The Mothers(57)

The doctor had told Nadia that the biggest concern about her father’s injury was infection, but she knew there were other things to worry about too. Pneumonia. Lung collapse. Fluids filling his chest. And pain. Even if nothing further went wrong, the pain alone could prevent her father from breathing deeply. Each morning, she checked him for fever and guided him through his breathing exercises, ten deep breaths every hour. She packed frozen peas inside his shirt for fifteen minutes to decrease the swelling. She encouraged him to cough, always afraid she might see blood. Three weeks in, she found herself looking at the phlegm her father had coughed into a wad of tissue and realized she didn’t feel disgusted at all. She was too worried to feel anything else.

She was starting to think like a nurse, Monique said. When her father was discharged, Monique had come by and talked her through all of the medicine bottles lined up on his dresser. She showed Nadia how to support him when he coughed to minimize the pain, how to listen to his chest for fluids, how to help him take little walks around the living room to keep his blood circulating. Nadia fell into her routine, most days not even leaving the house.

“You gotta go back to school,” her father finally told her. “You can’t just sit around here all day.”

She was helping him change for bed, pulling his navy USMC shirt over his head. She tried not to look at his scars, the parts of his chest that still looked bruised.

“I’m not,” she said. “I’m studying for the bar. That’s what I’d be doing in Chicago, anyway.”

She never wanted him to think she’d halted her life for him. Other fathers might have felt touched, but hers would only feel ashamed. She had inherited this from him, an inability to ask for help, as if needing something was an inconvenience. She always made sure to study in front of him, even though she could hardly concentrate. Every few minutes, she glanced up at him and swore she heard a hitch in his breathing. A snag in his throat or the swish of fluids filling his chest. She heard imaginary ailments. She felt herself falling apart. One night, when the pain was too bad for her father to sleep, she sat up with him, her hand clenched in his. She wanted to take him back to the hospital but he refused.

“What’re they gonna do?” he wheezed. “Give me medicine? I got some right here. I don’t need no hospital.”

He told her war stories, about growing up in Louisiana with parents who hated each other. His mother had cared for him and his five siblings, while his father worked long hours at the oil refinery and spent his week’s earnings at gambling houses and brothels. He’d return from work, sweaty and covered in soot, and his wife would draw his bathwater and iron his shirt so he could go back out to spend his day’s pay on liquor and women. Her father had never understood why his mother would do that. She’d sit on the edge of the claw-foot tub—she had a long braid down her back that whipped up at the end—and pour warm water. She sometimes added a drop of cologne and the house, which usually smelled like food and dust, filled with a sweet fragrance. At catechism, when the priest talked about the woman who had poured expensive perfume on Jesus’ feet, her father had thought of his own mother’s devotion. At least Jesus had been grateful. His father never thanked his wife for anything.

One cloudy day, she was in the front yard, washing clothes in a basin, while her children were shooting marbles on the porch. Her husband came down the steps, bathed and cologned and wearing a shirt she’d starched and pressed. He was heading to the pool hall to gamble away his week’s earnings and he would return in the early hours in that beautiful white shirt she’d scrubbed, now crumpled and musky with the smell of a cheap woman. And after standing in the welfare line all day, she would scrub it clean again. She stared down into the basin, at her fingers wrinkling in the warm water, at the pounds of shirts and coveralls and drawers waiting for her in the basket. As she would later say, she felt a heaviness on her chest, as if those shirts had all wrapped themselves tight around her heart. She didn’t think. Her fingers wrapped around an ice pick that had been lying near the pump and she shoved it into her husband’s back. He bled out on the laundry tub.

“The water was red, red,” her father said. “I never seen anything redder.”

He bore his father’s name but he wanted to be nothing like him. When he’d enlisted in the Marines, his superiors noted that he was calm-headed and quiet, the type who kept to himself. He was called Altar Boy because of the rosary he wore under his uniform. After he was transferred to Camp Pendleton, he had a bunkmate called Clarence who was loud and charming, the exact opposite of himself, so of course, they became friends.

“He wanted me to meet his sister,” her father said. “I thought she’d be ugly. Guy wants you to meet his sister, she usually is. Guys with pretty sisters don’t want their friends sniffing around. But he said we’d be good for each other.” He turned his head toward the glass door, where the morning sky lit pink. “I couldn’t believe how pretty she was. And young. Guess I was young too. I watched my daddy bleed out over a laundry tub and I never felt young after that. But your mom, she had light. She smiled at me and my whole chest cracked open.”

Her father finally fell asleep by noon, his head slumped toward the window. By the time the doorbell rang that afternoon, Nadia had been awake for twenty-four hours. She stumbled to the door, expecting Aubrey, but instead, Luke paused in the doorway, clutching a plastic container of food to his stomach. She knew she looked horrible—scrawny and mean, eyes dark and puffy, her T-shirt hanging off her shoulders, her hair in a tangled ponytail. She hadn’t showered or slept or eaten in hours. In his startled eyes, she felt like a sliver of herself, like an ice cube passed around inside a mouth until it hollowed into a slender crescent.