I walked down the hall and into Dad’s room, still composing my excuse for not being there first thing in the morning and finding it insufficiently compelling. So I was faintly relieved to see that Mom wasn’t there either. Then I remembered she was at home, that I had driven her home myself, the evening before. I wondered where my brain was. And why she hadn’t bothered to call me.
I’d call her and go get her, but for now I watched Dad, sleeping, his same limp-puppy look that I’d seen the day before, but maybe a little better color, or it was just my wishing. This was the first time I remembered being alone with him in the hospital. Hospital, hell, this was the first time I remembered being alone with him. I studied his face closer, trying to see a man rather than the image of the father, and wondering if I would like him better that way.
His eyes opened so he was starting back at me.
“Is your mother in the room?” he asked.
“No. She’s at home right now. Are you in pain?” He reached out for me, and I held his hand with its nails thick like an animal’s claws.
His body may have been weakened, but all his life was still in his eyes. “No,” he said. “I wanted to tell you when she wasn’t around. Your mother. She’s unnatural.”
I had no idea what was going on inside that mind of his, but I responded the way anyone would, whether or not they were talking to their father. “Aw, Dad. No she’s not. She’s natural.”
“I never hurt any of you, did I? Tell me that.”
I remembered all the ways that a child can be hurt. I was glad I could answer honestly, “Well, there was that time Todd was wetting his bed and you—”
“Besides that.”
“Then, no. You yelled a lot, you threw things, but I don’t think you ever hurt us. Per se.”
“What the hell does persay mean?”
“Dad, is there anything you’d like to tell me? Anything at all?”
He looked concerned. “Why? What have they told you?”
“Nothing. Just that you’re responding to the new antibiotic.”
Dad breathed a sigh, but it sounded like it came from the very top of his lungs. I wondered if they’d told me the truth at the nurses’ station or just had instructions to say whatever they thought would get rid of me. I stroked his arm, and wondered when I had ever touched him so much as I was touching him now.
Dad said, his difficulty breathing chopping up his words, making me remember Marcus Creighton after his asthma attack, “It’s just that. When people start asking. You questions it feels like they. Think you’re going to die and. This is their last chance for. Answers.”
That was kind of a thoughtful thing. Was I doing Dad an injustice by thinking of him as only a two-dimensional cartoon character? Was there some depth in him that I hadn’t seen? Something of wisdom, of a small good? Or even great bad?
“You’re not going to die,” I said.
But he was drifting back to another point. “I wasn’t a. Bad father, was I?”
“You were an excellent father,” I said, thinking of Marcus again, and wishing I could stop that little tug in my heart. “Better than most.”
That didn’t seem to satisfy him, though, and I tried to think of something more comforting. But then I wondered if he was totally off his rocker, because he followed up with “The devil in his might. He couldn’t catch a bite.”
I remembered that poem, if you can give it so highfalutin a name, from when we went crabbing. We wound string around raw chicken necks and, holding on to the string, threw the chicken far out into the canal. When we felt a little tug, we’d pull in the chicken slowly, luring the crab after it into a fishing net. He’d say that poem softly as the crab came closer and closer.
Going wherever his mind was, I held his hand in mine and finished for him, “So he fished and he fished the whole feckin’ night. He fished so hard that his arse got sore, and that’s why the devil don’t fish no more.”
Dad’s eyes shifted then, and I suspected that the whole poem had come out to disguise what we had been talking about, because he had the same Mom Radar the rest of us had. Aware of her at the door of his room, I looked up to catch her face sad, unspeakably sad.
I felt like I’d been caught. “Mom,” I said, a little too loudly. “I was just about to come get you. How did you get here without your car?”
“So many Weeping Willow residents come here, there’s a shuttle,” she said.
“Dad seems better today,” I said.
“The doctor called me at home. They’re moving him out of the ICU today. They’ll keep him for another seventy-two hours, then they’re going to send him home.” She kept it together until the word “home” that came out like “ho-oh.” Then she pressed her lips together for the “mm” and started to cry. It was the first time I could remember seeing my mother cry.