A Window Opens: A Novel (27 page)

I tried to open my mouth but the firm hand of gravity held it shut.

This was how I felt in my dad’s hospital room: heavy and helpless, pressed against the wall. The bottom had dropped out. I wanted the ride to end, but it went on and on.

•  •  •

I took the 6:57 train to work so I’d be able to get more work done before going to the hospital in the middle of the day. After work, I FaceTimed with my kids (“Look guys, there’s FAO Schwarz!”) while walking to the subway that would take me back to Sloan Kettering, where I stayed until it
was time to get back on the subway to Penn Station to catch the 9:35 train home. The schedule was head-spinning, literally.

I spent half my day underground and the other half reading brochures. They were everywhere in the hospital, splayed artfully on tables and hanging on the wall in Plexiglas racks:
Hospice Care: The Simple Facts
and
End of Life: Helping with Comfort and Care
and
Hope: It’s the Thing with Feathers
. (Okay, I made up that last one. Apologies to Emily Dickinson.) I read every word of these missives and even brought in a pot of stinky paperwhites for my dad’s windowsill, since all the self-actualized sick people in the brochures had them.

As for how I felt, aside from harried, devastated, and distracted? As for what it was like to present age-appropriate updates about my dad to my kids without losing it completely? The line that kept running through my head was
I’m too old for this
. It was an odd response, because I wasn’t old; I was on the young side to be losing a parent, just as he was young to be lost. But I felt ancient and bone tired, as if I was trudging uphill through molasses in ill-fitting boots. What was waiting for me at the top wasn’t anything I wanted to see, but I still had to get there.

•  •  •

“Alice, I heard about your dad. How is he doing?” Mariana was rinsing grapes in the office kitchen, the picture of bright-eyed beauty with her smooth hair and crisp white blouse.

“Aw, thanks for asking. He’s not so great, actually.” I tapped the lid of the Keurig impatiently and checked the water reservoir to make sure it was full. Isn’t this supposed to be instant?

“I’m sorry to hear that. He’s still in the hospital?”

“Yeah. We’re hoping he’ll be home by the end of the week.”

“And then he’ll . . . be on the mend?”

“Then hospice will come and . . . yeah. That’s how he’s doing.”

“Wow, Alice. I hope you’re making time to be good to yourself.”

“I guess I am. I’m trying.”

“Maybe a manicure? A massage?”

“Yeah, I should do that.”

“Well, I’m so sorry to hear all this.”

“It’s okay, thanks for asking.”

“At least he’s lived a full life?”

I threw my shitty coffee at the wall and walked out of the kitchen.

No, in real life I smiled and said what you say when someone you like is trying her best but simply doesn’t speak the language: “You are absolutely right.”

•  •  •

On the seventh day, it was time for my dad to go home. “There’s really nothing else we can do for him here,” said a nurse, so apologetic that I felt compelled to reassure her he would be in a better place. Then I realized I’d jumped the gun on that line—my dad was still alive, after all.

I left work early and met my mom in the hospital cafeteria so we could read more brochures and have a cup of tea before bracing for impact. While we were choosing our Earl Grey tea bags from a collection of soothing blends, we noticed Dr. Davis, still wearing his little surgery beanie and looking exhausted as he waited in line at the carvery station.

“Howard! Come join us. We insist!”

My mom was visibly relieved to have a fresh face in our party, but I sensed Dr. Davis’s reluctance. We were no longer the family of one of his most successful patients, the one whose e-mail he passed along to larys looking for purpose in the new normal. We were the caretakers of a marked man.

Dr. Davis pulled out a chair for my mom and then slid into the one beside her. “Ladies. Apologies for my appearance; it was a long night.” He had tiny pinpricks of blood on the front of his scrubs.

“Please. Look at
us
!” My mom had pinched-looking wrinkles radiating from her top lip, and she was wearing a massive maroon sweater that belonged to my dad.

“So today is the big day, I heard. I need to stop by and give Ed my best.”

“He’d like that.” This was a lie. My dad hadn’t opened his eyes when a priest came to visit or even his own sister. I had to resist the impulse to tell him that he was being rude, as I would have with my own kids.

“And you’re set with . . . whatever you need? The social worker gave you all the information, literature, what have you?”

We nodded yes. We spared Dr. Davis the story of how the social worker chirped cheerfully at my dad, “You’re one of the easy ones. Not one complaint!”

To which Will responded tartly, “Yeah, because
he can’t talk
.”

We chatted for a few minutes, and then my mom surprised me by asking the question whose answer we’d been tacitly searching for in the brochures. “Dr. Davis, I know you don’t want to put a number on it, but how long do you think we’re talking?”

He rubbed his tired face with an open hand, leaned back in his chair and crossed his arms over his chest. “Joan. That’s impossible to predict.”

“Just guess,” I said, dreading the answer. “So we can pace ourselves. So Will can plan.”

“I really can’t say.”

My mom reached over and cupped her hand around Dr. Davis’s elbow. “Howard. We go way back.”

“Joan.” He cleared his throat. “A month? Two months, at most.”

In such a low moment, his humanity was one of our greatest gifts. My mom and I stared at each other across the table. She shook her head slowly; I closed my eyes.

Then my phone buzzed, reminding me to dial into a conference call on workplace ethics. I sequestered myself in the empty hospital chapel and made the call.

•  •  •

The house was dark when we pulled into the driveway. My mom was in the passenger’s seat of my minivan and my dad was in the second row, asleep among the soccer cleats and empty Smart Food bags. I shook him awake and guided him up the back steps with one arm around his waist. He shook his head at the new hospital bed and opted to sleep in his favorite recliner instead. My mom and I split a container of cottage cheese at the kitchen table, and then I went home to road test video games while Nicholas boiled spaghetti for Georgie’s Strega Nona party the next day. We didn’t talk much, but his presence was a comfort. I knew my mom felt the same way about my dad.

To: [email protected]

From: [email protected]

Will you be in tomorrow? Please be sure to track your absences in GatheringPlace. A missed half day results in lower productivity, so we need to be sure we account for that, especially as HR is now tracking data from the hand scanners. Thanks.

I rolled my eyes at this one, the evil twin of the message sent by Genevieve to my Gmail account: “Alice, please do what you need to do. I’ve got your back.”

Susanna:
Hope the homecoming went smoothly. Just wanted to let you know, Paul & I are bringing over dinner tomorrow. Let us know if you’d prefer lasagna or navy bean soup. Both will be accompanied by bread and salad. I have a key.

Me:
Lasagna. Thank you so much.

Susanna:
I love you, A. I know you’re channeling your inner Winston Churchill.

Me:
Keep calm and carry on?

Susanna:
When you’re going through hell, keep going.

@alicepearse . 1m

“Do any human beings realize life while they live it—every, every minute?” Thornton Wilder, Our Town

(No retweets, no favorites, two followers lost.)

The next morning, I called my mom as soon as I woke up and she told me that my dad had slept soundly. He was resting comfortably, watching the news. They were looking forward to a visit from Linda, their new nurse, who would give them an overview of what to expect. We joked that there should be a brochure called
What to Expect When You’re Not Expecting Much.

Then my mom said, “Let yourself off the hook today, Alice. I think we’re in fine shape.”

This was a relief.

A
t Scroll, I received plenty of e-mail but very little real mail— or, I should say, carbon-based mail. A few weeks earlier, I’d been thrilled to receive an invitation to an evening of readings by first-time novelists at the Center for Fiction. This was a place I’d read about in
Publishers Weekly
and heard about from fellow publishing friends, but I’d never been invited to a gathering there before.

The invitation was hanging on the metal shaft of my office lamp with a WWHD (What Would Hamlet Do) magnet. I noticed it when I arrived at work and decided, spur of the moment, to go to the event. I
should
be good to myself, right? So I sent an e-mail to Nicholas, letting him know I’d be out late; then a text to Jessie just in case Nicholas had to work late; then, after some rejiggering of the evening’s swim team car pool, I was all set. Not exactly spur of the moment, but a mom’s best approximation.

The Center for Fiction turned out to be exactly the kind of high-ceilinged, parquet-floored, book-lined venue I’d imagined it would be. When Matthew, David, and I arrived, the cozy upstairs room was already abuzz with intelligent-looking people who looked like they’ve been born
in a John Cheever story, educated in a Donna Tartt novel, and now lived the full Jonathan Safran Foer life— or so said their tote bags, touting food co-ops and imperiled far-flung outposts of the New York Public Library.

Most of the folding chairs were already taken, so we settled into the second row, directly behind the authors themselves. I felt a soft tap on my shoulder.

“Alice Pearse? Is that you?”

It took a second of rifling through memory files before I placed the woman behind me, but of course, underneath her tortoiseshell glasses and artistically highlighted hair, she was Bonnie, one of my fellow Vermont waitress roommates. She had been an early adopter of recycling. Somewhere on one of my triple-stacked Ikea shelves, I still had her slim, pink-spined copy of Eudora Welty’s
One Writer’s Beginnings
. I remembered Bonnie canoodling on our sticky velour couch with her college boyfriend, a twinkly-eyed boy—a twin—who had died in the World Trade Center.

In more than fifteen years in New York, we’d never crossed paths before, but I knew from careful scrutiny of the deal announcements in Publishers Lunch that she had migrated to a top spot at a respected literary house.

“You’re at . . . ?” Bonnie mouthed hurriedly, as the first author approached the podium. She tilted her head to one side, quizzically, exactly as she had the night I botched the restaurant cash register so badly, I had to forfeit all my tips to the bartender in over-rings.

“Scroll,” I whispered.

“
Scroll?
That awesome, super-fancy new bookstore place?”

I nodded and shrugged at the same time. I still wasn’t at liberty to go public with the pivot, but it was hard for me to keep up the pretense that we were going to be the Starbucks of bookstores. I now suspected we were going to be the Dunkin’ Donuts of video games, with e-books and organic sprinkles.

The readings started. The novels were some of my recent favorites—
The Snow Child
,
Girlchild, Seating Arrangements
. Hearing snippets of each one in the voice of its creator was a little bit like meeting the parents of a
dear friend for the first time. I settled back between Matthew and David and lost myself in the words, my face relaxing into the same expression my mom wears in church: there but not there, seeing but unseen. Between authors, when the audience clapped politely, I glimpsed back at Bonnie and recognized her rapt look. We’d landed in the right place, a far cry from the shabby restaurant where we’d toasted our bright futures with Zima.

During cocktail hour, the long line for the bar snaked across the front of the room in such a way that my colleagues and I were forced to stand on the raised platform where the writers had waited their turn to read. We were the only guests standing up there, six inches above everybody else, so we only spoke to each other. We had easy access to oversized bottles of Yellow Tail chardonnay, but we were separate from the rest of the crowd in a way that made me uneasy. After a few plastic glasses of wine, Matthew said, “Is it just my imagination, or are people staring at us?”

“Maybe. We’re like tributes.”

David laughed, and then his face became serious. “Alice, your dad. What’s going on with him? I’ve been meaning to ask.”

“He has cancer. He just got out of the hospital—”

We were separated by a pair of women on their way to dismantle the podium; from across the divide, David mouthed, “But he’ll be okay?”

I mouthed, “I hope so!” Convincing someone that your parent is
not
going to be okay is such an arduous task.

My gaze fell on Bonnie as she circulated through the crowd, passed like a beloved baby from one cluster of literati to another.

I thought of the back cover of
Highlights
magazine, where readers are invited to circle what’s wrong in the picture. I’d circle the three of us.

•  •  •

“Hi, Mommy? This is Margot? Um, I forgot to tell you this morning, but I need a pack of unlined three-by-five notecards for tomorrow. For my oral report on Clara Barton? Don’t forget:
unlined
. Also, do we have any red felt? The sticky kind? I need to make a red cross for my apron. And if we don’t have the
sticky kind, can you sew the cross onto the apron when you get home?”

“Alice, this is your mother. No news to report. Daddy is resting comfortably. I think he’s really happy to be home. We’ll talk tomorrow.”

The 9:37 train was pulling out of the station when I arrived, so I had to wait for the 10:37. As anyone who has spent time there knows, an hour in Penn Station is the equivalent of three hours in charming Grand Central or even generic Port Authority, which at least holds the promise of bathrooms aplenty and the adequate Sedona chicken sandwich from Au Bon Pain. Penn Station offers no such creature comforts. Like a middle-aged, working-stiff Cinderella, I ate my Auntie Annie’s pretzel hotdog slumped against the wall.