The Return of Jonah Gray Read online

  “I like Marcus,” Blake said.

  “Don’t do this, Kurt.” It was my mother. “Your father’s illness has been hard on all of us. You know I’ve had my misgivings about Marcus. I’ve talked to you about them. But his being here…” She glanced at Ed before continuing. “I’m grateful to him for coming here. It’s hard to admit, but he has made this whole awful experience more bearable.”

  I wondered whether she would ever tell Marcus that, but it didn’t matter just then. I left the kitchen and went to check on my father, who was watching television in the bedroom.

  “You awake?” I asked. I kept reminding myself not to give up on my father. Jonah hadn’t. Marcus hadn’t. Maybe nothing would come of it, but I would keep trying all the same, because it meant that I wasn’t sitting and waiting.

  “Come on in, kitten,” he said, patting the side of the bed.

  I paused. He hadn’t called me kitten for about fifteen years.

  “Did you get enough to eat? I could fix you a plate of leftovers,” I offered.

  “Oh, I’m not too hungry,” he said.

  “Were you able to eat anything at dinner?”

  He shrugged. “I’ve eaten a lot of Thanksgiving dinners in my time. I know what stuffing tastes like.”

  “That’s the spirit.”

  “My hearing isn’t gone,” he said.

  I glanced back toward the kitchen. “Kurt’s just worried.”

  “I’m sorry for all of this. I know I haven’t been the easiest guy to have doddering around the house.”

  “You’re not doddering.”

  “You know what I mean.”

  “I know that it hasn’t been easy for you, either.”

  “Actually, it’s a lot easier on me. I get a little bored, but I’m not in much pain. That’s the one thing modern medicine can do.”

  “Marcus promised to do his best.”

  “Marcus mentioned how accepting you’ve been,” my father said. “Of him being here. In the house. It means a lot to me. He is family.”

  “I just looked at the economics,” I said. “That’s what I do. That’s who I am.”

  “No, kitten,” he said. “You’re much more than that. You’re the finest daughter a father could hope to have. I’m so proud of all that you do,” he said. “You tell Kurt I want to talk to him, okay? Your mother deserves a good night’s rest in her own bed.”

  A few days later, a hospital bed was delivered and wheeled into the den. My father spent his remaining nights there.

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  IN THE FIRST WEEK OF DECEMBER, MARTINA’S COMPANY held its holiday party. Though early in the season, it coincided with the official launch of the new beef and turkey jerky line, and the marketing department wanted to pack the event with enthusiasts. Martina invited me, Marcus and Jeff to attend with her.

  “Think of it as a double date,” she said.

  “With the added benefit of dried beef,” I pointed out.

  “And turkey.”

  “Jeff and Marcus didn’t exactly bond when they met before.”

  “Jeff was probably nervous, meeting your parents, trying to make a good impression. This will just be us.”

  “And everyone from your work.”

  Jeff and I got ready at his apartment beforehand. When it was time to go, I grabbed my keys and walked toward the door.

  “What are you doing?” he asked me.

  “You always drive,” I said. “I can drive.”

  “Of course you can drive.”

  “I mean, tonight. Why don’t we take my car?”

  “Oh,” Jeff said. “Okay.”

  I realized I couldn’t remember driving my car when Jeff was in it. Riding, sure. But not driving. “Have you ever seen me drive?” I asked.

  “Sure, I have.”

  “When?”

  “I know I have,” Jeff said.

  “It’s settled then. We’ll take my car,” I said. I thought I saw him hesitate. “Are you coming?”

  The restaurant where the holiday party was being held was only a mile from Jeff’s apartment. We climbed into my car.

  “You’re a fine driver,” Jeff said as we started out.

  “I appreciate the support.”

  “There’s a stop sign up there,” he said, pointing.

  “I see it.”

  “I thought maybe that you didn’t. You weren’t slowing down.”

  “I was slowing down.”

  “Sorry.”

  I pulled to a stop and looked both ways. I waited a bit longer than necessary, as if to prove that I wasn’t reckless. Long enough that the car behind me honked.

  “It’s not you I worry about,” Jeff said. “It’s all those other drivers.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “I would be wrecked if anything happened to you.”

  “That’s a nice thing to say,” I said, accelerating again. In my peripheral vision, I could see him clench. “What?” I asked.

  “Nothing. So Susan said that the restaurant where they’re hosting this party has great Italian food. Very clean.”

  “Did she?”

  “Watch out for that—”

  “Car,” I said. “I see it. I was watching it.” I found a space in the restaurant’s parking lot. I turned off the ignition and looked at Jeff.

  “You’re so beautiful,” he said. He leaned in and kissed me softly.

  “You can drive on the way home, if you want,” I said. He grinned. What did it matter in the larger scheme of things? I wondered. Here was a guy who wanted to be with me, who worried about me, who noticed things. And it was only a mile.

  We found Martina and Marcus at a table in the corner. Marcus was as dressed up as I’d ever seen him. He looked uncomfortable and kept fussing with his tie.

  “What’s wrong?” I asked.

  “I look like a drone,” he said.

  “You look handsome,” Martina said.

  “I can tell you don’t wear a tie too often,” Jeff said.

  Marcus just looked at Jeff for a moment, as if trying to figure out how to respond. Then he shook his head.

  “You’ll get used to it,” Jeff said.

  “I don’t really want to,” Marcus said.

  “You two don’t look alike,” Jeff said, looking from me to Marcus.

  Marcus and I stared at each other.

  “I think they do,” Martina said. “Sort of.”

  “I look more like Sasha than I look like Blake,” Marcus said. Blake didn’t seem to have inherited any of my father’s features.

  “I look a lot like my mother,” Jeff said.

  “I take it she’s tall and thin?” I asked.

  “You’ll meet her soon enough,” Jeff said.

  “Is she coming up?” Martina asked.

  “No. I want Sasha to come to Fresno for Christmas,” Jeff said.

  “You do?” That was news to me.

  “Of course.”

  “I’ll have to see,” I said.

  “Don’t you want to meet my family? I’ve met your family.”

  “My family lives nearby.”

  “But it’s Christmas. I told them so much about you over Thanksgiving. Everyone’s excited to meet you.”

  “It’s going to be my father’s last Christmas,” I said.

  “You don’t know that for sure,” Jeff said.

  “I kind of do,” I said.

  “She kind of does,” Marcus agreed.

  My father was on a break from the chemotherapy at that point. The interim was meant to allow him to regain a bit of strength. In the past week, though, he didn’t seem to have regained anything. Not his appetite. Not his sensory loss. Not the memories and words that overnight seemed to have begun to dissolve.

  “Look, it’s the Beef Queen!” Martina said. “She was my idea.”

  A young woman in a sash and tiara was moving through the party, shaking hands. She bore an uncanny resemblance to Linda Potter, so much that I wondered whether the Beef Queen was another one o
f the Potter girls. I found myself wondering what Jonah Gray was doing for the holidays. I hoped Ethan was still on the mend. I shook my head to clear it. Why was I still thinking about Jonah Gray? I was on a date, for goodness sake.

  Martina jumped up to say hello to the Beef Queen. Marcus smiled, watching her.

  “Did you ever imagine you’d be here?” I asked him. “With me and Martina and someone called a Beef Queen?”

  He shook his head. “It’s funny—say no and you’ll stay in the same place. Say yes and who knows where you’ll end up.”

  “Who’s ready for a drink?” Jeff asked. He extracted a thermos from a bag he’d brought in with him. I just looked at him. “What?” he asked.

  That next Monday, Marcus and my father returned from a doctor’s appointment with troubling news. My father’s white-cell count had dropped precipitously. The chemotherapy and radiation treatments meant to slow the cancer had damaged his bone marrow, which in turn blunted his immune system. Either that, Dr. Fisher said, or it was simply the way the lymphoma was progressing.

  It didn’t matter why. The question was what we could do about it. As my father received transfusions in a hospital bed down the hall, my brothers, mother and I gathered in Dr. Fisher’s office to talk about the vagaries of bone marrow.

  “It’s called an allogeneic transplant,” Dr. Fisher said.

  “Allo-what?” Blake asked.

  “A transplant between two individuals,” Uncle Ed explained.

  “Between Dad and one of us?” I asked.

  “If one of you is a match,” Dr. Fisher said. “We prefer to ask siblings first, but since your father doesn’t have any, that’s not an option.”

  “I wish your aunt Flor were still alive,” my mother said.

  “We’ve checked the tissue database. We’re still hoping to find an unrelated donor, but it’s prudent to test offspring. Just in case.”

  “So it’s just a blood test,” I said.

  “If there’s a match, there would be more, but we can discuss that if and when the time comes,” Ed said.

  “That sounds easy enough,” my mother said.

  “Lola, we’d love to get you tested, too, and in the database. Since you’re not a relative, though, the chance of you matching Jacob is quite slight,” Dr. Fisher said.

  “So me, Sasha, Kurt, and Marcus?” she said.

  “And me,” Blake said.

  “Are you sure you don’t want to sit this one out, dear? Your midterms are coming up. You’re already dealing with so much.”

  “But it might help Dad,” he said.

  “You heard Dr. Fisher. The chances are slim,” she said.

  “For you,” Blake said. “You’re not related.”

  My mother nodded, but looked away. I felt for her. Her husband was dying, and now her children were being asked to open themselves up to the possibility of surgery. Of course she’d be hesitant to let her youngest raise his hand. But he did. We all raised our hands and rolled up our sleeves.

  “What if,” I said to my mother, after the blood test, as I prepared to leave Dad’s hospital room and return to work. “What if I come by this weekend and we go get a Christmas tree?”

  My mother looked at my father and sighed.

  “What? It’s coming up. Didn’t you notice the cardboard snowmen up and down the oncology hallway? If you’d rather, I could get a tree and bring it by the house. But I know you always like to pick out the best—”

  “I don’t want to buy a big, cut Christmas tree,” she interrupted. She looked out the window, down across the parking lot. “I don’t like them anymore.”

  “You don’t?”

  My mother had always been an enthusiastic trimmer and demanding about the particular tree she brought home. It had to be tall, dark green, without any bald spots or misshapen areas. It had to have needles neither too long and limp nor too short and sharp.

  “I could cover the cost if that’s—”

  “It’s not the money,” she said. “I don’t want to deal with another…” She stopped and stared at my father, who had dozed off during his transfusions. She motioned for me to follow her into the hallway. Outside of his room, she spoke more quietly. “I’m sorry, Sasha. I just don’t want anything else in my house that I’m going to have to watch die.”

  “No tree,” I said. I looked back toward my father’s room. I felt as if I should be in there.

  “I’d like to start a new tradition,” my mother said.

  “I thought a defining aspect of tradition was repetition over time,” I said. Starting a “new tradition” rang to me as false as when people deemed something “first annual.” First annual fall sale. First annual Easter brunch. How do you even know you’ll be around in a year’s time? How does anybody?

  She looked at me, unamused.

  “Sorry. What new tradition do you want to start?” I asked, which was the question she had wanted to hear.

  “I want to buy a little, live tree, and after Christmas, we can plant it outside. In California, we have the luxury of living in an ecological zone that allows for that.”

  That didn’t sound like my mother, but I had no energy to argue.

  “So should I get a potted tree?” I asked. “I could do it this weekend.”

  “That would be lovely.”

  Back in my office, I realized that I had no idea what sort of tree to buy. If this were going to be the first year of a new Gardner family tradition, I wanted to get it right. What if I chose a tree that we lovingly planted, then spent the rest of the year watching as it withered? I needed a more auspicious beginning.

  Why had I even offered? Sure, I’d been picking up some interesting horticultural tidbits in recent months, but few people knew less about actual gardening than me. I didn’t even know where to look. And then it struck me. Of course I knew where to look.

  Jonah had redesigned his site in the time since I’d last been there, and he had posted some beautiful pictures. One I recognized as having been taken in the backyard of his house, looking out over the cornfield. One was clearly Ethan. None showed Jonah himself, although one revealed a pair of work boots and another, his shadow. I examined that one closely, trying to discern a detail I could use.

  I noticed that he’d recently posted a piece on Christmas trees. I wondered if he had recommended specific kinds.

  I was at one of those Christmas-tree farms recently. A fell-your-own sort of place. It’s something I’ve always done without thinking much about it. And this year, with my father unwell, I had set out to fell a most magnificent one. The owner of the place walked me into his field, until we found ourselves beside a gorgeous, fourteen-foot white fir. It was perfectly green and conical, the sort of tree that saplings want to be when they grow up.

  The owner said, “You don’t even need to decorate it. A tree like that speaks for itself.”

  And I started to wonder what a tree like that would say, if it could actually speak. It seemed to me that “Don’t kill me,” might be the first thing out of its, uh, trunk. I knew that I couldn’t cut it down. But this man had a business to run, and he’d probably sell it to the next person looking for the best tree on the lot.

  So I paid a little extra, for the work of getting it out of the ground safely, and as of last week, my father and I have a new tree in our yard, across from where the great oak used to be. Maybe it will be our tradition, if you can call something a tradition that hasn’t been repeated yet. We’ll get a living tree, and we’ll plant it in the yard. In California, we have the luxury of living in an ecological zone that allows for that sort of thing.

  So that was the source of my mother’s inspiration. Unfortunately, Jonah hadn’t included suggestions for types of trees, and I preferred the idea of a nursery, rather than digging in the dirt of a Christmas-tree farm. But I knew he’d have a suggestion, and besides, it had been a while.

  Dear Jonah, I wrote. My mother read your piece on Christmas trees, and she’s sold on the idea. Unfortunately, I have no idea
which species of tree is most likely to thrive in the Bay area. Any suggestions? Jeffrine.

  By the time I was packing up for the day, he had written back.

  Jeffrine, It’s always a pleasure to hear from you. I was going to write, but I wasn’t sure of your address, and I worried that the archivist might end up with my note. If your mother wants a tree that’ll be around for years to come, she might try a silver tip or Scotch pine, or even blue spruce. Or go for a white fir like the one I got. You’ll surely be able to find one of those varieties in your local nursery. Just be sure to keep the root ball moist (your mother will know what I mean). How are you, by the way? Jonah

  I’m fine, I began writing back. I’ve been—

  “Are you ready?”

  I looked up to see Jeff.

  “Almost,” I said. “I’m just finishing something.”

  “What are you finishing?”

  “A note,” I said.

  “I can see that. I meant, a note to whom?”

  “It’s nothing,” I said. “I’ll write it later.” I shut my computer down.

  “I didn’t mean to stop you,” he said, but I wasn’t sure whether or not to believe him. “So?” he asked.

  “So what?”

  “Have you made a decision?”

  “Decision?”

  “About Fresno. For Christmas.”

  I rubbed my arm where the needle had gone in earlier that afternoon. “We’ll be getting the results of the blood tests the day after tomorrow. Can it wait until then?”

  “Of course it can, baby,” he said. “Are we still on for dinner?”

  “Dinner?”

  “We were having dinner tonight and tomorrow because Friday you have that holiday party.”

  “That’s right. The Maselins’ party. You’re so good at remembering.”

  “That’s what they pay me for,” he said. “So are you ready?”

  I looked back at my computer and nodded.

  Two days later, on Friday afternoon, the test results were in. Blake was still in school, Kurt was teaching in Stockton, and Marcus remained home with my father. But I had promised my mother that I’d meet her at the hospital, so we could hear about our options firsthand. We had agreed to meet in Dr. Fisher’s office at two, but the room was empty when I arrived.