【by Paulina Campanella】

My hair crunches on my dancing fingers, pasty with week-old gel, making a sticky sound only I hear. This movement is the sole source of sound in the room, which has been holding its breath in darkness since I sat down. I have a bad habit of twirling my hair when I am nervous—sometimes I worry I am giving myself carpal tunnel syndrome. I tangle and detangle my fingers in my hair, circling and pulling with my left hand. I sit unusually straight on my grandmother’s velvet stool. 

Behind me, a basketball team is competing with another on the TV; there is always a game playing at this house. It’s muted, but with the curtains shut, the glass table reflects the screen, slanted. I cannot look away. The only sound, other than my hands streaming through my hair, is quiet and occasional: coughing, far to my left. Not coughs from the lungs, not from a bad cold, nor a strong gut. A voice croaks in each one. Soft, but vocal. And shaking.  

A streak of bright blue slices through the glass table, then repeats again very slowly from two angles. A black-and-white blob holds its limbs out, and a mile of blue-and-orange shirts leaps up and clasps one another’s backs. In a close-up on the table, a man in a cap is in tears: his favorite team is winning. He kisses a pretty woman, and they gleam in the glass. I tug at my hair and breathe.  

Another low croak shudders on my left. I feel my cousins and siblings turn their heads, an audible shift in the silence. We six “kids” are sitting around the table, spread between the brown leather couch, two velvet stools, and the floor. I am the youngest at seventeen years old, yet we are huddled in the corner like baby penguins keeping warm. One spot on the couch is empty, but no one sits in it. The glass reflects a commercial now, with very crooked trees.  

Then a moan, long and rattling. Sheets rustle, a footrest clunks, and I look up from the table. Even in the dim lighting, the black cape draped around my grandmother stands out like a boulder at dusk. Opaque, it covers her whole body and blocks out the twin-sized bed behind her.  

For a woman who has destroyed every marriage in the family, she looks small. My mother, standing with the other adults, disappears behind her. He’s agitated again, my aunt says in a low voice, craning her long neck over what I cannot see. My uncle tilts his head, then too disappears behind the black silhouette. A small clump of hair rips out in my left hand, and I brush it to the floor.  

Slowly, my grandmother sinks to the wall, and she reveals him like the sun at the end of an eclipse. But he does not shine as he always does. For the first time, I see my grandfather as a body. A skinny, pale, limp body. With gray skin and no hair. I feel far away from this ashen figure across the room; I’m alone in the dark, staring at the moon, and it has so many craters I’d never noticed before. Later, after, the only part I will recognize are the strong hands that once held me. He lies on the cot the nurse brought last week, the one my grandmother screamed at my parents not to buy, because her husband is a grown man who can walk up the stairs to his bed. His feet are on a low leather footrest to ease the pressure on his knees and back. He fights to sit up, to lift his arms and pry himself out of the cot, grunting like an animal. But my mother leans over and rubs his shoulders. It’s okay, Daddy. It’s okay.  

My uncle snatches a paper towel roll from my grandmother’s hands. She must have taken it from the kitchen counter. No, Ma. His voice trembles, for once vacant of anger. He rips a few sheets off and pats them on the floor, and she faces the hospice bed, searching for something to do. Her black cape twitches for a moment, and she emerges, holding up a pair of dark yellow socks. My fingers whirl in my hair, tugging at the roots.  

I understand why my grandfather is agitated now. Why he whines from his stomach in anguish at his son, for letting his two daughters see him like this. He is a former physician in the United States Army, an English scholar, a fifth son, and a grandfather of six. He used to let his patients pay him in Italian pastries if they couldn’t afford his medical fees. A cop once let him go with no ticket, realizing that three decades earlier, he was the doctor who delivered him. My grandfather deserves the dignity and strength to walk to the bathroom privately, without placing a humiliating burden on his wife and children. This chapter of his life, in which he wails like a helpless baby in front of his grandchildren, should not be part of his story.  

My aunt emerges from behind my grandmother, swiftly moving to the kitchen counter. She’s taken the soiled socks from her and drops them in the garbage. They thud, louder than I expected. She returns to the circle of standing adults, and I crease my hair.  

My grandmother has always worn black. Her father died young, and her mother taught her that no one wants a widow. She always taught me that black makes women look skinny, and that’s why she wears it, but I have wondered if she modeled herself after her mother. My mother and I couldn’t have more different senses of fashion—mainly, she has one and I don’t. But soon I will ask her to help me pick out an all-black outfit, and I will borrow her tights. And then the three of us will look the same, just like my great-grandmother.  

A silver glint catches the light from the TV, flashing in the dark room. I turn, and my uncle looks at me for the first time today, wielding a pair of scissors. My left hand halts, twisted deep in my scalp. He blinks. The kids, my aunt whispers. No more is said. I stand up, clumped with my older brother, sister, and three cousins, and we pace out of the room like obedient grade-schoolers.  

I’m sitting on a chair on the island now, elbow on the counter and hand in my hair. They are across the sea in the living room, behind the kitchen wall. Here, the huge windows attract the May sun—I forgot it was such a beautiful day. There, my uncle is snipping his father’s spoiled underwear with no intention of preserving it. My grandfather has more pairs of underwear than urinations left in him. He hasn’t accepted water for four days.  

Someone is spraying something in the dark room—my aunt and Clorox, most likely. She is neurotic about cleanliness and sprays her feet with cleaning supplies at night. But right now, she is doing what she can for her father. She must be wiping the floor and cot, and gently sliding a handcloth up his thighs as my uncle peels the soaked cloth off his body. Next to them, illuminated by the TV light, my mother holds her father. Shh, Daddy. I am not used to the three of them standing so close together, and I doubt they are, either. At family dinners, my uncle wolfs down his food and leaves to watch sports by the TV so he doesn’t have to sit at the same table as his sisters. The only person who could ever curb his anger is lying defeated on a hospice bed. I have never seen these dysfunctional siblings work together, but I am certain that I hear it now. My grandmother is weeping somewhere in the scene, though it doesn’t matter if she is clutching my mother or hovering in the next room; she would be just as distant from her children.  

In the middle of the marble island sits a white bowl of green grapes. Even though my siblings, cousins, and I all sit around it, nobody grabs one. I remember being young and my mother hiding the grape bowl on the top shelf of the fridge, because I ate so many every day. Back then, my biggest troubles were winning first place in SpongeBob Monopoly and convincing my older brother and sister to sneak me a few bunches of grapes. James would help me out when our parents weren’t home, as long as I swore never to tell Mom. Lara could reach them too, but she was useless when she was in a bad mood—which was often. Right now, they look afraid to move, sitting up straighter than I’ve ever seen them. My left hand cramps in my hair, and I flex it.  

Jenna and Christa, two of my cousins, look more comfortable sitting at the table. This is their house, after all. They are twins, and they are making assuring eye contact with everyone but each other. Their brother Paul clicks away on his laptop on the far end of the island. He is the oldest of us, and every day he spends here is a day he misses from medical school. He multi-tasks: managing homework, making faces at me across the table, and masking the ache from his hero lying in the bed behind the kitchen wall.  

The dark room inside is quiet, as it was before. For a while, the only sound is Paul’s clicking fingers and my wrist winding in my hair. Then, again, coughing. Maybe even weaker than earlier, barely reaching the kitchen. Everyone looks down, but I look at Paul. For just a moment, his confidence flickers, and I catch the sorrow he will wear in a few weeks, when he will be the last family member to look at our grandfather before we walk out into the May sun.

There is a sharp pain at the root of my thumb. My hair has become knotty and tangled, a hornet’s nest of brown curls. I pull my hand out from the coarse mass and pause as it suspends, longing, over the table. All I want to do is grab a green grape from the bowl and let it burst into my dry mouth.