After
HE STANDS BY her bed, holding her hand. Deep in his heart, he clings to the belief that despite her being unconscious she’s aware of his presence, his healing love, his gratitude at the sacrifice she’s made for him.
She’s hooked up to machines with beeping monitors displaying ever-changing data about her heart, her respiration, pulse—but none that can broadcast her soul, which is, and has always been, kind. Kind is the word he’s always thought of when his daughter, with her red hair and sunny smile, appeared in his mind. She’s always put others first, even when it harmed her.
This last thought causes the ball in his throat to expand, constricting. Tears rise in his eyes, spill over.
“You knew. You always knew. I should have listened.”
He squeezes her hand, trying to impart warmth, life force. “I didn’t hear you—that’s on me. After all, I’m supposed to be the parent and you the child. Those roles should never be reversed.”
He lets go to sit in the blue vinyl-covered chair next to the bed. Sunlight filters in through the half-drawn drapes on the other side of them. In the rays, he watches, distracted, dust motes dancing in the air. He listens as a cart rolls down the hall outside, one wheel squeaky. Voices, a man and a woman, laughing and chattering.
Despite his heart’s ache and his daughter’s silence, he envies these people and even these dust motes. They exist in an ordinary world, where it’s simply business as usual.
He wonders if business as usual will ever apply again.
His head lolls back and, for only a moment or two, blessed sleep—oblivion—comes to him. In just those few seconds, he dreams of Miranda as a child, running along the beach at Discovery Park, toward the red-and-white lighthouse poised at the edge of the rocky and driftwood-strewn beach. Once in a while, they’d find a seal lounging at the edge of the water. It must be summer because the sun beats down, the sky nearly cloudless. The air is warm, lifting her red curls as she races ahead of him, dodging the white-tipped waves that move restlessly back and forth at her bare feet. She wears a pair of denim cut-offs and a cropped polka-dot top, red and white. “Honey, wait up!” he calls.
But it’s as though she can’t hear.
And then she’s too far ahead, beyond the reach of his voice.
The sky darkens in an instant. The waves go from peaceful rhythm to turmoil, to danger, to chaos. They rise up, crashing against the shore, restless, hungry to erode, destroy.
He loses complete sight of Miranda as she disappears behind the lighthouse.
The sky darkens even more, like deepest night.
In the lighthouse tower, a bright white beam, rotating, comes on to battle the dark and cloud-choked sky. Its illumination blinds him, and he calls out helplessly, “Miranda!” He extends hands into air now chilled with freezing wind. The drops are stinging needles, icy.
He jolts and wakes to someone staring at him.
“Will she be okay?”
“Oh my god,” he whispers, gazing up.
It’s Steve, his ex, the man he once loved. Almost twenty years together and too progressive, they thought, for marriage. “A piece of paper doesn’t define us,” they’d once sworn when marriage became legal in Washington State. “What defines us is family, commitment, love.”
Happy words that all went to shit when Steve left him just before the horror that landed them here, in this hospital in Seattle’s Capitol Hill neighborhood. Happy words that morphed into ugly lies when Steve found that a piece of paper did matter, rapidly getting engaged to his new love right before Christmas last year.
Now, as he peers at Steve hovering alone in the doorway, a paper-wrapped bouquet of daisies in one hand, he’s filled with a winsome love. Despite the affection, all he sees right now is a man desperate to stay young—the dyed too-black hair, the gym rat physique, the smooth face, too unlined for a man nearing fifty. The Abercrombie & Fitch hoodie and distressed jeans. Mutton dressed as lamb comes to mind and, for the first time since the attacks happened, Connor smiles. He wants to laugh, but fears laughter will quickly ratchet up to hysteria.
Steve interprets the smile as one of welcome and reassurance. Or maybe he can now read the mind behind the opinion and knows that, beneath Connor’s unspoken criticism, real love remains.
Ah, go ahead. Enjoy your illusions. You never were able to recognize what was real. Even as he has the cruel thought, he recognizes another just behind it. But none of that matters now, does it?
“Will she?” he prompts.
“Will she what?” Connor rubs his eyes and sits up straighter. He glances over at Miranda and takes her hand again, squeezes. He remembers what Steve asked and nods.
“She’ll be okay,” he tells Steve, not because he knows it’s true, but because if he doesn’t believe it himself, he isn’t sure how he’ll carry on. Not only is his daughter’s life on the line, his own sense of duty and care are in jeopardy as well.
If only I had heeded her warnings, right from the very first moment the man calling himself Trey Goodall stepped into our lives…
Steve breathes a sigh of relief. He takes a couple tentative steps into the room, almost as though he’s waiting for an invitation.
Don’t hold your breath, dear. But it’s a free country.
All at once, without seeming to move, Steve is beside Miranda’s bed. He briefly touches her cheek. The concern on his face causes Connor’s heart to soften. Begrudgingly, he admits to himself that Steve was once her daddy too. And he reminds himself that wherever he and Steve are today, however betrayed Connor felt, his ex was once a component of their lives, integral—family.
Steve and Miranda will always love each other. Their bond is family, unbreakable.
Connor stands and gives Steve an awkward hug, dropping his hands before Steve has much of a chance to return it. He feels cold, different somehow, his body lighter as though made up of bird bones and tissue.
“She’s gotta be okay. This was all my fault.”
Steve shakes his head and, in Steve’s eyes, Connor sees something he thought had left their relationship completely—compassion. “That’s not true and you know it.”
“No. It is. I should have listened to her. She told me the first time she met Trey that she didn’t like him, that there was something off about him.”
“Ah, if we all only had the gift of 20/20 hindsight. But we don’t. Quit beating yourself up.”
Connor tries to smile, to show some gratitude and knows he fails.
With Steve, Connor falls into a prolonged silence, staring down at Miranda. Her head is swathed in bandages, a gauze turban. Her forehead, so recently smooth and unlined, now bears a jagged gash, stitched up. Yet she looks peaceful, serene.
Connor knows that right now peace is the one thing that’s impossible.
Suddenly, Steve’s presence feels like an irritant, annoying. Connor fears if he doesn’t get him away he’ll say something he might regret. He doesn’t know if Miranda can hear them or not, but if there’s the slightest chance she can, he doesn’t want her to witness family discord. Not now. Her life depends on it.
“I need to be alone with her, okay?” Connor reaches down and takes the flowers from Steve’s hand. “I’ll find a vase and put these in water.” He glances down at them again and sees not daisies, but a piece of jagged driftwood and seaweed.
He blinks and the bouquet morphs into a dozen pink sweetheart roses.
He tries again for a smile, but he’s lost the capacity. He’s sure what he wants to be a smile is more of a grimace. “When she wakes up—and she will—I know these will cheer her up. Roses are her favorite.”
Steve grins. “I remembered.”
Sure you did. Irises are Miranda’s favorite. And weren’t these a bunch of daisies?
Connor closes his eyes. And then opens them as he jolts awake.
He’s alone with Miranda once more. There’s no trace of Steve. At first, he surmises Steve must have slipped soundlessly from the room. And then he remembers…
The horror.
Steve wasn’t here.
In spite of the knowledge, he gropes for the bouquet on the bedside table. But there’s nothing there but a plastic cup with a straw and a decanter of water. He bends down to hold his daughter. He strokes her hair, her cheek, as he did when she was a little girl.
There’s no one else in the world he’d rather hold.
When she does awaken, he knows she’ll ask, “Where is he? What happened to him?” and he’s not sure how he’ll tell her.
The time may come sooner than he hoped. Miranda stirs a bit and her eyelids flutter.