21 December 2015
The first time I visited Nana at the nursing home I expected to find her alone in a dreary room, sitting in her own feces while the orderlies ignored or berated her. Shady Lane was nothing like that. It was bright and cheerful, with sky blue walls and so many windows, they hardly needed to use the overhead lights during the day. The staff was friendly and seemed to genuinely enjoy their jobs.
A few days before Christmas, Audrey joined me to visit Nana. TJ was the nurse on duty, and we swapped small talk while he signed us in at the front desk before telling us we could find Nana in the community room. During my other visits, I’d only seen Nana’s room and the garden, but TJ assured us the community room was easy to find. We had only to follow the music.
Nana was playing show tunes on a weathered piano while a pair of older men—one a gravelly baritone and the other a tuneless tenor—sang along.
“Well, this is just appalling,” Audrey said, stifling a giggle.
I waited until they finished “I Could Have Danced All Night” from My Fair Lady, and added my applause to the smattering from the handful of patients and nurses seated about the airy room. “That was great, Nana!”
Nana’s eyes lit up when she saw me, and she played the opening notes to “Son of a Preacher Man.” “Henry, sweetheart.” She spun around on the bench to face us. “Have you come to take me home?”
Her question was a knife that slid neatly between my ribs and left me bleeding. The two men who’d been singing with her continued smiling with their big, glossy fake teeth. “Nana, this is my friend Audrey. You remember Audrey.”
Nana offered Audrey her hand. “Audrey, dear, a pleasure. My name is . . . is . . . I seem to have misplaced my name.” She looked distressed.
“You told me the first time I met you to call you Georgie.” Audrey’s grace under pressure was astounding. “But I don’t have a grandmother of my own, so it’d be an honor if I could call you Nana too.”
“Georgie,” Nana said. “That’s me, right?”
I hugged Nana as hard as I could, taking care not to break her. “That’s you.”
The men’s names were Miles and Cecil, and they knew all the words to “Bohemian Rhapsody,” “Dancing Queen,” and every song from West Side Story. Audrey and I sang with them until we were hoarse, and after, Nana showed us her room as if I’d never seen it.
Audrey gravitated toward the picture on the dresser. It was the only photograph in the room. “When was this taken?”
“Thanksgiving,” I said. Charlie looked like he was chewing a lemon, Mom’s smile looked painful, and I’m pretty sure the only reason I was smiling was because I was imagining pushing both of them out of an airplane without parachutes. The tension radiated from the surface of the photograph like heat off a summer sidewalk. Only Nana and Zooey looked genuinely happy.
Nana shuffled to stand beside Audrey. “That’s my family. Aren’t they lovely? My daughter could stand to eat less, but she always did have a sweet tooth.”
“Mom?” I asked. She liked her wine and cigarettes, but I couldn’t remember her eating many sweets.
Nana took the picture and sat on the edge of her bed. “Oh, yes. Eleanor was quite a little piggy growing up. She especially loved to watch me bake because I would let her lick the spoons and beaters. Once, she became very ill. Vomiting all night. I nearly called Dr. Wadlow to come out to the house, but your mother confessed that she’d eaten an entire stick of butter.”
I clapped my hand over my mouth, laughing. “Gross!” Audrey was also laughing.
“Why in the world would she eat butter?”
The lines and wrinkles seemed to smooth out on Nana’s face as she recalled the memory. Nana couldn’t remember that I’d visited her two days earlier, but she remembered every detail of something that had happened more than forty years ago. The farther we are from someone, the further we live in their past.
“Eleanor saw me put butter in everything I baked, so she must have thought it would be delicious on its own.”
“I bet that’s why Mom hates baking cookies,” I said. “She always made me take store-bought treats for the bake sales in middle school.”
Audrey shuddered. “I love cookies, but I’d never eat butter.”
Nana sighed and touched the picture. “And yet, cookies would taste terrible without it.”
Audrey and I hung out for another hour, listening to Nana’s stories. She told us about the detective who lived on the third floor and the nice woman down the hall named Bella who was a stage magician, while Audrey brushed Nana’s hair. I wasn’t sure how much was real and how much was fantasy, but it didn’t matter because it made her smile.
When we signed out, I flipped through the pages to see if anyone else had visited Nana. Charlie’s careless scrawl popped up once, but Mom’s was there every day.
I wasn’t in the mood to talk on the drive back, and Audrey gave me some space. We stopped for coffee, and after we left, she said, “Nana seems okay.”
“I guess.”
“I mean, I’ve heard of worse places.”
“Me too.” I burned my tongue and swore. “Truth is, I’m not worried about her being mistreated. You just don’t know her. She was barely forty when my grandfather died, and she’s been on her own ever since. She’s so stubborn that Mom had to practically force her to come live with us.”
Audrey only ever drank iced coffee, and she sipped hers through a ridiculously long straw. “I don’t think she remembered me.”
“She called me Henry, but I think she thought I was my grandfather.”
“They’ll take care of her.” Audrey patted my leg. “How are things with Diego?”
I leaned my head against the window. “Confusing.”
“He doesn’t seem confused.”
“Maybe that’s the problem.” I’d been so sure that staying away from him was best for us both, but then we’d kissed and I’d read to him from my journals and he still hadn’t told me why he moved to Calypso, but I think maybe he wanted to. I couldn’t think when we were together. Diego took the clarity granted to me by the sluggers and twisted it around until I didn’t know what I wanted anymore.
Audrey drove slower the closer we got to my house. “Henry, Jesse would want you to be happy.”
“If either of us had known what Jesse really wanted, he might not be dead.” It was a terrible thing to say, but I had so many terrible things bubbling inside of me that it was inevitable some would occasionally spill out. “Whatever. It’s not just Jesse. It’s complicated.”
“I know, I know. End of the world.” Audrey pulled up in front of my house. She came to a stop but didn’t put the car in park.
“Maybe the end of the world isn’t the problem, Audrey. Maybe it’s the solution. And right now Diego’s a complication.”
• • •
Dust clouded the air in the living room when I got into the house, and settled on every surface. Boxes of Nana’s belongings were stacked against the walls. Clothes mostly, but also picture albums and scrapbooks I remember Nana displaying on bookshelves in her old house. The walls rattled, and I followed the twang of a cheerful country song toward Charlie’s room. The doorway was covered with plastic sheeting that I ducked through, and Charlie was dressed in board shorts, flip-flops, his old workout shirt, and a breathing mask, swinging a hammer at the wall that used to divide his room from Nana’s. She’d only been gone a few weeks, and it was already like she’d never lived there.
“What the fuck do you think you’re doing?” I pulled my shirt over my mouth and nose to keep from breathing in the drywall dust.
Charlie slipped the hammer into his waistband. “Making room for Zooey and the baby.”
I surveyed the mess. “You’re going to bring the house down on our heads!”
“I know how to Google shit, asshole. I’m not a total moron.” He tore a down a chunk of drywall and tossed it onto the heap with the rest.
“You failed woodshop in high school.”
“I was stoned through most of high school.” Charlie lifted the mask and rested it on top of his head. White dust coated his face, and he looked like the surface of the moon. He reached into a cooler under the window, grabbed two beers, and tossed me one.
“I’m pretty sure this is the cheapest beer you can buy.” I’m not a beer connoisseur, but I know shit when I drink it.
“Babies are expensive.” Charlie shook his head. “I’d give up drinking completely if I didn’t live with you assholes.”
“Mom could drive the pope to drink.”
Charlie chugged his beer. “If I could afford to get my own place, trust me, I would.”
“Do you really think this is worth it? The job, living here?”
Charlie sat down on the cooler and wiped the sweat from forehead. He was gaining back some of the muscle he’d lost after high school, but he’d lost the war with his hairline. “I’m doing what I have to do.”
“Wouldn’t you rather do something you love?” I thought back to my conversation with Zooey, about Charlie giving up his dream of being a firefighter.
Charlie finished his beer and grabbed another. I’d barely taken two sips of mine. “I’m gonna love being a dad. I’ll get to teach my kid how to throw a punch and a football. It’s going to be fun.”
“Raising a kid isn’t supposed to be fun.”
“Says you.”
“What makes you think you’ll be any better than our dad?”
“Because I want to be.”
“Is it really that simple?”
Charlie stared at me for a second, his brow furrowed. “Yes! It’s that fucking simple. I’ll be a better father than our father because I want to be. I’m sure I’ll screw up loads of other things, but I won’t make the same mistakes as him, and I won’t ever leave.”
“Was it my fault? Did Dad leave because of me?”
“Damn it, Henry.” Charlie rubbed his head and looked at me like he hoped I was joking, but I wasn’t. “You know what your problem is? You overthink everything.”
“Yes or no, Charlie?”
“Dad left because he was a dick. It doesn’t matter if it was because of you or me or Mom. He left because he was a selfish prick, and that’s all you need to know.”
It was as close to an honest answer as I was going to get without being able to ask my father directly, but it didn’t make me feel any better. “Why would you want to bring a kid into such a fucked-up world?”
“Are you kidding, bro? About the only good thing I can do is bring this kid into the world, give her the best life I can, and believe that she can make it a better place.”
Charlie’s transformation blew my mind. This was the same guy who delighted in sticking freshmen’s heads in toilet bowls in high school, and thought flicking boogers on me was hilarious. He was still an ass, but he was an ass with a purpose. I was so stunned that I almost missed what he’d let slip. “Wait. Did you say ‘her’?” He couldn’t contain his grin, and I hugged him, clapping his back. “Congratulations, Charlie.”
Charlie socked me in the shoulder. “Don’t tell Mom. Zooey wants to do it. Some kind of chick-bonding thing.”
“I won’t.” I couldn’t believe Charlie was going to have a daughter. She wasn’t a little parasite anymore; she was my niece. She wasn’t going to grow up and go to high school and become a porn-addicted, chronic-masturbating alcoholic. She was going to have a mother and father who loved her and didn’t slam doors. She was going to have an uncle who was sometimes abducted by aliens. She was going to grow up and grow old and fill her head with memories that time would never be able to steal from her.
Except she wouldn’t because the world was going to end. “I saw Nana today.”
“How is she?”
“We’re her family; she should be with us.”
“This way’s better,” Charlie said. “A month ago she tried to crawl into bed with me and Zooey at two in the morning.” He shuddered.
“It’s not right.” I couldn’t shake the image of Nana sitting alone in her bedroom staring at that one lonely picture. Even though she’d made friends, they weren’t her family. We were her family, and we’d abandoned her. But it was more than Nana. It was how bitter and cynical Mom had become, and Marcus’s downward spiral, and my not being able to get over Jesse and give Diego a fair chance. “Everything’s so fucked up.”
Charlie tossed the hammer at my feet. It hit the floor with a thud. “Help me tear down this wall.”
“Why?”
Charlie pointed at the hammer with his chin. “Break the drywall, or I break your face.”
“Yeah, you’re going to be a great dad.” Charlie feinted toward me, and I snatched the hammer. I’d seen Charlie do it, but I felt silly. What was he hoping to accomplish? Anything? Or was I just free labor? Still, I knew he wouldn’t let me escape without trying to tear down the wall. I swung the hammer. It barely made a dent. “Sweet. That was fun. Thanks.”
“Weak.” Charlie pushed me toward the wall. “Hit that motherfucking wall, Henry!”
I cocked my arm back and let it fly. The drywall cracked. Again, and it made a hole.
“Yeah!” hollered Charlie. He cranked up his shitty music until I couldn’t hear myself think.
Adrenaline surged through me. Testosterone and electricity. I began to understand the power of aggression, of fists and fighting and pain. With this hammer, I wasn’t Space Boy or Henry Denton, I was a mighty warrior and I could do anything. I attacked the wall, punching hole after hole into it, and when I’d made enough holes, I tore it down with my bare hands and bloody knuckles. The wall was my bad grades in school. The wall was the sluggers and their fucking button. The wall was Marcus. The wall was Jesse. The wall was Mom’s job and Charlie’s daughter. The wall was Diego. The wall was everything I hated, everything I loved.
I probably would have dug through to the other side if Charlie hadn’t grabbed my arms and pulled them behind my back. “Whoa, little bro.”
My breath heaved. I still heard music even though the radio was silent. Charlie let me go, and I looked at my bloody, dusty knuckles. Red smears painted parts of the discarded drywall.
“You want to do the rest?” Charlie asked. “You’d have it done in half the time it’d take me.” He laughed. I didn’t.
My arms were weak and my shoulders sore, but they weren’t what hurt worst. Diego had made me happy these last few weeks, but it wasn’t enough. I thought about Jesse looking down on me, seeing me with Diego. Teenage boys who are dead probably can’t masturbate, and it made me sad to think about Jesse stuck in the afterlife, lonely, frustrated, and unable to get off. I loved him, and I just don’t know if a world without Jesse Franklin is worth saving. Either way, I only have thirty-nine days to decide. “Thanks,” I said to Charlie, and stumbled toward the door.
“Hey, bro,” Charlie called after me. “You’re not just gonna be an uncle. You’re gonna be a godfather, too.”