You don’t remember, my brother says to me when he is driving me to the airport. You’re so lucky you don’t remember.
Yes, I am grown. All grown, with a home of my own (I think!) and a husband (of sorts) and a job (of even lesser sorts). My father has just been through an operation for colon cancer that has not, to say the least, gone well. They have taken away more of the colon than they were supposed to take, and now he has to have an apparatus attached to him, but little difference it makes since what has really happened is they have discovered the cancer is everywhere, even in the lungs, and he has only a few months left to live. Do I know this yet? I half know this. I find out more while staying in a chateau above Montreal where I am going, if I can just make this flight, and my brother is driving very fast, but it is far, it is far away, like everything.
For now, I know the surgery has gone badly. I have seen him, and I have been with him after the surgery, but I have not stayed. I could only stay for the surgery. The surgery was supposed to go well. It did not. Now I must go to Montreal, and from there to Mont-Tremblant, the ski village where they speak French. My sort-of husband is taking us to a beautiful chalet with a swimming pool and several hot tubs and a sauna so that he can write a novel and so that I can—what? It is unclear what I do.
You are so lucky you don’t remember, my brother says as we speed away from the hospital. You were too young. (He is remembering the stroke.)
Yes, I was too young, I lie.
They sent me into intensive care with Pam! He hadn’t cleared mom to go in. Pam must have been with him when they brought him. They thought she was his wife. I was the only other one let in as I was next of kin. I was fifteen. They made me go in and sit with him while he was unconscious, after the brain surgery, and it was just me and her.
Who on earth was Pam? I ask, although I know, I just didn’t remember the name.
That other woman.
Ah, the switchboard girl?
Right, maybe. I don’t know. I don’t know what she did.
She used to call the house. Mom told me who she was. She ran the switchboard at the trucking company.
They were going to live together on the lake.
Were they?
She was friends with Feral.
Ah, that explains something, doesn’t it?
Yes, he was going to quit driving trucks and give fishing tours in a boat on the lake.
Was he? Were they? That sounds so. Idyllic.
Yes, and sometimes I think, he almost made it. He almost escaped.
Yes, very nearly. Nearly escaped.
They made me go in there with him and I had to sit there.
Who made you?
Mom, and her friends. Agnes’s daughter Alice, she pulled me aside and said, Don’t leave him alone in there with that woman: it’s your responsibility.
What does Mom say about it?
She doesn’t. She says I’m wrong, I remember it wrong.
I doubt that.
I can’t let go of that, being made to sit there in the ICU with that woman.
He could have escaped to the lake, I say. Isn’t that crazy? How happy he would have been!
I don’t tell my brother that I had talked to my father about that other woman. Much, much later, once, when I was all grown up. My father said he loved her, this other woman. He said, also, that all men really adore having two women at the same time. It makes them feel alive.
As my brother drops me off he says, I hate them all! None of them want to admit that you have done so much and that you are really a success. (I am not. I now live in a world where no one is ever successful. It no longer exists. Only my brother thinks of me as successful. He believes in another time.) They hate that most! How you have gone off and become successful. That’s what they hate. The way you went off, and got away from this hellhole. They don’t even believe it. They like, want to fact-check it. They can’t stand it.
Who are they? I wonder. My mother’s friends? My mother? Certainly not my dad, who now, as it seems, is dying in Joplin. My brother, my champion?
I have to go. I’ll miss my flight. I say. Thank you, I say. Thank you for driving me. I love you, I say, though I have never said this to anyone in my family, and even now, I am not sure what sort of damage it does to each of us.
I go into the airport. It is Tulsa, so it is small. I don’t know what happens. Perhaps I check in? I check a bag? The flight must be delayed. Significantly delayed. I have no memory. I sit and stare into. I feel very calm, as calm as I have ever felt, as calm as at the bottom of the aboveground pool. I sit for some time.
My husband calls my phone: Are you going to make the flight? he asks.
Yes. I think so.
Did the surgery go well?
No. I think it was bad, I say.
How so?
They cut out almost all of the colon.
But he survived the surgery. That’s good.
No, it’s not good. It’s definitely not good.
What’s next then?
I can’t quite tell.
Are you alright?
I couldn’t say, really, I say.
You sound checked out.
I don’t remember anything after my brother dropped me off, but I think an hour has taken place, and I have a sandwich.
Dude, you don’t sound well.
What if I miss my flight?
You aren’t going to miss your flight; you are already there. Don’t miss your flight!
What if I forget to get on?
Don’t forget. I’ll call you again. I’ll check online to see when it leaves. I’ll make sure you get on. Don’t you want to go to Mont-Tremblant? There’s a pool. You like pools.
Yes, I want to go. I like pools.
You can practice your French. You can eat poutine.
Yes. I like all those things.