Chapter Nine
Riverbend, Louisiana
Thick gray clouds skirt over me as I walk across the giant parking lot in front of the hospital.
I keep my head down against the cold wind as I enter and take the elevator to the fifth floor.
My body is starting to feel the strain of this day, and it’s not even five o’clock.
At the rate I’m going I might be passed out by that time.
In my father’s room, a nurse who, thankfully, isn’t a former Poison Wood student is checking my father’s chart.
Debby is on the sofa, staring at her cell phone.
A plastic container of cupcakes sits on the tray next to my father’s bed with a teddy bear holding a red heart and a balloon tied to it that says Happy Valentine’s Day.
“Hey, Dad,” I say, moving to his side.
He smiles up at me. His face looks only slightly less pale than earlier. “Where’ve you been?”
“Had to run a little errand,” I say.
Debby coughs, but it sounds like she may have said something too.
I pick up the teddy bear. “It’s not Valentine’s Day yet.”
“We celebrate on the thirteenth,” Debby says, looking up. “So our dinner out won’t be so overpriced.”
I set the bear back down. “Smart.”
“No dinner for us tonight, though,” he says, and I catch the look between them.
“It’s okay, hon,” Debby says.
I try to remember if he looked at my mother that way, and it bothers me that I can’t.
“This is my daughter,” my father says to the nurse.
“Nice to meet you,” she says. Then she turns back to my dad. “Okay, let’s try again.”
My father sits up, holding an odd clear plastic thing in his hand. He blows into it as the nurse watches. A little ball inside it moves up, and she makes a note of it and my father bursts into a coughing fit.
“Good job,” she says. “Better than yesterday.” She takes the equipment from him, then smiles at me as if his horrible coughing is music to her ears. “I was just telling your dad it’s time to get moving. He needs to walk two laps down the hall today to get his ticket out of here tomorrow.”
“Tomorrow?” I say. “But what if—” I start to say, but my father interrupts me.
“There aren’t going to be any what-ifs,” he says.
The nurse looks between us. “Okay, so two laps. Got it?”
My dad nods, and the nurse leaves us alone. I walk to the side of his bed. He’s wearing a hospital gown, and his hair looks like it needs to be washed. I don’t like this look for him. It’s too . . . sickly.
I catch Debby looking up over her readers at me. I look back at her.
“What are you up to, Rita?” she says.
I look back at my father. “Maybe we need to walk those laps,” I say.
He glances at Debby. “Right.”
I start for the door and then realize he is still trying to stand up from the hospital bed. He’s got his hands beside him, and he’s pushing off so slowly, I wonder if he’s going to make it to standing. I hurry back to his side and take his left arm.
“I got it,” he snaps.
I pull my hand back even though he very clearly does not got it.
I stand next to him just in case he falls.
Two laps is now seeming like as big an ask as him running a marathon.
I notice a walker propped by the far wall.
I walk over and open it and offer it to him.
He looks at me as if I’ve offered him a casket brochure.
“I don’t need that,” he says.
“Okay, well let’s take it just in case,” I say. “I may need it.”
He shoots me a look, but he smiles.
It takes a painfully long time to make it to the door. Half a lap may be the goal today. His hospital gown is open in the back, and I can see his boxer shorts. I try to close it, and he swats my hand away.
“Leave it,” he says as we exit into the hallway opposite the nurses’ station.
Everything about this moment feels entirely wrong. I keep my eyes forward so I’m not tempted to look at how thin his legs have gotten.
“Good job, Judge Mac,” one of the nurses at the station says.
I want to tell her to shut up. This is a man who broke horses in West Texas as a kid. A man who built his farmhouse with his own hands. Three steps are not a good job for him. But he gives the nurse a thumbs-up, and it’s clear the rules for success look different for him now.
And maybe that’s what’s causing this thorn under my skin. His mortality has never been in question for me, an odd thing for a woman who lost a parent at an early age and chose a career where she sees mortality up close every day.
I know all too well nobody makes it out of life alive.
But my father was my constant. While everything else in my world whirled around me, he stayed steady and true.
He never gave me a reason to think that would change, and watching him shuffle his feet instead of picking them up drives home the reality that my perceptions were those of a child. A child in denial.
I rub my face and slow my pace to keep up with him.
“How are you?” he says.
Of course he’s asking how I am when he’s the one in the hospital.
“I’m good,” I say. I hear the twangy drawl in the word good.
$10K on a voice coach and after two days in Louisiana, the drawl is back.
But that’s what coming home does to you.
It replants you right where you left off, bringing with it all the feelings from whatever age you left, as if they’ve been preserved in mason jars and stored on a shelf, waiting.
“You’re all I’ve got left, Dad,” I say, keeping my eyes forward as we pass by rooms. “You have to promise me you’ll take better care of yourself.”
He clears his throat. I hear a rasp in it I don’t like. “I’ll do better,” he says.
“Promise.”
“I promise.” Then he says, “You know, you need to do better too.” I stop and he stops. This time he looks at me. “You’re too thin,” he says.
“It’s part of being on camera, Dad. You know that.” I look him over. “I could say the same about you.”
“Widow-maker diet.”
I don’t respond, and we start walking again. Although this normal banter has been nice, we have other things to discuss. “Lots going on around here. News-wise,” I say.
“Yes, there is,” he says.
We make it to the end of the hall. He’s breathing fast, so I let him pause a minute more before turning and starting back.
“A lot going on with Poison Wood,” I say.
“Uh-huh.”
“The skull, I mean.”
“I know what you mean,” he says between breaths.
“Dad, I feel like I’ve landed in the eye of a hurricane.
There is so much swirling around here. Stuff you didn’t tell me about.
” I give him a second to respond, but he doesn’t, so I elaborate.
“Like the new electric gates because of a suspicious car lurking around the farmhouse. How come you didn’t tell me about it? ”
“Because it wasn’t important,” he says.
“Feels important to me.”
“Everything feels important to you.”
I hear irritation in his voice. A tone that used to make me scramble to do better. But today that tone sounds false, like he’s trying to use it to get the upper hand but it’s not quite hitting. Today it sounds defensive.
He takes a long inhale and exhale, and I reach for his arm again. This time he lets me take it. I think about his heart, possibly pumping too fast now, thanks to me. I want to tell him never mind, forget it, but the reporter in me won’t let go. The daughter in me is not going to win this battle.
My father studies me. “Where’d you run off to this morning?”
I debate a lie but say, “You know where.”
He sighs. “That school.”
“We need to talk, Dad.”
“I know.”
I keep ahold of his arm. “What do you know?”
He pauses, but he doesn’t look at me. “I heard about the woman in Key Biscayne.”
“Who told you?”
“DA. From the Adair trial. We still keep in touch. Ex-governor called him. He called me.”
I was right earlier when talking to Dom. This thing is moving fast.
He runs his hand through his hair. “What a mess.”
“That’s an understatement, Dad.”
We make it back to the nurses’ station. “Nicely done, Judge,” one says. “One more to go. Can you make it down there and back?”
I follow her gaze to the opposite end of the hall where it dead ends into a large window.
“Dad?” I say, and there’s a part of me that hopes he says no. His body is slumped, and he is breathing rapidly.
“Yes,” he says.
“Maybe we could get a nurse to take your pulse first?”
He starts walking at a little faster pace than before. Nothing like his daughter questioning his ability to do something to get him moving. I catch up to him with the walker.
“Leave that stupid thing here,” he says, looking at it, and I set it off to the side.
We make it to the window faster than expected, and he stops and stares out it. “How did you even get involved in this in the first place?” he asks between breaths, his eyes staying forward.
“Someone made sure I was involved,” I say. I’m trying to gauge his tone and his questions like I would with anyone else I’d interview, but he’s nothing like anyone else I’d interview. I know too much about him to be objective.
“Who? How so?” he says, turning to me.
“You know I interviewed Dr. Willa live about everything that happened to us in Broken Bayou, right?” He nods.
“So that night at the docuseries premiere party, I got a text from Laura Sanders that we needed to meet in person.” I shift my feet.
“So I went to Miami. And Laura Sanders went missing. And . . .”
“Yeah,” he says. “And.”
He starts walking again, and by the time we return to his door, I’m worried someone is going to need to bring in a crash cart. But the nurses behind the station look completely unfazed by his red face and quick breath.
Back in his room, he falls onto his bed.
“Oh my goodness.” Debby jumps off the sofa and rushes over to pour him a cup of water from the mauve plastic pitcher next to the teddy bear on the tray over his bed. She hands it to him, and he guzzles it. “Are you okay? Should I get a nurse?”
He waves her off. “I’m fine.”
She looks at me, and I shrug.