At the Doorstep
Andrew Davies
My dad set the ladder for me against the house. Had shimmied apart both sides, the sounds of grating rust, until its base held firm in the plowed gravel driveway. Then he climbed up its bronze-colored rungs, quickly eyed the gutter running along the roof all shrouded in snow, climbed back down, and said to me, “Need you to clear out this crap from the gutters. There is ice and leaves frozen in there, so water can’t flow through the right way. I want you to go around the house and do all of them. Come to me when you’re done.”
I saw his breath like a haze out in the barren cold. That deep cold of late winter.
I kept my arms tucked tightly to my chest. I was shivering. I think I was eleven, or twelve, at the time. “Okay,” I said. All that there was to say.
January, it must’ve been. Frosty enough. Out there, you could look down and see the ice holding the pebbles in the gravel together like glue. See the abundance of trees around the house and our few acres of property. Their trunks are surrounded by clumped rags of snow. Limbs dark and skeletal as night incarnate, as though emaciated, and rattling in the breeze whistling by.
My dad patted my shoulder and went off to gather firewood in a wheelbarrow to stack in the garage. I watched him slough through the snow on his way to the log pile. Snow was padded all up the cuffs of his jeans, melting into them.
When he was gone, I went up the ladder, looked down the gutters overflowing with the brown slush of dirt-speckled ice and withered, gray leaves. The gutters hung with dripping icicles. I thought they looked like those needled syringes the nurses or dietitians would use to prick into my grandma’s arms.
I started shoveling into the gutters with my gloved hands, scooping a little at a time, alternating between my right hand and my left. But when the stuff soaked through the wool gloves, I had to strip them off and warm my hands a little with my breath and then go at the slush with my hands bare. Unrelenting cold stung my fingertips, cold digging underneath the nails, in waves, pulsating.
The air kept biting at my naked face, hardening the skin. Now the slush in those gutters was spreading a sharp, numbing cold through the joints in my fingers like an infection. I had to stop now and again to warm them with my breath. Massaged them some. Then I kept scooping out the gutters, kept going. I had to keep going.
Years later now, in my senior year of high school, after a wrestling duel in Pequannock, my dad drove me to the hospital to see my grandma. I had asked him to take me there. I was still dressed in my uniform, my singlet underneath still damp with sweat and bloodstains.
My grandma had suffered a stroke a few days earlier. She’d been staying with us for years because she was diabetic and could no longer take care of herself. My dad had found her unconscious in her bedroom in the house. Mom had been out all day, so when he’d come in to bring my grandma her lunch, he’d found her awkwardly squatted between the bed and the wall, mumbling and whispering incoherently. He called for an ambulance.
She was breathing, but she couldn’t talk, let alone open her eyes. Not at all conscious. Off lost somewhere like a last doorstep. She wasn’t going to leave the hospital. We all knew it. We knew where she was headed, but no one wanted to say.
I came inside holding my hands before me. I couldn’t feel them. Only a faint throbbing. I could barely even bend my fingers, the tendons wired through them all frozen taut. I’d opened the garage door with my elbow to get inside.
My dad was casually tossing sliced logs into the living room fireplace. Mom was in the kitchen preparing dinner. I shut the door to the garage to keep the rapacious cold out.
I approached my dad, said, “I can’t feel my hands.”
The flame light was playing on his face as he sat hunkered down across from the fire. Its delicate warmth was alluring to me. Urging. “Finish the gutters,” he said. “You can come back inside when the work is done.”
“But my hands.”
“Just cup em like this over your mouth, blow into them, and rub em together.” He made the motions with his own hands. “Come on. I finished my job, now you finish your job.”
“I tried blowing into them before. It’s not working.”
“You gotta finish it.”
My mom called down to him from the kitchen. “Bruce, let him rest.”
“No. I finished my job, he has to do his.” Then he turned to me and said, “Now finish it.”
And I said, “Okay.”
And I got the job done. And when I was back inside again, that fire was one of the warmest things I had ever felt. I had never felt a fire so enticing and so painfully, blissfully rewarding.
The two of us were the only ones in the lobby of the hospital that night, us and the receptionist. The receptionist told my dad that his brother had come in earlier to check on Grandma. He had left a little while ago. She was alone now. My dad told the receptionist that I was the grandson, and he gave her our info for verification and then she gave us the visitor passes, and soon my dad and I were riding the elevator up to the floor my grandma was on. I think it was the ICU. I think that’s what they called it.
We got off, walked down the hall a little ways, our shoes clacking on the tile with each footfall. The fine and soft reverb of the clacking off the walls. What a desolate hallway it was. Everything a different shade of white or gray, you could feel the slow crawl of death carrying through the place, almost tangible in the air. Smell it. Nothing can repel that presence.
This was a different type of coldness coming over me now, one I had never quite felt before.
We entered the wing in which they kept her. Sequestered away in that dark, somber recess, with all the other terminally ill patients in wait. Deathbeds here and deathbeds there.
Her room was off to the left, I remember. And it’s funny how the mind holds onto the little details during moments like these. It’s these little, minute things which remain. I remember the flower illustrations pasted across the wall in her room. A box television set atop a rolling cart, plugged into the wall, playing clips of luscious lavender fields, and ocean swells along serene coastal shorelines, and cascading waterfalls, the surreal orange twilight spilling over the scenery. And there was music like angels humming from overhead speakers built into the ceiling. I saw her under dimmed down lights. Cool lights beaming down upon her, like fragments of a splintered beacon bursting in from some distant and unreal firmament.
Grandma lay there on her deathbed in the center of that room.
I hadn’t expected to see her when we turned the corner.
I hadn’t expected to see her like this.
Holding my hands to the lashing flame, I felt the throbbing in my fingertips become slightly more pronounced.
My dad sat in a leather armchair beside me. “Good job,” he said to me. “I know that work wasn’t easy.”
All these trials. Those that he arranges in my path. Those that others arrange in his stead. The wrestling, all the romance I try to squeeze out of its deceptive simplicity. The work. The wood splitting in the sweat drenched summers and the wood stacking in the empty winters. Mending walls out of rock. The building. The breaking. Laborious sufferings all with their own set of tribulations to hurl at me, to dissect me, that which I am, and to foster in me a faultless durability. I want to open myself to them, to take into myself the duality of victory and loss, and I want to accept that these things do not care for me. Because they don’t. I must take and make them my own. Like a collector. It’s a process of a soul.
I know that these things do not want me, they don’t care, and yet I will make them mine. And I will construct with them as though they are my tools an implacable callus so that nothing can break me.
Nothing will break me, I thought. I will allow nothing to break me.
And then I saw her. And there was something that sank through me like an anchor descending into thick marsh. I was trembling. I was cold.
I came forward and landed in a seat placed next to her bed, hunched over, arms folded and drawn into my chest. Palpable cold. My dad was standing soundlessly next to me, and for a period of time that seemed to lurch by slowly, gradually, we watched her. Her chest was carefully moving up and down. Each soft, fragile breath. Nearly agonal.
A cord ran up the side of the bed and fed between her dry, blue lips. Her sealed eyes. Her eyelids flicking with each subconscious pupil shift beneath.
Dad spoke to her, his voice somewhat quavering. “Mom, I brought Andrew here to see you. Mom? Hey, Mom?” And he was holding up her limp hand.
Her bony, limp, pale hand. The blue, green veins running like roots up into her arm. The little life coursing intravenously through her. The little life.
“Mom?” he said softly. And he was gently squeezing her hand, searching for any sign that she could register our being there for her and yet her face remained expressionless. Just muscles flinching carefully and sporadically.
I supposed this is what happens when you’ve had a stroke this debilitating. Your muscles just respond to false signals. Your wrought body can feign life, can breathe like you are in control of your lungs. You can squeeze the hand that grips yours, as if out of sentimentality, but there is really no emotional resonance there. There is an idea of you, but the idea has gone.
I thought, Maybe she doesn’t even know we’re here. Maybe she’s not awake. Maybe she’s not really there, not anymore. I still wonder to this day about that. I badly wanted to have faith that she understood I was with her, that her grandson was visiting her one last time, but my overwhelming cynicism kept saying, Maybe not. And pretty soon I realized I had been sobbing. I felt the warm tears rolling down my cheeks. The aching in my chest. Heat blistering in my face and in my head like some cauterizing migraine. So I clutched tightly to my dad’s arm, I wanted to keep him close as though I was naked and freezing and lost in a sweeping blizzard, and I wanted him to save me.
Save me.
I couldn’t remember the last time I’d wept like this. I was eighteen.
“Do you want me to leave you alone with her?” he asked me. I could tell that hearing me cry had made his voice even shakier than it already was.
“No,” I said softly. “Don’t go.”
“It’s okay,” he said. “I’m here.”
Don’t go.
He didn’t.
My grandma had once told me not to take this thing, life, so damn seriously. It’s not really a big deal. There is no trial. What trial? No test. There isn’t some grandiose expectation, save for that which you yourself hold to. There is no expectation.
Relax. You are allowed to feel.
So very soft. Soft and vulnerable.
So human.
Andrew Davies is an English major at Rutgers University, and he plans to graduate in 2026. He lives in Kinnelon, New Jersey.
Andrew wrote this story in a creative writing class taught by Professor Rebecca Reynolds. Reynolds selected the piece for inclusion in WHR.