The Return of Jonah Gray Read online

  “I’m not saying you don’t have issues,” Martina said. “But yeah, I think you might be.” She was sorting through a rack of athletic gear. “You think Marcus would like it if I bought us matching track suits?” she asked.

  I stared at her. “Are you serious? You think he’s the one? That’s great!”

  Martina shook her head. “Marcus and I in his-and-her outfits? Oh, Sasha, I was kidding.”

  I agreed to go to Fresno. I was still worried about leaving my father, but even without a donor, his white blood-cell count had improved, and Dr. Fisher felt that he was stabilizing. So three days before Christmas found Jeff and me just off the highway, halfway between Oakland and Fresno.

  Jeff had informed me that whenever he had to relieve himself while on the road, he would try to find a Denny’s. “Their bathrooms are perceptibly cleaner,” he said. And so, spotting a sign for a link in that particular chain, he had pulled off the highway and into a parking lot.

  “I’ll be right out,” Jeff said, locking the car. He gave me a kiss and headed inside.

  I spun on my toe on the curb. I looked out at the passing highway, wondering whether we’d make it to Fresno before dinnertime. I looked at the rows of newspaper vending machines that serviced the freeway traffic. The Wall Street Journal. The San Francisco Examiner. The Stockton Star.

  I took a step closer. The Stockton Star? We had to be at the outer reaches of their readership. I crouched down to read the front-page articles—one on a town council meeting and another on immigrant health care. I found myself digging through my change purse for a quarter, but I didn’t find any. I knew that Jeff carried a roll for tolls, but the car was locked and he’d kept hold of his keys. I hurried into the restaurant and walked up to the first waitress I saw.

  “I need change,” I said.

  “They say that recognizing a need is the first step toward making it happen,” she told me.

  “No. Change. For a dollar.” I held out a bill.

  “Oh. That kind. The easy kind. Well, I just got on,” she apologized. “I’ve only got…let’s see. I’ve got two quarters and a dime.”

  “I’ll take it. You can keep the rest. That’s a forty percent profit in under a minute,” I said.

  She looked at me as if I were nuts, but she took my dollar and handed over the coins. I hurried back outside and bought a copy of the Star.

  I scanned the bylines on the front page but none of them interested me. I was opening the paper wide when Jeff came back outside.

  “What are you reading?” he asked.

  I spun around. I had forgotten, for a moment, where I was. I had forgotten where he was, where we both were, and even that we were there together, on our way to Fresno to meet his family.

  “The Stockton Star,” I admitted. He was going to find out anyway.

  “Why didn’t you get the Journal? It’s a much better paper.”

  I faltered. “I tried but the machine was broken.” As I said it, I thought of my family and the infidelity that seemed a more entrenched tradition than any living Christmas tree. Was this how it began? You got away with one lie, and the ones after that came more easily.

  Jeff looked unimpressed. “We should get going,” he said. “Are you going to bring that with you?”

  “Well, yeah. I just bought it,” I said.

  As he pulled out of the parking lot, I looked back, only then considering what the waitress had said to me. Had I actually said “I need change” aloud? What did that mean?

  Soon enough, we were pulling up to the Hill residence in Fresno. A tall, thin woman came out to greet us.

  “There’s Mother,” Jeff said.

  “So this is Fresno! I’ve never been,” I told his mother, as we pulled our luggage from Jeff’s car. “It’s lovely.”

  “We prefer to call it Fres-yes,” she replied.

  “Are you serious?” I asked.

  “What do you think?” I could see that Jeff had inherited her eyes.

  In fact, Jeff was a lot like the rest of the Hills: tall, thin, fastidious. They were opinionated, but they took turns letting each other speak. They didn’t smile much. They remembered details.

  “How long has the Hill family been here in town?” I asked at dinner, unable to make myself call it Fres-yes.

  “Four generations,” Mrs. Hill said proudly. Jeff’s sisters nodded, as if it were a story repeated many times before. “Herbert’s grandfather moved here near around 1900,” she said. “My grandmother moved here in 1910, so we’re relative newcomers. Jeff is the only Hill to have left, and we’re working on getting him back here as soon as we can.” His sisters nodded again.

  “It’s only a three-hour ride to the Bay area,” I pointed out.

  “The way his mother sees it, that’s three hours too many,” Herbert Hill said.

  Everyone nodded, even Jeff. I wondered what the Hills would have made of Jonah Gray’s piece on repotting. I wondered what Jonah Gray would have made of the Hills.

  “Jeff mentioned that your father hasn’t been feeling well,” one of Jeff’s sisters said.

  “He’s got cancer,” I said.

  “That’s a shame,” Mrs. Hill said. “I hope it’s not too serious.”

  I turned to Jeff, wondering what he had told them. “It’s very serious. Actually, it’s terminal,” I said.

  “Your mother must be beside herself.”

  “She seems to be handling it all pretty well.”

  “That’s probably just an act,” Jeff’s mother said. “I’m sure it’s worse when she’s alone.”

  “Maybe,” I said. I hadn’t spoken to my mother before I left. I knew she was grieving. I believed she was sorry. But I was still angry at her.

  Later that night, Jeff emerged from the guest bathroom to find me leafing through the Stockton Star.

  “I didn’t see you bring that in,” he said.

  “It’s something to read.”

  “I could get you a copy of the Fresno Bee. I’m sure it’s a better paper.”

  “My brother lives in Stockton. I like to know what’s going on out there.”

  “Does that guy you were auditing still write for them?” Leave it to Jeff to remember.

  I hedged. “I haven’t come across any of his articles yet.” I didn’t say that I was still hoping to.

  “Well, I’m beat,” Jeff said, crawling into bed. “It’s so nice to be here with you, in our home. How long do you think you’ll keep reading?” He was wearing his come-hither smile and caressed my arm.

  I pretended not to notice. “For a little bit,” I said. “Will that keep you awake?”

  “No. It’s fine.” He closed his eyes and turned over.

  I just sat there. For a moment, I didn’t read. I didn’t look at Jeff. I didn’t look at anything.

  The bed was comfortable and the guest room was neither too warm nor too cold. The man beside me, I knew that his body would fit nicely along the curves of my own, were I to turn and press up against him.

  Is this what I’ve chosen? I wondered. I looked over at Jeff, curled onto his side. He was a fine man. He wanted to include me in his life. Why was I fighting it? I told myself that I was tired from the drive, and I folded the newspaper. I was about to drop it to the floor when an article caught my eye. I leaned closer to the light.

  New Strain of Strawberry Blight Worries Farmers by Jonah Gray.

  I brushed my finger over his name. I was glad to see that he was covering agriculture now.

  I had never written him back after he’d offered Christmas-tree suggestions. I had intended to, even thought about what I wanted to say. That I’d been thinking of him through the fall. That he had served as an example for me. That I understood why his readers had been so fiercely protective. But instead my workdays had filled with audits and holiday gatherings, and soon a week had passed and then another.

  Maybe Martina had been right. Maybe I preferred detachment to diving in and making a change. Maybe Marcus was right. Saying no—or not saying an
ything—meant staying in the same place.

  All the same, I didn’t have any actual gardening questions, and I didn’t want to make one up just to talk to him. My Jeffrine persona was enough of a lie, even though everything I’d said through her was true. What was I supposed to say now? That though we’d never met, I felt some weird pull to him? That I understood how hard it must have been to give up his life in Tiburon, and that I was drawn to him even more for having done it?

  I shook my head. I should listen to the advice I doled out to my auditees. If you’re going to gamble, you’ve got to be prepared to lose. Calling or writing to Jonah Gray at that juncture was a gamble, and I was already in the process of losing someone I held dear.

  It was late. I stared at the article a while before dropping the paper to the floor of Jeff’s bedroom. I could still see his name when I turned out the light.

  Two days later, around noon on Christmas Day, we were raking leaves in the Hill’s backyard when Jeff’s mother called from the kitchen.

  “Sasha,” she yelled. “Phone call.”

  I hurried inside.

  It was Marcus. “I was really hoping I wouldn’t have to call,” he said.

  “Something’s wrong,”

  “Things took a turn for the worse.”

  “Should I come back?” I asked.

  “That’s your decision,” he said. “I can’t tell you what to do.”

  “What would you do?”

  He paused. “I would come back.”

  I went outside to tell Jeff. “I’m sorry,” I said. “I thought he had stabilized.”

  “Do you think Marcus might have been exaggerating?” Jeff asked. “Your family probably just misses having you at Christmas. Mine would feel the same. They’d make up any excuse to get me back here.”

  “Marcus is a nurse. He knows the difference between bad and worse. Besides, he wouldn’t do that.”

  “I think maybe he doesn’t approve of me and doesn’t like the fact that you’re here in Fresno.”

  “He’s my brother—” I began.

  “Half brother,” Jeff said.

  “Why do you always point that out?”

  “Because it’s not the same as full.”

  “Do you have any half brothers or sisters?” I asked.

  “No, but—”

  “That you know of.”

  “Hey!”

  “So you don’t know,” I went on. “I don’t hear you doubting Blake.” I had told him about the blood test in the car on the way to Fresno.

  “That’s different.”

  “I’m going to call about bus schedules,” I said and went back inside.

  I was back in Oakland that afternoon. The man in the bus seat beside me looked out the window as we pulled into the station.

  “Watch it when you get off the bus,” he said. “Lots of unsavory types hang out at these stations, just preying on single women, like yourself.”

  “I’ll be okay. My brother is picking me up.”

  “That’s good. Family will watch out for you.” The man had spotted Marcus, pacing, just inside the station doors. “Jesus, get a load of that guy. Bus stations are always full of creeps, aren’t they?”

  “That’s my brother,” I said.

  The man harrumphed. “I guess you know best.”

  “Merry Christmas,” Marcus said when I met him inside the station. “You made it.”

  “More or less.”

  “How was Fresno?”

  “How’s Dad?”

  “Not so good,” Marcus said.

  The hospice nurse, who had begun her visits the week before, called it “active dying.” I hadn’t realized that there was such a thing, or that the body could begin to power down a full two weeks before a person stops breathing. All the systems slow. The heart rate drops, the blood pressure drops. The hands cannot keep warmth.

  By the time I returned to the house on Christmas evening, my father had already eaten for the last time. We didn’t know that yet, but the hospice nurse said it was normal for his appetite to have cut out completely.

  “Dying doesn’t work up an appetite,” she said. “It’s the normal process of things.”

  “He’s got to eat something, doesn’t he?” I asked.

  “Or what?” she asked and looked at me. “Child, he’s dying right now,” she said more gently.

  “No, I mean…” I struggled to find words that made sense, but I came up empty. Was it really happening? Wasn’t there anything left to do?

  Christmas evening was quiet. We had agreed to skip the gift exchange, though Lori had brought presents for the boys, who seemed unaware, in their excitement, that they were the only ones unwrapping anything.

  My mother had retired early, and Kurt and Blake played video games on the computer in my father’s study. While my father slept in the den, I dug into a plate of Christmas leftovers. Lori and Marcus sat there, watching me, too spent to say much.

  “Dying doesn’t make you hungry, but sitting around waiting apparently does,” Marcus said.

  “It was a long bus ride,” I pointed out.

  Marcus got up to check on my father, leaving me with Lori.

  “You’ve got nice nail beds,” she said. “You ought to try polish sometime.”

  “It’s not really my thing,” I told her.

  “I know you know,” she said.

  “Know what?”

  “I was very angry at Kurt. I still am.”

  “Oh, that,” I said.

  “People are always saying what they would put up with and what they wouldn’t, but you never know, until…”

  “I believe you,” I said.

  “And it’s not just me I’ve got to think of. I mean, your mother stayed.”

  “She did,” I agreed.

  “We’re trying to work things out,” she said. “He’s not perfect.”

  “Maybe you haven’t noticed, but you didn’t exactly marry into a flawless family,” I said.

  “I’ll be glad when this year is over,” she said.

  “I always tell people I audit that some years are worse than others. It’s kind of true, isn’t it?”

  A slow and patient tide was pulling my father out to sea. You can’t fight a tide—maybe you can for an hour or two, but not for months. It’s larger than one person’s will. And this was a tide that the rest of us could neither fathom nor follow. In the days before we lost him, I didn’t feel any great calm; I felt helpless. I couldn’t do anything that mattered, and what I managed to do, I did poorly. I left the coffee-maker on all day. I burned soup. I locked my keys in my car.

  When we spoke at all, he and I, it was of little things. The weather outside, the temperature of my food, the show on television. I held his hand and watched him as he slept. Then I’d leave and Blake would take my place, and after him, my mother, and so on, so that someone was always there.

  You hear those stories about people sensing that they’re about to die and summoning loved ones to their bedsides to say goodbye. It didn’t happen like that for us. There was no more denying what was coming. I could see it in the continued presence of the hospice nurse. I could see it in the length of time my father slept each day, in the number of pills he took each night, and in the morphine drip that was brought in when he could no longer swallow. There would be no reprieve, no last-minute surprises. Death had camped out in our den and waited beside the bed. It was a smell just beyond reach. It filled in the lull when people had nothing more to say.

  My father died around eight in the evening, three days shy of New Year’s Eve. Eddie and Jackie were asleep, but the rest of us were around his bed when he slipped away. And with that, it was over. The disease that we’d all been focusing on, fighting, talking about, railing against for months, it had won. I wish I could say that I’d said all that I wanted to. I wish I could say that I even knew what I wanted to say. But you live with what you’re dealt, and my father died without any cathartic shift in our relationship. It hadn’t been easy, but he kn
ew that I loved him, I guess. And by the same token, I knew that he loved me. There are worse ways to go.

  If that seems anticlimactic, that’s cancer for you. It kills as thoroughly as a heart attack or gunshot, but with an insidious subtractive quality. Little by little, it eats away, sapping strength, then appetite, then memory, then locomotion, a hundred smaller farewells before the last one.

  But even I was surprised by how quietly it all wrapped up. Death carries such huge expectations. I thought my father’s final breath would grind everything to a halt, that a great, yawning loss would follow it, a chasm I would disappear into. Instead, the next day began much as the day before had, with dawn breaking and the birds out trilling. One’s own loss doesn’t slow the course of the sun across the sky.

  The worst of it happened in smaller, unexpected moments during the weeks and months that followed—seeing a can of my father’s favorite beans on the pantry shelf, hearing his voice on the outgoing answering machine message, getting a bill for the renewal of his CPA license. Those little things cut more quickly and more deeply than his last breath. Those little things were what took my own breath away.

  I knew she’d been prepared by the hospice nurse, but I was still surprised by how well my mother handled things in the days afterward. She worked with Lori on floral arrangements. She worked with Ed to get notices to the local papers and my father’s alumni newsletter, back in Virginia. She chose the music and readings for my father’s service. She set Eddie and Jackie to making cookies, so that well-wishers might have something to eat if they stopped by.

  What you’ll find, if you ever suffer the misfortune of losing a relative during the height of the holiday season, is that you’re forced to wait out the festivities. It’s a strange limbo to inhabit. Everyone else is celebrating, rattling around with champagne bottles, exchanging gifts, enjoying their vacation time. And you’re just riding it out, waiting until January second, when you can give people the specific time and date of the funeral service.

  My father’s service was scheduled for the end of the first week of January. It would be small—first at a local church and then at a cemetery. Maybe it was macabre, but I kept thinking how convenient it was that we lived in California, in an ecological zone that allowed for planting in the dead of winter, whether of live Christmas trees or coffins.