America, Present Day
When my father and I first arrived at the hospital, we’d gotten lost. Not hard to imagine, considering the sheer size of the expansive medical campus. It formed an intimidating maze of tall glass buildings that were situated one right after the next, and as the afternoon sun bounced between them, it created a distorted hall of mirrors.
Once we located our entrance, we walked side by side toward the door, our exaggerated reflections bounding forward to greet us with youthful energy in long graceful steps. But then they shrank in size, slowed in gait, and all at once, eye to eye, we faced our current selves.
A sick old man. A worried daughter. What we saw. What we were. The constructs of a fun house.
“The Taussig.” My father stopped short and examined the hospital name on the door. His mirrored image gaped from the other side. “That was the name of my ship. She was a Sumner-class destroyer, did you know that?” He removed his cap and finger combed his hair. It curled from the perspiration dotting along his fevered brow. “Yes, sir, seventeen years old, and that was where my life began. Who would have guessed it’d end there, too?”
End? I cast a sideways glance as I opened the door, then considered the odd coincidence in name.
As an investigative journalist, I wasn’t one who believed in signs or fate. I subscribed to the rationality of reason and its either-or language of hard-edged truth. But for the hospital and his ship to have the same name? Maybe the universe was trying to tell me something. And maybe that truth, where my father was concerned, spoke not in absolutes, but in the subtle shades of nuanced whispers, and I only had to listen.
“It was 1955... That was when I joined the navy.”
As we walked through the lobby, my father strolled down memory lane.
“It was a year of rock and roll, civil rights and complete unrest.” He dabbed at his brow with his handkerchief. “Rebel without a Cause was the voice of my generation. We didn’t want to conform. We wanted change. I certainly did. And I had to fight for it.”
“I know, Pops.” It wasn’t the first time I’d heard the story. “This way.” I motioned toward the elevators.
“Two things transformed everything for me that year.” He held up his hand, counted them off with knobby fingers. “One, James Dean died in a car crash. And two, Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat.” He explained that while one had nothing to do with the other, for him, a young man coming of age in the ’50s, they formed a small epiphany.
“How much time we had wasn’t in our control, but what we did with it was.” My father placed a hand to his chest. “And if I wanted a different life than my father, I had to stand up to him. So, I faced him square and told him I was joining the navy.”
“But you were only seventeen and needed his permission,” I said, imagining him going toe-to-toe with my grandfather—a formidable man.
“Yes, but I had a speech. A good one.” Pops threw his shoulders back, raised his chin, then told me how he used his grandparents’ immigration as an example. How, because they escaped an oppressive Slovakia before the outbreak of World War I to chase a better life, we all had one. And while following in his grandfather’s and father’s footsteps to work at the factory—like every other immigrant in their neighborhood—was a good life, for Pops it wasn’t enough.
“Then I drove it home. I said, ‘Don’t I owe it to Grandpops, who made that sacrifice, and to you, who benefited from it, to stand on your shoulders and reach for more?’” Pops gave a wide self-satisfied smile. “And that was it. The winning line. My father found a pen and signed permission for me to enlist then and there.”
“It’s a good story, Pops,” I said, signing him in at reception.
“I set sail on the Taussig not long after, and here I am again.” He looked at the logo sign mounted on the wall, coughed into his handkerchief and nodded. “Yes, sir, 1955...”
Not six months before he enlisted, the Detroit Master Plan zoned my grandparents’ struggling neighborhood as heavy industrial. With the grossly polluted river and air, people had begun to abandon their homes or burn them for insurance money. As families moved out, trouble moved in. For the poor Hungarian village in Detroit, these were telltale signs of hard times ahead.
And while I appreciated my father’s fight-for-independence story, I’d bet my grandfather’s reasoning had less to do with Pops’s speech and more to do with easing their family’s foreseeable burdens.
I only hoped my father hadn’t agreed to see the specialist just to ease mine.
Dr. Amon’s bright smile and yellow bow tie put me right at ease. He made small talk as he reviewed my father’s health history and joked during the initial exam. So, when he sent my father to radiology for a CAT scan, I didn’t think twice about it.
When we met with the doctor the second time, some three and a half hours later, his bright smile had dimmed to match a new, serious disposition. It hovered over the conversation, and I thought of nothing else.
He apologized for our wait, explaining he’d wanted to consult their extended team, then he smacked his hands together and delivered the news.
“...the cancer has metastasized...”
“...enlarged lymph nodes and pleural effusions in both lungs...”
“...pneumonia.”
My mouth went dry.
Coughing, shortness of breath, fever, perspiration, the bluish tint to his nails, low levels of white blood cells, and with his compromised immune system... Other things were said, doctor things that drifted in and around my altered state.
But my chin snapped up with his final assertion.
They were checking my father in.
The private room, even with the comforts of a nice hotel, couldn’t conceal the medicinal smell and noisy medical equipment of a hospital. It was astounding how fast the tide had turned. I sighed and rubbed the tension above my eyes. “This has been a long day. You must be exhausted.”
“I’m okay.” Pops set his magazine aside, then threaded bulbous knuckles across his middle. “You know what I was thinking? In a way, it’s good I got cancer.”
“Pops...”
“No, listen. What I mean is, with cancer, we have more time. Time we didn’t have with Mama.”
My chest tightened. Sure, cancer gave us time, but it stole its quality. Whittled away patience with pain, spitting out tainted last memories not worthy of remembrance. I wanted him. Not what cancer couldn’t swallow. “I miss her.” I wasn’t ready to miss him, too.
“With the heart attack, she went quick, and I thought of that, too. At least, that way we still remember her the same. She was still Mama right to the end.” His sky blue eyes clouded with memories, then drooped heavy under baggy lids. “Not like me.”
“What are you talking about, not like you?”
“Like this.” He swept his hand up and down in the air to indicate himself. “I’m grateful for the time, but I don’t want to be remembered as some grouchy old man.”
It was true. My father was grouchy one minute from his aches and pains and fuzzy the next from the pills that dulled them. But what fell between were flashes of the spirit within. The determined boy who didn’t let circumstance define him, the restless dreamer who sailed across the world and the stable family man with a flair for fun.
I sat tall, determined that he knew that. “That grouchy old man is not my father. I know who my father is. He’s a kind and thoughtful man who loved his wife and lived for his family. I know who you are. I see you, Pops. And that...” I copied his sweeping gesture. “That is the disease. It’s only the disease.”
“But that’s what people will see at my funeral.”
My heart dropped to the floor. Cancer was killing him, but he was killing me. “I wish I could just wave a wand, say some magic words and poof.” I wiggled my fingers. “It all disappears.”
Pops chuckled, leaning back into the stacked pillows. “Abracadabra.”
“My magic tree.” I smiled, thinking of the story, then pulled the thin blanket up over my father’s too-thin frame.
He tutted. “The tree wasn’t magic. It was the words.” His yawn overtook the smile.
“They were good words, Pops.”
It was a good story.
We’d been planting a sapling he had sprouted from seed in our backyard when he first told it to me.
“Not too deep, not too wide, just enough room to breathe.” He packed it in nice and tight. When I stepped back, I expected the branches to wave or sparkle—something. After all, he’d said the tree was magic. I told him it was broken.
But Pops said the magic was in the words. A written message given to him while standing under a tree just like the one we had planted. “Only this one was fully grown and almost thirty feet tall. And that night, Tori, paper lanterns filled every branch with shimmering light. So many, that if you held on to the trunk and looked up, it was like a giant umbrella shielding you from a hundred falling stars.”
“But what are the magic words?” I asked, my own lisping through the gap of missing front teeth. “Abracadabra and hocus-pocus?”
Pops laughed. The quiet kind that shook his shoulders. He placed a hand on top of my young head and tousled my hair, so my braids swung back and forth like a handheld bead drum.
“To understand your direction, you must know both your roots and your reach.” My father said the saying was magic because of where he stood in life—leaving the roots of home and reaching for a new one. “It just spoke to me.”
For the longest time, I thought he meant the tree spoke to him. I regarded my droopy sapling with new eyes, tried to remember the magic saying to make it talk. But then I wrinkled my nose, asked if I could maybe just say abracadabra instead.
Pops laughed, pulled me close and tickled me until I squealed. We spent the next hour making whistles from thick blades of grass. That tree still stands on our old property. It never reached thirty feet tall, but it talked.
With Pops’s story, it would talk for years to come.
“Hand me that, will you?” Pops pointed to his cup of ice. I sprang to my feet to retrieve it. Then, without thinking, I readjusted his blanket and cinched him in along his sides.
Droopy eyes flickered to mine. He laughed through his nose.
“What?” I mocked him with my smile because I knew. He used to do the same for me. “You want a story, too?” I asked, angling my chair to keep a better vigil. “I’ve got some good ones from work. How’s this? Falsified reports of illegal logging? I could make it a fairy tale with profiteers and furry woodland creatures.”
Pops’s chest shook. A silent laugh. For me, a triumphant win.
He wet his lips. “My magic tree story. Did I ever tell you why I was there?”
I thought back. No. He hadn’t. “But you can’t just add more to my story.”
“I’m old. I get to do what I want.” His eyes locked to mine. “Are you listening?”
“I’m listening.” I scooted closer.
“Okay, so this ancient tree, as you know, was forty feet high, truly majestic.”
“And magic.” I laughed. “It gets bigger every time you tell it.”
He shushed me with a faint smile. “And because it was in bloom—thousands of pink flowers—it was the perfect place for a wedding.”
My father said instead of an ordained priest to perform the ceremony, it was a spiritual leader in a robe of white. Instead of family, perfect strangers and brand-new friends attended. Instead of a ring, it was an ornate silk pouch. Inside, a single seed from the majestic tree with a small scrolled message written in English on one side, and Japanese on the other. “That was the magic saying I told you.”
“It’s a beautiful addition to the story, Pops.”
He blinked sleepy eyes and closed them. “You should’ve seen the bride’s gown.”
I brightened. It was always about the dress. My mother’s was a classic ’50s fit and flare—sleeveless, high neck and cinched tight to the waist. Then it exploded in a plethora of tulle to float above her knees. “Was it like Mama’s?” I asked.
“No, no.” He sighed. “It was a kimono.”