Chapter 49
Forty-Nine
“Ms. Conway,” the doctor calls, pulling Nash and I from the chairs in the waiting room.
I set a Styrofoam cup of coffee on a table, unsure how long I’ve been holding it or where it even came from.
“Dr. Leon,” she says, extending a hand.
Nash takes charge and guides introductions.
“He’s stable,” the doctor explains. “For now.”
“What happened?” I ask.
She looks cautiously between Nash and me. It takes seconds—two tops—but it’s telling. A too-short calm before a storm that will never end. Nash’s hand tightens around mine.
“Your father is in organ failure, Ms. Conway,” she says with a swallow.
“Like he needs a transplant?”
“Like—” She pauses again; these conversations must never get easier, even with all the practice they get. “He’s terminal.”
Terminal. What a terrible word. My mom’s “I sent you here to say goodbye” blares in my ears once again. She knew. Everyone knew. I should have seen it, but maybe I didn’t want to. Who meets a dad for the first time when he’s running out of it?
I claw at my neck. This can’t be right.
“How long?” Nash asks.
“We—”
“What can we do?” I cut her off, pulling away from Nash. “How can we get more time?”
She gives me a grim look. “Ms. Conway, he shouldn’t even be here now. He’s known for months this was coming. And you should know, your father has a DNR. We have him in a room where he’s comfortable, but that’s about all we can do. If—”
“If what?” I demand, eyes burning with tears I refuse to cry.
“If he goes into cardiac or respiratory arrest—both likely given his condition—there’s nothing we can do.”
“Nothing you can do?” There’s so much heat in my voice it stops people around us. “You’re just going to watch him die?”
Nash takes my hand again, this time refusing to let go even when I try to pull away.
“You need to go be with him,” the doctor says frankly. Like it’s just that easy. Like watching the dad who has only been in my life for five seconds disappear is no big deal. “Make him feel at home.”
Out of nowhere, Sunny’s voice is in my head. “We all just walkin’ each other home.” My heart shatters in the din of the hospital and there’s no stopping the tears I’ve held in.
The doctor walks us to Cap’s room, stopping outside the door and giving us a tight-lipped smile before leaving us to go in alone.
“I don’t know if I can do this,” I tell Nash. “I don’t know how to do this.”
His smile is slight, but for a split second, the curve of that line sets the world straight.
I don’t want to walk into this room, but if I have to, there’s not another person on this planet I’d want next to me when I do.
If Jonathan were here, he’d be walking me through the steps and making sure end-of-life arrangements are up to date, but Nash won’t do any of that. He’ll just be here. He already is.
“Nobody does,” he says gently, pushing my bangs out of my face. His shirt covered in cacti is the weightless paradox to the anvil crushing my chest.
“I barely got two weeks with him.” My voice breaks. “That’s not enough time. That’s not—” I sniff. “Fair.”
Nash kisses my hand he’s holding. “I was halfway to marrying you in two weeks, Rue Conway.” He says it like some things in life are just that simple.
Like beginnings and endings and the time in between are irrelevant.
Maybe he’s right. Maybe love is just love regardless of how long we get it for.
“And you could have fifty more years with him, but it still wouldn’t be enough. ”
I nod, grip his hand as tight as I can, and with a shaky breath, push the door open, trying my best to smile when my eyes meet my dad’s.
He has the nerve to grunt, annoyed. “Took you long enough,” he gruffs out. “Where’s Penny?”
My father is dying right before my eyes, and I manage the situation by forcing documents of lost gold into each of our hands.
I might not be able to control anything else in my life, but I can at least control this.
I can focus on old papers that lead nowhere instead of the pending tragedy at hand and pretend to have some semblance of say in how any of this ends.
While I scour every line, Cap lies slightly inclined in his bed, barely enough strength to hold the papers.
Every breath is a struggle and sounds like an old wind-up toy that’s reached the end of its wind.
I pass Nash a document, but he doesn’t look at it, focused solely on keeping a steady conversation going with Cap.
It’s the opposite of what I asked him to do, and it makes me love him more.
“I’m going to read the letter out loud,” I announce, neither of them objecting as I begin.
As I read, I pause for us to reflect on where we’ve been. Magnolia Plantation, Angel Oak, Folly Beach, Heyward-Washington House, White Point Garden, and the one that makes my dad find enough strength to laugh until he wheezes: St. Michael’s Church.
“Never thought I’d be so proud to see my kid in cuffs,” he says through labored breaths.
If he wasn’t dying, I’d slap him.
“Can you focus?” I snip, before resuming my read. “‘We will visit your Legare cousins as your father once told me they moved here before the war.
“I beg of you not to ask how I hav acquired the means to give you all this as I will name it good fortune after every thing the war took. I hope we hav four sons to fill our new house. but first, know I missed you every day of those six years I was away—’”
“That’s not right,” Nash interjects, leaning back in his seat and crossing one foot over the opposite knee.
My eyes narrow. “What isn’t?”
“Civil War was four years, he wouldn’t have been gone six. Troops didn’t even start training until ’61 and the war was over in ’65.”
Cap’s eyes are closed but he grunts softly in agreement.
“What?” I reread it, confused. “Why didn’t you say anything before?”
Nash shrugs, giving me a suggestive smirk. “I never cared about the gold.”
Even in the sterile atmosphere of the hospital, the admission makes me smile. Just a little.
“The war lasted four years—maybe six is something?”
“Two numbers,” Cap pipes in.
“Four kids and six years,” Nash says.
“What does that mean? Is this—” There might as well be a live parade marching through my chest. This is something. My whole body knows it. “A four and six. And—” I reread the section of the letter. “And a Legare cousin who nobody can confirm.”
Nash straightens; for the first time he looks like he thinks we might be onto something. “46 Legare.”
Another weak grunt from Cap and I already have my phone pulled out. On a real estate website, I find the house at 46 Legare with images.
“It’s an address, but—” I face the phone toward Nash, a photo of the immaculate home filling the screen. “It was built in 1964.”
“Won’t work,” Nash says. “House built in ’64 would have torn everything up during construction. Someone would have found it.” He shakes his head, lips in a tight line. “Not it.”
He’s right. I reskim the letter. “He says ‘first,’” I say. “‘but first, know I missed you every day of those six years I was away.’”
I look from the letter to them, Bennie’s words to my dad falling straight from the depressing drop ceiling. “Probably do it backward—that always works in the movies.”
“Could first mean the six is first?” I ask. “Sixty-four instead of forty-six?”
Once again, I have Nash’s attention, but this time it pulls him from the chair to stand next to me.
A new search on my phone reveals a house in disrepair.
The photos are old—the house was last sold about twenty years ago, and the pictures were never updated.
I swipe through them all, nothing standing out on the inside except atrocious décor from the eighties.
But at the images of the backyard, I freeze.
Because in the middle of the overgrown yard, there’s a stone bench—it’s old. We will sit upon a bench in the back yard and never forget the riches we hav. I wordlessly pass the phone to Nash, zoomed in as far as I can on the stone and what appears to be the name Maggie carved into the side.
“You see this bench, Dad?” I ask, my brain firing in a million different directions. “Or ever try this address?”
“Tried everything, kiddo,” he says, opening his eyes before letting them fall closed.
That’s a ridiculous answer. “Nash?”
“Every other lead we’ve followed had a million holes but .
. .” Standing next to me, he takes his glasses off.
“I can’t tell you a single reason why this couldn’t be something.
That house is on the route of our tours.
It’s old. Built in 1860. It—” He laughs like he can’t believe what he’s about to say. “Shit, Rue. It might be it.”
“Holy shit,” I say in a whisper. Because: Holy shit. Holy. Shit. “We have to go see it.” I shove the papers in my purse. “Right now.”
At the same time, Nash and I look at my dad, as if remembering the harsh reality we managed to take a momentary hiatus from.
Cap reads our hesitation. “Go.” He bats a weak hand through the air. He looks fragile, so fragile I don’t want to leave. “I won’t die before you get back and tell me what you find.”
“That’s not funny,” I snap.
Nash is already at the door, me on his heels when I stop and go back to the hospital bed. I lean down and hug Cap the best I can.
He wraps one arm around me: It’s significant.
When I pull back, my smile is plastic and come apart imminent. He sees, because he barks, “Don’t come back without Penny.”
It turns the tears at my eyes to a laugh on my lips.