Here So Far Away(6)

“I mean, thanks. Really, thanks.”

“Well, let’s face it, kiddo. You’ll be doing a lot more of the driving while I’m laid up, helping your mother and brother. It’s only fair. But no more missing curfew. You have a car and no excuses. And hear me now: no bringing babies into this house.”

“Wha— Where would I get a baby?”

“You get pregnant, you’re on your own. I’m not your aunt Joanna, running a day care for her offspring’s offspring.”

“Oh my god, Dad!” The unexpected sight of the empty cast lying on a chair in the corner of the room brought my voice down a few octaves. “I was only a half hour late.”

And my slutty phase was ten months ago, thank you, not to be revisited.

“Kids your age, on the brink of being sprung from high school, they decide the world has nothing left to teach them. This is your idiot year. You’ll never be stupider in your life.” He lit a cigarette. “Do me a favor and fetch that ashtray from the guest room before the rest of me gets incinerated.”

I paused at the door. “Is that what the hospital did with your foot?”

“No, they mounted it on the wall.”

Before his surgery, the only place my father was allowed to smoke was in the basement with the door closed. There wasn’t supposed to be an after location.

Mum was making up the bed in the guest room. “Did you know that Dad is smoking in— Who’s coming over?”

“No one,” she said. “I’m moving in here for a while.”

“Why?”

“Because your father is smoking in our bedroom. Don’t fuss about it, hey. The doctor doesn’t want him quitting just yet.”

“I’m pretty sure he said that smoking could damage his blood vessels. Oh, and kill him.”

“And later he said he’d never seen someone go through a more violent withdrawing than your father when he was in the hospital. Now. George.”

Now period George period meant Pay attention.

“Dad’s got pain enough. We’re not putting him through detoxivacation”—not a typo; this is how my mother talks—“at the same time. Soon he’ll be able to make it down to the rec room, and then maybe he’ll be in a mood to quit.”

Mum raked a hand through her hair, which was dark and wavy like mine but coarser and aggressively pruned into a no-nonsense, silver-streaked cap. Her attention had drifted to the window. “Should have done something different in the garden this year. One day I’ll rip the whole thing out and start over.” She sighed. “I say that every year.”

Down the hallway, a loud thud. “George!” Dad bellowed.

“Go on, see what he dropped,” Mum said. She handed me the gigantic spleen-like ashtray I made for Dad in first grade. “And give him this before he gets ashes on the bed. I’ll be there in a sec.”

My younger brother, Matthew, was lying unconscious on the carpet of my parents’ bedroom. “Did he see the stump?” I asked Dad, nudging Matty with my toe.

“What do you think?”

“I think he might have seen a stump.”

“Jesus, Mary, and Joseph,” Mum said, pushing past me into the bedroom. “Did he faint, Paul? What are you two doing, just watching him?”

“Here, put him on the bed with me,” Dad said, clearing away the newspapers.

“I don’t think bringing him closer to it is going to help.”

“It’s what they call exposure, Marlene. He has to confront his fears. What would you rather, drag him all the way to his own bed?”

When Matthew came around, next to Dad—who’d tucked his leg back under the covers—he was the yellowy pale of raw chicken. At fifteen, my brother had a Victorian constitution that was unlike anyone else’s in our gene pool. He passed out at the sight of blood. He’d been known to pass out at the thought of blood. Or vomit. Or mucus. Or earwax. Or hair in his food. He fainted at the hospital watching Dad get prepped for surgery. Later, in the cafeteria, remembering Dad getting prepped for surgery, his pupils one-eightied and he slid gently under the table.

“Did you dream?” I asked him. Matthew had once said that being out for a minute or two was like being asleep for hours, with vivid dreams, sometimes nightmares.

He shook his head and pointed in the direction of Dad’s leg. “Are you going to take it out again?” he asked.

“I’m not cruel,” said Dad. “Don’t mean it ain’t there. Aw, son, don’t start crying now.”

“I can’t help it. It’s so unfair.”

“What is? The partitioning of my foot and myself?”

He looked at Dad incredulously. “A pebble.”

My father cut his toe on a sharp pebble at the beach. He didn’t notice it at first because the feeling in his feet wasn’t great from the diabetes, ignored the cut when he did find it, ignored the infection that developed in the cut, ignored the gangrene-like symptoms that spread from the infection, and then faster than you can say transtibial amputation, the doctor was telling him the whole foot and ankle had to go.

This was the first time his bad habits had seriously caught up to him. He’d been living like he was on a campaign to do himself in as quickly as possible without using a traceable weapon. Smoking? Check. Buttered donuts? Check. Exercise? Please. And he got away with it too. He passed every health test those Royal Canadian Mounted Police threw at him, year after year. You’d think getting diabetes would have smartened him up, except, so what? Have your slice of pie, or three, since Mum’s already shoving a needle of insulin into you. On the days he’d let her, that is, because he didn’t like the side effects and often couldn’t be bothered. Then he gave himself a teensy cut.