Four Hours in the Dark to Dad
He went out in the dark in his sock feet, which was how I knew how scared he was, because Tom does not do anything half-dressed. By the time I had found my boots he had raised the hood on my old Buick and was checking the oil by the porch light.
“Oil’s right at full,” he said. “Tires are good.” He shut the hood. He had filled my thermos, I noticed, and set it on the passenger seat with a folded blanket and a sleeve of crackers.
I put my arms around his neck in the yard and held on longer than I meant to.
“Call him back once you’re on the road,” Tom said into my hair. “Let him hear you’re coming. Don’t make him wait and wonder.”
“What if I get there and it’s too late?”
“Then you’ll have driven there,” Tom said. “That’s something. But I don’t think it will be.”
I backed out of the drive at 2:27.
The first hour of that drive I did not pray. I was too busy being angry at myself.
Highway 63 runs south out of our end of the state, and at that hour in October it belongs to deer and grain trucks. The fields on both sides were bare stubble, silver in the headlights, and now and then a farmyard light stood alone out there like a lit window in an empty house.
I called the hospital number at 2:50, from a pull-off, because Tom was right.
Pauline answered the floor line. “He’s been dozing,” she said. “I’ll put the phone by his ear. You don’t have to say anything big.”
I said, “Dad, it’s Lacey. I’m in the car. I’m coming. It’s going to be a few hours, but I’m coming.”
There was nothing for a moment but his breathing. Then, so faint I almost lost it: “Drive careful.”
That was all. Two words, and I sat in the dark with the engine running and cried the way I had not cried at the funeral, or since.
Past the county line, a doe walked out of the ditch and stopped broadside in my lights. I stood on the brake. The thermos hit the floorboard, and the doe looked at me as if I were the one in the wrong place, then went on across the road in no hurry at all.
I sat there shaking. And I said, out loud, the first prayer I had said in years.
It was not a good one. I was never taught fancy praying. I said, “Lord, I don’t know what to say to him. But please let him know me when I get there. Please let him still be there.”
Then, because that felt thin, I added, “And if I’m too late, let me at least be somebody who came.”
I picked the thermos up off the floor and drove on.
I had stopped going to church the week after the funeral. I was angry at God in the same quiet, righteous way I was angry at my father, and I had decided that if neither one of them wanted to speak to me, I could play at silence, too.
I stopped at a Casey’s at four for gas and bought a coffee I did not drink. When I got back to the car, I called Pauline once more.