Chapter Thirty

 

Baltimore, Maryland

Monday, October 9, 1995

 

When the telephone in her hotel room rang, Lillianna’s eyes shot open and a wave of panic unrolled from her brain downward. She stared at the lighted clock dial on the bedside table. It was three a.m. And she knew, even before she picked up the receiver, it was her father on the other end of the line.

“They found a donor, Em. They’re getting me ready for surgery right now.”

She leaped out of bed. Her legs trembled. “Don’t worry, Dad. I’ll be there as soon as I can throw on some clothes. I’ll be there. Don’t worry.”

“You can wait till daylight if you want. Doc Willingham says the surgery might take four or five hours.”

“Dad, listen to me, I’m not waiting. I want to be with you. Right now.”

“Okay, then. Do me a favor. Don’t tell the others until after I’m in the operatin’ room.”

“Why?”

“Because I want your face to be the last one I see.”

She swallowed the lump that kept rising. “You’re going to be okay, Dad. I know you are.”

“Well, just in case, that’s the way I want it.”

She flipped on the light, and in its quiet glow, all the small objects in the room appeared golden and strangely tender. They affected her without her understanding why and the tears rose. While expected, and the very reason she’d come to Baltimore in the first place, this whole turn of events frightened Lillianna.

Knowing she didn’t have time to ponder, she took a deep breath to focus her mind, then threw on a pair of jeans and a T-shirt. She brushed her teeth, splashed water on her face and ran a comb through her hair.

No shuttles ran at that hour. She rang the bell at the lobby desk to summon a clerk. “They found a donor aorta for my father.” She talked fast. “I have to get to the hospital. Is it safe to walk?”

“No.” He picked up the phone. “I’ll call hospital security. They have a twenty-four-hour escort service.”

“Please hurry. I have to get there before they take him into surgery.”

She thrust open the front door and stepped outside to wait on the steps. The sprays of stars washing through each other in the murky black sky didn’t soothe her as she paced back and forth, so far away from Steve and her children, so far away from the woman who’d begun this journey.

The waiting seemed endless. All around her, the hotel grounds smelled of burned leaves. Out of nowhere, Lillianna recalled another autumn on the back porch of the Collins Park house. Most of the leaves had fallen into soft and colorful pools in their backyard. She had just turned thirteen, a teenager, and she charted the passage of time by the seasons. Each autumn, after the leaves dropped, more of her surroundings revealed themselves, and she could see the shingled rooftops, fences of the houses in Buttonwood, and the banks of the creek.

Standing on the steps of the Johns Hopkins Inn, it was as if she were able to see great distances. And suddenly, her father stood in front of her, no longer boarded up, but open, human and needing his daughter.

When the car pulled under the hotel’s front canopy, she jumped inside before it stopped. “Hurry. Please. I have to get there before they start surgery.”

After racing through the front entrance, she turned right and rammed the lighted button for the elevator. She could do this in her sleep now. Lillianna shifted her weight from one foot to the other. Her arms dangled loosely at her sides. “Come on,” she demanded of the closed steel door. “Hurry.”

She caught a glimpse of herself in the plate glass of the hospital lobby and wondered what had happened, how she’d changed and gotten so much older. When she looked again, she realized this was the way she was seen now. A grown woman—a responsible adult—older than she ever thought she’d be.

Once on the eighth floor, she stood in the hallway outside the room listening while the anesthesiologist prepped her father.

“I’m going to give you a shot, Mr. Miller. It will relax you. Make you sleepy. And I need to ask you one more time to authorize an amputation of your right leg.”

“No,” he said. “I won’t do that. But don’t do anything special to keep me alive if things don’t go like they’re supposed to. I mean it, Doc. If it’s my time, I’m ready.”

He couldn’t see Lillianna standing there, couldn’t know how his words rinsed through her thoughts, clear as water, disconnected as raindrops. She clamped her hand over her mouth and didn’t demand the anesthesiologist do everything in his power to save her father. Stuck at this distance from each other, she and her father were like magnets connected by his stream of words. And Lillianna found it strange that finally loving him could feel so lonely.

When the anesthesiologist left, she stepped inside the room and stood next to her father’s bed. The lines across his forehead and around his mouth had relaxed and softened. “How you doing, Dad?”

“I’m fine, Em. Just fine. The doctor gave me one of those ‘don’t worry about nothing shots.’”

“Good. You don’t need to worry. I’ll do enough of that for both of us.”

“It’ll be all right. And Lillianna is a real pretty name. Your mother loved it. If it wasn’t for me, it would have been your name.”

“I want you to call me, Emma, Dad. It feels right.”

His eyelids wanted to close, but he gave her a sleepy smile. “No matter what happens, Em, I’ve had a pretty good life.”

“Maybe so, Dad. But you’ve still got stories to tell me. I’m not finished with our book yet. I’m going to come home every few months until we finish it. And I plan to always bring your daughter, Emma, with me.”

The patient transporters wheeled a stretcher into his room. “You ready to travel, Mr. Miller?”

“Ready as I’ll ever be.”

“You his daughter?”

She nodded.

“You can go with him as far as the OR. There’s a waiting room just outside the doors.”

She trotted along next to the gurney, her hand on top of his, down the service elevators to the operating rooms. His eyes closed and she thought he was asleep, but when he felt the weight of her lips on his cheek, they opened.

“I love you, Dad. I’m gonna be right outside. Every minute. I promise.”

I love you, Dad... I love you, Dad... I love you... How long had it been since she’d said those words, felt them in the solid way she did now?

Even though he was half asleep, she’d never seen him smile so full and happy. He slurred out, “I love you, too, Em. These were the best two weeks of my life.” His eyes closed and he squeezed her hand.

She stood in the hallway almost choking from the sheer joy of that smile and his hand squeezing hers.

When the steel doors joined on the OR, she pushed the palms of her hands into her eyes and tried to bring up a picture of him laughing, telling her the rest of his story. She tried to stop herself but was unsuccessful, and a sob escaped.

She stumbled down the hallway to the pay phone, then called her brother and Aunt Pam.

In the waiting room, the florescent lights were bright against her skin. A heaviness that began as soon as the OR doors closed steadily increased and even the air hung impenetrable and dense.

“May I have your patient’s name, please?”

Startled, Lillianna raised her gaze to meet the voice. It was a young woman behind the waiting room desk, a candy striper in her pink and white uniform. Lillianna moved toward her. “Calvin Miller. He’s my father.”

“And your name?”

“Emma,” she said without thinking. “Emma Ruth Miller.” It was her name, and the piece of paper that changed it to Lillianna was meaningless. The marriage licenses that changed Miller to Morrison and then Morrison to Ferguson. What did it really change? Did it change the person she was? Somehow Lillianna Ferguson meant nothing here in this new world that had wrapped itself around her father.

“Would you like some coffee? I can make a fresh pot.”

She nodded and returned to the vinyl chair next to the doorway. Wrapping her arms around her knees, she cried, silently, like she was still trying to prevent him from hearing. She cried for her lost childhood, for everything they never said to each other. For all the years she made no attempt to see the world through his eyes and all the times she’d judged him. And she wept for her own children, for their big hearts so willing to understand and forgive.

Lillianna wished she could tell her father all the things she was feeling now. She opened her journal and wrote, the way she always did to clarify her feelings. And her spirits lifted like she held a song, not the words or the music, but the feeling of a song she labeled love, because no other word described it. Love, capable of lifting the soul up out of its darkness.

What was it about childhood that could never be left behind? She remembered the little girl who wanted so much to love her daddy, and in that moment of memory, she understood clearly she had always loved him. She feared him when he drank, misunderstood his love for her mother, but it was never anything but love she’d felt.

Hearing his life story had allowed her more certainty about how he fit into the evermore complicated puzzle of her own life. Her father, like many people, insulated himself from his feelings. The many tragic circumstances of his life hardened him, and he built a shield that only another grenade could blow apart.

And so it was provided to both of them, this aneurysm that brought his daughter back.

A strange gratitude and sense of purity rose in Emma, all the events of both their lives drawn together in trembling balance.

As she stared out the window, the globe of the world peeled its darkness away and replaced it with dawn. She shaped the precise words and phrases that would encapsulate all of him into her recounting for her children—the cherished trivia of a human heart.

Ashen shafts of light poured through the waiting room windows as the day awakened, velvet and ethereal as it expanded, the way a star sometimes softened the entire sky.

When she turned from the window, Greg and Sarah entered the waiting room, faces bleached and serious.

Sarah hugged her. “Has he already gone in?”

“About ten minutes ago.”

“How were his spirits?”

“Really high. He’s amazing. He told me no matter what happens, he’s had a pretty good life.”

They walked, arms around each other, to the line of vinyl chairs against the wall.

“Are you all right, Lillianna?” Greg sat next to her.

“If he dies, I don’t know what I’ll do. How I’ll stand it.” She looked at her brother’s silent and amazed face.

“Don’t think about that, sis. He’s tough. He’s been up against harder odds than these, you know.”

When she nodded, he went on. “I’ve never known a person who tried harder or hoped for more. Our dad, he wasn’t easy. But no matter how he behaved, he wanted good things for you, Emmy. And for me. He always did.”

She closed her eyes tightly and swallowed. When she sighed, Greg moved closer.

“I know,” she said. “I know so much more about him now.” She had a deeper understanding of life—the grief all of us experienced, alive or dead, or caught someplace in between. Life was about what happened between people who lost the truest moments of their history. And about how little effort it took to reclaim them.

She and Greg sat side by side, their hands wrapped together until the aunts and uncles arrived. After the greetings, Lillianna clamped her eyes shut and heard her father’s words. It’ll be all right, Emma. No matter what happens. It’ll be all right.

Would it really be all right? Would she ever be able to make up for all the lost time with her father? His words rang in her ears, a needle stuck in the grooves of a record. It’ll be all right, Emma.

The more she thought about it, the more upset and lonely she became. And it was odd because people she loved surrounded her. She wondered about herself—about who she really was. Daughter, wife, mother, writer, niece, sister, aunt. All the labels she’d ever used to define herself didn’t save her from this feeling of loneliness.

She promised herself she’d be courageous, but she sank into fears about the future. What if her father died? What if she’d already said everything she could ever say to him? Would she come to believe it was enough?

Why had it taken so long for her to bend the bitterness and forgive her father? Why was it even during those times when she believed she had, her forgiveness never quite rinsed the anger out? Never made it into those murky alcoves where outrage clung? She must have feared without her anger, she wouldn’t be able to identify herself. And she’d been right.

She had so wanted to find a common thread that wove itself through her entire life, but the thread she discovered was an angry, bitter one—an unforgiving thread that had kept her at a distance—a distance that for years denied any sense of belonging to this family.

In the silent waiting room, the tick of the clock, the sound of Aunt Evie’s sigh as she looked up from her needlepoint, filled Lillianna with sadness and hope the bends and curves of the past could be straightened. And she would be left free to walk on a different road. Perhaps time would be indulgent and give her and her father time. Give them another chance.

Uncle Joel delivered a cup of steaming coffee and patted her shoulder.

“This smells great.” She took the cup from his hand and looked toward the window as the final streaks of morning spread out over the horizon. She didn’t know she cried until her uncle wiped away the wetness from her face with his handkerchief.

This was what living was all about, and she’d never realized it before. She’d become a grown member of the human race without knowing the only things that mattered in life were love, compassion, and forgiveness—families holding themselves together at times like this.

When she had her children, Emma believed giving birth, the actual bearing of them, held the meaning of life. But that was merely a preschool for times like this one and her mother’s death. Suddenly, she realized the strength that human beings have and their ability to endure. Surviving the losses, and a phenomenal amount of hope—that’s what living to be old involved.

Emma Ruth Miller had finally grown up.

It’ll be all right, Emma. No matter what happens, it will be all right.

A nurse appeared in the doorway, her surgical mask dangling around her chin, like a bib. The whole family stood, silent as a held breath.

“Miller,” she announced.

Aunt Pam nudged Lillianna forward. “I’m his daughter. Is everything all right?”

The nurse leaned in, her tone soft and gentle. “Doctor Willingham has started the graft. It’ll probably take another couple hours.”

Lillianna’s eyes filled, and her throat tightened. Gratitude swelled in her chest and hung there, just under her ribs. “Thank you.”

She stepped back across the room to the circle of family, and when they smiled, she knew she didn’t have to repeat the nurse’s words.

A few minutes later Uncle Ron and Aunt Loretta arrived, and she filled them in before they, too, joined the silent vigil. Occasionally someone spoke—small, meaningless exchanges of words that dropped quickly back down into silence.

Greg paced.

Uncle Joel and Uncle David played cards.

Aunt Loretta pretended to read but rarely turned the page. The waiting room now held other families, and a new volunteer made a fresh pot of coffee.

Time began to slow down as the gravity of the situation crept up on Lillianna. It was as if she gradually, second by second, had the wind knocked out of her. With every tick of the clock, the reality she might not ever see her father alive again hit her hard. And her longing for a father came back like a fever. She held her stomach, bowed her head, and prayed for the first time in years.

Two hours later, Doctor Willingham emerged, still wearing his surgical gown. He caught Emma’s eye and beckoned her into the hallway. The rest of her family stood, anxious and waiting.

He placed his hand on her shoulder. “I’m sorry, Emma. But the aneurysm burst before I could get the donor graft in place. I tried clamps and everything I could to stop the bleeding…” He shook his head, and his eyes grew watery. “We lost him. When those aortic aneurysms decide to blow, it’s hard to stop them.” He tightened his grip on her shoulder. “You made him happy the last couple weeks. I hope you can feel good about that.”

These were the best two weeks of my life.

She stared at the floor for a few seconds, trying to keep the tears from rising. “Thanks for trying. And for taking such good care of him.”

He shook his head and swallowed. “We don’t have many disabled World War II vets left. It was an honor. A real privilege to know him.” He turned and headed back through the OR doors.

Tears slid down her face. She braced herself against the wall for a moment. And without even thinking about it, she raised her right hand in the victory sign for her father. He’d died the way he wanted, with both legs intact. Once she was more composed, she stepped back into the waiting room to tell the rest of the family. When she did, her brother, Greg, burst into tears. Uncle Ron gathered his sisters in his arms, and they huddled together for a few moments, the way they must have in Calvin’s hospital room at Fort Jackson nearly fifty years before.

Greg pulled her into a hug. She wanted to thank him for insisting she come, tell him about the way their father’s story had broken her heart open and allowed forgiveness to come inside. How she’d finally realized his grief over their mother’s death was as real as her own. Their mother was his first love, and though he’d lived twenty years after her death, he never got over losing her because grief was the price we all paid for love.

There were so many things she wanted to share with her brother, but the words weren’t yet ready to find her. She cried into Greg’s shoulder, finally understanding forgiveness was a gift to the person who wronged you, but more importantly to yourself.

Three days later, they buried him, with an honor guard and a twenty-one-gun salute, in Grace Memorial Cemetery, next to his wife. When the guards folded the flag, and one of them bent down to hand it to Greg, he whispered something to him. The guard turned sharply, handed it to Lillianna, then gave her a brisk salute with his white-gloved hand.

“He’d want you to have that,” Greg said. “You made him happier than I’ve seen him in years.”