Chapter 36

THREE DAYS PASS. The sun rises like an inferno, orange and enormous. A sign, I am sure, my dad will be better.

My mother, my sister, and I have been sleeping in shifts on the foam green couch in the waiting room. Three soldiers on duty. Three soldiers keeping guard. And when the nurse comes in, carrying a stack of new magazines, she tells us he is better. She says, “He is responding to pain.”

This is, apparently, a good sign, a positive sign.

But my father is hurting.

In these final hours, as the day moves forward, people, faceless forms, drift in and out. Seats are filled and then emptied, like a child’s game of musical chairs. Doctors and nurses hurry down halls, white coats flowing behind them, their soft-soled shoes silent against the tiled floor. Elevator doors open and close, telephones ring, announcements echo paging doctors, and we pace, keeping step with strangers’ ankles.

I am in the hospital hall leaning over the drinking fountain when I see them coming forward like a firestorm.

Something is different in their step, something ominous, and there are too many of them walking toward me. I back into the waiting room and tell my mother and my sister, “The doctors are coming.”

And suddenly, there they are, looking at us. White forms leaning against a pastel wall. The air conditioner, the only sound for moments, strains against the late June sun pouring through the expansive glass. Magazines on the window ledge flutter open. One doctor sits down. Another stands beside him, near a nurse. They are watching us—the waiting people—the patient’s wife and daughters.

The sitting doctor clears his throat. I hate him instantly. I want to throw my hands up and press them over his moving mouth, mute his words.

He crosses his leg and looks at us.

He explains what happened, making certain not to leave a space where some errant hope might erroneously crash through and challenge what he has to say. He has to speak quickly, all in one breath. He says something again about the surgery and other words I cannot hear. There is no diagram now, nowhere to divert our eyes, no chance to look away.

The doctor clears his throat again. “We are so sorry. He’s gone.”

Gone? Gone where?

That’s the thing about euphemisms. They never speak the truth. They leave all sorts of questions and dangling expectations. “Gone” would imply he’ll return, or he’s just momentarily slipped away. Around the corner. Off to the nearest store. Gone might mean there would be footsteps to follow, tracks in the snow, a place to set at the table for later.

Gone would not necessarily mean “never coming back.”