by Erin Jamieson
When I think of my dad, I always return to the image of a single purple balloon, violently shaking in the wind.
A balloon from my sixth birthday, days after a bad infection that kept me in bed for a week, with a winking face and bulbous sharpie eyes.
Having an NG tube after a week of having trouble swallowing more than watery oatmeal hadn’t made me cry. Having to wear a paper thin hospital gown and standing in front of strangers as they examined me the way you’d examine a car hadn’t. But the site of that purple balloon, leaving my still weak grip, did.
Even at that age, I longed for hikes and day trips more than I did for Barbies or robot toys, which apparently Mikaela went through a phase with.
But. Something about seeing that balloon slip from my grip, just like that finally made me cry. It wasn’t just any balloon; it was mine.
The balloon that I sketched a face on when I didn’t feel up to drawing anything else. The same balloon that sat beside me as we celebrated Labour Day the day before, with Arroz Con Leche rice pudding for me (softer on the stomach and throat) and Lechon Asado marinated pork for Abuela and Dad.
And as I watched my balloon slip away, my dad started running towards it. He passed by a woman walking her dog; a man pushing a stroller; the mailman delivered a package on a neighbor’s porch.
And caught it in time.
He also managed to scrape his leg badly against a wire fence. It was bleeding enough. I remember Abuela asking if he needs stitches.
Later, Abuela asked why he’d done it.
“Because,” he said, looking over at me. “It needed to be saved.”
“You can’t always save me,” I argue, setting my empty mug of cafe con leche down on the stove. Abuela made a cup for each of us (hers, with an extra shot of espresso) but my dad hasn’t touched his.
“And you can’t decide to kill yourself.”
I’m startled into silence. Even Abuela doesn’t say anything for a moment. The faucet is dripping behind us, the air filled with the aroma of sweet, steamed milk and dark espresso.
“I never said–”
“A lung transplant is dangerous, Andria. It’s not like trying a new type of therapy, or–”
“I know–”
“Your body could reject the new lungs. You could get a bad infection. You could–”
“I know, Dad. I researched.”
He’s squeezing his mug so hard I’m afraid it’s going to break. But his voice is oddly quiet. “You don’t know.” He dumps his coffee down the sink. Abuela’s eyes meet mine, as if to say, I’ll talk to him, even though I’ve barely had a chance to discuss this with anyone aside from Mikaela.
“The answer is no,” he says, and it’s like the soft spoken, introverted father I’ve known is gone, replaced with someone with twice his vigor, someone who’s angry and maybe afraid.
“It’s not your decision.”
“I’m your father. Who took care of you since you were little–”
“And you regret it! I can see it! I’ve screwed with your life. You don’t go on vacations because of me. We’ve always scraped by, because of me–”
“Andria,” Abuela tries to interrupt.
“For once, for once I want a chance. I don’t want to be the sick girl with CF. I don’t want to know that you’ve spent your life taking care–”
“That’s not what he was saying–”
“It’s not your decision anymore.”
“Andria, there’s no reason for you to do this. Not when there are other options–”
“What options, Dad? Live at home for the rest of my life, however long that is? Does that sound like an option to you?”
“You don’t–”
“Why aren’t you willing to let me try something, something that could work? It could change my life if it works.” I’m talking too fast, no longer thinking. I know it’s not as simple as that and I don’t care.
“The reason I don’t want you to get a lung transplant is because–” he hesitates. His voice is thick. “That’s how your mother died.”
My mother’s always been a shadow. Someone whose presence I feel, not for who she is, but how she shaped who my dad is now.
Before, Abuela has told me, my dad was still reserved–a more confident Frank I guess–but he smiled easily. He joked often. He was so silly my mother didn’t take him seriously.
I’ve been told my mother was every bit as stubborn as I am.
Though we don’t have many, I’ve seen pictures of her: a pale complexion but deep chestnut eyes, the same one her single Puerto Rican mother had, the grandmother I’ll never meet; I don’t know anything about her father. She didn’t resemble me, except the crinkles by her eyes when she smiled.
Over the years, I got crumbs of knowledge: she loved pottery, loved the smell of old books, but she also hated to be alone. Alone time for her was time she could be spending with others, seeing something, discovering something new.
She died a few years after I was born. You’d think I would know more, but I’ve only ever been told she became ill.
Pneumonia.
Maybe that shouldn’t have been enough for me to realize, but they never once mentioned CF.
CF is genetic.
And now my dad’s telling me she died not from pneumonia, but from trying to escape from the medical reality–then, people didn’t live long as they do now.
She died, he tells me, because she wanted to be there to see her daughter grow up.
I know I am supposed to say something. But all I can manage:
“Why didn’t you tell me?”
“I never needed to–”
“You never once thought to mention she had CF, too?”
He shakes his head. His eyes are hooded and dark. His next words are broken. “I don’t want to lose you too.”
I can’t look at him. I can’t look at Abuela.
Did my dad never talk about my mom because of how much pain it caused, or because he was afraid I’d find out?
“I need to pack to go back to school.”
They both look at me blankly. I don’t wait for them to try to explain away again. I don’t feel angry or upset. It’s like I’m still processing.
She died from a lung transplant. An infection from it, probably.
And she did it for me.
Would she have, had she known I too would battle the same illness?
Would she take that risk for someone who also had no guarantee of a future?
I take the steps two at a time. My chest feels heavy. I hear my dad and Abuela arguing downstairs but I can’t make out what they’re saying. I have text messages, some from running club members, some from Mikaela, one from Xander.
I lay down on my bed and close my eyes. The worn bedspread feels the same, a comfort from my childhood. If I close my eyes tight enough, I can envision myself jumping up and down on the bed, Abuela passing by with a stack of towels, pretending not to notice.
Or the nights when I couldn’t sleep and my dad would come in with a glass of steamed milk and read me short stories by Alma Ada, transporting me to the warm rays of Cuba, that same story about the Japanese vendor Alma saw as a child and gave scoops of soft serve ice cream to kids who couldn’t afford it.
There’s a knock at my door. I ignore it, my eyes still squeezed shut.
“Andria? Can I come in?”
I roll over, open my eyes. “Packing.”
Abuela opens the door anyway. Fading sunlight highlights the wrinkles around her eyes, wrinkles I’ll probably never live long enough to develop. And she can clearly see I haven’t been packing.
“You knew, didn’t you, about my mom.”
Her silence is enough. Of course she knew. How could she not?
How could I not have? I took my dad’s word for it–that it was sudden, tragic, unexpected.
But it wasn’t that sudden.
It was a constant state of dying.
“My mom knew. She knew that transplant was her only chance.”
Abuela looks at me, and I can tell she’s holding back tears. Abuela has only cried a few times in my life.
“It isn’t yours.”
“It is if I want to have a real life.”
“What is a real life?” Abuela squeezes my hand. “Who decides that?”
“I want to be able to run. Live in a dorm. Go to the grocery store and not worry about picking a bug up that’ll land me in the hospital. I want to go on big trips, not something an hour away. I want to go to Paris and stand in front of the Eiffel Tour and paint.”
I’m breathless. I swallow, but Abuela doesn’t notice.
“Andria, you can live. You can have dreams.”
“Not those.”
“Maybe not all of them. Or maybe not all of them now. We don’t know. We don’t know what’s possible.”
“I know that my lung capacity now means I’ll be more limited than I have ever been. What if I have to be hooked to a respirator? Like smokers when they get lung cancer? What happens when I have to spend most of my time–”
“That isn’t what the doctors said. You have time–”
“Time? To see if they come up with something better?”
Abuela smooths the corner of my bed sheets in a way that makes me irrationally angry. Because it’s my life, not hers. The hard truth is that right now she might outlive me. And that isn’t what’s bothering me. It’s not dying young. It’s spending my time left dying by degrees, not doing what I want.
Limiting myself when there’s a possibility of living without those limits.
“Andria, you have to know how hard this is for your father.”
“What about me? What about how hard it is for me?” It isn’t something I’ve said much before. This isn’t me. But I think it’s also something I may have felt for a while.
“Andria, this isn’t the answer to everything.”
“You don’t have an answer either.”
She squeezes my hand, more firmly. “What if it doesn’t work?”
I turn away from her, watching the sun set outside. Our skin is being bathed in crimson and sherbert; it feels like one of those scenes from a movie, where you’re supposed to pay attention; a quiet before what comes next.
“What if it does?” I say.
I hear my dad at night, working at his desk. Normally he’s quiet but tonight he drops something; opens and shuts doors with enough force I can hear with my bedroom door shut.
I close my eyes and try to shut the noise out, but as I’m drifting off to sleep my conversation with Abuela keeps playing over and over in my head.
I throw my fuzzy robe on, the same one Mikaela’s always said looks like what you’d get if you mixed melted skittles and hairball (she’s always has a way with words) and head downstairs. I find my dad in his office, bent over his desk, but he isn’t working, staring at his laptop and opening and shutting drawers.
“Looking for something?”
He jumps a little in his seat. “Andria. What are you doing up?”
“I want to know why you didn’t tell me. About Mom.”
He lowers his eyes. “She’s gone, Andria. There was no reason to relive that.”
“But what about me? Didn’t I have a right to know?”
“What would it have changed, knowing how she died? That isn’t how I like to remember her. That wasn’t what I wanted you to spend time thinking about.”
In a way, I get what he’s saying. Knowing that she had CF, that she died young, how would that have impacted me? Or hearing, when I was too young to understand, that she had a risky operation for me?
But it had to have been for herself, too. It could have been a last resort, her last hope. I sit down on the floor beside his desk. The carpet is rough, lightly stained from the times Mikaela convinced me it would be a good idea to make our own mini ‘volcanoes’ in pop liter bottles. We got the proportion of baking soda to vinegar wrong, or put too much of it in altogether.
“I wanted you to believe you had a future,” he continues, his hands finally still. “That you were going to live a good life.”
“Which is what I want.”
“Your mother–this isn’t the same, Andria.”
“I don’t know what happened in her case, dad, but you can’t have it both ways. You can’t want me to have a good life and choose what that looks like for me.”
“It looks like you staying alive.”
I take a deep breath, a breath that manages to fill my lungs. My chest is sore. My throat is sore. I am so tired.
“I want you to know. I already requested to have my name on a waiting list. There’s a chance it could be a long time.”
Shock registers in his eyes, so stark it’s hard to look at. To him this must feel like a betrayal. Maybe the way I feel from him keeping the secret of my mother’s death from me.
Before, I couldn’t have done this. Before I would’ve thought of that, and only that: how hard this will be for Abuela and Dad, no matter what happens. I know all that they’ve done for me. I know, I know, what risks I’m taking.
But my dad can print off article after article and not change my mind.
I’ve always been told that I’m stubborn like my mother.
I can’t think, right now, if that is the bookend. If this is me succumbing to my nature, or becoming who I was meant to be.
Except. I’m not doing this for a child, a husband. I’m doing it for myself. And I’m struggling to see if that’s something to be admired, or a reason why I will never be the selfless person so many have made me out to be.
“If you do this, it will break me,” he says. “You’re the reason I made it through after your mother died.”
But can’t he see how backwards that is? I think of the stories of how he used to be. The photos and grainy home videos of him cracking jokes. How he’s not aged so much as faded.
You can love someone. You can give a lot to them. But they can’t be your sole reason for living.
My throat is thick and for once it has nothing to do with mucus build up. “You’re going to be fine, Dad.”
Even though I’m still upset, I pull him into a tight hug.
It’s a long time before either of us let go. Before we both realize it’s getting late, and it’s time to part ways.
About the Author
Erin Jamieson (she/her)’s writing has been published in over 100 literary magazines, including two Pushcart Prize nominations. Her poetry chapbook, Fairytales, was published by Bottlecap Press and her most recent chapbook, Remnants, came out in 2024. Her debut novel (Sky of Ashes, Land of Dreams) came out November 2023.