The Return

Along with her sisters, Hope chipped in to help as much as possible. They installed hand railings in the bathtub and hallways and found a used van for disabled people with a wheelchair lift. They hoped it would enable their father to get around town, but his ability to drive lasted less than seven months, and their mother was too nervous to drive the van at all. They sold it at a loss, and in the last year of his life, her father never ventured farther than either the front porch or back deck, unless he was going to see his doctors.

But he wasn’t alone. Because he was loved by his family and revered by former students and coworkers, visitors flocked to the house. As was customary in the South, they brought food, and at the end of every week, Hope’s mother would plead with her daughters to take some of it home with them because the refrigerator was overstuffed.

Even that relatively uplifting period was short-lived, however, ending for good when her father began losing the ability to speak. In the final few months of his life, he was hooked to an oxygen tank and suffered from violent coughing fits because his muscles were too weak to dislodge the phlegm. Hope could remember the countless times she pounded on his back while her father struggled to breathe. He’d lost so much weight that she sometimes felt as though she would break him in half, but eventually her dad would cough up the phlegm and take long, gasping breaths in the aftermath, his face as pale as rice.

The final weeks seemed like a single extended fever dream—home health nurses were hired, at first for half the day, and then around the clock. Her dad had to be fed liquid through straws. He became so weak that finishing even half a glass took nearly an hour. Incontinence followed as his body rapidly wasted away.

Hope visited him every day during that period. Because speaking had become a challenge for him, she did all the talking. She would tell him about the kids, or confide her struggles with Josh. She confessed that a neighbor had seen Josh at a hotel with a local Realtor; she confirmed that Josh had recently admitted the affair but was still in communication with the woman, and Hope wasn’t sure what to do.

Finally, during one of his last lucid periods, six years after her stay at Sunset Beach, Hope told her father about Tru. As she spoke, he maintained eye contact, and when she reached the part of the story where she’d broken down in front of her father on the porch, he moved his hand for the first time in weeks. She reached over, taking it in hers.

He breathed out, long and hard, sounds coming from the back of his throat. They were unintelligible, but she knew him well enough to understand what he was saying.

“Are you sure it’s too late?”

* * *

Six days later, he passed away.

Hundreds of people attended the funeral, and afterward everyone made their way to the house. When they left later that evening, the house went quiet, as though it had died as well. Hope knew that people reacted to stress and grief in different ways, but she found herself shocked by her mom’s downward spiral, which was furious in its intensity and seemingly unstoppable. Her mom fell into bitter fits of unpredictable weeping and started drinking heavily. She stopped tidying up and left dirty clothes strewn about the floors. Dust coated the shelves, and dishes would sit on the counters until Hope came by to clean. Food spoiled in the refrigerator and the television blared nonstop. Then her mom began to complain of various ailments: sensitivity to light, aching joints, waves of pain in her stomach, and difficulty swallowing. Whenever Hope went to visit, she found her fidgety and often unable to complete her thoughts. Other times, she would retreat to her darkened bedroom and lock the door. The silence behind the door was often more unnerving than her fits of weeping.

The passage of time made things worse, not better. Her mom eventually became as housebound as her dad once had been. She left the house only to go to the doctor’s office, and four years after her husband’s funeral, she was scheduled for a hernia operation. The surgery was considered a minor one, and by all accounts, it went well. The hernia was repaired, and her mother’s vitals had remained stable throughout the procedure. In post-op, however, her mother never woke from the anesthesia. She died two days later.

Hope knew the physician, the anesthesiologist, and the nurses. All had taken part in other operations that same day, both before and after Hope’s mother’s, with no other patients suffering adverse consequences. Hope had spent enough time in the medical world to know that bad things sometimes happened and there wasn’t always an easy explanation; part of her wondered whether her mom had simply wanted to die and somehow succeeded.

The following week passed in a blur. Dazed, she remembered little about the wake or the funeral. In the weeks that followed, neither she nor her sisters had the emotional reserves necessary to start going through their mother’s belongings. Instead, Hope would sometimes wander the home where she’d grown up, unable to grasp the idea of living without parents. Even though she was an adult, it would take years for her to stop thinking she could pick up the phone and call either one of them.

The loss and melancholy faded slowly, eventually displaced by fonder memories. She would recall the vacations they’d taken as a family and the walks she’d enjoyed with her father. She remembered dinners and birthday parties and cross-country meets and school projects with her mom. Her favorite memories were of her parents as a couple, recalling the way they used to flirt when they thought the kids weren’t looking. But the smile would often fade as quickly as it had come, for it would make her think of Tru as well, and the opportunity she’d lost for the two of them to make a life together.

* * *

Back at the cottage, Hope took a few minutes to warm her hands over one of the burners on the stove. Way too cold for October, she thought. Knowing the temperature would drop further as soon as the sun went down, she considered using the fireplace—gas lines, with gas logs, so a flip of a switch was all it took to light it—but decided instead to raise the thermostat and make herself a cup of hot chocolate. As a child, she’d liked nothing better when she was chilled, but she’d stopped drinking it around the time she became a teenager. Too many calories, she’d worried back then. These days, she no longer cared about such things.

It reminded her of her age, something she’d rather not think about. Fair or not, they lived in a society that placed an emphasis on youth and beauty when it came to women. She liked to think she didn’t look her age, but also admitted that she might be fooling herself.

She supposed it really didn’t matter. She’d come to the beach for more important reasons. Sipping her hot chocolate, she watched the play of fading sunlight on the water as she reflected on the last twenty-four years. Had Josh ever sensed that she had feelings for another man? As hard as she’d tried to hide it, she wondered whether her secret love for another had in some way undermined her marriage. Had Josh ever intuited that when they were in bed together, Hope sometimes fantasized about Tru? Had he sensed that part of her would always be closed off to him?

She didn’t want to think so, but could it have been a factor in his numerous affairs? Not that she was willing to take all the blame, or even most of it, for what he’d done. Josh was an adult and fully in control of his behaviors, but what if…?

The questions had plagued her ever since she’d learned of his first affair. She’d known all along she hadn’t committed fully to him, just as she now knew that the marriage had been doomed from the instant she’d accepted his proposal. She tried to make up for it with friendship these days, even if she had no desire to rekindle anything between them. In her mind, it was a way to make amends, or atone, even if Josh might never really understand.