Life Without a Recipe

by Diana Abu-Jaber

  We can barely squeeze in the door. The hostess must have looked past the crowded lobby and noticed the antsy three-year-old, the elderly gentleman with the bruised eyes, and his post-holidays exhausted wife, because, magically, there is no wait. We’re ushered to a table. As she passes out menus, Bud beams at the woman. “I don’t care what they all say about you—you’re a great kid. You’re A-one in my book.”

  Dad can’t see well enough to read the menu, but he never reads it anyway. He gives the server a million special instructions. Lifting his palms, making rays with his fingers as if about to reveal the most amazing secret, he tells the young woman he’d like a “good steak.” Plenty of salt and pepper. “And don’t be shy about the butter. A good salad on the side with sliced radishes, cucumbers, herbs, don’t forget, and nice olive oil and lemon.” When it arrives, Gracie climbs out of her chair and stands next to him, a hand on his arm, cadging bites. He kisses the back of her head. “She’s fluffy but she’s no dope.” Bud watches us and the other diners, drinking in their voices. His steak has a good salty crust and a melting swipe of butter. “There, they did it,” he says, still surprised when Americans get the food right. The room is filled with sliding black lights, currents of laughter; there is something aqueous, submerged, about the place. The light has a winking quality: It seems we’re on a boat together on a dark night. Where are we going? The beautiful black waves glitter, time filled with quiet distance.

  Back home, once again we stay up late talking, lounging on the couches. Late night settles into the ligaments of the house, insects murmur in the windows. In the midst of casual discussion of all things, Bud tips back in his chair, saying again, “Such a wonderful life. So wonderful.” Outside, there’s the ragged line of pelicans, making their hajj, the shadow flight, low and tantalizing above waves—but we’re not at the beach—it’s odd to see them this far inland, their forms like flakes of black against the dark.

  In the morning, Bud feels good, his energy up. Scott, Gracie, and I are headed back to Miami in a few hours, but first I’ll drive my parents to Bud’s weekly checkup. He kisses his granddaughter at the door. “I love you, habibti, my darling.”

  “I love you too, Jiddo.”

  He stoops to kiss her round hand. “I love you.”

  “You already said that.”

  He laughs and slaps the top of his head. “The queen is always right.”

  At the clinic, he heads out of the waiting area to visit with a row of chemo patients pinned to their easy chairs. In the examining room, he tells his oncologist, “I don’t care what anyone says about you, you’re okaay.” There’s just one thing, one faint scratch on the fine day—a numbness in his hand and leg that the doctor squints at, frowning. Finally, he sends us to the imaging center for a scan. Bud is already thinking about lunch, asking for “maybe just a little soup. Go to that bakery—they have cake.” He signs a release form as we wait for the scan. After the attendant takes it, Mom touches my arm and whispers, “Did you see that? He couldn’t write his name?” I shake my head, willing it away—his vision is off and today for some reason his fingers are funny. “Something’s not right,” she insists.

  Bud touches my cheek as I sit beside him trying to test his vision, holding up my hand. “What do you see, Dad? How many fingers?” I’m trying to be brave and present, to muster a few atoms of strength, protecting myself from this thing that I refuse to notice. His voice is round and tender and he smiles at me, a look like sunlight angled over the earth, “There you are. I see you.” He kisses my fingers. Like that, I’m four years old again, and he is telling me what is important to see.

  As we wait for his results, there’s another surprise: My parents’ good friends Moira and Connell Duffy appear. Bud’s pals are all getting scanned and X-rayed these days. Connell has lived in the States maybe sixty years, yet he still has a good, strong brogue. Bud has leaned against Connell’s shoulder many times, communing on the extraordinary experience of finding themselves here, fellow immigrants in a land of barbarians. Now Connell plonks down beside Bud and slaps his knee. “Fancy meeting you here.”

  Connell, with his shock of white hair, tips against Bud; they look ready for a hand of poker. I want to keep thinking that things are compromised but normal, that Bud will struggle on and on, this broken-down-ness our new normal. Oh I see the woozy tilt, but I don’t see it. I want to tell Connell, somehow, that things aren’t normal at all, something is wrong, but I don’t know how to say it. I can only sit here, watching the men. Mom rises, the enormity of everything quietly dawning around us. “We need someone. Now.” She rushes off to find a nurse, her footsteps sharp cracks down the corridor.

  Bud can’t believe the luck of this encounter. “When we going to Ireland?” he demands, his voice thick. “I want to go.” The words slur between his teeth.

  “This summer! Let’s go.” Connell’s face is thoughtful. “We’ll go to Dublin, man.”

  “What’s there to see there?”

  “All kinds of things—pubs and pubs and Trinity College.”

  “What’s there? The college?” Bud’s voice is dissolving. I can barely understand his questions. I stare, unable to work out what’s happening. Connell manages to hear Bud better than I can. He says, “All sorts of things, art, and poetry. They have the Book of Kells.”

  Bud wants to know more. He says something we ask him to repeat. I can just make out, “. . . Book of Kells?”

  “Ochh.” Connell rolls back in a way I recognize—the contented talker. The charming kind, as Gram would’ve said, followed by, watch out. “It’s quite amazing, this very old book—a sort of mystical book—with fine writing, and such illustrations, my man, like you’ve never seen.”

  There’s a thin, soft light in Bud’s eyes. I think he’s distracted, seeing the gold-leaf filigree, the swooping calligraphy of his own holy book. The books of his mother’s library spilling open, words fluttering out like snowfall. The book is the thing. We lean together, our mutual languages encircling us, binding us in their traces. There is just enough time for the three of us to imagine and agree on this. Language lifts her pale hand over our heads, the words growing fainter and older: English, Gaelic, Arabic, as all around us the air grows bright, nearly blinding.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  What Lasts

  Who says? I want to ask. Who made up this terrible way of doing things, where we are given these people, people that we need, we absolutely require, and then whoosh, off they go? Nothing lasts forever? Oh yeah, says who?

  Hospitals are either very good or very bad at handling certain foundational realities, depending on how you look at it. Their corridors are tunnels between worlds, their people are guides, pointing to different doors. Florida medical facilities are especially weird, cool and dry inside, with big windows bounding with light and humid colors and bending palm trees—all just beyond the glass. That’s where I look, mind emptied into that sheer light, as if there was a way for us to run away from this place, skip off to distant blue islands, just as Mom returns with a tumult of emergency nurses and EMTs. An ambulance pulls up right outside the door. We’re in such a distant wing of this complex that they will drive him to the Emergency Room entrance. It seems Bud’s scan shows a brain hemorrhage—white moth wings of blood, the angel in the brain, ready to wrap him up. A nurse comes to my father, takes his hand, half-kneeling on the floor, I think she’s explaining what is happening to him. I’m listening, but everything is so close up and sparkling, so sheer and blue—I don’t know what to pay attention to.

  The ambulance doors explode open, its interior crammed with men and equipment. As they load him onto the stretcher, Mom and I try to tell Dad we’re coming right behind him, we’re on our way. Everything has been shocked into high speed. I pull Mom toward the car—we must follow! We reenter the corridor, charging toward the parking lot and there is her friend Moira—they are talking wildly, hands on each other’s arms, clinging to each other. Mom breaks into tears, saying, “His brothers—this
is how it happened.”

  At the front of the ER entrance is a young woman with light brown skin and forest-green eyes. She shows us to a quiet back room, speaking to us gently, part counselor and part ambassador. Minutes later, two doctors come in. One is Bud’s oncologist, his face pink, hair scattered, as though he literally ran here from his clinic, across the oceans of parking lots. He points to a page in a folder. “Gus has a living will?”

  No, yes, but wait. Wait. Wait. At some moment, very soon now, all this twirling will stop, I think. There will be a quiet space and things will stop. The blood will calm. We’ll put Bud in the car and take him home with his bad eyes, and now he will have this angel in his brain. It will just be another thing. I stare at the cranial scan on the wall before us. We can live with this.

  I must have said something, I don’t know what, because the doctor shakes his head. “We might prolong his life a little bit with machines, but. . . .”

  Mom nods, firm and pale. “No—that’s how he wants it. No heroic measures.” My throat tightens. I hear a whisking, flapping in the air, something too close. I will reach into the air at any moment now and make it stop, I think. Because this can’t be. This is not how it happens. People don’t just sit down in a room and decide they can let go of each other. I refuse to make that decision, and any second now I will say so. I will say, Just wait. And yet here I am, nodding with Mom, as if we are agreeing, though my eyes stay cool and dry and I am filled with disbelief.

  The ER doctor leads us into Bud’s area, a big, dim room made of curtains. We take up vigil beside his bed, one of us on each side. Mom and I each hold a hand. The EMT driver apologizes—they sedated Bud in order to intubate him. “We didn’t realize he had a living will,” the man admits. “We wouldn’t have done it.” Now my father floats just beyond us in a state of twilight unconsciousness, his breath a ragged snore, so our last words take place through this veil of anesthesia. The doctor encourages us to talk to him, and somehow Bud does seem to be listening. I squeeze his hand. “Don’t be afraid, Dad,” I say, because I’m so scared and I don’t know the right thing to say, but I can’t bear to think of him feeling the way I’m feeling right now. “We’re here,” I hear myself saying. “We’ll always be together. All of us.” We stroke his head. Time speeds up, slows down, paced by the rhythms of his hard breath and the hospital monitors. We call my sisters, one by one, and hold the phone to his ear so they can speak to him as well. His breathing quiets as their voices trickle into his ear. He’s listening. After each call, Bud nods, several times. He’d waited to hear from his children.

  Only then does his heart begin to slow.

  Several of his nurses from past hospital stays get word that Dad is downstairs. They join us, hands clasped, to bestow their last kisses. The young ER representative who first greeted us, our guide, with her narrow, caramel-colored fingers, soft hazel eyes, errant hair—a wisp of a creature with a fairy’s face—sits a while, telling us about herself. She loves to work with the critically ill, people balancing on slim thresholds. She uses the words potent and profound. At one point in the conversation, I find I’m touching her hand, as if trying to tether her, like a balloon on a string. I’m not quite sure she exists.

  Despite the cascade of bleeding, Bud hangs on. All his life, my father had been so physically strong; now, despite his winnowed blood, his organs struggle to keep going. Nothing in him wants to let us go. We wait, hold as still as possible, watching him do the work of it, inch by inch and breath by breath, the blip on the monitors growing fainter. Labor. Gravity loosening its hold. Later it will occur to me how lucky a good death is. Completion, the transformation into wonder: to feel beige walls melt into plains of clouds, to watch faces turning, glittering. Though he is leaving, I have the undeniable sense that he is going somewhere, tunneling through the air, in motion. We watch the monitor. There is one last blip. The last sweet drop. His spirit rushes over the palms of our hands.

  The nurse stands by the bed, watching; seconds later, she says one soft, “Okay.” She marks the time, leaves quietly.

  Mom stands to kiss the top of Dad’s head and she tells him that she’s happy for him. He’s wanted to go for some time, we know. Then she sits beside him again. After a moment, she says plaintively, “I don’t want to leave him all alone here.”

  “Let’s stay.” I haven’t let go of his hand. “We’ll stay for as long as we want.” We sit with him quietly, companionably, his spirit so radiantly present it seems to me nearly as if nothing has happened. This is a sense that will remain with me for weeks after his death. I’m not given to mystical beliefs, but now I’m struck by the ordinariness of it all, expecting perhaps a great gash in the air, yet it seems somehow quite clear that he hasn’t gone anywhere. Even now, perhaps ten minutes after the last solitary heartbeat, it feels just as if Bud is still squeezing my hand. I wonder if on her side of the bed Mom can also feel the press of his hand. When finally I let go, his fingers open slowly.

  We are pulling the car out of the hospital parking lot when Mom says, “Oh no. Oh my goodness, we forgot Dad’s clothes—in there. We’ve got to go back.”

  We could probably reclaim them another day. In fact, we don’t actually need them any longer. But I swing the car around. We pull up to the curb, and when I reenter, a nurse says they’ll bring his things out to me. A few minutes later, I see her through the window—our guide with the fairy face. The young patient rep comes through the door with my father’s possessions in a plastic hospital bag. I’d held off tears all this time, but as she folds me in a hug, they rise, as if embedded in the skin. She tells me, “There’s people in there crying that—” She has a wide, helpless smile. “It’s not usual. Nurses and doctors coming over, telling about him—” She shakes her head. “I’m so sorry I never met him.”

  I can hear him now: I don’t care what they say about you—you’re a great kid. I can’t help my own shaky smile. “They did—they broke the mold.” I thank her again and think to ask her name. She tucks a few strands behind her ear and says, “I’m Grace.”

  At home: tables jammed with salads and casseroles and pies and fruit displays and flowers and shrubs. The doorbell, the house phone, the cell. A tribunal of old men in the living room, Bud’s rickety, bony-kneed cronies, their faces wide and dazed or closed, grief-confirmed, into seams. In the dining room, Mom finds herself consoling distraught plumbers and landscapers and handymen. People Bud had routinely bargained down. They keep looking around as if expecting him to emerge. Wanting him back. He’s been gone for several hours and that’s enough.

  “My wife didn’t even want me to work here anymore,” the electrician says forlornly, bent over a cup of coffee. Mom pats his arm as he mutters, “I was losing money, working for Gus.” The man holds out his hand, palm up, weighing something. “He made me nuts. The way he’d stand over you, telling you how to do stuff he had no idea how to do. And his jokes? Oh, my God. Those crappy jokes.”

  A houseful of weeping men recount incomprehensible jokes. “Remember ‘worse than guilty’?” the landscaper asks. They mutter and shake their heads.

  Bud’s terrible gag: “One day, the king decides to make a challenge. He says he will give his finest stallion to anyone who can come up with a ‘crime worse than guilty.’” If you’re in Bud’s audience, now you say, “But what does that even mean—worse than guilty?” He doesn’t have a good answer to this. “So, the king’s joker, Jeha the fool, waits until the night of a big party. When the king and queen are in the receiving line, Jeha comes up and pinches the queen’s bottom. The queen shrieks and drops her champagne and her crown falls off. The king shouts, ‘How dare you? Take this dog out and shoot him!’ And Jeha says, ‘But Your Majesty, first you owe me a stallion.’ ‘How think you this, you evil, you monster?’ And the joker said, ‘You said a crime worse than guilty, did you not?’ And the king had to admit he was right, and that was how the king lost his best horse.”

  That’s it. That’s the whole joke. If you’re an Ame
rican, this is when you frown. If you speak Arabic, you might also frown. But you might also eventually say, “Ohhhhh!” Then translate it into Arabic for your friends. They will have a good laugh. But not the English speakers. Unless it’s a night like tonight, where the joke gets told and mulled over, and no one gets it, but they can’t stop trying.

  That evening, Mom, Scott, Gracie, and I take a drive to get out of the house. “Where is Jiddo?” Gracie asks for the third or fourth time as I sit beside her in the backseat. I feel the hairline crack in my chest as I say, “He’s gone, Sweetheart. He’s not with us now.”

  “When I can see him?” She watches me struggle, confounded, trying to offer her something. “I don’t know, Baby. Someday, I think.”

  Through the tall pines, there’s an immense, glittering sunset. It soaks the moving car, lights everything with gauze, flames the branches into white shadows. “I think the sun wants to come with me,” she says. Squinting at the radiance, Gracie strains against her car seat and points. “He’s over there! I see him! Hello, Jiddo, I’m right here. Hello. Hello.”

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  The Right Thing

  There are many parts to the walk to preschool.

  The elevator, in which you are the only one allowed to press the buttons.

  The lobby with the doors and the first shock of whatever the weather is doing.

  The walking up the hill with many backward glances—has the streetcar already come, is it coming yet? If it’s rolling up to the stop as you straggle down the front steps, there are two long (uphill) blocks that have to be run, hearts banging, school supplies, hats. Much backward yelling: Come on, Mama! Thundering through its doors just in time. Which is all pretty silly, since it’s usually faster to walk to school than to ride the streetcar. There are seating arrangements to consider: sit beside Mama, in the seat behind or in front, and if Daddy’s there, where does he get put. There are many faces to look at and to see what sorts of things are people wearing and are they appealing or not. Is there someone interesting aboard, perhaps someone talking loudly to someone who isn’t there, or someone who smells like no baths, someone who merits special attention?