Maddie was the first to show up for Christmas. She arrived unannounced a little after nine thirty p.m. the night before Christmas Eve and let herself in after a token knock. She found Abe alone in the living room, half-asleep in his recliner, something with Jeremy Irons playing on the old TV, the volume down low, Megs sprawled at the foot of the chair, her chest rising and falling with each breath. The old Lab lifted her head when Perry the Pomeranian charged into the living room and started yipping.
“Perry!” scolded Maddie.
To Abe’s surprise, the dog fell silent, though he couldn’t help sniffing around Megs’s posterior, and Megs just plopped her head back down and paid the Pomeranian little notice beyond the occasional swipe of the tail, presumably aimed at discouraging her assailant.
Maddie dropped her duffel on the floor as Abe eased himself up from his chair to greet her, feeling every one of his ninety years. Her hair was still cropped short in front but was a little longer in back, a different shade of blue than it had been at his birthday party.
“Daddy,” she said as they embraced. “How are you holding up?”
“Reasonably well,” he lied.
The truth was he didn’t know what to do with himself without Ruth around.
After the hug, Abe lowered himself back into his chair and, snatching up the remote, turned the TV off.
“I decided to just leave after work today,” she said. “Boy, what a fiasco. There was a big pileup on 5 south of Portland. Then the usual construction through downtown, which I swear has been nonstop for fifteen years. You have anything to sip on around here?”
Before Abe could provide an answer, Maddie was in the kitchen, rummaging around the liquor cabinet. Abe knew without looking that it was slim pickings in there: some ancient vermouth, probably vinegar by now; a pint of Myers’s dark rum half crystalized into brown sugar; some port from the first Bush administration; and a half-empty bottle of Pernod. Maddie returned to the living room with two snifters, dusty, no doubt, and the bottle of Pernod.
“How about it?” she said.
“What the hell,” said Abe. “It’s almost Christmas.”
Abe hadn’t had a drop of alcohol since his ninetieth, and he felt it almost immediately, that warm suffusion of well-being. The way the licorice-infused vapor expanded in his sinuses was a delicious sensation that offered immediate relief from his recent state of anxiety. It reminded Abe of the Martinique on Winslow Way, the very night Maddie was conceived.
“Geez, Dad,” said Maddie. “You need to restock the liquor cabinet. I feel like I’m drinking cough syrup.”
“I like it,” he said.
“Must be an old-person thing,” she said.
“You’re not exactly young, you know?” Abe observed.
“Well, compared to you,” she said, corkscrewing her face at the taste of the Pernod.
They fell silent for a moment, Maddie looking around the room.
“This place is like a family museum,” she said.
“So, what’s wrong with that?” said Abe.
“I mean, nothing, I guess,” said Maddie. “But they make flat-screen TVs now, you know, for like the past thirty years. I can’t believe that old thing even works with your cable.”
“I’ve got an adapter,” said Abe.
“It must weigh a hundred pounds,” she said of the bulky old set.
“Good thing I don’t have to lift it,” said Abe.
Maddie continued her inventory of the living room. “Are those the same curtains from when I was a kid?”
“Maybe, how should I know? What’s your point?”
“Nothing,” said Maddie. “It’s just that everything is the same around here.”
“And that’s a bad thing?”
“I didn’t mean that,” said Maddie. “It’s just kind of…eerie, I guess. Like the Land Where Time Stood Still.”
Why did their children never stop judging them? Everything had been fine until around age eleven or twelve: Abe and Ruth could do no wrong. Then the kids hit their teens, and it was one slander after another, and it never let up. Here they were in their fifties and sixties still disparaging their ways, telling Abe and Ruth to move on, to let go of those very things that constituted the fabric of their lives.
Maddie could see she’d hit a nerve.
“Dad, really, I didn’t mean anything by it,” she said. “It was just an observation. I like that the farm is timeless.”
Couched in those terms, the idea was a little more palatable to Abe but still not a fair appraisal.
“I wouldn’t say that, either,” he said. “Plenty has changed around here. You know this house is nearly a hundred and forty years old, right? It was old when your mother and I bought it. That oak out front, in the middle of the roundabout, you planted it as a seedling when you were maybe two years old; you could barely walk. You used to waddle around in overalls, toting a bucket of water, blackberry jam on your face, your big diaper protruding in back. Every damn day, it was all we could do to stop you from pulling the dang seedling out of the ground or drowning it, you were so eager to watch it grow. By the time you turned five, it was taller than you. By the time you graduated high school, it was taller than the house. Look at it now.”
They withdrew into silence once more, sustaining the thoughtful note Abe had struck. During this lull in the conversation, he considered his youngest child there on the sofa, her dyed blue hair gone gray at the roots, sipping her Pernod philosophically as she leveled the crosshairs of her recollection inward, the corners of her mouth drooping slightly at whatever she confronted there.
Was Maddie happy? Was she fulfilled, with more than half her life behind her, no children, no real prospects for a better life on the horizon? It was difficult to think so. Now Abe admonished himself for judging her.
“I always think of Karen this time of year,” Maddie said at last, her enunciation beginning to soften at the edges, her voice a little huskier. “I hardly remember her. But I remember that first Christmas without her.”
Abe remembered it, too, and all too well. Fifty years had done little to diminish the clarity of that dark period. The further it receded into the past, the more he forgot the days, and months, and years surrounding it, and the decades preceding it, like it was the one fixed point in an otherwise fluid sea of memory.
Maddie must have guessed at his state of mind.
“She was your favorite, wasn’t she? You and Mom.”
“You were my favorite,” Abe said without pause. “Don’t tell the others.”
Of course, he would’ve said the same thing to Anne or Kyle. In some ways, it was true Maddie was his favorite, even if she hadn’t quite lived up to what Abe viewed as her potential. He’d been more involved in the formative years of Maddie’s upbringing than he had been with Anne, or Kyle, or Karen, which is to say, he was around more. Maddie was probably their most agreeable child temperamentally, all things considered. She gave them the least grief, the least drama, and the least trouble growing up. But it was also true that in many ways Karen had been Abe’s favorite, because she was the most independent, the most steadfast in her pursuits. She earned good grades effortlessly, never complaining about homework, never requiring a parental prodding to address it, or any other responsibility that landed within her purview. Not that Karen wasn’t a freethinker; she was very creative and very thoughtful. But she was also the most stable and reliable in her adherence to Abe’s principles of hard work and responsibility, a bias Abe subscribed to long before her death turned their lives upside down, and one, in the end, he could never resolve with the final eighteen months of her life, an uncharacteristic period about which he would always harbor doubts and misgivings.
But now, half a lifetime on, it was Maddie who was Abe’s biggest ally among the remaining children, Maddie whom he could count on to come to his defense if Anne or Kyle bullied him.
Perry the Pomeranian was by now asleep on Maddie’s lap, just as Megs was deep in slumber on her old rug, her breathing pronounced and labored, her pink, nippled belly protruding, the nubs of her sagging black gums trembling with every exhalation.
“I remember when Megs was just a puppy,” she said.
“It wasn’t that long ago,” said Abe.
“Seems like forever,” said Maddie. “What’s it been, twelve years since I brought her to you?”
“Something like that,” said Abe, who found himself wanting to change the subject.
“Have you taken her to the vet lately?”
“Not lately,” said Abe.
“She’s getting old, Dad. Slowing down.”
“I’ve noticed,” he said.
“It won’t be long before…”
“Yes, I’m well aware of that.”
They may as well have been talking about Abe.
“How long has she been breathing like that?” said Maddie.
“Couple years,” said Abe, but the truth was he’d noticed a difference in recent months, as her breathing became more labored and her movement more sluggish.
Maddie polished off her Pernod and set the empty snifter on the coffee table in front of her. “Well,” she said. “I’m wiped, Dad. I’m gonna hit the sack.”
“Good night, sweetie,” he said as she retired upstairs to her childhood room.
Abe wasted no time in turning in, himself. It was late, nearly midnight, and the next few days were sure to be exhausting. He set his empty snifter next to Maddie’s, retreated to the bedroom, stripped down to his drawers and his socks, and assumed his place under the covers, Ruth’s absence resting heavily beside him.
Kyle and Soojin arrived around eleven a.m. the following morning, Christmas Eve, Kyle obscured by the five-foot Christmas tree he was carrying, a scraggly fir, none too full.
“There weren’t many left,” he said before anyone could comment on its scrawniness.
Anne and Tim arrived three hours later, their arms loaded with wrapped presents, though they’d all explicitly agreed against gifts in advance.
“Oh, Dad, where’s your holiday spirit? It’s fun. We don’t expect anything, we just like to buy gifts! Does someone want to help Tim with the groceries? We loaded up at T&C.”
Anne had not lied when she’d said she’d take care of everything. Tim and Kyle carted in no less than ten bags of groceries from the trunk of the rented sedan: fruits and vegetables, all manner of snacks, an eight-pound ham, a twelve-pound turkey, two half gallons of eggnog, flatbread pizzas, deli salads, beer, wine, Irish whiskey. Knowing how pricey T&C was (not like the old days), Abe figured Anne must have spent four hundred bucks, at least.
“Let me pay for this,” said Abe as she stocked the cupboards and fridge.
“Absolutely not,” said Anne. “Kyle already chipped in.”
Willful and inflexible as his eldest daughter could be, Abe could not fault Anne for her generosity, nor for her industry. Soon the whole house smelled of cooking. When she wasn’t preparing for dinner, she was in the attic, where she dug out the old boxes of ornaments and the Christmas plates and set to work decorating the tree and setting the table.
Abe couldn’t recall the last time the old farmhouse was so steeped in holiday cheer; it had to be twenty-five years. The mantel was soon adorned with a wreath and a poinsettia, flanked by Christmas cards from the Duncans and Jacobsons. But for all the effort, and the brave faces everybody donned for the occasion, the gaiety felt entirely cosmetic. Ruth’s absence hung like a dark cloud over the festivities. Anne was an imposter in the kitchen. It should’ve been Ruth buzzing around the house, Ruth adorning the hearth, Ruth arranging presents under the tree, for this house, this farm, it was nothing if not Ruth’s domain. Christmas be damned, Abe should’ve been at Swedish today, sitting bedside with Ruth. The thought of her alone in that sterile room, contemplating her future, her mortality, her disfigurement, was almost too much to bear. Despite Ruth’s assurances, and her insistence that Abe was not to visit her daily, she needed him. She could not get through this alone. Abe should’ve insisted on being there for her regardless of her entreaties, just as he should have encouraged the kids and Bess Delory to pay her visits, despite her resistance. Because Ruth needed them, too. But instead of dictating the healthier course of action, the one that might have served to comfort and distract Ruth, grant her the assurance that she would not have to face it all alone, Abe had caved in to her wishes, which were the same as always: to cause as little inconvenience as possible for everybody else. Only now could he admit that in doing so, he’d taken the easy way out. And here he was, about to sit down to a family feast, while Ruth languished in solitude.
Though Abe aspired to joviality at the dinner table, he was unable to manufacture any. There was a little talk of grandkids: Ben had met somebody new, Martha was considering early retirement, great-granddaughter Lucy was already talking in sentences. Though he ought to have felt something, Abe ate joylessly and in silence, leaving the kids to talk among themselves. After the meal, they all retreated to the living room, an occurrence that seemed natural enough at first, until Abe suddenly felt like he was the center of attention. Indeed, they all seemed to be gathered around him, sitting forward in their respective seats, as if they were waiting for him to make an announcement.
“What?” he said.
Exchanging a glance with Anne, Kyle took the lead.
“Dad,” he said. “The three of us have been talking.”
“Okay,” said Abe warily.
“We know you think Mom ought to come straight home from the hospital,” said Anne.
“Well, of course, I think—”
Anne fashioned a yield gesture with both hands. “Just hear us out, Dad,” she said.
“Just what the heck is this all about?” Abe said, appealing to Maddie, who couldn’t look him in the eye.
“Dad, we’ve looked into it,” said Kyle. “There’s an aftercare facility out past the Poulsbo junction on the way to Silverdale. It’s called Twin Pines.”
“It sounds like a cemetery,” said Abe.
“It’s not,” said Anne. “It’s a facility that exists exactly for situations like this.”
“Like what?” Abe said.
“Post-surgery recovery. It’s not just old people, either,” said Anne. “Mom will get round-the-clock care there, all the post-op medical attention she needs, the feeding and nutrition, the physical therapy.”
“She can get physical therapy at the Winslow Clinic,” Abe said. “I can feed her right here at home.”
“At Twin Pines, they’ll monitor Mom’s progress in ways that you simply can’t,” Anne said.
“She’s right,” said Kyle. “They will.”
“You keep saying ‘will,’ ” Abe said, leveling his gaze like a challenge at Anne and Kyle, side by side on the sofa.
When neither of them said anything, Abe appealed silently to Maddie.
“I think they’re right,” said Maddie. “I don’t agree with the radiation, but this isn’t that. She needs to be monitored. What if her blood pressure goes haywire again? We just can’t take that chance.”
Abe felt a heat rise from the pit of his stomach to his tingling scalp, equal parts anger and embarrassment.
“So, that’s what this is? Some sort of intervention?” he said.
“Dad, we just need you to understand where we’re coming from,” pleaded Anne.
Unbelievable. Who did they think they were that they could defy the wishes of their parents? Never mind they were old themselves, they were still, at least in Abe’s mind, children. While he knew they had no legal power over him, he also suspected that it was useless to defy them, for he was but a feeble old man in their eyes, and as much as he resented them for it, they were not wrong to intercede. But he wasn’t going to roll over.
“And what does your mother have to say about all this?” said Abe. “Does she get any input in the matter, or do you intend to strong-arm her like me?”
“We’ll talk to Mom when we see her tomorrow,” said Kyle.
“Trust me,” said Anne. “She’ll see the wisdom in it.”
Phase two of Operation Twin Pines, consigning Ruth to an aftercare fate she had no say in, would come to a head at Swedish the next morning, Christmas Day, when Abe and all three children piled into Anne’s rented sedan and ferried across Elliott Bay to the city, leaving the spouses at the farm to fend for themselves.
“Let me and Kyle do the talking,” Anne said in the car. “We need your blessing on this, Dad. It’s what’s best for Mom. So, keep your opinions to yourself, please.”
Abe neither consented to nor resisted this directive, gazing silently out the side window at a deserted downtown Seattle, almost unrecognizable, scarcely a soul or an automobile to be seen amidst the crisscrossing corridors of steel and glass. A mere ten minutes after they disembarked the Walla Walla, the four of them were crowded around Ruth in her hospital bed.
The feeding tube had finally been removed from her nose, and the bandages had come off. Nobody was shocked, so far as Abe could tell.
“I can’t even tell the difference,” said Maddie, God bless her.
“You’re just saying that,” said Ruth.
In the days since Abe’s last in-person visit, Ruth’s speech had improved markedly and was only slightly garbled. To Abe’s eyes, the results of the facial reconstruction were not nearly as glaring as he’d anticipated. McGonagle had done an admirable job of reconstructing the jaw. From straight on, the difference was negligible. But for some lingering swelling of the soft tissue, the frontal aspect presented only a slight asymmetry. The eight-inch scar running from earlobe to chin along the underside of her new mandible was mostly hidden from view. Only from the side was the disfigurement significant, a prominent though not extreme concavity below her right ear, which amounted to a sunken cheek, owing largely to the loss of so many teeth. While considerable, the renovation was nothing to inspire nightmares in children, as Ruth had feared.
Knowing what was to come, Abe found the small talk excruciating: details about yesterday’s ham, vagaries of air travel, news of the spouses.
“Just get on with it already,” said Abe.
“What’s got into you?” said Ruth.
“Tell her.”
“Mom, we’ve all been talking,” said Anne.
As always, Ruth listened patiently through the first half of Anne and Kyle’s proposition, until she could no longer hold what was left of her tongue.
“I want to go home,” she said, crossing her arms resolutely.
“But, Mom,” said Kyle.
“I want to sleep in my own bed, next to my husband. I want to see my hens, and Megs. I want to watch my own TV.”
“That’s what I told them,” said Abe, who was immediately reprimanded with an icy glare from Anne.
“We talked about this, Dad. It’s what’s best for Mom.”
“Says you,” Abe said.
“Says all of us,” Anne said. “And the doctors will back us up on this.”
“Let me worry about the doctors,” said Abe. “I can drive her to appointments. I can give her medications; it doesn’t take Marcus Welby, MD, to make her a smoothie.”
“It’s not that simple, Dad.”
Ruth’s pulse quickened as the debate raged on. The audacity of them to think they could decide her fate. She had birthed them and reared them, guided them not only through childhood and adolescence and adulthood but well into middle age, advising them, talking them down off ledges, sending them money and airline tickets. At what point did they presume the balance of power had shifted? Ruth may have been old, but she was in no way mentally feeble; she could outreason all three of them, if only she could summon the vitality. For, livid though she was, put-upon by the arrogance of her children, by the gravity of the situation, her uncertain future, the grim harbinger of their unwanted Christmas visit in the first place, all of them crammed into that suffocating little room, the painkillers coursing through her veins, the sum of all of it seemed to drain the sap out of her, and Ruth found herself all but powerless to advocate for her own wishes. Perhaps, too, it was that at least part of her knew her children were right, she did require constant care, and despite her insistence, she could barely get around with a walker, and when she managed with the aid of a nurse, the endeavor exhausted her within four steps. It was all too much to ask of Abe, though she knew he would do anything for her.
It was as though Abe could intimate these thoughts and was determined to fight this battle for her.
“That’s it,” he said. “I’m not hearing another word of any of this.”
“Dad, we already—”
“You listen to me, young lady,” Abe said to his sixty-eight-year-old daughter. “They can keep her here at the hospital as long as they see fit. And from what I understand, that’s a few more days. After that, she comes home. Does everybody understand? I’m caring for her. Me, her husband, nobody else. If any of you would like to stay around and help me, okay, fine. But she’s coming back to the farm. Isn’t that right, Ruthie?”
Ruth was near the edge of sleep then, but she managed to smile, nodding once in approval.