Passing

If your dad died on a mountain in Switzerland, blowing an alpine horn, if his anterior cerebral artery ruptured, and your mom told you his final breath flew “joyfully” through the hills, past deer, past goats, beyond trees; if you knew she said that only because you told her three times he was too old to go on that trip, that she shouldn’t wheedle him, whine him, guilt him into going — and if she carried him back to California in an urn and you picked her up at LAX in your Prius, if you drove up Highway One all along the cedars, and then into the winding mountain-oak roads until finally you circled up against her night-shrouded house; if you took in the suitcases, poured her a scotch, put her to bed, and then sprinkled salad dressing over a head of iceberg lettuce, ate it over the sink, hands shaking – if days later your mom sat on a rock as you waded into the Pacific Ocean to spread your father’s ashes in the surf, but they refused to descend, they flew up when you opened your fingers, up when you released them, and you gazed at the sky guessing he wanted to be there anyway, and all the while a blond college trumpeter stood behind your mom playing “I Surrender Dear,” because she had hired him to do that, he was the exact image of your father at age twenty-one, and she cried the whole time he played because he didn’t render the song with the same tonality your father had — and if you had never heard your father play the horn, if his trumpet was just a closet-creature you stumbled over as a kid playing hide-and-seek, and if you had gotten mom-slapped for pulling it out of the closet, out from under her boxes of high-heeled shoes, for opening the case, running your fingers over the velvet lining, touching the horn where his hands had touched it, where his fingers had mottled and discolored the brass, where his lips had turned the mouthpiece black, if your mother snatched the case away from you, shoved it back in with the shoes and said “Don’t touch!” — if you asked her why he didn’t play the horn anymore, and if she said because it ruined his teeth, because it woke up the baby, you, you were the baby, that he took up classical guitar because of you — don’t cry baby, don’t cry — if you suddenly felt awkward and wrong for falling asleep every night hugging your stuffed Bambi deer, staring at the stars out your window, listening to your father play Nocturno on the guitar instead of the horn, even though now the horn was just another box among boxes you helped your mom pack as you got her ready to sell the house, ready to move her into the upscale senior-living community she had picked out, where the two pools, the golf course and the shuttle to the symphony would help her forget, or maybe remember, and if most of the furniture was gone, and only your dad’s art books and some of his painting easels were left, if the old stereo turntable sat on the floor without its speakers or amplifier, and your mom looked around, shrugged and said You could sleep with me in my bed, and you knew she was lonely, but you said No, and the little embroidered leaves on the shoulders of her nightgown began to shake so you hugged her, feeling the twigs in the middle of her back ready to break, and you said “It’s okay, Mom, it’s going to be okay,” even though you wanted to say How the fuck did you let a seventy-eight-year-old man blow a horn in that altitude?— but she would not have understood, she never understood, and so you tucked her in bed, blew up the air mattress in the studio, and laid down to look up through the glass windows, up through the French doors, just one last time — to watch Orion rise through the twitching oak branches — maybe those branches were trying to hold onto the passing breeze, onto the unyoked stars — if you fell asleep, a kid staring at the moon, and you woke with the comforter over your head, with only your eyes peeking out, and a stag with antlers walked by just two feet away from you, nibbled the threads of grass reaching up between the dry leaves and acorns, and you didn’t think he could see you, but if he came to the window, and when his horn touched the glass it made a little ting-ing sound and you held your breath because you didn’t want him to leave, please don’t leave — ting, ting  — and all the light of morning, all the light of dawn around the deer, around you — if you you saw then, in that moment, that you’d admired your dad’s paintings, you’d listened to Sonny Rollins and Miles Davis with him right here in this studio, that you’d talked to him about boys, about Tolstoy, about surfing, and he had always made you feel like someone, but still you hadn’t really understood him, not until the deer looked at you, and you looked at the deer, and you saw what he was always seeing, what he was seeing, the indescribable light, the incandescence everywhere, the knotted, branching life on both sides of the window, that you, you were part of that knotted life, part of that incandescence, he was seeing you, from beyond the glass and before the glass; the music, the paint, the windows were all part of it — your life, his life, one life — then in that moment you would bawl like a baby, you would crawl up the stairs and ask your mom one more time not to sell the house, but she would not listen to you, she would not understand, and it would pass like ashes through your fingers anyway.

THE END