I Have Lost My Way(11)

Once Grandma Mary moved in, she took over what had been my parents’ bedroom, and Dad moved into the spare bed in my room. And just like that, he seemed to fully relinquish a role that had never fully fit in the first place. No more father and son, now we were truly a fellowship. We would stay up late in the night, talking about anything and everything: Was there intelligent life out there? Dad was sure of it. And could it be that we weren’t really living but were part of some video game someone else was playing? Dad thought it was a possibility. We talked about the places we might go one day. Dad wanted to see the hidden temples of Angkor Wat. I wanted to go to New York City because I’d started staying up to watch SNL and wanted to see it filmed.

“Done and done,” Dad promised, adding the places to our list. “We’ll do it all. We’ll see the world, together.”

“A fellowship of two,” I said.

It went on like this for years. I lived my life, went to school, and played soccer in the fall, baseball in the spring. I was getting pretty good as a pitcher and a first baseman, and the coach said I might get into a traveling league. Grandma Mary did the grocery shopping and cleaning and took care of me and Dad.

Dad still worked as an IT guy, but he didn’t have a steady job anymore; he was what he called a freelancer. Mom called it something else, but after a few years she remarried and had another kid, and stopped complaining about how much Dad worked, stopped asking me if I wanted to come live with her in California.

Grandma Mary was a creature of habit. She wore the same smocked apron every day. She went to the same mass every Sunday. She smelled of Nivea and Palmolive, and she always coughed. So no one noticed at first when the coughing got worse, more hacking and wet. And no one noticed the blood-speckled tissues that Grandma Mary coughed into, because she flushed them down the toilet.

When she caught a cold that turned into pneumonia, a chest X-ray revealed lung cancer. Stage four, the doctors said.

I had a teammate named Tyler whose uncle had recently died of colon cancer. He was the one who told me what stage four meant. Dad refused to believe it. He insisted Mary would be okay. “Not with stage four she won’t,” Tyler said.

“My dad’s going to figure it out,” I told Tyler, because that’s what Dad had insisted. He spent hours on the internet, ordering healing crystals one day and shark-fin powder the next. At one point, he was all set to charge airplane tickets to Israel, where some new stem cell treatment was being offered, only to be stymied when the charge was declined.

“She’s going to beat this,” he insisted.

Meanwhile, Mary grew sicker. She underwent two rounds of chemotherapy and then put a stop to it. “How can I take care of you two if I’m running for the toilet every five minutes?” she asked.

One day, I came home from baseball practice to find Grandma Mary collapsed on the floor. Dad sat beside her, legs crossed, holding her hand, tears streaming down his face.

“Is she dead?” I asked.

“I don’t know, I don’t know,” Dad replied.

I rushed to her, put a finger on her neck as I’d seen done on TV, and felt a pulse there. I was only eleven years old, but I stayed calm, like I already knew what to do, like I’d been preparing for this moment.

When the paramedics arrived, one of them asked, “How long has she been unresponsive?”

I looked at Dad, who was sitting in that same place on the floor, even though he was in the paramedics’ way. “How long?”

“I don’t know. I don’t know,” Dad replied, swaying back and forth.

Mary stayed in the hospital for three weeks. The doctors said she probably wouldn’t leave.

“Like hell she won’t,” Dad said. And he insisted on bringing her home. “What she needs is to be out of this institution, away from all those poisons they’re pumping into her.”

Mary was in no place to make such a decision; Dad was the official adult. The doctors had no choice but to listen to him.

But it was me who met with the hospice coordinator. Who filled out all the paperwork, who got Dad to sign on the dotted line, who arranged for a hospital bed to be delivered to our house and for the hospice nurse to visit.

The hospice nurse was named Hector. He came nearly every day that whole summer Mary lay dying, at first just for an hour or so to adjust her pain meds and make sure she was comfortable.

“Where’s your father?” he would ask me on the days when Dad was absent.

“Oh, at work,” I would lie. I didn’t know where Dad was. Out on a walk. Playing pool. Hunting for the cure for cancer out in the woods.

As Grandma Mary grew sicker, Hector stayed longer and longer, all afternoon, even toward the end when all she did was sleep. Sometimes he lingered in the kitchen with me, once frying me what looked like a green banana but turned out to be something called a plantain, and which was delicious. Other times, he sat with Mary, rubbing lotion onto her hands, combing her hair, talking to her, singing to her.

“Can she hear you?” I asked him once.

“I believe she can.” He beckoned me closer. I didn’t like to be in the sick room. It smelled sour, like slightly off milk, and Mary made a terrible rattling sound as she labored for breath. But with Hector I didn’t feel so scared.

I stood by his side as he ministered to my grandmother. The look on his face was serene, even happy. I didn’t understand. “Isn’t it sad watching so many people die?” I asked.