Drought

Before I hung up the phone for good, my father told me the land looked hungry. He had flipped the video chat camera around so I could see the starved grass outside his window, Napa’s bloody sky above, foreboding. Everything is orange, he said. The land, the forests, the sky. Only the masks are blue. He was dying then, dead now. Withered in another one of our California droughts, his lungs dry and hacking wildfire smoke. Outside of my apartment window I can see a little lawn of green. I never leave my apartment in Jamaica Plain anymore. My body couldn’t even bear to rush to Logan, fly out to watch my father dry up and wheeze. So I tried to see his face less and less, text and email more and more, and even in my efforts it was hard to avoid the finality of our time, the blazing truth of his end. Quiet demise.

When my guilt devoured me and picked up the phone, I never met his face, always tucked away behind a KN95, but peered into the pixels of his room. Just like our college calls five years ago, he wore his “Boston University Dad” shirt I had gifted him my freshman year, persisting to signal normalcy. As if to say It’s fine, nothing’s changing while his body drowned in the once-fitted crimson fabric. The hospice nurse bobbed in and out of the frame like a cyan finch, her small body busy making food, setting up his bed. Kelly’s her name, and she’s sweet, but I can’t help but hate her, how she takes my place and does a daughter’s job.

Chest pains she told me the night he died. I was here when his towering body burned like a redwood on the living room floor in front of our framed family photos of European vacations and high school graduations, our browning sofa, our old yellow dog pouting in the corner. It was the virus, you know, she said. And I did. That was his trivial end at sixty-four.

Everyday since Kelly’s call I clean the apartment and lie on my couch where I consume every streaming platform I can. The non-perishables huddle in the black of the cupboard and petals from sympathy flowers brown onto the counter. My neighbor, Stella, is forty five and Greek, so she brings me food everyday; the doorbell to my apartment rings at twelve and in walks baklava, avgolemono, salad, frittata. Every time she thinks to coddle me, like I’m incapable and thirteen. The sensible part of her knows to leave me alone, figures my mind will return in the next week. It’s wandered into the scorched wood, and I feel it engulfed. I tell her to put the containers in the fridge where they’ve stockpiled. Her head peeps out through the door and she scrutinizes.

This pastisio is from last week, completely untouched. She’s beginning to catch onto me, sees it purpling under my eyes, the way my skin sticks to me, vacuumed to my bones. There is no hunger left inside me. My remorse rumbles and howls in my cavernous stomach. The way I abandon what needs me.

Stella moves towards the couch and sits, distanced. Not because she must, but because she fears the definity of my hollowing.

When? She wants to know.

Heat will be the last embrace given to his body. I won’t see his face when he is delivered to me in a small urn. My hands will cradle him. I imagine that, in Napa, I will scatter him to feed the starved earth. He will give himself slowly to the soil day by day. Someday the grass will green and the fast will stop.

I turn to her, Then.