I’m getting out of here tomorrow my father tells me, two years after he was admitted.
A nurse comes in and pulls the curtain which separates us from his roommate who never speaks. We are in the nursing home next to where they once lived, just past the graveyard; one of those old New England cemeteries with wafer-thin headstones.
We can move from here to there my mother once joked, looking over at the building as we sat on their gleaming white porch, and from there, right into our graves.
He stopped driving the school bus when they found out about his medication. They sold their house with the porch and moved to a complex on a busy road. Within a year he was found unconscious on the side of that road after having wandered off.
I kiss his forehead, and tell him I’ll be back in the morning before I drive to New York—just to visit though, Texas is my new home now. When did you move there? he asks. Five years ago.
My parents retired to Cape Cod 20 years earlier, a permanent vacation to outdo all those Augusts we had spent in Eastham. Within a year, his diagnoses started rolling in like the waves on Nauset Beach: diabetes, hydrocephalus, cancer, dementia. Retirement was a slow slide into defeat. Money became intertwined with mortality.
You’re only as happy as your saddest child. I was still in my twenties when my dad said this. New York was hard and lonely and I could hear traffic coming off the bridge at all hours of the night. Still, I stayed.
When I was little, we used to count the cars of freight trains going to Port Jervis on the track near our house in New Jersey. Whenever I hear a train horn I think of you I tell him before leaving the nursing home. You’ll always think of me since there’s always a train coming. His eyes are clear and full of untampered love.
It’s hard getting to sleep my first night back in Texas. I’m picturing that house in New Jersey for some reason, how the sun would break on the branches all around it. They destroyed our home, you know he tells me the next time we speak. I ask him how he can be sure. I’m standing on the rubble right now.
Barbara Purcell is an Austin-based arts and culture writer with work appearing in Texas Monthly, The Austin Chronicle, Brooklyn Rail, and elsewhere.