A story about family dynamics, unspoken anger, and a mysterious event that takes place while on a vacation in Arizona.
He stopped and said the three words that had always caused my sister and I to panic: “Listen to me.” Growing up, he only said it when there was an emergency, flinging open our bedroom door in the middle of the night.“Listen to me: Grandma Malke is having heart palpitations on the back porch.”We were in Tuscon, winding through the brush, dry, warm, full of citrus and sage. Cacti with multiple arms stretched toward the sun. Fragrant rosebushes, buzzing with hummingbirds. It was dizzying, magical.
Back in Brooklyn where I lived with my husband and two daughters, winter had been a relentless wet slush of subway rides and Starbucks and day-care dropoffs. I’d been a few months earlier I’d received an unusual call from my dad, offering to fly my sister and our families to Arizona for my 40th birthday that February. My dad did not particularly like to leave the Midwest, and he was not a fan of splurging on decadent vacations. was to meet in Michigan on the Fourth of July: bratwurst barbecues, bike rides, lakeswims under the stars. Our Tuscon hotel, built in the 1930s, had an air of old Hollywood glamour with a heated pool and flowering orange trees. Pink stucco cottages, ornamental fireplaces, black olives and celery served on ice with every meal.“I’ve been making a document,” he said, dabbing his wet brow with a blue bandana. He always had a blue bandana in his back pocket. “Called Death and Passwords.”“I started it last week. In Google docs.” I could tell he was very proud about that last part, the Google docs. “You never know what could happen. With my PV.”, was my father’s strange blood disorder of almost two decades. It’s when your bone marrow produces too many red blood cells, which, in turn, makes your blood slow and sluggish, carrying less oxygen to your body’s organs. It was all very elusive. I knew he needed to sometimes get phlebotomies and that he gave himself shots in the stomach. He sweated more than most people and his spleen was sometimes swollen. He kept it all mostly to himself, this strange medical mystery. Truthfully, I tried not to ask too much. Who wants to know about their father’s spleen? Yeah. I piped in, in typical little-sister fashion. Up ahead, the tour guide stopped to show my children a cactus-root ball, nubby and unremarkable, like a miniature, unmoisturized beard. He only called us “girls” under two sets of circumstances: Either we were in trouble — my dad was famously a very high-drama, catastrophe thinker — or when my brother was not around. My brother hadto me three years earlier, some combination of me being an hour late to his wedding-rehearsal dinner and various childhood infractions. I learned about, on a Skype family-therapy meeting that my parents called after the wedding. My brother, they reported, was also angry with them, but he was really, He should’ve been on the Hawk Walk. My brother loved birds. We both did. Once, hungover and hypomanic in the early aughts, we got matching bird tattoos. For his fourth birthday, I made him a hand-drawn book of birds, eight of them — painstakingly sketched in a No. 2 pencil, shaded with crayon — stapled together on construction paper. After dinner, I repeated. But I’d actually stopped listening. I was thinking about my brother. I wondered if he still had the bird book I made him. I’d seen on Instagram that he had a pet hedgehog named Patty. I felt sad that I’d never met Patty, sad that my daughters didn’t even know they had an uncle. A high-pitched squawking sounded overhead; we all looked up at the same time. A hawk glided above in the burnt sky, soaring, circling for prey. Its silhouette cast a shadow over my father, my sister, over everything. For a long time, it was just my sister and I. Trading stories and Snoopy dolls and sticker books. We went to the same school, shared best friends (two sisters, who lived at the end of our block), and wore the same clothes — overalls, saddle shoes, and rainbow cardigans knit by our Nana. At night we’d play “Friends,” a game we’d invented that involved sitting on opposite sides of the hallway, surrounded by stuffies, pretending we were sailors who lived in adjacent lifeboats. Our family of four lived on the top two floors of a drafty 100-year-old house in Lincoln Park in Chicago. My dad ran the PTA. My mom taught aerobics. We’d play Red Rover with other kids on the block, then walk to the bodega and buy Doritos. It was the ’70s, and in many ways, an idyllic childhood. The local librarian knew my name. In the summer, we’d bike to Cubs games; in the winter, we’d watch the Bulls. My parents grew their vegetables, collected records, and read the Chicago Tribune. But my father had a temper. You never knew what would set him off. Sometimes he’d pull the car over and scream if we forgot to brush our teeth. When our dog got run over by a taxi, he came home from the vet holding her collar and berated my mom for not washing the dishes the right way.
Fiction Short Story Family Brother Sister Vacation Arizona Death Secrets Childhood Memories
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