“Speaking.” I wait for the sales pitch. But there is a long pause instead.
“It’s Hatch. Hatch Bridgeton.” He says his name like it is a small joke between us.
“Oh.” My father must be dead.
The children, sensitive to my tones of voice, stop their game.
“Your dad had a stroke. A big one. They can’t stabilize him.”
I got an invitation to Hatch’s wedding and, six years later, a group email about his divorce. I sent my regrets and a ceramic bowl for the wedding, and a short but I hoped sympathetic reply to the email. Other than that, I’ve had no contact with him in all the years that we’ve been stepbrother and sister.
“Are you there now?” I ask.
“I am. But I’m flying home tomorrow. I’ve been here a week and things are falling apart at work.”
“A week?”
I can feel him struggle for a way to explain the seven days between my father’s stroke and this phone call. But I know he’s just been following instructions. “I left a message for Garvey, too. They don’t think he’ll make it through the weekend.”
“I’m not sure,” I say.
“I understand. Scott and Carly are sitting this one out, too.”
In my mind, Carly and Scott are still skipping stones on their beach in Ashing on Thanksgiving Day. But life has lurched on for them, as it has for us all.
In the fifteen years since I last saw my father, I have spoken to him once. It was the night the Red Sox won the Series and broke the curse. I knew he’d be up. I didn’t think about it. I just dialed the number. Barbara answered and I surprised her. She didn’t know what tone to use with me. She told me to hang on and covered the phone. I could hear him refuse, and Barbara insist. I felt her try to seal the holes of the phone’s receiver more securely, heard his voice rising and snapping, and then a sudden, “Hello there,” fake, and drunk as hell.
“I won’t keep you on long, Dad. I’m just calling because of the Red Sox. I couldn’t help thinking of you.”
“What? Oh, yeah. Wasn’t that something?” He kept his voice flat. He wasn’t going to celebrate with me, not even for a second. “Listen, I gotta go.”
“All right.”
“Yup,” he said, and hung up.
Barbara is waiting for me at the hospital in Allencaster, which is fancier now: revolving doors and a glass-domed lobby with an enormous information desk. She is smaller, crumpled. There are black hollows around her eyes, as if the sockets are receding to the back of her head. Her squat forehead is even more foreshortened, the wrinkles thick and deep. I don’t know if this transformation has occurred over the last fifteen years with my father or just in the past sleepless week.
“Oh, Daley, I’m so glad you’ve come.” She is tiny in my arms. She tries to say more but her chest shudders, like my children just before they throw up.
“It’s okay. It’s going to be okay.” I stroke the coarse hair at the back of her head.
We don’t always like our children, Daley, but we do always love them, she wrote me after she married my father. She hoped I would come visit them. She’d redone the kitchen. When I didn’t answer that card, or the next, or the next, she wrote a fiercer one. I’d always been a rude and spoiled child, she said. She vividly remembered seeing me at a Christmas pageant when I was five or six and complimenting me on my pretty velvet dress and I turned away with my nose in the air. Julie told me to stop reading the cards. They always had a little tender flower on the front, or a baby animal. She begged me to burn them unopened. I lived with her then, in New Mexico. She saw the pain they brought on, the time it took me to recover from one. It wasn’t Barbara’s attacks on my character that hurt; it was the passing references to my father, the portrait of his life with her that she unwittingly depicted for me. He’d gone back to work for Hugh. He wasn’t coaching the “derelicts” at the youth center anymore. They’d been to a party and he’d had everyone in stitches when he snuck upstairs and came down in a kimono and slashes of eyeliner.
“How is he today?” I ask her, as if we are just picking up from yesterday.
“They’ve stabilized his heart rate. They still can’t get his blood pressure down and he was very agitated last night. But they took off his restraints this morning, so that’s good.”
“Restraints?”
“He wasn’t being cooperative with the nurses.”
“I thought he was unconscious,” I say, trying to hide my uneasy surprise.
“He’s in and out.”
“Is he talking?” Hatch told me he couldn’t speak. I wouldn’t have come if I thought he could say something to me.
“No. Nothing coherent. Just babble.”
I follow her down hallways. The walls are hung with harbor and beach scenes. She stops at a pair of double doors and puts her palm under a dispenser on the wall. I do the same. Antibacterial lotion squirts out automatically. I rub it over my hands as we go through the doors. The lotion is cold then evaporates. The whole place smells of it. There is a bank of desks and opposite them a row of cubicles. Most of the curtains are open. In the first one is a black man with wires attached all over his bare chest by round adhesives that are not his skin color. In the second a white woman is sitting up, opening her mouth for Jell-O that a nurse feeds her. TVs are blaring: news, sitcoms, the Animal Channel. Two nurses are typing at computers. There is the smell of old cooked eggs. I am aware of everything, as if each pore of my skin is a receptor, waiting for the sign of my father. He is there, in the third cubicle. I feel like I am floating slightly, carrying less than my whole self. I follow Barbara’s coat toward his bed. He is a long log under the covers with arms and a head sticking out. The arms are covered in wide black bruises with green centers. Everywhere else his skin is gray and loose. It hangs off his neck like fabric, and the features of his face, always pronounced and angular, are exaggerated now like a bad caricature. His straight bony nose has a bend in it, and his big ears now have enormous earlobes to match, with a crease in the middle, as if they have just been unfolded. His hair has gone past white to yellow, though his eyebrows are a bright silver, as wiry and abundant as they have always been. A tube is attached to the cartilage between his nostrils but he is breathing through his mouth loudly. At the opening of his hospital gown I can see wires attached to his chest too, the healthy peach of the adhesives no more able to match his gray skin than his neighbor’s. His hands at the ends of the bruised arms lie on either side of him, healthier looking than the rest of him, both curled slightly but not closed, as if holding things: a tennis racquet, a drink.
There is nothing more familiar to me than those brown veined hands.
There are two chairs, one beside his head and the other beside his feet. Barbara points me to the one at his head. I sit without taking off my coat or scarf. Barbara removes hers and lays them on the other chair, straightens her blouse, and faces my father from the foot of the bed.
“It’s Daley, Gardiner.” She speaks loudly, almost angrily if you cannot see how hard she’s trying not to cry. “Your daughter’s come to see you.”
His eyes flash open. I don’t expect them. I feel my body flinch backwards. He scans the room with his yellow eyes, their color and shape and wariness unchanged by time or sickness, before settling on me. I smile as if for a camera. Friend or foe, those eyes seem to be asking.
“Hey there,” I say, my throat dry.
Friend, he decides. The wariness recedes slightly. And fear floods his face as he sees the machines behind me and realizes he is not in his bed at home.
“You’re going to be okay,” I say quietly.
His head moves back and forth slowly.