Paula DeBoard - Here We Lie

“What do you need? More medicine?” That wasn’t the exact word for it, since nothing could make him better. Palliative care, the nurses had explained, another new word for our horrible vocabulary.

“Megan...” There was a sheen of sweat on his forehead, brought on by the effort of speaking.

One of Dad’s pillows had fallen into the crack between the mattress and the plastic headboard, and I lifted his head to adjust the bedding. “Tell me what you need. Are you hot? Or cold? I could bring in another blanket.”

His breath came sour against my ear, reeking of rot and medicine and the trickle of chicken broth he’d allowed through his lips. “Do it with the pillow,” he breathed. “Please, Megan.”

The pillow was in my hands, slippery in its hypoallergenic case that was changed daily in our constant rotation of linens. It would be easy to do—fast, almost painless. “No,” I protested, stopping my thoughts. “Dad, come on.”

“Please,” he whispered. “I can’t—You have to—”

Tears dribbled down my cheeks, and I wiped them away with the sleeve of my sweatshirt. “Don’t ask me that.”

His hand was on mine, the skin papery thin, a hand I didn’t recognize anymore. He was crying, too, his eyes strangely dry, too dehydrated for tears. “Megan...please.”

“I can’t,” I sobbed. But it was all just too much—for him, for Mom, for me. The part of me that could still reason was working through it like a complicated question on an exam. What was the right thing to do, the moral thing? To let him suffer, to let all of us suffer? It was cancer that was immoral; it was this horrible life, this horrible room, this horrible disease that was immoral. The pillow was heavy in my hands, and I considered its weight, its power to change our lives.

“Do it,” Dad said. A tear fell from my cheek and landed on his, sliding in a glistening trail to his neck. We held each other’s eyes until I placed the pillow ever so gently, over his face.

* * *

Afterward, I lifted the entire terrarium off its stand and lugged it through the house, down the back porch steps and across our overgrown yard to the invisible line where our property ended and the neighbor’s began. The snow was thawing and patchy brown grass peeked through, a reminder that spring was around the corner. I had to tip the terrarium on its side, and even then, Zeke was slow to grasp what was happening. “Go, go,” I urged, nudging my foot against the glass. “This is your chance.”

Snot dripped into my mouth, and I smeared it away. Finally, Zeke slithered out, hesitating as if he were waiting for me to reconsider. Then he inched forward and in another minute, he was gone.

Mom’s car came around the corner, tires squealing, the gravel in the driveway scattering. For a long moment she stared at me through her dirty windshield. I hadn’t been able to make sense on the phone. When I’d opened my mouth, all that came out was a wail.

Inside, I’d draped one of the clean blankets from our laundry rotation over Dad, and beneath it he seemed smaller than he’d been that morning, as if he were already decomposing, the flesh going, only the essential bones of his skeleton holding him together. Without him, no one in the world knew the truth of what I’d done.

* * *

A few of my high school friends came to the funeral, and afterward they stood around our kitchen with plastic cups full of red punch. Kurt was there, solemn in a pair of khaki pants and a new shirt straight from its package, boxy with creases. The hospital bed had been removed, and our house seemed larger now, smelling sharply of the Lysol that had been used to chase away the lingering odor of a slow death. My friend Becky Babcock cried on my shoulder for a full ten minutes, and when she was done, she wiped her nose and asked, “Maybe you’ll come to KSU this fall?”

“Maybe,” I said.

After our family members had cried their tears and hugged their hugs and scattered back to the four corners of the state, I met Kurt one last time out by the river, and he asked me to marry him. He had a ring and everything—a tiny diamond, a thin gold band. For all I knew, he’d had it for months and was just waiting for my dad to die. When I didn’t answer right away, he laid out his argument—he’d be finishing his auto tech program in another year, and that gave us time to figure out where we would live. I didn’t say anything.

“It doesn’t need to be a big wedding,” he continued, a desperate note creeping into his voice. “Or it could be big, whatever you want.”

I stared at him, wondering how he didn’t see that there was no possibility of me marrying him, that now that my dad was gone, I didn’t need to be tied here anymore. Until that moment, it hadn’t occurred to me that Kurt wasn’t just biding his time, that I wasn’t a substitute for something or someone else.

When I finally told him no—just that single word, that lone syllable—he’d snapped the velvet case shut, and a moment later he’d slammed the door of his pickup and gunned the engine, spinning an arc of mud into the air.

* * *

A week later, Mom told me about Dad’s life insurance policy—two hundred thousand dollars, which he’d wanted us to split down the middle. The paperwork had been neatly arranged in a fat manila folder, pages clipped together, notarized along with Dad’s careful signature: Mitchell E. Mazeros.

I looked at the date beside his name—January 7, 1998—and met Mom’s eyes. He’d taken out the policy, and then a month later, he’d visited the doctor about the lingering pain in his chest, his shortness of breath.

“He must have known a long time ago,” Mom said with a sad shrug. “Or at least he suspected. He never told me about this—” a gesture indicating the money that would change everything “—until a few months ago. He asked me not to tell you until he was gone.”

My throat was tight. All that time when Dad had been in his recliner growing weaker and weaker, he had figured out a way to take care of us. He’d known, when he asked me to end it for him, that this gift was waiting.

Mom rocked back in her chair, looking at me. “That’s a lot of money, Megan. It’s enough for me to pay off the house. It’s enough for you to go away to college—any college, wherever you want to go. Doesn’t have to be in Kansas.”

“But you would be...”

“I’m staying here, in Woodstock.”

“I can’t leave you,” I said. “At least, I could come home on weekends...”

She lit a cigarette, not meeting my eyes. It was a habit she’d put on hold after Dad’s diagnosis, but one she’d picked up again with grim purpose, lighting the next one off the first. I thought about the man she’d been referencing from time to time—Gerry, her boss at the tax office. Gerry who was not dead, was not dying, was very much alive. A puff of smoke trickled out the side of her mouth. “Listen.” She patted the back of my hand. “I’ll take care of myself. But you’re going to have to take care of yourself, too.”

* * *

That night, I dug in the back of my desk drawer for the admissions brochures I’d collected before Dad’s diagnosis, their finishes bright and glossy, offering rose-colored glimpses of college life. Of course, I’d been planning to attend KSU—it was close and convenient, it was where all my friends were going, and between in-state tuition and scholarships, it was affordable, too.

But now, I could go anywhere.

I sorted the brochures into piles—Harvard and Yale and Princeton, places that were out of my reach, thanks to the grades I’d pulled after Dad’s diagnosis; Bates and Brown and Bowdoin, schools that seemed too snooty now that I was truly considering them; the Southern California schools that featured tank-top clad students on beaches, where I would be forced to put my pale and flabby body on display; schools that were in big cities, where I might feel like a Midwestern hick; schools that were quirky and artsy, where I would stand out for not being quirky or artsy enough; schools that boasted NCAA rankings, schools that looked too institutional.