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I.

Rain gush-pummels our car. Whippet wipers slash frantically at the whitecaps. Off to Slippery Rock, Pennsylvania, to watch our daughter, Lily’s, volleyball tournament. It’s the weekend before Thanksgiving, and our son, Hudson, is meeting us there from Pittsburgh. 

After we’ve tunneled our way out of the storm, we’re spit into a mystical world of blue that looks exhausted. I grab my book: The Curious World of Seahorses. 

“Did you know,” I ask my husband, Mark, “that seahorses are surprisingly loud? And they love to dance?” 

Mark says, “Wow. That’s cool.” He’s distracted, grim: still shook from the washout. 

I share more seahorse facts with him: dried seahorses are used for Chinese Viagra; they change color and gender; the males get pregnant! I’m telling him more than he needs to know: such are the familiar contours of a thirty-year marriage. 

 

II.

The summer my brother died, I was diagnosed with sudden hearing loss. To be more specific, asymmetrical hearing loss, meaning only one ear. My right. 

I’d been having trouble hearing even my most articulate, front-row students; I couldn’t tell when the white noise machine was on in our bedroom; at Rooster Pub, I was ousted from any conversation by Led Zeppelin and smacking billiard balls.  

When I finally took a hearing test in a soundproof booth, I incorrectly answered “you’re drunk” instead of the correct “eardrum.”

 

III.

We listen to Mark’s favorite “Café del Mar”—chill, ethereal vibes fill the car. 

“Aw, listen to this!” I say. “Seahorses love cuddling together. ‘During courtship, the male and female often entwine their hindquarters and promenade through the underwater world holding each other’s tails.’” I want to tell him it’s just like Bridgerton! Where they all go promenading around in their boob-smashing corseted gowns looking for husbands, but another wave of downpour blasts the windshield. Cars pop on their flashers. Silently, we stalk any red-eyed bumper we can see.

I’m a nervous passenger, so I turn back to the seahorses book for distraction. Seahorses, I discover, don’t live very long lives. Whenever one of them is in danger, a seahorse family entwines their tails together, holding on.

Holding on, it says, is what they do best.

 

IV.

After my first MRI, an “acoustic neuroma” tumor was discovered on my hearing nerve. Not cancerous, but serious. Things were starting to move fast when my sister called out of the blue from Minnesota. Our brother Jim was on a Mercy Flight to the nearest hospital. And I needed to get out there right away. He was still alive, she said, but it was dire. She didn’t know much else.

I had to fly in the opposite direction to get from Rochester, New York, to Minneapolis. I prayed he’d hang on until I got there. My other siblings were making the long drive up from southern Minnesota to the hospital as fast as they could.  

 

V.

In Slippery Rock, we take Hudson out to eat at North Country Brew Pub: tree branches for door handles, Buck Snort Stout on tap. It’s a Hudson kind of place: Hudson, our firstborn with a job in hand a month before graduation. Even as a small child, Hudson had the curious mind of an engineer. When we took him to see the musical Annie, he’d ended up, neck craned, studying the light placement, sound system, cables, and wires above us to see how it all worked. 

“What do you think you’ll buy with your first paycheck?” Mark asks. He pops a fried mushroom into his mouth. 

Hudson tilts his head to the ceiling, thinking. “Hmm. Maybe a…I don’t know.”

“There’s a saying,” I tell him. “Want what you have.”

 

VI.

In Charlotte, North Carolina, my flight was delayed twice. Time blurs here, but I remember running up to an old lady at the gate in a pink sweatshirt, dark jeans, and puffy white sneakers. She seemed calm, kind, loving.

“My brother is dying,” I said to her. “I mean, I’m not sure what’s going on. But I need to get out there before he dies. I have to.” I searched her face for help.

She did not hug me as I’d thought she would. Instead, she told me to set down my heavy bag and giant black purse. “Just stand here by me, honey,” she said. “Everything will be all right.”

 

VII.

Driving back home to Brockport in Hudson’s little Honda, he DJs during the long, dark drive. I fall in love with a Mt. Joy song, “Astrovan,” so we play it over and over. 

“Hey,” I say, “did you know I’ve been reading about seahorses?” It’s a deep, inky dark only found between Erie and Buffalo on I-90, where there is absolute nothingness for two hours. 

He shrugs. “Why?”

“I saw a book at the library. I was curious,” I say. “How could a person not be curious about seahorses?” 

“Right?” Hudson says.

When he was little, Hudson was impossible to read books to because of his constant interruptions. He needed to know everything—slapping his little hand back to the page prior and insisting we explain. “But, Mommy, why is a cat driving a fire truck?” Honestly, that was a tough one to answer. “But, Mommy, if the sky is falling, where does it go?” Also a tough one. “Mommy, why doesn’t Peter want his chair painted pink? And what is that thing behind him?” 

Thank god we were fairly young and patient parents at the time—annoying as it could be, especially at bedtime. 

I adjust my book light so it glows orange like a little campfire. “Oh,” I say, “in case you’re curious. Seahorses’ tails are so long and flexible they can scratch their heads with them or use them as scarves. Isn’t that cool?”

I see Hudson smile from the side. “Yeah.”

“Apparently they can hold on to almost anything with their tails,” I say as I read on. “They hold on so tightly they can’t get washed away or taken by predators. So they don’t die easily.” 

“That’s so cool,” Hudson says. He wears a ball cap backward and his hair curls around the back. “So do they live long? How long do they usually live?”

“Actually, not long,” I say. “Small ones live about a year, and bigger ones don’t make it past around five to six years.” I laugh it off, saying something like “Well, there’s your marine biology lesson of the day!” but Hudson says, “That’s so sad.” 

We drive home in silence the rest of the way, the glow of the dashboard lights green and glowing on our faces. 

 

VIII.

In Charlotte, the plane to Minneapolis was finally ready to go. Before boarding, I tried calling the hospital one last time and was amazingly connected to my brother’s room. 

“Jimmy Boy! It’s Annie.” Even though he was fifty-three, I still called him that.

He was groggy, hard to hear. “Don’t be scared,” I said. 

Beeps and fuzz. 

“Well,” he said, “I guess the worst thing that can happen is a guy could die.” He and my younger brother, Mike, would often speak of themselves in the third person, as if to build distance between pain or fear. 

“You are not going to die! I promise.” Finally, a loud crackling microphone announced my flight to MSP was now boarding. I told him I was on my way.

Muffled voices. Fuzz. It was impossible to hear what Jim was saying.

“I love you so much,” I said. “You’re gonna be okay! I promise.”

“Well,” he said, “I should probably give the nurse the phone back now.”

As I settled in my airplane seat, I could see Jim’s warm brown eyes, his kindness and lack of desire to take up any of the nurses’ time. He was generous and humble like that. He did not grow impatient standing in long lines. He did not expect the worst in people, ever. Because he knew. He knew how hard it was just to get by every single day.

 

IX.

At my next ENT appointment, I saw Dr. Dutcher, who wasn’t exactly reassuring. “Ten years ago we would’ve had you in surgery to take that thing out right away.” 

When I asked why we weren’t doing that now, he said, “Well, the hearing nerve is connected to the facial nerve, so the risk of facial paralysis is fairly high.” He looked at me through smudged bifocals, then ran his fingers through sparse waxy strands of hair I’d describe as faded rust. 

I must’ve looked terrified, because he said, “We’ll do a wait-and-see. That’s the best course of action for now. I’ll schedule you for another MRI in six months to see if it’s grown.” He seemed completely unconcerned, as if I had a simple head cold. Six months?

I rubbed the right side of my face, imagining it drooping and dripping down like candle wax, slouched and saggy, one side of my mouth frozen awkwardly in a downward sneer. 

“Don’t worry,” he said, rolling back on his stool to signal we were done. 

 

X.

By the time I arrived at the St. Cloud Hospital in Minnesota at 1:00 a.m., my family was all hunkered down in folding chairs, blankets on the floor, and hard, narrow couches—anywhere they could try to rest. After my sister, Amy, groggily caught me up, I went down to see Jim. Apparently, it was an abdominal aneurysm, so large the doctor said he’d never seen a person still walking and talking with one of such mass. Also, the true and very horrible danger was that it could burst at any moment and kill him.

Of course it was the middle of the night. The nurses had all their patients settled after shift change, and seemed irritated by my arrival, my questions, my request for a blanket and pillow. I sat next to Jim’s bed and held his hand. He was on full life support and I had no idea if he could hear me. 

“I’m here, Jimmy Boy,” I whispered. “I came all the way from New York to see you!”

He’d always been gorgeous—olive skinned, dark brown eyes, a slightly cleft chin, and wavy blond-brown hair—and he still was, though slightly rougher around the edges after decades of drinking and smoking. I noticed his neglected, curled-up toenails needed a trim and wished I’d had nail clippers to do it for him. “Jimmy Boy,” I said, “you can’t leave us. We have so much to talk about. I have to tell you what Hudson and Lily concocted when we made up a Chopped competition for them. Lily made these weird, like, chocolate noodles with parmesan cheese and chopped jalapeños. Totally disgusting.”

But then I just sat there. I knew from a quick nurse’s briefing that on top of losing our mom and dad far too young, we were going to lose him too. Everything told me so. The waxiness of his skin. His oxygen levels. The way no one was on twenty-four-hour watch, which they’d do if a patient still had a chance. He was only fifty-three years old. We were exactly eighteen months apart. 

I laid my head down on the mattress beside him and let my body leak tears, but realized I was too tired to cry. 

I knew soon the sun would rise, we would be herded into the much dreaded “family conference room,” and there we would all make another grim decision that would not really be a decision. If we waited, the aneurysm would grow, expand, and that outcome was too terrible to imagine. That morning, the doctor showed us a slide of where Jim’s brain stem had been pushed and misaligned. “This means that everything is affected,” he said. “Breathing, brain activity, movement…everything.”

After the doctor left, we held each other’s hands. We hung on for all we were worth.

 

 XI.

Only later would I pick up that seahorses book randomly at the public library—intrigued, curious, just as we’d taught our kids to be. Only later would I have two kids in college and an eerie empty nest. Only later would I learn that just as my ear tumor would appear randomly, so it was with Jim’s abdominal aneurysm.

There would be only three of us left to hang on now: Mike, Amy, and me, the new partially deaf matriarch of a family felled by random misfortune. 

Later, I’d long for the strength and tenacity of seahorse tails to keep me and my younger siblings alive. I’d buy my own copy of the book this time, read it over and over. I’d highlight passages as if to make sense of the senseless. 

“Seahorses do not have stomachs,” which meant they did not die of abdominal aneurysms. 

“Seahorses are highly gifted hunters,” just like my two brothers who traveled to Texas every spring for wild boar hunting. 

“Most seahorses live according to the smart, sustainable motto: less is more!” Jim lived in a one-room garage apartment, lined up his ball cap collection on the windowsills, and was generally, I thought, happy enough just to be alive. 

But I kept coming back to those strong, tenacious seahorse tails. “Holding on is what seahorses do best.”

Except my siblings and I had no tails, no underwater buoyancy to hold us up. I imagined our minivans and children and jobs and airplane seats floating aimlessly in the deep dark sea. Our arms were open wide, reaching, but we were simply treading water, holding our breath as long as we could. 

Until we couldn’t.

 

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ANNE PANNING’s debut poetry collection, Spit & Glitter, is forthcoming from Cornerstone Press. She has published a memoir, Dragonfly Notes: On Distance and Loss, as well as a novel, Butter. Her short story collection, Super America, won the Flannery O’Connor Award and was a New York Times Editors’ Choice. She has also published short work in magazines such as Brevity, Prairie Schooner, Passages North, Quarterly West, The Kenyon Review, and River Teeth. Her essays have received notable citations in The Best American Essays series. She teaches creative writing at SUNY Brockport and is working on her next book, Bootleg Barber: A Daughter’s Memoir. Find her on Facebook @anne.panning.7.

 

Featured image by Luis Lara, courtesy of Unsplash.