34
It was four a.m. and he was bandaged all over.
The lights in hospital waiting rooms burn a sinister type of horrendous white that only amplifies the fear, anxiousness, and nausea. I was floating in and out of consciousness having not slept for a day and a half and reality had long since slipped from my grasp. My father was wearing his blue and black flannel jacket over a blood-stained T-shirt, and his stomach moved up and down in slow, labored movements that I assumed caused him a considerable amount of pain. He had gauze wrapped around the upper left side of his forehead and it too was stained with blood. He had avoided any skull fracture, but he was concussed. His right arm was broken, in a sling, and how he had survived, I didn’t know. He stared forward into an abyss of horror, completely lifeless and possessed by tremors, biting his lower lip over and over and over. It was raw and soon it would be bleeding too, but I didn’t stop him.
There were a few exhausted, well-meaning nurses that walked by on occasion and the dark navy-blue cushions were eroding in the waiting room. I imagined the thousands that came here before me, slowly dying of their wounds or their worry, the chairs molding themselves with their bodies. I felt myself sink deeper and deeper, mind shot and numb. More afraid than ever before. My father and I were the only ones in the waiting room, and we hadn’t spoken for hours, not one somber word. I could hear his haggard breath forcing its way up through abused lungs, nostrils and mouth. I’ll never forget how I wanted that breath to give up, or the urge I had then to finish what God had started, to remove him from the face of the earth. To me, he was no longer a man. He was a creature, hunched, pathetic and broken.
About ten hours ago he and my mother had been driving home on a long stretch of the backroad VV and had nearly finished their journey. Johnston was in the center of a vicious snowstorm, and the roads were completely iced out, enveloped with white. We were all used to brutal winter roads, but these were particularly dangerous.
In violent wind and below zero temperature, snow fell like a torrential downpour and packed the roads with ice while my father drove cigar mouthed, sleepy and hungover. My mother watched from the passenger side because she hated driving through storms. My father, I’m sure, had insisted. Johnston’s country roads are lined with long, deep, and treacherous ditches. On hot summer nights my friends and I would speed alongside them and laugh in the face of what could be a quick and easy death. Ma used to give me long warnings about this saying how scared she’d get thinking of me not paying attention and driving straight down into one of those crevices one day.
“Don’t worry Ma, I won’t. Don’t worry about me,” I’d say, but she did anyway.
Johnston had its fair share of tragic ditch stories. Cars missing a turn or sliding too far on ice, somersaulting down never to be heard from again. They were the real, backroad tragedies that you’d never hear about in your bigger city news, but those deaths would scar the hearts of all who made Johnston their home. When we caught wind there was an accident, we knew that nothing was given, and if it happened on a backroad in Johnston, far out in the belly of the country, the best thing to do was to pray. It was a long, long way down.
What happened that night was a short story, and the telling of it fell out of my father’s mouth like a five year-old’s’ incantation of something too large to comprehend. He retched out the details to the doctors while they stood, white coated, earnest, and hurrying. He swayed, hands pocketed and kept his eyes on the floor. He mumbled about the crash in a pathetic slur of shock.
He had lost control of his truck on a brutal stretch of hidden ice and spun out and into a ditch on the right side of VV. It turned and crashed violently, tumbling down. It spiraled its way through the snow and to the bottom of the ditch. From there, my father, mangled in his own right, had to work my unconscious mother from the passenger side, head smashed and limp. And if a passerby hadn’t been driving some short distance behind them, she never would have made it to the hospital alive. But through the icescape that night, a stranger who just so happened to be driving home to his family, helped get my mother into his truck and drove with my father to the nearest hospital, twenty miles away. There, she had emergency surgery.
That was the bones of it, anyway, the plain straight details of the thing. While sitting in the waiting room, across from my father, I was sure that if I lost my mother, I would no longer wish to continue. I would kill him, and I would kill myself.
Only a few years earlier a kid named Conner, who was a year older than me, had died in an auto crash. The whole town was devastated. Everyone came to his wake and wept over the unfairness of life and its dark workings. I remember Conner’s mother by the casket, not crying, eerily numb and silent. That was the worst. I knew the saddest people didn’t cry at all because there was no room for it, they just couldn’t. There is such a thing as too sad to cry. After Conner died, I thought that we could leave the nightmares behind us. We had faced tragedy and understood. Car crashes were something that happened, could happen, and did. I was just so shocked that one happened to Ma.
The whole unending time in that waiting room I never once considered that Ma could be gone. Honestly, I sat there and knew she’d be fine. If it had happened to anyone else, to me or my father, I could imagine us going but the thing about my mother was she was protected by God. You never saw such a holy woman in love with Jesus in all your life. I always knew that she was favored and that she was taken care of. While I waited and waited, I was mostly just numb with the rage I felt toward my father and myself. For not protecting her. For the wicked, unforgiving winter.
All to say, at least from the outside, I looked far more serene than I think you’d imagine. In all the movies and books, you get this image of waiting room morbidity, wide-open weep sessions with the families when things look perilous. That wasn’t the case, at least not for us. On the worst night of my life, it was just me and my father. Silent. Breathing. Blinking through violent white light and monotonous hospital overtones. No, the tragic sobbing hadn’t begun. The sad truth was I knew all sorts of folks that didn’t even blink at the thought of death and were stoic in its face. While I also knew some hysterics, my father and I were not that breed. He could barely breathe, and as for me, I’d never have the words. So, there we were, silent and waiting when the doctor finally showed his gaunt face.
Of all the moments in my life, I know I’ll always remember this most. Right there and then, I stood up and I knew that everything had changed, forever. It’s a strange thing, doctors having to deliver the news. Hope draining from the faces of friends and family, all gathered around, hands held and praying with water already in their eyes flowing, asking what’s the word, doc ? Begging to hear that it’s all going to be okay, and that the universe protected the best of us.
But when Doctor Clark turned the corner, I knew all at once that the universe did no such thing. I couldn’t help but drift up to God, and all of a sudden, I knew. I knew the simple truth. There was no confusion. It was a settling cloud of doom that I would never, ever be able to shake. The green, grinning court jester had taken the seams of the veil and torn it completely in half, showing me the face of death within life, and this image, this void, would always be with me.
Doctor Clark walked up with a gentle pained face, hollowed out from lack of sleep, and was going to have to find a way, yet again, to say what had to be said. I felt bad for him, somehow, for a flash of a second, I felt bad for him . He paused for a moment, and it wasn’t hard to know why. I couldn’t look at my father, but I was sure his face was opaque, dead and unreadable.
“I’m sorry…”
And on it went. I blacked out but I must have heard it. My face was blank as death, untethered and facing oblivion. It’s insane, ya know? In all those films actors play it all skyward and faucet-like tragic. But that ain’t how it goes. It isn’t that dramatic. When Doctor Clark gave us the news there was nothing alive in the depths of my chest. There was no soul. No heart. No guts. I was cavernous. The silence was excruciatingly loud, deafening, and it echoed. I was abandoned. I had no bones or blood or lungs. And how the hell is a man to weep if he is empty? No, there were no tears. There was no argument. There was nothing. Just the pounding drums of death in the quiet. There was only Doctor Clark and his words and my emotionless face.
And why was I blank? The straight unarguable line of it all. The audacity. The shock. It was the clearest evil I had ever witnessed in my life. For I knew that the blackness which took my mother that night had always been there, creeping, waiting and it had finally exposed itself. It had revealed its fangs and had struck. Its deep, insidious nature had finally sprung and the veneer had been shattered forever. No more hiding, no more swimming around in the dusk at sunset. No more ignorance, no more hand holding walks, no more bliss. It was dead. It was all dead. I had seen it. I had witnessed, for the first time, truth, and it was lifeless and foul. And this, this was the moment that walls upon walls, all buildings and structures, all the creation inside of me, crumbled to ruin. All the art my mother had shown me, all the shows, all the books. All the loving red seeping kindness had burned and died. I thought about God. And what had been done.
My father said nothing. He only walked away like a ghost while I stayed staring at Doctor Clark. It was as if he had morphed before my very eyes into a revealed mystery, as if he was the savior all along. I knew that I wasn’t waiting for grace and warmth anymore. I had no life. No body. No mind. There was just a wave of black.
I don’t know how long I stood there but like the saint that he was, Doctor Clark remained stoic and patient. The way I remember it, I stayed there for days, waiting for something to change. And all the others came and went, circling around me, moving in and out of their own tragedies, and paid me no mind. We were the same, in the end. That was one thing, we were never alone. Even in this. We were not unique in our suffering.
All the other doctors ran and scrambled around trying to conserve the very fabric of this here living thing. Even the receptionists, who put on that face of assured calm, received the visiting, healthy, and terrified and did their part. Yes, it was one big moving amoeba of endings, and that was it really. In the hospital you could tell that you were standing on the honest, final frontier. The last battle ground where we sad humans tried to understand the impossible, where we tried to take a stand in the skull-full land of death. And so, surrounded by all the others, I remained firm in that valley. Thinking of God and my mother and waiting for the nightmare to end. But the nightmare would and could not. It was just me and my saint Doctor Clark. And after maybe a month, I sucked some air to my lungs and I spoke before the tears ever came, “can I see her?”
And Doctor Clark did something I knew his type were just not there to do. He let water fill his eyes and his hand rose. He touched my left shoulder. He squeezed it in compassion.
God, you have done this, but why?
I haven’t seen my father since that night.