Maine - J. Courtney Sullivan [96]
“I can’t,” Kathleen said. “I want to respect his wishes. Besides, I don’t even think Dr. Callo would do it. All we can do now is hope for the best and try to make Dad happy.”
She saw from the look in her mother’s eyes that Alice had turned a corner, so quickly that Kathleen wasn’t even sure of the exact moment it had happened.
Alice got to her feet. “So you’re telling me I’m supposed to sit here and watch him die? And never set foot in a goddamn hospital room? Just lie next to him in bed and say, ‘Good night, darling. I hope you won’t be dead when I wake up.’ ”
“I know it’s hard,” Kathleen said.
“This is you—your doing,” Alice said hotly. “Your ridiculous herbs and all that. You’ve convinced him it’s all he needs.”
“That’s not true!” Kathleen said, growing angry. “You’re just looking for someone to blame, but this is no one’s fault. And I won’t have this energy thrown at me when we should all be focused on getting him stronger.”
“Energy! Focus! The man needs drugs, Kathleen. He needs a doctor. If you don’t at least try to talk to him about treatments, I’ll never forgive you.”
Kathleen shrugged her shoulders, feigning indifference. It was typical Alice insanity, which her mother would no doubt forget by tomorrow.
But after Alice walked out, Kathleen cried for a long, long time.
When she drove over to her parents’ house later that afternoon and entered their bedroom, her father was asleep. Everything she’d brought over in the previous weeks—the runes and the vitamins and the candles and the tea—was gone.
He began to deteriorate fast. His skin turned a sickly yellow, and eventually so did the whites in his blue eyes. He was queasy almost all the time, and couldn’t keep down a bite of food. He shriveled as they watched, helpless. Daniel had always been a cheerful man, but now he grew melancholy for the first time Kathleen could remember. Everyone wanted to see him laughing again, maybe more for their own sanity than for him. To see him somber was nauseatingly odd, like a bone that’s broken, poking through skin.
They all gathered around him and did what they could. They watched an obscene amount of the Three Stooges and Jackie Gleason on video. Her nephew Ryan sang Daniel’s favorite old Dean Martin songs. Maggie mailed books of Irish riddles and jokes. Ann Marie made more soup than the average person consumes in a lifetime, and she was tender with Alice—bringing her gifts and taking her out to lunch every once in a while.
He was never alone. They gathered at Alice and Daniel’s house, the house they had all grown up in, for dinner five or six nights a week. They sat around his bed. They looked through old photos from the cottage in Maine—one night, he said plaintively, “I’ll never see it again”—and laughed at all his jokes. They let him talk on and on as he told one of his meandering stories, when they would normally have said, “Dad, would you wrap it up? We don’t have all day.”
Kathleen wanted to soak up every second with him. Sometimes she wished the rest of them would go away. She thought that this was the worst part of grieving—the limbo phase when the person you love most is still there in front of you, but you know he won’t be for long.
By the end, he was down to ninety-seven pounds.
He lived through Thanksgiving and Christmas, and then it became clear that there wasn’t much time left. Just after the first of the year, as Kathleen looked out her kitchen window to see a light snow falling on the driveway, her phone rang. He was gone.
Patrick and Ann Marie hopped to it as usual, making all the arrangements. She took a rattled Alice to pick out a casket and called the caterers. He reached out to the lawyer to deal with the will.
He reached out to the lawyer the day their father died. Kathleen still thought of this with disgust: What kind of person?
Patrick was the one who called her with the news that Daniel had left almost everything—other than the house and the property in Maine and his pension and some savings for Alice—to her.
“He had three