Brandy Lien Worrall-Soriano

This might be the day he comes home.
We don’t know yet, but we wait.
Coming home again.
First time, from the war.
Second time, from the country where the war was,
with a new wife and someone else’s kid.
Third, fourth, twelfth, thirteenth times from rehab
of different kinds,
when I pictured it like my dad going to summer camp,
making crafts and participating in trust falls
to get rid of everything that threatened to tear us apart.

This time coming home, not to live again but to die,
to live a very dying life
with all the gear that goes with that.

Dr. Rachael fixing for him to come home meant
getting him out of bed to shuffle down the hall,
but first get him out of bed.
On his own two feet and everything else he had previously taken for granted—
we have to get him to stand on that, one oedematous leg at a time.

Getting permission to go home is the golden ticket, we think.
At the first hint of its possible issuance,
I make phone calls to men who drive trucks made for moving
cross-country, but instead carry oxygen tanks,
modified toilet seats, and anything else with wheels and brakes.

Where we live, you can’t keep an illness like that a secret.
It’s everybody’s business, and everyone has an opinion.
They’ll see the trucks and the nameless men
in uniforms delivering all the things needed
to make dying less horrible.
They’ll part their flimsy floral curtains
and look out their windows and mutter prayers
under their breath, spittle hitting their chins,
but they won’t notice cuz they’ll be too busy praising Jesus
that it wasn’t their driveway those trucks were pulling up in.

I think these thoughts as I’m on hold with
the medical equipment company receptionist,
as the nurse helps Dad bring one leg out,
as Mom hovers over the nurse because she knows her husband
better than this American woman does.
Dad’s done all this before.
All of this, to come home.