by T. L. Hines
She expected a rebuke, or a complaint, but none came. Instead, he said, ‘‘You sounded a lot like Kristina just there.’’
‘‘Who’s Kristina?’’
‘‘Later,’’ he said. He pointed to a sign ahead of them.
The large directional sign told them the entrance to St. Vincent Hospital was two blocks away.
36
RECONCILING
As they hurried down the hallway toward Nicole’s room, Jude felt the itchy dread of hospitals once again working its way into his stomach.
Part of what bothered him was the way hospitals were built, like large serpents intertwined on themselves: you always lost your sense of direction. Jude had hiked into many wilderness areas and forests, and he could always tell where he was. He’d never been lost, in fact, in the backcountry. Put him in a hospital of any size, though, make him turn a couple of corners, and he’d barely be able to tell up from down, much less north from south. Something about being closed in, surrounded by endless hallways like a rat in a giant maze, made him ill, uncomfortable.
They had stopped and asked for directions at the front desk, if front desk was a term that fit. It was somewhat near the main entrance, although hidden around a corner and not immediately visible. They had taken the elevator to the third floor, and now they were walking across the sky bridge to the south wing where they would take another right turn, then a left. Yeah, hospitals were a lot of fun.
(Dad sitting over my bed.)
The micro-memory was there again, flashing in the front of his mind. His dad, bent over his bed. He thought, at first, his dad had been talking, telling him something. But that wasn’t right; his dad was listening. He was listening to something the younger version of Jude was saying.
He tried to cull more from the image, but nothing came. It was already gone.
They made the first left after the sky bridge, and Jude could tell they were now passing patient rooms in the ICU. Names of patients zoomed by on the doors as they walked. Scott Franklin. Janine Harrell. David Elkers. They made a right, then continued down the hallway, past more names. Debra Branson. Mike Lambert. William All-man.
William Allman.
Jude stopped and stared at the name on the closed door. Rachel noticed he had stopped, and turned back. ‘‘No, no,’’ she said, pointing to the room next door. ‘‘This is Nicole’s room right here.’’
He nodded, then started to move toward her as she reached out for the room door’s handle.
A nurse in green scrubs busted out of the door to Nicole’s room. ‘‘What?’’ the nurse said, seeming momentarily flustered. ‘‘Oh, I— you’ll have to wait a few minutes,’’ she said. Another nurse was moving down the hallway toward them now. ‘‘We’re having to re-intu-bate.’’ Together the two nurses went back into Nicole’s room, pulling the door shut behind them.
Jude was stopped midway between Nicole’s room and his dad’s room. Rachel turned to look at him, and he read the frustration, the panic, in her eyes.
William Allman. His dad. In the room right next to Nicole. He nodded toward the door just behind him now. ‘‘It’s, uh . . .’’ He swallowed. ‘‘It’s my dad.’’
Her eyes narrowed for a moment before she walked back to look at the name on the door. ‘‘William Allman?’’ she said. ‘‘That’s your dad? Here, in this room?’’
‘‘I think so,’’ he said.
‘‘What are the chances?’’
He let out a deep breath. ‘‘Chance has a habit of following me around lately.’’
Rachel looked at him, and he couldn’t tell whether the feeling behind those eyes was pity, or confusion, or sadness. ‘‘I suppose it does,’’ she said simply.
They stood at the door for a moment. He noticed Rachel was biting her lower lip, probably without realizing it. Jude secretly hoped Rachel would forbid him from going into his father’s room, that she would tell him they couldn’t mess around with unburied ghosts from his past because they needed to save Nathan, the whole reason they were here. He suspected all those thoughts went through her mind, but she didn’t voice any of them.
Instead, she said something that frightened him: ‘‘Go on in.’’
He wanted to. He didn’t want to. And so his feet stayed frozen in place, doing nothing, caught between the gulf of yes and no. And it wasn’t until he looked at Rachel that he thawed.
She drew in a breath, exhaled, closed her eyes for a second before opening them again. ‘‘No, really,’’ she said. ‘‘We can’t get into Nicole’s room right now, anyway.’’
‘‘Do you wanna meet him?’’ he asked. She considered for a moment, then glanced down the hall toward Nicole’s room. Jude understood what she was thinking. She wanted to hurry, to return to Red Lodge, to find Nathan as soon as possible. Of course she wanted all that; he felt the same pressure. Except it somehow seemed too coincidental to have his dad here. He was sure, somehow, he was supposed to talk to his dad before seeing Nicole.
Jude tried to communicate all this to Rachel with his eyes, and he must have succeeded on some level, because while standing there nervously and biting her lip, she slowly nodded her head.
Jude returned the nod, grabbed the handle to his father’s room, and pushed open the door.
Darkness blanketed the room as drawn shades blocked the late afternoon light. Jude heard something filtering softly from the TV, but he couldn’t quite make out what it was. ESPN maybe. He moved slowly and quietly—why he didn’t know—and as he did, a thought popped into his head: what if this was a different William Allman? It wasn’t all that uncommon a name. Maybe there was another one—
‘‘Well, I’ll be dipped.’’ It was his father, speaking from the darkness. Jude blinked his eyes rapidly a few times, willing them to adjust to the low light, but his father’s figure remained mostly silhouetted in the shadow.
‘‘How ya doin’?’’ Jude asked.
As if in answer, a deep, rattling cough came from the darkness of the bed.
‘‘Don’t think I’ll be jumping up to box a few rounds anytime soon, but whatever. This?’’
His father was obviously referring to Rachel. ‘‘Oh,’’ he said, ‘‘I’m sorry. Dad, this is . . .’’ What was Rachel? The mother of my child? The woman who’s put up with my paranoid ramblings for six years? He cleared his throat and started again. ‘‘This is my friend, Rachel Sanders. Rachel, this is my father, William.’’ Friend, he had called her a friend. She didn’t wince as he said it, but he did. He’d never really been a friend to her. Never been anything.
She walked to the side of the bed and held out her hand. William took her hand and shook it. ‘‘Nice to meet you, Mr. Gress,’’ she said.
‘‘Allman,’’ William corrected.
‘‘Right, Allman,’’ she said. ‘‘I just found that out about an hour ago.’’
Jude still couldn’t see his father’s features, but he could tell William was looking across the room at him. He pictured the ‘‘What is this person talking about?’’ look on his father’s face. ‘‘Long story,’’ Jude said.
Rachel walked back over to Jude. ‘‘I’ll just pop next door and see if I can get into Nicole’s room,’’ she said. ‘‘Please don’t be long,’’ she said before turning for the door. Then she stopped and turned back around. ‘‘I’m sorry. Just . . . come as soon as—’’ Jude grabbed her hand, nodded, and gave it a tight squeeze.
Rachel left the room, leaving the two Allman men alone. Jude breathed in the antiseptic smell, another thing he’d always hated about hospitals. They smelled like death, pungent and rancid, but the smell was somehow masked behind an astringent. Hospitals presented themselves as places where lives were saved, but Jude knew better. Hospitals were places for dying.
His father turned off the TV. ‘‘Pretty,’’ he said to Jude.
‘‘Yeah.’’
‘‘Reminds me of your mother.’’
‘‘Really?’’ Actually, now that his dad had said it, it was so obvious. Ye
s, Rachel Sanders did evoke something of his mother. Not a spitting image, but they shared similar features, similar characteristics.
Jude walked to the bed and stood beside his father, where he could start to make out the features. He’d seen his dad only a few days previously, and yet William had aged more in those few days than he had in the previous six years.
‘‘So what happened?’’ Jude asked.
‘‘That congestive heart failure thing.’’ William smiled. ‘‘Which is just doctor-speak for ‘you’re an idiot for not taking care of yourself.’ ’’ ‘‘So are you gonna . . . be okay?’’ Jude was filtering through his recent thoughts, thoughts of rage and anger directed at his father. Had those thoughts put his father here? No, probably not; his father talked about a heart problem at their last visit, before most of those thoughts came spilling out. Still.
‘‘Doctors won’t say. But then, doctors today are scared of their own shadows. Don’t want to tell you anything, because they think you’ll sue them. So, they’re not really saying I’m gonna get better, but they’re not really saying I’m gonna kick the bucket. Me, I’m leaning more toward the bucket scenario.’’
Jude nodded, feeling he should stay quiet.
‘‘Funny thing you’re here,’’ William said to him. ‘‘I’ve been thinking a lot about you since they brought me in last night. Been feeling like I need to tell you something.’’
‘‘What’s that?’’
‘‘All these years, I thought you knew all about it. I thought you remembered it.’’
‘‘Remembered what?’’
William rolled his head the other way, grimaced. ‘‘I suppose it won’t hurt to tell you now. Your mom’s dead. Maybe even Carol too.’’
(Mommy’s gonna find out about Carol Steadman.)
More of the memory flashed in his mind. His dad, leaning over his bed, listening to Jude talk about Carol Steadman.
Jude cleared his throat again. ‘‘Carol Steadman, you mean? Mrs. Steadman?’’ Jude hadn’t thought about her since he was a child. Had totally forgotten about her until this instant, in fact. She had worked at the Thrifty Value store in Bingham, Nebraska.
‘‘I had an affair with her, Jude.’’
Silence. Not a sound, except the hum of the hospital’s machinery and a few clicking footsteps going down the linoleum hallway outside.
‘‘I . . . didn’t know that,’’ Jude finally offered. He knew it was weak, but his brain was too muddled to come up with anything better. ‘‘That’s the thing, though. I don’t know what I was thinking then; I still can’t make sense of it now. But it happened, and there was no way you could know, but you did anyway.’’ His father paused, licking his lips. ‘‘I was putting you to bed one night, and you just started crying. I remember this so clearly—you said: ‘Mommy’s gonna find out about Mrs. Steadman, and—’’’
—It came to Jude, swiftly and suddenly. In his newly unearthed memory Jude saw a young version of himself, lying in bed with the covers pulled up to his nose. Snug as a bug in a rug, his mom would say, only it wasn’t Mom sitting on the bed next to him. It was Dad. His mind creaked, trying to grasp something it had to say but unable to do so. And he was scared, so scared of what he had to say to Dad that tears spilled from his eyes and wet the pillow beneath him.
Still, even if he didn’t understand it, he could tell his dad about it. He was supposed to tell his dad, that was part of it. But the other part was, the eight-year-old Jude Allman had been taught you can trust anything you want to say, anything at all, to an adult. So even if he didn’t really know what it all meant, Dad certainly would. And Dad would probably be happy to hear it, and he’d scoop Jude out of the bed and take him to the kitchen for a couple of scoops of mint chocolate chip ice cream, and maybe in the morning they’d go fly that box kite. Jude liked the box kite.
He could tell his dad was thinking about something else; his eyes were staring at him, but they were also looking at something far away. ‘‘Dad?’’ he asked, hope starting to dry his tears. When he spoke, something shifted inside his dad.
A cloud of concern crossed William’s face. ‘‘What is it?’’ his dad asked. ‘‘You know you can tell me anything.’’
And his dad was right, sure he was right. Jude knew it was okay to share anything with good old Dad (Mom was better, he wished it was Mom, but this particular thing was about Mom). So Jude opened his mouth and continued. ‘‘Mommy’s gonna find out about Mrs. Steadman, and she’s gonna kill herself.’’
He saw immediately that he’d been terribly wrong, that there were in fact some things you shouldn’t tell Mom or Dad or any adult. He had just now found such a thing, and his dad had a look in his eyes that made Jude afraid.
Very afraid.
He wished his mom was tucking him in, that he wasn’t alone with his father. He had said the thing he was supposed to; he hadn’t understood all of it, and he had been sure it was something that wasn’t good or right (the part about Mommy killing herself Jude understood well enough, and it scared him), but he had told his father all the same.
He had been sure Dad would understand it all and fix it. That was what Dad did. But as he looked at his father, he saw he had been very wrong. His father understood, that much was clear. Dad was supposed to fix something, but even at that tender young age Jude realized something much bigger, much more important, had just been broken. And it would never be fixed.
Jude shook off the memory of his childhood and interrupted his father. ‘‘You were having an affair with Mrs. Steadman,’’ he said, his voice thin and flat. He still saw the scene playing in his mind. The fractured pieces of the memory had been put together again, and now the scene kept playing, rewinding in front of his mind’s eye. This was one of those memories he’d kept tucked into the deepest part of the closet (keep it secret, keep it safe), hidden under the nice soft blanket that cloaked so much of his mind.
Now he knew. He understood how a young boy with a gift he couldn’t understand could create fear in his father—fear he could understand. Fear he had always understood.
‘‘I didn’t remember that. Not until just now.’’ Jude looked down at his dad’s face. The roles were reversed: his father in bed, afraid of the secret he’d just told, the son looking down at him.
‘‘You were scared of me,’’ Jude said softly. It all made so much sense now, with the one memory he’d buried deep inside exposed and melting in the bright light of his mind.
Jude thought he could see tears in his father’s eyes. ‘‘I suppose I was,’’ William answered. ‘‘I knew of your . . . your gift, I suppose; your mother and I had seen that lots of times. For years I just waited for your mom to . . . you know. Every day, I lived in this secret fear she would find out. So finally I told her because I couldn’t live with it. And you know what she said? ‘I know.’ She had figured it out at some point, but she had already forgiven me—before I ever asked.’’ He paused.
‘‘After she was killed, I let it drive me mad. For a while I made all these crazy plans to attend the trial, to kill the guy myself if he got off. But then I remembered what your mother had done with something that hurt so much: she forgave, because forgiving me healed her. And, in an odd way, I think that’s what stopped your vision, your prediction, whatever you want to call it. Forgiveness.’’
Jude nodded. He took his father’s hand, and spoke softly. ‘‘I understand, Dad,’’ he said.
Now his father did start crying, an image that until a few minutes ago would have been discomfiting for Jude. He accessed the memory banks—new memories were coming online all the time, and he’d been taking them out to examine them as they popped into focus—and searched for anything that had his dad crying. Nothing. His dad had never cried that he could remember. Maybe even that his dad could remember.
‘‘That’s why,’’ his dad choked, ‘‘I need to tell you something else. About the day you almost drowned.’’
Almost drowned. He’d been dead more than an hour that day,
no almost about it. But it was obvious his father had a difficult time accepting Jude’s gift. He waited for his dad to get through a few quick sobs.
‘‘After you fell through the ice,’’ William whispered, ‘‘for a second, just a second, I . . .’’
Jude knew this one, and he finished his father’s thought again. ‘‘You thought about leaving me.’’
William broke down in a fresh sob, squeezing Jude’s hand as he did. ‘‘God forgive me,’’ William said. Any other time in his father’s life, Jude would have been convinced these were empty words, an expression that just happened to fit the situation, a colorful way of saying ‘‘I’m sorry.’’ But in this instance Jude was sure his dad meant everything the phrase said. He was asking for God’s forgiveness. In a strange way Jude knew how to answer this as well.
‘‘He does. And so do I.’’ Jude paused a moment, processing all the multicolored memories flooding back into his consciousness. Only they weren’t just a jumble now; they were starting to lock together in a way that made sense. ‘‘And I need to ask your forgiveness as well,’’ he said.
His father’s eyes widened, and he nodded for Jude to continue.
‘‘For wishing you were dead.’’ He shook his head. ‘‘No, not quite that. After Mom died, and I just didn’t realize it until now, but I was mad at God for taking her first.’’
His father didn’t seem shocked at this news.
You meant it for evil, but God meant it for good. Rachel had said that just a few minutes ago. ‘‘If you had died first, this conversation never would have happened. So in an odd way we’re here right now because of Mom.’’ He shook his head again. ‘‘Does that make sense?’’
His father nodded weakly. ‘‘Perfect sense.’’ He closed his eyes, took a few deep breaths. Jude waited patiently; the pain of buried memories was a giant wave, he knew that too well, and he would wait until his dad had made it past this swell.
Finally William opened his eyes and looked at Jude again. ‘‘I remembered flying that kite with you—just the other day I remembered. And now that I think about it, the wind wasn’t all that bad.’’