Educated

of raw, angry skin. There were a few craters from where the flames must
have concentrated in jets. They gave off a pungent smell, like meat gone to
rot, and were filled with white pools.
But it was his face that visited my dreams that night. He still had a
forehead and nose. The skin around his eyes and partway down his cheeks
was pink and healthy. But below his nose, nothing was where it should be.
Red, mangled, sagging, it looked like a plastic drama mask that had been held
too close to a candle.
Dad hadn’t swallowed anything—no food, no water—for nearly three
days. Mother called a hospital in Utah and begged them to give her an IV. “I
need to hydrate him,” she said. “He’ll die if he doesn’t get water.”
The doctor said he would send a chopper that very minute but Mother said
no. “Then I can’t help you,” the doctor said. “You’re going to kill him, and I
want no part of it.”
Mother was beside herself. In a final, desperate act, she gave Dad an
enema, pushing the tube in as far as she dared trying to flush enough liquid
through his rectum to keep him alive. She had no idea if it would work—if
there was even an organ in that part of the body to absorb the water—but it
was the only orifice that hadn’t been scorched.
I slept on the living room floor that night so I could be there, in the room,
when we lost him. I awoke several times to gasps and flights of movements
and murmurs that it had happened again, he’d stopped breathing.
Once, an hour before dawn, his breath left him and I was sure it was the
end: he was dead and would not be raised. I rested my hand on a small patch
of bandages while Audrey and Mother rushed around me, chanting and
tapping. The room was not at peace, or maybe it’s just that I wasn’t. For
years my father and I had been locked in conflict, an endless battle of wills. I
thought I had accepted it, accepted our relationship for what it was. But in
that moment, I realized how much I’d been counting on that conflict coming
to an end, how deeply I believed in a future in which we would be a father
and daughter at peace.
I watched his chest, prayed for him to breathe, but he didn’t. Then too
much time had passed. I was preparing to move away, to let my mother and
sister say goodbye, when he coughed—a brittle, rasping hack that sounded
like crepe paper being crinkled. Then, like Lazarus reanimated, his chest
began to rise and fall.