“I don’t understand what this means. Please, tell me,” Dad said, ignoring the doctor’s attempt at making him feel better.
The man had an easy face, looked friendly, compassionate, even the way he’d stood, arms crossed and a chart between his fingers gave him a relaxed but professional vibe. “It happens when the amniotic fluid or other fetal materials enters the mother’s bloodstream. That fluid can cause clotting issues with the lungs and blood vessels. It may be possible that the preeclampsia put Keira at a greater risk, but the important thing is that we’re treating her. The oxygen and the cycle of meds we’ve got her on will get her back to fighting shape, but you both need to understand Keira will be very weak for a while; we’ll need to keep her here for some time.”
“How long?” I asked.
“Weeks, possibly a month, it will all depend on how she responds to treatment.” The doctor watched my father as he nodded, and I caught the way the man’s eye shifted from Dad’s face to mom lying on the bed and then back again. “Mr. Hale,” he said, clearing his throat and Dad straightened his shoulders as the doctor glanced at the floor. “I can’t be sure until Keira’s recovered but, in my professional opinion it would highly ill-advised for Keira to get pregnant again.”
There was the smallest moment, a little flash that he tried to cover with a shrug, and I knew the news had disappointed him. Family was everything. Ohana wasn’t just some catchphrase in a Disney movie. It was real to him, to all of us.
“Doc,” he said, grabbing the man’s shoulder, “you take care of my Wildcat and my baby girl. That is all I care about right now.” He’d squeezed the doctor’s shoulder. “You get my girls healthy so I can take them home.”
We’d only seen the baby for a few minutes in the NICU; her breathing was labored and she was being monitored. It was probably nothing but they weren’t taking any chances. That baby was perfect and beautiful and I had to force Dad away from that incubator before he’d caused another scene. Between the waiting game of both Mom and my little sister being out of reach, Dad and I got little sleep.
The hours went by slowly as we waited next to Mom’s bed, watching her, avoiding anything that resembled a conversation because on that bed, between me and father, lay the fear that hung in the room like humidity. We couldn’t look at each other, make comments about football or practice or any damn thing because we were the same. We were so similar and neither of us was good at hiding what we felt. Not when it came to Mom. Not when it came to loss.
Dad did nothing but stare at her, practically lying on the bed next to her with his hand covering hers and his thumb rubbing along her knuckles. He touched her, kissed her as though he expected her to wake up and apologize for worrying him so much.
“One time,” he said, that deep, sleep-deprived voice made him sound sick, “when we were in college, she broke up with me.” He kept his eyes moving over her face. The right side of his mouth moved as something came to him and then he shook his head. “She was always trying to do that.” I let him talk, didn’t remind him that I knew that. They’d spent the past three years filling me in on their destructive, desperate relationship when they were kids and I’d never quite understood if they thought the stories were funny or if they told them to me to scare me. “God, we were young. We were…” one long blink and my father swallowed, “we were addicted to each other and there she was mad at me because I did something else that was stupid, I kept doing things that were stupid and the whole time I was away from her, I thought ‘How can I fix this?’ ‘How can I make this right?’ because I knew…I knew…” Then he went quiet, seeming too distracted by the small bones in her face and the smooth skin that covered them. Dad leaned on his elbow, pulling her hand against his chest.
“What did you know, Dad?”
He glanced at me like he’d almost forgotten I was there. “I knew my love was so thick, that what I felt for her then was something I didn’t just want, but something I needed. Even when I pushed her away, even when I was so scared of what she did to me, even when I spent years laying in bed at night wondering if that feeling would ever go away, I knew no one would give me that. There was only ever her. No one does love like Keira.”
“Thick love?” I said when he let the room go still again and the silence was too much for me to take.
He smiled and for the first time since we’d been here watching her, waiting for her, my father’s eyes relaxed. “‘Thin love ain’t love at all.’”
It took me a minute, but then I remember the line, something Mom had said through the years, that later I’d read in high school, something that stuck through repetition. “Morrison?” I asked him and Dad nodded.
“It was our…” he shook his head, like the explanation didn’t matter, “it was us wanting to prove that this thing between us wasn’t temporary. Thick love is best. Thick love is…it’s when you know.”
I sat up then, leaning on my forearms and Dad went back to his constant gawk of my mother, brushing away the hair from her face, looking a little more lost than he had in the waiting room.
“It’s when you know what?”
When my father looked at me, there was something telling in his expression, something that made him grin and I felt as though he’d been waiting for me to ask that question. “It’s when you know you’ve found the one that can pick up the pieces when you let your heart get broken.”
Kona Hale wasn’t a philosopher, but at that moment I realized I had never heard anything more profound.
I watched him as he clung to her, moving his cheek to her chest and his arm around her waist. It was a position I’d frequently found them in—him hanging on to her like she was his salvation, her with her fingers running through his hair. Leann had once told me they’d always been that way, needed those subtle, almost unconscious touches to keep them centered to the earth, and to each other. I felt almost like I didn’t belong in that small room just then, like I was somehow in the way of a moment that was one-sided. They’d loved each other for so long, so fiercely and had since they were kids. Since they were my age. Since they were Aly’s and my age.
I leaned back, rested my shoulders on the wall behind me, watching my parents but finally taking a moment to remember what Aly had been like tonight on the stage. And even afterward, when my panic had me lashing out at her, screaming, she’d taken what I’d given her, and fed it back to me.
We were not my parents. There was no epic, life-changing love between us, but there was the hope that we might have that one day. After all, she had held me when the roses in my car reminded me of an anniversary I never wanted to celebrate. She took the bitter, angry venom I gave her and didn’t pacify me with words that meant nothing. She fought back and I liked it because no one else had done that for me before. Emily had been the sweetest girl, but she’d been a girl scared of hurting anyone’s feelings. Aly was a woman who wasn’t afraid to stomp on my toes to make me realize how stupid I’d been.
My eyes felt heavy and I could barely keep them open, but then a movement from the bed, a slow, easy movement woke me up. It wasn’t Dad. He hadn’t moved; he still held my mother. But my mother…when she blinked, when her hand with the I.V. moved, when it rested on my father’s head, my heart sped up.
Mom’s mouth curved slowly upwards, as though the sensations around her were starting to come into focus. The first thing she recognized was the feel of my father’s heavy body laying where he always did, next to her, expecting her touch. And she did touch him—slow, barely moving strokes through his hair, once, twice and then my father jerked awake.