Was this the standard way to tell a family member (without the patient’s permission) that the patient was dying? Perhaps he didn’t want to add to my father’s stress by telling him directly that his disease was incurable. Later, however, he would plainly write it in his letter for my father’s appeal to the Taxi and Limousine Commission: “My patient Andre Miracin Danticat suffers from an incurable condition for which he is required to take codeine.”
My father never discussed the letter either before or after he xeroxed it and sent the original to the Taxi and Limousine Commission, which denied his appeal.
What causes an illness like this? I wondered as Dr. Padman and I waited for my father to return from his pulmonary function test. Could it be the persistent car fumes from the twenty-five- plus years my father had worked as a cabdriver? Carcinogens from the twenty-plus years he smoked as a young man, even though he hadn’t smoked in more than twenty-five years?
“What about a lung transplant?” I asked Dr. Padman. “Could my father have a lung transplant?”
“He’s sixty-nine years old,” he said, as though this too was news to me. “I’m afraid he’s past the age where he’d be put on the list. Besides, the transplant is no guarantee. There’s a very high probability of rejection.”
“Can he have surgery to cut out the bad part of the lung and leave the rest?” I asked.
“Both lungs in their entirety are scarred.”
I was beginning to feel that whatever I told him would be countered by some unworkable obstruction.
I heard my father’s shoes dragging across the floor, heading back toward us. I had come to recognize the sound of his loafers since he’d stopped lifting his feet while walking, to alleviate the pressure of literally having to carry his own weight.
Edie was standing behind him when he appeared in the doorway. Her shoulders drooping, she momentarily seemed as breathless as my father, who had been unable to get through the test. Each time she asked him to breathe into the tube, she reported, he would nearly collapse from coughing.
In the past two months or so, when my father stood for too long, his body would shake as though he might suddenly fall over. His body was shaking now. I got up and helped him into the chair across from the doctor, whom I expected to begin talking again, explaining my father’s condition to him. Surely he had only been practicing on me and was going to also tell my father, how “bad” the disease was, how many months he might have left to live.
He didn’t. Instead he prescribed more prednisone and codeine. My father didn’t say anything. He pushed his head back against the wall, closed his eyes and tried to take deep breaths, which came out as gasps.
Going down in the hospital elevator, still not fully understanding all that had taken place, I kept my eyes on the flashing numbers and avoided looking at my father, who even before he was sick had always been uneasy in unfamiliar surroundings. Now he seemed even more apprehensive, lost in the isolated world of the unwell.
In the car I broached again the very first question Dr. Padman had posed to him.
“How do you feel, Papa?” I asked in Creole. “Ki jan w santi w?”
Nou la, he said. Not bad. Okay, even. Not by usual standards, but what he’d come to consider okay. Not coughing too much. Not breathing too hard. Driving was fine because he was not exerting too much energy, but walking was difficult. Walking was hell.
“I’m going to drop you off. I’ll be home a little bit later,” he said as we approached his and my mother’s house, a four-bedroom, two-story brick single-family they’d purchased eighteen years ago, after living in a series of small apartments all over Brooklyn.
“Come home and rest,” I said.
He had a meeting at the car service business he ran with my uncle Franck, the younger of his two brothers and the only one of his four surviving siblings living in the United States.
My stomach was cramping again, so hard and so frequently that I wondered if perhaps the herbalist might be right after all. Was something going on with me? I asked my father to drop me off at a nearby pharmacy, where I picked up a pregnancy test.
My mother wasn’t home when I got there, so I locked myself in my parents’ tiny guest bathroom and let a stream of urine run over one of the two plastic sticks in the package. The frosted glass on the bathroom window kept out the afternoon light, and the small space, crowded with my mother’s vases of dried roses and potpourri bowls, seemed dark, even with the light on. I squinted to examine the results. One pink line popped up, then two. I examined the box again to make sure I was interpreting correctly. One line meant not pregnant, two meant pregnant, a symbolism that of course made sense. Before the results, one believed oneself to be one; then suddenly one was two.
I leaned against the sink, grabbing hold of the faucet so I could remain on my feet.
Cradling the now wet plastic wand, I slipped to the floor and sobbed. I was afraid of losing my father and also struck with a different kind of fear: baby panic. Everything was suddenly mixed up in my head and leading me to the darkest places. Would I carry to full term? Would there be complications? Would I die? Would the baby die? Would the baby and I both die? Would my father die before we died? Or would we all die at the same time?
On the other hand, bringing a child into the world seemed to be about anything
I had to speak to my husband. I blindly searched my purse for my cell phone and dialed his number.
“Guess what?” I blurted out. “We’re pregnant.”
Under different circumstances, I might have rushed back home, greeting him at the airport with an armful of roses addressed to “Daddy.” Or I might have teased him on the phone, forced him to pry the news out of me. But there was no other way to do it on this particular day. Still, I held back from telling him about my father. Perhaps I didn’t want to hear myself say it. Or maybe I didn’t want to dampen his excitement, to have these two pieces of news abruptly collide for him as they had for me.
“A baby? How wonderful is that?” My husband was cheering loudly. I could imagine his calm, reassuring smile, broader with delight.
“I can’t believe it,” he shouted, after it had sunk in a bit longer. “We’re going to be parents!”
Aside from my husband, I decided, I would tell no one about the baby for a few days, not even my parents. That weekend, my brother Kelly, a musician and computer programmer, who out of all of us most resembled my father, was coming for a visit from his home in Lancaster, Massachusetts. We all needed to concentrate on a family strategy to deal with my father’s diagnosis and we were not going to come up with one if everyone was distracted by the baby. Besides, I couldn’t fully keep both realities in mind at the same time, couldn’t find the words to express both events. I closed my eyes and held my breath, forcing myself to recite it as a mantra.
I stepped out of the bathroom and called my youngest brother, Karl, at
