The door swung open, and the nurse on duty poked her head in. “What’s happened here?” Her eyes were wide with alarm.
“He’s vomiting.” I worried then that I shouldn’t have moved him. “And his fever’s gotten worse.”
She put her hand through the water and turned the knob. Cold hit me like ice. I jumped back. “Sorry, we need to get his temperature down now. How many times did he throw up?”
“Three.”
“Why didn’t you call me?”
“I was all alone,” I told her. My father’s face was flushed, and he was sweating. “I didn’t know what to do.”
“You did fine,” she said, her voice neither compassionate nor hostile. She unhooked his IV and tossed his gown in the corner. “Just keep him under the cold water, and I’ll call the doctor and get someone to clean up. Can you handle this for now?”
“I don’t think I—” But she was gone.
I moved farther down my dad’s belly, soaping away the vomit, shivering in the cold. His eyes were wide open now, and he looked scared. “Hey, are you okay?” I asked him. He didn’t answer. I felt like crying. I wanted to tell my dad about this. I wanted to call him on the phone and tell him I’d had a dream that he was really sick and that I’d had to get in the shower with him after he threw up on me, that I’d had to soap his bare body just as if he were a child. I wanted him to call me Whobaby and tell me how sorry he was for me. He didn’t seem like the same person, this thin, naked man.
“Will?” he said again.
I stopped washing him. “Yeah?”
His eyes were still distant, but they got peaceful, like he’d slept a long time and had awakened satisfied.
“Jensen?” The nurse poked her head in again. “I brought help.”
My father squinted at her and then at me. “Who?” he asked.
I watched him. “I’m Will,” I said to her. “Sterling’s son.”
She drew the curtain back and reached in to turn off the shower. “Yes, you are,” she said. She had a fresh johnny and two towels draped over her arm. “And what a handsome son you have, Mr. Reilly.” She stepped in. “Let’s get you up and at ’em.” She toweled him off expertly while I stood there shivering in my wet clothes. She slipped his arms through the new gown and tied it in back. “You’ll be fine, won’t you, Mr. Reilly.”
But I didn’t think he’d ever be fine again.
When we got back to the room, the sheets had been changed and the floor was clean, but I could smell vomit beneath the antiseptic. “Can you lie down, Mr. Reilly?” the nurse asked.
My father’s breathing was quick and labored. She managed to get him on the bed and pull his legs onto the mattress. I took off his glasses and dried them while she tucked the new sheet around him. She had two syringes in her pocket, and she put them between her teeth. Pulling on one, she left the cap in her mouth and inserted the needle into the port below his elbow. “Phenergan for nausea.” She did the same thing with the other. “And lorazepam to help him sleep.” He seemed to drift off before she even got the second shot in, but his breathing was still labored, and his skin was jumping all over the place.
While she hooked him back up to the monitors, I stood there in my dripping clothes with a towel around my neck, watching him. The vein on his head was raised like a lightning strike. It beat a one-two rhythm, and once in a while a muscle in his cheek would twitch. I thought of the card tricks he used to teach me on the back deck while Jamie was doing the dishes and Will was at practice. The secret was having superfast moves.
The door opened, and Ryder came in. He was dressed in wrinkled brick red scrubs. A surgical mask hung around his neck. “A spiked fever and vomiting,” the nurse said. She told him what medicines she had given him.
Ryder picked up my father’s hand and took his pulse. He did that more than he checked the monitors, and there was something humane and reassuring about it. “He might be hemorrhaging.” I didn’t know if he was talking to the nurse or to me. A little louder, he said, “Hey, Sterling, my good man, what happened here?” But his voice wasn’t cheerful or happy.
“What does that mean, hemorrhaging?” I asked.
“It’s not good.” His jaw flexed. “I need you to wait outside.”
“Jesus, Ryder, why? What’s the—”
But two nurses came in as if they’d been beckoned by some silent whistle, and he said something to them I couldn’t hear. They went to work, unlocking the rails of the bed and gathering the plastic tubing that tethered my dad to his IVs. “Wait in the hall,” Ryder told me. “Please.”
I didn’t move. A yellowish liquid dripped from the IV bag into my dad’s veins. I counted the drips. “But he’s had a fever for a couple of weeks,” I said. “Why is he hemorrhaging now?”
“Please,” the nurse said to me irritably. I waited for Ryder to say something more, and when he didn’t, I let myself out.
In the hall, the cinder-block wall was cold and smooth on my back. I’m not ready, I kept saying in my head. I’m not ready. Finally, I got myself together and went to the nurses’ station. “Can I call my mom?” I asked an older woman behind the desk. “I forgot my charger at home.”
“Come back to the hospital as soon as you can,” I told Jamie when she answered. “And call Luke.”
I waited by his door, watching nurses run in and out, listening to their murmured voices. Ryder came out once, but he kept his back to me. He disappeared down the hall. A minute later, I heard a doctor being paged on the intercom. Ryder came back down the corridor. “Sorry for the wait,” he said to me before he went back in the room.
Finally, Jamie rushed in, wearing old leggings and a zip-up hoodie she never wore out of the house. “What happened?” Right away, she started for the door.
“You can’t go in there.”
She jigged in place, like she was hopped up on pills. Her pupils were huge and her voice was too quick. “What in the world are you talking about? Of course—”
I put my hand on the door. “Ryder’s in there with a shitload of nurses, and we have to stay out of the way.”
She slumped against the wall. “I shouldn’t have left him today.” She glanced at the clock above me. It was just past eight. “I knew something bad was going to happen,” she said, as though I had denied it. “There was something different in his eyes.” Her face was bone white, and her movements were too quick, jerky. She was very sleep-deprived. It scared me to see her like that.
Two nurses went into his room, and then a doctor I’d never seen before, followed by an orderly pushing a gurney. “What are they doing?” Jamie put her hand over her heart.
“I’m here now.” Luke was jogging down the hall in jeans and a Muddy Waters T-shirt. He went right to my mother and hugged her, and then he put out his other arm, and I fell into it. While we stood there, it occurred to me that everything Ryder and Dale had told us was bullshit. A clean scan didn’t mean anything. Weeks of poisoning him with radiation had done nothing but make him sick. For all my willing and wishing and hoping and, thanks to Luke, praying, my dad might be dead before sunrise.
I knew I wouldn’t be okay if something happened to him. I didn’t know what would happen exactly, but I wouldn’t make it. I thought I should tell someone this, but I had no one to tell. I leaned against Luke in my wet clothes and felt his chest pushing air in and out of his lungs. For the first time in my whole stupid life, I saw how breathing was a miracle.
A minute later, the door opened. Ryder’s face was impermeable as stone. “We’re taking him to intensive care,” he said. “His organs are failing.”
* * *
By the time they let us into the ICU, it was the middle of the night. Frontage Street was as quiet as I’d ever seen it. There was nothing comforting or quiet about this part of the hospital. Machines and monitors beeped and blinked constantly. Ryder was still in his scrubs, and he stood on the other side of the bed, holding my father’s chart. “Medically speaking, we’ve done everything we can. He’s medic
ated and shouldn’t be in any pain. Now it’s up to him.” He looked at his watch. “I’ve got to run upstairs, but I told the nurses to page me if anything happens.”
“Thank you, sweetheart,” Jamie said.
“Don’t thank me yet,” Ryder told her. He squeezed the IV bag. “I haven’t done a goddamn thing.”
When he left, I went to my dad. With tubes up his nose, he didn’t look like himself. His mouth was slightly open. He was pale, spent, and small. I took his hand. When I was a kid, I used to run my finger over his calluses, pinch them between my nails. “Does that hurt?” I’d ask. “Nope,” he’d say. “Can’t hurt me.” Now his palm was smooth and soft. When I kissed him on the cheek, he smelled clean, almost powdery. I could hear Jamie behind me, crying softly. I pushed the hair from his forehead and ran my finger over a scar between his eyebrows. “It’s okay,” I told him. “You can go to Will.” I wanted to scream, Don’t die. Don’t you fucking die on me. I felt like I was choking. “Go home to Will if you need to.” I said it as peacefully as I could. Behind me, I heard Luke’s voice. “I got Ryder’s message that we could come in now. I’ve been in the chapel,” he said. “I’ll give him last rites.”
“Can you do that?” I asked. He can’t die.
“Faith is faith. This will just make his journey a little easier if he has to go.” I watched Luke pull a small prayer book from his back pocket. He stood next to the bed and began speaking in an ancient language. He talked for a long time. Then he leaned close to my father’s face and whispered in his ear. He brushed his lips across his mouth. My dad didn’t move; he stayed very, very still, while those machines teased us with their maddening monotony, as though everything were just fine.
27
After Jamie and Luke had spent hours watching my dad lying unconscious, Ryder convinced them to lie down in the on-call room. Then he’d told the ICU nurses to let me stay with my dad. Just before dawn, I drifted off, cramped at an awful angle on a cold vinyl couch. When I woke, my head felt as if it were nailed to the cushion.
“Jensen?”
I opened my eyes.
“Jensen?”
My heart quit beating. I was almost afraid to look.
“What in God’s name are you doing here?”
Slowly, I unfolded myself and turned, to find my father sitting up in bed. His skin was a healthy color, and he was struggling to put his glasses on straight. “Daddy?” I untangled my legs. “But I thought you…” I couldn’t finish the sentence because I was crying. “All the doctors said…”
“Aw, Whobaby. Come here.” I ran to him and hugged him. He smelled like medicine and rubbing alcohol, but he also smelled, unmistakably, like my father. “You’re not going to get rid of me that easily.” He kissed my head. “Your old man’s still kicking.” I watched him finger one of the stickers on his chest where the wires were attached.
“But you were so sick last night.” I wiped my nose on my sleeve. “And Ryder came and gave you morphine, and—” I didn’t know how much I should say.
He patted my hand. “Where’s your mother?”
“Stay here.” I grabbed Luke’s cell phone from the bedside table. “I’ll find her.” I was worried if I let him out of my sight, he’d disappear. “Don’t move.”
“Where am I gonna go?” He blew me a kiss.
I almost ran into a black-haired nurse pushing a machine on wheels. “No cell phones in here,” she said.
“My dad’s better,” I told her, calling my mother anyway.
The nurse abandoned the machine and ran to the room. “Mr. Reilly,” I heard her say. “Good morning.”
Jamie’s ringtone sounded from down the hall. “Mom,” I yelled. She and Luke were walking toward me. “He’s back,” I told them, shutting off the phone. “Daddy’s back.” Then I saw Ryder come through the double doors at a jog.
Back in the room, we crowded around my dad’s bed. “Do you remember anything from last night?” I asked.
“Everything, Whobaby.” He reached up and mussed my hair. “Even the part where you told me I could go…” He hesitated.
“In that case.” I squeezed his fingers. “I have to ask what Luke whispered in your ear.”
“He asked me to telepath where he’d left his keys.”
Luke let out a belly laugh. He was always losing his keys.
“No, really,” I said. “What did he say?”
“He said if it came to it, he’d take care of my girls.”
There was a knock on the door; then it opened. Dr. Waller came in, wearing those same blue rubber clogs. “Welcome back, Mr. Reilly.” He arranged the pens in his lab coat pocket, his big black eyes swimming behind thick glasses.
“Thank you, sir,” my father said.
Dr. Waller stepped into the middle of the room. “Well, I’m fairly certain I know what caused the fever.” We all held our breath. “And”—he smiled—“we can make sure it doesn’t happen again.”
Without thinking, I hugged him. He was a head taller than I was, and I ended up kissing his shoulder. I stepped away, a little mortified, but he didn’t seem to notice.
“Keppra,” he said, as if I’d never mauled him, “the antiseizure drug.”
I almost jumped up and down. “Is there another one you can put him on? And why now? He’s been on it for months.”
“Hold up, Whobaby,” my dad said. “Let the poor man speak.”
“When you got sick last night,” Dr. Waller said, taking the chart from the end of the bed, “Dr. Anderson”—he nodded to Ryder—“upped your morphine for pain control.” He capped his pen. “But to prevent adverse side effects, he took you off everything else. It’s common with end-stage patients.” End stage. I felt disconnected, weak. “Keppra builds up in a person’s system over time.” When he took off his glasses, Waller’s eyes appeared minuscule, like a mole’s. He cleaned the lenses on his lab coat. “It’s the only thing that makes sense. We’ll watch you for twenty-four hours, and then, if you’re still good, you can be on your way.” Dr. Waller put his glasses back on and his eyes got huge again. “You almost had to die to get cured,” he said. “How’s that for irony?” I didn’t want him to go. He’d figured something out that none of the other doctors had, not even Ryder.
“So, your scan is clean,” Ryder said after Dr. Waller’s clogs made a squishy exit on the floor. “Which means no tumor.” Jamie kissed my father again, and he beamed. “But we should do one more zap with the radiation as planned, just to be sure, and you’re going to need some PT. You’ve been lying in bed so long, your muscles will be weak.”
“As long as I can go home soon.” My dad blew Jamie a kiss. “And, Whobaby, you can finally go back to your life.” He winked at me, and I winked back, but since he’d been in the hospital, I hadn’t been thinking about going back to Santa Fe. With Nic out of communication and all my energy focused on my dad, it’d been easy to pretend Santa Fe didn’t exist. I felt Ryder’s eyes on me. And then the same black-haired nurse from the hallway saved me by coming in. “Party’s over,” she said. “We’re moving the patient back down to the neuro floor.”
Ryder nodded. “I’ve got to check in at the office anyway.”
“You’re coming to dinner as soon as I get out of this place.” My father was letting the nurse help him up, his legs pale and thin, dangling off the bed. “Luke will cook.”
“A feast for the gods,” Luke said.
Jamie stood up. “I’ll help you get settled,” she told my dad.
“I need a shower,” I said. “And I have to charge my phone.”
“Whobaby,” my father said as the nurse helped him into the wheelchair. “I’d like to talk to you.”
I thought of him going through that break in the chain-link fence the night of Will’s birthday. My belly went weak. “Okay.”
He settled into the wheelchair, and I watched him close his eyes.
“You have plenty of time to talk, sweetheart.” My mother slid in front of the nurse and took the wheelchair from he
r. “Now it’s time to rest.”
But my dad opened his eyes and searched mine. “Don’t forget,” he said. “Soon.” He sounded stern, and he seemed to be speaking only to me.
28
When I got back to Colston, there were a ton of messages from Nic on my cell phone and even more on the home phone. He was arriving in New Haven that afternoon. The wall clock in the kitchen said he’d be landing in an hour. I had only a few minutes to shower, change, and call Mandy back. She’d just returned from France. “Come over,” she said when I told her the news about my dad. “We’ll celebrate.”
“I can’t,” I said. “Nic’s on his way.”
She groaned.
“Mandy!”
“Well, it’s just that now that your dad’s better—I mean, I’m happy and all, of course—but now you’ll have to go back to Santa Fe.”
This was the first time I’d thought about it. “Yeah,” I said. “But we’ll see each other a lot before I leave.”
“Okay.” She sounded disappointed.
I hung up and got in the Lexus. My hair was still dripping wet. I raced up I-95, going about a hundred miles an hour.
Almost as soon as I parked in the arrivals area, I saw Nic coming toward me. He was tan, and the leather strap of his bag was slipping off his shoulder. Before I could say his name, he was squeezing me into a hug. He smelled like salt and fresh air. I ran my hand down his face. I’d never seen him with a beard.
“No time for shaving.” He grinned. And then he kissed me full and deep on the mouth. When I drew back for air, he said, “We’re moving there, J.” He kissed me again, quickly this time, on the forehead. “I got the perfect place. You’ll never believe it. A restored monastery with super-high ceilings, the best light, and the most spectacular view of the Ionian Sea.”
Night Blindness Page 22
