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Sparkle (0)
I passed twenty-eight of them along the interstate on my way to the airport. Descansos. Resting places. Engraved metal crosses pressed into harsh red clay. Plastic flowers covered in brown highway spit. A bright blue teddy bear, damp and withered. A carved wooden shadow box filled with photographs I couldn't identify at seventy-five miles per hour. A balanced rock cairn next to an empty porcelain vase.
I passed them four weeks ago on my way to my father's house. He died that morning, died clutching a spiral-wired phone to his chest. He dialed 9-1-1, couldn't speak. The last thing he heard was an operator named Christine telling him to wait, to breathe, to wait, to wait. Help was on the way. Please breathe.
Christine is my middle name.
My dad liked to tell the story of the day I was born. I slid outside my mom's body, a corporal treasure of blood and transfered pain. He held my mom's hand, one of the first men to stand beside his wife in his generation. He forgot to tell my mom to inhale. He watched the doctor grab my head, turn me right, left, twist my shoulders free, let my body fade from perfect darkness to chaotic light. I breathed.
"It's a boy! It's a boy!"
The doctor raised one eyebrow above a woven baby blue mask.
"Uh, Mr. Jaworski, that's the umbilical cord."
My dad never got that boy. He birthed four more girls. He birthed a pink quintet, a collection too petite for football, a basketball team without space for injury, recovery. He treated us like sons, like his Catholic saints, like fallen angels. As the oldest, I was crucified, I was misunderstood, left to suffer the eternal punishment of the five, left to echo the unfinished business he couldn't clamp. I never made him smile.
He died clutching a phone. He died of cardiac arrest. He died eleven months, eight days after my mom. He died a few weeks after open heart surgery. He died not knowing I wrote, not knowing I unloaded that birth pain on paper, ignorant of my calling, of the one thing that bound us together.
My father wrote. He wrote. He spent his blood on story, on charred paper. He told one book, then another. He wanted to make it big, make it Oprah, best seller, New York Times' worthy. He didn't. The words he spilled in his field took root, found home, echoed in paid print. But the words he tended, the ones he wanted to leave his nest never took flight. They sit on my computer now, six Mafia thrillers, six adventure stories with heroes so much like my dad I can't read them without seeing his head of spiked grey hair, his chiseled chin.
I drove to the airport, passed twenty-eight descansos. Twenty-eight locations of death, of automobile failure, crash, burn, failure. Twenty-eight. When I returned, the number was thirty-three. Thirty-three crosses, bears, flowers, shadow boxes, balanced cairns, roadside memorials.
My sisters couldn't deal with my dad's body. They wanted it reduced to ash, captured in an urn, sanitary, removed. They didn't gaze upon his face one last time, didn't wipe his stray hair off his forehead. I did. I followed the white hearse to the crematorium, the lone mourner, the eldest, the most forgotten, most unloved, most mixed-up, most black in a sheep field of gray. I drove my dad's car, let it follow its master on roads so Kansas straight it seemed silly to follow.
An echo. That's what I am. An echo.
The hearse turned right, then left, passed through a hedge so narrow, lush, I knew I birthed again, felt the pain of loss and chaotic light as we dove into a clearing, a patch of dried cold Wichita prairie surrounding the house of fire. I parked my dad's car. It sputtered as I pocketed the key. It knew. It said goodbye.
I met the Fire Man in his chambers. Two funeral home men lifted a long cardboard box onto a slick black table. They left, left me alone with fire, with death, with a man who tended the gateway to heaven, to hades. Fire Man didn't meet my eyes. He lifted the lid of the cardboard box, dropped it on the ground at our feet, let me peer inside, identify my dad.
"Yes. It's him. Thank you."
I let the tears fall. I couldn't stop them. They filled my cheeks, the scalloped edge of my cotton blouse. I wiped a shock of hair from my dad's
