The Translator

"He's taken a turn for the worse."

Those were the words Betsy never wanted to hear, but she knew she'd be hearing them someday soon. Just not today.

She cancelled a meeting with her boss, who asked her to reschedule as soon as possible, arranged for Jacob's father to pick up Jacob at Holy Cross Preschool, the preschool her parents were paying for, even though neither Betsy nor Jacob was Catholic, and she borrowed a car from her coworker Ronald, who'd always had a crush on her, even though he was married, to get to Saint Vibiana's Home for the Elderly as quickly as possible, since her mother's voicemail had sounded urgent.

When she rushed into her father's room, nothing she saw looked urgent.

Her mother was sitting in a chair off to the side, reading a magazine about royal houses and the old country. Her father was lying in bed, the way he'd always been lying the last three and a half years, with a cheerful, expectant smile on his face. He didn't look like he was expecting imminent death.

"Papa?" Betsy said. Her father gave her a little wave, her mother looked up from her magazine. "Thanks for swinging by," her mother said.

"Swinging by? You said Papa was on his way out."

"Out the door to flirt with the nurses in the common room, maybe," her mother said.

Her father snickered. "They're nuns, Vanessa. Nuns."

"That doesn't mean they don't flirt. If I were a nun, I'd flirt."

Betsy looked back and forth between the two. She hadn't rescheduled her boss and her son for this.

Betsy's father raised his eyebrows. "Your mother was just on her way out to get me a... Kako se diče 'tavlica čokolade'?"

Betsy's mother put down her magazine, annoyed. "You know that, Andro. Chocolate bar. Parlaj da te mula razumi."

"I'm right here, Mama," Betsy said.

Vanessa sighed. "Speak so the girl can understand you."

This is the way things had always been, since she was born. The secret code between her parents, the language from the old country they never taught her. They said it was for Betsy's sake they never taught her, immigration and assimilation and melting pot et cetera, but Betsy knew it was so they could hide things from her. All her life.

Vanessa turned to Betsy. "Chocolate bar," she said, slowly, as if talking to an infant.

Betsy shook her head. "I'm leaving."

Her father looked sad. "That makes me sad, Betsy. Stay for a while. When's the last time we just got to hang out and chat?"

"Maybe before I had a kid and got divorced and had to start working full-time?"

"That's why we pay your bills, mjelice," her mother said. "Fine, I'll get the chocolate bar."

Her mother gave her a big kiss on the cheek on the way out.

Her mother's English had always been much better than her father's. They'd come to America together, a year before Betsy was born, but her mother had always been the faster learner. To this day, Andro would rely on Vanessa to translate for him, sometimes even when talking to their daughter.

As soon as the door closed, her father's expression changed.

"Kavaj me odavde," he said. "Get me out of here."

Betsy sat down on the bed next to him and put her hand on his. "I wish I could, Papa, I wish I could."

"You don't understand!" Her father was getting agitated. "No one understands."

Betsy patted his hand. He whacked her hand away. "I'm not joking. Get me out of here."

He was usually calm around her, but if he kept this up, she'd have to call a nurse. Betsy pulled her hand away, but she stayed put on the bed next to him.

"We talked about this, Papa. This is the best place for you."

"Like hell it is. Vraga je. Like hell."

Her father quieted down, but the cheerful, expectant look was gone. He stared off into space. When Betsy leaned over to brush a stray tuft of hair out of his face – he still had his hair, thank God, and the nurses weren't always as quick to cut it back as they probably should be – he reached around her neck and pulled her closer. "I have a secret to tell you," he said.

"Okay, Papa, tell me the secret. But let me go first."

Her father loosened his grip and she leaned back, rubbing her neck. "That hurt," she said.

"I'm sorry, mjelice. But that woman's trying to kill me."

"Is this like the time you accused the nurse of stealing your watch?" Her father hadn't worn a watch in years. Decades, probably.

"No one's trying to steal my watch."

"I don't think the nuns are allowed to kill patients, Papa."

"Not the nun. Femna ka se finži da je tvoja mati," her father said. "Your mother. The woman pretending to be your mother."

It was then that Betsy's mother, or the woman pretending to be her mother, came back to the room, chocolate bar in hand.

"Snickers," Vanessa said. "Your favorite."

She handed Andro the chocolate bar. He received it as if it were a dead rat the cat dragged in. "I hate Snickers," he said.

Vanessa shrugged and sat back down on her chair. She picked up her magazine. "I lost my spot," she said. "You always used to like Snickers."

Andro looked at Betsy. He held his hand to his mouth and coughed. He coughed again, but before he did, he mouthed something to Betsy that she couldn't make out. "I can't lip-read, Papa. Tell me what you want to say, it's okay."

Vanessa's eyes shot up from her magazine. "What was that, Andro? What are you trying to tell us?"

Andro looked panicked. Then he smiled. "I hate Snickers."

"We know that by now," Vanessa said, and returned to the latest gossip from the princely house. Under her breath, she said: "Vardaj se."

Andro raised his eyebrows at Betsy, as if to say: "See! That's what I'm talking about!"

"Look at this," Vanessa said, showing Betsy a picture of some random princess. "Isn't she beautiful in that dress? She looks just like her mother."

Betsy did not look like her mother. She looked like her father, as if all of his genes had eclipsed her mother's. Sometimes her parents joked that Betsy was actually the milkwoman's child, a joke Betsy found gross and dated and inappropriate, but she did sometimes wonder if she'd been born by surrogate. But then her mother would show her pictures from the hospital the day she was born, and that was definitely her mother in the picture, and Betsy did look freshly hatched, so no. But despite the humor, it was always a sore spot in the family.

Andro began peeling the wrapper off his Snickers, very carefully, as if it might explode.

He looked right at Vanessa. "Kad si nuda, vidim kako ti svitli špina pod pelom."

Vanessa slammed her magazine down on the table next to her, as if smashing a fly. "Basta, dosta! Ne parlaj de kve pred mjelicom."

"Mama! Papa! Stop already," Betsy said. "Look. Guys. Everyone's under a lot of stress. Let me get Papa's wheelchair and I'll wheel him to the common room so he can check out the nurses. We all need a break."

Andro smiled and nodded. He gave Betsy a thumbs-up only she could see.

"Over my dead body," Vanessa said. "No nuns for Andro today. Unless his heart stops beating."

She looked at her watch. Unlike Andro, she still wore a watch. "Isn't it time to pick up Jacob?" she said.

"Jacob's with his father."

"Poor Jacob."

Betsy sighed. "Don't say it."

Vanessa looked straight at Betsy and said nothing. And then she said: "You've always had such terrible taste in men."

"Here we go again. Jesus, Mama."

"Don't take the name of the Lord in vain, Betsy."

"Oh fuck this."

"Hey! I'll wash your mouth with soap!"

"Fuck isn't the Lord's name."

"What are you, Betsy, in kindergarten?"

"He's the father of my child, for Christ's sake."

"And whose fault is that?"

"There'd be no Jacob without him."

"And we all love Jacob, of course. But he could have had a better father."

Betsy was about to tear her hair out, or her mother's, but the crash coming from Andro's bed intervened.

"Ajme! Tešta mi!" Andro moaned, holding his head. Andro had fallen out of bed, the drawer of his night table had fallen on the floor, the Snickers had melted in his hand and smeared all over his gown and sheets.

"What were you doing, Papa!" Betsy shouted and tried to prop him up. "Call the nurse," she said to her mother.

Vanessa just shook her head. "Kve te neće salvat," she said to Andro.

"Mama! I'm right here."

"Okay, okay, I'll call the nurse."

Vanessa fumbled around the bed, looking for the emergency button, but there was none. She eyed Andro and walked to the door, opened it, and shouted "Nurse! Emergency!" to anyone who was listening.

During the second or two she was distracted, Andro showed Betsy two things: In his left hand, the emergency button he'd ripped off its cord hanging over the bed, and in his right hand, the Snickers wrapper with scribbles on it. He stuck it in Betsy's hand. Betsy hesitated, but Vanessa was already turning around. She stuck it in her pocket.

Two nurses arrived, habits aflutter. They were very efficient, these nuns, and very strong, and before Betsy knew it, they'd checked her father for a concussion, changed his bed sheets and gown, cleaned him up, nestled him back into bed, and installed a new emergency button.

Her father looked satisfied.

Betsy's phone rang: Jacob had a sore throat, his father didn't know how to handle it, Jacob kept crying for his mother.

Betsy kissed her father on the forehead and told him to stay out of trouble, she raised her eyebrows at her mother, she thanked the nurses and was off. She drove straight home, calling Ronald from the road to tell him she'd return his car tomorrow. Ronald, and Ronald's wife, were not happy about this.

Jacob's sore throat turned out to be because his father had fed him a bowl of cherries for dinner, and Jacob was mildly allergic to cherries. After arguing with Jacob's father, sending him home, she tucked Jacob into bed and told him a bedtime story about a giant who ate a giant cherry and had to toot all night, keeping up all the neighbors.

Jacob laughed and then he said, "How's Nono?"

"Nono's fine," Betsy said. "He'll be fine. Now, time to sleep."

It was time for Betsy to sleep, too. She changed her clothes for bed, and as she did, she found the wrapper in her pocket. In her father's handwriting, she read: "Štranjac. Kavat organe."

A lot of good that did. She put the wrapper in the drawer of her bedside table. She'd figure it out tomorrow. She'd figure everything out tomorrow. She fell asleep.

She woke up to the ringtone she'd assigned to her mother: Tubular Bells, the theme from The Exorcist.

"Mama."

"It's your father."

"What now?"

"He died. In his sleep."

Her mother never did mince words.

Everything happened in a flurry: The early-morning drive to Saint Vibiana's in Ronald's car, Jacob asleep in the back seat, no child seat, because Ronald didn't have children; the nuns consoling Vanessa and Betsy and Jacob, who looked at Betsy and said, "You told me he'd be fine"; the arrangements for Andro's belongings, his body (Vanessa said, to Betsy's surprise, that he'd requested cremation, which Vanessa would take care of, Betsy didn't have to worry about a thing), a last moment with her father alone, a last moment for Vanessa with her husband alone, the hugs, the bitterness, the goodbyes.

As Betsy was about to drive off with Jacob in Ronald's car, her mother knocked on the window. Betsy rolled it down.

"All the silliness on his last day. I'm sorry you weren't spared that," Vanessa said.

Betsy nodded. "I'm going to take Jacob to preschool now. I have to go to work."

Vanessa smiled. "Of course you do, mjelice." She hesitated. "He was losing his mind. There wasn't much of him left, really. All the nonsense he would say. And write."

"I know, Mama."

Vanessa touched Betsy's cheek. "Na finu je bil štranjac, i meni."

"What?" Betsy said. She was irritated. It'd been a long morning. "You know I don't understand."

Her mother smiled. "He was a stranger in the end, even to me. Štranjac." She kissed Betsy on the cheek and insisted that Jacob roll down the window so she could kiss him on the cheek. She waved, Betsy waved, Jacob waved, and, to her surprise, Betsy began to feel the heavy burden lift from her heart.

It was only weeks later, when she came home from the memorial service, that Betsy remembered the wrapper in her drawer. It still had melted Snickers on it, still a bit of her father's fingerprint. She drew it to her lips and kissed it.

Somewhere, in the basement, was her father's old dictionary, the one he'd used when he tried to learn English. Vanessa had offered to babysit Jacob after the memorial service. She said she wanted the company, and it would do the boy good. Maybe she'd even teach him a few words of his grandparents' language. Betsy had an hour before Vanessa would tire of babysitting, before she had to pick him up.

She rummaged through the old boxes, the boxes her mother hadn't wanted to keep in her house anymore and so Betsy was stuck with them, she couldn't bear to throw them out or give them to Goodwill or the library, even when her father had still been alive, and nobody would have wanted them anyway, old science books, old novels nobody read anymore, in languages nobody understood, magazines from before the war, and finally, the dictionary.

"Štranjac. Kavat organe," the covert note in the wrapper said. Štranjac. The same word her mother had used when they said goodbye at Saint Vibiana's: stranger. She didn't need to look that one up. Kavat. Her father had said "kavaj" when he'd wanted Betsy to get him out of the nursing home, take out, get out, she'd seen it on a movie poster for the movie, Get Out, when they'd visited the old country years ago. Kavat must be the same word, in some declension or conjugation or whatever those old languages did. "Organe" must be organ, the instrument her father had always wanted to play as a child.

"Stranger, get out the organ."

This made Betsy infinitely sad. The last words her father had said to her, written on a smeared Snickers wrapper, were incoherent gibberish mixed with childhood nostalgia. And he'd called her a stranger. Her mother must have been right.

Betsy was about to put the dictionary back in the box when she remembered something her father had told her years ago, when he'd wanted to teach her the old language, for all of a day or two: "Everything has multiple meanings, mjelice, so you can never be lazy. Like 'mjelica': It means 'little girl', but also 'little honey'. So you're my little honey, my little girl."

No wonder they left the old country. But Betsy wasn't lazy – she owed her father that much. She opened the dictionary again, and she worked through the words written in the wrapper, tried to parse the grammar, and, just before she was about to give up, there it was:

"Alien. Harvest organs."

Betsy stared at the wrapper. She stared at the dictionary. And then one thought eclipsed all.

She had to pick up Jacob. Now.

She ran up the stairs, out the front door and down the street to the bus stop, and she counted the seconds until the bus arrived, five minutes late. She would get to Jacob, she would pick up her son, and she prayed that her mother was merely a stranger.