In Darkness

I had prepared myself for the fact that when my brother passed, I wouldn't be able to drown my sorrows in a bottle of Absolut. I had prepared myself to feel my feelings, however overwhelmingly sad they might be. I just hadn't expected to have to feel them so soon.

Sarah and I left the hospital after midnight. Drained and numb, not quite believing that what we'd just experienced wasn't some nightmarish hallucination, we went in search of a hotel. I followed Sarah's Prius in my rental car. Her iPhone led us to us a Best Western, where we checked in without baggage. The room was drab and forlorn, nothing special. Sarah took a shower. I turned off the room light and turned on the bedside lamp, which cut a hole of the gloom and filled it with yellow light. I lay on the bed in my clothes and listened to the running water. Sarah emerged from the shower complaining about ants. "They're everywhere," she groused, toweling her hair. She asked me if I had anything to help her sleep, so I gave her a Seroquel and popped one myself. I turned off the lamp. We lay down in our double beds and waited for them to work. We said nothing because there was nothing to say, though we each knew what the other was thinking: We are the only two left.

I had also prepared myself for the fact that when Kevin passed I'd be the only sibling left who remembered our father. That Kevin refused to discuss him was an ongoing source of frustration for me, but I knew he thought it best to leave the past locked up in its cast-iron safe. While we were in Washington in July, Sarah and I had speculated on what would have become of us had our father lived. She said she'd probably gone more toward a technical field of some type. I said I'd have probably married a Republican. It was Kevin, we agreed, who had suffered the most from his loss. A strong father figure, like a lighthouse, could have guided our brother safely to shore, helped him find his way, made sure he had health insurance so that, when the symptoms first emerged, he could have afforded to see a doctor.

For the past two years, Kevin and I been waging two parallel struggles, his against cancer, mine against addiction. This notion was nothing new. In Colorado we had groped through our solitary lives, each trying to shake a legacy of sadness off our hides, not knowing how to help each other through the pain. For a while our lives had fallen into something resembling a normal routine: marriage, children, steady jobs. And then it all fell apart once again. Our lives shattered like a piece of vintage pottery on a hard-wood floor. I'd lost one of my favorite pieces a few weeks previously, a piece of 1950s Gouda with angular lines and a marvelous patterned glaze. As I often do when I break pottery, I tried to glue it back together, but the shape was too complex for a perfect repair. So I did my best and placed it back on the shelf with its best angle showing, an imperfect version of its former self.

I was lucky. I could glue my life back together. Our diseases were not the same, not at all. Mine is survivable. His was not.

I remembered how I'd dreaded breaking the news to him about losing my pinky. "What?" he'd barked into his phone, astonished. I gave a bare skeleton of the circumstances--I'd drunk too much and fallen off a ladder at a friend's apartment--and then tried to pass it off as no big deal. "Don't worry, I've got nine more!" But I sensed that he finally realized the seriousness of my problem. This was not something he could fix, McGyver style. This was not a broken zipper or a faulty alternator. This was life and death.

Nine months later, he and Sarah and I took our bonding trip to Catalina. I hadn't entered treatment yet, and the lure of alcohol and drugs kept calling to me like a ship's bell through the mist. Back on the mainland, when we parted ways, Kevin had barked in his usual blunt fashion, "Stop drinking!" I haven't touched booze in the eight months since, as much for him as for me. I didn't want to add to his burden. His burden had been lifted; mine remained.

Sasha's burden hadn't lifted. It had killed her. Everyone in treatment had known had someone would relapse--the recidivism rate is 30 percent. But a fatal overdose? It was a shock to the system, and a warning. She and I were both born in San Diego a generation apart. I didn't known Sasha well enough to understand what old pain or tragedy might have driven her to use, only that her self-destructive impulse had been breathtakingly fierce. I thought about her parents in San Diego, so desperate to remove her from bad influences that they sent her to live in New York with her older sister, a banker. She had signed Sasha up for rehab, and for a while, it had worked. I'd watched her transform from a sullen bad girl with black-rimmed eyes and belly shirts to a fresh-faced beauty who wore spectacles and a smile. I recalled how one evening in the elevator, she had noticed my peace-symbol earrings and exclaimed, "I have the same ones!"

"Bought on sale at Macy's?" I asked, smiling.

"That's right!" she'd said, and we'd both laughed. I was pleased that a 20-year-old and I could have something in common besides a birthplace and substance abuse.

I lay in a dark motel room on a mattress where countless others had tried to find sleep. Kevin and Sasha converged in my mind, a Venn diagram of irony and grief. Two lives that overlapped only in their relationship to me. My brother and Sasha, both gone within a day of each other. A pair of deaths that left two pair of survivors: Sarah and I, lying on adjacent beds, and his two children, now fatherless. They had to organize a memorial service; go through Kevin's things and figure out what to save, what to discard; and travel to a remote bay on Catalina Island with their father's ashes in a coffee can. They would scatter them in the part of the Pacific that he loved the most. Then Rai would return to her home in Washington and Scott would move to Riverside County. He and Louise had lined up a house about a mile away from her parents' home. Like many units in Kevin's complex, his condo was worth less than the mortgage, and Scott, who couldn't swing the payments on his CVS salary, had no choice but to lock the door and walk away.

I wished that the four of us could have been closer in our mourning, but my outburst had embittered an already heart-wrenching situation. I felt deeply pained by the entire episode. I wished Kevin's passing could have been more peaceful on every level. Nothing came easily in our family. Nothing went as planned.

Sarah's breathing had taken on the regular rise and fall of sleep. I drifted off thinking of Kevin and Sasha, who were now assigned to permanent darkness. Tomorrow I would wake up in light, determined to stay sober, to honor their lives by saving my own. 

The Nestling

The time comes to take Kevin off life support. The nurse will wean him off the sedative while giving him high doses of morphine. To "keep him comfortable," she says. He will be awake when they remove the breathing tube, but he will not be in pain. 

We have to wait for the morphine pump. It takes about 30 minutes to arrive. Sarah puts her bow to the viola strings and begins to play Ave Maria. I touch Rai's arm and tell her I'm sorry for my outburst, and she seems to accept my apology. Scott holds his head in his hands and cries. I ask the nurse to remove the soft restraints from his arms, so she unfastens the Velcro straps and takes them off and puts them aside. Then she begins to clean his face with baby wipes, gently, softly. When Rai asks if she can help, the nurse says of course and hands her a wipe. I'm sitting in a chair on the far side of the bed facing the doors. Restless, I reach for Kevin's gym bag.

"I found his bible," I say, removing it from the side pocket.

"Read something," Rai tells Scott. "One of the Psalms."

Scott turns to Psalm 27 and begins to read aloud. "The lord is my light and my salvation/Whom shall I fear? The Lord is the stronghold of my life/of whom shall I be afraid?" The room resonates with competing sounds: Scott's deep, rumbling voice, the viola's beautiful notes, the respirator's regular wheeze, the beeping EKG. I can't take my eyes off the various ragged lines that limp across the screen: heart rate and blood pressure, both systolic and dyostolic. Medication and the ventilator are keeping the numbers steady, but it's all a ruse. 

As I sit and listen, as I watch Kevin lying in the bed, so quiet and helpless and still, my mind returns to a memory that has come to haunt me. 

It was 1970. We had just moved to San Jose. I had become a gloomy, preoccupied child, prone to dreaminess and obsessive thoughts, largely friendless. I had, as they say, a rich inner life. On the street side of our corner property, a strip of grass was sandwiched between a high fence and a concrete walkway that ran alongside the house. A family of birds had nested in the eaves, and one day, while walking toward the backyard, I found a baby bird on the path. I knelt to inspect it. It was thumb-sized and featherless, only days out of its egg. Translucent lids were drawn tightly over its bulging eyes; its wings were pulled in tight to its body, and its minuscule beak was slightly parted, as if interrupted in mid-song. Whether it had been pushed from its nest or falling I couldn't say, but it was quite obviously a goner.

I decided that this dead baby bird was about the loneliest thing I'd ever seen. 

I didn't know what to do. I couldn't save it, but I couldn't leave it there, either. Throwing it onto the compost alongside the old lettuce and the melon rinds was out of the question. So I snapped a broad leaf off a nearby shrub, nudged the end under the bird and scraped it off the walkway like a piece of gum. I carried my prize into the kitchen and set it on the counter, but not before making sure mom was nowhere around since she wouldn't appreciate my germing up the clean Formica. I opened the door of the cabinet where mom kept the empty baby food jars. After Sarah had consumed the contents, mom would wash the jar, being sure to scrape off the Gerber label and the glue, let it air- dry and put in on the shelf, saying they were perfect for storing small things like nails or screws. 

Kevin enters the memory. "What are you doing?"

"I found this baby bird outside. I wanna keep it."

"It's gonna decompose and stink up the house."

"So what should I do?"

"You need to keep it in formaldehyde." We stood there, considering this fact. Formaldehyde being in short supply, I suggested an alternative. "How about vinegar? Pickles stay good forever."

The young scientist knitted his brow and pondered for a few beats. "It's better than nothing I guess." He retrieved a bottle of Heinz white vinegar from the pantry cupboard. "Put the bird in first." 

Gingerly, I extricated the bird from the leaf and transferred it to my palm. I picked it up with my other hand and placed it in the jar with the precision of a diamond cutter setting a stone. Kevin filled the jar two-thirds full with vinegar and screwed on the metal lid. The bird didn't float, but stayed on the bottom of the jar. 

"Now what are you going to do with it?" 

"Put it my room."

Any other brother might have considered this a weird thing for an 10-year-old girl to do. But I can't recall one time where Kevin was cruel or demeaning to me. Considering what we'd been through in the past few years, this was pretty normal stuff. Besides, he was his father's son; he'd trapped enough kangaroo rats and hooked enough fish and caught enough bugs that he knew nature's cycles weren't so much mysterious as they were predictable and fascinating; that all God's creatures were worthy of being poked, tested, examined, collected. So he just nodded his head. I carried the jar upstairs and put in on the window sill in my room where I could see it from my bed. Once in a while, while reading or listen to American Top 40, I'd look up and consider it for a while. It made my heart hurt in a way that I almost enjoyed. The bird may have died alone, but I wanted to make sure that its death didn't go unnoticed.

The vinegar did a good job because it took a couple of months before decomposition set in. Eventually I had no choice but to give the dissolving nestling a decent burial, which I did, under a lemon tree off the back patio.

Scott hands me the bible. "I'll read Psalm 23," I announce. I know it well, having memorized it at bible camp in exchange for a woven patch. The valley of death is yawning before us, hemmed in on both sides by mountains of grief. I read it slowly, solemnly, and when I'm done, I close the bible and hand it to Rae. 

A male nurse enters the room, pushing the morphine pump. Sarah stops playing and puts her viola in its case. We stand by, slightly dumbfounded, as the other nurse hangs the bag of morphine and begins to adjust the sedative levels. Then she leaves.

Almost immediately Kevin opens his eyes and begins to stir. He'd been lying on his side, and now he rolls onto his back so that he's facing the ceiling. He begins to choke. "Get the nurse," I plead to no one in particular, but she comes back of her own accord and suctions out the back of his throat, which had filled with saliva, cooing comfortingly to him all the while. Another nurse enters and together they remove the breathing tube from Kevin's throat. No amount of television medical shows can prepare you for seeing these procedures in real life; it is painful to watch, every second of it. They settle him down and pull the blanket up to his chest and up the morphine and leave. 

Disoriented, Kevin's eyes scan the room wildly until they settle on me. Our eyes lock for a moment and a confused look crosses his face, as if he to ask me, What the hell is going on? 

Rai and I are standing on his left side, Sarah and Scott on his right. We are stroking his arms and forehead, holding his hands. He flings his right arm up over his head and it lands on the pillow. We think he is trying to find a more comfortable position until the nurse comes in and pushes his morphine level as high as it can go. "He's agitated," she says. "We'll give him some Ativan to relax him." She injects the drug into his IV and leaves again. Kevin immediately becomes calmer. He brings his arm back down to his side. We hold his hands and tell him, through our tears, that it was all right, that he can let go, that the pain is going to end. His breathing becomes labored and slow. As he exhales through his open mouth he makes two small sounds, uh-uh, as if replying in the negative to some question we can't hear. His eyes are fixed on a point in the far corner of the room, near the ceiling as if looking at someone or something we can't see. I watch the numbers on the EKG go down, the lines begin to flatten. His exhalation slows to a single uh. The lines go flat. The nurse comes in. "He's gone," she says gently. But he was not alone.

High Noon in Fire Season

He died as the worst wildfires in decades swept through the San Gabriel Mountains. The drought-fueled inferno sent a mushroom cloud of smoke into the sky and drew a brown scrim across the horizon. It turned the waxing moon into an amber disc. In Mission Viejo, the leaves on the trees withered, once-lush lawns grew bald spots and the tinder-dry landscape began to return to desert. Thermometers hit the triple digits. Even for Orange County in August, it was hot. But the climate inside Saddleback Memorial was as cool as an icebox, as a last good-bye. 

After I saw Kevin, I was shown to a small waiting room. My nephew Scott and Scott's half-sister Rai were there, ages 20 and 24, too young to lose a father. Rai, whose height and build disguised the fact that she was in her second trimester of pregnancy, sat on a ledge by the window, legs dangling. She had arrived from Seattle that morning. Scott, his face flushed from crying, sat looking at his hands. I gave each a hug and was introduced to a gentle middle-aged woman named Vicki. She represented Saddleback Church, where Kevin had worked for 20 years before leaving to sell real estate. We were all surprised, not to be here, but to be here so soon. We thought we had more time to prepare ourselves.

"What happened?" I asked Scott. "Did the doctors explain it to you?"

My nephew looked at me steadily, strongly. "They thought he couldn't breath because fluid was pressing on his lungs. But they didn't find as much as they thought they would. Instead they found a giant tumor pressing on his lungs."

"But why did he fail so suddenly? When I talked to him on the phone he didn't sound that bad..."

"When I talked to him yesterday morning, he told me he was ready. And I think he let go. The will has so much to do with it." 

The church had kindly offered to pay for Kevin's cremation and to host a memorial service. Vicki told me she had discussed his final wishes with him a few weeks earlier. She said that he had accepted his fate with the same practicality with which he approached fixing a toaster or building a birdhouse. He wanted his ashes put in a Folger's can.

"Why a Folger's can?" I asked Scott.

"It's a scene from The Big Lebowski. Two guys put their friends' ashes in a Folger's can, but when they go to spread them, the wind blows them back into the faces. He loved that movie."

We discussed the logistics of reaching the remote bay on Catalina Island where Kevin wanted his ashes spread. When Scott said it was a three-hour hike from Two Harbors, I chirped, "Oh, I've always wanted to see Catalina's interior." 

Scott and Rai exchanged a quick glance. "It looks like the rest of California," he said. 

Then he left the room to visit his father again. "I'd love to have some of the ashes to keep," I told Rai, yet at the idea, she looked panicked. "You'll have to ask Scott about that," she said, and that's when I realized that the two 20-somethings were in charge. It made sense that Kevin would rely on the two people to whom he was closest, but I still felt a slight sting of rejection, like the quick, darting attack of a horsefly on a warm summer day.

A few people from the church arrived. They gave us their condolences and sat with us for a while. Before leaving, the only man, an elderly fellow in a Hawaiian shirt, led us in prayer. I had no choice but to go along with it. I closed my eyes and half-listened as he murmured for about two minutes, but when he said something about Kevin being saved, my ears perked up. My brother had never mentioned that detail; in fact, he once told me he went out of his way to avoid the religious aspect of his job. I remember wondering how he could get away with that seeing as how he worked in one of the largest evangelical Christian mega-churches in the nation, but Kevin had made staying below the radar into an art form.

Kevin's ex-girlfriend Bette, the woman he should have made his second wife, arrived from Huntington Beach. She had spoken to him on the phone the day before and had come for what she thought was a routine visit, not realizing his sudden turn for the worse. She was shaken and crying and kept apologizing for being shaken and crying. I'd only met her once, years earlier, while she and my brother were still dating, but suddenly I liked her immediately. We went out into the heat to buy snacks and Starbucks, and during our outing she told me she'd worked as a hypnotist until the economy drove her to switch to selling insurance. I told her I wished Kevin had married her. She told me they'd gone so far as to drive to Nevada so Kevin could ask Bette's father for permission to marry his daughter. But for some reason, he never asked, and he and Bette broke up soon thereafter.

By the time we got back to the ICU waiting room, Sarah had arrived from Miami, where she'd been on vacation with her family. She'd flown into LAX, dropped her kids off with a friend and driven south, making sure to bring her viola.

Together we went to our brother's room. "Kevin, it's Sarah, I'm here," she said softly. She had brought Bach's Unaccompanied Cello Suites, arranged for viola, and as I sat with him, she began to play, knowing he could hear her. The deep, rich notes filled the room and drowned out the beeping machines and wheezing respirators. The notes drifted past the sliding glass doors into the rest of the ICU, and when she was finished, the nurses told her how beautiful her playing was. But he couldn't tell her. He couldn't speak at all.

Sarah left and I sat with Kevin for a while. I couldn't think of anything to say. It was an exaggerated version of one of our telephone conversations--a drawn-out pause, a practiced silence. Then I spotted, sitting on a chair in the corner, the gym bag he'd packed before checking in. Feeling only slightly nosey, I unzipped it and examined its contents. I saw his laptop and began to cry as I recalled how he took it everywhere, including dialysis and chemo. It was his lifeline to a world beyond his apartment and doctor's offices and the cubicle at the church's administration building. I cried when I saw the blue fleece sweatpants he always wore, and a pair of gym shorts, and his toiletries, all packed when he assumed he'd be checking out. I unzipped a side pocket and found a book. I pulled it out and saw it was a bible. It was a new edition, probably a gift from the church. Inside I found the hospital chaplain's card. That Kevin had brought a bible surprised me at first, but then I thought that it would make sense that as he approached the end he would turn to its promises of eternal life. I wondered if he'd been saved recently, or if, knowing I'm a skeptic, he'd kept his religious status a secret for fear I'd find it corny or delusional. I would have, once, but now I respected anything that gave my brother comfort in his final days.

Kevin's ex-wife Rhonda was the last person left to say good-bye. She was coming in from Seattle. Her father and sisters and nieces, who live in the area, showed up first. They were there to support Rae, Rhonda's daughter. Our growing numbers necessitated a move to a larger waiting room, beyond the locked double doors of the ICU. We'd have to push a buzzer and give our name to be let in. "Kevin meant so much to our family," one of the sisters told us, though as far as I knew, they hadn't seen him for years. Sarah and I didn't know them at all, and I found it ironic that we were outnumbered by relative strangers. 

Finally Rhonda got there. She was much heavier than I remembered, but her blonde hair still fell past her backside. Her blue T-shirt, blue as her eyes, bore the name of the holistic wellness center she owns with her third husband. We shared a tepid hug. In the years following the divorce, retinitis pigmentosa had claimed most of her eyesight, and she had to be led by the hand to the ICU to say good-bye to her ex-husband. Scott, her son with Kevin, was already there.

With little to do but worry and wait, I opened my phone and pulled up my contact list. I scrolled down, weeding out the people I rarely called. Most of them were my fellow IOPers from the treatment center. I saved Danielle, saved Toby, saved Michelle. When I came to Sasha, I hesitated, then pressed erase. If I wanted to contact her, I could do it via Facebook. I'd been keeping tabs on Sasha on Facebook, and the photos she'd posted over the course of the summer--trips to Vegas and the Hamptons with friends--had concerned me. I looked for signs of a relapse--a drink or joint in her hand, a wasted expression. In one photo I saw what looked like a hookah pipe. She was so beautiful, always smiling, a 20-year-old with everything to live for.

I heard my cell phone beep on a table, indicating I'd gotten a text. I left Sarah to read it. I was surprised to see it was from Danielle, my young friend from the treatment center. I hadn't seen her since July, when she'd asked me to speak at an AA meeting she was chairing. I received her daily "Just for Today" text, we left the occasional comment on each other's Facebook walls.

Her message read: "I can't believe about Sasha."

I didn't know what she meant. What? I texted back.

Her reply: I'll call you in two minutes. I had a bad feeling. 

"What happened?" I asked when she called, though I already knew.

"Sasha's dead. She overdosed yesterday." Danielle's voice was trembling.

"No!" I moaned,. "Was it heroin? Did she inject heroin?"

 

"Yeah. I don't know anything else." Her voice rose. "I can't take this anymore. I'm surrounded by death. My friends are dropping one by one. I've lost four this summer alone."

By this time I'd left the waiting room and had walked into the hallway crying no no no. Danielle was crying on the other end. When I told her where I was and why, she cried even harder. I asked her where she was; she said was at home in Texas. "Danielle, just promise me you'll be careful. You need to keep yourself safe. Get back to New York, away from all those influences, those friends. Get away from them."

This was unfathomable. While my brother, who fought so valiantly to live, was dying in another room, Sasha had thrown her life away as casually as a smoker tossing a cigarette butt onto the sidewalk. I had erased Sasha's name from my phone only 10 minutes ago, and now she was dead. Sarah would have called this eerie coincidence a sign, a premonition of the coming news. Whatever it was, I was shaken to my core, though not as much as Danielle, who was Sasha's age. They had entered the IOP a week apart, and now one of them was dead. The overwhelming irony of the moment set me to such a howling that Sarah and Vicki rushed out into the hallway to find me curled in a fetal position.

"I have to go," I whispered into the phone.

"I love you," Danielle sobbed.

"I love you too. I'll be in touch. Please take care of yourself."

Sarah and Vicki helped me back to the waiting room as I was the blind one. Like Danielle, I felt besieged by death, reeling. And I was still reeling when Rhonda returned and joined her family. She shook her head, which set her long hair to swaying, and looked into the distance, beyond the walls of the waiting room to the nearby duplex where the four of them--Rhonda and Kevin and Rai and Scott--had lived happily, at least for a few years. "He didn't even look like himself."

Then Rai came into the waiting room and said, "It's time." It was 11 p.m.

Scott was still in the UCI room. Vicki sat in a chair. Rai was standing in the middle of the room, near Vicki. But when Sarah and I stood up to go with Rai, she turned to us and said, "Dad told us he only wanted Scott and me in the room with him when he passed."

The sting blossomed into a body blow. I was literally breathless. He didn't want his sisters there when he died? I couldn't believe it. 

Sarah said, "I feel like someone just punched me in the stomach." And then she burst into tears. I stood up and said, "I don't accept this."

"We're just trying to respect Kevin's wishes," Vicki said quietly.

"He explicitly said he didn't want us there?" I asked sharply.

"He said he didn't want a crowd," Rai replied for her. 

"You consider us part of the crowd?" Now I was livid. I regretted attacking Rai, whom I liked. My brother loved her; she'd brought him joy and happiness. But my fury had jumped the firebreak. It could not be contained.

"I'm sorry, I've never done this before," Rae said plaintively, showing her palms in a gesture of helplessness. Sarah was sobbing uncontrollably. They had no idea who much we needed to be with him, no idea at all. "Why are you telling us this now?" I said loudly. I didn't want to shout but I couldn't help it. And all the while I was shouting I was thinking how Kevin, the man for whom drama and fuss were akin to third-degree burns, would have hated this. Discord was the last thing he'd have wanted, but I couldn't just roll over.

Rai fled the room and joined her family in the hallway. I could see her crying in her mother's arms. I felt horrible about yelling at her, so I walked into the hallway to apologize and ask if we couldn't find a compromise of some kind. But before I could say that, one of Rai's cousins, a young woman I'd never met before tonight, emerged from the crowd of relatives, looked me straight in the eye and said, "It's about respecting Kevin's wishes."

She said it in a mild, matter-of-fact sort of way, as if she was trying to help. She didn't. "Sometimes it's not about what the dying want but what the living need," I snarled, and I stalked back into the room. Sarah was curled up in a chair in the corner, disconsolate. I sat down and put my arms around her, too angry and confused to cry. "I've always felt excluded from his life," she cried, gasping for air. Her misery fueled my rage further. I would fulfill my reputation as the out-of-control, nine-fingered, drug-addict sister with the unpredictable temper. The scary one, made no less scary by sobriety. The heat of my anger and grief would scorch the countryside, leaving no one spared.

"Who are you to tell me when I can be with my own brother?" I screamed at the cousin across the room. "Where were you when it was just the three of us?"

The remarks were directed at all of them, strangers except for Rai. He had planned to adopt her years earlier, but then her mother left him and took Rai with her. Still, he had accepted her as his own, bought her prom dresses and taken her camping and sailing and been the father she'd never had. Suddenly, we were on opposite sides, rivals for the affection and attention of a dying man. The same cousin who'd spoken to me in the hallway closed the door to the waiting room to shut out my ranting.

In the middle of this crisis strode Bette, Kevin's ex-girlfriend. She'd been elsewhere in the hospital when the dispute erupted. I briefed her on the problem and she said, "Let me talk to them. Maybe we can reach a compromise."

Bette had temporarily dampened the flames, yet I was still smoldering when she returned, followed by the cousin who'd offended me so deeply. "We all grieve in our own way," the cousin said in a gesture of peace.

"Rai and Scott say you're welcome to stand outside the glass doors," Bette said. And then Rai came in and said, "You can go in now."

I pushed the button and said my name and we were buzzed into the ICU. Rai followed us to Kevin's room. I figured Sarah and I would be allowed to say good-bye to Kevin and then asked to leave. But when we got there, Scott, who hadn't witnessed the uproar but had heard about it, simply shrugged and said, "It's all right. You guys can stay." 

And with that, the fire was out.

What the Jade Plant Taught Me

As I believe I've already told you, my brother's condo had a small patio off the kitchen area, beyond a set of sliding glass doors. He liked to sit out there and smoke cigarettes and listen to the birds. The first time I visited him after his diagnosis, in the winter of 2008, I saw that he had let it fall into disrepair. Since he was usually a neat person, this was a sign of how ill he was. Sara and I spent hours cleaning it up until he told us to stop messing with his environment. There were several plants he had rescued from our mother's backyard jungle after her death, including an elephant philodendron and a tall, spindly jade plant. Right before I left, he asked me if I wanted a cutting off of the jade plant. I said sure. He took a kitchen knife and sawed off a sprig as I watched. 

I couldn't get used to the way he looked in sickness. His fluid retention was so severe that he could barely walk. He looked nine months pregnant and his legs were swollen and spongy to the touch, yet his upper body was emaciated. His head seemed too large for his shoulders and the skin hung off his upper arms. His skin was yellow and waxen, and his eyes had the wild, frightened look of an animal caught in a leg trap. When I first saw him, we hugged hello, and then I went out to retrieve my suitcase from my rental car. The lot was reserved for residents, so I'd parked at the curb. Once there, I leaned against the car door and sobbed. He was already stage V; tumors had entwined themselves like kudzu around his vital organs. Later, Kevin told me that the doctors had given him two years at the outside, secreting their terrible fluids, overwhelming his kidneys and shutting them down.

As Kevin cut the sprig off the jade plant, I thought of our mother, and not just because it had been her plant. All the years they spent together must have rubbed off on him because he'd picked up many of her mannerisms and habits, such as sending me off with a botanical parting gift. I can't remember all the times she lopped off an aloe vera leaf and handed it to me, its mortal gash oozing a clear, sticky  with the admonition to use it on a sunburn or a cut. When it came to aloe, she was ahead of her time. 

The jade plant's twiggy stem was about ten inches long, and its thick, glossy leaves were the size of baby's teeth. Holding the cutting his his puffy hand, Kevin shuffled into the kitchen and wrapped it in a damp paper towel to keep it moist during the flight home. "When you get home just stick it in some dirt. It's pretty hard to kill."

When I got home to New York, I stuck the cutting in some dirt, put it in the dining room window and forgot about to water it. The cutting withered in the weak winter sunlight. One by one, the tiny leaves dropped off until nothing was left but the stem.

A few months later I returned to California. Twice-weekly dialysis had returned Kevin's legs to normal but his belly was still distended and his arms thin. He'd been undergoing chemo and had lost enough hair that he decided to shave his head. His skin was crackled and pale, ghost-like. He was always cold. Yet he insisted on cooking dinner for everyone, on driving and grocery shopping and all the other activities that, if he stuck to them, would prove he wasn't going anywhere. He asked me how the jade plant was doing.

"Um, I think it died. All the leaves fell off."

He shook his head and went to cut me another one. I stuck that one in a pot, too, but this time I took care of it. I watered it every week. I took the dead twig and stuck it in dirt and put it next to the healthy one in the dining room window. And then a miracle happened. It came back to life. Tiny green leaves appeared and grew and multiplied. Kevin was right: jade plants are hard to kill. With a little care, I'd brought the first cutting back from the dead. 

When I saw Kevin last December, he looked astonishingly well, especially considering his appearance a few months earlier. The experimental treatment he'd received at City of Hope Hospital seemed to have made a difference. He and Sarah and I were able to go to Catalina for two days. We did sightseeing stuff, such as taking a submarine ride into the bay. It was just the three of us in that womb-like space, staring out the windows at the sunfish and perch. We didn't go very deep. I was mesmerized by the kelp gardens, the way the golden seaweed waved and shimmered in the currents. I looked at Kevin looking at the fish. He was as handsome as I'd ever seen him, and I told him so. Unaccustomed to flattery, he simply blushed and said, "Yeah, cancer looks good on me."

I returned to California in June, unsure what to expect. And when I saw that the ascetis had returned, as had his wasted appearance and tired shuffle, my spirits fell. He was an expert at hiding his true feelings, so if he was frightened, I couldn't tell. When I left I told him I'd see him in September, when I planned to come out for Sarah's 40th birthday. 

Upon returning to New York, I continued to tend the jade plants. I watered them and tied their fragile branches together, and when the first cutting was strong enough I transplanted it into a pretty vintage flower pot. Then I placed them outside in the secret garden where they could catch the frequent rains. One day in July, deciding they deserved to be shown off, I moved them to the front porch. I put the second cutting on a wicker table and the first one, in its pretty orange pot, on the front step. Two weeks later, Sarah and I went to Washington, D.C., but I returned to find the jade plant missing from the steps. Astonishingly, someone had stolen it. Though I live on a street with a lot of foot traffic, theft is rare. Someone had walked through my gate, picked up the pot and taken it home. I drove around the neighborhood for an hour, hoping that the perpetrator had been stupid enough to place it on their own front porch. But it was gone. 

Last Tuesday, I got an email from Rae, Kevin's daughter. She wrote that Kevin was entering the hospital in order to have fluid drained from around his lungs, one of which had shrunk to the a size of a lemon. He would be in the hospital for four or five days. She also said that the doctors told him that he had three to six months to live.

 I called him right away. "I hear you're going into the hospital," I said.

"I'm already there. I'm in a bed right now, getting drained," he replied. His voice sounded relatively strong, but he was coughing a lot. "I've been having trouble breathing." Then he paused. "I have something else to tell you."

"What?" But I knew what he was going to say.

"Three to six months. That's all I've got left."

I pretended I hadn't known. I said, "Shit," followed by, "Let me know if there's anything I can do for you."

"There's not much you can do now."

"I guess not. But I'll be out in a couple of weeks, and we'll talk about stuff then."

My brother had a funny way of saying "bye." It came out in one quick syllable that sounded like bah. It was a light-hearted farewell, one meant to convey a lack of worry or concern. He said "Bah!" to which I replied, "I'll call you tomorrow."

But the next day, when his voicemail picked up, I had a bad feeling. He usually answered his cell in the hospital simply because he had nothing better to do. 

On Wednesday night, around 12 a.m., the phone rang. Nothing good comes of a midnight telephone call. Dave answered, and a few seconds later handed me the phone. "It's Sarah. She won't tell me what's wrong."

What was wrong was that Kevin had crashed. Sarah said the doctors felt he'd  make it through the night, but had no more than 24 hours left. 

I was on a plane the next morning, and by 2 p.m., I was at Saddleback Memorial Hospital in Mission Viejo. I was directed to the ICU, and as I was buzzed through the double doors, it hit me that this was the same unit where, in 2001, our mother had passed away. Neither Sarah nor I had been there when she took her last breath. I did not intend to make the same mistake this time. "He's on life support and heavily sedated," the nurse told me. She was kind. "He tried to put out his breathing tube this morning, so we gave him a paralytic to keep him immobile. But you can go in and see him. He can hear you speaking, he'll know you're there."

Kevin was lying on his back, but his face was turned to one side, toward the respirator. Every few seconds the machine forced air down the tube and into his lungs, causing his head to jerk a bit as if he was having a nightmare from which he couldn't awaken. His arms were wrapped in Velcro sleeves which I later learned were weighted to keep him from raising his arms. The sight of him, so helpless and close to death, forced the tears out of my eyes and down my cheeks. I told him I was there and I held his swollen hand. Cruel-looking sores and scabs covered his forearms. Machines beeped and hummed, and an IV stand held a half dozen plastic bags containing clear liquid. The respirator wheezed like a scuba diver drawing breath from his oxygen tanks. I sat him with for about half an hour, not knowing what to say, but saying what I could. His eyes were closed. I asked him to squeeze my hand if he could hear me, and he gave a feeble squeeze. I stroked his forehead, massaged his feet, ran my fingers through his thin red-blonde hair, which showed not a speck of gray.

"I love you," I said. "I'm sorry if I never said it often enough." Then I bent over to kiss his forehead. His skin was slick with perspiration and had a pungent, unpleasant smell. Perhaps it was the odor of imminent death. There would be no miracle comeback for my brother, but I'd never expected one. The jade plant's return to life never fooled me into thinking that death could be thwarted with a little water and direct sunlight. It taught me that tending to any living thing shouldn't be about the outcome--that will take care of itself-- as much as the act of nurturing for its own sake. If you do your job well, the result is a thing of such fragile beauty that when it's taken from you, you're not really surprised.

A Thousand Cranes

That very same August, 1,200 miles north of Albany, Georgia, a nine-year-old boy sat at a picnic table with a dozen other kids, folding paper cranes. This was his second summer at Camp Trywoodie in Hyde Park, New York. Trywoodie was a progressive sort of place founded in the late 1950s by a two teachers who were drummed out of the New York City public school system during the McCarthy witch hunts, and the boy's mother worked there as a group leader. The new John Lennon song drifted from a radio turned to WABC. All we are saying is give peace a chance, the boy sang softly to himself as he worked the colored paper into a bird. Every finished crane was tossed into a cardboard box, and when they'd reached their number, the box was sealed, addressed to President Richard Nixon c/o The White House, and driven to the post office. 

The kids have been told that according to Japanese custom, if you fold 1,000 paper cranes you'll get your wish. The kids wished for an end to the war. Peace was the theme of their camp Olympics. They sang Woody Guthrie songs and sailed the Hudson on Pete Seeger's sloop, The Clearwater. They staged plays about the equality of all people, whatever their color or station in life. The boy doodled peace signs on everything. One time, while driving through the South, he'd made the peace sign out the window to passers-by. When his mother noticed, she'd quietly but firmly put her own hand over his and lowered it out of sight. "Not here," she told him.

The Kent State shootings upset him terribly and not just because they happened on his 10th birthday: He couldn't understand why American soldiers would shoot American citizens simply for speaking their minds. He almost canceled his party. On May 8, 1970, he and his mother boarded a bus for Washington D.C. Two among 100,000, they held hands and walked quietly along with the other protesters. He asked his mother who those men were taking their photograph, and she answered, "People from the government, probably." 

The boy who would become my husband grew up believing he had a file with the FBI.

Dave was a doctor's son. He lived in a brownstone on Manhattan's Upper East Side with his father, a psychiatrist, and his mother, a teacher. In the sixth grade he started taking the subway downtown to The Little Red Schoolhouse, a private school founded by the same lefties who'd started Camp Trywoodie. His mother enrolled him in Hebrew school, but he didn't go. He got away with it for a while, then one day, his mom asked him how class had gone. "Fine," he said, whereupon she'd informed him that the school had called wondering why Dave had never shown up. He refused to have a bar mitzvah because he didn't believe in God and bar mitzvahs were all about envelopes full of money anyway. 

His parents separated in 1972. Dave and his brother lived in the brownstone with their mother for two more years before moving to a high-rise apartment on East 82nd Street. Dave's love for his mother was unquestioned, but his relationship with his father was more complex. He couldn't forget the way his father treated his mother, how demanding and self-indulgent he was. When he left her for an old med school friend named Paul--though it took him years to admit that's what he did--Dave wasn't surprised, and neither was his mother. His younger brother, on the other hand, was in denial for decades. It took 11 years for the divorce to finally happen. Dolores just wanted to be done with it, with him, so she asked for nothing but child support. Determined to provide for herself and her sons, she returned to school and became a psychiatric social worker. Dave couldn't stand watching his mother struggle to make ends meet while his father bought property and antiques and traveled the world.

Dave always worked. During the summer and school holidays he bused tables at a fancy fish restaurant, working his way up to waiter. The summer he was 17, he took a two-week baby-sitting for a wealthy family iwho lived in the city but raised trotters in Pennsylvania. An Israeli family was staying as houseguests, and one day the beautiful teenaged daughter lured him to the pool house. She returned to Israel, and today he can't even remember her name. Dave enrolled at the University of Pennsylvania, majoring in psychology and minoring in film, with an emphasis on partying. After college he moved in with his mother and took a series of slave-wage jobs in the film industry. By the summer of 1984, he was working as a freelancer making $150 a day for driving cargo vans around New York City. He spent Labor Day weekend helping his best friend Josh make an industrial film about Alzheimer's Disease. Steve's friend from California was due to arrive on Friday, so he left a key with the doorman along with a note saying that his mother was away for the weekend and to make myself at home.

By the time he got home it was almost 9 p.m. He found me sitting in his mother's bedroom watching The Bridge Over the River Kwai. It was the part where the bridge is about to be demolished. I looked up from the television and saw the most beautiful smile I'd ever seen on a man. Josh was behind Dave as they entered the room, and even her felt the visceral electricity that crackled between us . I'd never felt anything like it. And, apparently, neither had Dave. Maybe it was because we each had less hair than the first time we'd met in California: he'd shaved his scraggly red beard, and I'd cut off most of my hair. In other words, we could see each other much better this time, and we liked what we saw. The three of us went out for Thai food, and our rapport was so easy it seemed as if we'd been friends for years. 

Dave had to work on Saturday too, so I explored the city from stem to stern. As with Dave, I'd met the city once before. It was a longer time ago, yet the metropolis felt familiar. In the mid 1980s Manhattan was dirtier, edgier and more dangerous, and I loved it. It felt as if I'd come home to a place I didn't remember yet had never forgotten. 

That night, in a city of 1,000 restaurants, Dave and Josh and I went back to the same Thai restaurant for dinner. I liked the pad thai.

I spent Sunday with several of Dave and several of his friends from Penn. They included a big teddy bear intellectual named Donnie and a whip-smart brunette named Katrina. She had lost a leg to cancer as a child and gets around on crutches, unbothered by her empty pants leg. I admired her grit and energy and lack of self-consciousness. I wondered what it would be like to lose a piece of one's body, and how long it had taken until the leg became an acceptable loss. They were a whole new level of smart, Ivy League smart; and for the most part, I listened. We wandered around Central Park sharing a joint. Dave and I walked closer and closer, and every once in a while, until our fingers would brush against each other. I talked about my father and Vietnam and the years after. I talked about my impending trip to Japan. Dave listened attentively. He was different from the other men I'd dated recently. He was kind and empathic and entirely focused on me. He looked into my eyes, not at my chest. I liked his strong, solid build and warm hazel eyes. We met more of his friends for dinner on the Upper West Side. It rained that night, so we ducked into coffee shop and found seats on the mezzanine level. We ordered dessert and coffee. A damp curl had fallen over one of his eyes. I ran my fingers through his hair, slicking it back away from his face. The gesture seemed to leave him in a mild state of shock which he would later describe as intense surprise and desire. Finally we said good night to his friends and returned to the apartment.

I wondered if it would happen. I wanted it to, and I didn't. I was leaving early the next morning, and in four months I was leaving for Japan. It wasn't the time to start a new relationship--already I knew that if it happened, it wouldn't be a one-night stand. He didn't seem like the type. I was the type, but I didn't want to be the type that night. We sat in the guest room and talked for hours. He said good-night and left. I sat there waiting for him to come back. And he did, but without his shirt on this time. 

It happened. We slept together on the narrow bed in his mother's guest room, and when I woke up the next morning and saw his beautiful gray cat lying on her side next to the bed, it seemed like a sign. 

I was broke, and he gave me $100 to get home. The cash came in handy. My plane landed hours late and the buses were no longer running to Orange County, so I had to take a bus from LAX to Disneyland and a cab back to the trailer. I sent him a check right away along with a long letter. In October he came to visit me for four weeks. The trailer became our love shack, our hideaway. Once in a while I crawled out of bed to go to my Japanese class at a local community college. I had also secured a teaching position in the English department for the fall semester. Now that I was out of school, the government money had dried up, and I was broke. Society had paid its debt to me. We went camping in the desert and made love in a palm oasis. Steve had a new girlfriend, Maria, the most beautiful woman in the English department. A Phd candidate, she had pale skin, red lips and black hair cut in a smooth, straight pageboy. It was easy to envision her lying on a sofa in Modigliani's studio, posing for a portrait. We took a double date to Tijuana. "Hey honeymooners!" the cab drivers and bar owners would yell at us . And wouldn't you know, Steve and Maria ended up getting married too.

I couldn't believe that I'd fallen for someone weeks before leaving the country for a year. I could have easily bailed out on the English school that was holding a job for me and move to New York. But I'd foregone so many opportunities for men. I felt as if I'd let my need to be wanted supersede my need to be me, and I didn't want to do that again. If it didn't work out I'd kick myself for missing a chance at adventure. One night, on the phone, I told Dave I'd made my decision. I was going to Japan as planned. Then I burst into tears. 

"I'll come to see you," Dave said. "I'll get the money somewhere. You can count on it."

The Summer of '69

I'm getting a little tired of all this Woodstock hoopla--it only reminds me that this summer is the 40th anniversary of something else, something known only to a few select people, but of no small magnitude to the people involved. It didn't occur to me until fairly recently that 1969 was not only a turning point for the culture, but on a micro level, a turning point in the lives of my family. It was a big year all around, a terrible year.

Six weeks before Woodstock, somewhere in the Pacific Ocean, after seven months in the Gulf of Tonkin, my father's reconnaissance squadron catapulted off the U.S.S. Enterprise and flew to Albany. Five RA-5C Vigilantes landed at the air field, one jet short of the number that had left in early January. I stood on my front lawn and watched the families, excited at the imminent reunions, pile into their cars and head for the airfield. I crawled into the firethorne and let it scratch me bloody.

A week later, as the Enterprise sailed under the Golden Gate Bridge for its home port at Alameda, a few anonymous sailors unfurled a white sheet on which they'd painted, in black paint, a giant peace symbol. I only know about this last detail because it was mentioned in a condolence letter that one of the squadron pilots had written to my mother that summer, along with the promise that an investigation was underway to find the perpetrators. But for all intents and purposes, the war was already lost.

Had my father lived to hear about this act of treason, he would have been furious. Had he lived to see news reported from Woodstock, he would have been appalled. He would have seen it as a hippie-dippie horror show, the apotheosis of all he despised, a slap in the face to servicemen like him who were dying in order to salvage the freedoms that allowed a mob of unwashed young people to drop acid, fornicate in the mud and sing along to anti-war songs. Indeed, if you were to conjure the polar opposite scene of the farm in Bethel, New York, where, in August 1969, 400,000 music fans descended to celebrate the age of Aquarius, it would be Hill Village Housing Area in Albany, Georgia. Like an itinerant thunderstorm, the Age of Aquarius missed us. It poured up north and out west. In the South, nothing broke the heat.

In the South, the local boys liked to play POWs. Kids in Los Angeles didn't play POW, at least not that I could see during my two months there, living with Kevin and my grandparents while our mother was in Hawaii. Given that we received such bad news upon our return to Albany, I spent a week out of school, and by the time I went back, there were only a few weeks left. I was expected to get back on my brother's old bicycle, the one I'd learned to ride only a few months previous, and resume pedaling to school. In those three weeks between the report of my father's loss and the determination of his death, I came and went in a trance while the world around me changed itself irrevocably.

The woods near Sylvandale Elementary were pitted with shallow holes that may have been the result of erosion or shovels. The local bullies would grab their prisoner--some poor kid on the way to school--and throw them in a pit. Then they'd jump into the hole and attempt to extract information from him. One kid would get behind the prisoner and hold a stick across his neck and threaten to choke him if he didn't tell them what they wanted to know, whatever that was. I never played myself, but only watched them in the time it took to pedal past. 

At night, in my bed, when I let my fantasies run wild, I prayed that my father had been taken prisoner. He might be tortured and starved, but at least he'd be alive. Even after the navy declared him dead I indulged my fantasies for a little while long. I wanted to hold that small gem of hope in the palm of my hand and watch it sparkle. The hope was hypnotic. It held me in its thrall.

In my memories of that summer, I am alone. My mother was understandably consumed by her pregnancy. Kevin must have been around but he is hiding in my memory banks, refusing to be found. It was as if I had been marooned on a desert island, the sole survivor of a boating accident. I spent a lot of time in the living room playing POW with Barbie and Ken. This gender twist injected a bit of sexual tension into the proceedings. At eight I was beginning to feel that warm, ineffable fuzziness of desire in the scary region below my belly button, and my dolls were ideal avatars for sexual role play. Barbie was the prisoner, Ken the guard. He tied her up and made her lie on the bookcase and then he laid on top of her. He made her do what he wanted. I pulled down his pants and examined the hard loaf of plastic that stood in for his penis. I wasn't clear on what a penis looked like, but I was pretty sure it didn't look like that.

Through the sliding glass doors that opened onto the backyard, I could watch the neighborhood boys playing football and freeze tag, oblivious to heatstroke. Eventually I decided to join them again. We played as before, though this time I was tackled less and allowed to score more often. The boys went easy on me. And then the new kid showed up.

He was older and taller than the rest of us. Kids were always coming and going, chained to their father's deployment schedules, so we figured his family had just moved into officers housing. He asked if he could play football with us. We said sure, but then we stood and looked at each other, wondering which team would get him. He was big enough to be a team all on his own. We ran a few plays, but the kid was so dominant it ruined the game. Everyone drifted away, everyone except me and the new kid. This fact made me nervous, for reasons I couldn't articulate.

A long hedge ran behind the Woods' house, and it had a tunnel big enough to crawl in and out of. Whenever I felt anxious I looked for a place to hide so I crawled into the hedge, the same way I'd hide in the firethorne. I sat there for a few minutes hoping the kid would be gone when I emerged from the other side. But when I went to do that I almost crawled right into the pointy end of a big stick. He was standing over me, holding a branch as big as a jousting staff. He'd carved one end of it into a point the way you whittled a pencil tip with a pen knife if a sharpener wasn't around. I don't know where the stick came from--he must have brought it with him. He must have kept it hidden waiting for a moment like this. 

We stayed frozen in our positions for what seemed like minutes, our eyes locked. His handsome face was pinched into a scowl. He was good-looking. Not as good-looking as Ken, but Ken wasn't real. My mind flashed to an old-time movie poster I'd seen once in a book. An actor in a sheik's costume and a beautiful maiden were clutching each other in a fierce embrace. He was staring into her eyes almost angrily, as if he didn't want to be feeling such passion, but he had no choice but to love her. The kid's glare lit that warm feeling in my lower abdomen I'd felt while laying Ken on top of Barbie. I recognized it from my days playing baseball in Florida, when my first boyfriend guarded me with his body. I was pretty then, a little girl with blonde pigtails and feminine dresses, not this androgynous tomboy with short hair and grass-stained knees and scabby, scratched-up arms.

"You're my prisoner," he said. He was holding the pointy end of the stick about six inches away from my eyes. 

"No I'm not." I tried to sound defiant. I backed out the other end of the tunnel but suddenly he was there, on the other side of the hedge, pointing the stick at my behind. Lip trembling, I sat Indian-style and crossed my arms.

"Let me go." I meant it, and I didn't mean it.

"What do I get if I do?" 

My mind clicked through the options. My marble collection. My Hippity-Hop ball. "I dunno. What do you want?"

This question seemed to put him off balance. He hesitated, then put down the stick and crawled into the tunnel next to me. He took up the entire space, and I felt small next to him. His face was close to mine. I wondered what he wanted with me--I looked like a boy, not a Barbie, not a girl a boy would want. And then I realized I was deluding myself because all he said was, "I heard your father died. That's too bad." He crawled out of the bush, grabbed his stick and walked away, across the connected backyards, toward the little playground. I never saw him again, and to this day, I wonder what he wanted from me.

Fight Night

I neglected to tell you about the outcome of my Hall of Heroes inquiry. On the last day of the conference, as Sara and I were about to enter the ballroom, the handsome captain who had made it his mission to help approached me and said, "I have an answer for you. It turns out that the exhibit was taken down a long time ago and warehoused. But here is the number of the person in charge of Pentagon exhibits, and he's willing to talk to you. He might be able to get someone in the warehouse to dig up the plaque and see if your dad's name was ever corrected."

I took the number and thanked him for his efforts. Had he been a bellboy I would have tipped him. And I thought, Of course the exhibit is gone. What made me think it would still be up after twenty-five years? I imagined the display crated up and buried in a giant storehouse filled with thousands of similar crates. If the name was still misspelled, at least no one would see it. Still, this outcome only underscored my sense of deja vu, of dwelling on an era that had long since past for everyone else.

This morning I was watching CNN. The new anchor was interviewing a former daytime star. She was written out of the show when her character fell off a cliff, never to be seen again. The anchor asked her if she might return to the show. "Well, they never did find a body," the actor replied, laughing. "Soap operas thrive on ghosts."

In the 1980s and 90s, my mother also thrived on ghosts. She began to watch the daytime drama of her life go by as if waiting for her favorite actor to return to the show, miraculously resurrected, living proof that he had survived the plane crash that had presumedly claimed his life. Her return to the past threatened to hold me back as well, hold all of us back, and I refused to let that happen. I was determined to live, not to watch my life go by, and inevitably, the heat of this friction sparked an explosion.

I returned from my first League of Families Meeting in 1984 feeling pleased that finally, our loss was being recognized. It left me as emotionally wrung-out as a well-used dishrag. Yet I certainly didn't come away with a sense of hope that my father was alive. My mother's fantasies, on the other hand, seemed to intensify. She seemed determined to find her way back to him in any way she could, including rekindling an affair with one of his best friends, a fellow naval office I'll call Randall. My father and Randall, pilots who had known each other since 1956, were both stationed in Japan in the late 50s, serving on separate aircraft carriers. Their deployments did not overlap, and my father had to head to sea for several months. One night, in the officer's club at Atsugi, he said to Randall, who was also married, "Take good care of her until I get back." Randall took this request literally. One night he came to her house on the imperial grounds with two lobsters and a bottle of champagne. She was still beautiful. Their affair continued until my father returned, but eventually they lost touch.

In 1982, Randall re-entered my mother's life. He lived in Northern California, and every once in a while he'd come through Orange County on business, which had something to do with airplane parts. When I was interning at the Times, they spent several days together. She seemed so happy, whizzing around town with him in the Austin Healey. She let him drive. One time mom, Sara and Kevin met him in Phoenix where he was picking up an old airplane fuselage. They were driving past an aviation graveyard when Sara spotted an RA-5C Vigilante, dusty and broken, baking in the triple-digit heat. She called out for Randall to stop the car. She got out and ran toward it and laid her hands on it the way a pilgrim might cup her hands to catch the water at Lourdes and so be healed of some very old, very pernicious wound. 

It's ironic to think of it, but mom and I were equally unlucky in love. By mid July, my relationship with Hans had ended badly. His girlfriend was coming out from New York for several weeks so he'd broken it off for good. I'd done my best to keep it casual, but my heart was a casualty nonetheless. I didn't want to be on campus while his girlfriend was there, lest I run into them, so I decided to take a vacation. At first I mulled visiting the guy from the League of Families conference in Georgia, but I didn't like him that much. Finally I settled on a cross-country jaunt wherein I'd visit poet friends in Indiana and Massachusetts before ending up in New York City. I hadn't been there since 1966, when the SS United States deposited my family there on our return from France, but the city's was magnetic. My mother hated big cities, particularly Manhattan; she'd often complain of the time she went there with Arnie and all he wanted to do was ride the subway.

I couldn't afford a hotel room in Manhattan so I asked Steve if he had any friends I could stay with. "There's that guy who came to my poetry reading--what was his name, Dave?" A week later he told me that Dave had agreed to put me up. "He lives with his mother on  the Upper East Side, but they have a guest room. He said, 'Any friend of yours is a friend of mine." 

The Summer Olympics were held in Los Angeles that year. The events were held throughout Southern California, including Mission Viejo, where the road cycling events were staged on its wide boulevards with their manicured medians. This gave mom the chance to finally use the deck for its intended purpose, and she invited friends and family to watch the races from this wooden platform which occupied most of in her stamp-sized backyard. At the time it was strong enough to hold a crowd. I spent the day sitting on the deck in a lawn chair, moping over Hans and fending off a friend of Kevin's who who kept offering to massage my back. I drank beer but not to excess.

The gathering doubled as a going-away party for mom and Sara. Like the deck on which we sat, the family was on the verge of splintering. Mom had abruptly decided to relocate to northern California so Sara could study with a new music teacher who lived in Stockton. She wanted to relocate before the school year began, which meant they had to move in early September. Kevin would stay behind in Mission Viejo (not that he minded) while I was scheduled to jet off to Japan after Christmas. When I'd told mom I was moving to there for a year, she accepted my decision to relocate 8,000 miles away with the same calmness with which she'd left me behind in Colorado seven years earlier. She knew she couldn't talk me out of it nor, I suspect, did she want to. We had both reached the unspoken conclusion that now, as then, our emotional distance demanded a geographical equivalent. Her only comment was, "You're following in my footsteps." 

At first, I was confused--in what way could I possibly be emulating her? Then I remembered her stint in Japan in the late 1950s. I inwardly recoiled. Of all the footsteps in the world, hers were the ones I was least likely to step in. Any connection was purely subconscious. I simply wanted to experience as exotic a culture as possible without needing a malaria shot; I'd chosen Asia because I was less likely to be attracted to its male population. I needed a break from men and from five years of higher education. But mostly, I needed to escape my mother mom and her delusions about my father, which had become as lush and overgrown as her jungle-like garden. I couldn't bear to hear that lumber mill fantasy one more time.

The start and finish line was down by the fake lake, a long stone's throw from mom's deck. Cycling fans had been picking their spots along the race route for days in advance, and by start time, spectators were lining Marguerite Parkway, the road that ran below mom's neighborhood. Much to mom's chagrin, they included two young men who decided that the hillside in back of her house, just on the other side of her containment wall, would make a dandy place to set up camp while they waited for race day. I was telling Kevin's friend one last time that his services were not required when a commotion broke out on the far edge of the deck. Mom and the spectators had gotten into a shouting match, and I turned around just in time to see her toss a glass of soda, ice and all, onto their heads. 

At dusk the races were over--the Americans swept--and mom's guests headed home, but her bad mood stuck around. I had to drive north to Irvine. As I headed down the short hallway toward the back bedroom to get my things, mom followed in full harangue. She was yelling at me about going off on a trip over Labor Day Weekend when she needed my help and what an ungrateful bitch I was to leave her to pack up the house, what with her being an accident victim and such, and I couldn't expect Kevin and Sara to do everything, and don't walk away from me when I'm talking to you!

I hadn't seen her this upset in a long time. Surely my trip east wasn't the only reason she was angry with me. There was also my utter lack of sympathy for her after the car accidents; my seven years of college with no real job to show for it; my refusal to settle down and have children. I was not the daughter she'd bargained for when they plucked me from the foster home 23 years previously. I was young and attractive and she was not. I had the world in front of me and she did not. And as she voiced her displeasure with me, decades of standing in the exhaust blast of her rage, of being seen and not heard, rose up in my throat like bile. I whirled around and shouted at her to shut the fuck up.

By this time we were in the back bedroom. Sara had used this room for a while but recently moved into the front bedroom. Now it held a twin bed, a small metal table and chairs my grandfather had made in his machine shop, and an antique cabinet filled with old dolls from her youth. They had porcelain heads and tiny teeth and eyelids that clicked open and shut. They wore gingham dresses and ribbons in their real human hair. They watched the drama unfold from behind the glass door of the cabinet that held them. They saw me standing with my back to the glass door. They saw mom's eyes turn black, just as they had that day she looked at me while holding the disemboweled rabbit. They watched her curl her fingers into a fist and pull her fist back and step toward me. They saw Sara crying in the doorway as Kevin wrapped his arms around her from behind and held her back and said Stop it, both of you. And it's a good thing he did because had she tried to punch me, I would have stepped aside and her fist would have smashed through the glass door of the cabinet. Unlike those minor car accidents, there would have been blood and screaming and an ambulance ride.

But not that night. Another night. It would take twenty-four years, but it would happen.