There’s a golden lab beside her dad’s hospice bed, doing what it’s been trained to do: accept her dad’s touch on its noble head. Ginny adorns her Comfort Companions harness.
Her dad is allergic to dogs.
He announces that he’d only told her, Dara, that he was allergic because when she and her stepsister Lily were aged 13 and 11, they, and Lily’s mom Melba, wouldn’t shut up about getting a fucking dog.
“But she’s a pretty bitch,” he nods at the dog.
He eyeballs Dara, his whites now yellow, before returning his focus to Ginny. The dog is looking at Dara and her gaze suggests sympathy with Dara’s predicament: the time to say anything is ebbing along with her father.
But Dara hasn’t been on speaking terms with her father for years. Now she has un-asked-for responsibilities in the next-of-kin role that she didn’t talk to him about not wanting to do. She sits on the edge of the visitor’s chair and pats Ginny’s soft rump.
Her dad declares that he’s still the director and life is a goddamn movie. The innocent dog takes his excited words for an invitation and puts her front paws up on the bed. Her dad glowers, tries and fails to push her down. “That’s not what I wanted,” he wheezes and swats at Ginny and a machine beeps and a nurse comes and pushes more anti-anxiety drug into the IV. He glares. He settles. Ginny stays on the floor and he resumes his touching.
He falters. “I’m dying here.”
He coughs. “Where are Lily and Melba?”
Lily and Melba are floating around the waiting room. They can’t seem to settle. Lily and Melba are dead.
*
Dara and Lily used to drift up on the perfect, lovely smoke rings her father puffed out while he arranged them for one of the pictures he’d made them make. Dara could descend after it was over, and re-enter her body. Lily, being younger and less practiced, hadn’t been as good at returning. She’d stayed trapped against the ceiling for days, lost to her skinny arms and legs, separated from her quick green eyes and slender fingers and toes.
When Melba had come home early that one and only time and saw Dara half-in and half-out of herself, and Lily drifting, she’d poured a straight whiskey and downed it in three swift swallows. She’d waited while Dara had re-attached herself to the cloth of her body, whipstitching her mind closed, neatly blanketing her heart with French knots like roses, joining the other rips and tears with featherstitching. Melba had then whispered so Dara had to lean close: “I had no idea. I’m sorry. He was such a charmer. I would have never. Pack up.”
Melba had taken on extra work to pay for the three of them to see people who helped people like them who had encountered people like her father. They had adopted a dog but the dog had run away. After that no-one had been able to convince Lily it was safe to come all the way back down into herself.
*
Ginny’s handler comes and takes her to the next patient. Her dad mutters, “That was a good dog, it was a good shoot.” He leans against the pillow and says she and Lily were good girls. He mumbles, “bring me a cigarette, and then you two can go have fun, you can take a twenty from my wallet. Why aren’t you going?”
Lily and Melba stick their heads in the room, curious.
“Do what I say,” he rattles at Dara.
Dara stands.
Lily and Melba cross their finger wisps for luck.
Dara says one word.
Dara says no.
He scrabbles and flails. He would yell if he could but his lungs are sealed with cinder and ash.
*
Dara does the next-of-kin-things and then she steps into the no-man’s-land alley between the parking lot and the hospice. It is cool despite the August humidity. It is moss and fern and hemlock. The air moves at her ankles.
She sees Ginny resting in a slab of shade, nose lifted, alert. The dog is looking at Lily, hovering, nine feet up; at Melba whittled to nothing. Dara carefully undoes her tender stitches, opening herself from gullet to gut, and they climb in.
Before graduating from the MFA Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College, Lesley worked in regional planning, founded a land trust, raised two sons, and helped establish the cohousing community where she still lives. Her fiction has been recognized by Glimmer Train and Zoetrope, and published in the Lascaux Prize Anthology, Leon Literary Review, the Little Patuxent Review, Narrative, and the Western Humanities Review. Her Under the Gum Tree flash creative nonfiction essay was one of Creative Nonfiction’s Sunday Short Reads.
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Picture Credits: Raahima S.
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