Jacqueline Vogtman
When we finally reach the doorway to the room where my father’s sister, Johanna, is dying, I stop outside to let my father go in and talk to his sister alone. But he stops too, puts a hand to my back, ushers me in before him. His hand on my back is shaking, heat radiating from his palm. The room is dim and smells like menthol and plastic, dying flowers and dirty diapers. A nurse sits knitting in the corner and looks up at us briefly, pointing to Johanna, as if we can’t see where she’s lying.
…..Maybe we can’t. We don’t approach her. Her body is so thin and tiny it disappears under the blankets. Her eyes are on us, but I can’t tell if she recognizes us or not. My dad walks to her bedside; I don’t think I’ve ever heard him walk so soundlessly in his construction boots before. It sounds like he’s wearing velvet slippers.
…..Her face disappears behind my father’s body; I imagine she smiles at him, the smile that makes her look like photos of Janis Joplin I’d seen in my parents’ old magazines. My father is whispering to her. I can’t remember the last time I heard him whisper. He takes her hand, her fingernails shining with red polish. This is the closest I’ve ever been to death, and the effect on me is one of paralysis: I can’t move, even when my father turns around to look at me, in the dim light his blue eyes glowing like votive candles, beckoning me. I don’t know why I’m here; this is my father’s sister, an aunt I’ve met only a few times in my life.
…..Johanna’s boyfriend rolls in on his wheelchair, and I’m forced to move out of his way. I walk to my father’s side, to Johanna. I look at her face, and I don’t think she’ll recognize me; it’s been that many years. I wonder who she’ll confuse me with—her daughter, my sister, her dead mother, an old friend, herself in a mirror? And then her eyes—they’re brown, after all, deep and dark and large, opposite my father’s—focus in on me, and she croaks my name. Madeleine. I hope this is not her last word.
…..I smile at her, saying nothing. In her face I try to see my father’s, see my own. I can’t. Her face is too thin and pale, wearing the mask of death. Instead, I see the face of our cat, which died when I was a teenager. Also, strangely, I see the face of my sister, who had two kids when she was a teenager and then grew thin and pale and light, like her bones had been sucked of their marrow.
…..The last time I saw Johanna before this night was at my sister’s baby shower Johanna had driven up north in a pickup truck, her oxygen tank in the back. She was plumper then, almost healthy, wearing a red blouse, vivid, the color of blood in the movies. She wore shorts, too, and her legs were coltish, like my legs when I was a child. She gave my sister frilly baby clothes, and gave the rest of us presents too, one for each year she hadn’t seen us. They piled up on the deck like the mountains surrounding us, like the mountains in which she would die. The mound of presents hid her from our view, and by the time we saw her again she was diminishing, beginning to say goodbye.
…..Now my father gives me Johanna’s hand. It’s cold. I can’t feel the pulse of blood between us, but I know it’s still there. She smiles up at me, her face looking older than ever yet still somehow like a child’s. She will not live through the night. I remember, she says, when you were kids…
…..But she never finishes her story. Her voice gives out, and she lies there silent until she falls asleep again. I place her hand in my father’s, and he puts it down on the bed. He sits on a chair near the window, looks out the torn screen into the woods behind the house. No doubt animals move silently in and out of the shadows, families of bats circle the rooftop. I kneel beside my father, breathe the air through the window, the scent of soil cooling and newborn flowers, and I hope some of the air I exhale reaches Johanna before she dies. Her boyfriend wheels next to the bed; her daughter slinks into the room, whispering on the phone. Circling around her as Johanna sleeps, we’re silent as the sound of yarn the nurse knits in the corner, and we’re all dreaming something different.
…..My dream: I’m trying to finish Johanna’s story, her memory of my childhood. I hope she was thinking of the time when I was four years old and she took my sister and me to dry out on the sidewalk after splashing around in a baby pool. We lay on our backs on the warm sidewalk looking up at the clouds. We were trying to pick out which was God’s cloud, and we couldn’t decide. They all looked so good. When we got up, we noticed that our bathing suits left wet stains on the sidewalk that looked like shadows of gigantic butterflies. The stains were nearly identical: mine, my sister’s, even Johanna’s.
…..And we stood, three girls looking at wet shapes made by our bodies, until they gradually disappeared in the sun.
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Jacqueline Vogtman is an MFA candidate at Bowling Green State University, where she teaches and serves as an assistant editor of Mid-American Review. Her fiction has been published in Pindeldyboz and Twelve Stories.
