Fifteen Scenes

I.

It’s evening. A Chicago rain streams down Gill’s apartment window. He contemplates hiking the pile of dirty dishes from his sink up the fire escape to the roof, leaving them to wash until morning. The phone rings. It’s a telemarketer. The two calls he received last night were telemarketers. He unplugs the phone from the wall jack and opens a beer marketed to taste like springtime. It tastes like a wet sock. He lies on his bed and opens his diary.

The last entry was back in October. Something about anger at the system, something about missing a diagnosis, something about guilt, something about pain, something about a pile of dirty dishes, something about a female Gill wanted to become more of a woman.

Tonight he writes very little. Did Pop trip on Widow Maker Hill on purpose to let me win? And lower down on the page: Bedsheet hold my hand today. He rests his head on the pillow and drifts off to sleep.

II.

Home for the holidays. The thermometer reads 10 degrees. It’s too cold to snow, but there is a foot of it already on the ground. He pitches handfuls of cracked wheat, from a coffee can, to 14 California quail stooped under the old bird shelter in the backyard. The black teardrops they wear on their heads bend out of shape when they fuss for their take of the grain.

His mom and dad built this bird shelter from the boards of a collapsed barn, before Gill was born. Now it’s the shelter that leans, foretelling an inevitable cycle of things.

Back inside, he fetches the photo album and sits on the fire room chair. The pictures are powdered in sepia owed to the passage of time. Here’s his dad wearing only denim shorts and a leather carpenter’s belt, his arms flexed high around Gill’s mom’s waist as she swims through the sunny air over him with her legs kicking her spring dress into reckless furls of paisley. She is so beautiful. And here she is again, balancing one of the barn boards on her head. Here his dad pounds the final nail, and here they embrace.

Gill doesn’t realize his dad is now standing quietly behind the chair looking over Gill’s shoulder at his own past, until he rests his hand on Gill’s head. “It took the birds a little while to understand we built it just for them,” his dad says.

III.

The phone rings. Gill’s mother is on the line telling him his 90-year-old grandma who lives in Wisconsin will be visiting for Christmas. He tells her he can’t make it, that he’s scheduled to be on call in the intensive care unit. She seems not to understand. “Can’t the fully trained doctors work Christmas?” she asks, and then tells Gill how much his dad’s back needs a rest from plowing the driveway and shoveling off the roof. Gill explains to her he’s not the one making the rules of his medical residency.

IV.

As his family gathers for a turkey Christmas dinner in Montana, Gill disconnects the ventilator from Henry Lassiter’s endotracheal tube so that his heart—without oxygen—will stop beating and his wife, Ethel, can excuse herself from his brain-dead body to spend the worst Christmas of her life with her living family, a daughter and three grandchildren in South Bend.

Henry collapsed at a local Mexican restaurant one week ago after choking on a piece of meat. Eating alone, he went unnoticed for too long before the medics were called.

Ethel looks like Gill’s seventh-grade English teacher, with her glasses resting out on the tip of her nose. She has read Rudyard Kipling’s poem If more than 70 times, by the nurses’ count. She asks Gill to hold her hand as she reads it to Henry one last time.

. . . If you can force your heart and nerve and sinew
To serve your turn long after they are gone,
And so hold on when there is nothing in you
Except the Will which says to them: “Hold on!”

Gill’s pager interrupts, but she continues. Gill is embarrassed. He doesn’t let go of her hand to answer the page.

V.

Gill is practicing the piano. Well, sort of. He has placed a bowl of cereal upon one of the high octaves and is lying on his side on the bench with his head propped up by his bent right arm. His left hand drags the cereal spoon over some flats and sharps while his left heel hammers upon the lower notes. His mother acts busy in the kitchen, like she’s not distracted, though he’s sure she is doubting the value of her investment—more than money—in his piano lessons. Above the piano, Gill’s Grandpa Merle looks down on him from a nicely framed photograph. Standing by his P-38 fighter plane with his helmet in one hand and a cigarette in the other, he looks like he would rather be somewhere else too.

VI.

The day before Gill leaves home for college in Los Angeles, his dad challenges him to a footrace up to their neighbor Gary’s horse corral. Gill’s dad is a runner, but Gill is going to be a college wrestler and has been training all summer. His dad chooses the course: the Silo trail to the Porcupine trail to the bullet-riddled jalopy and the Widow Maker Hill climb. It’s all trail running, and Gill hopes the roots and rocks will slow his dad up. They do. He trips on Widow Maker Hill and falls to the ground. Gill passes him before he can get to his feet, and when Gill slaps the victory stake at the horse corral, he’s 20 paces up on his dad. Gill pukes and falls, sick and tired and seeing stars. His dad recovers on his feet, hand-feeding hay to Ramus and Rusty, Gary’s two horses.

The luster of a harvest sunset greets them as they exit the forest. “That wasn’t fair, Pop. You won,” Gill tells him. “No, I didn’t,” he replies, “but I won’t run Widow Maker Hill until next summer’s rematch.”

The next morning, as Gill pulls out of the driveway in his rusty Toyota Celica to head for the City of Lights, he sees, out of the window, a tear on his father’s cheek. He has never seen that before.

VII.

They dip Gill’s mother twice per day. Place her into a whirling liquid and withdraw her again, then irrigate the burn after more morphine tablets—the pressured saline is harsh—are laid under her tongue.

Gill’s father is not allowed into the treatment room but stays nearby, has to hear her scream from behind that double door. He is standing by the window that overlooks the Port of Seattle. He is looking at the colossal red cranes that lift unfathomable weights of freight from the ships. A sign on the wall reads: GOOD NUTRITION HEALS BURNS.

Gill has arranged coverage for his patients during his mom’s whirlpool treatments in order to be with his dad. “Have a seat, rest your legs, Pop. I’ll bring you some coffee,” he says. His mother’s cry pierces the double door, and Gill’s stomach roils.

VIII.

“The last of the tulip bulbs came today!” Gill’s dad is almost shouting with excitement. “Four hundred fifty of them. Double earlies. The biggest bulbs make the biggest flowers.”

He grabs them from the box in double handfuls. The veins on the backs of his hands bloat like blue rope that will lace around anything he chooses. “Ready, Gilly?” To help plant the tulip bulbs, he means. Gill answers in a jazzed-up voice, “Right on, Ron!”

His father fastens his eyes upon him, and then smiles. Gill climbs into the tractor scoop to ride with the bulbs.

IX.

Thirty-three percent of Gill’s mother’s torso was scorched severely at full thickness. There must have been a yell, and a horrible smell of flesh, the degree of all that. What did it take to walk backward into the fireplace?

She does not like to be talked about. “Don’t amputate me!” she screams at the huddle of doctors. They are plastic surgeons. They move to her bedside and she jibes them about the heavy starch of their white coats. She treats them like her children, one surgeon observes. They don’t see her bawl, like the nurses and aides do.

X.

“I’ve got barbed wire, I’ve got hog wire, I’ve got metal chain, I’ve got posts,” says Gill’s dad. “Good God, Pop, let me take some of that,” Gill says, aghast. The chain weighs so heavily on his dad’s shoulder that he is propping himself with a fence post as if it were a crutch.

They’re going to fix the gate that enters the orchard from the gravel road—the scene of its vandalism bears the marks of a teenager Saturday night with too many shotgun cartridges and an alcohol-soluble judgment. Gill’s dad hands him the hog wire. Gill hears the click click click of his father’s metal heart valve marking their time left together before Gill goes back to the city. “At least they didn’t shoot the blue heron,” says his dad. “I’m scared for that.”

XI.

A kettle boils on the woodstove. Gill tries to show his mom how much kettle steam his face can take, but she tugs at him from behind. As he drapes his wet sledding clothes over her outstretched arm, Gill explains how his sled’s metal runner can make sparks as it cuts into gravel sticking up from the ice.

The moon out the kitchen window is a big white frozen peach, and Gill sees the town’s lights twinkling nine miles away. If she lets him sled late tomorrow evening, he reasons, he can make more sparks.

An hour later, in bed, his stomach is full of lentil soup and a toasted cheese sandwich, and he rests his head on his mom’s lap. A goose-down comforter wraps around them and his head vibrates to her reading voice. Gill’s eyelids grow heavy, and close. He takes leave of his bedroom through the back of an old wardrobe for a place called Narnia, where horses can fly and talk and little boys can go into battle, where a White Witch guarantees it will always be winter.

The next day the snow comes down in sheets of white feathers, and Gill is unable to make more sparks with his runner sled.

XII.

Gill survives the first quarter of medical school but feels changed forever. He’s in a Palo Alto shopping mall watching a team of gift wrappers work with his presents. His flight home departs in two hours. He bought his gifts in a rush. It doesn’t feel like Christmas to him without snow on the ground. He has not called home in three weeks. He has not shaved in four. He watches the gift wrappers’ arms and hands. They have no skin. He sees their arteries pulse. He sees their nerves spark and little pink muscles that wiggle their bones...

Abductor pollicis, Opponens pollicis, Flexor pollicis brevis, Flexor carpi ulnaris, the eight carpal bones remembered by the acronym “Some Lovers Try Positions That They Can’t Handle,” the median nerve, the radial artery within the anatomic snuff box . . .

All those structures machining together to wrap his mom’s blue silk shawl and his dad’s flannel pajamas into pretty green paper packages with candy canes tied into the bows. Is this wonderful, to see hands in such detail?

No. It is not wonderful at all, he thinks. He wants whole hands back in his life, hands with smooth skin and magic, hands to hold. If he finds that his mom’s Christmas carol piano key hands are these same skinless unenchanted machines, he tells himself, he’ll quit. Quit before women altogether become females.

Gill sits alone on the airplane and looks out at the night on the clouds that live between California and Montana. He sees the gift wrappers’ hands again.

XIII.

Since his mom died, Gill’s dad has been working himself silly. Gary calls Gill from the diner pay phone, worried: “Your pop ain’t slowin’ down for nothin’. He’s gonna drop, would rather drop than stop and think about your mom.”

Gill dials his dad just after, but there’s no answer so he tries back in the evening. His dad tells him he’s just planted a whole bunch of trees: 150 rugosa rose, 50 red osher dogwood, 50 ponderosa pine to replace the reds and Austrians that the voles girdled under the snow.

XIV.

Autumn. Gill flies home one weekend to see if there’s any wood in the shed for winter, since his dad says there’s plenty but Gill senses he is lying. There are three boxes of Ernest and Julio wine. There isn’t a lick of firewood.

XV.

The double doors of the Madison Park branch of Wells Fargo Bank swing closed behind Gill and the sun warms his face. Clutching the thick envelope that reads IMPORTANT INFORMATION ABOUT YOUR LOAN, he walks across the street to a small park and sits on the grass next to a candy bar wrapper. He opens the envelope. He decides to climb into the envelope, where he finds a flat-bottom canoe, and he climbs inside that and lies down on his back. He is floating upon the small pond next to the roses and dogwoods and ponderosa pines. He looks up at the suckling spring sky, where his mom is. It is a sky teeming with honking Canada geese. He reaches up to suspend their flight. He strokes them like low-hanging fruits. He hears his father rattle the cowbell from up at the house. He must wake up. He must get up. He must paddle to shore.