James Hynes - Next

From his car, Kevin tramped through the drifts in his Converse All-Stars and thin denim jacket. He stamped the snow off his sneakers on the porch and then hauled the storm door aside and pushed open the kitchen door without knocking. The overhead light cast a superfluous yellow glow over everything in the kitchen, all of which was already yellowed with age: the ancient Frigidaire, the Formica-topped table, the patterned linoleum that crackled under foot. The only remotely new thing in the kitchen was a yellowed Mr. Coffee on the yellowed counter, where Kevin’s Aunt Mary, his father’s sister, was fortifying herself with a huge cup for the night’s vigil. She lifted her head at the scrape of his sodden feet on the mat and by way of greeting said, “Take off your shoes.” And then, turning away, “Where’s your mother?”

“She isn’t here?”

“Nope,” said Aunt Mary, evoking with a monosyllable a lifetime of tension between the Quinn and Padalecki families. “Kathleen’s here,” she added, and Kevin found his sister asleep under a garishly orange afghan on the swaybacked sofa across the living room from Grampa’s old black-and-white Motorola. The TV and the little ceramic Christmas tree on top of it provided the only light in the room. The tiny red and white bulbs on the tree cast very little light, while on the screen Alistair Sim was trembling his way silently through A Christmas Carol, the grainy image hauled in through the storm from Channel 10 in Jackson by Grampa’s skeletal rooftop aerial. Kathleen wasn’t the only one not watching the redemption of Scrooge: his cousin Kyle in jeans and a huge cable-knit sweater sprawled snoring in Grampa’s recliner, presenting in the flickering TV light a clear view of his basketball gut, the threadbare soles of his white socks, and his cavernous nostrils. One of Kyle’s kids, whose names Kevin could never keep straight, curled on the ancient carpet before the TV with his or her blond head on an embroidered throw pillow. Standing in his wet socks under the oppressive woodwork archway between Grampa’s dining room and living room, Kevin sensed that the house was murmurous with comatose Quinns; just below the threshold of hearing he was vaguely aware of snores and sighs and farts fumigating the clammy old farmhouse in the middle of the night. Only he and Aunt Mary were awake at the moment, and she touched him lightly on the arm as she passed, startling him a little.

“Merry Christmas,” she whispered, perhaps to make up for her brusqueness in the kitchen, and she beckoned him to step carefully through the sleepers in the living room to Grampa’s bedroom door, which stood open and which, in fact, was probably impossible to close in the humidity of all that snoring, sighing, and farting. In the doorway she stopped Kevin with another touch and tiptoed to the bed, bending over the figure on the right side of the mattress. Kevin’s grandmother had been dead for nine years, so Grampa could’ve lain in the middle of the mattress if he wanted to, but even at the end he kept to the side of the marital bed he’d occupied for fifty years. Or perhaps it was just easier for his daughters to tend him there. A lamp on the bedside table cast a nimbus of yellow light around a bent straw in a half-empty glass of water, a little brown bottle of morphine with an eye dropper in it, and a box of baby wipes. The bed’s usual blankets and bedspread were neatly folded on a chair, and its bottom sheet had been replaced with a fitted, rubberized sheet, a reminder along with the baby wipes that colon cancer was not a tidy way to die. Kevin had expected at least an IV drip, but the old man lay untethered under an incongruously new blanket, baby blue. His head was centered on a single pillow, his hands, as pale as exposed roots, curled on his chest, and his feet, in red woolen socks, sticking out beyond the end of the blanket. From the doorway, Kevin could not see or hear his grandfather breathe. In fact Grampa looked like he was already dead, and Kevin realized that his own heart was pounding, perhaps because he was seeing something that had been denied to him the night his father died. On that summer night in Royal Oak, still floating from the weed he’d smoked an hour before, he’d been shuffled into his own bedroom by his mother’s awkward priest while his father’s body had been bagged and gurneyed and wheeled down the hall. The priest hadn’t even let Kevin peek through his curtains to watch the gurney being lifted into the ambulance, and the next and last time he saw his father he was looking surprisingly youthful in the coffin at the funeral home. But now Kevin was standing at the threshold of the inner sanctum, where the thing itself was taking place, where his grandfather’s breaths and heartbeats were counting down to nothing, where each exhalation measured an increasingly large fraction of what remained of his life. Above the bed, at the margin of the dim lamplight, a pointillist blot of green mildew had been spreading slowly across the bedroom ceiling for years, and it looked to Kevin now like the stain of his grandfather’s last, diseased breaths.

“Can you hear me, Dad?” Aunt Mary said, taking one of the old man’s hands in both of hers.

Kevin heard no reply, but Aunt Mary nodded for Kevin to come to the bed, and he jerked into the room as if someone had pushed him. Aunt Mary slipped the old man’s limp, waxy hand into Kevin’s and stepped away. What do I say? Kevin almost asked her, but it wouldn’t have mattered, because his throat tightened and his eyes watered and the best he could do was utter a tremulous “Hello?” Grampa Quinn’s eyelids fluttered open, and his eyes, faded to a milky blue, fixed on Kevin. His face was as pale as his hands, and his lips were papery and blue. His tongue moved weakly inside his mouth, as if he couldn’t even muster the energy to dampen his lips. Then, for an instant, his gaze brightened and his cold hand moved in Kevin’s, and he managed to whisper, faintly but distinctly, “Frank?”

Kevin couldn’t speak. He looked helplessly at his aunt, who slipped in beside him and took the old man’s hand and said, “No, Dad, it’s Kevin. Frank’s son. Your grandson,” and Kevin watched the light in his grandfather’s eyes fade as quickly as a bright stone dropped into dark water. Then his aunt caught Kevin gently by the arm and escorted him to the door, and he left the bedroom feeling worse than he had when he’d come in, guilty that he wasn’t the one his grandfather wanted to see at the end, then angry at his father for letting them all down by dying eight years before, then angry at his grandfather for not hiding his disappointment, then angry at himself for being angry at his father and his grandfather for things they could not control. Through the contention in his head he was dimly aware of Aunt Mary murmuring to Grampa Quinn, lifting his head to offer him water, dropping morphine between his lips with the eye dropper, and he pulled himself together when she came out of the bedroom and led him tiptoe through the living room and the dining room and up the cold, creaking stairs to the last empty bed in the house, in a unheated, high-ceilinged back bedroom, lined with peeling wallpaper and stacked all around with moldering old boxes of God knows what. With a farm wife’s no-nonsense tenderness she turned him out of his denim jacket and maneuvered him onto a canvas cot, tucking him in like a child with a scratchy old army blanket.

“Don’t take it personal, hon.” She cupped his face with her cold hands. “It’s all running together for him at the end. He don’t know who’s here anymore and who isn’t.”

Kevin was still too choked up to reply, so she just patted him and said, “You try to sleep, and we’ll come fetch you when it’s time.”

But then they didn’t. Aunt Mary, God bless her, had too much on her mind, and no one else knew that he’d arrived. Ever since that night Kevin has lacerated himself for not being present when his grandfather died, for sleeping through it. He could have stayed awake, he could have offered to sit up with his grandfather, but instead he’d let himself be stashed out of sight like one of those mildewed old boxes, so that when Kyle, who was awake at the time, said, “He’s going,” and a dozen Quinns all over the house rose from their beds or sofas or recliners like vampires from their coffins to troop into the bedroom and witness Grandfather Quinn’s last, stertorous breaths, Kevin was fitfully asleep on the stiff old cot upstairs, still humiliated by his grandfather’s undisguised disappointment. For years afterward Kevin was angry at himself, because out of all the nights he’d stayed up for no good reason — to finish a paper in college, to party until dawn, to fuck, to restlessly channel surf because he couldn’t sleep even if he wanted to — this was the one night when he should’ve made the effort to stay awake and he didn’t, and the old man died without his witness. And the worst of it was, he’d known that night, as he let Aunt Mary steer him upstairs and onto the cot, that it was his responsibility and nobody else’s to keep himself awake. In the end his body betrayed him, clouded his consciousness, dragged his eyelids down, lied to him like a seducer by saying, “Just rest your eyes for a minute, you’ll feel better afterward,” so that when Aunt Mary finally remembered and shook him awake in the leaden dawn of Christmas morning, Kevin woke up angry at himself, at her, at the world.