I used the bathroom, rinsing my mouth out with water and wishing I had my own toothbrush. Another gift left behind in Brasília for the Ligados. I dabbed at my mouth with a towel and flipped the bathroom light off. Not wanting to be left in total darkness, I crossed to my bedroom first and turned that light on before coming back to the hallway switch and turning it off. For a moment, as I stood in the hall with the only illumination behind me, I thought I saw a tiny light coming from my father’s room.
I sighed, my hand still resting on the switch. It was probably nothing. An LED alarm clock, or else the reflection of a streetlight through the window. If I didn’t look, however, I’d end up lying in my bed, wondering. I walked to the other end of the hall and reached my arm around the doorframe to find the switch for his room. I flipped the switch, flooding the room with light.
A figure lay slumped on the end of the bed, his back to me, wearing a hospital gown. I couldn’t see his face, but I knew that head of curly gray hair better than I knew my own face in a mirror. It was my father.
I couldn’t move at first. Adrenaline flooded my system, sending my heart into a gallop, and my skin flushed with a heat that felt like fear. An eternity passed in seconds. Was he dead? But no, he held something bright in his hand. What was he doing here? Was he hurt? Where was Paul?
Eventually, my fight-or-flight reaction subsided, and I took a deep breath. My father hadn’t yet moved or acknowledged my presence, or even reacted to the light. I took a step closer and saw that the object he held was his iPhone. The glowing rectangle, perhaps reflected in the window, must have been what I’d seen from the hallway.
“Dad?”
I stepped closer and peered at the screen. He was paging through the photographs of Julia and her daughter, Ash, his thumb sweeping across the device every few seconds to bring up the next. Finally, he shifted his head a fraction to regard me. There were tears in his eyes.
“How did you get here?” I asked.
He didn’t answer me. Instead, he flipped to the next photo, this one of Julia’s husband holding the baby, and stared at it with an expression of intense despair.
“That’s Hisao,” I said. “He’s married to your daughter, Julia. The baby is Ash, your granddaughter.” I slipped easily into the soft, calming tone of voice I had grown accustomed to using with him in recent years.
“I know who it is,” he said. “Don’t patronize me.”
I sat down on the bed across from him, just an arm’s reach away. “Dad? What’s going on? How did you get here? Are you… ?”
“Am I of sound mind?” he said bitterly. “Who knows? I certainly can’t be trusted to have an opinion on the matter.”
“Dad—”
“Do you know those dreams, where nothing makes any sense, but you know there’s somewhere you were supposed to be, or something you were supposed to do? You wake up with that feeling of urgency and panic still lingering, but you can shake it off because, hey, it’s just a dream. Only it wasn’t for me, was it? I woke up to find that the dream was actually the last two years of my life.”
He seemed lucid enough. On the other hand, he still wore the same flimsy gown he’d been wearing when he left the hospital, smelling like a sick room and with a few days growth of beard darkening his face. He wasn’t exactly back to normal.
“Do you remember how you got here?” There had been no car in the driveway when I arrived. Mom would surely have checked the house, and although he might have hidden up here in the dark, she would have noticed if his car had been here.
“Paul dropped me off. I haven’t seen him since.”
“He just left you here?”
“He was called away.”
“Called away? By whom? Have you been here all this time?” I assumed my mom had checked the house, but maybe with all the lights out, she hadn’t realized he was home.
“I slept a lot,” he said. “I think.”
“Have you eaten anything?”
“I don’t know,” he said, and his voice rippled with anger and frustration.
“Are you having memory lapses?”
“Yes? Maybe?” He groaned and sat up, holding his head. “I don’t know whether to thank Paul or curse him. It’s like torture, this glimpse of what I should be, what I’ve missed.” He held out the phone with a close-up of Ash’s pudgy face. “I’ll never really know her, will I?”
I met his eyes. “I don’t know, Dad. You might. We never expected you to regain any mental ability, but here you are.”
He gave me an acid smile. “Here I am.” He sucked in a breath and let it loose in a great sigh. “Don’t you think losing your mind once is as much as anyone should have to endure? I’m afraid to go outside now, in case I can’t remember how to get back to the house. Earlier today, I couldn’t remember where the bathroom was. In my own home.”
“You’ll need someone to stay with you, at least until we figure out what you can and can’t do now. Does Mom know you’re here?”
“I don’t think so. When she came, I hid in the closet until she left.”
“Dad! She’s been worried sick.”
“Please don’t call her. I don’t want her seeing me like this.”
“She loves you.”
“That’s exactly why I don’t want her here. She’s already been through this once. I know it hasn’t been easy, dealing with someone who doesn’t remember how much you’ve done for them. She shouldn’t have to go through that again.”
I put a hand on his arm. “I’m sorry,” I said. “I shouldn’t have gone to Brazil. I should have been here with you. But this is a gift. Maybe not a perfect one, but we’ll figure it out. Mom will want to be here.”
He pushed himself up on one elbow and stared at me. For a moment, I thought he didn’t know who I was. “Neil,” he said. “I want you to admit me to a psych hospital. Somewhere they’ll watch me. Where they won’t let me leave.”
“I don’t think we need to resort to that yet.”
He grabbed my sleeve. “Listen to me. You don’t know how hard this is to say.” He tried to continue, but it turned into a hacking cough that he couldn’t control. I patted him ineffectually on the back until he waved me away. “I almost killed her,” he said urgently.
“Who?” I said. “Mom?”
“That young doctor. Chen or Chu. I wanted to kill her.” He ran the fingers of both hands roughly through his hair. “I wanted to so badly.”
I pulled away. “Dad, what are you talking about?”
He propped his feet up on the bed and hugged his knees. His arms stuck out of the short sleeves of the hospital gown, and I noticed how thin he’d become. “It came on all of a sudden,” he said. “The doctor came in to take a blood sample. She didn’t have a nurse do it; she came in with a syringe herself, looking around like she didn’t want anyone to see her. And suddenly, I had this tremendous urge to take her throat in my hands and squeeze until she died. It seemed natural and obvious, like something I might do every day. Just something that needed to be done.
“Instead, I told her to leave. I told her they’d already taken samples, but she said I had very special blood, and she was trying to understand what made it so special. She told me I’d been infected by a fungus, and that other people had been, too. I shouted at her and called her names and told her to get out before I called security.
“She said she would let me rest and come back in an hour. While she was gone, I searched through the cabinets in the room until I found a scalpel. I hid the scalpel under the sheet and waited for her. All the while, I imagined slashing it across her carotid.”