As I step outside, my brother is nowhere in sight—and that sits fine with me. The early-spring air has a chill to it so I put on my sweatshirt. Each step I take puts distance between me and that moaning stranger’s loss. I keep my eyes down as I walk. My sneakers crunch the shriveled brown leaves strewn on the pavement, left over from a recent spring pruning.
My life is in desperate need of pruning. I need the dead and withered to be snipped. I need to feel the bright-green shoots breaking through.
I come to a halt. Listen to me. Using words that would infuriate Vance. It’s a habit I started in middle school soon after Mom died. I don’t speak like that to anyone but him, and watching his reaction is really satisfying. He goes nuts.
As I walk, I wonder if the pruning event of my life will be my father’s last breath.
The day of Dad’s car accident we’d thought he was going to die in the ER. Turns out he stopped breathing and had to be resuscitated—the nurse told us after he was brought back. Surprisingly, that was the first time I’d looked my father’s demise in the eye.
I remember saying to Vance, “What would we really do if Dad died? I mean, holy shit, Vance, what would we do?”
Vance’s eyes bulged and he shrugged. “I have no frigging idea what we’d do.”
My father dying, for real, just wasn’t a reality for me. Despite Dad ramping up his drinking to vodka and scotch after we lost Mom and waking up covered in his own sick sometimes. Despite the ER doctor’s warning about liver failure.
The curly-haired social worker talked with Vance and me as our unconscious father lay battered and bruised in his ER bed. She basically talked at us for about fifteen minutes. My brother had his glazed-over look on, so I forced myself to pay attention to what the woman said. She asked if Dad had a will. That question stopped Vance and me in our tracks. A will? A will meant dying. Death.
Once we calmed down, Vance surprised me by telling her that he did have one, actually two. A living will and a regular will. He said Dad showed him where they were and everything.
When she actually said the word death, Vance snapped out of it, strung a bunch of curses together, and flung them in the woman’s direction. I remember her ducking down a little bit as he shouted.
He’d stormed out, and I apologized to her with sincerity. She drew the meeting to a close rather quickly. I had hundreds of questions floating in my head—the most pressing of which was, Where would I live if my father died? With Vance? Alone? But I didn’t get the chance to ask her right then because my father had a heart attack behind the ER curtains. Every conceivable adult shifted into high gear, including the social worker woman. She yanked me out of the madness, found Vance, and deposited us in the waiting room. We were instructed to sit tight, which neither of us did once she was out of sight. Vance paced the length of the rectangular room, and I was up and down from my seat—getting drinks from the water fountain, going to the bathroom, grabbing a magazine, putting the magazine back.
He didn’t die that day. Obviously. He came to after the heart attack and then proceeded to shake uncontrollably, an apparent side effect from alcohol withdrawal.
That whole disaster was only two weeks ago, and my father never regained full health. They’d kept him in the hospital for almost a week and sent him home to finish recovering. Each day he was home “recovering,” he drank himself into a stupor. Last week, I noticed the yellow hue to his skin.
In retrospect, it was the beginning of the end.