by James Hartman
I stood at the window, still watching those bare limbs on that birch tree along the slope of bright snow in the dark because I wanted to believe I saw one flutter a little red.
“Oh, Jonathan,” my father called. “It’s there, right? One has finally come?!”
Cardinals were my father’s favorite animal. When they were younger he and his brother used to set bird feeders throughout their backyard, strategically placed according to what they had learned from their Audubon book. My father always talked about them. He always believed they meant the return of something.
I rubbed my palms down my jeans. Gradually, I turned. I breathed. Still I had no idea what to say, too terrified of either option. Before his diagnosis, when his ears were getting cold, he began wearing big brown earmuffs, and he had pulled one off to better hear me but now he couldn’t get it back on. “Oh God,” he said, and I rushed over and secured the earmuff gently over his ear. “Is that better, Dad?”
He closed his eyes. “Yes, thank you.” Cautiously, he sat back. He let out a tiny breath.
I sat back in the recliner next to him. I felt awful. I was knotted everywhere, scrunched tighter and tighter, like I was shrinking. It could last for several minutes, his forgetfulness, or he could forget something altogether, as if it had never fired in his brain at all. I did not want to encourage his forgetfulness, but I did not want to lie to him, either. I had lied to my father enough. As far as he knew, Britney was back in Michigan in our house on Silver Lake, and I was just visiting, I was going back to my wife and my marriage and my life at the end of the week, I certainly was not living here with him in York, Pennsylvania, and the stuff I had managed to jam into my car was certainly not jammed now into my bedroom closet.
*
“Oh, Jonathan,” my father said. He shoved his head into his hands and swung it back and forth. “I can’t focus. I can’t think. I can’t do anything. I can’t I can’t I can’t.”
I sat there, getting smaller and smaller.
Cautiously, he lifted his head. “Maybe there’ll be something on the news,” and he reached for the remote on my arm rest but I pulled the remote quickly into my lap.
“Dad, it’ll upset us. Remember?”
His eyes locked on me, dark, almost savage. He appeared as if he might argue, but I knew, and so did he, that there was no energy. That reach exhausted him, and it took him several heaves to steady his breath. Slowly, he leaned back. He turned his eyes up to the television above the crackling fireplace. Sophie and Blanche were arguing over the quality of some man Blanche had gone out with. The audience laughter soared.
I placed the remote beside my thigh. I breathed. I kept breathing as I tried not to see it, hanging there in my peripheral vision all those bright stark empty limbs on that birch tree. He longed to see one, just one cardinal, because he truly believed it meant the return of something. When my father was told his diagnosis, he received it with unaccustomed calm. No minute expression of fear, as if he had never once conceived of it, even though his parents and his brother died from it. It was like his fear had translated to something so far away as to never be a threat. Scattered debris from an airplane crash in Sudan. Mile-wide swarms of locusts in Tunisia. Torrential mudslides in Haiti. A truck of explosives driven by an Islamic terrorist into a packed wedding pavilion in California, the terrorist gunned down by wedding guests with weapon permits.
*
I worried more and more about the harm my father’s refusal to accept his diagnosis would cause. And still I had no idea what I could do. Now my father was staring at me, and it was a stare I had never seen. The hard glare of his eyes wrestled his face into something red, menacing, a completely different being, a rapid formulation of hostile intent.His dementia changed him, but not like this. He forgot things, simple mundane everyday habitual things. He cried spontaneously. He said things he did not understand, mash-ups of random vowels and syllables. He threw sudden fits triggered by nothing. He became something else, but he did not look like something else.
“Jonathan,” my father said, his voice scraped out like he had been screaming. “I have to see. I have to find out. I have to bear witness. Do you understand? Everything happening out there, it’s all so horrific and wrong, all those poor people who don’t deserve all that trauma and pain. All those innocent lives lost. All I hear from everyone is how they can’t stand to watch the news, because they can’t handle seeing it all. But Jonathan,” my father said, and his face began to soften. His skin released a fragile glow. “I don’t want all those lives to go unseen, to be ignored. All those lives cannot be forgotten.” He looked at me, and I saw my father as he had always been: fully present and shining with the total giving of himself, like you were always the only person who had ever mattered. “Don’t you understand?” he said.
I looked at my father. I really looked. And then I picked up the remote from beside my thigh, and I handed it to him.
He squeezed his thin fingers around the remote and pointed it at the television. He switched off The Golden Girls and flipped back and forth, the rest of the night, among five different news channels. Now and then he would murmur under his breath, but he did not look at me once, and I never had to tell him what really wasn’t outside.
James Hartman’s fiction appears in December, Raleigh Review, Litro, Mount Hope, New World Writing Quarterly, South 85 Journal, and elsewhere. His fiction has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and The Best Small Fictions, and was a finalist in New Millennium’s 54th Annual Short Story Award. His scholarly work is featured in The Hemingway Review. He holds a Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing from Eastern Kentucky University, and lives in Pennsylvania.
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