Family of 4, In 4 Parts

(1) winter night, I and my sister follow my father through the woods. I’m eleven, which makes my sister fifteen, which makes my father forty-two, which makes my mother thirty-nine. My sister and I walk, watching my father’s flashlight cast beams across the motorcycle trail through the apple orchard. We’re looking for my mother who, experimenting with hysteria because of my father’s infidelity, has gone missing. We find her in her robe lying in the field grass and snow.

My father gets her to her feet and walks her back by the arm, patting her hand like a funeral usher.

(2) times my mother wanders out of a bathroom in Denny’s. My father and mother and I are traveling through Georgia, on our way to visit her side of the family in Jacksonville, Florida. My mother is high on valium.

The second time she walks out of the bathroom she moves through the restaurant like Blanche DuBois, brushing at her hair and nodding at babies and busboys and rednecks at their biscuits and gravy. A waitress has to help her to the manager. I watch the manager and waitress looking around the restaurant until the manager looks at me and points me out to my mother in a way that suggests he’s asking her a question.

My mother is smiling and her eyeballs are vibrating and she doesn’t recognize me at first. For those seconds, I am and am not her son.

(3) of us when my sister is not there as my father dies of Alzheimer’s. My sister reasons that because he doesn’t recognize her anymore she’s not his daughter and he’s not her father.

He is and he isn’t, I say, which isn’t how I feel, but what’s the point.

That night my father lies on his side, breathing through his mouth, his watery whale eye following my mother wherever she moves. My mother wears her dead mother’s mink coat and the $27,000 diamond ring my father bought her. She gives orders to the nursing home attendant like a hostess: “Darling, Dr. Ardelle needs more ice.”

When I don’t have the faith to read the Bible to my father any longer, I step out of the room to call relatives to tell them their favorite uncle, their brother-in-law, their baby brother is dying.

(4) hours later and the hospice nurse tells my mother and me go home to get some rest. The nurse feels my father’s feet. He’ll be here when you come back, she assures, which will and won’t be true. He’ll die an hour later, and I’ll spend months not convincing my mother that the nurse didn’t kill him.

And when we return and I enter his room that last time, my father is there but not there. They’ve propped him up with pillows. His body sits on the bed like a costume to be returned. His eyes are open and he looks alarmed. Like he just now remembered something important.