Duty (a short story)

I

The orange pills are chewable. I always start with them. She used to call them sweets. Now she’s in too much pain to talk, to smile even. But she still makes the effort to widen her eyes when I bring them over. I make an effort to grin when I see the muscles in around her brow tighten up. I’ll never know how much it hurts her to do that, and if it’s for my benefit, I wish she wouldn’t.

This jar is the only one dad had no hand in. Pharma and vitamins are entirely different worlds to him. I think Vietnam’s to blame for that one. “Anything that smells like a “hippie” or the “new age” may as well come stamped with the image of a burning child!” I guess that was an anti-war sentiment? My Dad never did think too hard about these things. By the time I got old enough to notice the disconnect there, I didn’t have the heart to tell him which side the hippies were on.

The white pills are the biggest, and she has to take eight of them every morning. Is there anything on this earth that you’d feel comfortable taking eight of? This is the sole part of my day where I’m glad she’s lost her ability to express. I hand over the first glass of water, wince as she wades into her three minutes of asphyxiation. Two and a half down, I head back to the sink for another glass. Bear another wave of choking, check that her drool isn’t vomit. Check that the choking isn’t life ending rather than life prolonging. Third cup, get the final two down. Leave her there defeated and exhausted.

That’s the jar that Dad and I used to lock horns over most. “There’s got to be another way. What’s an extra three months of life worth if every day begins with fifteen minutes of torture?!” The maddening thing is, every time we entered our battleground—usually the kitchen— me in school uniform, he in his Ambulance garb, I always knew he was right. “You were there for the second opinion Nathanial, shit! Or was there something about the sixth, seventh or perhaps the eighth opinion that convinced you Teranocoplomide wasn’t our only option!” He’d always look down at the Wellington hospital patch on his shoulder when he dropped some variation of this line. I had my own chorus to fire back with, “You’re an ambulance driver dad. That doesn’t qualify you medically. You’re a glorified Truckie!” but my heart was never in this comeback.

The black pills. Well. Don’t they speak for themselves? It’s almost like the chem-head who invented them was suffering from a case of Oppenheimer syndrome and wanted to warn people, “I am become death, destroyer of worlds.”—nope I looked that up, apparently O syndrome is a real disease. Nothing to do with guilt. Fritz Harbor syndrome? That’s a deep reference. Probably too deep to land.

The black pills make me hate myself. Let’s leave it at that.

Ma usually makes an effort to put on a brave face for me. Throughout her decline, I’d hear her humming, whenever she knew I was home. Amazing how the maternal instinct to comfort one’s dependents can carry all the way to the end. But perhaps that’s stealing credit from her. This wasn’t instinct. That was just my Mum. Anyway, there is no humming at 2:00 pm when the black pills are due. Her room is dead silent. As if she’s hoping I’ll forget. Hoping this person who’s become the centre of my world for my final years of primary school might just slip my mind.

Ironically, the black pills were the sole scrap of ground that my Dad and I could agree on without conflict. It was an unpleasant job that had to be done. Clearing the dead mice from your garage after they’ve been poisoned, emptying the waste tank of your campervan after a four day festival. The bastard could have carried the load of delivering those pills from time to time though.

You may have noticed I dragged that last section out. The black pill section of all things! That should give you a warning of what’s to come.

The pink triangles. Little chunks of mercy. Like miniature time machines. Even on her worst days, she’d light up at the sight of the small pottle. Lid to base, covered in warning labels. “DO NOT EXCEED PRESCRIBED DOSE!” She gazed at that bold, red print like it was the colouring on a psychedelic frog or a puffer fish. In nature, deadly, but in the right hands? Ecstasy. Life affirming.

Immediately, I would watch the pain leave her body, her eyes would settle, her forehead would relax. But this wasn’t like morphine. Once she’d been gifted her respite, she’d allow one brief moment to thank the heavens, then she’s roll her head my way. “Nathanial, thank you for being here. What news have you got to share with me today?” And just like that, we may as well have been chatting in the front seat of her Prius on the way home from school. Fully conscious, not for a moment wacked out. Not a flicker of what my dad would call “Doped up.” This was my mum, gifted back to me for a small window. Oh my god that window. I never wanted it to end. It let me fantasize for a small corner of every day. Let me pretend the sentences hadn’t already been passed. That perhaps she might be able to fight this.

II

Dear Dad,

I’ve been holding off writing home all semester, letting you take the first step. Silly me.

I guess this is you finally being honest about your feelings for once. So, I suppose I shouldn’t scold the sheep dog for barking. Your silence might be the first clear representation of how much you care you’ve ever shown me!

I’d be lying if I said I don’t resent the hell out of you for stealing my opportunity to vent though.   

I had a revelation the other week. Do you have a minute to hear me out?

You can thank my new dorm mate for this one. Would you believe it took an Acid spiked lemonade-- Sorry LSD for your generation—for me to finally see what was really going on with Ma in those final months?

That’s ten years of thinking it was all my fault.

 That’s goth teen scars.

That’s staring off the edge of more bridges than I want to count. I suppose pills would have been more fitting—family tradition, right? But I can’t even bring myself to take vitamin C tablets these days.

Some type of irony it took another substance for me to see it all then ay?  

For a whole decade, the part of my brain containing this question held its mouth firmly clamped shut. But it’s open now Dad. It’s open fucking wide. Saliva and all!    

What type of father entrusts his eleven-year-old son to issue a medication which makes phyntanyl’s overdose rate look like a negligible statistic?

You clever. Cruel. Manipulative prick.

Maybe this is my Tudor Stewart paper talking, but this is like something out of the old classics. A perfectly Middle-Marchian murder! Allow the incompetent to deliver the morphine, be vague about the dose, “an accident, oh what a terrible accident!” Divert the blame from yourself and even the involuntary murderer.

Me.

And such restraint to keep your foot on the pedal so long after the fact. Bravo.   

It probably wouldn’t have worked if you’d immediately shacked up with a young secretary, taken up cigar smoking, lumped me with the sight of two suitcases in the hallway one school morning?

Shit Dad.

You sure played it well.  

Sticking around. Forcing me to listen to your wails at night, then simultaneously bear your “best efforts” at sheltering me from the pain.

The sickest part of this is how hard you worked to assure me that it wasn’t my fault? Yet, depriving my natural instinct to blame of anywhere else to turn. “It couldn’t possibly be this sympathetic arm on my shoulder. So it must be…”

I nodded every time you said “don’t blame yourself,” but all I heard were the last two words of that sentence.

It sickens me to think about the way you used to assure me on those late night talks. Were you really just talking to yourself all that time or were you just staying in character?   

You know, it would have been so much easier if you’d begun to thrive after her passing. Just ripped off the band aid. Why couldn’t you have given me that much?

If I’d seen a renewed spark of youth, an exhale, a freedom that you’d been waiting years for. Using the life insurance to buy that bike you’ve always wanted, take that trip that was always in the back of your mind, but were barred from by Mum’s sensible voice, “Dwayne, we’ve got a mortgage, don’t be ridiculous.”

That would have at least helped me clock onto things a bit earlier. I guess you’ve likely gathered this by now, but I’m not coming home during the semester break. That place isn’t a home.

Don’t worry. I' won’t press charges, I’m in no place to go through all of that.

I don’t expect you to write back.

Have a good life. I’ll do my best to put mine back together.

Nathaniel.

III

Surreal is an understatement. Seeing you over this side of town—cheeks gaunt, yet belly distended—I expected you to stand out like a whore at a wedding. But seeing you today, anyone might think you’re someone’s Granddad—someone’s sherry and gambling addicted Grandad.

To be frank you look like shit, and I’m getting less joy noticing that than I thought I would.

I’ve gotta admit: It must have been a bitter pill (no pun intended) reaching out to me after all these years.

Paying for my college fees was one thing.

But I never took it as anything real. I took it as the impulse call made a lonely late night. Looking down the neck of a bottle, musing on life in a way that belongs in songs, not letters, not phone-calls, not electrical bank transactions.

If I’d had a way to contact you at that time though, I would have leveraged whatever guilt wave you were riding for all it was worth. I had a speed addiction and six months worth of therapy bills I’d happily write off to my childhood years.

Turning up here though, at the Anderson’s Garden Café? My territory.

It took balls.

I order an open steak sandwich. You get right to the punch:

“ Your desire to up your Mum’s dose was only natural.”

Here we go again.

It’s not your fault.

Not your fault.

Not…Your fault, your fault, your fault.

Shit, to think I was expecting some type of apology! Have you driven all the way out here to finally get your own dig in? Is that what this is? Did my letter really get to you that badly?

I hold my sandwich in two hands. It’s not the type of sandwich you’re meant to pick up with your hands. Yet I let onion and gravy drip down my fingers and stare until you start talking again.

“If one pill bought you thirty minutes with her, then two pills?…” he sighs and stares into his own fingernails. “Your mum was leaving us either way Nathanial, and that only made those lucid moments with her more precious…”

Suddenly it strikes me that I’m the same age he would have been when she died. Here at the table, between a bottle of water and an unlit candle, it hits me. It messes with me a little bit. I put down the steak sandwich and think about Lexi.

How would I cope if she was given a hard deadline on life? Five months to live.

I sure wouldn’t let my pre-teen son think he murdered her! I sure wouldn’t cut that five months down to three!

“It’s fine Dad.” I say with a little more shortness than I mean to. “It was a hard time, but it’s over now.”

A flicker in his eye spikes my senses. We’re getting close to his agenda. Whatever reason he had for calling me after all these decades, it’s on its way down the barrel.

“Is it over?” he asks hopefully, looking down as he chooses his words. “I know before you went to college, you had a hard time of it. But after that. Did things pick up? Did things get better for you?”

Suddenly I see the little man he’s become. Despite all the years of resentment, I guess some part of me blocked out that one quality that was undeniably there. A poise, a confidence. But that quality is gone now. He’s lost the spark in his eye that used to draw people to him. Here at Anderson’s Garden café with a flat lemonade and a soggy cardboard straw, he’s just a desperate pensioner hoping to undo the past.

I stand up, “Yea, things got better. Once I realised it was all you, not me. Things improved a lot.”  I look down at my untouched Sandwich. “You can have that if you want.”

It’s sick. But I can see even this peps you up slightly. This is all you wanted.

You conned me into murdering my own mother. You’re seemingly unphased by the murder element. But you couldn’t live with the con element. Because in your eyes, “that part is a question of character.” If that part, impacted my life negatively, then it reflects badly on you. What a fucking Narcissist.

I think I even catch you whisper the word “good,” though this might be my imagination. Your eyes glint as if I’ve just shared good news though. How sad does your life need to be, for a line like that to make you happy?

For a moment, I think about clarifying. That was not meant to be a hopeful message, but in the end I turn around. I say hi to the Cranstons who are having brunch near the doorway and brush through the ivy creeper on my exit

We’ll never talk again.

IV

Dear Dad,

This is just like you. Why wait till now to do this? Why couldn’t you have died right after she did? or right after I wrote my last letter?

Either version would have let me sleep at night.

Anything but this.  

 I haven’t been able to get our meeting at Anderson’s Garden Café out of my head ever since it happened.

The way you seemed to have no plan. Yet seemed to be expecting something very specific out of me. I’m still not sure whether you got what you wanted there.

I was too angry, too unprepared to attribute anything but selfish reasons.

The choice to wait until I was the same age as you had been when Mum passed won’t stop circling the contents of my skull though…that detail has been haunting me like an old hag at the foot of my bed.

I keep trying to come up with ways I would have approached that reunion, if we were to swap shoes. Ways I would have done it better.

But I can’t do that without knowing what you were trying to get out of it.

Were you going back to the well on the whole “It’s not your fault” spiel?

Or was it an attempt to rewrite all my longstanding beliefs about you?  

Good luck trying on the second through words alone. A hostage negotiator couldn’t have talked me out of the conclusions I’d come to about those pink pills.

Until that lunchtime meeting, you remained the ageless “father” who had let me deliver those pills to my mother—fast tracking her death without knowing it. In my mind you’d forever be this man who had all the autonomy in the world, who wasn’t affected by grief, who wasn’t subject to mistakes. In my mind any pain you caused must have been deliberate or short of that, something you were indifferent to.

 But seeing you there in the flesh. Seeing you weathered, so beaten up by the years, allowed me to revisit the thirty-five-year-old who had been forced to live through that difficult period through new eyes. Sitting there and reopening those difficult questions at the same age that you’d been forced to address them, I realized I could relate to that version of you for the first time. Even if he was long dead.

Only after I left your there at Anderson’s Garden cafe did it dawn on me that I’d never even considered the sacrifice you made by staying out of the way during that daily afternoon ritual.

Until our meeting at Anderson’s Garden café, I couldn’t even fathom that you might have liked a final chance to say good bye to the beautiful young wife you’d only had the joy of a handful of years with.

That’s the first time I considered that she might have had more of a hand in the end than I’d assumed as well.

Listen to me now. Still doing it. I, I, I. Me, me, me. I’m a fucking George Harrison song.

Old habits are hard to kick though ay?    

In all these years it didn’t occur to me once that the extra pills she started taking might not have been so much out of pressure from my end. Perhaps this wasn’t a grown adult buckling to an eleven-year-old, but rather a personal recognition that she was deteriorating, and that these windows of the past might not be around forever. Looking back there with fresh eyes, it hardly seems insane to consider there might have been a calculation at play. Might it be worth cutting the final days short if it meant she may be able to cling to the extra mental time with me?  

What an ego I have on me hah? This is the first time I’ve considered that I might not have manipulated her into that. That instead of her falling victim to my pre-pubescent genius, there might have been some back-room conversations between you two, where you decided what was best for me. Not best for her. Or even you.

She never talked about fear in the final days. It was all positive, all about my bright future.

Neither did you.

Then after. Those first ten years. After the letter.  

You never said anything to quell my building anger in defence of yourself. You let me sentence you to be the target of my blame without protest.

Some might judge you for that part. But, I guess you sensed anger at least has an energy to it. Better than the path I was on at the time. That hopeless, self-blaming path.

And after you’d made the first choice to let me play that hand, I suppose this was the only way to undo the guilt that would inevitably be lain on me as a consequence.

Blame was the only escape from that guilt.

And if that blame had to be aimed at you? So be it.

For the longest time, I’ve looked back at those years of blame as the worst of my life. But I can’t even bring myself to think of what the alternative might have looked like.

Shit Dad, why’d you have to go!

Even after our meeting at Anderson’s café, you didn’t indulge in defending yourself. You just let me stand up and walk away. Content to have seen for yourself that I ended up okay and that was enough for you. You didn’t need me to know the sacrifice you’d made.

But this is still selfish of you,

Why’d you have to leave me here? Once again, not allowing the truth to spoil the illusion. This is just like you.

You and I will never get the proper goodbye that Mum and I had. But I suppose I need it less now that I’m an adult.
Shit I’m an adult? Who would have guessed I’d last this long?

Silly question. You did, and it wasn’t a guess.

For the first time, you’re not taking the blows for me. That’s what the meeting at Anderson Garden Café was about. Thanks to you, I’m strong enough now to take them on my own.  

Thank you Dad, I hope you and Ma are finally together.

Nathanial.