The Exact Nature of Our Wrongs Read online

  “I’m hungry,” he said. “How comfortable is that? No one will let me have a blessed sip of water.”

  “It’s because of your test,” the nurse prompted. “You’re scheduled for a swallow test. You agreed to it last night. If you eat or drink you can ruin the results. You wouldn’t want that, would you?”

  “Yes, I would. I don’t want the test. I certainly don’t want a feeding tube or any heroic measures. I want to go home.” He looked at Hattie and said, “Call Roger Blankenship and have him get a court order. Tell him they’re holding me against my will.” He held up his wrist to show the metal bracelet. “Unlawfully restrained.”

  Hattie and ClairBell looked at each other. ClairBell said, “Daddy, let’s just wait and see what the doctors say.”

  He scoffed, refusing to look at her. “I can’t believe you’re in on this, daughter. I thought that you at least would respect my wishes. You were always my favorite.”

  Now, in addition to feeling sick, ClairBell felt two more ways, and all at once. Elated that she was his favorite—he’d never said this aloud, though her brothers and sister had long maintained it—and accused of wrongdoing when she had only done what she’d thought was right, when she was trying to save the day. “Daddy,” she began, but she could say no more.

  Hattie felt sorry for her daughter. The girl had tried to help and now her father was angry with her. She gave ClairBell an apologetic look, and then said to no one in particular, floating a trial balloon, “Maybe if we just take him home.”

  Abel said, “Now we’re getting somewhere.”

  The nurse shook her head. “I can’t let him go. The doctors have to release him. That’s hospital policy. He’ll have to wait until they make their rounds. I’ll try to get them to start here, though.”

  Under her breath to Hattie and ClairBell, she said, “They’ll talk sense to him.” She left, taking the rolling blockade with her.

  Now that the obstacle to his release was removed, Abel conceived an escape plan. To his wife, shifting his tone toward sweetness, he said, “Hattie, dear, this will be straightened out soon and I’ll be home, but in the meantime will you ask the nurse if I might have a few ice chips? She offered earlier but I—”

  “Oh, I’m happy to,” Hattie said, relieved that the storm seemed to be over. She hurried out.

  Next he turned to his daughter and smiled warmly, winningly. “SisterBell, all is forgiven if you’ll run down to the canteen and get your old dad some biscuits and sausage gravy.”

  If this had been any other day, ClairBell would have argued with him, or pressed him to be patient or refused to do his bidding, but this day was different. She had been accused. She needed to get back into his good graces, and so without argument or further word she made her way into the labyrinthine basement of the VA to the canteen, ordered his food, paid for it, and carried the warm Styrofoam box back upstairs.

  “Where did that come from?” Hattie asked when he opened the box and the smell of sausage and biscuits rose into the room. “Abel, are you sure you should? Let me just run and ask the nurse.” Wringing her hands, she left the room.

  Abel winked at ClairBell, and then with a plastic spoon he tucked in. He took his first bite. “Tasty,” he proclaimed. “And now I’ve fouled up their test. All we have to do is wait for them to let me go.”

  Down the hatch went the next few bites of breakfast with nary a glitch, and then he must have swallowed wrong, for a bit of sausage seemed to go down the wrong pipe. He choked violently.

  “Oh, shit, Dad!” ClairBell hurried to his bed and began pounding him on the back, but he couldn’t stop choking. He was looking at her with widened eyes, his face reddening, hands at his throat.

  “Do you want me to help?” she cried. “Tell me! I won’t if you don’t want me to!”

  He nodded desperately, and she sat him up and crawled onto the bed behind him, straddling him to give him the Heimlich maneuver. Once, twice. His chest was surprisingly solid, strong. She had to put all her strength into her grip. On her third try, the maneuver worked and he heaved. The morsel came up. At that moment Hattie entered the room with the nurse, who arrived at his bedside just as his breakfast came up into his lap. “You need to get out of his bed,” she ordered ClairBell. “What’s happened in here?” The nurse grabbed the emesis basin from the bedside stand and held it until Abel stopped retching.

  But there was no time for anyone to answer for what had happened, as the doctors appeared in the room, Dr. Abbas and Dr. Hakim. “We understand that you want to go home,” said Dr. Abbas, flipping open the chart. He hadn’t yet looked at the patient or taken in the disorder in the room. “You are aware of what could happen if you go home? You could get another pneumonia. You might not be able to eat.”

  “Well, I just ate!” Abel said triumphantly, wiping his mouth. “Biscuits and gravy.”

  “Is this true?” Dr. Hakim asked the nurse, and when she nodded he huffed in disgust. Both doctors looked around the room, as though taking in Hattie and ClairBell for the first time. “He was NPO. How did this happen?”

  ClairBell stepped forward, ready to confess her part, but Hattie put a hand on her arm to stop her. “Blame him. He tricked us.”

  “Mister and Missus and your daughter, I presume,” Dr. Abbas said, “I will put this to you simply. Either we put in the peg tube for feeding or it’s the end of the line.” He flipped the chart closed. “Take an hour or so to discuss it and we’ll be back after rounds and we can go from there.”

  “I don’t need an hour,” Abel said, but his voice had faded and no one was listening to him. He repeated his intention. “In full knowledge of the consequences, I want to go home. This is what I want. I had things planned otherwise, you know.”

  The doctors left the room, shaking their heads.

  Hattie sank into a chair and closed her eyes. Before her thoughts could come to rest on what was going on, on the awful prognosis the doctor had given, she thought briefly of Billy, hurt, too, and sleeping in his father’s bed, of the scene Abel might make if he went home and found him there. Her heart was pounding and deep down the fist was squeezing and an aching tightness spread across her chest. She’d heard what the doctors had said the night before when Abel had been admitted, but somehow she now felt as if she was hearing it for the first time. The end of the line. The words ran through her mind.

  ClairBell took a seat beside her and reached for her hand. “Sorry, Mom,” she whispered.

  Hattie smiled wearily. “Leave me with your father, will you?”

  ClairBell got up and went out. The seriousness of what was happening overwhelmed her. She’d always known this day was coming, but somehow she’d considered her father’s death in only an abstract way. The special powers had been quiet where his longevity was concerned, but now they quivered into action. She went around the corner and leaned into the corridor’s wall for support. For all her sister’s high-handedness, Doro’s was the voice she wanted. She drew a few ragged breaths, trying to calm herself, and then she pulled out her phone and dialed the number. “You’d better come home” was all she was able to get out before her voice broke.

  Hattie pulled up a chair to sit beside the bed. She couldn’t think of what to say. Nothing was too much and everything was too little. And so she only looked at Abel, trying to see him truly, to see into him to the center. When they were courting she’d tried this as well, when they’d sat in the front seat of his Crosley convertible coupe, parked on the bank of the Ark River, gazing for hours into each other’s eyes, but she’d never been inside him the way she’d wanted to be. She couldn’t see him deeply enough, couldn’t take him in. She felt that always between them there had been some strange impediment. And now he was an old man in a bed and she was an old woman in a chair beside it and the end had come barreling at them too fast. Her first and only love, her husband, looking back at her with eyes that had turned, with age, from their once-sharp green to a soft blue-gray, and yet he and she were no closer to what she’
d always thought of as union.

  “We agreed about this,” he reminded her gently, the anger gone from his voice.

  She could only nod. Despite their pragmatic approach to dying and the talking they’d done over the years, they’d not once been faced with a moment when a word could seal the future. She wasn’t certain how she felt. Whether she wanted him to have the feeding tube and prolong his life and maybe his suffering for who knew how much longer—months, she remembered the doctor saying the night before—or to forgo the intervention, to take him home to let him die. Both outcomes were terrible, and there was no third choice.

  The decision was his to make; on this they had long ago agreed, and she would honor him by honoring the agreement. But she wanted to say something meaningful and deep to mark the moment, something that would let him know how much, despite the way she sometimes resisted him or didn’t show affection the way he wanted her to, she loved him. Her natural reserve ran deep and words were hard. It hadn’t been her way to speak plainly about her feelings. She’d prided herself on her self-containment, but now she rued it. She wished she were a different kind of person, one who could cry aloud, could pound her chest in grief, throw herself on his chest, who could say what she felt rather than opening her mouth to say one thing and then saying something completely different to the point that she hardly trusted herself to speak, one who could reveal her heart clearly, without equivocation or havering or second-guessing.

  A verse from James about plain-speaking came to her: let your yea be yea and your nay be nay. She took Abel’s hand and clasped it, willing into her grip all the warmth she felt for him, all the sorrow and all the gladness, too, and most of all the love that surprised her, now, in its depth. “Abel, I don’t think I’m ready,” she heard herself saying, understanding even as she said the words that they were true, “to let you go.”

  For a time she thought he hadn’t heard her. He lay quietly, his eyes closed, his chest rising and falling in slow, steady rhythm. His throat was moving, as if he were trying to swallow something back. She was just about to repeat herself, for she understood that for once she’d said exactly what she meant, when he met her gaze and said in a cracked, dry voice, “Then you won’t have to.”

  Ten

  To cut down on his night terrors, Hattie moved into Abel’s hospital room and slept on a cot the nurses made up for her. After the feeding tube was inserted, she learned how to care for his stoma, a word she tried to avoid using for its ugliness. She called the narrow rubber tube that protruded from a hole in his belly a tunnel, and even though she would have to tend its dressing once they got home she did her best not to look at it too closely. He had opted for the tube for her. The least she could do was try to hide her squeamishness.

  She felt dead on her feet, both at the hospital and then at home after he was released. She said the 23rd Psalm so many times as the minutes went by that she believed she could say it in her sleep, what little sleep she got. Doro had arrived to spend the remaining weeks of summer, and she and ClairBell took turns spelling Hattie, so that was a help.

  Doro took on Billy duty, running her brother around on his errands, and she was saddened by the changes in him. He was as wobbly and low as she’d ever seen him, one moment at valiant pains to resurrect his old exuberance but failing and the next moment either strung out or in a dark, sad mood. No matter which state he inhabited, it was clear that he was suffering. When the word broken came to her, she pushed it away, but it stayed out of her mind only briefly. He could hardly walk. Sometimes bone pain drove him to his knees in the middle of a step. He’d found a discarded walker with bright yellow tennis balls stuck onto the legs and he had taken to using this rather than his cane. She’d gotten him to move back into his apartment uptown so he wouldn’t be at the house when their father came home, but she could see that the situation there was bad. His roommate was a lowlife and probably a criminal. Somehow her mother had been dealing with this. Doro didn’t know how she could bear it.

  For all the years he’d lived under a death sentence, some kind of amnesia or scar tissue had grown up around the possibility that he would actually die, and everyone went along in a state of forgetfulness. But now Doro feared she saw the approach of his last season. He was nearing fifty. His health was shot and he, too, needed to be cared for. She wanted to find a way. She would find a way, but her first goal, the reason she’d come home, was to get things squared away with her parents. They couldn’t go on this way, either.

  They needed a plan, the siblings agreed, and so one afternoon in late June the four of them gathered at Jesse’s, the better to keep the proceedings from Hattie and Abel and let them rest. They sat in lawn chairs on the raised deck built off Jesse’s barn loft, looking out onto the long roll of bench land stretching south past fields of ripe wheat to the tree line of the timber.

  The day had reached the golden hour when the setting sun’s orange light on the swaying grain heads seemed to set the air aglow. Locusts buzzed in the catalpa trees around the farmhouse and a flock of guineas surged frantically out of the walnut grove, honking a snake warning. In the packed dirt of the lane, Jesse’s blind red setter lay on her side in the heat, from time to time raising her feathery tail and then lowering it, as if to sweep the dust.

  “Just when you think things can’t get any worse,” Jesse said.

  ClairBell finished his thought by making the sound of a toilet flushing.

  “It’s bad,” Doro said. “Every day it’s some new problem, or Dad has a new demand. She’s already exhausted and he’s only been home two days.”

  “He’s agitating to get his guns back,” Gid said. He took a long pull on a can of Bud Light. “Can’t say I blame him.” Gid had long had his eye on the collection, hoping that his father would leave the guns to him. “He wants that little Sig Sauer especially.”

  ClairBell said, “He tried to bully me into going down to the police station to get them back.” The truth was that she’d gone on her own, hoping to make herself a hero in his eyes, but she was thwarted by regulations and procedure and the presence of her ex-husband’s new girlfriend.

  “Bet he didn’t have to bully you very long,” Jesse said under his breath. It was well known that ClairBell hoped the guns would come her way so she could pass them down to her sons.

  Abel had at one time or another made the gun collection one of his confusing bequests, parting them out according to who was in front of him at the time. He’d once given the pacifist Doro a monstrous double-barrel Browning that made her queasy just to look at, but a few weeks later he’d told Big Bill the gun was his.

  ClairBell made a sour face. “Don’t look at me. No way I’d set foot in that station. Jimbo’s new wife works in there. On dispatch.” She reached up to pull at two hanks of her topknot ponytail, tightened it, then shook her head. “Thank God somebody told me that before I went down there and made a spectacle of myself. Anyway, Daddy called up Uncle Big Bill and got him to do it.”

  “I heard that,” Gid said. “But they wouldn’t let Uncle Big have them, either. Won’t let anybody have them. Not until Dad’s out of the house. Not while he’s delusional. Fucking police state.”

  ClairBell looked closely at Gid. “How do you know that? About the guns.”

  Gid extended a pinkie from his beer can and held it delicately. “I have my ways.” He, too, had gone to the station hoping to get the guns released. He’d ended up making a scene, spouting about Big Brother and the right to bear arms and the U.S. Constitution. He wasn’t proud of losing his temper, but he was proud of the points he’d made speaking out the way he had, especially in a repressive government climate.

  “Wait a minute,” Doro said. She hadn’t been able to follow their conversation. “Why do the police have Dad’s guns?”

  “Tell her, Bell,” Gid said.

  When her sister had finished the story, Doro sat back. “Mom told me he had a claw hammer.”

  Jesse laughed bitterly. “Of course she did.”

&nb
sp; Doro was still mulling, trying to put the story together. The day before, in her efforts to find a place for her parents, she’d gone to the Amicus nursing home to talk about the possibility of getting her father checked in. Before she’d even had a chance to describe her father’s needs, the woman in charge had said, “We don’t have the facilities to care for a case like his.” Doro had been surprised. The woman hadn’t even met him. When she pressed for an answer, the woman hemmed and hawed and seemed hesitant to provide a specific reason. Now she understood. Amicus was a small town, and word about the guns and the old judge’s delirium had spread. She didn’t know how she was going to fix things, but she wasn’t leaving town until the situation improved.

  Gid brought up Abel’s threat to sue the ambulance company for ignoring the DNR on the refrigerator.

  ClairBell sank lower in her chair.

  Jesse reached over to pat her arm. “You were only trying to help. Don’t worry about it. He’s being an asshole.”

  Doro’s throat tightened. Her brother’s bitterness about their father shouldn’t have surprised her—it had been going on for years—but just now it did. Anyone who watched the two men could see that the problem was that they were of the same temperament and they couldn’t stop being who they accused the other of being long enough to see it. “He’s an old man,” she said. “He’s sick.”

  Gid shrugged. “Doesn’t mean he’s not an asshole.”

  Doro turned the talk back to the medical aspects of the problem, and then she moved on to enlisting their sympathies. “Mom’s overwhelmed with his feedings. The smell is terrible, and it has to be injected six times a day.” She went on to say that treating the inflamed tissue around his tunnel opening was a long, tedious procedure. She didn’t say that their father didn’t shorten it any by trying to cooperate, for this would set off the boys, who were angered by their father more than, Doro thought, they needed to be. And she didn’t say that their father bossed their mother, criticizing the angle at which she tried to work, the length of paper tape she’d cut, the way she folded the bandage. “And on top of all this there’s Billy. He’s in a bad place and he needs help, but every time he calls down to the house Mom has to wait between Dad’s naps and feedings to do anything, even to talk on the phone.” As she spoke she realized she wasn’t really saying anything new. This had always been the way. It was just worse now. She finished with, “What’s she going to do when I have to go back for fall semester?”