On the fifth day, Tom finally turns the corner. He is in the clear, and that evening the oxygen tent is removed, and when Remy puts down the card trick he has been practicing and goes over to look into the open crib, Tom looks up at him and beams. On the morning of the sixth they promise that after a final chest X-ray, Tom will be able to go home, but they keep him one last night, so that it is not until the morning of the seventh day that he is finally released, returned to the family the same way he came to them, only now with the awareness that the people who arrive to us from nowhere and nothing are only ever that: a gift, received without our having known to ask, with only the wonder of how life delivers and delivers.

To Be a Man

To Be a Man

My Father

My boys are standing at the edge of the jetty, and either they will jump or they won’t jump. It is early summer, June, under the great bell of the sky, on the island on which I was raised. The waves are coming in from such a long way off that no one can say when or where their turbulence began, only that they are the transmittance of an energy that finally breaks here, and resolves into the shore. I watch them, my two boys, from the sand. My father, unusually quiet today, wearing a hat against the sun, watches too. He isn’t yet old, but at this very moment I can’t recall exactly how old he is. If his life seems long to me, it’s because he has changed more than anyone I know. One day, over the course of many years—there is no other way to put it—he took all his great anger out to sea, let the wind out of its sails, and came back home without it. Came back home with a stillness and patience where once the rocking fury had been.

Sometimes I forget my own age too. When people ask the ages of my boys, I round upward to give myself time to get used to where they are going. But while my father doesn’t have so very much time left, and I have some, my boys still have all the time in the world. The younger one does a little dance on the edge of the jetty. The older one tilts back his head, spreads his arms, and shouts something toward the sky.

I watch my boys and talk, and my father listens. Life, I say, or am trying to say, which is always happening on so many levels, all at the same time.

Broken Ribs

1

That summer, while her boys are on vacation with their father, she goes to visit her lover in Berlin.