Page 60 of Slanting Towards the Sea

FIFTY-FIVE

MY FATHER IS IN the intensive care unit in Neurology, ironically in the same bed he lay in four years ago, after his first stroke. They tell me I can stay with him for only a few minutes. Not that he’s aware of my presence.

There are a dozen beds along the walls, patients lying in different states of decline, no screens dividing them.

I try to not let my gaze skate over them.

How undignifying it must be, being displayed in such a vulnerable state to the eyes of every stranger who enters the room.

The furniture is from the eighties, not a dime spent since the building was first erected.

A knob dangles off the nightstand next to Dad’s bed like a comma in an unfinished sentence.

The blanket he’s covered with is frayed, evoking the refugee era of the Homeland War.

I worry a hole in it with my fingers. Machines beep and there’s always a nurse rushing around, and yet there is a hush that lies atop of it all, as clinical as the smell of bleach permeating the air.

I focus on my father. I wish we could have some privacy. An apology sits in my throat, for not being there, for not checking up on him, but before I muster up the strength to speak, a nurse comes over to usher me out. “The doctor should come by shortly if you have any questions.”

It’s hard to let go of his hand.

I sit on an orange plastic chair in the hall, a cold draft licking my bare legs and feet. I’m still in my flip-flops, in my bathing suit covered only with an oversized shirt. It’s a bad joke to look like this at such a defining moment in my life.

This is the second time my life has been defined by sitting on these orange chairs.

Ten years ago, it was Mom lying in the intensive care unit.

It was a different kind of intensive care, though, her room was off-limits to visitors.

The doctors floated around, godlike. Nobody was giving us any information.

I had been at the pe?karija buying a skate fish for lunch when I first received the call.

I held the mucousy handles of a plastic bag in one hand, handing the fisherman money with the other, before I managed to wipe my fingers against my jeans to grab my phone.

When I picked up, no words came from my dad.

Just a coughy whimper, sounding like a huh .

“Dad, is everything all right?”

“Your mother. She’s in the hospital.”

I dropped the bag. The skate slid out on the dirty floor.

When I arrived at the hospital, Dad said that Mom had pulled out the ladder to clean the stained-glass window above the front door.

He found her when he was going out for work.

She had fallen on the back of her head. “There was bird shit on the glass, and she just couldn’t ignore it,” he said, and that was the last thing he said that whole day.

He couldn’t—or wouldn’t—talk, so it fell on me to break the news to Sa?a.

Sa?a went mute at first too, but then he started crying.

I hadn’t heard my brother cry since he was a teenager.

“But I just talked with her last night,” he said, as if I were lying about her condition.

“Silvija is pregnant,” he said next. “We didn’t want to tell anyone before she was at least three months along, but I guess this changes things.

Will you tell Mom? If she wakes? If I don’t make it there in time? ”

“I will,” I said, though it was unlikely that would happen. “And congratulations.”

I hung up, gutted for the second time that morning.

The doctor finally met us in the hallway at two p.m., after rounds.

It struck me as odd that he didn’t have an office to receive us in.

Or maybe that was on purpose so the meeting wouldn’t last as long.

Other patients’ family members hovered around us, waiting for information on their loved ones, inevitably eavesdropping on ours.

The doctor barraged us with words. Trauma to the back of the head, a break in the skull, brain swollen, bleeding in her brainstem, coma.

“If she wakes up, she’ll be an invalid,” he said, as if implying we should pray that she doesn’t.

At four-thirty, my phone rang. Vlaho. He had come home from work to an empty apartment.

It wasn’t that I hadn’t thought of him at all since that morning, but every time I did, I made a small excuse to postpone the call for a minute longer, then a minute longer, then another minute, until I’d managed to push him into the corners of my mind.

“When did this happen?” he asked after I’d given him a brief breakdown of what was going on.

“This morning.”

“This morning!” An accusation. Hurt. A silence that acknowledged the rift between us. “Where do I need to come?”

“Hospital. Intensive care unit.”

I should’ve been relieved he was on his way. But the honest-to-God truth was, I didn’t want him there. My pain had worn his face for so long I couldn’t disentangle him from it. And yet he came, and he held me, and he cried with me when they told us Mom had passed away.

And here I am on these orange chairs again.

Ten years ago, when Mom was dying, I didn’t call Vlaho because I needed the space.

But now, I need the vanquishing of space.

There’s nothing I want more than for him to come and hold me again, for his gentle murmur in my ear, for his warmth to unlatch the valves that are keeping my tears locked, and this horror suspended painfully inside me.

But my last words to him still ring in my ears, their foulness. Grow the fuck up.

Funny how I could address myself the same way.

When I’m coherent and poised enough, I call Sa?a to break the news to him.

“Ivona,” he says by way of hello.

“Sa?a,” I say. “Dad’s had another stroke. I’m not sure he’ll make it this time.”

Sa?a doesn’t answer. In the background, Silvija is giving instructions to the kids, trying to get them dressed for bed. Then, her worried voice, closer to the phone. “What is it, Sa?a? Everything okay?”

“You sure you’re not exaggerating? He made it out okay last time.”

I cringe against his words. Only Sa?a could say that Dad came out of his last stroke okay, but that’s a privilege of someone who hasn’t been here, who doesn’t know Dad’s limitations as well as I do.

“He’s unconscious,” I say, clutching my throat.

“When did this happen?”

“I’m not sure. I wasn’t at home. I didn’t get him to the hospital in time.”

“Where were you?” His question comes out sounding like an accusation.

“What does it matter where I was? I wasn’t home.”

Sa?a falls silent, his judgment louder than if he put it into words.

I have failed as my father’s caretaker. I wasn’t there when he needed me most. The pungent smell of Dad’s urine still attacks my nostrils.

Dad cares so much about being clean, scrubs himself with meticulous rigor every night before bed, his hygiene another way to show the distance he’s come from his underprivileged childhood, so all I can think about is how mortified he must have been if he’d been conscious when his bladder hadn’t held.

Sa?a can spare me his indignation, I have plenty of my own.

“I think you should come,” I say.

“I’ll—” A sharp exhalation as the reality of what I’ve said to him is slipping inside him, finding a place to release its poisonous roots.

“I’ll come first thing tomorrow morning.

” I can imagine my brother’s eyes watering, the lump in his throat growing.

I know his pain well. Ten years ago, I was the one losing the parent I still hoped I would please someday.

A loss of a mother but also of potential is what it was, and now my brother is going through the same thing.

Silvija murmurs something. In my mind’s eye, I can see her putting her arms around my brother, stroking his back, comforting him the way I wish Vlaho were consoling me.

We say goodbye and hang up, because we don’t have anything else to say to one another.

The only thing connecting my brother and me are our parents. Our mother is gone, and now our father is hanging by a thread, so where does that leave us?

It seems to me we’ve always been, and always will be, two islands bathing in the same sea with our backs to each other—him facing the sun, me facing the moon, both of us resenting the light the other got.

But one of those lights has gone out already, and now the other one is fading too.

I guess where it leaves us, then, is in the dark.

The sounds are hushed, lights turned off in most of the rooms, all the doors open so that the nurses can check on the patients as they walk by.

Machines bleep, punctuated by soft moans of those who can’t sleep, can’t tolerate the pain.

It’s close to midnight. I turn the phone in my hand.

The loneliness feels like an affliction, a chronic ailment.

I open the group text, The Square, that’s now turned into four disconnected, stand-alone points.

The last messages are from last night when we were preparing for the trip.

Cheerful exchanges between Asier and Marina, about the coves we’d visit, and how much sailing time we could expect.

I put the phone away. In the darkened room down the hall, death looms over my father. I can feel it, licking him, tasting, hovering. I realize, with a hefty dose of irony, that Dad is the only person who was always around, even if his presence was insupportable at times.

I wait longer, until the plastic seat numbs my butt. Until the neon lights of the hallway dim behind my eyelids. Until sleep pulls me under.

“Miss?” Someone’s hand nudges my shoulder. It’s that nurse from before. Her eyes are tired, but also compassionate. “Would you come with me?”

My legs are paralyzed. I cannot get up.

The knowledge is instant.

Dad is gone.