Castling

By Sharon Solwitz

THE QUEEN WAS coming in today. For the week. Just like her, giving everyone else the day-to-day swabbing and pampering and watching him lose weight, hair, the red-gold that used to shine from his face. She herself loved and obeyed him like a king, though he was never good to her, but what did wanting or deserving have to do with it? You made the honor roll and picked up your dinner plate without having to be reminded and wrote Thank Yous a week after the gift and married someone no one had to worry about and had well-behaved children you enrolled and drove places etc., and what did you get for it? A little relief maybe from some internal eye, nothing, in fact, while somebody else whose name she wasn’t going to mention forgot everyone’s birthday, and when all of a sudden lightning struck and she sent flowers on Mother’s Day, it was “Isn’t Jean a sweetheart? I really think Jean’s changing! She’s growing up at last!” while she, Terry, who had been grown up for the last hundred years, could kill herself bringing soup and the dry cleaning and she’d even planted a clematis outside the den window where he could see it from the couch, but Ms. Musical Genius Price sends a card with a poem on it, or some medical journal article that shows she hasn’t the faintest what’s happening with him. Yesterday he wouldn’t say a word to anybody, even her and Mother, and they’d sat all day in this little white room, wiping off his forehead, cleaning his mouth now that he couldn’t keep anything down, and she had felt awful for him, so thin and weak and aluminum gray-colored, but then Jean calls to say she’s canceled class, she’s coming in a day sooner and you’d have thought it was God’s own angel. A minute ago he can’t lift his head off the pillow, and all of a sudden, phone to his ear, he’s talking like some TV actor. “Well Daughter, I could be better (chuckle, cough). Honey, think of it this way, you don’t have to watch me turning into a crotchety old man!” Being funny, and days from death, or so the doctor said. And then he asks to have his hair combed.

Terry put down the leotard she was turning into a dragonfly costume for her daughter’s ballet recital: There was her father dying right there in front of her with his red-gray hair flat and neat on his balding head. She’d combed those wispy little tufts, it could make you cry. She wanted to mess up his hair. She wanted to stick her tongue out at him, a child’s gesture, inappropriate; who was she fooling? Dying or not, just and fair in the apportionment of his affections or not, the red-gold of him was as bright as ever. “Mother, it’s lunchtime,” she said. “Why don’t you go down and get yourself something to eat?”

Her mother was sitting in the darkest part of the room on the least comfortable orange plastic chair. Terry was impatient with her mother for choosing a chair with a straight back and no arms, a martyr chair, though her own was only slightly better. The one that unfolded into a chaise longue remained empty, and for whom, for what? For the remote possibility that her father would rise up like Lazarus? No, uh-uh. For Jean, the coming of Jean, which would probably take place a lot later than she had said on the phone. She wiped her damp hands on a tissue, not wanting to stain the pale green fabric of the tiny leotard. “Go, Mother!” she said. “You haven’t had anything today.”

Her mother’s soft voice had the vibrato and urgency of a stage whisper. “I’m not hungry, dear.” A moment passed. “I had breakfast.”

Terry knew that breakfast of hers: black coffee and diet candy. For almost as long as Terry could remember, her mother had been gaining and losing large amounts of weight. She’d eat more than a human being could be believed to eat, then run over to Duke University and slim down with the rice diet. Now her mother was slimming down at home, on her own, but too fast, Terry thought. She was worried about her mother. She was tired of worrying about her mother. She picked up the costume and began sewing green sequins down the bodice, rows and rows of green sequins with a strong double thread, sequins that would not fall off the shiny green body of the dragonfly during the fastest jumps and turns.

“I should stay with your father,” her mother said. “I ought to be here when Jean comes.”

Terry tied a knot, cut the string, pulled the waste end of thread out of the needle and threaded it again. “She’ll be late,” she said. “She’ll miss her plane. Something.”

“Don’t worry, honey. Her boyfriend will get her here, she says he’s a very responsible–”

“Her boyfriend?” The spool of thread had dropped to the floor. She stooped for it. “Well, that’s timing for you.”

“She wanted Dad to meet him.”

“That’s just what Dad needs now. A new friend.”

“He’s her fiancé, honey. They’re engaged to be married.”

“Mom,” Terry said, “do you know how many times she’s been engaged and unengaged and disengaged?”

“Darling, he’s sleeping.”

Holding the costume up to the window Terry noticed a pulled thread in the jersey material of the leotard. A cut thread, though she hadn’t been careless with the scissors; she began stitching. Jean’s current boyfriend was supposed to be smart, and he’d had an interesting life, which included traveling and a first marriage. He was also supposed to be the headmaster of a private school, which sounded good, but if she knew her sister the school was one of those old hippie places in a church with no discipline and ten drugged-out students; there was something wrong with this man, she’d bet on it. Because that was Jean’s pattern, finding one dodo after another that she could then reject, as if the only men in the world were damaged men. Terry felt a little sorry for the boyfriends, but even more, she was astounded that Jean had the gall–that was her father’s word, though not regarding Jean, of course–to bring one of them here at such a time. There was something wrong with Jean if she thought it was okay to foist a stranger on her family while her father was dying. Terry covered the damaged spot with a sequin, then, with a large blunt needle began ruffling a swatch of green tulle that would eventually fit around the waist. She would never have done such a thing, she thought, working her needle in and out the hard, tiny holes. She had too much concern for the other people. In, out, in, out. While Jean was always so busy with her own supersensitive feelings she had no time for anybody else’s. In, out, in, out, in, out. The stitches hurried forward through the loose green weave. Jean used to sing show tunes in the car on the way to their relatives’ in Pittsburgh so loudly that people in other cars would turn their heads; craving attention like people crave sweets. And–not that Terry wanted to spend this much time in the gone past–but in their old home movies there’d be this quick flash of her, Terry, coloring or something at the kitchen table–don’t blink now. Then enter the Queen singing into a ketchup-bottle microphone, her long face out of focus filling the whole screen.

She held the costume up to the window and pulled it back and forth in the light, checking the evenness of the rows, the strength of the stitching; then she set it down on the windowsill and walked over to her mother. She was surprised at what she was feeling, a wild, ragged kind of pain, perceptible through the pain of her father’s dying. She kissed her mother’s cheek, patting her arm. “I’m going down, Mom. What do you want, coffee?” Her mother’s arm was so thin it almost hurt to touch it. “I’ll get you a cheese sandwich, Momma. And I’m going to watch and make sure you eat it.” Charlotte half raised her hand to call her daughter back, then became absorbed in the movement she’d just made, the hand that had gone away, then returned to her lap. She turned it palm up, then over, staring into the translucent skin that let the veins show through, the soft milk-colored nails that needed a calcium supplement. Careful of her manicure she flipped open the clasp of her purse, then snapped it shut. She wasn’t hungry in the least, she was pleased to say. She hadn’t cracked when Jack got sick; no matter what people expected, herself included. Instead she’d grown stronger, making all those fat-free meals according to Jean’s instructions, driving him for his treatments, even administering the Demerol, which she’d gotten pretty good at. She almost enjoyed it, sucking the clear fluid into the syringe, then emptying it fast but not too fast into the fleshy part of his less and less fleshy hip. And Jack was no hero. She had stories if someone wanted to hear. He was no cowboy facing off with Death on some bright dusty silent street. He knew how to run the world he lived in–business, family–but the skills did not translate. When the doctor called with the results of the blood work, he’d thrown the receiver against the wall so hard it dented the wallboard. Weeping, with his face in her lap, “I messed up, Char.” And then: “I tried to be good. What did I do? Tell me what I did!” rocking from side to side like a little baby. Not that she’d have had more presence of mind; she’d have burned the house down or committed suicide. But less was expected of her; she could drive her car through the plate glass doors of Jack’s downtown office building and her friends would nod with pleased, weary foreknowledge: That sounds like Charlotte. Poor Charlotte. They liked her, she was good at the games they played and she listened without judging and she served a good dinner, but she was not a strong person. She’d surprised herself that afternoon, she’d been so competent: cooing to him, smoothing the back of his head, just as she’d done for the kids in their baby fits, promising herself for his sake never to describe the scene to anyone–they wouldn’t believe it anyway–and mostly marveling how easy it was to do this for him. Hair came off in her hand but it didn’t bother her. It wasn’t real hair. It was gray and fuzzy like pocket lint, hair from the head of a sick man-doll. And she could look right into his eyes all wet and naked as she’d never seen them before because over the long years of not being loved by him she had learned how to change people. Not their bodies, of course; she wasn’t a witch. And she hadn’t the force of character or personality to change their behavior. As for their souls, she had come to see, nothing could change that element, not time, not experience, not revelation. No, as far as she could tell, people remained as they were–large-minded and self-assured or cowardly, stupid, dishonest, petty. But with an effort of will so small it would have been equally difficult to arrest it, she could turn a friend’s neglect into “a delicacy that fears to intrude,” a malicious remark into pure incoherence. And that was only the beginning. As she became more adept, the people who frightened or hurt her became lumps of matter, condensations of dust and vapor, negligible as weather.

On the hospital bed in front of her lay a bald, old plastic man-doll. She could wipe its surface, or coo to its noises without seeing, feeling, touching, smelling; anything that would end in discomfort. Odd how long it had taken her to come to this when some people had it from birth. Not Jean, who used to cry when you made a funny face at her. Who sobbed out loud on the street she saw a person in a wheelchair. Jean had no control over what she absorbed and what she turned away from. Terry on the other hand was an adept. And Jack was the master. Whether she talked or was silent, fussed over or ignored him, it had no effect whatsoever. He wasn’t unkind–he was friendly, in fact, and he hadn’t had affairs that she knew about–but when the first baby came and she’d kept the weight he’d simply stopped looking at her. By the time she let it in to bother her there seemed no way to rectify it. Even when she lost the weight it was clear to her that he was concerned only with Jean, at the dinner table, after dinner in his study.

Once–she felt shame thinking of this–she had tiptoed up there and flung open the door to find–what had she expected to find?–her husband and older daughter bent over a game of chess. They were so engrossed they didn’t look up. No need for her even to apologize, just tiptoe out, shutting the door noiselessly behind her. She did not exist. She was the kitchen table. Though there were times, especially in tornado weather, when the air came in hot through their bedroom window, and she remembered how it had been for them in San Antonio during the war, how amorous he was, how much he loved odd parts of her body, her knees, for example, and her long, shapely (he said) hands–enough! There were still a few things she didn’t need to remember, thoughts that required a cupcake in the mouth.

She opened her purse, took out a white paper bag and selected a piece of caffeine-free, coffee-flavored sugarless candy, then poured herself a glass of orange juice from the pitcher on Jack’s movable tray. Odd, that they brought juice every morning when Jack no longer drank juice. She thought about that, rolling the hard candy over her tongue. Perhaps the hospital itself had its own way of not-seeing, clever as hers–. If she were silent within herself, if she breathed so shallowly she couldn’t hear her own breath, and the only sound in the room was an intermittent wheeze from the direction of the bed, she could hear the hospital itself, sleeping badly, tossing its frightened, rotting cargo.

No crazy-think! Charlotte stood up and touched her toes to the floor five or six times. She turned around once, slowly. She focused on a corner of the room, the perpendicular interface of wall and ceiling, the right angle, the flatness of the planes defining a box, a rectangular solid, a room, that’s all. She pictured the hard candy dissolving down her esophagus, stomach, through the little doorway of her duodenum into the long winding corridor of her small intestine, then seeping out through the membranous capillary-thin walls, strong and warm as coffee or fur.

There was a sound from the bed. She bent over the doll-mouth. “I’m here, honey.”

The sound repeated. She unwrapped one of the lemon-flavored cotton swabs that the nurse had left and, inserting a finger and then the swab between the doll-lips, she massaged the sweet sourness into the tongue and both sides of the upper and lower gums, carefully breathing in the lemon but no other odor and cutting off the mental pictures the fear of the odor engendered. Helpless man-doll. Manikin who had been her husband. It was easy nursing. If she had her life to live over again she would live it as a nurse.

There was another groan. A flutter from under the covers. She fished the hand out and squeezed. Sometimes when she did this he would squeeze back. She waited, fixed on his face. “It’s Char. Talk to me, darling.”

His eyes opened, then closed. His hand seemed impatient with her hand; it squirmed away, began patting his chest, the mattress under the covers. She was hurt for a moment. Some moisture rose to her eyes. She wiped it off and sat down, ignoring the wet, the little chill on the pads of her fingers.

Jack could not locate the remote control. He wanted it bad. Couldn’t remember why. God damn morphine swoon. Like swimming, warm spots and cold spots. Some people liked the blur. He fought it. Fought it. He remembered. Oh that. Par for the course, heh heh. And on a good day at Forest Glen he used to shoot (sometimes) ten over par, heh heh. Well, he could still amuse himself with puns on pastimes he would never indulge again. Which was itself a pastime, suited to the current situation. He was coming out of it. Sounds, thoughts ahhhh. But pain too. Capital P pain. Not much time till he hurt so bad his mind would say only my shot, my Shot! He breathed slowly: in-out, in-out, concentrating, until general pain curdled into discrete sensations drifting past him, slow and harmless enough to name.

Cramp. In his big toe. Delicious pain, old-buddy pain– for the past twenty years in the locker room after squash. It came on slowly and could be relieved at times by gently pulling at the toe. Toe now so far away. Sorry down there, Toe-boy.

Numbness. From his foot to his calf all the way up into the hip. This was more irritating; as if half his body were asleep. He contracted his muscles, then relaxed, wanting to shake out the leg, the hip, get out of bed, get the blood moving. He could picture this in his mind though the picture did not move him to action. Business not topical, he knew; it originated somewhere on the right side of his brain.

The numbness subsided for a moment, or else for a miraculous moment his mind swam over it. Warm spot, cool spot. Remarkable how clear his thoughts were. He could feel the minute pulsations of the rot of the connective tissue, the cancer cells accumulating on the inside surface of the lungs, which took in air with increasing reluctance. That was frightening. As a child, he’d once debated the relative advantages and disadvantages of different modes of death (fire, drowning, falling, the gas chamber, electric chair, firing squad, etc.), preferring any form of death to suffocation. He’d rather (he had stressed this) have his fingernails peeled off, or lighted cigarettes pressed into the soft undersides of his arms to the gagging terror of his parchment-thin breathing apparatus filling with water, with sand. He trembled at the mental picture: his lungs expanding too far, rupturing like the condoms he and friends had filled with water and dropped from the window onto junior-high-school enemies below. Now under the too heavy hospital sheet the physical terror of this form of death emptied his mind of all words and pictures. His pulse raced, he coughed, gasped, amassing breath to tell Charlotte please to put the little black plastic remote control box into his hand, because in these moments nothing helped except the loud calm resonant television voices of men who breathe without thinking. His right hand groped over his chest, the slight depression of his body in the mattress. He wanted a baseball game, the voice of the announcer assured, amused, excited; and underlaid by the muted staticky roar of the crowd. So raise those shoulders dammit. Stretch. Grope. With all the strength he could muster, he fished it out from between his legs and dropped it on the hollow of his stomach, pulling the sheet down so that the sensor end of the box faced the blank gray eye of the television screen.

“You’ll get cold, honey.”

A heavy movement from alongside the bed. Charlotte loomed, reached for the sheet. Don’t! It came out as a kind of yelp, and she sprang back, but in the small hiatus he had found the power button. Yes. There was life for him, within him. Pleasure; not physical, of course, but as palpable. In his mind he could hear the song that Carmen begins in the wings, Tra-a-a la la la la la, muffled and far away but amplifying as she walks toward the stage, Tra-a-a la la la la la, loud now, fierce and stubborn and not to be impeded. Jean had liked to sing Carmen but her voice was too high; and really not quite thick enough; she was Micaela, Don Jose’s country girlfriend, whose pure-hearted impotence she used to make fun of. She didn’t sing now, though, anything. Musical comedy, even. He knew why; she’d had a “problem.” Had had. In the past. Over. Bad business, entertainment. They got used to the highs, began to think they deserved them. Still, it bothered him. As if it was his fault. She had been gorgeous, on stage, in clubs, with the orchestra. Had been. Was. Is. She was getting somewhere. She was still getting somewhere, even at the University of Illinois. She had brains. Multiple neurons and synapses, a good chess mind. She won her share of the games they played over the phone. Every Sunday night for the last ten years since she’d moved to Chicago. Every Sunday from seven to eight, great games, great talk–so clear in his mind he couldn’t imagine dying if it meant the loss of that clarity. He worried sometimes that inadvertently he had hurt her fatally, that something he’d done had nicked a crucial psychic organ of hers, caused it to fail under stress. There was a letter she’d written him from Barnard, freshman year, the story of her seventeen years from the clear cold perspective of out-of-town. He’d made her think, she said, that she was smarter and more talented than everyone else, inflating her too full for friends, for “enjoying life.” Well, so, she’d made friends. Learned to enjoy, evidently. And almost flunked out of Barnard: was that his fault? Should he have treated her as if she were average?

Not have given her music lessons when it was clear how much she loved music and how well she did. He remembered her once in front of the Suburban Symphony Orchestra–age twelve and utterly unselfconscious , failure inconceivable. And now? Now she was an “addictive personality”: she’d said that once. What did that mean? Some shrink’s term. He knew her better than any shrink. When she’d had her little nightmares it was he she’d tiptoe in to; he and not her mother that she’d wake in the night. He hadn’t minded. Once she thought she had cancer. Got so scared one night she couldn’t sleep. He’d talked to her, sat by her, woke up in the chair beside her bed with the sun coming up. And she was fine afterward. Happy, sunny. Fine. He felt a sensation in his chest now, a heat that slowly (but lately faster and faster) would approach burning if not relieved by morphine–but instead of flinching under it, he was simply surprised and pleased to note how long it had been since he had felt that pain. Magic balm of thoughts of his daughter. Charlotte was concerned she wasn’t married. So what? Terry’s Vic had not stimulated her thinking powers as far as he could see. Better alone than with someone weaker and/or stupider. From the way Jean talked about him the present candidate was a loser. A sweet man, she called him. Her best friend. Not the way you talk about the man for whom you will forsake all others. Stretch, dammit. Chest too small for whatever filled it. Poe’s old torture, the dungeon walls tight on his back, his chest; they longed for each other, these walls, like lovers, pressing together, regardless of the flesh and bones that separated them. The pain a pit he stared into. He wanted to scream. Could not scream. Could not find the TV box. Please. He flailed. Something clattered to the floor.

“Jack honey?”

The sound, plastic, square, small. His throat hurt longing for it.

“Jack darling, you’ve dropped something. Let me pick it up for you. Where shall I put it? Shall I find a good program for you?”

Steps in the corridor. He turned his head as far as it would go. It was Terry, directed as a vacuum cleaner. And her baby-thug of a husband.

“Dad!” Vic boomed, striding in, grabbing Jack’s hand and shaking it. “You’re looking better, I think.” Jack felt his son-in-law’s obtuse, unabashed gaze. What did he see? Did he see? “You bet!” Vic cried. “You look more relaxed. More comfy here than home, right Dad?”

“Shhh, shhh. This isn’t the stadium,” Terry’s loud sickroom whisper. Her hand pressed his knuckles. He felt it, compact, firm, smelling of mayonnaise. It vanished. “Vic, that tray is for Mom. Mom sit down. Sit down.”

“Looks like the Indians are playing this afternoon,” Vic went on, quieter. “Want me to turn them on? Might take our mind off this business, wouldn’t hurt, what do you think? Nice of them to put up a little fight for the pennant this year, though I watch ‘em, you know, win or lose.’’

Jack lay with his eyes closed playing dead for his family. Almost dead. Perhaps already dead. In the Tibetan ritual, which Jean had read to him over the phone, for three days after death, spirits stay in the room with their senses intact. His hearing was splendid, better than ever, it seemed, though it was hard to judge. He heard the TV click on, buzz for a second, resolve into a murmur. The clip-clip of Terry’s needles, a clean, delicate sound, unutterably lovely. The TV gave a number for somebody’s on-base percentage. Turn it up, Vic, he said in his mind. Go ahead, let’s hear the play-by-play. . .

“I think he’s in pain,” Charlotte said.

“Eat your sandwich, mother,” Terry said.

He felt a hand on his arm, Vic’s, large and too warm. “What do you know! Niekro’s throwing strikes, like the old days.”

“Please turn it off!” Terry said. “Nobody’s watching it!”

“I’ll turn the sound off.”

“Put the box back in his hand,” Charlotte said. “He likes to hold it.”

The nurse came in and gave Jack an injection he couldn’t feel. She drew the curtains. He basked in the pleasure of Vic’s loud voice, other voices, creaks in the floor, the sound of the door opening.

“Well, well, well!” Vic said. “Will you look who’s here!”

The Valium should be coming on now, that warm cottony stomach feeling where the lessening of anxiety is like pleasure. She took her hand out of Mark’s, wiped it on her skirt. “I’m okay,” she said. She stood in the doorway, waiting for her eye to see. The only light came from the TV, gray and flickering. “Don’t leave me.”

“Jean, baby,” her mother cried. Jean embraced her obediently, noticing the slippery resistance of her rayon blouse, then took Mark’s arm.

“Hi, sister,” Terry whispered. Jean hugged her with the arm that wasn’t holding onto Mark’s. Terry’s back was soft to the touch, the muscles a little slack, as if she’d been letting up on her exercise program.

Vic had been reclining in the lounge chair in front of the TV set. Like a parochial schoolboy caught in some wrongdoing, he jumped away from the program he was watching and clambered over to her. “Looks like–” He kept an arm around her. She thought he might start to weep on her shoulder. “He gathered himself together. “Ahhhh! So this is the finance!”

She and her father used to laugh in private at Vic’s awkward forays into cleverness. Now in the Valium haze she didn’t know how to react: to laugh or not to laugh; both seemed a betrayal.

“The finance,” he said grinning. “Fiancé! He who finances. Get it? Who takes care of you!”

“He does. He’s kept me alive these past months.” She told them Mark’s name, first and last, with a smile whose stretch felt like pain in her cheeks. “Is Daddy up now?” She didn’t hear anyone’s answer. She was pulling Mark over to the bed. I’m going to marry this man, she said to herself. My father will die and I will marry Mark and have children and call one of them Jonathan or Jon or maybe even Jack. She was breathing fast and high as if there were an obstruction in her throat. Digging through her purse, but before her fingers found the pill box she remembered back thirty years ago when she’d felt a lump in her throat the size of a golf ball and she’d called it cancer. It had hurt to talk, to sing, but she’d kept it a secret for several weeks, drinking hot water to dissolve the mass, begging God in her prayers for another ten years, five, even–until late one night when her father found her sitting up in bed in her school dress. She was staring at the window, at Mr. Death lurking just beyond: his gray face, his empty eyes, his black boots and cape and cane. She let go of Mark’s hand.

The man in the bed, though, looked only vaguely familiar, like her mother’s grandfather in the old photos. She straightened the sheet, folding the top end down over the chest. The face was pale gray-blue, the skin stretched tight across the forehead. She walked to the curtain and felt around for the pull.

“Honey,” her mother cried, “he won’t be able to see the screen.” She dropped the string. In the flickering TV light she saw that the head was propped slightly: the TV remote control lay on the man’s chest under the covers. She squinted at the arrangement of features, staring so hard that a spot an inch or so behind her eyes began to throb. It came then, a profound surge of relief: this was not her father.

“He likes it on,” her mother explained. She began cleaning his mouth with a cotton swab.

Jean looked from the man to the television and back again. The man’s eyes were closed and the sound was off. On the screen a stream of beer, shining yellow-gold, bubbled to the top of a cone-shaped glass. A woman in a leotard executed several jumping jacks, then a man came up from behind and kissed her. An aerial view of a stadium took over for a moment, followed by a man in baseball garb swinging a bat. From time to time the man on the bed muttered something. The men on the screen hit the little ball up in the air or failed to hit it. Fans waved at the camera. The man who was supposed to be her father said something that sounded like “go,” but could have been “goal” or even “gold,” unnervingly loud in the silent room. Mark, whose presence she’d utterly forgotten, kissed the top of her head.

“Jeanie,” he said. “Why don’t you sit down? I’ll get you a chair.”

Vic stood up and pushed his own chair over to the bed.

“I know this is a hell of a time,” he said, clapping Mark on the back like an old fraternity brother, “but marriage is a good thing. On the part of an outsider, I say, welcome to the family!”

The TV came on with a roar. A single screaming cheer from thousands of voices. Happy fans jumped in the air, hugged each other, waved their arms as a man ran around the bases. The sick man must have pressed the volume control. One of his hands lay outside the control.

She touched the hand and the fingers closed over hers: a slight warmth as if someone were stroking her hair. It was a fragile sensation, the smallest twitch would displace it, and she stood quietly. Her father murmured the word that could have been “go” or “goal.”

“He’s in pain,” her mother said.

The sheet almost imperceptibly rose and fell.

She wanted to speak but she could not speak. She thought of the little packet she carried in her purse, not to use, just to be there so each necessary moment she could resolutely not use it. She imagined it between her fingers, finer than flour, how it would relieve the tightness in her mouth, make speech flow like a song. The way thirty years ago when her throat froze on her singing and her father had lain down in her bed between her and the window that her death was knocking at. He called it castling, the chess move he was teaching her at the time, in which the rook and king change places behind a wall of pawns. No harm would come to her, he assured her, with him between her bed and the window, his big body the protective wall of pawns. Now in her mind she ran for the doctors, told them quick to freeze her father’s body till they found a cure for cancer; she would go into medical research, work nights, weekends till she learned how to subdue the wicked cells.

At the window she pushed aside the plants and get well cards and opened the curtain. Her father’s face was almost skeletal–contours of jaw and cheek severe–but in the gold late afternoon light he looked like a religious ascetic, a Yogi ecstatic in meditation, more beautiful than mortal man; not ill. She slipped out of her shoes and, feeling quite alone, eased herself onto the hospital bed, the side facing the window.

“Jean?” Her mother’s voice, a puffball of sound.

“Come on, Jean.” Her brother-in-law’s heavy hand tapped her shoulder. “Come on, Jean.”

“Please,” Terry said. “You’re being weird.”

Mark’s hand on the back of her head, his voice in her ear: “Please, Jeanie, get out of that bed.”

She burrowed under the sheet. She wrapped her arms around her father’s arm and kissed his shoulder. It was warm, warm. She held her breath until Mark’s hand was gone. His footsteps. Other footsteps. She counted them out the door one two three four, blanking her mind, five six seven, feeling soft against her cheek the cotton of her father’s hospital gown. There was singing in her head, the clear, high, steady voice of a little girl who fears nothing. If Mr. Death set one black-booted foot into the room, he was in for a struggle.