Where You Are. J.H. Trumble

Dad and gripping him around his bare shoulders. “Get this chair out, then I need you to help me lift him.”

      “Where’s Mom?”

      She rounds on me with a suddenness that makes me flinch. “I don’t know where your mom is. But she’s damn sure not here where she’s supposed to be. Your dad’s been on this shower floor for twenty minutes.”

      I seethe at the unfairness in her words as I brace myself against the far shower wall and lift the chair over her head and Dad’s. She has no right to dump on Mom. Mom’s the one who has taken care of Dad all these years—drove him everywhere he wanted to go when the seizures robbed him of his ability to drive, sat with him during endless rounds of doctors’ visits and MRIs, filled his prescriptions. She’s the one who supported the family because he couldn’t, who paid the bills and took care of the house and me because he wouldn’t. She’s been the glue holding this family together, but not once have I heard any of them thank her or defend her. It’s like she’s the hired help.

      “Where have you been?” Dad repeats in a pained voice.

      And sometimes I feel like the bastard son. I set the chair in a corner, out of the way. I can tell from the pinched look on his face that his head is really hurting.

      “I had to make up a test and then I had my group.”

      He scoffs. And the implication of that small exhalation is like a knife in my gut. I wrap my arms around him in a bear hug and heave him to his feet. He’s nearly two hundred pounds of dead weight. He’s weak, but once I get him upright, he manages to support himself just a little on his one good leg. Aunt Whitney takes one side and I take the other, and together we half drag him back to the bedroom.

      I’m keenly aware that his towel is not traveling with us, and I’m angry all over again—this time at Aunt Whitney for not protecting his privacy, at Aunt Olivia for dumping her four kids here and disappearing, and at Dad for not dying with more dignity.

      I’m not being fair. I know that.

      “Where’s Aunt Olivia?” I ask as we settle Dad down on the bed. Aunt Whitney lifts his legs onto the mattress.

      “She’s on call. She had to run to the hospital. One of her tonsillectomy patients blew out his scabs and had to go back into surgery.”

      “If she’s on call, why didn’t she just leave her kids home with Uncle Thomas?”

      “You know what,” she says, snapping her head up. “Your aunt Olivia and I are giving up our evenings to take care of your dad because you and your mom are just too busy with your own lives to do what’s right. So I don’t want to hear about it. Okay?”

      I’m speechless.

      The four-year-olds have jumped up on the other side of the bed and are giggling, while Franny leans against the footboard, intently studying anatomy.

      Dad groans and shifts.

      Aunt Whitney finally shoos the kids away and pulls the sheet up. “Hand me that oxygen tube,” she says.

      I want to defend myself and my mom, I want to walk away, I want to pretend like this isn’t my life. But I don’t do any of those things. I hand her the tubing and she gently slips it over Dad’s ears and positions the prongs in his nostrils.

      Dad squeezes his forehead with his one good hand. His hair has grown back only sparsely since his last chemo treatment, and he no longer wears a beanie to cover the scars and indentations on his scalp. His face is bloated from the steroids, and the oxygen tube presses into his flesh. He used to be handsome, I guess—six-two, solidly built, sandy blond hair a shade darker than my own, a wide mouth that showed beautifully straightened teeth that I rarely got to see unless he was laughing with one of his sisters.

      I find it hard to look at him now.

      Aunt Whitney gropes around under the mattress for a key that she uses to open the gray metal box on the bedside table—Dad’s home pharmacy. She shakes out a couple of morphine tablets, then helps Dad sit up. He takes the pills with a shaky hand and tosses them both in his mouth. She hands him a glass of water. When he’s settled again, she locks the box and picks up a small spiral notebook on the table.

      “I brought your dad something,” she says to me like she didn’t just cut my balls off. She hands me the notebook. “I thought he could use this to record his thoughts for you while he still can, give you something you can hold on to, share with you his favorite memories of being your dad, his hopes for your future. Things like that.” She brushes her fingers across his forehead.

      I shift my focus to Dad and see tears glistening in his eyes.

      I should be moved. I should feel something. It scares me that I don’t.

      He says something, but his voice is raspy and I don’t catch his words.

      “What’s that, Dad?”

      He opens his eyes and fixes them on me with a look of exasperation. “I need you to clean the fish tank,” he says with some effort.

      Aunt Whitney smiles down at him, indulgently, I think, then turns her smile to me. “He’s been worrying all day about those fish. He wants you to check the water’s pH and replace the filter.”

      The thirty-gallon tank is Dad’s therapy. He set it up in their bedroom ten years ago, a couple of months after his diagnosis. Aunt Whitney says it gives him a sense of control. I say it gives him just one more way to avoid interacting with us.

      “Do you need anything else?” I ask.

      “Just take care of the goddamn fish,” he growls in a whispered voice. He squeezes his eyes shut like he’s fighting the reverberation of his words in his brain. Fighting that same reverberation in my soul, I turn to go.

      “And don’t forget to vacuum the gravel and do a water exchange.” I look back at this stranger for a moment, then I go.

      In the garage I have to move aside the lopsided, five-foot Scotch pine to get to the siphon tubing hanging on a rack on the wall. The tree has been soaking in a bucket of water for over a week now and the garage smells like a pine forest. It’s unlike Mom not to have the tree up and decorated the weekend after Thanksgiving, but this year is unlike any other. I finger the needles and focus on breathing for a few moments. It doesn’t feel like Christmas to me. It feels like some kind of purgatory.

      I take a deep breath and remove the tubing along with the deep bucket hanging next to it. There was a time when I really liked cleaning the fish tank. It was one of the few things I ever did with my dad, but when it became all too clear that the only reason Dad let me help was because he could no longer do it by himself, the fun evaporated like the water in the tank. I was just a necessary evil, like the cane or the scooter or the wheelchair.

      He despised every one of those crutches. The tumor started on the right side of his brain, in the motor cortex, and even though the doctors removed it, the damage was done. The seizures that affected his left side were pretty well controlled for a long time, but then the breakthroughs became more frequent and the weakness on his left side more prominent. Despite the radiation and the chemo, it was clear he was losing the battle. Eventually he was forced to use a cane to maintain his balance. The second surgery to zap the tumor also zapped the brain tissue that controlled those muscles, and what little use he’d retained of his left arm and leg was suddenly gone. He had to trade in his cane for a power scooter, something I knew he found humiliating. Then the cancer spread, and the scooter was replaced with a wheelchair.

      I drop one end of the tubing into the tank. When I get the water flowing into the bucket, I drag the larger end across the gravel to vacuum up all the debris. I know what I’m doing, but I still feel Dad watching me. And I can’t help wondering whose future he is more anxious about—mine or the fish’s.

      He never wanted me after all. That’s a hell of a thing for a kid to find out. Maybe it’s because I’m an only child that I know things I shouldn’t.

      Like the fact that my dad wouldn’t have