Both

Like a snake, my father’s scar meandered down from his breast bone to the bottom of his torso.The thin, navy blue cotton robe he wore around the house often opened in a vee, revealing this stitched-together part of him, the tiny lines and uneven grooves which formed the skin that had been sewn together like an inseam, a shirt. I knew that the doctors had broken his bones to get to his heart and I pictured them pounding on his open, sleeping chest until it finally gave way, his eyes never opening against the merciful power of anesthesia. They had touched his heart, I knew, and even at my age, an age where reality still suspended easily, I knew that it was remarkable to reach into the depths of another person and hold their heart in your hands. They fixed it with a new valve, one from a pig, and then they took a needle and a very long thread and cross-hatched a thick line of embroidery down his body.

I sat on his lap quite a bit and once I traced the scar with my finger. I hadn’t, until then, realized how long it was, how it ran almost the entire length of his trunk. He also had a well at the base of his throat, a cup. He told me it was from something they had to do to help him breathe. He was different, my father, no one else I knew had these scars and divots, walked as slowly. Nor had anyone else ever made me laugh the way he did. He teased me in ways that made my eyes sparkle, with made-up private jokes, ones that only my sister and I understood. He told us bedtime stories every night until he left for the hospital and stayed away forever. They were fairy tales, old standbys, stories he concocted with his own brand of humor. I laughed every time he told me about how I sneaked into the hospital as a four-year-old in order to visit my mother and newborn sister. I had, he said, after repeatedly being denied entry onto the ward for being too young, dressed as a 64-year-old woman and connived my way in past the unsuspecting and gullible front desk. My father sat on the edge of my small bed, his long, thin back arching him over toward his knees, our dark bedroom forming the silhouette of his perfect man shape against the light of the hall.

***

I first saw my daughter through a wall of thick glass. I had to peer closely and practically press the glass with my forehead against the glare from the nursery lights. She had a head of wild black hair which made me laugh, she sure didn’t take after her old man, balding even as I stood before her. She was calm, sleeping. The nurse was going to let me in to hold her and I waited, wondering how I was going to actually touch this brand new creature, someone so much mine, yet whom I knew not at all.

She stirred as the nurse picked her up and motioned for me to come in. My daughter was cradled in this strange woman’s arms, but not as a soft loaf of bread, something that could just fall in at the sides. That is my baby, I thought, anger rising. The nurse walked quickly across the floor, squeezing between incubators and cradles as though she were carrying a football. She handed the swathe to me; I looked at my big hands, clumsy and ridiculous now, and wondered if this moment would matter to her one day, wondered if I touched her wrong she would hold it against me. How was I supposed to do this thing?

She landed softly. My arms fell into place and I don’t know how, but they bent at just the right angle at the last possible moment and the fit could not have been more perfect. And I knew her immediately.

***

It was hard on my mother, traveling the hour back and forth to the hospital every day with a four-year-old and an infant at home. Babysitters, rushed breakfasts, then dinners; I heard about them much later, but had no recollection of those weeks except one. It was the afternoon my grandfather took us all out to the university campus. We drove over smooth highway, then bumpy red bricks as we got closer to the hospital. Tall, old, buildings surrounded us, their roofs pointed like cathedrals. My father was somewhere in one of those buildings, doing mysterious things. He had had an operation and doctors and nurses were taking care of him. I had to sit downstairs with my grandmother and sister while my mother and grandfather walked into the elevator and disappeared. I couldn’t see him, my own father, I was too young and not allowed. The waiting room was warm and dim, the chairs brown vinyl and silver metal. It was crowded and I colored in a book. Soon we went home. And then I grew with this father for seven years, shared the couch with him while we watched hilarious sitcoms, took slow, summer nighttime walks down the long end of the block, stood at the side of the sink in the morning watching him shave. When he ate, his huge bites made the food disappear off his plate like magic, when he sneezed, the house seemed to shake. He was bigger than life, a thrilling man who regularly and literally swept me off my feet and onto his while he whisked me around the room to imagined music, dancing me into giggles.

***

I watched her grow and through her eyes, my own opened. One night I taught her to play Solitaire and as I left the room, I saw her cheat. When I returned I asked her if she had done so. She said, no, she would never cheat. I asked her again, and again she denied the charge. Cheating was wrong, I told her, and just in case you ever decide to, just remember that the Man Upstairs does not appreciate a cheater. I could feel the air around me change then, and she broke down, admitted her crime. She was repentant, a little scared. The Man Upstairs was big to her, an entity that had more say-so in matters than even her old dad. She promised to never, ever cheat again and to this day I believe she meant it. I saw her learn a lesson, and I knew that it was one that she would store in her memory right next to the ones of me. She would need those.

They only gave me seven extra years. They replaced my damaged part with another, but this was new, and didn’t always work very well. I had two daughters at home and I had to leave. I didn’t know when I would go, but I knew that I had better store up as much of them as possible for the long trip ahead. When you know it’s time to go, you suddenly realize that you will leave a piece of you behind and that no matter how much you yearn to keep it with you, no amount of bargaining or wishing, praying or wheedling will do you an ounce of good. So I went, and I scarcely said goodbye. Because just how in the world are you supposed to do that?