Tracy Neiman

The Last Leg of the Journey

Finalist for the 2023 American Literary Review Essay Contest, Judged by Kendra Vanderlip

On my forehead, I wear a Post-it with my name on it. My father has asked me to. He does not want to forget who I am.

He has a matching yellow sticky note affixed to his own skin, which is almost as yellow as the Post-it. On it: his name, my name, my mother’s name, my brother’s name, and all of our phone numbers. He does not want to forget who we are or how to find us. He does not want to forget himself.

It is like this, as mirrors of each other, that we begin studying, perched together on his bed. We do not speak again about the twin squares on our faces.

I unfurl a New York City subway map and point: What landmarks are in Coney Island? What trains go to 68^th Street? What can you find at Kings Highway? Where were you born?

Right now, he knows the answers. He tells me about the Parachute Jump and Nathan’s Hot Dogs and the boardwalk. He tells me about the 6 train, which he still remembers goes to my college. He tells me about Highway Bagels and Adelman’s, one of the last true Kosher delis in our borough, the sort of place where pastrami sandwiches come thick as bricks and tongue is still considered a delicacy.

Brooklyn, he says. That’s where I was born. That’s where I live.

As my father speaks, orange and gold shadows shimmy in through the blinds. It’s a late afternoon in early October, and everything’s glowing. Our Post-its have become square suns above our eyes.

Weeks earlier, a blue minivan travels four blocks from our home to the public school where my parents vote. My father is behind the wheel.

I am not there, but when my mother calls to tell me the news, I see it like I am. I see my father stick the key in the ignition with one hand and reach for his sunglasses with the other. I see how he checks both rearview mirrors, the careful way he swivels his head, back to front, side to side, before rolling into the street. I see him flick on his right turn signal, flick on his left. And I see him rounding the corner, easing the car between two others as if he’s been parking his whole life. And he has. Almost.

Four blocks. I know the route like the back of my hands. Bus stop, Tot Lot, rows of houses, football field.

Four blocks.

Stop sign, stoplight, stop sign, crosswalk.

Four blocks.

My father drove.

After a few minutes, I fold the map and tuck it into my father’s nightstand. The next questions need no visual. What are our cats’ names? When is my birthday? When is your birthday?

He remembers. It’s October 17^th. He’ll be 59 in a little over a week. I ask him what he’d like for the occasion.

A new watch, he says after some prodding. His old one ticks softly on the bedside table. I try not to wonder how long it’s been since he’s worn it. I try not to wonder if he’ll wear a new one at all.

A new watch, I say. I’ll order one tonight.

A few days before the doctor tells my father the chemo has stopped working, there’s a tornado in Brooklyn. The sky is gray and glowing, almost Biblical. Wind and thunder rage around us like feuding lovers. The whole city, it seems, is hunkered down. Well, the whole city except for the single kitten perched on the roof of our garage, singing in the rain.

Discovering this, my brother rushes outside with a ladder, my mother follows my brother, and, together, they guide this tiny life to safety.

My father and I remain inside, in the comfort of his study, but he’s paused the movie we’re watching. He’s still himself enough to be worried, himself enough to think of dangers to bodies other than his. He won’t press play. He refuses. Not until his wife and son come back.

It’s poetic, really, almost cliché—the rare presence of a funnel cloud spinning through the streets of Brooklyn days before we learn that my father is dying. But back then, before those words are said out loud, before I know what I already knew, I see it differently. In the story I tell myself, the thunder doesn’t matter. The lightning doesn’t matter. Even the tornado doesn’t matter.

What matters is this: We survived it.

What matters is this: In the end, my brother pulls off a valiant rescue. The kitten is returned to her mother. My mother and brother return to my father. The storm passes. It doesn’t even snatch a branch from our tree. And, when everything’s over, the leaves and the grass are that much greener, that much brighter, given new life by rain.

Who is your wife? Your sister? Your son?

Helen. Amy. Jeremy.

Who am I?

Tracy.

My father answers quickly. I’m still wearing my sticky note, but he doesn’t look, nor does he need to.

Outside, the leaves on our tree are just beginning to yellow. Suddenly, I see Post-its growing from branches, our names splayed against the sky.

In the days after the tornado, the kitten eats and plays, plays and eats, as though nothing has happened. There’s no evidence of her trauma. That’s written in our memories, it seems, not in hers.

Right now, she still fits in my palms, her ears are still too big for her head, and her head’s still too big for the rest of her—but she’s growing.

One day, she’ll be as big as her mother. Bigger.

I continue to quiz my father on his own life until, finally, he tells me he’s tired. Before I leave, he grabs my hand. His strength is startling. He holds me as though he might fall through the mattress and into another dimension.

Honey, he says, don’t let them take me away.

What? I blink at him.

If I don’t remember things, honey, don’t let them send me somewhere else.

I don’t know who or what he means by them. He’s speaking in code, or else seeing things I can’t.

I won’t, I promise anyway. No one is going to send you somewhere else.

I tuck my father into bed and kiss his cheek, slipping my Post-it in my pocket. His still clings to his forehead, its yellow corners curling up at the edges.

Three weeks earlier, my father’s admitted to the hospital. It’s about keeping him comfortable, the doctor says of the morphine pump he’s installed. We nod. We all know what keeping him comfortable means.

An hour before we’re set to leave, my father picks up his silver flip phone and presses the buttons like a baby playing pretend. In the three days he’s been here, he’s forgotten what it is and how to use it. He thinks it’s the remote to call the nurses. When no one shows up, he panics. He throws the cell phone at his feet and cries.

As my mother explains the difference between a remote control and a cell phone, I stare outside, through the wall of floor-to-ceiling windows. Manhattan is tiny beneath us. I want to crush it in my hands.

Sprawled on my bed, I scour the Internet late into the night, searching for the perfect wristwatch. My computer screen glows, possibilities abound. By now, there must be hundreds of tabs open. My laptop is starting to slow, and its hum turns to a whine, its fan whirring in protest.

I wonder why my father wants a watch for his birthday, if it’s on purpose. Does he want me to buy him time? Does he think I can? Can I?

In the end, I can’t decide which to get, so I get nothing. I shut my laptop and go to sleep.

We are packing up my father’s things, and he throws a tantrum. He doesn’t want to leave the hospital.

You didn’t want to come here either, I remind him. Wasn’t he the one who’d kicked and screamed at the very suggestion, even when the doctor assured him it was temporary? Wasn’t he the one who said Overmydeadbody notgoing notgoing notgoing?

I’m scared, he says, to go home.

I reach for his hand because I don’t know what else to say or how else to comfort him. I know this isn’t what he actually means, what he’s really afraid of.

Home doesn’t mean home.

I hear her before I see her—the soft patter of footsteps as she ascends the stairs to my bedroom. It’s 3 AM, and my mother’s approach can only mean one thing: I wonder if my father’s already gone.

Dead or alive, dead or alive, dead or alive, I think in rhythm with her steps. Dead or alive, dead or alive, dead or alive.

Daddy’s delusional, my mother whispers from the threshold. I feel my breath catch in my chest. Alive.

He thinks I’m trying to poison him, she adds sharply. He’s asking for you.

Downstairs, I find my father trying to rip out his pain pump. They won’t let me take it off, he cries. Honey, help me get rid of it.

We’ll call the doctor about it first thing tomorrow, OK? Gently, I lift his hand away from the cord connecting his chest to his morphine supply. Promise.

No! He grabs the phone and begins dialing. I’m calling now.

It’s not the right number, and the person at the other end of the line is not a doctor, nor a nurse, nor anyone who can understand what my father is saying. Whomever it is hangs up. My dad resumes the duel with his pain pump.

Desperate, I scribble the number for my father’s doctors on a Post-it and hand it to him. See? I say. Here’s the number. The office isn’t open now, but we’ll call as soon as it is.

Ok. His face relaxes. I’ve gotten through to him this time. Can you make me a copy?

I return with three copies and he asks for a fourth. When I come back, he wraps himself around them, embracing the pages with his whole body.

There’s a name for what’s happening to my father’s mind. It’s called hepatic encephalopathy. It means his liver’s too sick to filter out the toxins in his body, and it’s making his brain sick, too. It means he’s forgetting his family. He’s forgetting himself.

At last, my father falls asleep. His Post-it, and all four copies of it, rest like plush bears in the crook of his arms.

On the ride home from the hospital, my father sits up front and speaks to the cab driver.

Take the FDR Drive to the Battery Tunnel, he says. Then the Battery Tunnel to the Gowanus Expressway. The Gowanus to the Prospect. The Prospect to Ocean Parkway. I’ll guide you from there.

My mother and I exchange smiles from the back. My father has given perfect directions, it’s unseasonably warm for September, and the sun’s out in force. Light and shadows move together on the highway.

The day after the 3 AM “incident,” I move downstairs permanently. I’ve assembled a makeshift cot of pillows on the floor. This is where I’ll sleep, at the foot of my parents’ bed. I want to be here when the time comes.

My mother takes one good look at me and laughs. It’s like when you used to come in here as a toddler. Remember how you’d sit on those same exact pillows and pretend to be Big Bird in your nest?

I nod. Of course I remember. That’s only because you wouldn’t let me get in bed with you.

Blame Daddy, my mother says. He gets all the credit for that.

I glance up at my father. From here, he doesn’t look so different from the man he was all those years ago, back when I was a little girl with this very same view.

Now I’ve become her again. I am a child who can’t bear to sleep alone—without Mommy and Daddy—in her own, big-girl bed. I am a yellow bird in a nest of pillows.

On the last leg of the journey, “Total Eclipse of the Heart” bursts through the speakers. The car radio’s tuned to an oldies’ station.

Like this, we wind through Flatbush, the taxi thrumming with echoes of yesterday. We ride through crowded streets, ordinary streets, streets we’ve walked and streets we’ve driven, streets stitched into the fabric of our family, etched into our skin. We share them as we share DNA.

We pass corner stores and discount stores, hardware stores and pizza stores, these landmarks of our lives together. Once unremarkable, they now seem remarkable, almost beautiful. Through tinted glass, I see everything differently.

Third house on the right, my father says as we make our final turn, by the blue minivan.

Our home stands, somehow, as it has always stood, appearing both untouched and untouchable. Hungry street cats await us on the porch, dependable as statues. Their cries for food remind us they’re alive.

My father is going somewhere. He tells the mattress he’s leaving. He tells the pillow he’s leaving. He tells us he’s leaving.

Where? we ask.

The fierce forest, he whispers.

His throat is dry, so we tip cups of water into his mouth, shovel ice through his lips. He can’t say much, but when he does, he says this again, over and over: the fierce forest, fierce forest, fierceforest.

Maybe, most likely, this is another side effect of my father’s failing liver. He’s seeing something that doesn’t exist, something that isn’t real—except in his head.

Still, I wonder: Can a soul stretch between the “here” and the “after”? Does the afterlife look like a forest?

A few days after we get back from the hospital, I dangle a stack of Post-its in front of my father’s eyes. Write things you’re grateful for, I say, or things that you want to be true. Then we’ll display them, so you can always look and remember.

Why? He glances from the pile of Post-its to the fabric bulletin board I’ve propped against a laundry basket.

You know, some people have cured their cancer with a positive attitude, I tell him. I regale the hours I spent on cancer message boards the night before, the way my computer screen seemed to light up with miracles. This dying person, cured by watching every Charlie Chaplin movie ever made. That dying person, whose tumors were manifested away. Killed by gratitude.

Try it, I say. Please. When he sees my face, my father picks up a pen and writes.

I am glad I went downstairs for a family dinner. I had two slices of pizza.

Days pass, and I am a constant at my father’s bedside. I am a smile, its very embodiment. I coax optimism from my father’s fingers with the insistence of a drill sergeant.

I ate almost an entire roll, he scribbles. The cat is looking jealous 🙂

I will sleep through the night. It will make me feel better.

I will no longer get out of breath when I exert myself.

Post-its dot the board like stars.

Sometime during his last night on earth, my father sits up in bed. He reaches out for my mother. He touches her shoulder. He squeezes her hand.

From the floor, I watch and I wait. I squint and I strain. I listen to my father whisper I love you to my mother. I listen to my mother whisper I love you back to my father.

The scientific term for this is terminal lucidity, but I don’t know this yet. All I know is my father was gone from his body, and right now, he’s back in it.

At some point, I think I crawl into bed with my parents. It’s possible this is more a wish than a memory, but here’s how I remember it: My mother sits on one side of my father. I sit on the other. We hold hands. We form a chain. We murmur I love you I love you I love you as though these are the only three words we know how to say.

In the morning, the treetops drip crimson and gold. It’s a cruel trick of nature. Leaves look most alive as they’re dying.

Years earlier, it’s my mother’s birthday, and it’s not the year my father forgot to get anything, nor the year he got her a pair of dollar store slippers, and it’s definitely not the year he gifted her a power tool she’d explicitly said not to get.

This year, he not only got my mother a gift, he got her the perfect gift—and he’s hidden it somewhere in the house. It’s our job to find it.

Together, my mother, my brother, and I scavenge for clues while my father trails behind us with a goofy smile.

Found one! I pull a Post-it out from under the microwave. We rush upstairs and downstairs, downstairs and upstairs, excited to unearth the next clues. At last, we arrive in the laundry room, where a gift box looms large atop the washer/dryer.

I think I see tears in my mother’s eyes as she fingers my father’s signature wrapping paper. Beneath old newspaper pages, she finds the bread machine she’s been eyeing for months.

Happy birthday, Swampmonster, he says, and she can’t even be mad that he uses the nickname she hates. Do you like it?

I love it.

In the damp of our basement, at the end of a Post-it yellow brick road, my parents find each other. We all do.

In the dead of night, a heavy bag is carried downstairs by two men in black suits. They load it into the trunk of a car, slide into the front seat, and rev up the engine. The car purrs its assent.

I stand on the porch, watching them drive away, watching the car fade into the dark. Now they’re gone, but I remain, barefoot and coatless, squinting at nothing.

Just beyond my field of vision, a passenger takes a final ride past a mailbox. A playground. A parking meter. All these things that he touched.

Upstairs, a Post-it sits on the nightstand beside an empty bed.

Postscript: We adopt the tornado kitten and call her Kitten. Maybe we simply lack the energy to come up with something more original, but I like to think there’s more to it than that.

Kitten’s too young to understand what a tail is, so she spends hours upon hours chasing her own appendage: that blasted creature! Kitten darts back and forth across my father’s study, leaping from his chair to his desk to his computer tower and back again. Kitten swats at anything, everything—a string, a finger, the air—you name it. She pounces.

As kittens do. As Kitten does.

Maybe we should have called her Tornado. But I like Kitten. I like how, in some small way, she’ll stay forever like this, preserved in time by a name.

Kitten.

Forever new, forever young, forever here. A little ball of fur the size of my fist, if not my heart.

Tracy Neiman is a writer, globetrotter, and spicy food enthusiast from Brooklyn before Brooklyn was cool. She was recently named a semi-finalist in the Medium Writers’ Challenge, and was awarded second prize in Flash Fiction Magazine’s contest. She is currently pursuing an MFA in fiction at Brooklyn College and is at work on her debut novel.