by Ursula Hegi
“Any time you want to move in with us …,” her daughter has offered more than once.
“You know you’re always welcome to live with me,” her son has assured her.
They’re both protective. Puzzled by her determination to look after herself, they’ve told her it forces them to worry even more about her.
Sabine looks at the insect bites on her thighs, traces them with her fingers up to her colorful swimsuit. Ah, she tells herself, but I am a woman who had a lover. Her lover was with her that night when she first encountered the death that has been waiting for her ever since.
They were the only ones camping in the vast canyon above a creek that flowed from one basin to the next, connected by waterfalls. Their fire flickered, casting shadows of long-gone generations against the stone walls on the other side of the canyon. The night was warm, and after loving, they walked down to the largest of the basins. At its far end, streaks of water cascaded, reminding Sabine of pictures she’d seen of Hawaiian women standing beneath warm waterfalls, hands raised to their long hair, fanning it out, while luminous beads envelop them.
But as she entered the basin, a current pushed outward from the waterfall, and she had to pull herself along the cliff to get beneath it. Instantly, the force of the water drummed down on her, pushed her beneath its churning surface, and as she struggled to surface, she screamed out. Her lover waved to her and laughed as though they were playing a game, but when she went under again and emerged with louder screams, his expression changed to panic and he kept running into the water and backing up because he didn’t know how to swim. And as the pressure of the waterfall pushed her down, down, Sabine thought how ridiculous it was that the water she loved would cause her death, and she had another thought then, very clearly—that her death would come to her in water, but that now was too soon. She felt calm, almost at home in that silver womb, and it was with something close to regret that she sought for a foothold on the slippery rock wall, pushed both feet against it, and catapulted herself away, shooting out below the water’s embrace. As she surfaced outside its coil, outside that ring of tension that surrounded the waterfall where it hit the basin, she was trembling—not from fear, but because she was no longer afraid of death.
From that night forward, she would think of the canyon as dividing her life into before and after.
It is late afternoon, long after the excursion boats have returned to the harbor, after the fishing boats have pulled in their marlins and tunas and dolphins. Sabine takes off her watch, leaves it on a flat stone for Armando to find. Dark-gray crabs move across the beach like tumbleweeds, and as she walks toward the ocean, the crabs bury themselves in the sand as if pulled into vortexes, leaving penis-shaped holes and half-fans of sand that look like the raised imprints of shells.
Four pelicans ride the crests close to shore. One of them lifts itself off, feet brushing the water for an instant. Sabine brings herself to the edge of the sea, gently. Frothy salt water swirls around her calves. She waits for a large wave and slides into its backwash as it is sucked out, drawing her along without judgment, without refusal. Swimming steadily, she dives below the crests that seek the shore.
The body that has become such a burden to her feels light as she heads out, her back to the peninsula. If she wants to, she can imagine there’s no land in sight, no place to return to once her arms and legs get too tired to keep her afloat. But why not accept the solid sand behind her and, despite its safety, choose the open expanse of water and sky? She swims, her eyes on the horizon, yet knowing the line of the shore and the rock ledges that become smaller and more urgent where Baja ends and the Pacific merges with the Sea of Cortés.
Moonwalkers
My father has the heart of a twenty-seven-year-old woman. While waiting for a transplant, he didn’t worry about the donor, because he forced all his strength into willing his own heart to endure long enough. But now he speaks about her as though she were still alive.
“She is studying to be a librarian,” he whispers to me when I arrive at the hospital, where he lies hooked up to tubes and monitors. The puckered skin beneath his chin stretches, tissue-thin.
Beyond his window, the sky is streaked with the blues of dusk; but inside, the lights are as white as the sheets and walls, sealing my father from all that lies out there, from time past and time yet to be. He seems oblivious to the noise around him: machines beeping; wheelchairs clattering; people shouting; televisions droning.
“Reading … She is constantly reading. Her parents…”
As he raises both hands toward me, I’m once again alarmed by how uncertain they’ve become, how brittle. Only a year ago, when he retired from his physical-therapy practice and surprised my wife, Eleanor, and me with a visit, his hands were still rugged. He helped us rake the fallen leaves behind the house, caulk the skylight in our sunroom. He has always relied on his hands—their knowledge, their wisdom —more than he relied on sight. But now he’s maneuvering through uncharted territory. “She is two months younger than you,” he tells me.
Smells of iodine and cleansers and gladiolas clash in his cold room. Two gurneys rumble past his open door, harsh against the tiles. White sheets cover the patients to their chins, and I wish I could follow them—away from my father. Instead, I sit down on the edge of his bed. Stroke his wrist with two fingers. Trace the plastic bracelet with his name. My name. John Bauer. His name used to be Hans, but he changed it to John when he emigrated from Austria as a young man. For him, touch has always been easy, part of his work. But for me, it’s not easy to be near my father. I feel ashamed for noticing, ashamed for not being a more compassionate son. But touching my father shrinks the distance between us too much. Will I still be able to say no to him now that he is frail? No, I cannot take off from work to go hiking with you. No, I cannot call you back in five minutes. No, I—
“She carries books with her wherever she …” His head lolls to the side, and his eyes follow the arc of the branches. This time of year is his favorite, the leaves still full while starting to turn red or golden.
I try not to notice the flaky skin on his scalp. Against the pillow, his baldness is almost aggressive. Though he had no hair left when I started my junior year, I rarely saw him without a hairpiece so well crafted it could pass for real. By the time I graduated from high school, I had my own bald spot, and it has widened since, the way snow gives way to piss in a nearly perfect circle. I have promised myself two things: to never wear a hairpiece, and to never comb my few remaining hairs sideways across my bald spot.
My cousin, Nick, still brushes his hair like that, long blond wisps that flop in the wind and make Nick look even balder than he is. The day before my graduation, he and I split the cost of an aerosol spray that was guaranteed to camouflage hair loss. It came in three colors—black, brown, beige—and we picked beige because that was close enough for both of us. When we sprayed the backs of each other’s heads, it fizzed like shaving cream but smelled like wet paint. Most of it stayed on my pillow that night, and the rest ended up on my graduation robe like a drastic case of dandruff.
My father’s fingers are bone. Ice. I grip them. Because I want to be here for him. I do. For as long as I can remember, I have fought to extricate myself from him, while at the same time being tugged toward him. In college, I didn’t answer most of his letters and phone calls. Once I lived away from him, the words we used to move back and forth between us no longer fit. And yet I found some balance—an uneasy balance—in being cut off from him and yet linked. Safe. Because I knew he would take the first step toward me again. And again.
I don’t have that kind of courage. And I feel embarrassed by people who do. Embarrassed by their naked urgency. Whenever I feel ignored by Eleanor because she’s reading or playing computer games, I retreat. Because I’m afraid of what I really want: to cling to her. And I’m afraid of disgusting her with my devotion. My father’s devotion was too much for me alone. I never was enough for him, and I used to wish he had more children.
Perhaps then his marriage to my mother would have lasted. There was the almost-child, a girl, who’d died after five months in my mother’s womb, a stay long enough to settle her in my father’s plans for his future years, plans that then shifted to me when I was born, making the absence of that child my loss. My duty: to replace her with my body; to multiply my love.
“… two months younger …” My father’s eyelids flutter, bluish, half transparent.
I pull the blanket to his shoulders, tuck the musty-smelling sheet loosely around his chin. “You want me to get you another blanket?”
“Step back,” he says urgently.
“What is it?”
“She should step back.”
He must be talking about his donor. From his doctor I know she was standing on a sidewalk in downtown Portland when a motorcycle jumped the curb and struck her. Only her heart has survived, beating inside my father, who is prepared to treat it responsibly. Over the past months, he has grown thin, the kind of thin that comes with waiting. He has never been good at waiting, taught me that waiting was a weakness. Each time he visits Eleanor and me in Lincoln City, he is impatient to return to the mountains of Joseph, where he settled forty years ago because the landscape reminded him of the Austrian Alps. He loved to climb up the steep paths of the Wallowas or down into Hells Canyon to the Snake River, and by the time I was six, he took me along, encouraging me to keep moving forward whenever I thought I could not take another step. “Challenge yourself, John,” he would say.
My wife says it’s cruel to constantly push a child. Although some days I agree with Eleanor, I do believe that, without my father, I wouldn’t understand what lies beyond that first barrier where most of us give up. Or the next barrier. By nature, I’m lazy. Extraordinarily lazy. It’s just that I haven’t tested that laziness. Not yet. Because of my father.
Eleanor says she can’t imagine me lazy. But I know my capacity, know that what saves me, even today, is how on those mountain paths I learned to set one foot ahead, then the other, until eventually my father would let me rest and point back at the additional stretch I’d walked. “Aren’t you glad I made you challenge yourself?” he’d ask, and start pulling nuts and raisins and oranges from his leather backpack. While we’d eat, I’d feel content. Proud even. He’d tell me the names of flowers and of birds, so pleased when I’d remember their names from previous hikes. Some days we’d glimpse deer far away. Vermin, my father called them. But I loved watching their movements—like sudden light on water.
The windowpanes vibrate as a helicopter takes off from the roof of the hospital. When my father lifts his head, his throat emerges—gray and sharp—from the nest of sheet I’ve spun around him.
“I want to meet her parents. They—” Though he’s moving his lips, I can’t hear the rest of what he’s saying over the roar of the helicopter.
Last night, before Eleanor and I left here, Dr. Meyer took me aside. He’s concerned my father is getting too enmeshed in the donor’s life. “Or death, rather,” he said.
“But how can he not?” I asked. “You won’t tell him her name, just a few details like her age and her profession… what she liked to do and how she died.”
“Sometimes grief makes people really crazy,” Dr. Meyer said. “Sometimes they are crazy anyway. And then it’s better for the recipient to stay anonymous.”
Still, my father continues to ask about her parents. I think they want to mourn their daughter—not adopt some man who is a generation ahead of her. I see her lying on a metal table after her brain death has been established, still hooked up to machines that breathe for her, that keep fluids and blood salts in balance, until her heart is harvested for my father.
Harvested.
That’s what it’s called, according to Dr. Meyer. A harvest of hearts. Of kidneys. And livers. Of eyes and toes and spleens and ears and—Stop it. A cannibalistic feast. Stop—
“Dr. Meyer told me you’re doing well,” I say quickly. The skin on my face feels dry and stretched from two hours in the car to Portland. I bend across my father. “Really well.”
He smells of mouthwash and, oddly, gladiolas, even though there are no gladiolas in his room. Just roses. Two bouquets of roses from Eleanor and me. But those I can’t smell. Just those gladiolas. Funeral flowers. A scent from the future?
No. Stop it now—
How to grieve when you dont know the language of grief?
My mother spoke the language of grief, carried it in her gaunt body where the almost-child had lived and died. That grief was all she had left. Her tears dried up entirely, and her eyes felt hot. When she put in drops to soothe them, her sight shimmered as though she were looking up from the bottom of a pond.
Ten years it took my mother—ten years and two months—to become pregnant with me, as though her body were denying her passage of another child. Perhaps she could have shed her grief if she hadn’t let my father claim me so entirely as his. Whenever I think of my parents during my early years, I feel I’m seeing them through binoculars: my father enlarged, right up against my face; my mother reduced, fading from me while I watch her through the wrong end of the binoculars.
I don’t even know the words for grief.
How to grieve when you dont know the language of grief?
“Dr. Meyer … he talked with her parents,” my father is saying. His features are jagged, small. He has no flesh left to waste. Not much between himself and death.
But he is recuperating, I tell myself. He’s not dying. Soon he’ll get out of the hospital, and he’ll only return to have his knees and hips repaired to match his youthful heart, to hike faster and higher than I ever will, to beat me at tennis, at everything I have tried and will try.
“You’ll feel much better,” I say. “Once you get out of here and back into your own house.”
“She reads a lot, John. She …”
I can feel the fusion between the donor and my father—their only language the murmur of blood—and for an instant I feel left out. Envious. She has taken the space of the almost-child, the daughter who will release me from his aspirations. What does that make her relationship to me, then?
“… has at least a dozen novels on her night table, some just started, some almost finished. Maybe Dr. Meyer can ask her parents if they’ll let me borrow the books….”
In the room next door a woman and a man are arguing loudly above the television laughter.
“… she hasn’t finished yet… so I can read those books for her.” That moment, somehow, my father feels closer to me in age. More contained. How much has the heart of this woman changed who he is? Is that even possible?
“You and books?” I tease him. Because he’s not much of a reader, my father. He has tried to blame it on being an immigrant. All he reads are professional journals and The Oregonian. While my mother would vanish into a book for days, emerging only to teach her Spanish classes at the high school or to go to the library for more books.
“Me and books,” he says without hesitation. “Bugs.”
“Books?”
He starts swatting at his head. “Bugs. Bugs in here.”
“There are no bugs here.”
Trailing tubes and wires, his hands ambush his ears and his neck, like frenzied birds. “Bugs in here …”
“I promise you there are no bugs in here.”
But he’s whimpering. “John—”
“All right. Let me get the bugs off you.” I sweep my fingers across his face, his dry skull. Pluck away imaginary bugs. Step on them.
“Bugs…”
“All gone.” I capture his hands in flight. “See? They’re all gone.”
“Step back.” He struggles to sit up. “Step—”
“The bugs are all gone now, Dad. I squashed them all.” I try to think of something to distract him. “Hey, you want to hear something funny?”
He frowns. “Funny …” A single bead of sweat sits between his eyebrows.
“You want to hear something funny?”
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br /> “Funny … Yes…”
“One night last week, when I came home from installing a security system in Neskowin, I found two messages on my machine. A woman’s voice: ’This is Mrs. Lodge from Tiffany’s school. She said you were going to pick her up, but since we haven’t heard from you, we’ll simply put her on the bus.’ Click.”
It’s the kind of story my father would usually get into, plant his opinions, insist it would be best for Tiffany to live with the dependable Mrs. Lodge from now on. “Parents who forget their children dont deserve their children” he would say. “And parents who name a child Tiffany dont deserve being parents.” He’d grimace as he’d say “Tiffany.” “I’ve never met a Tiffany who wasn’t a brat. Such a goddamn precious name. Expensive, exclusive, privileged …” He’d speculate about the names of Tiffany’s brothers and sisters: “Brittany … Cameron …”
Instead, he lies there silently, hands twitching in mine as he pursues hallucinatory bugs. I miss his odd humor, even though it has brought him trouble. Just a few months before he retired, a forty-four-year-old patient, Vicky Cotter, threatened to sue him for unprofessional conduct. She was referred to him because of pains in her upper back, and while my father was massaging her shoulders, she moaned and told him she already felt much better. My father laughed and said what I’m sure he’s said to a hundred other female patients before: “I know it takes a lot to keep you old gals going.” He still calls his receptionist and assistant “the girls.” Teases his patients that they just want to lie there all day and have their backs rubbed. Had he been born into this country thirty years later, he would have automatically picked up the appropriate words. What happened, though, is that the dislocation from his first language was all he could bear. Once he settled within his second language, he ignored all nuances of change. Though most of his patients enjoy his bantering, others have climbed off his massage table and left. Like Vicky Cotter, who fortunately did not follow up on her threat to sue him.
