Sweating profusely, he tried to say something, but couldn’t. My mother quickly asked us to clear the room-he’d grown too hot-to give him some air.
Soon after we left the room, a friend of my father’s from church told me, “Why don’t you let him go? Tell him it’s okay to go.”
I couldn’t, I told her, because I didn’t want him to go. I didn’t want him to die.
During the day, my father hardly ate anything. At night he couldn’t sleep. Whenever he took a sleeping pill and dozed off for a few hours, he spoke loudly, incomprehensibly in rapid staccato speech. There were people, long dead, standing at his bedside, he would explain the next morning. His mother in a red dress. His father singing. His sister laughing. They were keeping him awake.
“Stay with me a while,” he’d tell my mother and me, after he’d said his evening prayers. Then he’d dismiss us a half hour later, saying, “I suppose you have to go. You can’t sit here all night.”
We would go reluctantly, leaving our doors open so we could easily hear the slightest stir. He would get hot, then cold, in the middle of the night and call on us to open or close the windows.
Karl and Bob would come and bathe him, rub medicated lotions over the scaly patches of psoriasis on his skin, some as raw as open wounds. They would cut his hair, trim his curved, oxygen-deprived fingernails and toenails. I’d still watch his game shows and movies with him and, when he could, would debate the news from Haiti and elsewhere.
One afternoon, while my daughter was sleeping, I was sitting with him and my mother was downstairs in the kitchen, when he told me to ask her to cook him some plain long-grain white rice for supper. Early in his illness, he’d decided that rice grains were aggravating his cough, so he abruptly stopped eating them.
Overjoyed that he was actually craving food, I shared the news with my mother, who was downstairs cooking.
“Guess what?” I said. “Papa wants some rice.”
My mother sent me back to ask exactly how he wanted his rice prepared. Could she soak it in chicken broth, mix it with black or brown beans or mushrooms, sprinkle it with shredded cashews? Would he mind if she lubricated it with butter or margarine to add some extra calories and taste, stirred in chunks of sausage or bacon for much-needed protein? Perhaps he wanted some fresh vegetables thrown in for fiber?
He only wanted a small bowl of the plainest white rice she could possibly prepare, he said. He even provided a shorthand recipe. “Cup of rice, water, drop of salt, spoonful of vegetable oil so nothing sticks to the pan. Boil it all.”
My father had always been a picky eater. However, he had only learned to cook during his early years in the United States, while my mother was still in Haiti. When she joined him two years later, the first thing he did was cook for her.
My mother’s first Brooklyn meal was very much like Bob’s and mine. It consisted of stewed chicken, fried sweet plantains, which my mother loves, and diri ak pwa, rice and beans. For a while, each time someone would visit from Haiti, my father would help cook that same meal, just as he had for us, his welcome repast, he called it, because he wanted his visitors to taste something that had buffered his transition to immigrant life. And even if their stays were not meant to be as long as his, he hoped that they would feel, as he did, that one could easily return home, simply by lifting a fork to one’s lips.
I watched as my mother prepared my father’s rice. As she dropped the contents of an overflowing measuring cup into a pot of boiling water, a few grains spilled over the side, turning black in the burner’s blue flames. Her hands trembled as she lowered the lid to trap some steam to prevent the rice from becoming sticky. My father liked his rice light and fluffy, but separate. If given the choice, he’d rather eat it al dente than soggy. Since he’d gone so long without a taste, the possibility of disappointing him weighed heavily on my mother.
When the rice was done, my mother searched a cabinet filled with her special-occasion dishes, the kind she used only when she had company, and pulled out a white porcelain plate with two giant cherries sketched in the middle. The cherries overlapped in a way that made them look like one large heart and as my mother heaped the rice on top of them, they seemed like a coded message from a woman who was beyond taking ordinary moments with her husband for granted.
I took the rice up to my father on the bright yellow tray on which all his meals were served. My mother added a tall glass of ice-cold water, which my father had requested at the last minute. When I walked into the room, my father’s face lit up, his eyes sparkling with anticipation. He was sitting in the recliner, his eyes glued to the plate. I leaned over to place the tray in front of him. He was covered in four layers of blankets, which were doing the work that muscle and fat had once done for his body. What seemed like room temperature to someone else could feel glacial to my father.
The forward sway of my body made the water glass skid across the tray, spilling the chilled water into my father’s lap. The water soaked through the blankets onto his pajamas, leaking into the sponge padding beneath him.
My father let out a loud cry. I quickly pulled the tray aside, resting it on the dresser behind the television. Even as he moaned and tried to wriggle away from the soaked sheets, my father’s eyes trailed the plate of rice that was now cooling off just a few feet away.
My mother heard my father’s screams from downstairs and rushed to his rescue. She quickly peeled back the blankets, all the while shouting for me to get her a towel and dry pajamas from the closet.
My father’s pained utterances quickly went from moans to wails.
“Oh God!” he called out tearfully. “Oh God!”
An hour later, my father was still trembling, under no fewer than three piled-up dry comforters.
“It feels,” he said, “as though I’ve been sleeping on a bed of ice for days.”
It took some oxygen and a nebulizer to stabilize him. By then the rice was cold and he showed no desire for it.
‘I’m sorry, Papa,” I said, trembling myself at his bedside. I had terrible visions of watching him freeze to death as a result of my carelessness.
“It was an accident.” He raised one bony hand from under the comforters to grab mine. “I know you didn’t mean to do it.”
“I am sorry I ruined the rice for you,” I said. “I know how much you wanted it.”
He hesitated, then pressed my hand harder.
“I didn’t want it so much as I
It pained me much more to hear this than it did to have heard him say a few weeks before that he’d dreamed of Granpe Nozial and Granme Lorvana and Tante Ino, his long-dead father, mother and sister, standing at his bedside. It pained me more than the way he’d been starting every sentence with “Le m ale.” When I’m gone.
Sitting beside him that afternoon, I remembered being angry with him two Thanksgivings before when he’d sat down at the dinner table and left his plate untouched.
“There’s nothing here I want to eat,” he had declared.
After cooking for two days, my mother had been devastated by what she’d considered a blatant condemnation of her cooking. But what we didn’t know then, and what my father himself wasn’t aware of at the time, was that he already had a disease that was slowly eating away at his body, including his yearning for food and his reliance on it to sustain him.
We could smell it before we saw it. A new batch of long-grain white rice
