Outside the Forest

by José Sotolongo


She hung up the phone and had to sit down. One end of the sofa seemed to be angled up, away from the floor, off kilter, and Claire put her hands on the seat before she dropped her weight on it. Still, she almost toppled off, dizzy with the suddenness of the news.
    
When the room had righted itself again, she picked up the phone to call her mother.
    
“I just spoke to Dad,” Claire said.
    
Her mother snorted before she said, “So?”
    
“Did you know he has liver cancer?”
    
“How would I know he has liver cancer? You know the last time I spoke to him?”
    
“Not since the divorce?”
    
“That’s right.”
    
Claire shook her head. It had happened ten years ago, while she was in the convent.
    
“He doesn’t have long, Mom.”
     
“So what am I supposed to do? What’s done is done.”
    
“He’s too weak to leave the house. He’s got a visiting nurse service, but it’s not enough.”
    
“This is not my problem. What goes around comes around. Let his little friend help him.”
    
Claire frowned. “Mom, what are you talking about? What little friend?”
    
“I’m not getting into this with you.”
    
Claire pleaded into silence, until the phone’s honking signaled her mother had hung up.
    
On Saturday she drove the three hours to her father’s apartment in Newark. She wondered whether it was too late to bridge the gap between them, and was unsure about making the trip at all. There was coursework she had to complete. She felt pressured to finish her therapist’s certification, her masters in psychology granted several months before.
    
The young woman who opened the door had striking green eyes. Her hips filled the blue health aide scrubs. “Are you Claire?” she said. “Your father said you were coming. I’m Sofia.”
    
Claire followed her into the bedroom. A sweet, unwanted smell reached her as she neared her yellow father sitting up in bed. His smile was a trench of teeth. She wanted to prolong the hug, but her father’s hands on her shoulders pushed back a little.
    
She had to know things before she could accept this reality. How long had he been ill? What treatment was he getting? Why the secret? He shrugged at everything. “What’s the difference?” he said. But she insisted, and with a look of unwilling acquiescence he told her about the years-old hepatitis C, the difficult, intolerable treatments that had almost killed him, the new cancer diagnosis.
    
“But hepatitis C? How did you get that?” Dirty needles was all she knew, but her father was sixty-seven, had led a boring, bourgeois life.
    
“Fred, I’ll be in the living room if you need anything,” Sofia said, and left the room.
    
Her father’s face was an amber mask of warning, eyes defiant. Through her cropped brown hair, Claire scratched her scalp furiously with both hands. “Dad?” she said.
    
Fred called Sofia back in. “I need to rest,” he said to Claire.
    
She sat with her papers in the living room, but could not focus, her mind a whirligig of questions. Who would take care of him? Should she move in? What about the job offer in Philadelphia when she got her certificate?
    
Sofia came in from the bedroom. “He’s sleeping,” she said.
    
Claire learned from Sofia that she was there two hours at time, twice a day. His insurance didn’t cover, and he paid the agency directly. Claire gave the young woman her phone number. “Call me if he can’t pay you, or if anything happens.”
    
Sofia nodded. “I won’t be doing this much longer. I graduate from nursing school in three months. But, of course…”
    
He wasn’t going to be around that long. Isn’t that what she was saying? “Does anyone come to visit? Any friends?”
    
“A woman comes to see him once in a while, but I’ve never met her. He says she does things for him. Groceries, errands. I do the laundry, change the bed, cook a little.”
    
She wondered if this visitor was the little friend her mother had referred to.
    
“She doesn’t come in every day? Just once in a while?” Claire asked.
    
“That’s what he says.”
    
Sofia left, and Claire looked in on the sleeping figure, a ghoulish mannequin version of her father. The years of emotional distance as far back as she could remember, his utter lack of physical or verbal warmth, mocked her. Too late, too late.
    
She had never received physical affection from either parent, even as a child, and blamed herself, some undesirable quality. In the psychoanalysis she had undergone as a requisite for her masters, she had explored that issue with the therapist. Her conclusion, with input from the analyst, was that her parents were emotionally limited, were unable to express affection, maybe even to feel it. She feared she might be made of the same stuff, and the analyst had left that point vague. “Only you know,” he had said. Maybe that’s why she had never been in a serious relationship and had sought isolation in the convent. There, her sole emotional attachment had been to Sister Mary James, but Claire had not brought that friendship up with the analyst, had not considered it significant enough.
    
It was time to leave. Sofia would be back later.
    
Outside, the sky was like slate, flat and hard. She wanted to flee from its menace, and turned her collar up to the mild day. The neck, she had read once, was the most vulnerable structure, the essential jugulars and carotids protected by nothing but soft muscle. She walked with long, hurried strides to her car and stood beside it, wondering whether to go back to her father. Unfinished business. Try harder. But no, it was done for now.
    
A week later, Sofia called. “His mind is going. He doesn’t know who I am. He calls for Gordon. Do you know who that is?”
    
“I have no idea. Has he mentioned him before?”
    
“Not to me, no.”
    
Claire called her mother with the news of his worsening. “I don’t care,” the old woman said.
    
“He can’t be alone now. We’ll have to get round the clock care. It’s expensive.”
    
“I can’t afford it, Claire. He’s probably left it all to you anyway. Can’t you can cover it for now?”
    
Claire would handle it. But she had to know. “Who’s Gordon?” she asked.
    
She heard a screech like a menacing hawk through the phone, unintelligible words, and the slam ending the conversation.
    
She stood and looked at the phone, mouth open. What had gone on between her parents that she didn’t know about? Their life together was as mysterious as a forest, the leaves and branches glimpsed through the years giving no clue as to its complexities.
    
There was a flutter of memory of her days as a nun, while her parents’ marriage dissolved. Sequestered in the convent, she had learned of their divorce years after the fact. Both had remained cryptic as to the reasons.
    
In the convent, there had been few personal connections. Only Mary James, a sweet, brilliant nun, had brought her true happiness. They had walked the wooded grounds of the nunnery together in the evenings, after dinner and before vespers, speaking of their past lives, filling each other in. They grew to know each other, became close friends. The memory of this colleague withering as she died of breast cancer was unbearable now. And yet, at the time, Claire had inured herself to the nun’s deterioration so she could care for her day and night. When Mary James passed, her eyes had remained dry in stunned disconnect while the other sisters wept. She had kept her arms at her side when one of the nuns hugged her and murmured something Claire was too numb to register.
    
She called Sofia. “Can you move in with him?” she asked. “I’ll pay you privately. He can’t be alone.”
    
“I could do that. I’ll have to cut some of my hours with the agency, though,” Sofia said.
    
She researched hepatitis C, but nothing of what she read made sense. When she called her father’s doctor, he wouldn’t speak to her, citing privacy laws. She spoke to the psychiatrist supervising her counseling work, who only confirmed what she had read. “Typically it’s acquired through intravenous drug use, and also unprotected rectal intercourse with an infected partner,” he said.
    
She noticed the pink-flowered pattern of the curtains in his office. They were open, letting in the sharp light of the sunny day. She wanted to close them.
    
“Why do you ask?” he said.
    
Claire shook her head and shrugged. “A friend.”
    
The funeral was two weeks later, a brief, one day affair with rare mourners. Sofia introduced her to Roberta, the visitor she had mentioned. The woman had been there the day her father had died. Roberta was about Claire’s age, and she wanted to ask this woman how she knew her father, and about Gordon. Who was he? Why hadn’t he shown up yet? But she didn’t want to put this stranger off by asking questions that might seem like an interrogation. Roberta seemed kind but shy, and Claire was grateful to her for being present. Her mother hadn’t come to Newark from Pittsburgh, of course. She hadn’t shown much emotion on the phone when Claire called with the news. “Well, I hope he’s at peace now,” is all she had said in a quiet voice.
    
In the still moments, when she was by herself with the casket, sometimes with Sofia, she was struck by the fact that she was alone on this earth. There was no other family that was close, emotionally or geographically. She had no real friends, just acquaintances, colleagues at the clinics where she did her training, no one she socialized with. She saw her solitude and detachment as confirmation that, like her parents, she was emotionally deficient. Her choice to go into the religious life, an escape from personal entanglements, was undeniable evidence of that.
    
At the end of the day, before the remains were taken away to be cremated, Sofia said, “I can help you sort through his things if you want.” She wore a grey blouse, and a black skirt that looked too big, as if it had been borrowed.
    
They met at the apartment the next day.
    
Among the documents Claire found in a file folder were his will and a health care proxy designating her as the decision-maker, both dated the previous year. She also found an envelope from a cemetery near Newark. The documents inside indicated where the remains of Gordon Hess had been buried five years before.
    
Sofia came into the bedroom. She had been packing books to donate and going through boxes of stuff: New Year’s Eve hats, star-shaped sunglasses, bunny house-slippers. “I think you may want these,” she said, holding out a stuffed animal and a photograph.
    
The smiling teddy bear, its arms open wide, had a sign around the neck that read “I love you this much.” The photograph showed her father, not so many years ago, standing next to another man, their arms around each other’s waists. The other man was pale and thin in the color print, but he had been handsome once. The blond hair was greying, the skin sallow, but the blue eyes sparkled. And in her father’s forced smile for the camera was a down-turning of the corners of the mouth, a worried furrow of the brow, as if he was about to lose something he loved very much. She recognized her own dread about losing Mary James, the person she hadn’t mentioned to her analyst.

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