“He could have been having an aura,” she said. Jesus, now she sounded like Luke. “It’s a prelude to a seizure,” she explained.
I felt a wash of relief. Maybe it wasn’t because I’d told. “If I’d known what it was,” I said, “I would have brought him in. I just thought we were so close to the end of radiation, he must be getting better.”
She ignored this. “We need to get him to radiology as soon as possible.” She held her breath for a moment. She was infuriatingly calm. “We’ll run a series of tests.” She continued in her level voice. Stop it, I wanted to scream at her. “And then we’ll have a clearer idea of what stressed his system.”
I knew exactly what had stressed his system. “Luke is with your mother at the cafeteria. She was very upset, and I asked him to take her out of the room. I’ll check in again soon.” She walked purposefully down the hall.
“I’m going in,” I told Mandy.
When I pushed open his door, the room was dark and quiet. It smelled like ammonia. My dad was completely still, his face pale and waxy. His eyes were closed. I thought of what Dale had said: Your father is very sick. Leaning over the metal rail, I put my lips to his forehead just like he’d done to me a thousand times when I was a kid. He was really hot. Putting my ear against his thin hospital gown, I could hear him breathing.
I stayed like that for a long time, watching the lights go up and down on the screen above us, listening to that steady, hypnotizing heartbeat. Finally, I raised my head and pushed the lever that lowered the safety bar. I lay next to him. He didn’t move when I wrapped my hand around his belly and put my head on his shoulder. His mouth was open a little, and I could hear a whistling sound through his nose when he exhaled. “Hey, Dad,” I said. Beyond him, the window shade was up. On the street below, cars sped through green lights; people stood at the corner of York and Legion, waiting to cross. I didn’t think any of them could have known pain like this. Very softly, I touched his cheek, his wiry blond eyebrows, and the tiny veins in his lids. “I’m sorry,” I whispered.
Lying there next to him, half-falling off the bed, listening to the beeps of his vitals, I knew I shouldn’t have been so stupid as to think people lived forever. I should have come home when he asked, shouldn’t have missed a single holiday, should have gone on all those trips to California when he’d invited me. I should have had him out to Santa Fe every chance I got, stayed up late playing gin rummy, like we used to. Now I would have done anything to save him—cut off my arm, blinded myself, given up every single year I’d spent in New Mexico, every vacation to Greece. I should have sat there on the carousel beach, eating the crab salad sandwiches in the rain, remembering Will, instead of believing for some reason it was a good idea to tell the truth.
23
My father slept through that night and into the next day and the one after that, until I lost track of the hours and eventually the days. The light drained out of his face, as though I were looking at a stranger. I replayed how he’d stepped away from me as if his bones had been put together wrong. I felt that adrenaline burst of regret every time I thought about it.
Dale and Ryder came and went. I hadn’t really talked to Ryder since the night at Hamilton, when we’d almost kissed. Every time he came into the room, he was brusque, businesslike, as though somehow he knew that I’d told. I commanded myself to take him aside and let him know what had happened, but then I couldn’t do it. I just sat in that room hour after hour, not speaking.
I wanted Nic. He had a way of dismissing things. He knew how to brush things away and to make like everything would be fine. He didn’t allow vulnerability or doubt. He believed things turned out how they were supposed to. And his stance on the past was not to think about it. “What’s done is done,” he liked to say. “Life happens in the moment.” I needed to hear that right now. I needed to feel that the past was small, insignificant. That nothing from before could have done this to my father.
I called Nic again and again, listening to the staticky ring. It seemed like no one had answering machines in Greece. I thought he must be in Chania by now, strolling down those cobblestone streets, perusing whitewashed houses with Realtors. He’d be swimming in turquoise waters next to topless European women. He believed that soon my dad’s radiation would be done and we’d be meeting back in Santa Fe. I put the phone on the windowsill and pulled at the jeans Mandy had brought in for me. I’d already spilled hospital coffee on them, and Jamie had gone to get me another cup.
From the stiff, cracked couch, I watched my dad. His face shone with a thin sheen of sweat, which made me think of the dead. The room was very still. Everything smelled like antiseptic and brand-new rubber. I leaned back on the couch, closed my eyes, and listened to the wall clock tick. I felt dirty, unloved, and selfish. All this time my father had been sick, I’d been begging God, or whomever, to keep him healthy, but now I was half glad for this fever that wouldn’t go away. It kept us from having to talk about what I’d done.
Jamie came through the door, holding a cardboard tray of drinks. “I ran into Dale and Ryder,” she said. “They want to do another MRI to compare to the one they did when he first got here.”
Dale and Ryder. Ryder and Dale. It sounded like the beginning of a nursery rhyme. She put the drinks on the table and wedged herself on the side of the bed. I watched her stroke my dad’s cheek tenderly. He didn’t stir. She’d been the same way with Will, comforted him through bruised ribs and lost games. She’d nurtured him in a way she hadn’t been able to do with me.
“I’m going to brush my teeth,” I said. But before I could, the door opened and a chubby nurse rolled in a wheelchair and parked it by the bed. Jamie stood up and lowered the rail while the nurse removed the IV line from his port. “Time to go for a ride, Mr. Reilly,” the nurse said in a voice so perky it made me want to smother her.
She put a pulse ox on his finger. My dad opened his eyes, taking in the room. He was usually only awake long enough to eat a couple bites of food and to go to the bathroom; and then he was often suspicious of us. He thought we were impersonating his family. He hadn’t recognized me in days. Now he couldn’t seem to focus. I went to the side of his bed. “Hey, Daddy.”
“Ma’am”—his voice cracked—“could you tell the cruise director I ordered the salmon?”
The nurse straightened his IV line. Her name tag said KATI, with a tiny heart above the i. “That happens with fevers.” As if I didn’t know that by now. “You’re in the hospital, Mr. Reilly.” Her words were too loud, too slow. She slipped the monitor off his left index finger. “We need to take you down the hall.” She helped him up. “To take some pictures.”
He sat there, his knees bare, pulling at his hands. “Daddy,” I said. “They’re going to do a scan of your head.”
He seemed to take that as a cue and stood. He’d been obedient, the peacekeeper among his brothers. We lowered him into the chair. Dale appeared and propped open the door with her foot. “He’s still really hot,” I told her.
“I’ll order some more acetaminophen,” she said. “But right now, we have to get him to radiology.”
“Where’s that?” Jamie ran a hand through her hair.
“Third floor.”
The nurse turned the chair around.
“Wait,” Jamie said. “I’m going with him.”
“You’ll have to stay in the waiting area,” Kati told her.
Jamie came up behind the nurse and slid her out of the way. “I don’t care,” she said. “He’s my husband.” I watched them leave the room.
Half an hour later, Ryder came in. He was wearing blue scrubs and had circles under his eyes. I sat up on the couch.
“Hey,” I said.
“The scan is clean.” There was no inflection in his voice, no clue as to what he was thinking, but I got the feeling something was really wrong.
“What do you mean? The tumor’s gone?” I couldn’t believe it. “But he’s not done with radiation.”
He nodded. His face was
tight, sculpted from wax.
“Isn’t that good news?” I asked.
The chubby nurse rolled in the wheelchair. My dad was sleeping in it. His chin had drooped to his chest—so undignified, I wanted to cry. Jamie and Dale came in behind them. Dale was holding a clipboard. She was forever clutching clipboards and writing things on charts.
“No tumor,” I said to Ryder, “is what we were after. It’s what we want. Right?”
Dale glanced at Ryder, and then she dropped the clipboard on the table with a loud clang. No one moved. She seemed angry. “The mass is no longer present,” she said, “so this seizure wasn’t caused by new tumor growth, which means we don’t know why it happened.” She crossed her arms over her chest. I felt that horrible panic return.
I watched Jamie help the nurse move my father from the wheelchair to the bed. I heard her cooing to him. “That’s my boy,” she said.
My stomach was up in my throat. Tell Ryder, I told myself. Tell him what you did. “What now?” I asked.
“I believe he’s hyponatremic,” Dale said.
“What does that mean?”
“His sodium levels are low. He was dehydrated when he got here,” Ryder said. “So we put him on a wide-open IV saline drip. But saline can dilute the body’s intravascular sodium. Unfortunately, people with brain disorders are particularly sensitive to changes in sodium levels. In extreme cases, it can cause disorientation. We believe that’s what’s going on here.” We all looked at my dad, who had not been coherent for more than a minute or two since the seizure. My mother leaned over him and kissed his cheek. The nurse released the wheelchair brake with her foot and left. “Reintroducing sodium too fast can have devastating neurological implications. So we’ll add a slow drip and see if we can get Sterling to join the land of the living,” Ryder told the room.
In high school, I swore Ryder could read my mind. He’d scratch the unreachable place under my shoulder blade before I even knew it itched, and he was always finishing my sentences or climbing up the oak tree to my window on nights when I silently prayed he’d come. Now I stared at him, I didn’t want to ask him why, if it was only sodium, my dad had this enormous fever. I just wanted him to promise me my father would be okay. “Try not to worry. It’s probably an infection we haven’t tested for yet.” He glanced at Dale and then back to me. “It won’t last forever.”
24
Jamie and I took turns staying at the hospital. At night, I crammed myself on the cold leathery couch in the corner, but I could never sleep. Even though the tumor was gone, my father’s fever still wouldn’t break. He wasn’t eating, and his collarbone stuck out like a boomerang.
We were having another heat wave, but inside his room it was cool and dark. IVs pumped saline, meds, and liquid nutrients into his body. Only Jamie could get him to open his mouth for a spoonful of chocolate pudding or a bite of banana once in a while. Watching her feed him, wiping the sides of his mouth, coaxing him with songs and childish noises, I kept thinking of what she’d said to me in the kitchen. I was beginning to realize that she wasn’t alone in what had happened between her and my father after Will died.
Dale came in and out, blaming infection, contamination, viruses, anything but the radiation. Specialists were called, and they tested him for everything from malaria to AIDS. I asked a team of fellows visiting from the UK if they thought my dad had been shooting up in the jungle. No one thought it was funny. I stayed by his bedside every day. Vigilance didn’t reverse the guilt, but it held it at bay. In my notebook, I tracked the number of words he spoke and his temperature, whether his sleep seemed restless or peaceful.
On the eighth morning, I walked out of the bathroom, to find a male nurse at the sink, filling a pink plastic tub with water. Jamie had kicked off her high heels and was helping my dad out of his johnny.
“Time for his bath,” the nurse said to me. He resembled Hadley, with his high cheekbones and his soft blond hair, and I realized then that Hadley had left on his European tour and that I’d never gotten to say good-bye. “You might want to get a cup of coffee.” He looked me up and down. “Or a double cheeseburger—with bacon.”
“Yes, sweetheart.” Jamie stood up. “You need a break.”
I told her I’d go home and water her garden. I drove back to Colston in ninety-degree heat. We used the house only as a locker room now, a place to shower and change clothes. Wandering through the rooms felt strange, as if the house were holding a secret that swirled with the dust cones in the living room.
I went into the hall bathroom, splashed my face with water, and stared at myself in the mirror. My skin was gray from not being outside, and my rib cage was poking out at an awful angle. When Will died, I’d done the same thing. Food was abhorrent. The smell of it had made me feel like I was going to vomit. I remembered pushing it around my plate, and Jamie watching me with eagle eyes. “You don’t have any weight to lose, sweetheart,” she’d say in her quick, hard voice. Both my pediatrician and an ophthalmologist had told me that malnutrition could have caused my night blindness, but I didn’t care. One of my favorite things to do with Will and Ryder had been to sneak onto the golf course at the Colston Country Club or lie on the fifty-yard line at the Hamilton high school field and watch the stars. I’d wanted to tell those stupid doctors that since Will was dead and I’d lost Ryder, it hardly mattered that I could no longer see at night.
Along the south side of the house, I went to work watering Jamie’s garden. The storm on Will’s birthday hadn’t given us much rain, and we’d had eight days of heat. I watched the water stream over her water lilies. They were wilted now, ready to die. “Peace and new life,” she’d told me one day after I’d been back a month. I was sunning myself on a lawn chair, and she was weeding. “And those”—she pointed to the magnolias—“mean perseverance.” I’d watched her hands moving deftly, pulling weeds. “I planted them right after Luke started counseling me,” she’d said.
I watered quickly, facing away from the sun, trying to hurry so I could get back to my dad. All those years my mother had been muddling through, getting by, and what had happened to make her come around? “I helped her learn how to comfort herself,” Luke had told me that day at his house. I stopped watering and touched the leaves. Peace and new life. I thought of my father going through that break in the chain link, thought of him lying there in the hospital bed day after day. And no one could figure out why. I looked at the lilies again. Peace and new life.
Jamie kept repeating, almost chantlike, that my dad would pull through, said he’d be fine. I felt sweat trickling between my shoulder blades. But she didn’t know what I’d done. A slight breeze kicked up, and I could smell the earth. I’d been hiding out half my life. And the one time I faced what had happened, the one time I told the truth and things didn’t go right, I’d started hiding again. I dropped the watering can. I had to tell Ryder that I’d told my father. No matter the consequences. And if I didn’t do it right then, I might lose my nerve.
It took me twenty minutes to shower and change clothes, and then I was back at the hospital, waiting in Ryder’s reception area.
Scott slid open the glass partition. “I’m sorry. He’s on the phone. Damn insurance companies. They’re going to put us all out of—”
“It’s an emergency.”
“Sorry.” He lisped and shrugged his shoulders in an exaggerated way. “He can see you tomorrow at ten.” He ran his finger down his appointment book, then added, “As long as his morning surgery is done by then.” I saw his tongue worry that fat space between his teeth.
“Please, Scott.” I found myself moving past him toward Ryder’s office. “This is really important.”
“Miss Reilly.” Scott was practically shouting at me as I went down the hall, and I felt bad, ignoring him, but I couldn’t help it. Ryder’s door was closed, but I turned the knob.
“Miss Reilly,” Scott called again. He was probably in love with Ryder, too. Who wasn’t? “Stop,” he called.
Ryder’s
head jerked up when I walked in his office. “I’ll have to call you back,” he said into the phone. I wondered if it was Dale. “No,” he said into the mouthpiece. “I can’t talk now.”
Scott blew into the room behind me, but before he could speak, Ryder said, “She’s fine.” The door shut behind me.
Ryder stared at me. “Jenny? I’m glad you’re here. I’m sorry I haven’t seen you. It’s just after that night at Hamilton when we … I just thought maybe we could both use some—”
“I told him,” I said.
He blinked. “Told who, what?”
On the street below his window, midday traffic was scurrying along York. “My dad. I told him. I know you told me not to, that stress isn’t good for him. But I had to.” I said it quickly, without pausing to breathe. “I did what you told me not to, and here we are.”
He pressed a black button on the phone, and a red light came on. “Scott, tell my next patient it might be a while.” The light faded. “Jenny, the disease did this. Not you.”
I slumped in the leather chair across from his desk, feeling weak suddenly, almost faint. “You don’t know that,” I said. Please, I thought, make this not my fault. Make something, anything, not my fault.
He came around the desk and squatted in front of me. “You didn’t do this,” he said firmly.
I watched him. “I did.”
“No, you didn’t.”
“I told him, Ryder.” I sounded like a child.
“It’s all right.” He put his hand on my knee. “Telling him didn’t cause a seizure and a one-hundred-and-four-degree temperature for a week.”
“Eight days,” I said.
He nodded and gave me a sad smile. “Right, eight days.”
“Ryder. I had to tell. I felt so…” There were tiny winches on the sailboat above his desk, books lining the walls, and diplomas framed and displayed. “Guilty.”
He watched me.
Night Blindness Page 20