Four Hours in the Dark to Dad
“He’s resting,” she said. “His numbers are better. Go on and drive safe. Don’t hurry yourself into a ditch for him.”
“He wouldn’t let me put his wallet in the safe, though,” she added. “Held on to it like there was gold in it.”
I did not ask why. I could not.
A little before five I crossed the Missouri River at Jefferson City and left Highway 63 behind. I picked up 61, and then I-55, the long road south with the Mississippi somewhere off to my left in the dark.
By the time I came down the last stretch of I-55 into Cape Girardeau, the sky behind the river had gone the color of dishwater. It was 6:34.
The hospital sat on a hill, big and tan and tired-looking. The front doors were locked, and a sign said visitors after eight p.m. were to use the emergency entrance. I parked by a row of ambulances and went in under bright lights.
A security guard behind a glass window looked at my driver’s license. “Pruitt, fourth floor,” he said. “The nurse left your name.” He printed me a sticker with my face on it, the date, and the time. 6:41.
The elevator smelled like floor wax and burned coffee. My hands would not stay still. I held my purse in front of me with both of them, like a girl going to a church recital.
The fourth floor was quiet the way hospital halls are quiet in the early morning, which is not really quiet at all. Beeping from several rooms at once, each on its own rhythm. A cart rolling somewhere.
At the end of the hall one lamp was lit over a counter. A woman sat there writing in a chart, perhaps fifty-eight, with a gray braid down her back and reading glasses on a beaded chain. She looked up and took me in. Boots, Tom’s flannel over my pajama top, hair tied back with a rubber band from the glove box.
“You’re Lacey,” she said. “You made good time.”
“Does he know me?” I said. It was the only question I had left.
Pauline put her pen down. She looked at me for a long moment, and something moved across her face that I did not understand yet.
“Go see,” she said quietly. “Room 412. I’ll be right here.”
I walked down that hall like I was nine years old and had been called to the principal.
Four-twelve was the second to last door. It was open a hand’s width, and I could see the glow of the monitor, the green numbers rising and falling. A pair of hands lay on a white blanket, big and square and cracked across the knuckles. Farmer’s hands. One of them was opening and closing, the way a hand does when it is reaching for something it cannot see.
I pushed the door open.
My father turned his head on the pillow.
He was smaller. That was the first thing, and it nearly took me off my feet. He had been a six-foot man with a chest like a rain barrel. The man in the bed had a plastic line in his nose and a clip on his finger and a face that had lost its fill. His hair, once dark, was white and flat on one side from the pillow.