One day, after some time passes, my mother appears with my brother at Agnes’s house. She has come to take me to visit my dad. I had forgotten there was one. How the time flies!
He is in the hospital in Joplin. There have been many surgeries, I am told in the car. Many surgeries on his brain. And many surgeries involve many stitches and many restraints, and on one evening not so long ago, he has torn free of his restraints and attempted an escape from his bed, but in so doing, has crashed and fallen and split open his many stitches, and this has involved many more surgeries and many new stitches. I am warned that he struggles with words. I am warned that he has changed.
We arrive at the hospital, and my father is there in his pajamas and in his red Hawkeye bathrobe in a chair, and although he can sit up and although he seems alert, he has not yet fully regained language, and he is not, to say the least, anything like my dad. He is skinny, far too skinny, and his head is shaven and covered over with red, emblazoned embroidery. He is a patchwork doll now.
He cannot hug. To hug him will hurt him. Besides, I am scared of him. He is a fright, a monster. I hide behind a chair.
Stop that woman calling my house, my mother says, and then we leave.