The Last Cadillac (33 page)

The doctor said to keep Dad comfortable and on a schedule of sorts, including the physical therapy that was hardly exercise at all. He moved around as little as possible. He mostly sat and cooed and ogled the pretty home health aide who bent over him for forty-five minutes every Tuesday and Thursday afternoon. She made him lift an arm at a time, or a leg, while she asked him a few questions, and he usually commented on her lipstick or hair-do. He missed his nap for her visits. Whereas, normally, he barely had the energy to stay awake an entire afternoon.

That last day, we headed toward the television for a brief look at the TCM channel before his nap. But he moved slowly, dragging his leg more than usual. He was barely able to stand upright.

“Are you OK there?” I asked, knowing how perfectly useless that question was.

“I have to lie down, oh, I'm so tired,” he said.

Then, in the next instant, it happened. I held a plate in one hand and an empty glass in the other. I stood rooted to the tile floor as I watched my father slowly teeter sideways, like falling off a horse.

In fact, it was odd, that decades before I had seen him do just that—on a bright Sunday afternoon, fall off that big, black, shiny horse named Pat, without a scratch.

I moved quickly in front of him, trying to break his fall, and all I could think was that he would squash me. I didn't know where to grab him. I dropped the plate and it shattered as the walker rolled away toward the front door like it wanted to leave. Dad hit the upholstered arm of the couch and glanced off the corner of the TV table before coming to rest on his side. He cut himself on the tray table. A small squiggle of blood appear on his forehead.

“Oh, Oh, Oh.”

It was the only sound after the thudding, the shattering. Somehow, I managed to hold onto him, and indeed, break his fall, or at least slow it down. I was no help at all, only adding to the confusion and the mess with broken glass all over the floor.

I righted him, and now he was almost dead weight. But somehow, I got him in the bedroom.

He was lying on his back in bed. I called 911. “Get over here now. Yes, it's an emergency … I think he's dying.” I could barely speake, my voice shook so, as did the rest of me. I was cold all over. I focused on the phone in my hand.

“What do I do?”

“Is he breathing?” the assistant asked.

“I don't know. Yes, I think so.” His eyes were open but glazed, and more prominent than usual, almost as if the destruction going on in his head was reflected in his gaze. He made little puffing sounds, in and out through his lips, and I noticed some peanut butter in the corner of his mouth. He had not gotten sick, nor made a sound since telling me he was tired before the fall.

“Give him mouth-to-mouth resuscitation. Now, until we get there. We're on the way.”

“But I don't know how.” How stupid of me. I'd never taken a CPR course, and I had an elderly parent living with me for all that time. The thought of it annoyed me. I should know how to do this, but I didn't. And I was so afraid.

“I don't know what I'm doing,” I said. “Will I hurt him?”

“No, you won't. There's no such thing as a bad effort. It's all good.”

Then she told me to close off his nose and breathe in through his mouth in a regular pattern. She stayed on the phone while I tried it.

I pinched his nose shut. He had no cartilage left from his days as a boxer, and it was like touching a fold of tough skin. I couldn't remember ever touching his nose. I leaned closer and I could smell the peanut butter. His lips were dry and I breathed in slowly, then regularly. The puffing had stopped and I looked into his eyes. He didn't see me at all when I called to him.

Then he lifted his head and looked toward the corner of the room. He started talking.

“Dad, who's there? What are you saying?”

He tried to tell me, but it was useless. He stared across the room, talking, talking, talking, like it was the most normal day of his life, like he had something to say, so deliberately, and he wouldn't lie back until he said it, whatever it was. I couldn't understand a word. Then he fell back on his pillow. His eyes were still open, seeing only what he could see, and his breathing was so shallow I could hardly sense it.

I heard the truck, and then the metallic sound of doors slamming and men talking and yelling to hurry. Two technicians appeared in the bedroom with a stretcher. They dropped it to the floor and loaded Dad on to it in one sweep.

They stretched him out on the bedroom floor to work him over. I finally had to ask the question I was dreading. “Is he gone?”

The technician was soft spoken, courteous, young, but so knowing for that age, as he handled the gear and pointed the way to get moving. “It's not for us to say, ma'am,” he said. “We'll meet the doctor in the emergency.”

They did things I never thought to do. They loosened his shirt and his belt, and checked his mouth for obstruction, and took off his shoes. They tried to resuscitate him with paddles. And I didn't have the presence of mind to tell them Dad had a DNR—Do Not Resuscitate—order in his medical records. All I could think about, all I could fear, was that he was already dead.

He'd met someone in the corner of that room, someone standing in the sunshine, who helped him along. I hoped it was like that. He had to be with them.

I didn't care what these medical people said, because they
didn't know him and what my dad, the strongest man in the world, was capable of. But it didn't seem he was with me anymore. I didn't want to believe it, watching them load Dad into the back of the ambulance, chasing after them out the door, jumping into the front seat.

Dad rode in the back of the ambulance, and I turned to look at him, clutching his toes in a grip, talking to him. But there was no response. His eyes were closed, and I didn't know if he had closed them, or they had been closed for him. And what did it matter? His eyes were closed.

They seemed to know that they couldn't do anything further. He didn't have an IV, like they do in the movies. It was clear to me that he wasn't breathing anymore. Somewhere along the way, he had stopped doing the most automatic thing we do to stay on this earth. I never knew the exact second he stopped, but I know he had last words to say to someone standing in the corner of the bedroom. I had looked over that way, and I saw nothing. But he did.

I didn't want to admit he was gone. I was beyond crying and in another zone that made me numb. I wanted to go back, re-trace and figure out how I'd gotten to this place. But there was no going back, only forward.

Conditions were clear as we sped along the road on the way to the hospital. The driver glanced in the rear view mirror, but he kept a steady pace behind the yellow Mustang in front of us. It was a thirty-minute drive, and after frantically venting myself on the driver to make some magic and get us there, I slumped down in my seat, tired and sick at heart. I'd known this would come one day, but there was no way to prepare for it. I had no idea loss could feel so bottomless.

I looked behind me into the back of the ambulance. The cover was pulled up to his chin, and I could see his face. I watched for a faint hint of life in him. I couldn't see anything.

I swung around to the road again, and the rusty car the color of bile was still in front, even while the ambulance driver inched forward and then back, pressing the Mustang to move over. And then with a cocky swerve, the driver in front of us dropped sideways into the right lane. I looked down into the driver's seat and saw a young man with a fat, leering face. A cigarette dangled from his lips. He righted himself in the lane and craned up at me, and as the ambulance lunged for the open road, the freak in the Mustang rolled his window down and shot us the middle finger.

“Well, at least we know what we're dealing with,” said the ambulance driver. “In this business, it's always best to know what you're dealing with—here, we have it, a perfect A-number-one asshole.”

I gave him a half-smile.

He grinned. “Sorry, ma'am.”

“I hear you,” I said.

When they wheeled Dad into the emergency room, the doctor was waiting there—the first time I'd ever seen a doctor waiting for him! And he was dead, so he couldn't appreciate it. So I appreciated it for both of us.

But, this time, the doctor hardly looked at him. The medics, the notes, the summary, I guessed, had filled him in. It was just a matter of signing the papers.

“How did he die?” The strange sound of my words seemed to come from another place, from within the tile walls and stainless-steel fixtures and shelving, bouncing off the cold, hard surface of the place where my father lay dead.

“Your father most likely had a stroke,” the doctor said. “A massive one before he even fell.”

“How do you know that? Are you sure?”

“Nothing is sure. You say he fell?”

“Yes, he sort of drifted off to his side, and just fell sideways.”

“That's good,” he said. “What I mean is, that it was very fast.”

“All I remember is the strange breathing—like little desperate puffs—and his eyes. They weren't his eyes any more.”

“Yes, you are right. Everything is in the eyes.”

“But, I don't think he could see anything anymore. He was in another world.”

“Yes, he was.” Our sentences dissolved into smaller and smaller pieces that hung in the air, but I didn't want to let go.

Fortunately, the doctor was a good one.

“We'll leave you now, to have a moment …”

I stood next to Dad in the middle of an open section of the emergency room in the hospital. Not a soul was there, except Dad and I, our last meeting in this cold place. All I could think was how he hated to be cold. But he was cold, and his face, when I touched it, had no resiliency and warmth, no one-liners and jokes, no more crinkles around those pale blue eyes.

He'd made it into spring, and he didn't see 9/11 and the horrors that followed. If he had, that would have killed him alone. If I'd done an inventory, I could have said there were some reasons that Dad was at peace.

I lingered over him, tucking the sheet around his chin and stroking his white hair that was still unruly, untamed, no matter how much I smoothed it and combed it with my
fingers. Some things do not change. It was a strange hour on a late Friday afternoon, before the overdoses, abuses, and accidents rolled in. No one was there that day, except for us. Dad was at peace. I touched his forehead, wishing for the old warmth to come back, but it was gone. I said goodbye, in an instant that will live forever in my head until the day I die.

I went back to the house a couple of years after I sold it. I drove past it slowly, down to the cul-de-sac and back again. The day was hot and silent except for the invisible doves and crackling palms and distant tumble of waves. I rolled down the window and the heavy island air whooshed in and hit me with all its usual mighty force. I slowed the car almost to a stop to look at the house, to will back a good memory or two, and mixed feelings rushed over me. When I looked back on it all, it was hard. Would I do it again? Not the same way. But I would do it. The only problem was that there would be no second chance. We had to go with what we were handed.

The new owners of the house made the best of it. The stucco had been white from its roof to the ground; now it was a deep buttery yellow and the barrel tile roof was painted brick red. My bright red French door was just as I'd left it. A tiny American flag was draped on a grapevine wreath at the door. Dad would have liked that—a touch I never thought of. The loud greetings and laughter, going in and out of that door, were only memories but I could hear them, drowning
out the slamming and sneaking about and the escape, as Dad had done, scaring the daylights out of me.

I drove on slowly. The holly that lined the driveway had grown up, round and bushy, and the silver palm by the door was a huge sphere of waving fronds. The white stone yard was completely free of the weeds I'd chased and sprayed relentlessly, and, of course, the glass chunks of unmade bluebirds of happiness were long gone. Someone living there must be happy, I thought, people who cared about the house, and I was glad for that. It was a sad sight, and happy at the same time, because The Adventure of our lives had taken us up and down so many times.

Tick went to the University of Illinois–Chicago. He said he wanted to become an international lawyer, and in the meantime, he was playing lead guitar and singing in two bands, or solo, all over the city. My daughter was president of the National Honor Society, a cheerleader, and a juggler of meetings, parties, and life in high school. Then she went to New York for a couple of years to Fordham University, finally studying medical technology near Chicago. She's going to be a nurse and take care of me when I'm old, she said. “Whenever that is, and not anytime soon. Then I'll braid your hair every day.”

How I admire those two for all they've done, and are doing.

Me, I became an English teacher, thanks to Aunt Marian and to finally getting off my duff. It worked out well. And I made a sort of truce with my brother the tennis whiz, my sister the restaurateur/saleswoman extraordinaire, and my sister the nurse. None of them apologized for the hurtful accusations and the backbiting; I haven't, either. But we are talking, civilly, infrequently—but at least
civilly—remembering that we are still a family, however fractured it has become.

I drove away from the house, remembering the time I'd raced down the street toward Dad. He had turned the driving over to me. I was sad, yes, and foggy in a flood of remembering all of it. And, no, I wasn't sorry. It was The Adventure. I kept driving. I was free. The street looked the same, and Dad was in heaven with Mom, and all was right with the world, inside and out, I thought, slowly accelerating the last Cadillac and driving away.