HERE IF YOU NEED ME BY BETH KEPHART
I run. Across the campus, where I’ve been teaching. Through the grit of the city, into the grit. Through the cavern of the train station, up to the wind-chucked platform, into the train. Now the train is bumping along its tracks. Now it has stopped. Now there are three long blocks to the hospital and then Reception, elevators, the ICU, where they tell me to stop running. I am to mask up, gown up. I am to drop the backpack of books I have been toting around like a turtle shell and adorn myself with nylon, paper, strings. The nurse talks and thenmy father starts—a helium whiz of words, a steroid high. “Hey, Dad,” I say, but he has his hearing aids out and his glasses off and there will be no reading my lips behind the mask that I am wearing. When they lose my father’s medicines in the days and weeks, then months, to come, I demand emergency provisions. When it is clear that the wrong pills and the wrong doses have been slipped into the treatment, I am not easily consoled. When they accidentally bring my father someone else’s cure, I am aggressively self-righteous. When the meals that are delivered aren’t the meals my father wants, I knock to the front of farmer’s market lines so that I can hurry back to him with something he might like. “I’m here,” I say, despite it all. “I’m here,” I say. For my sake.
of my mother young to curbside strangers then carry my father’s future up the hill— lamp by lamp, suitcase by suitcase, salvaged plate by undispersed spoon, until the pressure is too big and I am far from big enough, and my brother arrives with a plan: We’ll hijack a dolly to transport the heavier things. We’ll get the heavier things transported. Then we’ll nudge the empty dolly toward the downward curving hill, take a running start, and hop a ride, skateboard style, back to our father in the nearly empty villa. It will be funny, trying to keep our balance. It will be funny, if one of us falls off. I wish I’d thought of that. Proficiency is not benevolence. There is an art to being present. In early May, I get into my car, pull up to the village, and park. I wave hello to the ladies who sit like brightly colored birds on the benches outside the Personal Care wing and walk the long hall where my father lives. Knock. “Hey, Dad.” We head down the hall and slide into the sun. The ladies on the benches raise the wings of their arms inside their white and baby- blue cardigans. Their three-footed canes stand upright and steady—a miniature, silver, defoliated forest. Had I a bus I would sweep them up into the adventure I have planned. I swap my car for my father’s car and drive it nice, slow—giving him time with WESTONMAGAZINEGROUP.COM 79
When there are bills to write, I write the bills; when there are calls to make, I make the calls; when the therapists and the aides and the nurses are kind, I bring them books, I bring them flowers, I bring them cookies; and when something goes wrong and then another thing goes wrong and when, now, no fault of his own, no forgiving this scenario, my father is newly quarantined, I declare, super hero style, To hell with quarantine . And show up. And do not don the quarantine gown, the quarantine gloves, the quarantine mask. And insist with my questions, until I get the news we must have, so that I can carry it back to my father, who lies in his bed and asks if, perhaps, I can just sit, if, perhaps, I can quiet now and be. Thin-lipped. Grim-faced. Narrow-eyed. Drought complexioned. When fighting on behalf of the father you love, who do you become? Now it is decided that my father must move—from his spacious retirement village villa to a two-room fraction in Personal Care. Now I start the moving, winnowing, choosing, packing. I distribute and disseminate, negotiate the Steinway with the invisible cracked rib. I give my mother’s vases to the aides I like most. I leave an oil painting But this is his life I am defending. This is his life, and I am turning:
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