Last Words
Janine Canan
Justine’s father sat in a wheelchair, his emphysema far advanced. He was panting arduously, as if trudging up the last steep mountain in a lifetime of hard work. After so many years of painful breathing, ineffable joy suddenly lifted him up. Happily he greeted his long lost friends. “That’s different from anything I’ve ever heard of,” he thundered with amazement. And then, with cosmic dismay, “What a crazy price.” Those were his last words.
Justine’s younger sister tried spooning him some soup--but that only triggered the final coma. Her father’s commanding head fell over. They had to carry him to bed. Justine automatically stepped back, so the other members could say their good-byes. As she stood in the corner of the room next to the stuffed green parakeet she had recently given him, she could feel her father, like her, watching--he had already left his body--this final scene.
He had been home from school, sick, the day his father’s model A Ford skidded fatally over ice into a giant sycamore. After the farm was sold, his family headed to California, where he and his brother found work picking oranges. He knew he would never go to college--he would have to learn from the books of Experience. After he met the stunning dark-eyed Maria, he bought an orange grove with thousands of orange trees, and Justine was born. He had been a tender father. But most of the time he was at work. His whole life he had been at work.
The sun was setting over the magnificent blue Pacific, leaving an intense orange sky. The silvery old man lay back, gasping on his bed. His wife knelt on one side of the bed, and Justine’s sister knelt on the other. Another sister was missing--abdicated long ago. Justine gazed softly at the lean, well-used body, sucking over wet gravel its last lingering breath. “Dearest--we’ll join you,” her mother cried. “Soon,” her sister added, strangely emphatic.
Late that night--about two o’clock--Justine woke up, and went to her father’s room. Someone had closed his mouth. He looked like a marble sculpture, deeply carved by life. An authoritative hawk’s beak guarded the mouth. Justine sat for a long time in the dim silence. And then she was three, standing on the sidewalk, her little arm raised, hand tightly clasped in her father’s wide freckled hand. He looked both ways for any oncoming cars, as the wind blew through his thick black hair, and through the waving fronds of the palm trees.
Justine saw her father for the last time only a few nights later in a dream. She stood at her window, gazing out. High above in another building, her old father climbed into bed. She waved as hard as she could--but he never saw her.
