Daniel finished the sandwich in four enormous bites, then answered emails while his father slept. Monday, a workday after the Thanksgiving weekend, so much to catch up on at the office, but his boss said he should stay at the hospital all afternoon if he needed to, working from his phone. If his mother came in, he’d have to put the phone away. She had an aversion to his phone, he wasn’t sure why. He hoped she wouldn’t come to the hospital, and not just because of his cell phone. He had noticed for some time, months, how tired she was, and this episode with Aaron had really knocked her off her pins. He looked at his father, at the gray beard and disheveled gray hair, the big hawk nose. He turned off his phone.
“Dad,” he whispered.
His father twitched, but didn’t wake up. His breathing was loud. Sinister red lights blinked above him accompanied by beeps like strangled birdcalls. It was too familiar, the beeping and blinking and labored breathing. Daniel stood up quickly, ready to make for the door.
Aaron opened his eyes.
“You’ll be fine, Daniel,” he said, reaching out a stringy arm and taking Daniel’s hand.
“Me?” Daniel smiled and sat down. “How about you?”
“Where the hell am I?”
“Hospital.”
“Don’t worry, now. You’ll be out of here in no time.” Aaron heard the word “hospital,” saw Daniel, and put the two together. They had, after all, been a pair, an intimate pair, Daniel and hospital.
“Thank you, Dad. Thank you for worrying about me. But I’m okay. That was thirty-five years ago. Remember that? Bad times.”
Aaron nodded. “Terrible.”
You were not much help, Daniel thought, in spite of himself. He’d convinced himself he’d put it all behind him, the worst year of his life, the year he was eighteen and developed osteonecrosis out of the blue, a year of searing pain, conflicting diagnoses, the year he couldn’t walk, the year he spent in the hospital. His mother had practically moved into his hospital room to look after him. His father had not visited much. He was preoccupied, planning another business, squandering whatever was left of his own father’s money. And he didn’t like hospitals.
No one likes hospitals, Daniel thought now.
Maybe, Daniel’s mother had said, maybe it’s just too painful for him to visit. You mean he’s too weak? Daniel answered. Yes, said his mother. Yes, I guess that is what I mean. But someone weak can love you, and he does.
“That was a long time ago,” Daniel said. “This time, it’s you we have to look after. Are you comfortable, Dad?”
“Who knows.”
“Well, you, presumably.”
“Don’t believe everything they tell you,” Aaron said.
For a weak man, he was physically strong. His hand still held Daniel’s, and Daniel felt the grip tighten.
“Dad?”
Aaron moaned.
“Pain?”
Aaron moaned again. He couldn’t speak. He looked pleadingly at his son.
When the nurse arrived, she tipped a pill into Aaron’s mouth from a small, pleated paper cup. “Now drink up,” she said, handing him a plastic cup of water.
Aaron looked at her with wide-open eyes — eyes full of fright. Did she notice? Daniel wondered.
“It will help the pain,” Daniel said.
The moans got louder, a crescendo of misery. Daniel thought he had never heard anyone in such misery.
His father’s face seemed to shrink with the pain, his eyes growing wider, fearful, his ears standing out from his head like little elbows.
“Dad, I wish I could do something for you.”
The moaning stopped. “You got a stick of gum?”
Daniel put his head in his hands. He waited a few seconds, breathing deeply. “Dad,” he said when he looked up, “how is the pain now?”
“Nobody tells me anything,” his father muttered, then drifted off into a robust, drugged sleep, snoring deeply.
* * *
Aaron was supposed to come home from the hospital soon, and Molly tried to talk to her mother about how she would manage once Molly went back to Los Angeles.
Freddie was gone already, back to her sleepy undergraduates. Her semester started a week earlier than Molly’s, and Molly envied her that roomful of hungover boys and girls, students forced to sit and listen. You could test students, grade them, fail them if necessary; you could tell what the correct answer was. Your mother was another story.
Molly tried, she really did. She ran through all the things her father could no longer do, all the things Joy would have to help him with, even writing them down on a large legal pad in broad black letters. Aaron could no longer stand up by himself. He couldn’t get himself into bed or out of bed or out of a chair or into a chair. He could not walk by himself, though he often tried, which meant he could not be left by himself for even a minute. Joy would have to dress him, and Joy would have to undress him.
“This is not news to me, Molly.”
He needed to be bathed, frequently. And dried. And powdered. He required ointments and unguents. He needed all the attention to pouches and adult diapers that Molly was so queasy about, as well as the rashes and sores they produced, and even so, the bed linens often had to be changed in the middle of the night.
“I can cope. I have always coped. Haven’t I? Admit it, Molly. Through everything.”
“Yes, you cope, but can’t you cope with some help? Just keeping him fed is exhausting.”
“I order in,” Joy said.
Molly had noticed that. In the days leading up to Thanksgiving, her father was given the remains of the same turkey meat loaf dinner from the coffee shop for days, interspersed with the remains of the roast turkey dinner and the turkey burger deluxe, for variety. Joy had tried to feed Molly endless teaspoon-size portions of turkey leftovers, too, but Molly had rebelled and insisted on cooking. Both her parents pronounced her chicken too spicy and her green beans undercooked, then turned rather loftily back to their scraps.
“Next thing I know you’ll be sending both of us off to assisted living,” Joy said to her now. “To a facility.”
“A locked ward.”
“In the meantime, I need you to fix the computer. I hate the computer.”
She said the words “the computer” with categorical disdain, the way someone might say “Tea Party.”
Molly felt the buzz of her phone and went into the bathroom so she could check the text without incurring her mother’s rage.
“Help,” said the text from Daniel. “Dad thinks I’m in the hospital.”
“You are,” she responded.
“He thinks I’m the patient.”
Daniel was waiting when she got to the cramped café ten minutes later. She swept in, looking harassed, windblown. She always looked harassed and windblown, he thought, even when she was reading a magazine on the sofa or sitting in a restaurant at dinner. Her clothes were always pressed and tucked in and perfectly, overly, coordinated; yet she always appeared to be weathering a great storm. Maybe it was the way she moved — big, jumpy gestures.
“Mom is going to have a nervous breakdown and die,” she said.
“Hello to you, too!” He stood up and kissed her. She rested her head on his shoulder for a moment, relaxed and soft. Then he felt her pull herself up. Back on duty.
“Those two are killing each other. What are you eating? I want a panino.”
He laughed. A panino, singular. She did like to be correct, Molly did. “I already had a sandwich at the hospital that was prepared in 1958,” he said. He ordered an espresso. “A good espresso place in our old neighborhood. Imagine that.”
“Imagine that. You sound like Daddy.”
Daddy. He liked it when she said that. It made everything seem softer, kinder than it was. “He’s in agony one minute, and then the next minute he forgets he was in agony. It’s like a backward curse. Or a Greek myth: Dad-alus.”