Joe’s face is the color of salt. His head, flopped to one side, floats above the crisp white sheet his wife has tucked tight around his failing body.

Irma shifts from one foot to the other. She’d like to tell her brother that he reminds her of a burrito, but she suspects Helen wraps him so because she is afraid of something falling out—one of his atrophied limbs or the slick stuff that oozes from an uncontrollable bed sore.

For the past 40 years, multiple sclerosis has gradually shut off the thousands of nerve connections between Joe’s brain and body. He can move his head but he no longer speaks. He whispers, but so softly now that no one can make out what he is saying.

“Just talk to him,” Helen says. “It’s better than him listening to the news.” She assures Irma that Joe prefers his guests to do all the talking. “He’s very tired this week,” she adds. “He’ll probably just fall asleep after awhile.”

Irma has come 3,000 miles to say goodbye to her brother but she can’t quite say it. She has lived in California since her brother’s earliest symptoms began and, since the death of their parents, she has rarely returned east. Their discussions over the years have been phone conversations in which Irma largely avoided the obvious. The question “How are you?” was always followed by a painful silence and finally the word “okay. “

Joe’s only working eyeball studies Irma. It’s unnerving to her because it bulges out of its socket with a muscular twitch that moves it from side to side whenever she speaks, like he is tracking her words on a page.

She’s finished telling him how deeply sorry she is that this happened to him. She just told him she believes he has suffered more than Christ on the cross. This was an odd thing to fall out of her mouth because neither of them were ever churchgoers, nor were their parents.

Joe’s eyeball remains focused on her, waiting for more. Pulsing silently, like the expectant cursor on an empty computer screen.

“Uh, remember when Dad dropped us off at church and we’d leave before the collection plate was passed and go buy ice cream cones?” 

Joe slowly rolls his head over the pillow from one side to the other.

Irma isn’t surprised he doesn’t remember. The truth is, Joe and Irma were never very close. Joe enlisted in the Navy before she even got to high school. In past visits, they’ve gone over the things that siblings with little in common but their childhood talk about—the injustice of being kicked out of a sandbox, “that bloody bullfrog dangled in front of my face,” or the time Joe locked Irma in their father’s old footlocker and sat on it despite her fearful cries that she was suffocating.

She’s thought a lot about how unfair and cruel it is that most of her brother’s life has been dictated by a disease, and that it continues to torture him, even in hospice, after he’s made the decision to fight it no more. But she’s not sure that this is the kind of thing she’d like hear on her deathbed, so she remains silent.

Instead she stares out the window at the bird feeder that Helen hung up right outside Joe’s window. It’s winter, and right now there are no birds hanging out around it—not even a noisy squirrel to break up the silence.

For a second, Irma considers asking her brother if he remembers the time he allowed his friend Andy to pin her to the floor in a wrestling move and put his hand up under her training bra. This is something they’ve never discussed, and Irma quickly decides they never will.

“Stupid Andy,” she mutters under her breath like she has a thousand times before. She hopes Joe didn’t hear her, but when she looks at him again his good eye closes and opens, like a wink. The cursor, still pulsing, waiting.

“You remember Andy?”

He nods, slowly sliding his head up and down on the pillow with all the strength he can muster.

“He enlisted in the Navy with you?”

Joe’s eye begins to move from side to side again, tracking every word Irma utters.

“But that day you left for boot camp, he didn’t show.”

He nods again and his head catches a little on the pillow’s gentle folds. He leaves it there, in an awkward, upward position. His eye is focused for some reason on the ceiling. Like he’s searching for something there. His chest rises fully. Irma anticipates a long sigh, but none follows.

“I always wondered why he did that,” Irma continues slowly. “He ever tell you?”

Joe labors his head back in place on the pillow, then tucks his chin into his neck and looks down the still plane of what’s left of him

Irma went with her brother and their parents to the bus stop that day. She remembers that Joe was so anxious when Andy didn’t show that he didn’t seem to hear his mother’s request for a kiss before getting on the bus. He took a seat near the back and stuck his head out the window, searching in both directions for his friend. When the bus pulled out, they all waved at him but it seemed he could see straight through the three of them. She’s never forgotten his expression. Lost, and really scared. This was something she’d never seen on her older brother’s face before.

Joe’s eye is twitching. Waiting. Waiting, Irma supposes, for her to say something—anything. But she really doesn’t want to say any more. In fact, she regrets that she even whispered Andy’s name. This was not the time to bring him up.

Not long after the day Joe left for boot camp, Andy was drafted into the Army and sent to Vietnam. Irma was friends with Andy’s sister, Linda. She was the one who told Irma that Andy wasn’t even out in the rice paddies for a day when he stepped on a land mine.

Irma’s gaze returns to her brother’s pulsing eye. She begins to wonder whether Joe’s eye movement is as deliberate as she has assumed. Maybe he didn’t have any control over it at all.

But both of Joe’s eyes are moist. The good one is sparkling with its twitch. And Irma remembers something else.

“Did I ever tell you that when I was in Washington, DC, I went to the Vietnam Memorial to look for him? I mean I looked up his name on the wall. There were a couple of Vietnam vets there at a table with a huge book of all the names on the wall. This was back before computers. They told me where to find Andy’s name.”

This seems to be news to Joe, and his face changes. It is now pink. His lips are quivering like he is trying to get something past them.

Irma gets as close to her brother as possible and puts her left ear to his lips. Joe whispers something that she can’t quite make out. But she doesn’t press him. It was either “That’s nice,” or “I’m sorry.”

Irma stands up and away from her brother. She tries to smile at him, but can’t. Instead she is paralyzed with fear. It’s been a long time since she’s felt this way. It reminds her of Joe on that bus the day he left his youth behind.

Minutes of stillness roll by before Irma follows an impulse to reach under the covers and pull out her brother’s hand. A tear rolls out of Joe’s paralyzed eye and down his cheek. Irma cannot tell for sure if he can even feel her hand holding his, much less the tear on his cheek, but she grabs a Kleenex from the dresser and takes a swipe at it, and then dabs at her own moist eyes. She spots a nearby wastebasket, but she’d have to let go of her brother’s hand to reach it. She stuffs the wet wad into her jeans pocket.

More time passes, but  Irma has no idea how long she’s been standing there holding her brother’s limp, cold fingers. She looks at his face again. His complexion has started to fade back to white. The lid over his active eyeball droops, and then closes completely. His head flops to one side, exactly the way she found him when she first entered his room.

“Maybe I should go now,” she says. “Let you get some rest.”

She kisses his cheek and wonders if he remembers she told him she would be leaving for California early the next morning. She lets go of his hand and turns away from her brother for the last time, the salty remains of his tears on her lips.

Denize Springer’s nonfiction and fiction have appeared in various publications and literary journals including the Marin IJ, East Bay Express, Pearl, Estero, Vistas & Byways, and Ocean Realm. Her plays and adaptations have been presented in distinguished New York and San Francisco venues including the New York Theatre Workshop, the Public Theater, and the Bay Area Playwrights Festival. “The Way We Say Goodbye” was named a semifinalist in the 2019 Tillie Olsen Short Story Award.