Four Hours in the Dark to Dad
But his eyes were mine. Brown, deep-set, a little hooded. They found me in the doorway, and they did not wander and they did not blink.
His mouth opened.
“You came,” he said.
I could not walk. I stood holding the door.
“I didn’t think you would,” he said. His voice was a rasp, but it was clear. “Wouldn’t have blamed you.” He drew a labored breath. “Had a speech ready. Ten years’ worth.” Another breath. “That oxygen took every word of it.”
A laugh got out of me. It was wet and awful and it was the most natural thing I had done in a decade.
“I don’t need the speech, Dad.”
“Well, I need to give it,” he said. “I may have to give it in pieces.”
I crossed the room then. I remember the rail of the bed under my hand, cold, and then his hand, warm and papery over mine. It weighed exactly what it had weighed when he walked me to the school bus.
“Sit down, Lacey Ann,” my father said. “You look like you drove all night.”
“I did.”
“I know.” His eyes were bright. “I counted.”
I sat. We said nothing for a while, and for once it was not a weapon. It was just two people breathing in a room.
After a bit, a nurse’s aide came in to take his temperature and his pressure, and I stepped out to let her work. In the hall Pauline was waiting by the window at the end, looking at the parking lot where the sky had gone from gray to pale pink.
“Can I tell you something?” she said. “Before shift change. I go off at seven and I may not see you again.”
“Please.”
She leaned on the sill. “Twenty-six years on nights,” she said. “People call for their mothers, mostly. Every so often someone calls for the one they quit speaking to. When they do, I make the call, even when it’s not strictly how it’s done. I’ve never once regretted making one. I’ve regretted the ones I didn’t.”
“He had no one listed,” I said. “At the front desk. Did he?”
“He told the intake clerk he had no one. ‘No one to call.'” Pauline’s face was kind and unhurried. “His neighbor, Roy Wicker, brought him in about eight and had to get home for the evening feeding. He said your father had been poorly three days and stubborn about it. That’s all anyone knew.”
“Then how did you…”
“Around midnight his oxygen dipped. It does that with the pneumonia on top of the heart. He got confused. He was trying to pull his line out and he asked me where Sue was.” She stopped. “Is that your mother?”
“Yes.”
“I told him I’d see about it, and I stayed with him. Near two, he got a little clearer and started patting his shirt for something. Patting and patting. His things were in a bag. I went to put his wallet in the safe, and he would not let me. He took it in both hands and dug a card out himself and put it in mine.”
She reached into the pocket of her scrub top and took out a small white index card, creased, the corners worn round as river stones, soft as cloth. She held it out to me.
It said, in blue ink, in careful looped handwriting: Lacey, cell. And my number.