Free Hotel of the Saints by Ursula Hegi Page B

movements—like sudden light on water.
    The windowpanes vibrate as a helicopter takes off from the roof of the hospital. When my father lifts his head, his throat emerges—gray and sharp—from the nest of sheet I’ve spun around him.
    â€œI want to meet her parents. They—” Though he’s moving his lips, I can’t hear the rest of what he’s saying over the roar of the helicopter.
    Last night, before Eleanor and I left here, Dr. Meyer took me aside. He’s concerned my father is getting too enmeshed in the donor’s life. “Or death, rather,” he said.
    â€œBut how can he not?” I asked. “You won’t tell him hername, just a few details like her age and her profession… what she liked to do and how she died.”
    â€œSometimes grief makes people really crazy,” Dr. Meyer said. “Sometimes they are crazy anyway. And then it’s better for the recipient to stay anonymous.”
    Still, my father continues to ask about her parents. I think they want to mourn their daughter—not adopt some man who is a generation ahead of her. I see her
lying on a metal table after her brain death has been established, still hooked up to machines that breathe for her, that keep fluids and blood salts in balance, until her heart is harvested for my father.
    Harvested.
    That’s what it’s called, according to Dr. Meyer. A
harvest of hearts. Of kidneys. And livers. Of eyes and toes and spleens and ears and
—
Stop it. A cannibalistic feast. Stop—
    â€œDr. Meyer told me you’re doing well,” I say quickly. The skin on my face feels dry and stretched from two hours in the car to Portland. I bend across my father. “Really well.”
    He smells of mouthwash and, oddly, gladiolas, even though there are no gladiolas in his room. Just roses. Two bouquets of roses from Eleanor and me. But those I can’t smell. Just those gladiolas.
Funeral flowers. A scent from the future?
    No. Stop it now—
    How to grieve when you dont know the language of grief?
    My mother spoke the language of grief, carried it in her gaunt body where the almost-child had lived and died. That grief was all she had left. Her tears dried up entirely, and her eyes felt hot. When she put in drops to soothe them, her sight shimmered as though she were looking up from the bottom of a pond.
    Ten years it took my mother—ten years and two months—to become pregnant with me, as though her body were denying her passage of another child. Perhaps she could have shed her grief if she hadn’t let my father claim me so entirely as his. Whenever I think of my parents during my early years, I feel I’m seeing them through binoculars: my father enlarged, right up against my face; my mother reduced, fading from me while I watch her through the wrong end of the binoculars.
    I don’t even know the words for grief.
    How to grieve when you dont know the language of grief?
    â€œDr. Meyer … he talked with her parents,” my father is saying. His features are jagged, small. He has no flesh left to waste. Not much between himself and death.
    But he is recuperating, I tell myself. He’s not dying. Soon he’ll get out of the hospital, and he’ll only return to have his knees and hips repaired to match his youthful heart, to hike faster and higher than I ever will, to beat me at tennis, at everything I have tried and will try.
    â€œYou’ll feel much better,” I say. “Once you get out of here and back into your own house.”
    â€œShe reads a lot, John. She …”
    I can feel the fusion between the donor and my father—their only language the murmur of blood—and for an instant I feel left out. Envious. She has taken the space of the almost-child, the daughter who will release me from his aspirations.
What does that make her relationship to me, then?
    â€œâ€¦ has at least a dozen novels on her night table, some