Island City by Laura Adamczyk

Author:Laura Adamczyk
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux

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Between school and Spain, there was a lot I missed. Now that I think about it, I didn’t actually witness the couch fire. I don’t know how high the flames really were. It was Sister and her boyfriend who discovered it and put it out, the same way it was Sister and our aunt who decided, late my senior year of college, to put Dad in a home and which one. The decision was presented to me as one having already been made. Sister merely informed me of its madeness. It made sense. I was only twenty-one. At twenty-three, she had a real leg up.

In some different life or if I’d been older or the older sister, I might have felt chagrined at having been left out of the process, but I was relieved. Were the decision left to me, I would have immediately passed it to someone else. Whatever makes sense. Whatever you think, is close to what I said when Sister told me about the assisted living facility she and our aunt had found a few towns away from his house. The information came with their reasoning attached.

He gets meals and they check to see that he’s taking his medication, but other than that he’s independent, Sister told me over the phone. Private room. Private bathroom. We saw it. It’s not bad. It’s kind of nice actually.

When will he go? I asked.

He’s there right now.

Oh.

We had to—well, we didn’t tell him where we were going.

Oh.

I don’t think he’s happy about it.

I can’t imagine.

It sucked actually. After we showed him his room, we ate in the cafeteria with him, kind of trying to convince him how nice it was, but he wasn’t having it. He kept on saying, Okay, let’s go, like we were just there to eat.

Imagining the scene, I felt like my guts were being pressed out of my body. At the same time, I was relieved that, between the two of us, only Sister had that one, would have that one for however long she held on to it. That year I lived in an apartment with two friends who I’d been in Spain with, a couple who shared the other bedroom. There was a boxy computer in the living room, a bulky TV, a flame-retardant couch. (Exactly, if only my dad had had one.) I slept in what had been the sunroom. In the winter it was cold and airless, hot and stuffy in warmer weather. I shut myself up in there whenever I talked to Sister on the phone. I closed the French doors then a little while later opened them and left for class or the dining hall or the library or my job at the bakery downtown. I spent that last year writing short stories that were either barely veiled— a sick father! Two sisters trying to deal with it!—or rip-offs of heist movies that culminated in dramatic poker games. I showed up to meetings with my writing professors hungover and ghostly.

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