“Enough”

By Rachael Siciliano

ENOUGH

I bought a betta fish in August 2020 to help me through COVID. He died in December before the world had a vaccine.

I did not know you could love a fish that much. But it wasn’t enough. I couldn’t heal his torn dorsal. I couldn’t keep his iridescent scales blue. He didn’t swim long enough in his palatial planted tank to overcome the trauma of fryhood in a tiny barren cup. None of us does. I guess.

By April, I had had enough of COVID. Enough of mainlanders, younger than me, post-boasting their second vaccines while I was still waiting for my first. Enough of tourists swarming back into these Hawaiian islands like it were their disposable playground. Enough of worrying my mom would have to spend another birthday in isolation.

As soon as I had scheduled my second vaccine, I booked a flight that would land me home on her eighty-first birthday. Over the phone we joked that my presence would be present enough.

Then she told me our seventy-seven year old neighbor, a woman who had taken me on day-long canoe trips, was dying from pancreatic cancer. We had been invited to send letters. As if words would be enough.

After seventeen months, I was going to see my family. Would two weeks be enough? At the airport, my mom greeted me with a long, tight embrace. For the first time, so did my dad.

“We haven’t had enough rain lately,” he said as he drove us home, “we’re in a drought.” The greenest pantone-color palette drought you will ever see.

Over the two weeks, I noticed things that had not been there when I was a girl. White pelicans now circle the local lakes. White lupins now decorate the marsh prairies. Cottonwoods now fluff the air with their May snow.

My dad now listens when my mom speaks, then validates what she says, because a few years ago she had let him know she had had enough.

My mom now tells me she’d like it if I moved back, because, I think, she knows. And I wonder if moving back would give me enough time to make up for the things I wish I hadn’t said, and to say all the things I wish I had.

My mom seems well enough, for now. But things that don’t normally happen to young bodies are happening to her old one: inexplicable spikes in blood pressure: undiagnosable bouts of gas: hairless arms and legs. Will her years of healthy living be enough to keep these little things from becoming big ones? Will she live long enough to glimpse what her life might have been had my Dad found his composure sooner? Will I? Had he once been who he is now, might I now feel as though I had done enough with my life?

One night during my visit, my mom placed the palm of her dominant left hand against the palm of my dominant right.

“They’re the same size,” she said, “I knew it.”

Her once long fingers, which sewed my clothes, stitched my stuffed toys, knit me intricate sweaters, and embroidered cat faces onto my favorite brown corduroy quilt, now matched my stubby ones. The middle knuckles on my second and third fingers now sometimes bulge as hers always do. Will looking at the back of my hand be enough to remember the details of hers when hers is no longer here?

During my visit, our ailing neighbor passed. Her obituary taught me that she had minored in French, met her husband when she was seven, taught a course at the university, restored native prairies, trained course and comfort dogs, and visited Hawaii, likely while I had been living here.

During all the years I had flown home to my parents, I had only visited her once, because there had never been enough time to see both my family and hers.

But her obituary taught me more. A quiet life lived kindly in a bucolic Midwestern town is more than enough.

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Rachael Siciliano holds a Ph.D. in French Literature from UCSB and worked for twenty years as a User Experience Researcher and Designer uncovering and telling other people’s stories. These days she volunteers, growing industrial hemp, restoring native ecosystems, and meditating with women who live in the prison up the road. She lives on Oahu with her blue fish, Max.