“Okay,” I say reflexively. I’m used to agreeing with whatever he asks of me. But this time, I don’t know what I’m agreeing to. I lean forward, my lower lip already trembling. Tears blur my vision until they fall over and sluice down my cheeks. Every time he’s spoken, I’ve turned into a walking puddle.
It takes several breaths before he can utter anything else. “Take care of yourself.” I wait for the corollary to his request. Take care of Dyl. But he doesn’t say it. He shuts his eyes, remembering something. “Stay safe, no matter what.”
“Of course, Dad.” His hand jerks and claws into mine. I am surprised by his strength, by the pain he inflicts. His nails dig in hard, as if he’s trying to imprint his message into my body.
“Safe,” he gasps. A few more ventilator breaths and he chokes on his saliva. “But you—I have to tell you—” He swallows the words that come next.
“What, Dad? Tell me what?” I ask, when I notice his nails aren’t hurting me anymore.
On the screen at the foot of his bed, white lines of his heart rhythm turn crimson and zigzag all over the place. The monitor alarm sounds like a horn.
“Dad!” I turn around and scream, “Help him! Somebody!”
Four doctors and nurses rush to his bedside and I am pushed away, my hands clamped over my mouth to keep myself from wailing. Already the bedside pharmacy bot, a black mushroom-shaped machine with tentacles attached to my dad’s body, is clicking like mad, sending liquid medicines into his IVs, trying to reverse the inevitable.
As the workers become more frantic, I feel the fingernail marks where Dad squeezed me. I stare at my hand, because I can’t see Dad behind the wall of people. The little crescents are pinkish, shallow, and perfectly curved.
They fade quickly. By the time the doctors leave his room one by one, heads hanging, there is hardly a shadow of a mark left on my skin.
But I can feel the sharpness he’s left behind. The memory is still there. Even after the last doctor pats me on the back and tells me he’s sorry, so very sorry for my loss, I can still feel the pain.
I DON’T MOVE FOR ALMOST AN HOUR. I don’t know what to do.
I know he was hardly around in my life. Sometimes he’d work so hard that a week would go by and I’d barely seem him. The relative difference is slight, but the absolute difference—Here versus Nowhere—is enormous. I waver on the chasm between the two, barely able to stand.
Finally, a young man in a crumpled tie and shirt gently ushers me into a pink room down the hall. “You need some privacy,” he says quietly, his gray eyes still and unemotional. We brush by a group of people clustered by the colored doors.
Of course. The hospital doesn’t want me to disturb the tenuous hope of other families milling about. I am so jealous of every one of those people who have a mangled, tube-filled family member in the ICU.
And then I remember. Oh no. Dyl. I push the man aside and run to find Dyl, still in her white cubicle. She stares stony-faced at the screen, which shows an empty, cleaned bed. No more miles of tubing. The pharmacy bot is shut down, tentacles neatly coiled on its dome, quietly awaiting the next patient. There are no traces of Dad.
Dyl watched the whole thing.
“Dyl,” I say, and sit down next to her. I put a hand on her arm but she shrinks away. I try to scoot a little closer. The world outside the space we occupy just got ten times more enormous. It’s just us and no one else anymore.
“Come, let’s go.”
Dyl doesn’t turn around. Under my hand, her shoulders start to jiggle. For a crazy second, I think she’s laughing at me, until I realize she’s sobbing. Her cry is quiet but high-pitched, sharply etched with despair. I know this sound. If you drained the blood out of my heart, it would be the sound left over, echoing in the chambers.
Dyl turns and pushes her head into my stomach, and I just hold her while she convulses with sobs. I can’t remember the last time we hugged like this. And yet, here she is, needing me again. Just like when she was littler, when I knew I was a good thing in her life.
Footsteps approach, then pause, waiting. I ignore the presence for as long as possible.
“Girls, you both need to come with me. You can’t stay here any longer.” The man stands outside the room, but his foot taps impatiently. He doesn’t step any closer, keeping us both at arm’s length, as if grief is a dangerous contagion. He tilts his head, watching us carefully.
“You’ll get through this.” He offers the words with a confidence that startles me. I’ve already forgotten what that must feel like, to possess certainty about anything. “You’re going to be okay.”
I want to laugh bitterly at his words. Nothing will ever be okay. Because the one person who held us dear, despite our limitless faults, is gone forever.
I DON’T KNOW WHERE WE’RE GOING, but I’m more than willing to follow him. I vaguely hear him introduce himself as a social worker. The words safety and concern are pitched out to us. I don’t really care. I’m just relieved someone knows what to do right now.
Dyl and I follow him to a bleak room where we sign some forms by pressing our fingertips into the electronic pad. Our F-TIDS, or fingertip IDs, are the summary of our very existence—our identity, bank accounts, and medical records, shoe size, even our newly orphaned status—everything.
Afterward, the man takes us to his office down the hall. For the first time, I notice his brown hair badly needs a haircut, and he’s much younger than I expected—maybe in his early twenties. His dull clothes and dull reassurances give him the illusion of age. He sits in the center of a round desk and computer screen that almost completely encircle him. On a happier day, I’d joke that he’s got a bad Saturn complex.
“Sit down, ladies.”
I cringe. I hate it when people call me a lady. I’m anything but, so it feels like an insult. I sit down in a corner chair. Dyl pauses to wipe a wet eye and surveys the empty seats along the wall. She could sit far away, as she’s been apt to do this year, or in the chair beside mine. I feel like I’m about to win or lose some big prize. I hold in a deep breath, waiting.
Dyl shuffles closer and plops down next to me. My chest shrinks with a glad exhalation. As we try to cover up our sniffles, tissues sprout from the armrests of our chairs. Apparently we are not this room’s first weepy clients.
The social worker starts touching the screens around him, ignoring us.
I blow my nose, then sit forward on my chair. “I’m sorry. What’s your name again?”
“John. I’ve been assigned to your case. I am truly sorry for your loss, but right now my main concern is your safety.” He smiles at us with only his mouth, while the gray eyes remain hard as cement. It’s as if he’s only been given a one-feature allotment of sympathy. “Your F-TIDS again, please.”
Dyl’s on her fifth tissue already. One tumbles onto the floor, and a small four-armed bot shaped like a beetle picks it up, sprays the carpet with disinfectant, and fetches her an incinerator trash can from the wall.
“Thank you,” she whispers. Her nose is so congested from crying it sounds like “Dank you.”
A black shiny square pops up from our armrests and we press our fingers against them. The screens around Social Worker Guy (John is way too human a name) burst into various colors. He starts spinning around in his chair, searching the data. He coughs loudly, not bothering to cover his mouth.
“I see. Your mother died from influenza. Missed her annual vaccine packet. How irresponsible.”
It happened when I was only four years old. I barely remember her. Mom dumped our family when she couldn’t handle Dad’s moving-target jobs, then forgot her vaccines in the excitement of her newfound freedom. My resentment conveniently blots out any remaining memories. I’m even proud that I can’t recall her hair color.