he might soon recover.
“You know, in many ways you were good about sex,” I told him. Sex was our easiest subject. “When you put in a diaphragm,” he’d lectured me in high school, “you have a moment all to yourself to decide again what you want to do.” He had not insisted I take the pill, or worried openly about my becoming pregnant, instead giving the sense he trusted me, and knew me to be reasonable, profound even.
“You didn’t try to make me feel ashamed,” I said.
“Yes. Yes!” he said. He was hardly able to contain himself, bobbing his thin legs up and down in the seat beside me. We were in the car with the engine off because we had arrived at the sushi restaurant in the mall. “That’s what I was trying for,” he said. “And do you know what? I was the first person you talked to after you lost your virginity!” he said. “It was so great. It meant so much to me.” I’d forgotten this before he mentioned it.
“I know you better than I know the girls,” he said, as we got out of the car and walked toward the restaurant. I didn’t know what to say back; this was a shocking claim, considering I’d met him so late and they’d lived with him their whole lives. It couldn’t be true, I thought.
That night, I walked into his bedroom upstairs when he was watching old episodes of Law & Order. He’d asked me, abruptly, from bed, “Are you going to write about me?”
“No,” I said.
“Good,” he said, and turned back to face the television.
My mother became sick, a sinus and bone infection that we couldn’t diagnose at first, leaving her unable to work and unable to pay her rent. She had sold her house on Alameda de las Pulgas a few years before, against my wishes, and had used the money to travel and live for several years until the money ran out. Desperate, I called the parents of a friend from Nueva who offered her a place to live for a few months in their extra house in San Francisco. Another set of friends loaned me money to help her pay for oral surgery that made her cheek balloon out as if it had been stung by a bee.
A few weeks later, I went to visit my father in the hospital in Memphis after he’d had a liver transplant. He’d gone to Memphis because that’s where a liver became available, he and my stepmother flying there in his private jet late at night. Once, when he had to urinate, a nurse had tried to usher me out of the room.
“She can stay,” he’d said, and then proceeded to pee in a plastic jar under his gown while I stood there, talking to me as he peed, as if he couldn’t be away from me for even one second. He’d had two rooms at the hospital, a room with his hospital bed and a small anteroom, and in the anteroom were a couch and chairs, like the kind at elementary schools, with melamine bodies and metal legs, and in order to visit we had to move the chairs around, pushing the extras out of the way, making them clack. At one point, sitting in the anteroom with me and my aunt and stepmother, he started gasping for breath and turning purplish, and we all panicked, trying to find out what was wrong. I glanced down surreptitiously and noticed with dismay that the leg of my chair was crimping his oxygen tube. I moved my chair as quickly as I could, and he started to breathe again.
Less than a year after the transplant, back at the Waverley house, the cancer had spread to the top of his femur and the outside lining of his gut. “What’s it called?” I asked the nurse, Elham.
“It’s called the superficial fascia,” she said. I imagined it, the pouch holding his intestines together, and for some reason in my imagination it was a phosphorescent skein like a jellyfish or like city lights seen at night from an airplane. Inside the glowing outlines, it was dark. He was called Johnny Eight on the papers in the hospital. Sometimes he sucked on morphine lollipops. In the bed sleeping, at certain angles, he looked like a pile of yellow bones. He couldn’t walk anymore. “He’s not in pain,” Elham reassured me. His brain, according to the MRI scan, was cancer-free.
During my previous visit, he