What If?

I look down at you in the bed with all that hardware—tubes and wires running around you, over you, through you. The machines have assimilated you, like the Borg—an entire species that now exists as a metaphor for how we’ve turned you over to the machines as caretakers, task makers (eat this, drink this, breathe now). Resistance is futile.

I want to crawl in the bed with you, to comfort you and reassure myself, but machines can be delicate. I won’t disturb the precise bend of a tube or the embedded point of a needle. Instead, I pull up a chair and reach for your hand. You open your eyes.

I wish we had known each other longer, you croak.

Shush.

You shush. We should have met sooner.

You weren’t ready for me then.

Bullshit.

Maybe you’re right. Maybe we’ve known each other our whole lives.

Tell me.

We were eight and your family moved in up the street. I was never lonely or bullied on the bus; you were there. At recess we’d huddle in the large tunnel, sequestering ourselves from the rest of the kids.

‘Cause they were big mean stupid-heads.

Exactly. And we made a fort in my basement, with sheets and blankets and pillows. No one allowed but you and I. When my mom died, we snuck away from the adults to hide in our fort. When I cried, you cried.

Tears brim on your eyelashes, so I move on.

Remember when I spent the night at Sean’s house when his parents were out of town?

Sean, what a tool. You smile.

That’s not what you called him the next day, after he ignored me at school. You remember?

What did I call him?

Fucking dickwad.

You chuckle. Sounds like me. What next?

Surely you don’t think it was my idea to cover his car in shaving cream? Or syphon gas out of his tank?

No, but you were the one to suck the gas out of the tube.

Seemed only fair. It was my revenge…I spent days getting the taste out of my mouth.

The taste of gas or the taste of Sean?

I wiggle my eyebrows.

What next? What next?

We graduated high school. We went to college. You learned key lessons about tequila. I learned about men named Keith.

You were at my wedding, you whisper.

Maid of honor, baby. Your bachelorette party remains legend. We still can’t go back to the Bellagio.

I time-travel through our stories, sewing them together, knowing you before you were tied down by husband and children and family. Before you were you. I run over the seam between our tales until I reach the place where they are one, where you marched into my life all tubas and twirling flags and sparklers.

Children were born, a couple divorced, and a husband got sick. These stories need no thread.

How does it end? you ask.

I don’t know.

Yes you do.

I look down and begin to cry. You squeeze my hand until I look up. With a nod, I move to the closet of your private room and grab the spare sheets from the top shelf, along with some extra blankets and pillows. I turn around to see the question on your face.

We’re going to need a bigger fort.

           

 

In the Numbers

Dad’s breath grew erratic and ragged. He drew one last, long burst of air and pushed it out, exhausted and spent. That was it.

Dad was gone.

This gentle, wry man—the one who showed me the numbers running throughout our entire lives—was gone.

From him, I learned that numbers are everywhere, pulling order out of chaos. Say, for example, the geospatial trajectory of a BB shot through the air by a malicious brother.

Numbers were in the kitchen when I asked Dad a cooking question, like how many cups were in a gallon. “Pint’s a pound, world around,” he’d respond, matter-of-factly. Beneath those words, layers of equations and calculations would produce the answer I needed (16).

Numbers were with me even when Dad wasn’t. In gym class, I mentally graphed my deceleration as that Presidential Fitness mile wore on—an exponential curve with speed along the y-axis and time over the x-axis.

In second grade, I caught hell for using the top of my desk to track the ratio of times the teacher called on girls versus boys. Sitting at that desk over recess, scrubbing away the carefully penciled charts and graphs, remains a vivid childhood memory.

The moment after Dad took his last breath, his empty shell lying on the bed, the numbers were silent. No equation could graph our pain.

I grappled behind me for something, anything solid, and found Charles. I turned into him, buried my face on his shoulder and sobbed as he held me tightly.

My Charles. He was there with my family that whole horrible week. He took shifts like the rest of us, staying up with Dad, plying him with morphine. He ran errands, made phone calls, smoothed ruffled feathers. He stroked my back and held my hand.

In the days following Dad’s death, Charles was there. He pooled music for my dad’s wake and funeral. He brokered peace between brothers at the funeral home. He made sure my mother ate, helped hustle her out of the house when she would have lingered indeterminately, and corralled all the paperwork needed for the business of death.

On the day of the funeral, we sat in a straight line in the front pew of the church—all fixed points in a cruel equation of life balanced with loss.

Charles pulled the eulogy he wrote from the pocket of his suit jacket and walked up to the stage. Numbly, I sat, holding my mother's hand. Charles began talking about the strong and quiet man my father was. Suddenly, we heard a catch in his voice.

Then, a sob.

Two weeks of attending to our grief, and my husband had forgotten about his own. All that time, he was anything and everything my family needed. He did it all without fanfare, blending into the background of grief. But his pent-up emotion would no longer be set aside.

Suddenly, the numbers snapped into focus. I could see a graph for how I’d loved my husband (y-axis) over time (x-axis). Far from a straight line, the points on this graph jumped around, snuck up on me, surprised me. This moment in time soared above the rest, as Charles grieved for my father and I saw my husband for the man he was—for me, for all of us.

Charles was still crying. Everyone sat, silent and waiting.

I jumped out of my seat and onto the stage. I hugged my husband, took his hand, and looked down at his notes. I began to read, “For Dad, God was in the numbers.”