IN WHICH I TRY TO REACH YOU
By CARMEN WILLIAM
Dad is in the kitchen toasting spices. Cracking cardamon pods open with his teeth and tossing cloves until the air is thick and fragrant. Plucking at tea leaves and stripping the skin from gnarled nubs of ginger, making a mess over the benchtops.
When it’s done, he simmers them with milk and dark nutty sugar. His willowy frame braced over the stove until the mixture begins to froth and spill down the sides of the pot in great weeping slides.
‘It’s alchemy, Nia,’ he tells me seriously. ‘You have to boil all the ego out.’He’s always had a funny way of speaking.
I laugh, weaving my arm through his as he wobbles. ‘Okay, Dad. I’ll keep that in mind.’
He smiles and kisses my cheek, ‘Ah, my brilliant daughter.’
We sit together. He pours the steaming chai between three porcelain mugs, slopping it across the table. His hands are trembling more than the last time I visited. I can see the agitation building behind his irises, deepening the lines in his face.
‘It’s all right, Dad,’ I say. ‘We’ll just clean it up.’
To demonstrate I wipe my sleeve over a particularly big spill, letting it soak up into the cottony fabric.
‘See? Like it was never there.’
‘Silly girl,’ he chides, giving my hand an affectionate pat, ‘you’ll ruin that smart top.’
Reyna had told me that it was important to maintain Dad’s independence for as long as possible, so I resist the urge to jump to my feet as he eases to his own. Instead, I watch as he picks up two drinks and carries them out to the garden, to where Mum is resting in the shade. The day is hot and slow, the bougainvillea surrounding them both like a bright, thorny cage. Pink crepe paper blossoms running rampant over the dry beds.
When he gets to her, he places the cup gingerly beside the urn’s smooth stone. Out of the pocket of his dressing gown, he pulls a matchbox and a single stick of incense, stooping to push it down into the soil, like a ritual. The matchstick’s red head wobbles in his unsteady grasp, crackling as he moves it back and forth, willing fire. Today it takes him twelve shaky strikes.
*
Reyna’s call finds me at two-thirty in the morning. I’m too busy shaking off dreams to grasp what she’s saying; listening to the soft lilt of her voice with my eyes closed and my consciousness stuck somewhere transient and half-formed. When she tells me the room number—347—everything rushes into dizzying focus. She’s calm and professional and patient. Sympathetic, but not at the cost of the truth. I say ‘okay’ more times than I can count, thank her, and try not to picture Dad splitting open like a seed pod on rough hospital sheets.
In the washed-out kitchen of my apartment, the entire spice drawer is strewn out across the laminate bench. The stove burner is lit, the low circle of flames runic in the steady dark. I pour milk into a pot, place it over the heat and watch it form skin. I think of Dad’s body and its constant motion. Of chrysalises and calcination and ash; of being reborn from sweet green cardamon shells. I am trying to undo something that can’t be undone. Praying for alchemical transformation under the light of the rangehood.
*
I sneak the thermos of miracle potion in under my jacket. Visiting hours for the ward have only just opened, and except for the occasional nurse, the sterile halls are empty and listless. Something urges me to keep the bottle hidden, that another’s eyes will shatter its delicate spell.
When I get to room 347, I pause. The door is a yolky yellow, left ajar so I can see into the space beyond. Dad is on the far side of the room, sitting upright in bed and watching me through half-cracked eyes. A vase of cut flowers, pale green stems and milky heads, tremble on the windowsill. For a while all I can do is stand there, lost to the sacred beep, beep, beep of the monitor and the slow slip of morning light through the blinds.
There is a chair in the corner, straight-backed, hard plastic. I drag it over, wishing I could curl up beside him instead; crawl under the sheets and fold myself into the space between his body and the metal bedrail. The tendons in Dad’s hands flex and soften. Recognition or impulse, I can’t tell.
I twist the lid off the thermos; steam rising to meet the cold room. A spill of warmth and spice. I hold the chai to his parted lips, tipping the liquid in like I’m feeding a kitten, or a child. He swallows.
Exhales.
I close my hands around his slender fingers; feel the way they shake and pray to the star anise.
The monitor spikes and falls, charting heartbeats like symbols. There is a brief, impossible moment, where everything is still. And then, under the humming fluorescence of the hospital lights, my father grows wings.
