Chapter 28
Oh, God.
The implications of these pages unravel all around me.
Fiction is never really fiction. It’s just the truth, hiding in plain sight.
I keep reading.
I woke up in the hospital.
The first thing I noticed was how dry my mouth was. This was immediately followed by the fact that my head was pounding. I reached a hand up to the side of it, and I could feel a massive goose egg beneath a gauze bandage.
“Ah, bon dia, senor,” said a male nurse? A doctor? An orderly? I had no idea.
I smacked my lips together. Parched.
“English, yes?” he asked. “You are American?”
I nodded.
“You are at Horacio Oduber Hospital. You had an accident.”
My face twisted, silently asking for more information.
“You fell down and hit your skull on the edge of a metal chair.”
I shook my head.
“Let me call the doctor for you.”
He left, a blur of navy-blue scrubs.
I closed my eyes. The white light of the fluorescent ceiling bulbs was too bright.
“Senor?” a new voice asked. A woman this time.
I opened my eyes.
“Ah, hello. I am Dr. Maduro. You took a nasty fall. Do you remember?”
I thought about it. Tried to remember. I saw Harmony leaving in a taxi.
I cleared my throat. “Harmony?”
“I’m sorry, sir. What was that?”
“Water,” I whispered.
“Sure. Of course.” She opened a small bottle of AWA water and poured some into a disposable paper cup. I squirmed to sit up, noticing how badly my head hurt. She handed the cup to me, and I took a grateful sip. “Better?” she asked.
I nodded.
“You tripped and fell in the airport. Collapsed. Early reports show it may have been a combination of a head injury and a panic attack that led to a blackout.”
“What—what time is it?” I asked.
Dr. Maduro checked her watch. “2:15 p.m.,” she replied.
“My flight—”
“You’re not going home today. We need to keep you for observation. You hit your head badly. A fractured skull is not a small injury.”
“Is she here?”
“I’m sorry. Who?” Dr. Maduro asked.
“Harmony?”
“No one is with you, sir. You’re here alone.”
“My bag?”
“Yes. We have your bags. Two of them. One is a smaller bag, a knapsack, yes? And then a regular piece of luggage. Carry-on size.”
“Oh my God.”
“Do you remember the circumstances of your fall?”
I shook my head. But I did remember. My father was there.
Being a dad to someone who wasn’t me.
***
I slept more then. When I woke up, I could see the sun setting out the hospital window. I looked around. I was in a room now.
Alone.
My head was definitely bandaged. It didn’t hurt as much.
My stomach rumbled.
There was a television on the wall, but it was off. I adjusted my body in the bed to sit upright and was able to see my reflection in the black screen.
My head was bandaged, all right. And it had been shaved.
I had an IV in the back of my hand. There was a large remote control on the bed beside me. A red button in the center had a cross on it, which I guessed was the universal call symbol for a nurse or someone. I pressed it.
“Why, hello there,” a lady said. Her voice sounded like a song.
I remembered Harmony and her mother.
“Hi,” I croaked.
“You rang? Good timing. I need to check on your vitals now anyway.” She wrapped my free arm in a blood pressure cuff, clamped a gray, plastic thing onto my pointer finger, and pointed a thermometer directly at my forehead.
Moments later, she nodded, writing down her findings. “Looking good. How are you feeling?”
“Confused,” I admitted.
“I’m sure.”
“I was supposed to go home today.”
“Yes, I know. Don’t worry. As soon as we discharge you, you’ll be able to get on another flight. The airline was made aware of what happened.”
“Oh. Okay.”
“How’s your head feeling?”
“Okay, I think. It’s shaved.”
The lady chuckled. “That’s customary when you get stitches.”
“Stitches?”
“Twelve. But don’t worry. The scarring won’t be bad.”
“Huh.”
“The pain medicine we’re giving you must be working.”
“I’m hungry,” I said.
“No problem. I can get you some dinner. Any allergies?”
“Uh uh.” I shook my head. It felt like my brain was held aloft by a million balloons.
She nodded, then left. I tried very hard to remember exactly what happened to me. There were Cinnabon cinnamon rolls. In a box. Lattes. A little boy.
My father.
It was my father. Not a ghost or a figment of my imagination.
He’d been gone a long time, but some faces you never forget.
I looked at the telephone next to the bed.
The nice lady returned with a pink tray.
The plate was covered by a silver dome. A small can of ginger ale and a box of apple juice, like for a child, sat beside the hidden meal.
She set it down in front of me and took off the cover.
Turkey, it looked like. Or maybe chicken.
Gravy. Broccoli. Sliced potatoes. Another small dish, wrapped in plastic wrap, was dessert. Rice pudding, I surmised.
I unwrapped the plastic utensils and dug in.
The nurse moved about the room, charting things and rolling a cart away from me.
She offered me the television remote, and I turned on a game show that I didn’t understand.
I muted it. On the screen, someone won a lot of money and jumped up and down, hugging the person next to her.
After eating, I asked the nurse, “Can I use this phone? To make an international call?”
“Sure,” she said. “You will be billed, though.”
Which made me wonder how I would pay for any of this: the hospital stay, the dinner, the rice pudding. “How much is it?” I asked. “For, um, all of this?” I waved my hand around to indicate what I meant.
“You have travel insurance,” she explained. “We got your information from your passport. It covers emergency medical expenses.”
“Oh.”
“But not the phone call.”
“How much is that?”
“To the United States? I believe it’s seven U.S. dollars a minute. You will see the charge on your hospital bill.”
“I need to call my mom.”
“Of course. Here,” she said, rolling the nightstand closer to my bedside. “Dial 00 to call internationally, then hit 1 and the area code and number you wish to call.”
“Thank you.”
I dialed my mom’s landline in Floral Park, a number that was intrinsically part of me.
She picked up on the third ring. “Hello?”
“Mom?”
“Sweetheart! I’ve been so worried about you. You were supposed to land hours ago. I called your cell, but it went straight to voicemail.”
“I’m sorry. I’m actually calling you from Aruba. I’m still here.”
“Why? Are you okay?”
“I, um…” I hadn’t considered how to go about sharing this development. Over the phone was probably not the right answer. “I fell. I hit my head. They had to take me to the hospital.”
“How did you fall? Do you have a concussion? Where are you now, honey?”
“I’m still at the hospital. I’m okay. They’re monitoring me. But I just wanted to tell you so you wouldn’t worry.”
“Where did you fall? What happened?”
“I, uh. I was in the airport.”
“And?” she pressed.
“I don’t know, Mom. I think I passed out.”
“Were you drinking?”
“No, nothing like that.”
“You’re not taking drugs, are you?”
“God, no.”
“Then what was it? You’re being weird. Tell me what happened.”
“I, just. I’m sorry, Mom. I gotta run. I’ll let you know when I have new flight information.”
“Wait—”
“Talk to you soon,” I said. “Love you.” I hung up before she could respond.
***
Sometimes you keep things from the people you love.
I went through the motions of being discharged from the hospital the morning of January 4.
After a whole extra day of observation, I was concussion-free, my head bandage was replaced by a much smaller one, and a look in the mirror showed me I’d been through the ringer.
I asked a nurse for a razor so I could shave off my beard to match my head, because I looked weird.
It was a mistake; I looked even less like myself without facial hair.
But it all tracked; I didn’t feel like myself, so why should I look like myself?
A taxi took me to the airport, where I was able to book a new flight on JetBlue at noon. I went through all the same motions as I had two days prior, except without the promise of sitting with Harmony for the five-and-a-half-hour flight home.
My mind was a tornado of spinning thoughts, so on the plane, I took out my notebook and opened it to a clean page.
I started writing a letter to her. I wanted to explain everything that happened.
I told her what I’d hoped the morning would have been like, and I said how sorry I was that we overslept.
It was like that movie The Butterfly Effect, I wrote, but I wouldn’t have changed anything about our night together.
And maybe this was the universe’s way of showing me that my father was really gone. Moved on.
Maybe it was time for me to move on, too.
I tried to imagine how she must have felt when I didn’t show up at the airport for our flight. Would she have been angry? Worried? Both? I wouldn’t want her to ever feel those things on my account.
I knew that when the plane landed, I’d be able to check my phone, and I was sure I’d have at least one message from her. Probably more. She was such a worrier.
I realized that I also never asked her to make things official during our night in the bungalow.
I meant to. I was just so swept up in our time together.
And I kept thinking I’d have more time. But when we overslept, she was upset and we rushed to get her back to her mom, so the timing was bad then.
We would figure it all out, though. We had to. What we had was so magical, it would be impossible for her not to hear me out, and then I could ask her to be my girlfriend.
Happily-ever-after.
My bigger fear was actually my mom. I didn’t know how I was going to tell her I had seen my father—that he was in Aruba, of all places. With a younger woman and a boy.
A whole new family.
It dawned on me then that maybe the child wasn’t his.
They looked like father and son, though. Even if the boy wasn’t his, he certainly behaved like they were related.
That hurt the most. He traded us in for something that didn’t look much different. Younger, sure. Newer. But still, a small family of three: a mom, dad, and son.
Why wasn’t our family of three good enough for him?
I wasn’t as close with my mother as I had been when I was a kid, but we were still close enough that I didn’t want to hurt her.
So, on the plane ride home, I decided I would leave it alone. If he wanted to live the same life in an alternate universe, let him.
He was dead in my book, anyway.