This ain’t all there is
But if it’s all that I have
What’s broken will become better
If we can.
—JASON MOLINA, “What’s Broken Becomes Better”
I.
Erica was just waiting for her father to get there in the ambulance. They were transferring him over from Lutheran, where he’d beat the pneumonia but had also caused a lot of trouble. She’d tried to be there as much as she could but she had to work and it killed her to get there at night and see him with a net around his bed. And now she’d lied to him, told him they were bringing him home when they were really bringing him to rehab at Saints Joachim and Anne in Coney Island. He needed to get his strength back—he couldn’t even stand on his own—and she couldn’t handle him at home. At least he’d be closer, just a ten-minute drive from Bensonhurst, and Saints Joachim and Anne had a parking lot, so she could come here right after work and not have to worry about fighting to find a spot on the street.
“You look lost,” the security guard sitting behind the front desk said. He wore a blue blazer dotted with lint and had a dark mustache. He smiled. His teeth were yellow like ballpark mustard.
“I’m just waiting for my father to get here.” She looked around and saw some residents sitting at a table in the corner near a fake Christmas tree strung with popcorn, playing cards. Big pots of coffee were set out on a table on the other side of the room. A lady in a red coat, wearing a pink Yankees cap, mixed sugar into a Styrofoam cup shooting up steam.
“Did you sign in?” the security guard said.
“No,” Erica said. “Do I need to?”
“You sure do. And then I’ll send you up to admitting, and you can deal with all the paperwork while you wait. No telling how long it’ll take for him to get here. There’s always a delay. Add the weather to that, and it’ll probably be at least a couple of hours.”
She thought of the old man at Lutheran, waiting, and her stomach dropped. He hated to wait. He was the most impatient person she’d ever known. Forget Eddie even.
The security guard picked up the phone and called upstairs. He covered the receiver with his hand and spoke to Erica. “What’s your father’s name?” he said.
“Joe Barba.”
He took his hand away and spoke into the phone. “Diane, Joe Barba’s daughter is here. I’m gonna send her up.” He nodded and hung up the phone. “She says go on up. Room two-sixteen. Across from the TV room.”
“This is all so new to me,” Erica said.
The lady in the pink Yankees cap passed behind her and said, “You’ll get used to it.”
Erica didn’t want to get used to it. The place was nice, but she didn’t want her father to die here.
“If you bring clothes, make sure you check them in at the desk,” the security guard said. “We’ve got to write your father’s name on all the tags. They get mixed up real easy.”
Erica looked down at her empty hands. She hadn’t thought to bring his clothes or his toothbrush or his razor. Her hands were dry, her nails unpainted. She was cold. She hadn’t carried his rosary beads. She hadn’t brought him scratch-offs. “I’ll bring them tomorrow,” she said. “I’ll put his name on everything.”
The security guard nodded. “Like the lady said, it’ll get easier.”
Erica took the elevator upstairs and found 216. Diane was sitting behind a desk scattered with paperwork. She was a large woman, maybe two-fifty, and Erica could tell she was tall by how awkwardly she sat in the rolling office chair. She wore a ruffled red sweater that still had a strip of tape on the arm that said XXL. She wore a saint’s medal—Erica couldn’t see which saint—and it swelled with her rising chest. “You’re Erica?” Diane extended her hand.
Erica nodded. “Yes, my father’s Joe Barba.” They shook.
“Nice to meet you, sweetie. Your father should be here soon. Take a seat and let’s get the paperwork out of the way.”
Erica sat down.
Diane hefted a binder marked BARBA from the filing cabinet behind her and put it on the desk between them. She started to go through the forms and stopped to tell a story about her seventy-year-old cousin who had just done a stint here in rehab. “He likes models,” she said. “He builds all these ships, robots, planes. Now he’s into Frankensteins. It’s nuts. Just him and his ninety-year-old mother and all these Frankensteins. He collects DVD players, too. He’s got fifty-two. They’re all numbered. I mean, he’s not right in the head, but that’s a lot of DVD players. I want to send them to the soldiers, you know?”
For the most part, Erica wasn’t really listening about the forms. She signed where Diane told her to and shook back into reality whenever she had a choice to make. Her father would be totally covered, by Medicare for twenty days and by AARP after that, and that was a good thing. She shook Diane’s hand again and went back downstairs and asked the security guard if her father had arrived yet. He said twenty minutes. She went outside and smoked one of the Parliament Lights Marianne had given her. It was windy out but it had stopped snowing.
The world just kept beating her down. First it was Jimmy moving to Texas and never calling. Next Eddie died of brain cancer in hospice at Lutheran and the funeral drained her savings. When her mother broke her hip going to Augie’s for the lotto, Erica wondered why God was punishing her. Her mother never came out of the hospital, and her father and uncle had to deal with the funeral costs because she was tapped out. Then there was all the damage to the house from Sandy. She had to cash fifteen of her father’s bonds to pay for repairs. She was fifty but she felt a hundred. She had varicose veins from being on her feet all day at the office. Her eyes were getting bad from the computers. Her cholesterol was high even though she was rail-thin and almost all she ate was frozen vegetables and pretzels and bread crusts.
She dropped the cigarette and stubbed it out with her shoe. Back inside, she poured a decaf coffee and swirled in creamer. Three people were sitting at a table over near the vending machines, talking about de Blasio. She’d hardly kept up with the news except for what she saw in the headlines. She knew he was the new mayor but new mayors didn’t matter when your life was falling apart.
She took out her phone and tried the last number she had for Jimmy. The 512 area code still felt so foreign under her fingers, no matter how many times she’d dialed it. She prayed he would answer. Last she’d heard from him was a postcard. He hadn’t been home for Eddie being sick. He hadn’t been there when he died. He hadn’t even come back for the funeral. He said he wasn’t mad but why wouldn’t he talk to her? He just didn’t care or what? He didn’t know that it would help if he just talked to her, just said, How are you, Mom?
No one picked up.
And her sister, Jeannie, hadn’t even called in two days. She tried her number now, not wanting to get into it—Jeannie would say get Daddy the hell out of rehab, they’d kill him there, she’d say she had some hippie oils and vitamins for him—but Erica wanted to hear a voice she knew.
Jeannie picked up after two rings and whispered hello.
“I’m at rehab waiting for Daddy,” Erica said.
“You should’ve brought him home,” Jeannie said. “What they’ll do to him there.”
“I’m alone here. I’m out of options. I can’t watch him all day. I’ve gotta work.”
Jeannie let out a breath. “Okay, okay. If I could be there, I’d be there.”
Erica started crying, softly at first and then harder, so hard that she felt unsteady on her feet. She hated to cry. She hated it as long as she could remember. In second grade, Mrs. Scagnetti made her stand in the corner and she cried into her chest and that was the first time she remembered hating it. She cried when Jimmy left, at home and at church and in her car and on long walks to the bakery on Eighteenth Avenue. She cried for months when Eddie was dying, prayed and cried and hated herself for not being stronger. She cried at her mother’s bedside when her mother faded in and out of confused sleep. “I’m sorry,” Erica said. “I’m just not sure how much more I can take.”
“Hon,” Jeannie said. “I’m sorry I’m not there to help. You know, I’ve got to be here for Ron.” Ron was Jeannie’s boyfriend of twenty years. He had multiple sclerosis and Jeannie spent all her time taking care of him. They lived in Kingston. She got down to Brooklyn for an hour or two once a month maybe.
Erica didn’t want to hear anything about Ron. “I’ve gotta go,” she said. “I shouldn’t have called.”
“I’m sorry, Er.”
“I’ll update you later.” Erica ended the call.
Saints Joachim and Anne backed up against the beach. Erica walked down to the water through sand dusted with snow and tried to get a grip on herself. The water was dark, the sky pressing down on it. Her cries turned into big throaty whimpers and then she stopped herself. She wondered if God could see her crying. There was all that shit about the beach, about the single set of footsteps, about God carrying you when you needed him most, but that wasn’t true at all. God hadn’t carried her. Father Ignozzo told her God was more present than she could ever know, not to lose faith. But maybe she was losing faith. She didn’t understand how you could think one thing your whole life and then it could just unravel.
She thought about the cross she wore around her neck. She’d worn it since she was twelve. It was a frail gold cross on a wispy chain. She pulled it out of her shirt and held it in her palm and looked at it. It had been a gift from her godmother, whom she’d fallen out of contact with or been totally forgotten by. She undid the clasp and drizzled the chain into her palm, the cross settling on top like something from a wreck. She thought about throwing it into the water but instead stuffed it deep into her jacket pocket with the crumpled tissues and sticky pennies and went back inside and waited for her father.
Her father was asleep when she found him in a room on the third floor, sprawled on the bed like he’d fallen there from a great height. His hair was fluffed up, his eyes crusty. He was still wearing his hospital gown, even though she’d brought clothes to Lutheran and asked them to dress him before putting him in the ambulance. He had better color but otherwise he looked like a different person from the one she’d known only a couple of short weeks before.
The bed next to him was empty but a shirt was folded on the bedside table near a stack of James Patterson novels and a bottle of Listerine. The roommate’s television was on, Fox News turned all the way up. Erica went over and lowered it and pulled the curtain between the beds. She touched her father’s forehead and tried to smooth his hair without disturbing him. “I love you, Daddy,” she said.
A nurse came in and wanted to weigh him with some complicated rig but she said she’d come back after dinner when he was awake.
Someone else came in, her name was Edna and she was the head of recreation or something like that, and she started asking about his interests. “What brings him joy?” Edna said.
“I don’t know,” Erica said.
“Does he like to watch TV?”
“Yes, he likes crazy movies. The Frog That Ate Tokyo. Death Wish. Westerns. He used to love Twilight Zone marathons more than anything.”
“Okay, that’s good. So he likes TV. That brings him joy.”
“I guess.”
“Does he read?”
“Just the Daily News. He likes his scratch-offs.”
“Music?”
“He used to love big band stuff.”
“Good, that’s about all we listen to here. How about church, does he go?”
“He used to. He’d take the collection. Never missed a week until about ten years ago, when he stopped leaving the house.”
“Would he like to attend Mass here? We have services every day.”
“I don’t know. Probably not.”
Edna was checking boxes on a form. “One thing you might want to consider is taking off his wedding ring. We don’t want him to lose it.”
Erica looked down at the ring. His fingers had gotten so skinny he’d had to tighten the ring with medical tape. She reached down and felt to see if it was secure. “I doubt he’ll take it off,” she said. “I’ll put more tape on there so it doesn’t fall off.”
“I’ll bring you some tape when I come back later,” Edna said and then she checked one final box and left the room without saying goodbye.
Erica sat in the chair next to her father and bit her nails. She didn’t want to watch TV. She didn’t want to read. She looked at her father and at the curtain drawn down the center of the room and at the closet full of bent wire hangers and at the swollen ceiling and then she got up and paced out in the hallway for fifteen minutes before settling back into the chair and watching her father sleep some more.
When her father’s roommate came into the room, he nodded at her as if he knew her. He was in a wheelchair. He had one leg cut off above the knee and was wearing shorts and had a patch of hair on his cheek that he’d missed shaving. Erica smiled at him. “Sorry I lowered your TV,” she said. “My father’s sleeping.”
“Of course,” he said. “My name’s Gene. What’s your father’s?”
“Joe. I’m Erica.”
“Very nice to meet you.”
“How long have you been here?”
“Three months.” He pointed at a scar on his knee. “Had my knee replaced. It’s a good facility.” He wheeled over behind the curtain and turned the TV back up.
Erica went back to biting her nails.
Her father opened his eyes and he had that confused look that killed her, his mouth hanging open, his lips dry, his eyes spacy. “I’m home?” he said.
Erica stood and put a hand on his shoulder. It felt especially bony through the hospital gown. “You’re in rehab, Daddy.”
“I want to go home.”
“You’ll go home. You just need to spend a few days here.”
“This isn’t right.”
“What’s not right?”
“You doing this to me. Sticking me in here. All I did for you.”
Her chin trembled. She felt the tears coming again. “This isn’t a nursing home. It’s rehab. Cut me a break. You need to get stronger. I can’t take care of you, and we can’t afford a live-in nurse. Medicare doesn’t cover that.”
He licked his lips. His voice was gaspy. “I need some water.”
A water pitcher on his bedside table was half-empty and warm. She took it and went out into the hallway and looked for a nurse. She couldn’t find one but she found the TV room, where a group of old ladies sat at a card table. They weren’t doing anything, just sitting. The TV was on behind them, some judge show, but no one was watching. At another table in the corner, a nurse in purple scrubs spooned soup into an old man’s mouth. He looked catatonic but he accepted the soup in slurps. Erica noticed an ice machine and water dispenser and decided to not even bother the nurse. She would’ve preferred a fresh pitcher but this would do. She dumped what was left, filled the pitcher with ice and water, and found a stack of plastic cups. She went back to her father and poured him a small cup without any ice. She held the cup to his lips and he took small sips. When he was done drinking, she fixed his pillows and smoothed down his hair. He closed his eyes. She dried his chin with a napkin where the water had dribbled.
She sat back down and bit her nails.
He woke up a few minutes later, startling her. “I’m gonna die in this goddamn shithole,” he said. “Get me the hell out of here.”
“It’s just a few days.”
“What kind of daughter are you?”
“I’m a good daughter,” she said. “I’m trying to help.”
“Help, my ass.” He closed his eyes and drifted back off. This time he fell into a deep sleep. Within a few minutes, he was snoring.
She figured she’d let him rest. And she needed some rest. She went out to the nurses’ station and made sure they had her cell phone number. She told them she’d be back tomorrow after work. She was worried he’d try to get up and fall down. They said they’d put a sensor on him, an alarm on the bed. She was worried that he wouldn’t eat his dinner. They said they’d make sure he ate. She said he’d probably get agitated. They said they had it under control. She said to call for anything, she’d keep the phone right near her, and they nodded.
At home, Erica boiled water for a cup of decaf tea. The top of the kettle was broken, so it leaked steam when the water got to a rolling boil and she had to use a potholder and be careful not to burn her hand. She turned the TV in the living room on for sound, poured the tea, mixing in just a bit of milk, and sat at the table with the Daily News and a bulletin from St. Mary’s.
She read about horrible things: a girl thrown on the subway tracks, a man who jumped from an apartment building with his toddler in his arms, a convenience store owner shot and killed on Eighty-Sixth Street.
She took a sip of the tea. It tasted off, the milk probably spoiled. She set the mug aside and put her head in her hands and took a deep breath.
Before going into the shower, she turned the TV up louder, loud like the way her father listened to it, the walls vibrating. She hated the silence of the shower, the water buzzing the world into a lull.
In the shower, the TV noise seemed distant behind the door. She tried so hard not to picture her father that she pictured him. Rehab had been the only choice. That’s what the social worker at Lutheran had told her. She couldn’t afford to bring him home and pay for around-the-clock care. Three weeks, and she’d see where things were. If he could walk, if he was strong enough to stay on his own while she was at work, then maybe she’d let them discharge him. For now this was the only help she knew.
To be alone in the house like this, as she had been since her father was admitted into Lutheran, frightened her. She’d moved in with him after her mother died, giving up her basement apartment around the corner on Eighty-Third Street, which she only paid six hundred dollars for because the landlord was Mrs. Ingram from church. It was an old frame house, the kind that filled the block before they started knocking them down for condos, and it was going on seventy years old. It had vinyl siding from the nineties and a newish roof but the floors sagged in some places and it was hell to heat. Her father, in a fit of paranoia, had also cut down the trees surrounding the house, a big pine in the front yard and two sycamores in the back, leaving it bare, exposed. She wished there were bars on the windows like she’d had at the apartment. But her father insisted on the alarm.
She took quick showers, three minutes or less. It was something she’d had to get used to when she moved in with her father, who was cheap about the water even though she paid the bills now.
She toweled off and put on her pilly blue robe and brushed her teeth and rinsed with hydrogen peroxide and went out to the kitchen and checked her phone and put on more water for tea. But she remembered about the milk and shut off the stove and listened to the kettle sigh as the boiling slowed. She emptied the now-cold mug of old tea and rinsed it with soap and water.
For dinner, she dipped pretzels in hummus and boiled frozen vegetables in a saucepan with a handle that spun on a dangly screw. She had to be careful not to burn herself when she drained the vegetables. She lost some down the drain, as she always did, and she put what was left in a cereal bowl with a teaspoon of Olivio and ate the mushy vegetables at the table with the St. Mary’s bulletin spread in front of her.
The postcard from Jimmy was up on the refrigerator, held in place by a Sacred Heart Auto League magnet that was losing its pull. A picture of the Texas Capitol was on the front, Hello from Austin in red curlicue script across the top. She wished she had an address for him. She’d send what she could, even if it was only fifty bucks. He was twenty-three but still her baby. She missed him. She worried so much.
When she finished eating, she washed her bowl, scrubbing away a pea that stuck to the rim of the bowl like a naggy scab. She set the bowl in the dish drain and washed her hands under the cold water. Always cold water when you washed. Another habit of her father’s. “Don’t waste the hot,” he’d say. “Goddamn city’s ripping me off.”
She checked her phone. Nothing.
She went to the other bathroom and turned the hot water in the sink to a drip so the pipes didn’t freeze. Her father had built the back bathroom, his bathroom, as an addition, and it wasn’t well insulated. She’d forgotten a few weeks before to leave the water running and she’d had to go rent a kerosene heater from Home Depot during a blizzard and put it in the crawlspace under the bathroom until the pipes thawed.
She went back into the living room and turned down the TV a little.
She looked out through the blinds and saw the streetlights changing, splashing colors on the snow-wet pavement, and she saw shadows of people passing.
She sat down in her father’s recliner and put her feet up, dropping the phone on the floor nearby. The remote was on the arm of the chair. She picked it up and flipped around. They didn’t have cable, just the free channels the digital antenna picked up. She found Highway to Heaven somewhere in the thirties, between the movie stations her father usually kept on. It was her all-time favorite show. She’d seen this episode, the one about the banker and the bum. She put her father’s red-and-black-checkered blanket over her and pulled it up under her chin.
At four in the morning, Erica sat up, shivering, so cold she felt wet all over. She went over and checked the thermostat. It was on fifty-nine, where her father liked it at night. She would’ve raised it with him gone but she’d forgotten and now she was awake an hour before she needed to be. She turned the knob to sixty-three and went over and stood next to the radiator, warming herself over the pipes as they began to pulse with heat. She yawned and went back to the recliner and watched an infomercial for the Magic Bullet.
She thought about having to drink her tea without milk and got sad.
Then again, there hadn’t been a call from Saints Joachim and Anne in the middle of the night, and she should’ve been happy about that.
She’d check in when she got to work at seven and hope for the best.
Instead of tea, she decided to have some of her father’s instant coffee. It was decaf, and it smelled like her father when she opened the jar. She spooned some crystals into a mug and boiled water and waited near the stove, holding her hands over the gas.
She poured the water and stirred the crystals until they dissolved.
She drank the coffee standing up.
For breakfast she had half a container of plain yogurt. When she was done, she put a plastic baggie over the top of the open yogurt and fastened it with a rubber band in case it got toppled. She put it back in the refrigerator.
She took her Centrum and red yeast rice with a quarter-glass of orange juice. She’d bought the pulpy kind by mistake and it felt like sewing thread in her mouth.
She looked at the clock.
She showered again, two minutes under hot water this time, keeping her hair dry with a cap.
She went into the bedroom and put on her purple scrubs and her white Keds. She stopped to look at her parents in their wedding picture, young and far away in the past.
She remembered the cross in her jacket pocket and went to the hallway to see if it was still there. It was, coiled like a garden hose, the chain crinkled into hard knots. She sat at the kitchen table and smoothed the chain out and put it back around her neck.
The phone rang on the floor where she’d left it. She rushed over and picked it up, not even checking the number.
“I knew you’d be up,” Jeannie said. “I’m worried about you.”
“What are you doing up?” Erica said.
“I never sleep.”
“I didn’t hear anything from the hospital.”
“That’s good.”
“I guess.”
Silence passed between them for thirty seconds but it felt like thirty minutes.
“I’ll come down when I can,” Jeannie said.
“Okay, come when you can,” Erica said.
Jeannie exhaled.
Erica ended the call. She went over to the window, thumbed open the blinds, and looked outside. Still dark but she could tell it was icy. She didn’t have to leave for another hour, but she’d need to salt the sidewalk, start the car, and scrape the windshield. The thought of it exhausted her.
She put on her heavy jacket and gloves and went down to the cellar for salt. The bag, which she’d clawed open last storm, was leaning up against the wall at the bottom of the stairs. The furnace was humming in the darkness. The cellar had never frightened her but the early morning seemed to rattle ghosts from the walls. She saw shapes. Heard creaks. She thought about how she’d never watched another horror movie after seeing The Exorcist in high school and hustled back upstairs.
Collar up, she drew her hood over her forehead and cinched it tight. She reached into the bag of salt for the rusty coffee can she used as a scoop, powered down the alarm, and headed out into the cold.
The darkness, gauzed by streetlights, overwhelmed her. Everything looked suspicious: parked cars, riot gates on the stores across the street, telephone poles, garbage piled at the curb.
The sidewalk was pure ice.
She sprinkled salt in front of her as she walked and fought for balance. Falling would be another thing she didn’t need. She paused, steadied herself, dribbled more salt.
She made it to the car at the end of the driveway, the windshield thick with frost. She put down the bag and tried the door but it wouldn’t budge. She’d run out of de-icer weeks ago. She tried again. Now she’d have to boil water, haul it back out, and hope it was enough. Christ.
She counted to forty-four, a habit she had when she needed to have patience, and yanked the handle again. Harder this time. The door snapped open, and she fell back, landing on her ass.
In her mind, for a second, she was a kid getting ready to make snow angels. But here she actually was, an old lady on the icy ground, salt pebbled around her, bone-tired, her bottom sore.
She got up and dusted herself off and started the car, pumping the defroster to the max, and went to work on the windshield with a warped red scraper. The ice was caked on. She chipped at it. Once the defroster kicked in, the ice began to loosen and it came away in larger chunks. She sat in the car as it warmed and held her gloved hands over the vent. Her breath covered the windshield.
The sidewalk needed more salt. She left the car running and scattered it between the fence and the curb, using almost the whole bag. She didn’t want anyone going down outside their house. She could just hear her father: “All we need’s a goddamn lawsuit.”
When she was done, she headed back inside and lowered the thermostat to fifty-six and shut the TV and all the lights and put on the alarm. She backed out of the driveway carefully—people always took the corner too fast—and drove to work on slick roads with her headlights bouncing across the blackness in front of her.
Work was a madhouse. Charts from the day before hadn’t been filed. Being office manager at this urology practice meant more than just managing the office—it meant being a babysitter, a nurse, doing everything but tying people’s shoes for them. She had to stop hiring high school girls. She’d had the job for twenty-five years and she’d been fed up with it for fifteen. But applying to other jobs was a hassle. She’d gotten this one through her Aunt Elly. Before this she’d worked at a jewelry store in King’s Plaza and gotten a bachelor’s in psychology at Brooklyn College. She’d worked at the McDonald’s on Twenty-Fourth Avenue until she landed the jewelry store job at the end of senior year. Her résumé was just a few lines long.
She was the only one who came into the office before eight thirty and she liked it that way. She had ninety minutes to herself. She scheduled surgeries and dealt with insurance, fixed what others had screwed up.
She was so busy she almost forgot to call Saints Joachim and Anne. When she finally did, it was past eight.
“I’m calling about my father, Joe Barba,” she told the nurse who picked up.
“Oh,” the nurse said.
“That a bad oh?”
“It’s not a great oh.”
“What happened?”
“He’s a tough customer.”
“Stubborn, I know.”
“He kept trying to get up. We don’t restrain here, so we lowered the bed and put a sensor on him. He kept at it. We were worried he’d fall, so we put him in a wheelchair and brought him out to the TV room where we could keep a better eye on him.”
“How’s his strength?” Erica said.
“He’s weak, but he keeps trying to get up,” the nurse said. “He wants his coat. He says he’s ready to go home.”
“That’s my father.”
“He has his first rehab session at ten. Hopefully he’ll get into a rhythm today. First night’s always the toughest.”
“Thank you so much,” Erica said. “Will you tell him I’ll be in after work?”
The nurse said she would and then hung up. Erica just held the phone to her ear, listening to the sound of being disconnected.
Dr. Dinapoli came in a little after eight thirty. She needed someone to break down in front of, and she started to cry before he even asked how her father was. He hugged her. He wore a designer wool trench coat with gold buttons that smelled like his house in New Jersey, where she’d been once for his son’s confirmation. “Tough one?” he said.
“I just can’t anymore,” she said.
“I know. Same thing with my old man. It’s not easy.” He stepped back and put his hand on her shoulder. “You’re being a great daughter. The best daughter. You’re doing everything you can.”
“I am, right?”
“You are. Don’t doubt that. Hard decisions are hard decisions.”
“He always liked you, my father. He always said, ‘Doc Dinapoli’s a good guy. Not much of a doctor but . . .’ ” She laughed and knuckled away tears.
“He’s a piece of work, your old man. He’ll probably be fine. Outlive us all.” Dr. Dinapoli went to his office and took off his trench coat.
Erica put on coffee in the kitchen and set out a tray of rainbow cookies that a patient had brought in late the day before and then got back to dealing with charts and insurance.
The first call from the nurse she’d spoken to earlier came at nine, just as Ludmilla and Marianne arrived. Her father wanted to talk to her. “Get me out of here,” he said. “Come get me now.”
“I can’t, Daddy,” she said. “I’m at work. I’ll come later.”
“Bullshit. All I did for you, you’re leaving me here to rot. I just want to be home. In my own bed.”
“I know.”
“So come get me.”
“Okay, after work.” She had no intention of getting him discharged but she needed to calm him down.
“After work, you’ll get me the hell out of here?” he said.
“I promise.” Her heart fell a little, using promise like that when she didn’t mean it. It was like when Jimmy was a kid and she’d promise a Hostess cupcake, hoping he’d forget.
Her father gave the phone back to the nurse.
“I’m sorry,” Erica said. “I guess he’s driving you nuts.”
“It’s okay,” the nurse said. “He wouldn’t rest until he got to talk to you.”
“I should’ve asked to talk to him when I called before. Maybe that would’ve settled him a little.”
“He’s just getting adjusted.”
“I hope so. I really, really do.”
The nurse said goodbye and Erica felt her stomach tighten.
Marianne, from across the room, held up two cigarettes and motioned for them to go outside.
Erica nodded.
They put on their jackets and came together by the elevator, Marianne throwing an arm around her. “You’ll be fine, hon,” Marianne said.
“He won’t make it through the day,” Erica said.
“What do you mean?”
“I mean, he’ll have me getting him out of there and then he’ll be back at home with me and what am I gonna do with him?”
Out front, they stood away from the building, near the bus stop, where the sidewalk had been layered thickly with salt, and they smoked.
“Ben is sick,” Marianne said.
“How long?” Erica said.
“Months. Doesn’t look good.”
“Shit, I’m sorry. Here I am complaining about my father and . . .”
“And what? My no-good boyfriend’s on the ropes, that’s it. All the promises he broke. Said he’d divorce Carlee. Said he’d buy us a house on Staten Island. Good, he’s dying.” Marianne blew smoke at the sky.
“You don’t mean that.”
“Bullshit I don’t. I won’t bring him water. I won’t even see him. Let his fat wife feed him his pills.”
“What’s he got?”
“Pancreatic cancer, what he deserves.”
“Jesus.”
“He’ll be gone in a few months.”
“Twenty years you’ve been with him, right?”
“Twenty years I wasted.”
“He was good to you.”
“No, he was.” Marianne choked up a little. “I’m sorry he’s dying.”
“I don’t get dying,” Erica said.
“We’re in our fifties and we don’t get it,” Marianne said. “I don’t think we’ll ever get it.”
They flicked their butts out into the street and went back inside. The second call came when Erica was taking her jacket off, a little after 9:20 a.m. on the computer clock. This time there was no nurse. Just her father. “Christ, kid,” he said. “What’d I do?”
“I’ll be there after work,” she said.
“I need to go now.”
She slowed down her voice, like she was talking to a toddler or a drunk. “I. Will. Be. There. After. Work.”
Her father hung up.
He called back five minutes later. “Bring my razor,” he said. “I want a shave before you take me out of this joint.”
She said, “Okay.”
Three minutes later, her phone buzzed again. “And bring my brown shoes from my closet,” her father said. “And the socks in the top drawer without any elastic. All the other ones cut off my circulation.”
She said, “Okay.” He was doing much better, sounding a lot more like himself, but what would she do with him at home if he couldn’t walk, couldn’t take care of himself? Before she took him to Lutheran, he’d kept her up all night, wobbling to the bathroom on unsteady legs, refusing to use a walker, pissing in the corner by mistake, crumbling to the floor and shitting himself. Part of that had been the pneumonia but part of it had just been him hitting the age where things like that started to happen.
After the calls, she was tense. She forgot to drink water. Her mouth was so dry her teeth stuck to her lips. She made appointments. She helped Ludmilla in the back and they talked about how hard it all was. Ludmilla was a PA but she’d been a doctor back in Russia and she’d lost her husband to brain cancer right after moving to the United States. She’d really helped Erica when Eddie was dying from the same thing. Losing husbands like that in their forties had fused them together.
“Are you eating?” Ludmilla said.
“You know,” Erica said.
“Are you drinking water?”
“I forgot.”
Ludmilla huffed and then went to the kitchen and filled a cup from the Poland Spring dispenser and brought it back to Erica. “Drink water at least,” she said.
Erica drank the whole cup and her mouth softened. She thanked Ludmilla.
“You can’t let yourself fall apart,” Ludmilla said. “Who will take care of you?”
“I know,” Erica said. “There’s no one.”
Her father called one more time, a little after noon, to ask if she was on her way yet. She told him she’d be there around six thirty, that she still had a dozen patients and a lot to do at the office. After that, he must have fallen asleep or settled into watching TV because the afternoon passed without any word from him. The phone still rang, constantly, and her heart sank every time, but it wasn’t him again, just people making or canceling appointments, wanting to ask the doctor a question, haggling about insurance. She got lost in work, as much as she could anyway, and Marianne fed her cigarettes on breaks and Ludmilla made sure she was drinking water and even brought out a bowl of unsalted pretzels because she knew it was the only thing Erica might actually eat.
As the end of the day neared, Erica found herself getting irritable. She cursed at patients under her breath. Saying words she didn’t like to say, even in a hush, felt good. She was worried about what she’d do when she got to Saints Joachim and Anne. How could she lie to her father, tell him he wasn’t coming home? Surely that was a worse sin than bringing him home and leaving him to his own devices while she went to work.
Ludmilla left at six and put a hand on Erica’s shoulder and asked if she’d be okay. Erica nodded. Marianne and Dr. Dinapoli did the same thing when they left fifteen minutes later. When she was finally alone in the office, she shut out the lights and sat in the dark and played solitaire on her phone and bit the eraser off a pencil the way she used to in grammar school.
Her father looked panicked when she got there. His eyes were bleary. His mouth was hanging open. “Where the hell you been?” he said. “I’ve been waiting for a goddamn week.”
“You haven’t been waiting a week,” Erica said.
“The hell I haven’t.”
“You’ve barely been here a day.” The nurses at Lutheran had told her that the dementia he had when he was first checked in was called hospital psychosis. It had faded day by day at Lutheran but now she wondered if it was back, if bringing him to rehab had reignited it somehow. “I brought you a couple of rainbows.” She dug around in her pocket and took out the rainbow cookies she’d wrapped in a paper towel.
“Day, my ass. Get me out of here.”
She set the cookies on his bedside table. “You’re gonna stay a little longer and get better.”
“You promised,” he said.
So he remembered that. “I shouldn’t have done that,” Erica said. “I was confused. They can’t check you out yet, not without doing a few days of rehab at least.”
He pushed up with his arms, trying to sit straight on the bed, and collapsed back into the pillow.
“See,” Erica said. “You have no strength. They’ll teach you how to get strong again.”
“Bullshit,” he said. “I don’t want to be strong. I’m eighty-five. I just want to be in my house.”
“I know you do.”
“Then get me out of here. A week in this joint, you oughta be ashamed.”
She reached out and held her father’s thin, bony hand. As a child, she’d loved the grease under his fingernails, the tough skin. Now it was papery, tired blood humming behind the frailness.
He pulled his hand away. “Get out of here with this hand-holding shit.”
“Please don’t talk to me like that,” Erica said.
“Go to hell,” he said.
“Daddy?”
“Take me home or you’re not my daughter.”
She felt the tears coming but anger rushed up and beat them back. “Fine! You want to come home, I’ll bring you home. This isn’t prison. I’ll take you home and you can keep me up all night and fall down when I’m not around and break your hip like Mommy and die in the hospital.”
Her father said nothing.
“That’s what you want?” Erica said.
“That’s what I want,” he said.
“Fine,” she said. Her head was spinning. She sat down to get her balance back.
“Just get me out here,” he said.
“I said fine.”
But getting him out wasn’t going to happen with Diane gone for the day. Erica was hungry and exhausted and now there was this. She went out to the nurses’ station and told the two nurses on duty that she wanted to take him home. They told her it would have to wait until the morning, as she’d suspected. She was hoping her father would be sleeping when she got back but he wasn’t. “Well?” he said.
“They don’t discharge this time of day.”
“Bullshit.”
“We have to wait until tomorrow. I’ll take off. I’ll come back in the morning.”
“Stay.”
“Daddy, I can’t.”
He closed his eyes.
“Fine,” she said. She got a blanket out of the closet and sat down and sighed.
Gene wheeled into the room. “He talk you into staying?” he said.
“He sure did,” Erica said. “And into checking him out tomorrow.”
Gene laughed. “He’s got some of his marbles, I’ll give him that.”
Erica smiled. “I’m so tired.”
“I’m sure. Those chairs aren’t very comfortable.”
“Why should I be comfortable?”
“Well, try to get some rest.” Gene disappeared behind the curtain.
Erica looked at her father. He was sleeping deep, snoring. She thought about slipping out the way she had the night before. Her luck, he’d wake up and make a big fuss and disown her. It just wasn’t worth it. Keeping him here wasn’t worth it either. He wanted to come home so bad, why stand in the way? She closed her eyes and tried to sleep but she couldn’t sleep so she prayed. She prayed for her father and Jimmy. She prayed for Eddie and her mother up in heaven. The darkness swallowed her prayers. 
Parts 2, 3, and 4 of Everything Is Broken will appear in the next three issues of SwR.
William Boyle is from Brooklyn, New York, and currently lives in Oxford, Mississippi. He is the author of the novels Gravesend, The Lonely Witness, A Friend Is a Gift You Give Yourself, and the forthcoming City of Margins. Everything Is Broken was published in France by Gallmeister Editions in 2017; this is its first appearance in English.
Illustration by Mathieu Persan.
