Begin Reading #8
An image floats into his head unbidden, Rusty and Blake kneeling side by side near the tire, working in harmony.
Deep breath. Four-count hold. Exhale.
Evan takes a tentative step forward.
The doors slide open in response.
Something catches in his throat and he reverses again.
He mashes his closed eyes in circles with the heels of his hands, the sensation more pleasing than painful—though not by much.
“Maybe I can help, hon?”
A woman in her seventies is emerging from the lobby to claim him, a spill of air-conditioning conveyed with her movement. Thin arms protrude from her teal scrubs, bones pronounced at her elbows. A volunteer name tag identifies her as GWENDOLYN.
She gives him a searching look. Her hair, the color of fresh snow, falls in wisps about her walnut skin. “Hard to come and see loved ones.”
Evan says, “Right.”
She reaches for his arm, her fingers slender, skeletal. The touch at his biceps is as light as a bird nest. He wonders if she, too, is chronically ill. It seems she might be volunteering here to gird herself for what is coming.
He allows her to guide him inside.
The place looks empty, understaffed. The sole nurse manning the central station is arguing about a late prescription with someone over the phone.
“Who you here to see?” Gwendolyn asks.
“My…” His throat is dry. He clears it. “Jacob Baridon.”
“Oh, Mr. Jacob. He’s a card.” A knowing wink. “The joker, maybe.”
Evan sees how desperately she wants him to smile, but he cannot. He is staring up the vivid white corridor at the row of closed doors.
“You’re a relative?”
Evan says, “Kind of.”
They are coasting up the hall, past reception. Gwendolyn leads him, his arm in hers. She is so light her footsteps make no sound. “You got here just in time.” She gives his arm an encouraging little shake. “You should know, hon, he’s right at the end.”
They reach room 12, Jacob’s name scrawled on a whiteboard in Magic Marker along with a schedule of nurse visits initialed by different hands.
Evan balks.
That’s the only word for it. He’s halted so abruptly that Gwendolyn slides from his arm. She stands in front of the closed door, examining him.
“Complicated,” she says.
He gives a slight nod.
“I understand. I’ve spent a good amount of time with him.”
“Why?”
“Because no one else wants to.”
His appreciation is unbounded. “Thank you.”
Her forehead crinkles, the skin paper thin. “For what?”
“Being real.”
“Go on, young man,” she says. “Do what you have to do.”
Evan rests his hand on the door lever. Lowers his head. Closes his eyes.
Inside the room, country music is playing, something twangy and soulful.
He enters.
Jacob Baridon looks like hell.
Stubble sprouts erratically from the sallow skin of his face, patches at his chin and the edges of his lips.
Last time Evan saw him he was lanky, loose in his ostrich-quill boots, but now he’s mortuary thin, already in the grasp of death.
He still has that great hair he cared so much about, a salt-and-pepper tousle well-suited to hospital bedhead.
A pulse oximeter is clipped to his finger, and what looks like a morphine drip threads into his arm.
Evan bears zero resemblance to him; Jacob was a significantly more handsome man when he was fully alive.
The room, smaller than Evan’s walk-in closet, smells of urine and iodine.
A Louis L’Amour dime Western with a torn cover rests on the nightstand next to a white plastic pitcher of water and a cup of ice.
A ragged straw Stetson Gunfighter tilts from the back post of the visitor chair.
The radio is soft, a throaty female crooner playing with a melody, working an almost-yodel into the transitions.
Baridon’s red saggy eyes slide druggedly over to fix on Evan.
If he recognizes Evan, he gives no indication.
Then he says, “Came to gloat?”
His voice is a croak, and it takes a moment for Evan to arrange the sounds into words.
He says, “No.”
“Vulture-circling for money then? ’Cuz I don’t got none.”
“No.”
“Just came to see me on my Medicaid holiday?” With great effort, Baridon spreads his arms, trailing wires and cords. Crepey skin sags from his humeri. He looks like a scarecrow. “The last hurrah.”
Winded from the exertion, he lets his head fall back onto the pillow. His pulse ox shows a flagging 82 percent, the alerts regular.
Evan stands there. There is nothing else for him to do.
“You’re the son of—what’s her name? The rich one, right? College girl?”
Evan feels his head give the faintest nod.
“How’s she doing?”
“She’s dead.”
Evan told him this last time, the one time they met.
“Wow,” Jacob says. “Life, huh?”
A precise repeat of their last go-around on this.
“So how’d you hear about me if it wasn’t from … the rich lady?”
“Veronica LeGrande,” Evan says calmly. “That’s her name. You will learn her fucking name.”
Jacob’s gummy eyes flare with what seems like amusement. “Why should I?”
“Because I’m two feet from your IV line, there’s a syringe on the tray, and dying from an air embolism can be excruciatingly painful.”
Jacob’s mouth gapes. A horrible cawing sound comes out. At first Evan thinks he is crying but then he realizes it is an attempt at laughter.
“So … I see I did get … some piss and vinegar into you … after all.” He has to articulate carefully, each word an Everest. His hand, bandaged and catheter-stuck, flares just barely toward the chair. “Sit.”
Evan eases between the foot of the bed and the wall, lifts the cowboy hat from the chair, and sits bedside. The proximity to this man is unsettling. Tufts of nasal hair outgrowing the nostrils, white gunk at the corners of his lips.
“Hand me … ice.” His breath carries the rot of the grave.
Holding his own breath, Evan leans across him, grabs the thin paper cup, nestles it in his hand.
Jacob rattles a pellet of ice into his mouth. “So dry. And these … sores.” An eyebrow cocks rakishly. “Ain’t the kind you get from fun … tell ya that.”
The blood-pressure cuff wheezes to life, takes its reading, hisses an exhalation.
Jacob closes his eyes. His chest sinks.
Stillness.
It lifts.
Without realizing it, Evan has tensed on his chair. It takes a conscious effort to relax his legs.
The singer keeps on, bathing the room in melancholy: Why can’t you be blue over me?
“That goddamned broad’s voice … puts a fist in my throat … every time.” Jacob’s eyes stay closed, it seems, in appreciation.
It is stunning how little Evan knows of this man.
His mind pulls to Blake in that run-down bungalow. How the hell did he muster the courage to ask what he needed to ask?
The spaces between the pulse ox beeps quicken.
Jacob’s eyes stay closed. His lips move faintly. Evan strains to hear what he is saying. “… ’ronica … gran…”
He’s down to agonal breathing, the words pushed out from his stomach.
“Yes,” Evan says.
At the response, Jacob alerts slightly, lids twitching. It’s as if he’d forgotten Evan was there.
His mouth bunches and parts, lips chapped, teeth a ragged yellow ledge. His voice comes as little more than a fading rasp: “… scared…”
His hand gropes the sheets, bunching them, fragile skin tenting beneath the clear adhesive film. It edges closer to Evan’s side and Evan realizes with horror that he wants Evan to hold his hand.
He squeezes his eyes shut hard. Four-count inhalation. Hold for four. Exhale for four. Hold empty.
He takes his father’s hand.
Callused and dry, the back splotched with bruises.
Jacob’s head rolls on the pillow. His eyes take on a softness. Words leak out with his breath. “Evan … tell you…”
Evan leans forward.
It takes a full thirty seconds for him to realize that Jacob has died.
It’s the silence that lets him know. No more beeps from the pulse ox.
Evan wants to scream. He wants to shove on Baridon’s chest and heave air out through the memory of his vocal cords to hear what the final words would have been.
The song finishes on the radio and something new comes on.
And another song after that.
Evan is still dumbly holding Baridon’s hand.
He cannot believe that this is what happened, that this is how this ends.
There’s movement at the door and then the harried nurse enters.
“Oh,” she says. “Oh dear.”
Gwendolyn meets him in the hall. It’s bizarre how empty the place feels, all closed doors, vacant stations, and beeping machinery.
She’s already peeked inside room 12 and knows the score. “Must have been hard for you,” she says.
“Not really.”
“No matter how ready we think we are, it still comes as a shock.”
Bright Texas sun shines through the sliding doors ahead. As he keeps toward them, they seem to recede, a cruel trick.
“Nothing can quite prepare you for it.”
Evan is eager to get out of this place with its dying flowers and ghostly corridors. He has to tell himself not to sprint.
“Would you like to speak to a grief counselor?”
“No.”
At last the doors part before them, heat rushing at his face along with the smell of hot asphalt. He steps onto the pavement and blows out a breath, clearing the air of this place from his lungs.
Gwendolyn hovers at his back. “Would you like some more time inside with him? To say goodbye?”
Evan says, “No.”
The rental Jeep is right there in a front parking spot, seven and a half strides away.
He starts for it.
Halts.
He turns around. Walks back to Gwendolyn. Her scrub top has settled down over her shoulders, the V of the collar exposing a wider isosceles of skin. Only now does he notice the four pinpoint tattoos on her throat. Calibration dots prescribing the treatment area for radiation therapy.
This woman, in distress herself, has gone to such lengths to comfort him. He feels utterly incapable of meeting what this moment demands.
He wants to express something to her but his jaw stays locked. He’s as helpless as Blake was standing in that bungalow, trying to find the words to thank Evan.
Gwendolyn’s eyes are seeing him straight through.
Still he cannot speak.
She gets blurry.
And then blurrier yet.
“Sometimes it’s not what we get,” she says, “it’s what we give.” She lifts a hand, touches his cheek. “Thank God, huh?” she says.