“Christ! Dad…you’re awake!”
His father looked up. He looked fresh and rested. He might have been sitting on his front porch having a gimlet.
“Jack? You’re here? You?”
His blue eyes were clear and bright through his steel-rimmed glasses. His hair was damp and combed, his face looked freshly scrubbed. If not for the facial bruises and the bandage on the side of his head, there was no evidence that he’d been seriously hurt.
“Yeah. Me.” He shook his head. “I can’t believe this. Last night you were still level-seven coma and today…”
“They told me one of my sons had been visiting. I assumed it was Tom. But come to think of it, I seem to remember hearing your voice.”
“I was talking to you a lot.”
“You were? Maybe that’s what brought me out. I couldn’t believe you were here so I had to see for myself.” He sighed and looked at Jack. “Is this what I have to do to get you to visit?”
“Such a thing to say!” Anya said, bustling around Jack and heading for the bed. She’d hung back at the doorway, making Oyv comfortable, she’d said, and had waved Jack ahead. “Be nice, Thomas.”
“Anya!” his father said, eyes lighting at the sight of her. “What are you doing here?”
“Jack brought me. We’ve become fast friends.” She took his right hand in both of hers. “How are you?”
“I’m fine. Better every minute, especially since they took that catheter out of me.” He shuddered. “That’s not something—”
“There she is!” said a heavily accented woman’s voice. Jack turned and saw a thin little Hispanic woman, dressed like a nurse’s aide, standing next to the hulking form of Nurse Schoch, pointing at Anya. “She’s the one I told you about.”
Nurse Schoch, looking as stern as ever, glanced down at the aide and spoke in a rumbling voice. “You want to tell me again what you saw?”
“I was in the bathroom, washing the sink, when she come in and hold his hand and say, ‘Okay, Tom. You’ve been asleep long enough. Today’s the day you get up.’ That’s what she say.”
Anya laughed and waved a hand at her. “How do you know I don’t say that to him every day?”
The little woman shook her head. “Right after she leave, he sit up in bed and ask me if he miss breakfast.”
“Did I?” his father said, smiling. “I don’t remember. I was a little groggy after I first woke up, but I’m fine now.” The smile faded. “So many things I don’t remember. They tell me I had an accident but I don’t remember a thing about it.”
The aide was still pointing at Anya. “Bruja!”
Jack knew enough Spanish to know she was calling Anya a witch.
“Enough of that,” Schoch said. “Go clean something. Git.”
After one last fearful look at Anya, the little woman scurried off. Nurse Schoch stepped over to his father’s side and took his blood pressure. She nodded and wrote on a clipboard.
“How am I doing?” he said.
“Fine.” Schoch smiled and, surprisingly, it didn’t break her face. “Amazingly fine. Dr. Huerta’s coming up to see you.”
“Who’s he?”
“She. She’s been taking care of you since you were brought in to the ED.”
“Well, she’d better get here fast, because as soon as I finish this Jell-O, I’m going home.”
Jack and Schoch began talking at the same time, telling him he couldn’t, that he’d just had a serious injury, and so on and so on. Didn’t faze him.
“I don’t like hospitals. I feel fine. I’m going home.”
Jack recognized the note of finality in his father’s voice. He’d heard it as a kid. It meant Dad had made up his mind and that was that.
“You can’t,” Schoch told him.
He peered at her through his glasses. “I guess I’m a little confused. When did I become the hospital’s property?”
Schoch blinked and Jack guessed no one had ever asked her that.
“You’re certainly not the hospital’s property, but you became its responsibility when you were wheeled through the doors.”
“I appreciate that,” he said. “Really, I do. And from the way I feel right now, you’ve all done a wonderful job. But I no longer need a hospital, so I’m going home. Where’s the problem?”
“The problem, Dad…,” Jack said, feeling his patience slipping. His father was acting dumb. “The problem is that you had a serious accident—”
“So I’m told. Can’t remember a thing about it so I guess I’ll have to take people’s word for it.”
“It happened,” Jack told him. “I’ve seen the car. Totaled.”
He winced. “Not even a year old.” He shook his head. “I wish I could remember.”
Jack watched his father’s expression. Was that fear in his eyes? Was he afraid? Of what?
“That’s not the point,” he told him. “The point is you’ve been in a coma for three days and how do we know you won’t lapse back into one in the next minute or hour or day?”
His smile was thin. “We don’t. But if I do, you can bring me back here.” He held out his arm—the one with the IV running into it—to Schoch. “Would you remove that, please?”
She shook her head. “Not without doctor’s orders.”
“Okay, then. I’ll do it myself.”
“Christ, Dad,” Jack said as his father began peeling off the tape that held the line in place.
“All right, all right,” Schoch said. “I’ll take it out for you. Just let me get a tray.”
As she lumbered out, Jack looked at Anya. She hadn’t said a word through all this. He looked at his father who had lowered the top of his hospital gown and was peeling off the cardiac monitor leads.
“Can’t you convince him?” he said to her. “I obviously can’t.”
Oyv popped his head out of her big straw bag as Anya shook hers. “I should be making his decisions? He’s not crazy.”
“He’s acting crazy.”
“He wants to leave the hospital because he feels fine. What’s so crazy about that?”
Thanks for the help, he thought. He’d feel a lot better if his father would stay just one more day, to make sure his condition was stable. He had to find a way around his reckless stubbornness.
Anya was staring at him. “Switch places. What would you do in his situation?”
I’d get the hell out of here and go home, he thought. But he couldn’t say that.
“I’m lots younger and—”
Oyv dropped back down into the bag as an anxious looking Nurse Schoch came charging into the room, carrying a tray. She stopped at the foot of the bed and shook her head as she stared at the cardiac leads scattered across the sheet.
“I figured that was what you were doing when the monitor flatlined, but I had to be sure.”
A few minutes later, Dad had a gauze patch taped over the spot where the IV had been. He stood and looked around.
“All I need now are my clothes.”
“They had to throw them out.” Here was the angle Jack had been looking for. “They were too bloody to keep. You know what? Why don’t you hang out here one more night and I’ll come back first thing in the morning with some of your clothes. How does that sound?”
“Terrible. I’ll wear this if I have to.”
Jack thought of refusing to drive him home, but what would that accomplish? All he had to do was call a cab.
He caught a glimpse of his father’s skinny white buttocks through the back of the hospital gown as he walked to the tiny closet.
“Well, will you look at this!” he said as he opened the door. He held up a white golf shirt and tan Bermuda shorts. “Just what the doctor ordered.”
“Somehow I doubt that,” Jack said. He looked at Anya. “Where’d they come from? You were here this morning. Did you—?”