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Kelly Hebrank Honorable Mention story in the 2005 Nick Adams Short Story Contest |
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Return to: ... Nick Adams Contest ... Winning stories and authors ... ACM home page Note: This story is reprinted with permission. Copying this story without the express, written permission of the author is prohibited. |
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My father is losing pieces of himself, my mother tells me, and no one can predict what will fall out next. Or how much more he has left to discard before he becomes just a ragged remnant of someone we once knew. For several years now, things have been trickling away from him, but at this point he's down to the bare essentials. Even the basics are getting to be beyond my father. Just a few days ago, she tells me over the phone, he lost most of his innards. She held the clean sheets beneath his belly as he lay face down on his bed. "I was crying," my mother said. "I didn't want him to hear." I imagined the slick v's down her cheeks. My father's new diapers were made from their wedding sheets. In a matter of days, my father will be leaving the house he built, carted off to a nursing home in Franklin. The name they've given to his condition sounds to me like a squash beetle inside a rotted acorn. Something red and crumpled and pulled damp from the ground. Something thick and fetal. I don't want to see him there. I don't want to be there at all. It's been six years since I've seen the house I grew up in, and in just a week my father will leave his little home on the mountain for good. Some families ship their elders off to Florida to die. The Franklin home forty minutes away is the best we can afford. This is how it happens. I am in bed, on my back, counting the cars going by my window, just before the phone rings. Very early in the morning in Chapel Hill, the rhythm of traffic is a slow lull, a few cars at a time, sporadic. Towards six-thirty, though, the morning rush starts to swell; picking out the sounds of individual cars becomes no small feat. I have been trying to move out of the city since the day I got here. I have been trying to get rid of Paul for almost as long, but there he is beside me, arms flung all the way across the bed, so that's that. This particular morning, like most mornings, I try to pinpoint the moment when the room changes from black and white to color, knowing it simply isn't possible. When the phone rings, though, the faux-wood paneling is dark, and Paul's arms still a pale blue monochrome. She always calls early, my mother. A shared habit of ours. "Honey, I didn't wake you up, did I?" Beside me, Paul mutters darkly at the sudden jangle, but does not stir. "No, Mom. What's going on?" Idly I dangle the phone cord over Paul's face, stretching it taut so that his nose warps upwards. He grumbles and paws at the white slinky-cord with one hand. Still asleep, he rolls over and digs himself face-down in the pillow. "We're moving, Honey," my mother says. "Out?" "Not exactly. Your father's gotten to be too much. We can't keep him up here any more, Honey. Aunt Sissy and I are taking him in to Franklin." There is a brief pause over the line. "It won't be for very long." "He's not that old," I say. "Are you positive?" "He doesn't remember hardly anything. He doesn't know Sissy, and he needs someone watching him constantly now. A few days ago, in that warm spell? He got up and went for a jog. The sheriff found him a few miles down the road." I can just see my mother in the kitchen, phone to her ear. "We could really use your help, Honey. And it would mean so much to him." I try to picture him. My father standing on the porch with one hand on the railing. I imagine him smiling as I approach, then dismiss it as fantasy. My father was always around, but rarely accessible. He loved to place loose change, quarters usually, inside the hood of his old Datsun. His little presents for me. When I went to pick the coins out he would lean on the horn. It was the most surefire way to get him laughing, and when he laughed, it made me laugh too, hands on ringing ears and hopping foot to foot. By then my brother had already left for the army. My sister never played. "Has anyone told Ryan?" I ask my mother. Beside me, Paul is moving; I picture bits of my conversation dropping into his head like rocks in a dark pool. Strange words clunking around in synapse, making shapes, colors, slow comprehension. He rubs his eyes on the pillow. "I left a message. He's on an extended leave?" She says this as though unclear on the details. My older brother is entering his twentieth year as an officer. He's been stationed in Italy for as long as I've lived in the city. "It's not like it would make any difference, if he knew. I was just thinking -- " I don't know what I was thinking. "A week, mom. That's what you want?" I don't see how my presence would make much of a difference, and getting the time off work could be difficult. Really, I don't have the time. "Just until we get him settled." I look at Paul, who is now looking back at me, his face blank and open. I nod once into the phone, then again. "One week," I say. The rising light has turned the bedroom into full color. I missed it again.
Home is not a house so much as a region. Crossing through Old Fort the mountains rise up slow before me; the blacktop ripples and twists up the pass, clinging tight to the hills. Here, valleys hold you against the earth, like a cradle. I was raised on the cusp of Wayah Bald, which hasn't been bald since William Bartram came through two hundred years ago. No two ridges look the same, and yet, even still a full hour away, the shift in landscape marks my progress back, rubbing away the traces of my life outside of the Blue Ridge as I drive. On the far side of Old Fort a spitting rain sets in, clouds that obscure the low green peaks, drifting across the mountains like spots on a camera lens. Sylva is a small town, tucked into the mountains. The billboards on the outskirts cheerily read, "Abortion is Sin!" Riverview Baptist. The Wal-Mart. Waffle House. An empty aluminum plant, an empty paper mill. The speed limit is fifteen within the city. The rain has come and gone in a quick fit. The driveway up to my house is rutted and slick with rain, the tires on my old Camry kicking up red clay in wet globules. My mother is standing on the porch, under the trellis she put up when they moved in, December 1965. At the time she was pregnant with my brother. I remember a black and white photograph on the mantle: my parents standing under the trellis, which then was laced in ivy and honeysuckle. The frame was engraved, 'Arthur and Ruth Whitworth.' She was wearing white, and bulged out. He was tall and staring mildly at the camera, large hands cupped over her shoulders. Kudzu swept in and smothered that honeysuckle before I was even born. As I get out of the car, rainwater drips down from the glossy green leaves, making rows of tiny circular puddles on the ground below. My mother wears a large and floppy hat. "Honey, you made it," she says, hugging me too tight, even before I get all the way up the porch steps. Her fingers are thinning into claws. I notice my Aunt Sissy though the kitchen window. She catches my eye and wiggles her fingers, puts them down quickly. It must be strange for her, I think, to watch her little brother fading away. I had never known her well as a child, and now her presence in my kitchen strikes me as foreign, mildly intrusive. The house creaks more than I remembered. When I step through the doorway I can feel the floorboards give, gently, and push up against my feet as I lift them. Maybe this is just my imagination. Maybe it's just that I am no longer the featherlight child that skimmed these wooden beams in wool socks. I have a scar on my wrist from slamming into the woodstove one Christmas morning. From the door I can smell cinder across the long, low living room, and make out the heavy, potbellied presence of the woodstove in the far corner. Year round this house smelled of ashes, and cedar, and that high, brittle, inexplicable scent particular to it alone. Little has changed. My mother has been cleaning, and I know it's because of my homecoming. She is jumpy, shifting her bare feet back and forth across the floor, hands slipping into her pockets, then back out again. From my father's little study I can hear his heavy wheezing. I push my shoulderblades together, then apart, and wonder how I might avoid going in there. "Same old house," I say. The words don't sound like mine. "Same old." She grasps my forearm. "He's in the study." |
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Note: This story is reprinted with permission. Copying this story without the express, written permission of the author is prohibited. |
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