Rose Petals in a Jar

Orange and red cabbage roses danced on the wall. I wished him conscious so he could see them. My father was allergic to roses, and he hated them. Tears would roll down his cheeks until we made them go away. It was the only time he ever cried. He didn't cry at his mother's funeral, and no one was allowed to send flowers.

I confess, I hated my father and still do. He was an angry man who never had a kind word to say about anybody. Well, there was a point where he did, but that's a long time ago. Then I got to the point where I didn't either. Maybe that's why after six weeks, my marriage broke up and my husband Jim, said, "Have a good life."

When my father died, I thought I would feel liberated and at peace. But now I am alone with no one to please but myself, and I don't know how. So I go to this beach to think about life-the one I'm not living and the one I've lived.

I do like the shore. I'll tell you that much. I come here often. Each time I bring: a blanket to sit on; sun block 45 because I burn easily; the classifieds, thought I don't know what I'm looking for; and some odds and ends. I like to come down here because every time I do, it's different. The beach becomes wider, so you're as insignificant as a grain of sand, or a little thinner, like a fringe along the ocean, giving you the feeling you could be swept away at any moment. The sand castle you build in the afternoon is plowed under by the tide I the evening, so you have to start the next morning and build another one. Then you can build it stronger with higher, thicker walls and towers with secret rooms where no one can find you.

****
On his deathbed, my father looked like just another patient to me, lying in just another hospital bed. Transparent IV tubing coiled from both hands because the veins in his arms had collapsed. Through one tube, liquid the shade of normal urine fed his skeleton with nutrients. The other was connected to the green monster, Dr. Morph, the visitor who took you to La La Land at the push of a button. White, red, black, green, and gray leads (smoke over fire) were monitoring every beat his heart made or skipped. His chest rose laboriously with each breath and was punctuated by a gurgle. Cyanosis began in his fingertips and traveled to the top of his arms. His gray face lacked the smiles of my childhood. I couldn't tell whether he was at peace or in pain.

I stepped closer, but not close enough for him to touch me if he were to wake up. His earlobes pressed against the sides of his skull. I had learned in nursing school, when a patient's earlobes flattened against his head, death was imminent. At first I had thought it was an old wives' tale of nurses, but every time it happened, my patient died.

****

I feel the jar's cool smoothness. My father's ashes are in it. The first time I came here, I was going to scatter his ashes in the ocean because he hated it. Just like roses.

I think he had a fear of the ocean in the way I had a fascination for its power, its depth, and mystery. There were unexplored worlds beneath the ocean. I used to dream about being swept under the tide and being pulled into its depths where no one would find me. I would swim with the mermaids and the gods who lived in the water. They would take care of me, as my father should have. I would call his name from its caverns and haunt him.

I've been coming back daily for about a month, and I haven't been able to let go of his ashes. After the third trip, I ended up putting his ashes in a mayonnaise jar. I washed it, peeled off the label, and boiled it for five minutes the way you do when you're canning peaches. After it had dried on the window sill overnight, I poured the ashes in the jar with some dried petals of a rose Jim had given me.

I wanted to be able to see my father, wanted him to see the ocean. I wondered whether I should poke holes in the lid, like when you catch fireflies and put the jar beside your bed and watch them flash in a rhythm like they were talking to each other. In the morning, they were always dead.

At night I'd set the jar on my nightstand and talked with my father in the jar and Jim who wasn't in the empty bed. I created their voices and told myself, "I love you," and "I'm sorry I hurt you." The words were easier to say because they came out of someone else's mouth. I'd hold the jar to my breast thinking, "I love you," and "I forgive you," but my mouth couldn't form the words.

****

A German shepherd puppy scampers through the water to retrieve a Frisbee. He runs away before the tide drags him under. I must tell you about Rugby.

My father brought him home from the animal shelter one day. Someone there told him he had been abandoned along the river, but he didn't know why anyone would want to abandon a dog with good bloodlines. We gathered some old blankets and bought a red collar and license. For an hour daily we taught him how to sit, to stay, to heel. We fed him table scraps and ate all our meals together.

That winter we trained Rugby to pull a sled. While the neighborhood was stranded indoors because of the two feet of unplowed snow, Rugby pulled me in the sled, and my father skied beside us. He told me when I got older, he was going to teach me how to ski. But that never happened.

I looked forward to every snowstorm. It were as if we were the only people on Earth, making the first tracks in the snow. I chattered about how the road looked as if it were blanketed with diamonds, and I'd tell him, "I'm going to scoop up all these diamonds and buy us a castle for just you, me, and Rugby. We'll be the richest people in the world."

My father always responded, "I'm already the richest man in the world. I have you."

I never had anything to say after that. I'd watch his breath steam from his nostrils, and I'd count the little puffs. He smiled, and my entire body felt warm, not because of the layers of clothes I wore but because I made him smile.

As we rounded the bend at the end of the block, Rugby raced down the street. I gripped the sled with all my strength, knowing what happened next but still thought I could prevent it. When Rugby turned into the driveway, the sled dumped me face-first into the snow.

A few minutes later, my father would arrive and pull me out of the snow. He'd brush it off my snow pants, and we'd laugh. I remember my father had a deep belly laugh, kind of like Santa Claus. Rugby always stood, wagging his tail and looking as if he were laughing also. My father would ruffle his fur, then carried me into the house where he helped me get out of my wet clothes. He'd make hot chocolate and cinnamon toast. I'd sit on his lap, and we dipped toast in the hot chocolate, eating one piece of bread after another until the hot chocolate and bread were gone. His belly would jiggle against my back as he laughed. Those nights I would go to bed with the smells of cinnamon and chocolate and the sound of his laughter surrounding me.

But when Rugby went, something happened to my father. To us.

As much as we tried, we couldn't keep Rugby confined to the yard. He used to run away about once a week. Once I suggested to my father that we build a fence around the yard. He protested, "If you build a fence, it'll put up a wall between you and your neighbors."

The day after he said it-a Friday-I was getting off the school bus when I saw Rugby lying on Third Avenue beside our house. The blow of a car had turned him into a mound of blood and shattered bones.

My father came out to the street to see what the screaming was all about. Without saying a word, he picked up Rugby with his bare arms and tossed him into the compost pile in the back yard.

I thought it was strange because he was always so damned persnickety about what we dumped there. Once he slapped me when I threw chicken bones and egg shells there. Rugby was family.

With a garden shovel he scooped the remains and that, too, ended on top of the grass clippings. He wiped his hands on his blood-soaked shirt and disappeared inside the house. I stood in front of the compost pile and cried. For a moment, my heart contained a glimmer of hope, and I wanted Rugby to charge through the yard, so the carcass would be someone else's dog.

But that was not to be.

The weather was unseasonably hot for May that year, so it was only a matter of hours before the stench of decay invaded the air. I thought it would suffocate me. Even with the windows closed, the smell crept through the cracks and burned my nostrils. My father didn't say a word, even the next day when the neighbors called to complain. Somehow I found the strength and stomach to give Rugby a proper burial.

It took me all day to dig the grave. He never helped. Through the corner of my eye, I saw him watching me from behind the kitchen curtain. The only time he spoke to me was when he complained that I lay in the bathtub for three hours. I had to get rid of the smell, though I would never be able to erase it from my mind.

****

The puppy becomes a black dot jumping across the sand. It disappears. Rugby's memory lingers. The stench of his death reminds me of the foul odor of cancer I had smelled so often in the hospital and when my father was dying.

I don't think it was the cancer which killed him. It was his anger and bitterness that metastasized throughout his body until it was too late to save him. Now his anger is alive inside me, and I'm just as alone as he was.

It begins to drizzle. The mist cools my face. For the first time in years, I remember my grandmother's funeral.

"You're being a baby," he said to me in the Lincoln on the way to the cemetery. "Only babies cry."

I played with the power windows as his words cut into me. Up and down. Up and down. Cold air blew into the open window. Then I shut it out, but I couldn't shut out my father. At twelve years old, I should have been used to him. Still, there was always the hope everything would be just as it was before.

As the car climbed the steep hill to the cemetery, I imagined pushing him through the door. I wanted to stand at the top of the hill and watch him rolling down, down, down, his head crashing against the rocks and leaving a scarlet trail in the untouched snow.

I had murdered my father in my mind many times. It was a way to cover up the pain. His life expired on a fender, instead of Rugby's. I pierced his body with the knife he used to cut chicken bones. Fountains of blood spurted and stained the linoleum floor. I saw him decapitated, dismembered, disemboweled.

Then my thoughts turned to suicide, though I never had the courage to act on my thoughts. I imagined different ways for him to find my body. I wanted him to feel guilt, sadness, and loss, feelings a parent should have. I wondered whether he would cry at my funeral.

I didn't cry at his.

It had been a quiet service. Only my father's boss, the pastor, and I attended. There was no one to tell about his passing. No one would come. His second wife left him for a network marketing executive when I was sixteen. He sent her bouquets of roses that for months she tried to hide from my father. I fished the cards out of the trash. The notes contained words such as love, always, and forever. They were words my father never used in their two years of marriage. I was surprised anyone had married him at all. I found the last card on the table beside the vase. It said, "I want to take care of all your needs." She had already gone, leaving behind the card and roses, and I left them there to wilt and turn brown. My father never said a word.

I never knew his first wife. She left the hospital the day after she had given birth to me. I never knew why, since my father never talked about it. I don't know why she didn't take me with her, but I never tried to find her, either.

My father's funeral service lasted fifteen minutes. Pastor Kleinfelter read a scripture and said a prayer. There were no eulogies. I had nothing to say.

Like my father's funeral, my wedding was a small private ceremony. I met Jim while he was doing his residency at the hospital where I worked. He had examined a patient who had been assigned to me, and while I transcribed his orders, he asked me to a movie. On our first date, he brought me flowers he had cut from the hospital garden. Residents were too poor to afford florists' bouquets. But the night he asked me to marry him, he brought me a singe red rose. I had thought I was in love at a time when I didn't know how to love.

We rarely went out. He didn't have time for friends, and I didn't want any, so I could focus all my attention on him. We usually spent our evenings on the sofa, my head nestled against his chest, as he read to me from medical journals. The articles used words like necrotic and serosanguinous, Latinate terms about death and blood. I fell asleep listening to the murmuring inside his chest. It was like a lullaby.

After almost a year of dating between his twenty-one-day work stretches, we married in the hospital chapel. There were just us, the chaplain, and a cleaning woman in the back waiting to vacuum the carpet. I didn't tell my father until I went home to gather my possessions before moving into the marital residence. That was the way I wanted it. I didn't want to share Jim with anyone else in the world.

****

My hands mound cool wet sand and set the jar on top. I want my father to see the ocean as it creeps up to him. I've poked holes in the lid so he can smell the salt air. If he were alive, he'd bolt from his chair and run to where the ground is solid again, where the earth doesn't shift anymore.

I laugh aloud as a wave begins to creep back to the ocean from where it stopped, just inches from where I have mounded the sand.

"See that Daddy? You can't run from it now." I shake the jar. The ashes tumble against the glass without making a sound. I remove the lid. The ashes are soft, like talc or rose petals before they've begun to wilt and dry. I wonder whether the ashes I've poured into my palm are his bones, his brain, or the cancer, reduced to dust. A fragment of dried rose petal lands on top, and for a moment I see Jim's chiseled features and blue-green eyes, the color of the ocean at high tide.

I shake away his image as I return the ashes to the jar. I am careful not to let any slip away in the wind.

My husband Jim wanted children, but I didn't. I knew this when we met. I saw the way his eyes brightened when he talked about the babies he delivered. I heard his voice crack as he told me about the babies who were sick and abandoned by their mothers and how there weren't enough nurses to hold them or to give them any love, if only for a few days. Though I knew this, I thought I would be enough.

"You are alone," I say aloud.

A wave crashes in response.

"Are you happy now? Daddy? You got just what you wanted. Now what?" I shake the jar shouting, "Now what?" My voice disappears beneath the ocean's thundering and churning.

"I don't know how to be anything but a nurse and to try for your approval. I became a nurse because I thought it was the one thing that would make you proud of me." My fingers tighten around the neck of the jar.

"When I was a little girl, you said I would be another Florence Nightingale. It was what you expected-it was what I did. It wasn't good enough when I was accepted into one of the top programs in the country. It wasn't good enough I graduated salutatorian."

"Big deal, you were second," I hear him say. Startled, I drop the jar. It rolls on the sand beside me. I leave it on its side.

"The truth is, I hated nursing and hospitals and touching sick people and the ammonia-sterile smell of the floors and the pungent odor of bedridden people and that horrible, horrible smell of cancer. I hated you."

I kick the jar. "I hate you."

****

A nurse bustled in and stopped beside my father's bed. "Time to take his vital signs. Has he responded?"

I shook my head.

"How long has he been like this?" The nurse pointed at the string of upside-down v's traveling across the monitor. His heart was failing, and I had failed to see it.

The nurse shouted for help and pounded the blue button beside his bed. The halls echoed an anonymous voice saying, "Code Blue room 713." It was someone's job to announce someone was about to die.

Footsteps pounded toward me. I flattened myself against the cabbage roses as the team arrived with the crash cart. I wished I could sink into them and disappear. Fall asleep breathing their scent. Sleep forever.

The nurse started compressions immediately after pressing the button. Another had already placed the Ambubag over his nose and mouth. She squeezed the balloon rhythmically, as it exhaled life into my father who had lost his own will to breathe. The Ambubag had once scared me. It meant Death. But that day against the cabbage roses, I waited for it.

The doctor entered and barked at someone to give the patient an injection. He grabbed the defibrillator paddles, barely giving someone time to prep him. He barked more orders and numbers. Nurses and respiratory therapists and anesthesiologists and surgeons darted in and out. The nurses shouted numbers and medical jargon which should have meant something to me. My instincts should have told me to jump in and help, but instead, I stood paralyzed against the cabbage roses.

The doctors fought to save a sixty-eight-year-old man with colon cancer that had spread to his lungs and liver. The man was going to die, anyway. His doctor told me himself, "Your father is dying." The doctor was cracking ribs and poking new holes to prolong his life.

As furiously as he worked to save a dying patient, Jim was as quick to let our marriage end. Sometime during our sixth week, I had gone home to find Jim loading his Chevette with boxes filled with possessions he owned before our marriage. Anything we had acquired during our marriage, he left behind. I followed him from the apartment to the car and back again, wanting to hear him say something, even if it was to swear at me for stepping on his toes. But even when I stopped in front of him, and he dropped a stack of pathophysiology books on his foot, he didn't say a word. A line of tension formed as he clenched his jaw. It was the angriest I had ever seen him. Yet he didn't say a word.

When he backed out of the parking space, I clung to the door handle, slid beside the car and screamed, "Why? Why?"

"I just can't stand your neediness anymore. Have a good life."

That was it. He didn't even look at me. He lit a cigarette, and I watched the smoke puff out the window as he drove away. Yes, though he had seen blackened lungs and skeletons emaciated with disease, he still smoked almost a pack a day, leaving unfinished packs throughout the apartment. That's all I could think of when he left.

Technically, Jim and I are still married. He changed residency programs and moved to Juneau, Alaska, but never sent me divorce papers. I never removed my wedding ring. I just didn't think about it. Not long after Jim left, the doctor told me about my father's cancer, and I spent all that time preparing for his death.

After they had worked on my father for forty-five minutes, the exhausted team trudged out of the room. They hung their heads like defeated soldiers. The doctor, with his head bowed, stopped to touch my hands.

"I'm sorry, we did everything we could."

"I know. I understand. Thank you," I said, shrugging his touch. I concealed my relief and elation while the doctor had to deal with another failure. Any death, even a terminal patient, was a failure. This, I witnessed often.

As I walked away, I felt every strong, hard contraction my heart made. I floated past nurses wearing the solemn masks I once wore and uttering the expected, "I'm sorry" and went to the stairwell. I shut the door and laughed. My voice echoed against the walls and traveled to the bottom of the stairs where it faded, and the stairwell was silent again. I filled its walls with the sounds of my footsteps pounding in unison with my beating heart. I didn't stop until I was against the door at the bottom.

When the smells of flowers, chocolate, and potpourri from the gift shop reached me, I knew what I was going to do. I bought every bouquet of roses in the gift shop and a copy of the classifieds. My plans were that I would leave nursing, my apartment, and all the memories. With the money from selling my father's house, I would begin a new life, find a new job, and live in a new home. Let go. Liberate.

****

I light a cigarette from the pack I've brought, one Jim left behind. I don't inhale but let it burn between my fingers. I wonder what a crematorium smells like, whether you can smell the flesh burning off bones and melting marrow. I hear the bones crackle and sputter, like kindling in a camp fire. Shuddering, I wonder whether my father felt it.

The tendril of smoke reminds me of the smell that lingered in Jim's hands when he had a slow night at the hospital. When he was busy, they smelled of germicidal scrub and Latex gloves. The talc from the gloves used to cake in the ridges of his wedding band. I remember he was still wearing it when he left me.

The cigarette is one long ash now. I consider flicking it into the jar, still on its side where I kicked it. An ash is an ash. A few pepper the sand. I bury them with the butt of the cigarette.

About twenty yards away someone has built a sand castle. Taking the jar, I go to it. The castle is about ten feet in diameter with a wall about a foot high. When I get closer, I see chambers at different levels, some as deep as three feet and deep enough to sit inside. My eyes barely reach over the top of the walls. I watch the waves tumble, stopping just before the castle's base. I feel as if I'm in a fortress that protects me from past hurts, but I know eventually the walls will crumble.

My eyes are drawn to the families walking along the edge of the water. Toddlers trail behind. They can't see I'm watching them, looking for Jim in their faces. Faces of children we never had. A father rescues his son from a cresting wave. He cries. The mother embraces him. Her voice is high-pitched, hysterical. She cries. They sob and hug each other until they topple in a heap on the sand. They laugh. I hear my father's belly laugh echoing among them. He pulls them to their feet, and they walk arm-in-arm away from me, disappearing into the shadows formed by approaching night.

I cradle the jar in my hands. I know now what to do. With all my strength, I hurl the jar beyond the breakers. When I let go, I want to feel it in my hands again. The residual light along the horizon glistens on the lid rim. The jar bobs, rolling and tossing in the ocean. A wave tumbles in and brings the jar toward me. I step forward. Just before another swallows it, the jar fills with water. It sinks, and it becomes lost in the water's endless caverns where I know the sea creatures will take care of him. Some night, I tell myself, I may hear his voice in the wind. Maybe he'll laugh again.

My legs give way, and I sink onto the sand. The water washes over my legs. I clutch my knees to my breast and rock with the tide flowing in and rushing out. All I have left are the memories, I tell myself. Now I can choose the ones I want, leave all the others in the ocean. It's time to go on. Maybe I'll go to Alaska. Learn to ski. Who knows? I rock as tears trickle down my cheeks.

This time I don't try to stop them.