A new nurse fiddles with a machine. She changes his IV, then pokes his finger for a drop of blood. He wakes up screaming.
“All right, drama king, settle down,” she says. “You want those restraints off?”
My father nods with pleading eyes.
“You gonna behave yourself?”
He nods again.
With routine dexterity she unfastens and removes the stiff bands of cloth. “You’re sort of smooshed down at the bottom.” She turns to us. “Wanna help me get him up?”
She and Barbara each take an armpit and I am told to push his feet. My father is alarmed.
“Na,” he says. “Na!”
“You have to help us now, Mr. Gardiner,” the nurse says. She pulls up the bottom of the covers to his knees. “Now, your daughter is going to have her hands right here on your feet and you are going to push with your legs.”
It is strange to be called a daughter. I put my hands on his bare feet. They are all bone, every toenail long and gray and bumpy. His calves are nearly as thin as Lena’s and the same shape, doubly familiar to me.
“Push. Push,” Barbara and the nurse say to him. “Push!”
As soon as his torso is lifted from the bed, he starts to wail. “Bacafumee,” he says. I don’t know what he means. “Bacafumee.” It’s the first time I can’t understand him.
“What’s he saying, Daley?” Barbara asks.
“Bacafumee!” His face is squinched and red.
We get him a few inches higher in the bed. He is covered in sweat. Be careful of me, he was saying. I think of his drunk mother staring at the wall. Isn’t that really all we’ve been saying to each other, generation after generation: Be careful of me? I am trying so hard to be careful with my children. I look at my father. He’s still whimpering a little. I’m sorry, I say silently. I’m sorry we couldn’t be more careful of each other.
Afterwards, he sleeps again. I try to read, pretend to read, but mostly I watch him. I find him as intriguing as a painting. His body tells me a long story that I have, in the past fifteen years, nearly forgotten.
My phone dings.
“They’re here,” I say to Barbara, after I read the text.
We meet them outside the double doors to the ICU. They’re putting on the antibacterial lotion, Jeremy smelling his palms and then his sister’s.
Jonathan puts out his hand to Barbara but she ignores it, steps right past and flings her arms around him, as if she’d never written in her last missive, after a conversation with Neal’s mother who’d seen us at Neal and Anne’s wedding, that I didn’t need to date a black man to get my father’s attention. That time I did write back and never heard from her again.
“Thank you so much,” she whispers. I watch his arms go around her soft pink sweater. Somehow she understands that without Jonathan I would not be here, and she is grateful for his forgiveness. She bends down to greet the kids. They don’t know what to make of this hobbit face and the tears that slip along the wrinkles in her cheeks. “You two have come a long way. They have yummy pies in the cafeteria. Do you have a favorite kind of pie?”
They look up at me to answer.
I put my hand on Lena’s head. “Strawberry rhubarb or pecan,” I say, then move to Jeremy, “and blueberry.”
“Or apple. Or cherry in a pinch,” he adds. He is wearing a baseball cap backwards. In a pinch. My eyes fill.
Barbara smiles for the first time. “I think they have nearly all of those.” She looks at me and Jonathan. “May I take them down there while you two go in first?”
I’m not expecting this. I’m not ready to trust her with my children. My mind spins for an excuse. But before I have one, Jonathan says, “Sure,” and the kids bounce with pleasure. Pie at ten in the morning!
Jonathan and I go through the ICU doors alone. The man in the first cubicle raises his eyes briefly at Jonathan, thinking for a moment he has a visitor. Jonathan catches this and lifts up his hand to the man.
My father’s eyes are open. He looks at my husband for the first time.
“Good morning,” Jonathan says. Like our children, he has no name for my father. There is a guardedness to his face, a thin shield only I can see. He’s had his own tortured relationship with this man. He’s wrestled with him through me, with the wraith of my father that’s still inside me.
My father nods, makes a small sound, does not take his eyes off of Jonathan. He doesn’t appear scared, as he did when he was being lifted earlier, and he doesn’t appear angry or surprised. If anything, it’s a childlike curiosity I see in my father’s eyes. What’s going to happen next? he seems to be saying. And he seems to think Jonathan has the answer.
“Dad, this is my husband, Jonathan.”
Without looking at me my father nods. I know that, is what he means. His right arm twitches. “Ow do?”
“I’m fine, thanks,” Jonathan says. “How are you feeling today?”
“Ahm in pre gu shay.” I’m in pretty good shape. “Pre gu shay.”
“That’s good. You’ll be out of here soon, then.”
My father looks slightly to either side of Jonathan, seeing where he is. “Oh,” he says. “Ya.”
“They treating you well?”
“Oh, sur. Isa gu play.”
Jonathan takes something out of his coat pocket. “I wasn’t sure if I would be able to see you, so I got this just in case.” It is a card, a greeting card. On the front are puppies sleeping in a basket. Jonathan holds it up so my father can see it. I have no idea where this card came from.
My father makes a soft moan of pleasure.
“‘If you get lots of rest,’” Jonathan reads, then opens the card. From a microchip in the paper comes the sound of many puppies yelping. “‘You’ll be howling good in no time!’”
My father loves this. For the first time I see him lift both his bruised arms. He takes the card in his hand and shuts it and opens it for the barking and shuts it and opens it again. He looks up at Jonathan. “Ah lie tha,” he says.
“I’m glad.”
He points to Jonathan. “Av doe?”
“No dogs,” Jonathan says. This is because of me. “Two kids, but no dogs.”
“Ki? Wa they?”
“They’re eating pie with Barbara,” I say.
He looked confused. “Who Barbra?”
“Barbara Bridgeton. Your wife.”
“Ma wie!” He says and he laughs and then winces and grabs his stomach and then laughs again. He points at me. “Daley’s funny,” he says, clear as a bell.
The sound of my name startles me, shatters my illusion that I have been a generic figure, an everydaughter, in the room. And then, before I can respond, he is asleep with his mouth open, making his gagging sound.
Jonathan takes my hand and pulls me closer. We’ve been standing unnecessarily apart from each other. We laugh about it without saying a word.
A cart rattles by outside the cubicle. My father doesn’t wake up. We sit in the chairs.
“Every time he falls asleep,” I say quietly, “I worry that my reprieve is over, that he’ll wake up and remember he hates me.”
Then I hear the kids in the corridor, their small steps, their attempts at whispering.
Barbara pulls back the curtain. “They told me I could sneak them in, just for a few minutes, since he’s been so calm today. I’ve got to go down to the pharmacy in the basement anyway. These children are so polite.” She smiles at them. Would she have said that if they were white? “See you in a little bit.” She closes the curtain, closes us in with my father.
My father’s eyes open and my heart races. What if now is the moment he remembers everything? What if now, with my two children right here, is the moment his memory returns and he hollers, What the fuck are you people doing here? I wish the restraints were still on him.