Frames

This is something I've been working on for class. I've got a few other stories that I can put up and probably will. 

He was once a creature of rings and rags. His body had felt like steel under his torn clothing and I remembered the way his jackets smelled like coffee and charcoal. Lying draped in that absurd gown, wan and tasteless as dishwater with overcast light leaking through the brocade forest that guarded the window, he wasn’t the raging Zeus that had towered over me as a child. The respirator mask concealed his face, his eyes closed against the struggling day. They had shaved his beard, that bearlike mane that covered his face for all of his life I could remember, leaving his face soft and small and unprotected. The chair on the edge of which I leaned felt like a cage.

            “Jason?”

            I jumped up and smoothed my wrinkled shirt. Mom was in the doorway, her broad, usually ruddy face tight as a snare.

            “I brought you a muffin.”

            “I’m not hungry.”

            “You have to eat.” She was purposefully avoiding glancing at the bed where my father laid.

            “I’m just waiting for the bastard to pass on.”

            “Jason, stop.” She set the cup of coffee and muffin down on the table opposite the hospital bed. I leaned against the rough wallpaper, rested my head against it. Mom sat on the other chair, studying my face. She’d been a tattoo artist when my father, a traveling union welder, had met her thirty years ago. She was nearly sixty now, but the ink that leaked out of her sleeves onto her hands and fingers was still bright as the flowers that sat in the window. I looked at the swallows and roses and bright compass on her wrinkling hands and let the familiarity of the designs comfort me.

            “Go home. Get some rest. I’ll let you know when we hear anything.”

            “I’m only here for you, mom.”

            “I don’t need you right now. Not for a while. Sleep.”

When I was seven I took my father’s favorite hunting knife and carved my initials into the broad magnolia that cast a verdant umbrella over the front yard. Never one for small gestures, I carved the letters J A H as large as I could into the dark wood, reveling at the way the bright blade bit into the soft wood, leaving moist, ash-white wood bare. When my father came home and saw my handiwork he just stood in the front yard for a long time, hands on his hips in a way that drew his calfskin jacket behind him like a cape. At last he came inside, silent as a shadow, and found my cat—a little ill-spirited, sickly animal that I called Lukie—and took him into the front yard and with the blunted, sap-sticky blade of his knife he pinned the mewling animal through the ribs to the tree, right between the long legs of the A.

            I remember that it took Lukie a long time to die. I remember that my father left him there a long time.

            “The doctors are giving him a week to live.”

            I had spilled some tea and I drew the droplets along the wood grained formica tabletop of the coffee shop. The barista was closing up, trying to make some noise so I would notice. I ignored him.

            “Jason?”

            “I’m here.”

            “They’re giving him a week.”

            “I heard you.”

            I could hear my mother breathing. She never cried. She wasn’t one of those women who cried at any old thing. She didn’t cry at big things either. She just breathed hard and her tan face would get pale and she would clench and unclench her right hand, over and over again, and the turquoise and silver rings on her hand would scrape together like coins in a pocket.

            “He missed you.”

            “What?”

            “He missed you,” she said, louder. “He told me so.”

            “Bull.”

            “You’re right, not in so many words. We were eating breakfast a few weeks ago and he said ‘I wonder if Jason is thinking about visiting.’”

            “That doesn’t mean anything. He was wondering.”

            I heard her take a deep breath. “You know him better than that.”

           

            When I was eleven my mother gave birth to a girl who lived for three days. When she died I was at the hospital. I’d been told to stay in the waiting room but I had to use the bathroom and found myself wandering the sterile, death-smelling halls of the third floor. I passed a chicken-wired security window and saw my father cradling a stiff pink bundle, face wet. I’d never seen him cry. His rough, perennially blackened hands brushed the area beneath the pink knit cap, tiny next to his bearded face. He never saw me. He never knew I saw him cry.

            We had to go through his things the next day. He was stable, if unconscious, and my mother silently fretted as we purchased cardboard boxes from a moving company and began to pack some of his things away. It was agonizing, this slow march towards grief. I found myself staring out the window at nothing, or memorizing strains of music faintly heard in elevators or seeping from passing cars. I savored the way light struck the scarlet-breasted robins nesting in branches pimpled with lime-colored buds, or the way the horizon bruised with sunset. Every day was one that my father existed in this world, mutual in whatever misery we were given. I could see him again; I could take actionable steps to be in his presence for a moment longer, if I tried.