Edge

Mom's in the hospital, recovering from a knee replacement surgery on Tuesday. It's the first surgery she's ever had in her life, and so nobody knew that oxycontin makes her vomit. She's been vomiting for 48 hours, and hasn't eaten anything since Monday. When I left today they were pouring her own blood back into her--she'd donated ahead of time--and giving her Tylenol. "She's OK," the nurse tells me when I insist that Tylenol isn't enough--that I see vertical pain lines across Mom's eyebrows. "She's not OK," I tell her. "What other meds can we try? Have you tried percocet? She's had percocet before with no bad reaction." And I get the look some nurses give meddling families: that "I've heard it all before" eye roll that they execute without once actually rolling the eyes: the signal that they've lost their compassionate edge--their sense of urgency. It's a plush place--carpets and wood floors and a Steinway player piano in the lobby. But I prefer the grittier teaching hospital near home, and its imported nurses from India.

Yesterday Liam and I were there all day; she was in really bad shape. Dad wandered in around 3, but he's nearly deaf--and won't wear a hearing aid--so I didn't trust that he'd understand what the nurses and doctors said, and he, too, is missing some of the urgency and anticipation I want him to have for her. So I stayed. At 4 he grumbles at me, "Look, I'm here now so you can go. If you're staying, I'm leaving."

"I don't want to leave until I feel sure she's OK for the night," I said quietly, not wanting a quarrel over her bed, and not really believing he's in a snit because I'm there. He sighed and frowned, but stopped. Today he came in after we'd been there a while, and she'd just finished physical therapy and was in a lot of pain. Eyes closed tight, breathing through her mouth. "She's in a lot of pain," I tell him, and put my finger to my mouth--the "shhh" signal.

But he stands beside her and smiles down and ruffles her hair, and tells her about his haircut and that crazy Korean who slaughtered all those kids, and what he ate for breakfast and packed for lunch (maybe he didn't hear me tell him that she's throwing up every hour at this point), and what his glucose reading was this morning, etc.

Anybody else would walk in and see him standing there with his cane talking to his semi-conscious wife--both of them white-headed, both of them with replacement joints installed recently--and it might paint a different picture. But I see him though a screen of anger. I know too much--I've been too close: I see what he costs my mother, and how he mistreats my kids--how he sits like a cat and stares at them, waiting for the moment when he can holler at them. "Why does Poppop hate me?" his first grandchild asks me, and I don't know what to say because in fact he does hate her. Though I deny it to her. And I--trained all these decades to walk on eggshells, to fear his thundering roars, to bury and deny as a matter of course--I grew up feeling the same way: that he hated me. And now I've let him do that to my daughter? I've let that happen?

I'm finished with him. It happened this week. I felt a quiet click.