Free Hotel of the Saints by Ursula Hegi Page A

both of us. When we sprayed the backs of each other’s heads, it fizzed like shaving cream but smelled like wet paint. Most of it stayed on my pillow that night, and the rest ended up on my graduation robe like a drastic case of dandruff.
    My father’s fingers are bone. Ice. I grip them. Because I want to be here for him. I do. For as long as I can remember, I have fought to extricate myself from him, while at the same time being tugged toward him. In college, I didn’t answer most of his letters and phone calls. Once I lived away from him, the words we used to move back and forth between us no longer fit. And yet I found some balance—an uneasy balance—in being cut off from him and yet linked. Safe. Because I knew he would take the first step toward me again. And again.
    I don’t have that kind of courage. And I feel embarrassed by people who do. Embarrassed by their naked urgency. Whenever I feel ignored by Eleanor because she’s reading or playing computer games, I retreat. Because I’m afraid of what I really want: to cling to her. And I’m afraid of disgusting her with my devotion. My father’s devotion was too much for me alone. I never was enough for him, and I used to wish he had more children.Perhaps then his marriage to my mother would have lasted. There was the almost-child, a girl, who’d died after five months in my mother’s womb, a stay long enough to settle her in my father’s plans for his future years, plans that then shifted to me when I was born, making the absence of that child my loss. My duty: to replace her with my body; to multiply my love.
    â€œâ€¦ two months younger …” My father’s eyelids flutter, bluish, half transparent.
    I pull the blanket to his shoulders, tuck the musty-smelling sheet loosely around his chin. “You want me to get you another blanket?”
    â€œStep back,” he says urgently.
    â€œWhat is it?”
    â€œShe should step back.”
    He must be talking about his donor. From his doctor I know she was standing on a sidewalk in downtown Portland when a motorcycle jumped the curb and struck her. Only her heart has survived, beating inside my father, who is prepared to treat it responsibly. Over the past months, he has grown thin, the kind of thin that comes with waiting. He has never been good at waiting, taught me that waiting was a weakness. Each time he visits Eleanor and me in Lincoln City, he is impatient to return to the mountains of Joseph, where he settled forty years ago because the landscape reminded him of the Austrian Alps. He loved to climb up the steep paths of the Wallowas or down into Hells Canyon to the Snake River, and by the time I was six, he took me along, encouraging me to keep moving forward whenever I thought I could not take another step. “Challenge yourself, John,” he would say.
    My wife says it’s cruel to constantly push a child. Althoughsome days I agree with Eleanor, I do believe that, without my father, I wouldn’t understand what lies beyond that first barrier where most of us give up. Or the next barrier. By nature, I’m lazy. Extraordinarily lazy. It’s just that I haven’t tested that laziness. Not yet. Because of my father.
    Eleanor says she can’t imagine me lazy. But I know my capacity, know that what saves me, even today, is how on those mountain paths I learned to set one foot ahead, then the other, until eventually my father would let me rest and point back at the additional stretch I’d walked. “Aren’t you glad I made you challenge yourself?” he’d ask, and start pulling nuts and raisins and oranges from his leather backpack. While we’d eat, I’d feel content. Proud even. He’d tell me the names of flowers and of birds, so pleased when I’d remember their names from previous hikes. Some days we’d glimpse deer far away. Vermin, my father called them. But I loved watching their