Sign Language

Vincent’s daughter, Rose, rips away the tape that seals his right eye shut each night. She doesn’t think he feels pain there, and so she isn’t gentle. She’s half-right. Physical pain isn’t what he feels, not on his right side. The sensation is more like coming to consciousness after a bad dream—the comfort of the familiar bed, its sharp angles and flat soft surface, somehow distorted. On the edge, falling, catching his fall. The bed firmly under him. Everything is exactly as he left it: his memory fraying, his daughter fussing, his wife, Francesca, gone.

Every morning, this tearing away. Rose peels him, layer by layer. A fruit, he thinks, an overripe pear whose skin takes with it part of the pulp. Thin parchment is all that’s left between him and bones.

“Pop?” Rose says, her cheek hovering over his mouth, checking, no doubt, to make sure he’s still breathing. He hasn’t opened his good eye, and the other lolls in its socket. He holds his breath, ashamed but curious, wondering what she’ll do.

“Pop?” she says again, more urgently. She slaps him lightly on the left cheek. “Pop?”

He’s waiting for Francesca. Maybe she’ll come to him as bones. Her cheekbone against his cheek. Her kiss, all incisors and jawbone. He’s been waiting for flesh, but maybe all that’s left is bone. He shudders, opens his good left eye, and stares at flesh-and-bone Rose. Yes, just a bad dream.

“You scared me to death,” she says.

Her face is so close, the heat of her breath warms his cheek. There’s a tear in her right eye, a single bead of water stuttering on the rim of her lower lid. So she’d cry, and then—what? The tears would dry.

She presses her hand against his chest, brushes her lips over his forehead. Her dark, curly hair falls over his face. So much like Francesca, Vincent thinks, closing his eye again. Francesca bends to kiss him, her fingers undoing his shirt buttons even as he fastens them. He pretends to be annoyed as he winds her long hair once, twice around his hand, pulls her head back, kisses her down the length of her exposed throat. She’s finally come to him after so many years apart, but then something touches his shoulder. He opens his eye. No, only Rose, not his dead wife.

Rose pushes the rolling invalid’s table over his bed and fiddles with the toggles on the bed’s control panel, adjusting his body over the tray until his position approximates sitting up. Straining the good muscles in his back, he manages to lift his head and smile lopsidedly.

Without returning the smile, Rose thrusts a spoon in his hand and asks, “What would you like for lunch today?”

Lunch? Not that he remembers each day’s rhythm. Steam curls from a bowl of liquefied baby cereal she’s set in front of him. Yes, still morning. He stirs slow figure eights through the mush as he considers her question, his response, her likely “no.” He lets go the spoon and drums his fingers on his thigh, his signal for the alphabet board he uses to communicate with her. Since his second stroke, he can’t speak, so that although he thinks he’s said the word for broken or no, all that comes from his mouth is a long O. He can gesture—a slight nod for yes, a small headshake for no, hand movements that mean come and go and please—but his left hand trembles so badly when he holds it up too long that sometimes it’s hard to tell what he wants.

Rose retrieves the board from the clutter on his nightstand, carefully moving aside the framed photographs she’s placed there to remind him he has a family. He flexes his good left hand (what he thinks of as his good hand, although this past week, the left has been troubling him as well) and points to the letter “F.” He pauses, then finishes the word: “-AGIOLI.” Even without looking, he senses Rose’s frown.

She folds her arms across her chest. “You know what happened the last time we tried that. If I hadn’t heard the glass breaking . . .”

The words dangle between them like a dare. He knows she won’t say, “You could have died.” He knows she won’t say, “I don’t want you to die.” Instead she says, “You’ve hardly touched your breakfast."  . . .