By Gary Finnegan
“Mr. McKittrick,” the doctor says.
“Yes.” Dad and I reply in stereo. The three of us smile without warmth as the room’s newest arrival comes to rest at the foot of the bed, his arms folded across a clipboard of bad news.
“I’m Dr. Harris. Glad to see you’ve family with you.” He’s in his sixties, wearing a name badge that says, Hi, My name is Chris, but sticking with the old form. Dad prefers it that way too.
One of the joys about the hospice is the death of euphemism. In St. Vincent’s hospital, it was always a shadow or a growth or maybe a malignancy. Anything but hard words. It took the bones of a month before anyone in the family mentioned the Big C, even when talk had turned to tumors and lymph nodes and distant secondaries.
None of that here.
“So, the bloods are stable,” Dr. Harris says, preparing the base layer of a shit sandwich. “But I’m inclined not to risk transferring you for an MRI. Too risky and, quite frankly, at this juncture, there’s no point.” He lets that hang like a lamb on a butcher’s hook. “On a brighter note, we feel good about the pain meds this week. Reckon we can keep you comfortable without leaving you too zonked. Alrighty?”
With that unanswered question, he whirls out the door and across the corridor for his next knock-and-enter. “Mrs. Fitzgerald,” we hear him say, before his brisk sounds trail away.
I look at Dad, trying to catch his eye which had followed Dr. Harris out the door, coming to rest on the abstract print in the hall. He’s miles away and I want him back. The past, always a reliable route to conversation.
“Do you remember my first art project in secondary school?”
“Your what? No,” he says, with distant agitation. “I never really think of you doing art. It was always science. Biology and chemistry.”
“Well, I had to take art for a few years. Did a project in month one in the Community School called My Hero. Remember that?”
“Oh, God. No… Do I want to remember?”
“I came in with a watercolor. Excited, I suppose. And told Mam we’d all painted our heroes and I wanted to show it to you.”
“I don’t remember any of this. I’m afraid to ask what you painted.”
“You came in from the garden—Mam had called you like there was a medical emergency. ‘Bryan,’ she’d said, ‘he’s after painting his hero and wants to show it to you.’ You downed tools to see what I’d done.”
“You didn’t?” He looks at me with the same deadly fear that filled him decades earlier.
“No, I turned it around and said I painted Man United captain, Bryan Robson. Mam looked gutted. You looked relieved.”
“First weeks of secondary? Bloody sure I was relieved. Painting your old man would have been social suicide.”
“Truth is, you kinda were my-–”
A nurse interrupts. “Hi, I’m Lou.” She taps her name badge. “Just wondering if more of the family are expected? Soon?”
“Yes,” my father says. “My daughter’s on a flight. She’s apprised of the situation.” He always takes on an officious tone when dealing with anyone he considers to be an authority figure. Telephone voice, projected to the back of an auditorium.
“Apprised?” asks Lou, arching a brow.
“She knows,” I say. “My sister knows.”
“Okay, grand. Need anything, press the bell.”
“Thanks, Lou,” Dad and I say together.
The receding echo of shoes on tiles leaves us in aching peace. The gentle movement of browning greenery waving outside the window draws our eyes like a pub television: going nowhere in dull motion, but it’s the only thing on.
A gnawing guilt tells us we’re wasting time, the final showing of our highlights reel. Dad pushes our review forward with another chapter from the past.
“Do you remember the early holidays? Courtown. Tramore. Any of that? Your sister had made her communion the year we went to Courtown, so you were maybe three or four.”
“Courtown is hazy,” I say. “Was it a hotel in Tramore or camping?”
“We did both. Camping one year, hotel the next, then back to camping. Hotel wasn’t worth spending money we didn’t have.”
“I remember, clearly enough now that you’re bringing me back to it, winning a dance competition in the hotel.”
He looks wistful, sheepish. “Yeah? What did you win?”
“Bottle of Coke and… was there a medal? Definitely a drink. Maybe it was a runner-up prize.”
“Mam bought you the Coke. Said it was for being the best dancer.”
“What? Who won the competition?”
“There was no competition. Just your Mam. Your biggest fan. You can’t dance.”
“Jesus Christ. You’re telling me this now? I think I preferred living with my ignorance!”
We laugh until the coughing comes and pain intervenes. Cancer really kills the mood.
Time has been molten, mercurial, for weeks, like an hourglass turned to lava lamp. We sit with our thoughts.
“I died the day of the diagnosis,” Dad says, embracing the brutal honesty of the place.
If there is a comforting response to that, it eludes me.
He raises his bloodshot eyes to meet mine and pulls me into a fumbled hug. “So…”
I ask him not to say goodbye. There is nothing else to say. He moves the unread newspaper and gathers his coat from the back of the chair, draping it over his arm.
“Cheerio so,” he says, with a doleful shrug and a shake of the head. His whispering footsteps fade fast and, just like yesterday, I lie in my bed wondering whether that was the last cheerio.
