“Be my guest,” I said to Sophie.
Hospice, I said to myself. After we got back from Boston, I would add it to my New Vocabulary list and then I would call Mai Mai Fan and tell her that my list finally had 100 words. By the time we got in our decrepit Volvo to drive to Logan Airport, I had practically wiped Sophie from my mind.
Every night while my father was away in Idaho, my mother and Cody and I watched the Weather Channel. Snow always hung right over Idaho. It was funny that my father had gone to a place called Sun Valley in a state that clearly never got any sun.
The night that I saved my father’s life, Cody fell asleep right in front of the TV while we waited for the Idaho weather. I sat on the couch, trying to drink from a straw while I was lying down so that if I ever became paralyzed or got a terminal disease, I would still be able to drink coffee milk, my favorite thing in the world, and one of the only good things available here in Providence but nowhere else in the country, maybe even the entire universe. My mother was reading a book and taking notes for an article about healthy eating.
She looked up at me and said, “Why are you wearing that ridiculous Husky T-shirt?”
I grinned, loving her so much for that.
“Let’s put it in the giveaway bin,” she said. The giveaway bin was where clothes that didn’t even fit Cody ended up.
“Look,” I said, pointing to the television, “there’s Idaho.”
“More snow,” Cody said.
I tried to imagine my father riding in a helicopter and getting dropped off on some mountain, having to find his way back. He was, I knew, resourceful. After all, he had climbed all the way to the top of Mount Kilimanjaro. He had eaten a roasted guinea pig in Quito, which is the capital of Ecuador. He had ridden on a raft down the Amazon River while guerrillas shot at him. But still, finding your way off a mountain in the snow in Idaho sounded really scary.
“What if Daddy doesn’t find his way off that mountain?” I asked my mother.
“He will,” she said without looking up.
“How do you know?”
“He’s with a guide, for one thing.”
I sighed and watched the weather report for the Cape and islands. Rain. Cody thought that was a special place, the Capon Islands, even though our father had shown him on a map and everything: Cape Cod and the islands, Martha’s Vineyard and Nantucket.
“Have I ever been to Nantucket?” I asked my mother.
“When you were a baby.”
That made me smile. I loved to think of myself as a baby, a bald pink thing that was carried from place to place, Nantucket and Mexico and London and Barbados, in some kind of conscious state; I remembered none of it. In pictures, I look so cute in my jean jacket and OshKosh overalls, with ridiculous droopy hats.
“I wish I could remember,” I said.
“All you need to know,” she told me, “is that you were the most fabulous, most adored, most wonderful baby ever.” She smiled at me.
Even though I had just turned eleven, I wanted to curl up right on her lap and stay there for a while. Before the divorce, my mother had that effect on me.
Instead, I asked her, “What’s hospice?”
She looked up, all worried. “It’s where people go when they’re dying, when there’s no hope for them at all. Who’s in hospice?”
“It’s a place?” I asked, disappointed, thinking that Mr. Greer maybe didn’t die in the kitchen after all. Then where was my source of power? And how would I ever find it again?
“Yes. Well, yes and no,” she explained. “Hospice workers sometimes go to the person’s house and help take care of them until they die. Like Boppa.”
Boppa was my father’s father, a heart surgeon, a smart man who nonetheless died last year of the same disease a famous baseball player named Lou Gehrig died from. After Boppa got that disease, my father made us all watch that movie so we’d understand better. Then Boppa died, and that’s how we got money to buy this house.
My mother was going on and on about Boppa and the nurses that stayed with him around the clock and how that way everybody got to be right with him when he died.
Lucky everybody, I thought, shivering. I had never seen a dead person and I didn’t want to.
“And he got to die at home,” my mother continued, “right where he wanted.”
Lucky Boppa, I thought, already bored with hospice. Maybe I wouldn’t add hospice to my New Vocabulary list after all.
My mother sighed and looked dreamy. I wondered if she was thinking of her own father who had also died, but without hospice. He just lay down for a nap one Saturday afternoon and died.