The monitor beeped on. Her father looked pallid as a wax dummy in the bed.
“But would you watch him a few minutes?” Dr. Heyd asked. He wore baggy slacks and suspenders, his bald pate shining. “I’d like to go down and fix myself a sandwich.”
“Sure,” Ann said.
Dr. Heyd left her to her own unease. She didn’t like to look at her father, because her mind could not associate the vision she had of him with the sunken form in the bed. She sat down and flipped through one of Milly’s romance novels. A random page revealed a rather explicit sex scene. She remembered when romance fiction was innocuously tame. Not anymore, she thought now. Nothing is. She hadn’t read a complete novel herself, though, in years.
Milly’s purse lay opened on the floor, and inside a large woman’s wallet hung similarly open. Ann noticed pictures. What was the harm? She took the wallet out and looked through it. No credit cards or the like, of course not. But there were several snapshots in the string of clear plastic envelopes, all either of Rena at different ages, or Rena and Milly smiling together. Ann looked closely at one school portrait of Rena, probably at around age six. The picture made Ann clench. It was almost impossible to believe that the adorable little girl in this snapshot was the same girl she’d seen today masturbating with a vibrator.
Toward the end were some baby pictures, even more adorable. But the last picture caused her to stare.
A baby, days old, lying atop a quilt. But the tiny pudenda left no doubt. It was a baby boy.
Milly had never referred to a son. Ann immediately feared why that might be. Did the baby die?
She put the wallet back in the purse. What an awful thing. She could be wrong, of course, but why else would Milly have never mentioned a son? Or perhaps it was a relative’s child.
Ann glanced up. The beeps of the heart monitor seemed to change their rhythm a moment, then increase in pitch. Ann was about to call for Dr. Heyd, but her gaze was quickly overwhelmed.
Her father’s eyes opened.
His mouth was moving, and he was looking at her.
“Dad!” Ann jumped up, raced to the bed. Her father’s own gaze followed her. He’s conscious, she realized in a burst of exuberance. “Dad, it’s me,” she said. “It’s Ann…”
She could see his mouth working. It opened and closed; it was obvious to her that he was trying to say her name. Ann’s heart was racing.
Next, his crabbed hand took hold of her wrist. It felt cool, dry, wriggling in infirmity. The other hand faltered, rising over the bed. It moved around in some cryptic gesture.
“What, Dad? Can you try to talk?”
He clearly couldn’t. It crushed Ann to see the frustration on his infirm face. The mouth moving but giving no voice, the futile concentration in efforts to communicate to the daughter he hadn’t seen in over a year.
“Dad, what…”
His hand moved furiously, not pointing but seeming to mimic an act.
The act of writing. Thumb pressed to fingers, the withered hand made gestures of writing.
“A pen, Dad? Do you want a pen?”
He actually huffed in relief. His tired face nodded.
He couldn’t talk but he wanted to write. He must be much more lucid than they’d thought. Ann took one of Dr. Heyd’s notepads and sat down on the bed. She lay it against her knee. Then she placed a ballpoint pen into her father’s right hand.
“Go on, Dad. Take your time.”
First just scribble. The old man chewed his lip as he struggled to wield the pen. Ann felt tears in her eyes, witnessing her father’s desperation at so simple a task.
He began to whimper, eyes fluttering, then closing. “Dad, Dad?” she cried. He fell unconscious again, and the monitor slowed back to its normal pitch.
“Ann, what’s happened?”
Dr. Heyd came back into the room, rushing over. She excitedly explained what happened. But he only half listened as he quickened to take vital signs. Suddenly, Milly and Ann’s mother were crowded into the room, both in robes and slippers. Ann repeated everything for them in desperate joy.
“He was seeing me,” she went on. “I know he knew it was me.
But Dr. Heyd seemed disapproving, busying with an injection.
“What’s wrong?” Ann asked, dismayed. “Isn’t this good?”
“No, Ann, it’s not,” Dr. Heyd replied. “You should’ve called me at once.”
“But he was writing, he was trying to talk. He recognized me. I’m sure of it.”
“Ann, you’re forgetting what I told you the other day. Undue excitement is the worst thing for him right now. The excitement of suddenly being conscious and of seeing you at the same time made his blood pressure and heart rate skyrocket. You should’ve called for me first, so I could give him something to keep his heart rate at a lower level.”
“Why!” Ann objected. “He was conscious!”
“My God, Ann,” her mother muttered.
“What the hell is wrong?” Ann continued.
“The drastic rise in blood pressure caused a physical strain against the occluded blood vessels in his brain. You shouldn’t have encouraged him to write, because that only increased the strain further. It challenged him to a physical task he’s no longer physically capable of.”
Ann still didn’t understand. All she understood was that her father had been conscious, and now everybody was acting like Ann had done something grievously wrong.
“Before trying to induce him to write, you should’ve called me so I could lower his heart rate to a safe level. All that excitement at once was too much for him. The rise in systolic pulse more than likely forced some of the clot apart, sending pieces further into the brain. He may die now.”
Ann felt paralyzed in turmoil.
“My God, Ann!” her mother yelled.
“It’s my fault,” Dr. Heyd offered. “I should have explained more specifically before I left the room.”
“It’s not your fault, Ashby,” Ann’s mother hotly replied. “The problem is my fine daughter doesn’t realize the fragility of anything! She has no forethought at all!”
“Mom, I—”
“I invited you home to see him, Ann, not kill him!”
Ann’s mother stormed out of the room. Ann stood teary-eyed. Milly put her arm around her shoulder.
“It couldn’t be helped, Ann,” Dr. Heyd said, watching the monitor. “You didn’t know.”
I may have just killed my own father Ann realized.
Ann watched in mute numbness as Milly and Dr. Heyd tended to her father. In a few minutes, Dr. Heyd confirmed, “He seems to be stabilizing for now. We’ll know more by morning.” Then he looked down at Ann’s hand. “Is that what he wrote?”
Ann still held the piece of notepaper her father had scribbled on. She looked at it now, for the first time. Just scrambled letters, nothing coherent. “It doesn’t make sense,” she said, and gave the note to Dr. Heyd.
“To your father, though, it probably does,” the doctor told her after reading the note himself. “Unfortunately, orbital strokes of this magnitude frequently obfuscate the learned memory faculties in the brain. In other words, he was writing without a sequenced memory of the alphabet. It’s quite common in these cases.”
Dr. Heyd, it seemed, had a professional answer for everything. Ann felt disappointed. She would never know what her father, in what may have been his last conscious moment in life, had been trying to communicate to her.
What he’d written was this:
BLUDCYNN HÜSL — DOTHER FO DOTHER
—
Chapter 21
“Secean we,” bid the wifmunuc. Becloaked, she knelt before the blessed nihtmir.
“Eternal mother, bless us!” came the chorus.