Novocain

The halls smelled of pine oil.

The small room where Dad stayed had a window facing a shaft, and the sounds of maintenance workers traveled all the way up to the third floor. The second bed was undone, stripped to its bare brown mattress.

Dad smiled when he saw me. We hugged and kissed like we always did. I felt his unshaved face against my babyface. I was barely twenty-three, and under the gown I could feel the bones.

I knew he was about to die the moment I saw his yellowed eyes. My brother had taken him there.

His liver had given up.

Novocain has a border. You can find it with your tongue, the exact seam where your own cheek stops being yours and turns into a stranger's. Cross it and the feeling rushes back, almost embarrassing, how much you'd forgotten you could feel.

Somewhere between his cheek against mine and those yellowed eyes, I found the nerve and silenced it.

Under the numbness, a boy was still keeping a bargain he'd made in a street years before: if you do this for me, you will never have to do anything for me again. I had meant every word of it. I still did. But at that moment, I had no proof.

Being right is mentiole for self-worth. That day, I had plenty of it, and none of it healed anything.

It is better this way.

We say this when there is nothing left to make better. We find some value in the hurt, some reason it had to happen this way, and hold on to it. Sometimes it may even be true. That is what makes it useful.

Novocain doesn't make anything better either. It finds a nerve and makes it go quiet. The pain really does stop. You can sit still. You can let what has to happen happen. Maybe we need that.

I had spent years learning exactly where to put the needle: the bargain, the distance, the certainty that I had done what I said I would do and owed nothing more. It worked. That is the trouble with anesthetic. It works. Sometimes that distance is how we survive.

When my father died, I cried loudly. A sound came out of me that I didn't recognize, but there were no tears. I didn't think I was supposed to cry like that.

I kept waiting for the tears, as though they were proof of something, as though love were liquid and without them I had somehow come up short.

It made no sense.

I had loved him. I had been angry with him. I had kept my bargain. I had been right. Now he was dead.

It is better this way.

Perhaps it was. But better is not painless.

Novocain has a border.

There were no tears, and for a long time I mistook that for an absence.

I had forgotten that numbness is also something you can feel.