They nearly lost him many times that first night. His breathing would slow, then stop, and my mother—and the heavenly host of women who worked for her—would fly about, adjusting chakras and tapping pressure points, anything to coax his brittle lungs to resume their rattle.
That morning was when Audrey called me.* His heart had stopped twice during the night, she told me. It would probably be his heart that killed him, assuming his lungs didn’t give out first. Either way, Audrey was sure he’d be dead by midday.
I called Nick. I told him I had to go to Idaho for a few days, for a family thing, nothing serious. He knew I wasn’t telling him something—I could hear the hurt in his voice that I wouldn’t confide in him—but I put him out of my mind the moment I hung up the phone.
I stood, keys in hand, hand on the doorknob, and hesitated. The strep. What if I gave it to Dad? I had been taking the penicillin for nearly three days. The doctor had said that after twenty-four hours I would no longer be contagious, but then he was a doctor, and I didn’t trust him.
I waited a day. I took several times the prescribed dose of penicillin, then called Mother and asked what I should do.
“You should come home,” she said, and her voice broke. “I don’t think the strep will matter tomorrow.”
I don’t recall the scenery from the drive. My eyes barely registered the patchwork of corn and potato fields, or the dark hills covered in pine. Instead I saw my father, the way he’d looked the last time I’d seen him, that twisted expression. I remembered the searing pitch of my voice as I’d screamed at him.
Like Kylie, I don’t remember what I saw when I first looked at my father. I know that when Mother had removed the gauze that morning, she’d found that his ears were so burned, the skin so glutinous, they had fused to the syrupy tissue behind them. When I walked through the back door, the first thing I saw was Mother grasping a butter knife, which she was using to pry my father’s ears from his skull. I can still picture her gripping the knife, her eyes fixed, focused, but where my father should be, there’s an aperture in my memory.
The smell in the room was powerful—of charred flesh, and of comfrey, mullein and plantain. I watched Mother and Audrey change his remaining bandages. They began with his hands. His fingers were slimy, coated in a pale ooze that was either melted skin or pus. His arms were not burned and neither were his shoulders or back, but a thick swath of gauze ran over his stomach and chest. When they removed it, I was pleased to see large patches of raw, angry skin. There were a few craters from where the flames must have concentrated in jets. They gave off a pungent smell, like meat gone to rot, and were filled with white pools.
But it was his face that visited my dreams that night. He still had a forehead and nose. The skin around his eyes and partway down his cheeks was pink and healthy. But below his nose, nothing was where it should be. Red, mangled, sagging, it looked like a plastic drama mask that had been held too close to a candle.
Dad hadn’t swallowed anything—no food, no water—for nearly three days. Mother called a hospital in Utah and begged them to give her an IV. “I need to hydrate him,” she said. “He’ll die if he doesn’t get water.”
The doctor said he would send a chopper that very minute but Mother said no. “Then I can’t help you,” the doctor said. “You’re going to kill him, and I want no part of it.”
Mother was beside herself. In a final, desperate act, she gave Dad an enema, pushing the tube in as far as she dared, trying to flush enough liquid through his rectum to keep him alive. She had no idea if it would work—if there was even an organ in that part of the body to absorb the water—but it was the only orifice that hadn’t been scorched.
I slept on the living room floor that night so I could be there, in the room, when we lost him. I awoke several times to gasps and flights of movements and murmurs that it had happened again, he’d stopped breathing.
Once, an hour before dawn, his breath left him and I was sure it was the end: he was dead and would not be raised. I rested my hand on a small patch of bandages while Audrey and Mother rushed around me, chanting and tapping. The room was not at peace, or maybe it’s just that I wasn’t. For years my father and I had been locked in conflict, an endless battle of wills. I thought I had accepted it, accepted our relationship for what it was. But in that moment, I realized how much I’d been counting on that conflict coming to an end, how deeply I believed in a future in which we would be a father and daughter at peace.