10

Big Daddy

In the back of the ambulance, the paramedics had Mom strapped to a gurney. There was a bandage on her head and orange padding stuffed around her face. It pinched her cheeks and pushed her lips into a pair of prunes. But it couldn’t stop her from grinning. That was because she was dreaming of Dad. “Daniel … ” she murmured, breathing deeply. “Daniel … Daniel … ” She whispered his name over and over. Eventually, the words faded away, but the smile stayed.

The paramedic looked from Nomi to me, arching his eyebrows. “She often talk in her sleep?”

“Sometimes.”

I picked up Mom’s hand and stroked it. The paleness of her skin looked even whiter under my brown fingers. She squeezed my hand and the grin on her face went even goofier. I think she thought my hand was actually Dad’s.

Nomi watched Mom’s face, wincing as if in pain. “I shouldn’t have pulled her.”

“She’ll be fine,” I told her. “It’s not your fault.” Of course, my sister didn’t believe me.

At the hospital, they made us sit in an empty hallway while the doctor did his examination. The blue chairs were a gazillion percent plastic and about as comfortable as the crappy bleachers they have around the track at school.

Nomi sat beside me and kicked her legs, staring at one foot and then the other swinging up, then thumping against the chair legs.

My sister is eight years younger than me. I was thirteen when Dad died, but Nomi was only five. She says she remembers him, but she doesn’t really. (I can match all of her memories to photographs we have around the house, all the ones with Dad in them.)

I worry about her. When you grow up with no father and a mom who’s liable to conk out for days at a time, it takes a toll on a kid. Sometimes, I think Nomi’s forehead ought to be stamped with the word FRAGILE. Everything about her—her arms, her legs, even her hair—seems too thin. The most fragile part of her, though, is her eyes. They’re so big and glossy, it’s like she’s always on the verge of tears.

I put one arm around her shoulders and felt the thump-thump-thump as her feet hit the chair. “Don’t worry,” I said. “Just a matter of time before she wakes up again.”

Nomi kept on thumping. “It’s because of me.”

“You just wanted to wake her up.”

“But there was B-L-O-O-D.”

“You don’t have to spell it.”

“But I don’t want it to happen to you too.”

I hugged her close. “I’m not gonna pass out just from hearing the word. I promise.”

“What if it’s not an attack? What if it’s because she hit her head?”

“It’s just an attack,” I told her.

There were televisions bolted into the corners of the room. I thought maybe I could distract Nomi from blaming herself with a TV show. Unfortunately, both sets were tuned in to the latest episode of Big Daddy, the worst reality TV show ever conceived. They take a bunch of twenty-somethings who have never known their parents, and make them humiliate themselves in competitions to find their biological father.

In the first episode, all of them were exiled on a tropical island (like we’d never seen that one before). They were separated into two groups: orphans who had been abandoned as children and fathers who hadn’t known they’d had a kid. The trick is that none of them knew which father had fathered which orphan.

At the end of each episode, all the fathers voted on which orphan they thought was their kid. The orphan with the fewest votes was booted off the show. At the end of each season, the last remaining orphan won $250,000. This was followed by the big revelation scene of which father had fathered the winner. That lucky dad also won $250,000.

I hated that show.

“That girl has big boobs,” Nomi commented, stating the obvious. On the screen, an orphan in a tank top swung upside down from a tree branch.

“Let’s read a magazine,” I suggested. I started searching the tables for some kid-friendly reading material, but there wasn’t much. Luckily, the doctor came out of the emergency ward. He had a face like a bloodhound, saggy and dull but reliable.

“You’ll be happy to hear your mother’s head injury isn’t serious. Nothing that would keep her unconscious.”

“You see?” I told to Nomi. “It’s not because of you.”

The doctor started asking questions about Mom: How long had she suffered from somnitis? What precisely were the symptoms? Were there any warning signs prior to an attack? At first, I thought he needed this information to treat her properly, but then I realized he was just excited to be treating someone with such a rare condition. To him, Mom was a novelty.

Nomi must have sensed the same thing because she suddenly asked, “Can we go in and see her now?”