Elizabeth Tallent - Mendocino Fire

12

About two in the morning her mother comes out to the couch and calls her name and she wakes and stands up. The two of them hold each other briefly. She says, “How are you, Mom?” Her mother says, “Just fine.” Then, “I’m taking a break. Do you want to go in?” “Is it all right?” “Of course it’s all right.” How does her mother understand what happened when she appeared in the guest-room doorway? She would like to ask, to have her terrible interpretation negated by her mother’s superior understanding of her father. From the kitchen table where he has been drinking a cup of coffee, her brother says matter-of-factly, “Go on in. You came all this way.” Then, hearing the grudgingness of that, he says with exhausted gentleness, “I know it was bad before. But I know he would want you to try again.” In the guest bedroom she is alone with her unconscious father, as slight, under the sheet, as he must have been as a skinny boy in Tennessee. Is she wrong to want to be here? His last exertion on earth was the thrashing meant to drive her away. What would a person who understands love do, if he were her? His lips are parted, his breathing an irregularly timed ruckus. Something should have been done to ease it, it shouldn’t have been let get so arduous, should it, his breathing? Before now she has had no idea of the strenuousness of the act of dying. His lungs will fill, the hospice worker explained when she asked what the actual cause of his death would be. “He will drown.” But she hadn’t understood. Drowning was rivers. It was the sea. Not the body on its own. Not within . Not welling up from inside . The untouched order she associates with the guest room is intact around this central disturbance, the grappling, stopping and starting hazard of his breathing. There is no more smell of torment in the room than if a freshly bathed child rested in this bed, and like that child’s his body is unadorned, neither tubes running into his nose, nor any intravenous connection, and again, all over again, but more forcefully, as if she had not fully grasped it before, it comes to her that what she was told is true, and he really has sailed beyond help. Apart from the central hollow formed around the heaviness of his immobile head, the pillowcase is crisply devoid of creases, his only covering a sheet pulled evenly across his upper chest, with, under the sheet, his arms arranged parallel to his distinctly outlined torso, no hand she can reach for with her own, and she is relieved not to be responsible for the coldness, the affront to his better self, to consciousness that may still exist as a strayly glimmering, not yet snuffed-out ghost in the largely abandoned comb within his skull, of not taking his hand if it had been lying out in the open, and below the arc of his rib cage a well, a famished sunkenness, his belly gone, his hips dwindled to a stark cradle, the close lie of the sheet outlining the heaped mess of his genitalia, and the torque of the parallel femurs in the shrunken thighs, and the perched eggs of the kneecaps, and the feet tenting the sheet in peaks. She searches for proof he is hers. The ear. The lobe ample, the rim a smoothly continuous curve, the cloistered yellowy, flushed-pink branching and whorls lustrous, the aperture a specific dab of shadow that absorbed her first words. His browbone protests his gauntness with the familiar challenging thrust. Laid across the wan skin, his eyebrows are meticulously themselves. The stitchery of the lashes of his closed eyes is dearly known. But this has never been possible before: she can see how he is made. His temple is a hollow whose bottom shivers across with an arterial quaking. The puzzlework where mandible intersects skull is exposed. Under the jut of the cleanshaven jaw — the throat, too, shaved fastidiously close — the central column obtrudes, interrupted by the cobble of the adam’s apple, braced at its base by a wishbone of tendons straining against the skin. His inhalation snores harshly and hits bottom with an echoing phlegmy gargle, the contact of breath and destroyed tissue as liquid as well water echoing to a dropped stone, followed by the hoarse slow shallow exhalation, amplified by his slack throat almost to a roar. She bends close and says, “I’m here. I’m right with you, Daddy.” After a long lapse he takes another breath, takes , that’s the word, it’s never been truer, the breath grabbed from the air of the world he is forsaking, dragged in through parched lips incised with minute cuts, sucked down to the lungs drowning in the still-wide chest. Then, nothing. Can you die on an in-breath? She leans close to the face silence has seized, to the parted lips. She holds her breath with him, but he outlasts her.

ELIZABETH TALLENTis the author of the story collections Honey, In Constant Flight , and Time with Children , and the novel Museum Pieces . Since 1994 she has taught in the Creative Writing program at Stanford University. She lives on the Mendocino coast of California.

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Cover design by Gregg Kulick

Cover photograph © Feargus Cooney / Getty Images

Grateful acknowledgment is made to the editors of the publications where the following stories appeared:

“The Wrong Son” appeared in The Threepenny Review , Summer 2009.

“Tabriz” appeared in The Threepenny Review , Summer 2007, and in The Pushcart Prize: Best of the Small Presses (2008).

“Mystery Caller” appeared in The Threepenny Review , Fall 2001.

“Eros 101” appeared in Tin House , Summer 2004, and in Best of Tin House: Stories (2006).

A different version of “Nobody You Know” appeared in Boulevard , 2001, as “Woman Weighing Pearls.”

“The Wilderness” appeared in The Threepenny Review , Spring 2012, and in The Best American Short Stories 2013 .

“Never Come Back” appeared in The Threepenny Review , Spring 2010, and in The PEN/O. Henry Prize Stories 2011 .

“Mendocino Fire” appeared in ZYZZYVA , July 2014.

“Narrator” appeared in The Threepenny Review , Winter 2015.