I don’t know what made me knock on his office door. And I don’t know what made me open it when there was no answer. My father had left his desk lamp on, but on countless nights before I had walked past the dim light escaping from the gap above the floor without a second thought. Tonight, though, I turned the knob.
At first I couldn’t move; I was frozen for three interminable heartbeats with blood roaring through my ears as my mind worked furiously to scroll through the possible explanations for why my father was lying facedown on the floor: heart attack… stroke… aneurism. Then I saw the vomit and I knew. I ran to him and knelt down. “Dad!” I said loudly, with my face next to his. He didn’t move. There wasn’t even a rise and fall of his chest.
I know that I grabbed the phone; I know I dialed 911. But those memories are vague and cloudy. What I do remember, what I can still replay in my head with absolute clarity, is picking up my father’s hand, closing my eyes, and praying. Stripped of everything else, every pretense, every shred of pride, I had nothing left in me but my desire for my father to live. With my eyes closed, all I heard were my whispered pleas to God, and my breath. I don’t know how long it was before the paramedics got there, but when they came rushing in I told them what had happened.
“My father’s tried to kill himself.” It came out so matter-of-fact.
I didn’t know what he had taken, but I knew what he had done. Only later did we find the bottle of vodka, along with an empty bottle of tranquilizers, placed neatly in the wastebasket under his desk beneath a stack of papers. On his chair was a note written on his monogrammed stationery. It had the name of his insurance company, where he had a sizable life policy that he had purchased decades ago, a policy that didn’t have a suicide clause.
I rode in the back of the ambulance, still holding my father’s hand and still praying as the paramedics moved about, communicating with each other in a brisk, austere language all their own. At the hospital I called my family. I found a secluded corner of the waiting room and turned against the wall. I called my mother at least a dozen times, but her phone was in the pocket of her mink coat, vibrating mutely in the catacomb of the Arnolds’ foyer closet. Luke answered right away, sounding tipsy and relaxed. Get Kat and come to Allen Memorial. It’s Dad.
I weighed the phone in my hand for a few moments, pretending to debate doing what I had wanted to do all along. Then I called Mark. I was always going to call Mark. I called him because I knew he would come; I called him because I never should have left him. And tragedy has a way of delivering a brand of clarity all its own.
“Ellen?” he said tentatively.
When I heard his voice, feeling rushed back into my numb heart. I couldn’t formulate words over my tears.
“Ellen, what’s wrong?”
“It’s my dad,” I wept. The veins in my neck felt like they were strangling me.
“Where are you?” he asked, urgent but calm.
I told him.
“I’ll be right there.”
Though I never intended to admit it, waiting for Mark to arrive was more excruciating than waiting for the ambulance. As the automatic doors of the hospital silently parted, he rushed through. Our eyes met and he came to me. With vomit still on the knees of my black panty hose, I fell into him. His body yielded slightly but was tense.
At first, he was gentle but clinical, asking questions. “What did he take? Have the doctors been out yet? Where is your mother? Should I go and get her?”
I clung to his jacket like a child. “No, please don’t go. Please.”
He was next to me when I told my mother. She had gotten all the way home before she checked her phone. She had seen the state of my father’s office and the note on his chair and she knew. “He’ll be okay, Mom,” I whimpered. “I promise he’ll be okay.”
My mother arrived before Luke and Kat. Perhaps it was the shock, but when she saw Mark, it was as though she had expected him to be there. Like he belonged there, next to me. Luke was the same way, nodding in acknowledgment before asking about Dad. Only Kat, whom Mark had never met, recoiled a bit when she saw him, her tear-streaked face suspicious and wary. But as we all sat together on the immobilized blue pleather chairs, waiting for news, even Kat let her guard down.
It was the middle of the night when a tired-looking doctor in blue scrubs came out and told us that my father would live. “He will be unconscious for a while still,” said the doctor, seeming a bit put out by the wastefulness of it all, the needlessness of this entirely preventable event. There are blessedly few moments like that in life, when you see someone you love teetering on the stark line that separates life from death, light from dark. And when I found out that my father had landed in the light, it was as if the hand that had been twisting my chest suddenly released its grip, and I could breathe.
After relief flooded our bodies, after we thanked, thanked, thanked the doctor, after we wrapped our arms around one another in shared gratitude, it became quiet. Mom and Luke both stepped aside to make phone calls—Mom to Aunt Kathy and Luke to Mitch. Mark excused himself. I collapsed into a chair. Kat, who had stayed on the fringes of the group, pushed away from the wall against which she had been leaning and walked toward me. She took the seat next to me and rested her elbows on her knees, the look on her face ancient and sad. Her full lips were cracked and peeling, with a hairline strip of dried blood forming in one of the ridges. She had been uncharacteristically silent as we held our vigil, even when she learned that my mother and I had been at the Arnolds’ party when it happened.
“It was Christian Arnold,” was all she said. And there, under the buzz of the fluorescent lights, in a waiting room surrounded by strangers whose loved ones were hidden behind those steel doors, I finally understood. I understood the anger that had surfaced in Kat that night when she walked into my parents’ house to see the Arnolds at their table. We had all betrayed her without even knowing it.
I breathed a sound of recognition. Christian Arnold, I repeated to myself. I had long ago stopped wondering who the father was. I sometimes even doubted that Kat herself was sure. But while Kat was wild, she hadn’t run rampant. Though she neither confirmed nor denied it, I had heard hushed conversations between my parents about the overnight trip that Kat had taken with the boys’ and girls’ varsity lacrosse teams, and its coincidental, suspicious timing with her pregnancy. Christian played lacrosse. I believe that he went on to be captain, the spring that Kat officially dropped out of school.
“I never told anyone,” she said. “Only him.”
“Oh, Kat.” I took her hand. And she let me. Then she rested her head on my shoulder and closed her wet eyes.
. . .
When my father regained consciousness, Mark waited while my mother, Luke, Kat, and I went in to see him. I imagined that we would cautiously surround his bed, whispering our greetings like lullabies. We love you, Dad. We are so glad you’re okay. But as soon as my mother saw him, her jaw clenched and her hands formed tiny fists and she rushed his bed, beating at his legs like they were snakes under the blanket. Her admonishments were strung between sobs. “How dare you? How could you? How could you try to leave me?” She wept and wailed and pounded at him until he caught her hands and their foreheads met and they cried, their tears mixing.
Kat knelt by the foot of his bed, weeping in the silent, muffled way that Kat sometimes did. My father’s hand reached down and tried to find the top of her head. “I’m so sorry, Kat, my little girl. I’m so sorry.” His words came out in sorrowful sputters, and I knew that his apology extended far beyond the events that had brought us all here.
Luke wrapped his arm around me and inched me closer to the bed, and my mother reached up and grabbed his hand. “Hold hands,” my mother commanded softly, her voice shaky. Kat clasped my father’s hand; Luke and Kat held mine. My mother closed her eyes and began a prayer of thanks.
When she had finished, I kissed my father on the cheek and looked at my mother, who nodded. She knew what I had to do. And so without a word I left the room and went back to find Mark. He was sitting with his eyes closed, his feet propped up on the chair across from him. His breath was the slow and steady sort that comes on the brink of sleep. I sat next to him, then reached over to pick up his hand, cradling it in both of mine. He took a jagged, startled breath and opened his eyes.
“Mark,” I said, staring at the dry, red patches over his knuckles. “I’m so sorry.”
He looked at me but did not speak.
Seeing the wariness in his eyes brought on fresh tears. “Please?” I pleaded. “Please forgive me?”
“I’m not going to give up the ministry, Ellen.”
I pulled myself onto his lap and wrapped my arms around his neck. “I don’t want you to,” I said, my damp face hiding in his neck. “I don’t want you to change.”
And then his hands slowly found their place on my back.