I drove up to my parent’s house to drop off the children
with my mother before heading to work.
The minivan struggled to make it up the slick, icy driveway. The wind whipped drifts of snow across the yard,
making the chilling cold temperature visible from inside the warm van. I saw a truck that I didn’t recognize in the
driveway and wondered who might be at my parent’s home on a weekday
morning.
I put the vehicle in park and wrapped my scarf tighter
around me before exiting into the freezing morning air. I heard the dogs barking in the garage and
wondered why they were locked up. The
dogs were typically only locked in the garage if my parents weren’t home. I
assumed they were home because of the stranger’s truck in the driveway, so my
next assumption was that something must be wrong.
Something is wrong.
Something must be wrong. I went directly to worst case scenarios as I went
around the rear doors to unbuckle the children from their safety seats and head
into the house, now frightened of what I might find. It’s my father. Oh no, I just know it’s my father. My father had his first heart attack at
age fifty, followed by bypass surgery to replace five arteries. Not even two years later, two of the bypasses
had failed. There were stents placed in
his chest. My father, also a diabetic, might
be lying on the floor suffering from heart failure inside the home I was about
to bring his two young grandchildren into.
I couldn’t leave the children in the car though, certainly
not with wind chills in the negative. I carried
the two bundled up babes toward the porch.
I suddenly heard sirens approaching in the background. Fuck.
Those sirens are coming here. They’re coming to my parent’s house. I felt certain beyond doubt that the
nearing sirens belonged to an ambulance intended to escort my father to the
hospital, hopefully still breathing with a chance of living. Oh shit. Oh shit. The sound of the
sirens more rapidly approached.
As I tightly held my two tiny children, his beloved,
precious grandbabies, in my arms, my mind became a nightmarish film of the
worst possibilities. As I walked slowly
down the slippery sidewalk, each second seeming like a lifetime, mental images
flashed before me of my father collapsed on the floor, clutching his chest,
gasping for air, pain and terrible knowing present in the tight lines of his
forehead. He held an open palm out to me
and the children as if to say goodbye. I
tried to calm myself and shake such awful images, but they kept coming to me,
just like the snow kept falling down around us.
I was interrupted from such dreadful images when my mother
opened the front door and came out upon the porch, holding the lapels of her
coat tightly together with trembling, gloved hands. “I tried calling you,” she called to me, as I
approached the porch steps. “I didn’t want
you to bring the kids over right away.”
I felt that my worst fears had been confirmed when she spoke – that those
sirens really were for my father. “Well,
get them in here anyway,” she continued, “it’s freezing out here, and a fire
truck is coming.”
A fire truck. A fire truck, and not an ambulance. There was relief at this, but it was quickly
replaced by a new fear. “What’s going
on?” I asked.
“I think we have a chimney fire,” she said. “Your dad is downstairs with the fire chief.” I figured out that stranger’s truck in the
driveway must have belonged to this man.
I looked around the house, and everything seemed to still be in
order. There was, however, the odor of
smoke hanging in the air. “Get your kids in the bedroom, okay?”
I followed her commands as the other firefighters
arrived. My daughter wanted to see the
fire truck and the fire fighters, who were now up on the roof examining the
situation. My mother began describing
her fears to me, how she thought there was a chimney fire as a great deal of
smoke filled the home and she went outside and saw more smoke billowing from
the chimney than was normal. Ash had
scattered onto the roof and fallen down into the snow along the side of the
home.
She then began to complain about the response services. “I
wasn’t certain if there was a chimney fire or not though, you know,” she said, “so
first I tried to call the fire station.
No one picked up there so I had to call god-damn 911. The lady just told me to get outside right
away if I though the roof might be on fire.
I told her I wasn’t going outside because it was way too fucking cold
and it was just the roof, not the whole home.
It’s fucking freezing out there, Angela.”
She was right. It was
fucking freezing, but I tried to imagine being the emergency operator, who
probably had a desire to respond, “Well, if you stay inside I guess you’ll at
least stay warm because your house is on
fucking fire. Get out, you dumb
bitch!” However, now that I was now
inside the house too, I recognized that the situation was not really serious
and the threat of the fire spreading was minimal, so I understood my mother’s
reluctance to get out of the house. I’m
sure she would have exited had flames been licking the walls. Well, maybe. I mean, it was really, really fucking cold
outside.
When my father and the fire chief came back in the home,
they informed my mother that there was no fire after all. There had been smoke and ash because the chimney
needed cleaning and it just expelled extra ash when she started and stoked the
fire early this morning.
“Better to be safe than sorry,” they both said. My mother nodded. The three of them all
expressed relief, and the fire chief excused himself, wishing my parents a good
day.
As soon as he left, my father turned to my mother and said, “I
told you to just let me check it out, Cindy. You don’t listen to me. I could have done that shit. I could have taken care of it.”
“Well, you thought there was a fire too,” she replied. “I don’t want my damn house burning down in
the middle of winter.”
“I could have gone up on the roof,” he answered, although he
also nodded in agreement that the threat seemed real given the amount of smoke
in the home.
“Dad, you don’t belong up there,” I added my own
contribution to their discussion. I sat
feeding my six month old son a bottle while my daughter sat next to me eating a
strawberry pop-tart and smiling at her grandparents, totally oblivious to the
fright that had just occurred.
“No shit,” my mother seconded my concerns. “What would I do
without you? That’s just what I need. My roof possibly on fire, and my husband
climbing up there and falling on his dumb ass and killing himself.”
“Meh,” my father said, treating every serious situation with
his strange air of brevity and dark humor. “You could have collected insurance
then. You would be just fine.”
“No I wouldn’t,” she said, looking at him with eyes that
asked him to be serious without a word needing to be spoken.
“Dad, don’t talk like that,” I said. I didn’t like him making jokes about death
like this. He had said these kinds of
things as long as I can remember.
Whenever I would warn him about his bad eating habits given his
diabetes, he would just brush off my gentle, loving discipline. He would sneak sweets while my mother was at
work, and I would say, “You can’t eat like that. You’ll kill yourself.” His response, without fail, was always, “Good.
When?”
“Yes, please don’t talk like that.” My dad got up from his chair and approached
my mother, letting her know he was just joking.
Yet, he continued on with his ridiculous jests.
“I think with our insurance, if it’s an accident, you can
claim double,” he added, “You’ll be fine.”
My daughter picked up on this and excitedly threw her hands
up in the air, screaming, “Double! Double!” with a great big smile spread
across her face.
We all laughed, and then moved on from the excitement of the
morning. I was so damn glad that while
my mind tends to run rapidly toward worst case scenarios, those scenarios
rarely become a reality. I still had my
father next to me, beaming a smile at his silly, happy granddaughter in a house
that was still intact. We were all
together, safe and warm.
