Before I Forget by Tory Henwood Hoen - 8

On the morning Nina is to leave for Stockholm, I wake in my creaky twin bed from a confounding dream: I coughed up my own heart. One quick retch and there it was in my hand, continuing its steady, purple thud.

Bewildered, I thrusted it toward hazy passersby, asking, “Can I live without this?”

They all shrugged—not knowing, not caring, or both.

Can I live without this? Perhaps I don’t need my heart after all, my dream-self decided, so I threw it toward the frozen pond, where it fell through a hole in the ice and sank.

Over breakfast, Nina attributes my dream to nerves. She never has dreams herself (no time), and she has little patience for the details of my nighttime phantasms.

“Do you think it means I’m heartless?” I press. “Or emotionally arrested?”

“Something like that,” she says, distracted as she rinses her plate and verifies something on her phone. It’s easy to see that she wants to get moving toward her new life.

“Goodrich is going to mail you a physical copy of Dad’s will,” she reminds me. “And they’ll keep a copy at their office as well.”

I nod. Last week, we updated my father’s will and switched the power of attorney designations from Nina to me, putting me legally in charge of my father’s finances and medical decisions. “It’s just a precaution in case something happens unexpectedly,” Nina had assured me. “But it should be you, since you’re local.”

Now, as she prepares to leave, I feel the heaviness of the responsibility begin to descend. She takes a final walk through the house, where she has left a profusion of lists and labels meant to guide me from here on out, and that’s in addition to the digital files she has shared with me: spreadsheets, documents, and a calendar that she will be able to monitor from abroad.

I help Nina load the last of her things into the Subaru—which will now be my car, with the Raisin being demoted to backup. Nina closes the trunk, checks her watch, and looks around. “Where’s Dad?”

“He was just here.” I turn and go back into the house, where I find my father in his room, changing back into his nightshirt.

“Dad, what are you doing?” I ask.

“I think I’ll have a rest,” he says.

“That’s fine, but can you rest in the car? We have to drive Nina to the airport.”

“The airport? Where is she going?”

“Stockholm.”

“Stockholm!” He looks both excited and concerned.

“Yes, she’s leaving today,” I say. “And I’ll be staying here with you.”

He looks me up and down, skeptically.

“Can you change so we can go?” I say, holding up the beige turtleneck I had helped him put on less than thirty minutes ago. “We don’t want to make her late for the plane.”

“I don’t see why I can’t wear this,” he says of his knee-length linen nightshirt.

We negotiate for a moment, and when we finally make it out to the driveway, he is wearing his nightshirt over a pair of jeans. For footwear, he has chosen lime-green Crocs.

Nina raises her eyebrows but says nothing, and we pile into the car. The nearest international airport is in Burlington, and on the three-hour drive, we have plenty of time to review every last detail of my father’s care. By the time we cross into Vermont, Nina’s task-mastering has given way to a jittery optimism.

We park and walk to the terminal, where Nina checks in and requests an upgrade. Persuasive but not pushy, she succeeds. Business class it will be. We watch her neatly packed suitcases float away on the conveyor belt, bound for New York and then Stockholm. With all her to-dos done, she finally relaxes enough to become tearful, hugging my father as if this is their final goodbye. I suppose the version of him she meets next will be changed, but that’s true of all of us, to some extent.

“There, there,” my father pats her back, seeking to ease her distress, though he doesn’t understand its source.

Nina sniffs assertively and squeezes her eyes closed as if to halt the flow of tears. When she opens them again, she looks purposeful.

“You’ve got this, Cricket,” she says to me, grabbing my shoulders and giving me a little shake. I nod, which seems to satisfy her. With that, she turns. We watch as she breezes through the short security line, moving buoyantly in the direction of her future.

Back in the short-term parking lot, I find myself scanning the rows for the Raisin before I remember: I’m a Subaru woman now. I open the passenger door and stay close as my father effortfully climbs into his seat, clinging to the roof of the car for balance, or for dear life, or both. By the time I get into the driver’s seat, he is grumbling in frustration.

“This damn thing…” He wrestles with the seat belt, pulling it at the wrong angle and in the wrong direction.

I lean over and slide the belt across his torso, but just before I latch it, he grabs it from me and pushes it into the buckle as if delivering the final blow in a battle. Once it clicks, he relaxes and his annoyance quickly dissipates.

“So, where to?” he asks.

I let him know we are heading home, but the drive will take a few hours. We pull away from the airport, and only now does the weight of my new role finally hit me. I wonder if this is how first-time parents feel when they bring their newborns home. It’s not that my father is as fragile as an infant, but he is dependent on me. It’s terrifying to finally be in charge.

“Have you ever been to Sweden?” I ask, knowing that he has, several times.

“Not yet.” My father shakes his head. “Someday, perhaps. Although I’m quite busy. And why would I go all the way to Sweden when I could go to … Saratoga?”

I laugh. “Or Scranton?”

“Or Scarsdale.”

“Or Saskatoon?”

My father smiles, his watery gray eyes bright in the midday sun. He says, “This is where I belong. There’s really no place better.”

This far north, there is a voraciousness to early summer, brief though it is. The season snaps into action, flashing its brazen greens, knowing it must exist to the hilt. It’s not like the lazy, wilted summer of the South, nor is it like the long, abundant, sun-soaked California version. In the Adirondacks, summer is an ecstatic, too-bold season that, even when in full swing, already seems to long for itself.

“Will you miss Nina?” I ask.

“Certainly,” he says. “But she deserves a nice trip.”

Though we have tried to prepare him, he doesn’t seem to grasp that Nina has moved away and that I am her replacement. I could tell him for the hundredth time, but instead, I just agree, “She does.”

He begins poking at the control panel in search of a radio station, then grows frustrated with the touchscreen he can’t decipher. “This damn thing…”

I help him scan the channels, pausing so he can react to each and finally settling on a station playing Roy Orbison. We pick up speed as Roy warbles about heartbreak, and within minutes, my father is asleep.