a finger to my lips with one hand, point him down the hallway toward the back door with the other.

  “Don’t you dare ignore me, woman. I know you’re there. I hear you breathing. Did you bring that man into my house again? Did you fuck him in my bed?”

  By now Jake and I have reached the bottom of the stairs. I catch him by the shoulders, turn him a sharp left and give him a gentle p
ush in the small of his back. He takes a reluctant step into the hallway.

  “I’ll kill you for it, you dirty whore.”

  Dad’s words skid Jake to a stop on the hardwood floor. He swivels his upper body to face me, shock and something else I don’t have time to think about pushing at the edges of his mouth.

  “Dad!” I double back, leaning my head around the corner into the living room, and yell-whisper, “It’s me, Gia. Not Ella Mae. Now go back to sleep before you wake the whole house.”

  “Don’t lie to me, bitch! I know he’s right there behind you. If he was any kind of man, he’d not be running out the back door. That’s what he’s trying to do, isn’t he? Goddamn chicken shit.”

  I dart a glance to Jake, still frozen on the other side of the Persian. “The morphine makes him hallucinate,” I whisper.

  “I’ll kill him, Ella Mae. I’ll kill you both.”

  I turn back to Dad. “Dad! I’m Gia, okay? And the only other person here is Jake. My boyfriend.”

  I motion for Jake to come into the doorway, but he doesn’t comply. His feet stay rooted to the floor.

  It’s like I didn’t even speak. Dad throws off the covers, arms and legs thrashing, and tries to push to a sit. He tilts dangerously to the left, and I rush across the room to keep him from flailing himself off the bed.

  “Stop, before you fall and snap a hip bone.” I try to snatch one of his arms out of the air, but his movements are jerky and, for such a sick man, still pretty forceful. After a few tries, my palm finally makes contact with his wrist, right before a fist lands in my cheek. His three other limbs are still on the loose, wild and writhing him closer and closer to the edge, and I only have one more hand.

  “Jake!” Short of throwing my body over Dad’s and weighting him down, I don’t know what else to do other than call for help.

  Jake doesn’t come. “Should I go wake up Fannie?” he suggests instead.

  Dad uses my grip on his arm for leverage, pulling and pushing to get himself higher off the bed. A knee comes out of nowhere and thonks me on the temple, hard enough to make me see stars.

  “Ow! Shit. Jake, I need help now.”

  After a moment, hasty footsteps come up behind me, and Jake steps around the head to the other side of the bed. He clamps a palm onto Dad’s right shoulder and the other onto his thigh and pushes, pinning his right side to the bed. I think there might be something off in Jake’s expression, judging by his pinched mouth and the red flush rising from the collar of his North Face fleece.

  Jake’s appearance works on Dad like a stun gun. His muscles unclench and he collapses back onto the bed, blinking up at Jake with an expression of delighted confusion, or maybe it’s confused delight.

  “Brian! Well, I’ll be. When...? How...?” Dad shakes his head, and his face breaks into a grin. “So good to see you again, son!”

  Now there’s definitely something off in Jake’s expression. He goes completely still, and he won’t quite meet my eye.

  “No, Dad. His name is Jake Foster. He owns the Roadkill Bar and Grill in town.”

  Dad grabs a hunk of Jake’s shirt and clutches it into a ball. “Tell her, Brian. Tell her I didn’t kill Ella Mae.”

  “Who’s Brian?” I say, more to myself than anyone else. So far, Dad’s hallucinations have been filled with real people from real pieces of his past, and I don’t recall any Brian. Maybe he was one of the summer stock boys down at the pharmacy?

  Dad turns to me, his face lit up like the July sky. “This here’s Ella Mae’s boy. This is her son.”

  “But Ella Mae didn’t have a so—” I swallow the last letter at the look on Jake’s face, and a bitter taste pools on my tongue.

  “Gia, please.” He reaches a hand across the bed, but I step back before he can touch me. “Let me explain.”

  People who say the world is small have never traveled to La Rinconada in Peru, or Motuo County in China or to the Kerguelen Islands in the southern Indian Ocean. When your destination has no airports or trains or even roads, when the journey is just as long and treacherous as the land is untouched by the modern world, our planet feels enormous, its farthest flung corners infinite.

  But as I stare across my dying father at Jake, I realize the world will never be large enough for me to escape my past.

  “Is this a joke?” It’s my voice, but the tone is all wrong. Quiet and controlled and strangely detached, like I just asked him if it’s supposed to rain tomorrow.

  “No.”

  “Am I being punked? Is somebody going to pop out any minute with a hidden camera?”

  “No. Gia, I—”

  I stop Jake with a palm in the air. Dad’s arm, now freed from my grasp, drops to the bed with a muted thud.

  “Is it tr—” My voice almost breaks from the sob trying to sneak up my throat, and I gulp it down before it can escape. “Is it true?”

  My heart already knows the answer. Of course it does. But that doesn’t mean my brain doesn’t still need to hear Jake say he’s Ella Mae’s son. I clutch the edge of the mattress and brace myself for his reply.

  He closes his eyes briefly, and I think he sways, but that might have been me. “Yes.”

  The sourness on my tongue explodes in a rush of bile, and I press a shaky hand to my lurching stomach. So far it’s the only one of my organs to fully grasp the meaning behind the truth. My brain and heart are still struggling to catch up.

  “I don’t understand. Ella Mae never said anything about a child.”

  “My birth wasn’t exactly a joyous occasion. At least, not for her. My adoptive parents thought differently.” His fingers clench harder into Dad’s shoulder. “Please don’t look at me like that.”

  But I’m still having trouble processing. “Like what?”

  “Like you’ve never seen me before. This doesn’t change anything. I’m still me, and I still mean every single word I’ve ever said to you.”

  “Right now I’m more concerned with the words you didn’t say.”

  He makes a face like I punched him in the stomach. “I tried to tell you.”

  His excuse strikes me somehow as perversely funny, and I bark out a laugh. “When? By mental telepathy?”

  “I tried, at least twice. I just...I didn’t know how.”

  “You should have found a way.”

  My adrenaline suddenly spikes, smashing my anger instinct out of its paralysis. A cold ball of fury forms in my belly, pushing at my throat, putting down roots in my organs, snaking through my veins, growing and pulsing with life. I feel it swirl inside me, and somewhere in the very back closet of my mind, I acknowledge relief that it’s rage, rather than grief, gripping me by the guts. At least my anger, even as sharp as it is, feels like it’s holding me together rather than ripping me apart.

  “Okay,” I say, my voice rising loud enough to wake Dean Sullivan from his drunken stupor next door, “so let me get this straight. Your mother fucked my father, and now you’re fucking me? Is that about right?”

  “Watch your language, young lady,” Dad says, lifting his head and his brow in a warning look.

  I make a get-real sound in the back of my throat. My father hasn’t scolded me since I was eighteen, and I’m not about to let him start now, sixteen years too late. I fix my glare steady on Jake, waiting for his reply.

  “That’s not how I see it.”

  His nonanswer sends me over the edge, and gives my volume knob another sharp twist. “Jesus, Jake! Her son? That’s kind of an important detail, don’t you think? You should have told me that very first night I climbed onto one of your bar stoo—” And then I think of something else, and my body fills with ice. “Oh, God. Does Lexi know?”

  “Does Lexi know what?” my sister asks, blinking at us from the hallway. Despite her rumpled T-shirt, mussed hair and last night’s smear
ed mascara, she looks like a Victoria’s Secret pajama model.

  Jake doesn’t even notice her. Not for one millisecond does he shift his gaze away from me. “No. No one knows. I didn’t even know until a few years ago.”

  “Know what?” Lexi asks again.

  “Yes. Know what, Jake?” I lift a brow, signaling I’m not going to be the one to tell her.

  Jake’s shoulders slump in defeat. He blinks, then looks beyond my shoulder to Lexi. “Ella Mae Andrews was my birth mother.”

  I hear my sister’s gasp behind me, then another louder and deeper one that can only have come from Fannie.

  Awesome. An audience.

  “Tell them I didn’t do it,” Dad says, reaching excitedly for Jake, who steadies him with a distracted hand on his shoulder. It’s a comforting but familiar gesture, and a new realization slams me with the force of a Mack Truck. These two men are not strangers.

  My gaze lifts to Jake’s. “Dad recognized you. He knew your name. How?”

  Jake drops his head, but not before I can see his wince. When he looks back up, his gaze is anywhere but on me. “There was a letter. From Ella Mae to me, written less than a month before she died. I showed it to your father, when I visited him in prison.”

  His message punches me in the gut, deflating my lungs and stealing my breath and leaving me gasping for air. “You visited? When?”

  “Just once. It was a long time ago, a few months after I moved to town. Long enough ago I didn’t think...”

  Jake doesn’t have to finish. I know what he was about to say. Long enough ago he didn’t think Dad would recognize him.

  “Could this letter have gotten him out of prison?”

  Jake pauses to look over my shoulder. He is, I think, about to nod, when from behind me booms a loud, emphatic “No.”

  One word from Cal, spoken with the doggedness of a thousand lawyers.