Our nearest neighbor was a mile away, so nobody asked what I was doing when I hung the hurricane shutters on the living room and kitchen windows, and my father asked no questions from inside. He slept so heavily now that a few times, with his arms and legs always so cold, I thought he had already died. I nozzled up the hose and propped it so it would spray on the shutters, and just at dusk I turned it on. The angel was half-ugly and half-kind because I was half-stoned. “You play tricks on him when you should be calling him out of his bed.”
“It’s not a trick,” I said. I spent another few moments watching the sky and taking just the smallest nip of the morphine and then went in. When I came into the living room with a candle he asked what was going on. “A big storm,” I said.
“Finally!” he said.
We had a party during the storm, two more dinners and Ativan and morphine all around, and the storm picked him up, so he was more alert for a while and told me stories of hurricanes past, of ruined crops and toddlers surviving miraculously when a tornado stole them from their homes and deposited them in the next county.
“I know you have secrets,” he said suddenly. And then he said, “Your sister tried to drown you when you were two — do you remember?”
“No,” I said, and asked him to tell me more. But then he thought I was my sister Charlotte.
“How could you hurt a little baby like that?” he asked, and I said I’ve done a lot of bad things.
“Tell me about it!” said the angel. I took another drop of morphine, right in front of him because his eyes were closed, but then as if he could smell it he opened his mouth, so I gave him some, too. And then I took some more, and gave him some more, and then switched to the Ativan. But still the angel was a harpy. “Put out your hand!” she said. “Another angel is coming!”
“It’s all right,” my father said. And then he whispered, “Your mother tried to smother him once. Just a little, with a blanket, and she told me about it right away. But she was depressed, and that’s what you do when you’re depressed.”
“If you were a great man,” the angel said, slurring now, “if you were president — and you could have been president — then I would be a national conscience!”
“Shut up,” I said quietly to her, thinking I had pitched my voice so she would hear it and he would not.
“Don’t tell me to shut up, sassy girl!” he said, and I gave him some more morphine. Though he hadn’t asked for it he sucked at the dropper when I put it in his mouth.
“You can do it,” she said, her face flashing beautiful for a moment. And she showed me, putting out a hand that was soft and white on one side and hairy and rough on the other. She held it over his chest. “All you have to do is finally stop fucking up.”
“You’re ruining it,” I told her, and took a swig of the Ativan, just a tiny sip really, but you are only supposed to take it drop by drop and I knew why as soon as I took the swig. It was too good, and it made everything too beautiful, not just the angel, whose ugly skin flew off as if blown by a real hurricane wind, so her wings were clean again and her naked face and body were open and compassionate. Even my father’s face became beautiful, still yellow and sunken but now utterly lovely, and how strange to see a beautiful face that looked so much like my own. The room shined with something that was not light, and there really was a thrilling storm blowing outside and shaking the walls. Every so often he would reach blindly for something not there in front of him, and he did this now, so I reached with him, and the angel reached, too, all three of us putting out our hands together.
“You have to be ready at any time to have the conversation,” Janie Finn told me, meaning the conversation where you sorted everything out and said your goodbyes, and the dying person sorted everything out and lost all their regrets. “You talk about things and then you let go,” she said, making an expansive gesture with her hands, as if she were setting free a bunch of doves or balloons. It was just the sort of thing that hospice people always say, and it’s because they say things like this that I think they should all be put slowly to death, half of them ministering to the others as they expire by deadly injection, having their conversations and dwindling, half by half, until there are only two, and then one, and a little midget comes in and shoots the last one in the face.
But suddenly I thought that this must be the conversation, as we opened our mouths in turn and shared something wordless and important and lovely, and the whole room seemed like a great relief to me, and I knew it must to him, too. The angel was struggling, though, seeming to wrestle with herself. Her face was beautiful but then her body was ugly again and my bottles were almost empty. My father’s mouth was open but I took the last of the morphine myself and gave him a drop of water. He opened his eyes and looked at me and said it again, “You!” and he shook his head, then closed his eyes again. But when I put my head on his chest he didn’t push it away, and though one hand was reaching out blindly above him, he let me put the other on my neck. “I want a better angel, Dad,” I told him. “That’s all I need.”
“I’ll take a nap now,” he said. “Batten down the hatches and go to your room.” But I stayed where I was, and took a nap myself. I woke up the next morning on the couch, the fake rain still drumming at the shuttered window, with no recollection of how I got across the room. The angel was in the corner, her face ugly again, but only in that way that all weeping faces are ugly. I sat down next to my father, who must have died sometime very recently, because though his face was cold and his open eyes already had the look of spoiling grapes, his chest and his belly were warm. I put my hands on his chest, and my head on my hands, and stayed that way for a long time before I called Janie to tell her that it had happened.
THE CHANGELING
My father and I stand in the kitchen, staring at the toaster and waiting for the waffles. Since my son became ill, we have been taking turns with the meals, so he handles breakfast and I do lunch and then we both take care of dinner. We have a waffle iron, but the prospect of making the batter was somehow too much this morning, and though I believe that waffles made from scratch would carry some premium of affection, I know once-frozen waffles won’t matter to Carl, and I recognize my father’s exhausted posture from the latter days of my mother’s illness and my divorce, and I know better than to suggest that frozen waffles will somehow work against us today. Our stretched and inverted images look back at us from within the toaster-chrome.
A spring is broken inside the toaster, so nothing jumps up like it should. The waffles rise slow and stately. Carl used to say that the toast looked like it was rising from out of a grave, and made jokes about zombie-strudel and vampire Pop-Tarts. He wasn’t an entirely normal kid, even before he got sick. My father takes the waffles out, butters them up, and puts them on a plate, then puts that on a gigantic silver tray of the sort a butler would carry around, complete with a handled silver dome. “Get the syrup,” he tells me, and starts upstairs.
He pauses outside the door and knocks. He always knocks; I never do. He says it’s important to treat Carl with respect, and I agree, but the thing presently in his bed could care less if we are polite toward it. It asks of us a specific set of behaviors and everything else is superfluous. “Who is it?” comes the reply. The voice sounds like dozens of voices speaking at once. Sometimes I convince myself that I can hear Carl’s voice in there, sounding very small and incredibly far away.