Chapter 50
My dad wasn’t dead, he just shot himself in the foot.
I helped my mom lower him onto the grass bed in front of the house.
Blood grew on his shoe the way sunflowers open in sped-up movie montages to show the passing of time.
I was entranced by my father’s red foot, the small hole in his shoe, trying to understand it.
But my thoughts kept tripping right up to the point where I understood what was happening, then flickered off.
I was still at the kitchen table, trying to turn back time.
Would they chop it off? Would he be confined to a wheelchair?
It was a floundering feeling, having no grasp on what came next.
I couldn’t look at his face. I didn’t want to see the pain on it.
“What do you think you’re doing?” my mom said.
I blinked. “I’m tourniqueting.” I sounded like someone I didn’t know, like a little girl.
My dad’s face had settled into a calm shock when I finally looked, his eyes damp.
My mom was eerily calm too. With her palm, she drew circles on his chest. “You’ll be all right.
The ambulance is coming.” Her resigned tone as she told him to breathe felt ominous, like a shadow crawling up the entire street.
I was embarrassed when the ambulance came wailing toward our house, announcing that we were the ones to whom something bad had happened.
Curtains were pushed aside, faces appeared in windows, sleepily alarmed.
The sky had darkened, deep pink stripes.
Our next-door neighbors wandered out in their night clothes, saying, “Is everything all right?” as if ambulances appeared when everything was all right.
I wanted to scream at them for looking at us.
I became very worried about my hair, the frizzy curls around my face.
Taking my palm, I smoothed them down with a compulsive focus that became less about my appearance and more about having an object under my control.
The police arrived, concentrating their efforts on the “crime scene” while the EMTs tended to my father.
When they said only one person could accompany him in the ambulance, my mom told me to go.
I looked at her, confused. Her blush had smeared with sweat, her curls flat from the evening’s humidity.
She didn’t entertain my look of confusion and got into the car with Auntie Lisa.
Through the rear window, I could see them talking, Aunt Lisa shaking her head, then my mom shaking her head before her face poured into the cup of her hand.
Even as my father was lifted onto a gurney, rolled into the back of the ambulance, tied up with tubes, he insisted that he was fine.
“You know you shot yourself, right? With a literal fucking gun.” My voice was so hoarse I wondered if I had screamed and hadn’t realized it. This sometimes happened to me when I woke from a nightmare, hearing a scream but not knowing it’s mine.
My dad said he was fine. Ignoring him, I asked one of the EMTs, “Is he going to be okay?”
“A gunshot wound to the foot is usually not fatal, but we’ll have to see.”
I didn’t say anything, just awkwardly strapped myself into the fold-down wall seat while we sped to Holy Cross.
I evacuated to the cliffs on the coasts with coconut cookies and felt a rush of peace, letting my daydream spirit me away.
Only later did I realize my hands had lost circulation, I’d been squeezing them so tightly between my thighs.
I’d never seen a hospital visit unfold so fast. It was like in America we waited until people were probably dying before finding a sense of urgency.
There was a lot of medical jargon volleyed between the EMTs and nurses I didn’t understand.
It seemed their biggest concern was blood loss and whether the bullet had exploded or stayed intact.
I didn’t remember seeing my mom and aunt walk in, but suddenly my mom’s cold, bony hand was gripping mine.
Her mouth was a focused line when the nurse spoke to us.
She kept saying, “yes, Doctor,” even though the man was a nurse, but it didn’t matter.
We weren’t allowed in the operating room, so the three of us sat in the waiting area.
Waiting felt like being pummeled by a force much bigger than me, as if it were designed to make me confront the scale of my powerlessness.
I knew he wasn’t going to die, but what if he was permanently disabled?
Our lives would change, and there was already too much change whirling around us.
My aunt didn’t seem to mind waiting. She was playing Tetris on her phone while my mom sat with her legs crossed, rotating her ankle.
I recalled her running after my dad in her ratty bathrobe, the way it flew open revealing her splotchy chest, red from scratching her eczema in her sleep.
Beneath my fear had been a disgust for the whole scene, how she nearly tripped racing down the porch while he lugged himself into the car like a log, nodding like her head might roll forward, everything to appease him.
But looking at her now, I felt something else entirely. Protective. That was the only way to describe the feeling, like I was a bird wanting to wrap her whole body inside my feathered cocoon.
I placed a hand on her back. She gave me a sad smile without looking at me. “He’s gonna be all right. You know that, don’t you?”
“I know,” I said. “How are you gonna be?”
She laughed. It sounded like a snort. “I’m gonna be all right too.”
The doctor walked into the waiting room a few hours later.
She looked like a TV doctor with a peppy blond ponytail and enviable bone structure.
Good news. The bullet hadn’t exploded, which meant they were able to extract most of it.
But since the foot has a lot of bones, some were broken.
She named which ones, but I didn’t really hear it.
They’d keep him overnight to monitor, but already we were being handed aftercare brochures, the next several weeks narrated to us in the form of wound dressing, signs of infection, wheelchair, walker, crutch rentals.
My mom turned to me mid-lecture and said, “Are you getting all this?”
“What? I—aren’t you listening?”
“I’m not the one who’s going to be taking care of him.”
When the doctor left, I asked, “Are we getting a home nurse or something?”
My mom was twirling her ankle again. I thought of my dad’s bloody foot, the hole that was in it now. “Sam is my Realtor.”
This admission only added pieces to the scrambled puzzle instead of putting anything together. “What? Are we selling the house?”
She said, “I’ve found a place. I’ll still be in the city. But I’m moving out at the end of the month.”
I must’ve looked confused because she said, “I’m tired.
I can’t keep doing this, I can’t. I know it’s not a good time.
It was never going to be a good time. I was planning to tell you two.
How was I supposed to know your father was going to up and shoot himself today? ” Her laugh contained a yawn in it.
“Is it temporary?”
“No. But I’ll always be here for you.”
All that protectiveness I’d felt drained, an angry shock rising in its place. “Yeah, except for when I actually need you. How are we going to pay for the house?”
“I’ll help some, but you need to start putting in, especially since your dad probably can’t work for a while.”
My nightmare had materialized: I was stuck with my father, doing all the dreary shit my mom had to do around the house. Maybe I’d just let it fall apart. I was good at that.
She licked her thumb, reaching over to wipe the crust from my cheek. I slapped her hand away.
“Don’t be that way, Catherine. I’m here.”
“You keep saying that and yet you’re leaving.”
My aunt briefly glanced up from her game. My mom passed her a look I couldn’t interpret. I stood, wobbling slightly, and stormed toward the elevators, stabbing the down button with my finger until it arrived.
In the gift shop, I flipped through “Get Well Soon” cards in a fury.
Covid had cannibalized my early twenties, made me an anxious wreck.
I’d been climbing out of that feeling when the election hit like a tidal wave, clearing away that fresh, hard-earned hope, already brittle from watching Gaza’s obliteration.
Now this: How long would I be taking care of my dad?
I might as well crush my twenties up and dump them in the nearest trash can.
On my way out, my wrist got tangled in a thin balloon ribbon by the door. I drove my fist into the squeaky balloon and it jerked back like someone’s surprised face.
“Please don’t punch that,” the cashier said. I mumbled “Sorry,” then stepped through the hospital’s sliding doors into the cool March night.
My aunt called. I didn’t answer. Scrolling through my call log, I let my thumb hang over Jay’s name.
He was who I wanted to speak to. He’d say the right words in a soft, assuring tone.
He’d stop whatever he was doing, call me Kitty Cat, listening quietly as I rambled.
Then he’d offer a gentle solution, one I couldn’t come up with on my own.
But what if I called and he was with the girl from the gallery? What if he didn’t pick up?
I pressed the green call button.
Tristan said, “Hello?” in a groggy voice.
“My dad shot himself in the foot.”
There was a long pause. “Uh… hi?”
“I’m at the hospital now. He’s gonna be fine but.”
“Oh, wait, what, you’re serious? W-what happened? It was on purpose?”
“I have no idea. I think he was planning to shoot the guy he thought my mom was having an affair with but didn’t know where to find him, then accidentally shot his own foot.”
“Oh my God, I—fuck, are you okay? I’m still kind of confused—I was asleep. Is your dad gonna be all right?”
My cries came out in a hiccupping rush. I sank onto the bench outside, relinquishing myself to the reality that everything was going wrong.
“I’m sorry, I’m making you cry more. I’m bad at this.”
“You’re not, I—” I was sobbing now and couldn’t stop. I realized he’d never heard me like this. There was rustling on the line, like he was sitting up in bed, turning on a table lamp, keys jangling.
“Hello?” I said.
“I’m here. I’m getting dressed. I’m coming to get you.”
Sniffling, I said, “You don’t even know where I am.”
“Well, you’re gonna tell me, aren’t you?”
The sliding doors parted. My aunt walked out, for once with no theatrics.
“Actually, could I call you later?”
“You sure?”
“Yes. Thank you.”
He told me to text him. We hung up. My aunt lowered herself beside me, the smell of hotel peppermints faded. “Do you want to talk?”
“What’s there to talk about?”
“It’s been quite the day.”
I didn’t say anything. Part of me believed that none of this would’ve happened had she stayed in New York.
“You’ve got to know your mommy hasn’t been happy in a long time. She’s been trying and trying. How much does she have to try? Are you hearing me?”
I felt like a child giving her the silent treatment, but my mouth was incapable of holding sound. Tears slid into the dip of my lip.
I asked, “What if he killed himself?”
She went quiet, staring ahead. “No one told him to get a gun, you know. Or to wield it like a child. Your mommy saved him from being stupid.”
The sliding doors swooshed open again, and my mom came toward us. She was still wearing her bathrobe, which I hadn’t registered until then.
She said, “Your dad wants to see you.”
In the hospital room, my dad was wearing a cotton gown, a paper wristband like he was headed to some bleak music festival.
I pulled the lone chair in the corner up to his bed.
His head was lolling a bit, I gathered, from the pain medications—I prayed they hadn’t put a recovering addict on Oxy, but that was a problem I didn’t have the heart to deal with right then.
“How are you feeling?”
He slurred, “I wanna go home.”
“You’ll be home soon. How’s your foot?”
“It’s got a hole in it.”
“Okay.”
CNN was muted on the mounted wall TV. My dad’s eyes shifted to watch it.
I only really knew how to talk to him if we were talking past each other.
On the TV, there was footage of men in khakis, their faces blurred, handcuffing an Arab man in a nondescript hallway.
The scrolling headline at the bottom read: Columbia graduate student and pro-Palestinian activist detained by ICE.
My stomach dropped. Whatever scrap of safety I’d been holding on to blew away like it was nothing.
My dad looked like a giant baby in that white gown. It didn’t fit him properly, sliding off his shoulder. “If I die in here, it’s that little blond doctor.”
“You’re not gonna die.”
“That’s what they do to us in these places, kill us.”
“Why would they kill you?”
He looked at me like he’d failed to teach me anything. In many ways, his lifelong paranoia was paying off. “ ’Cause that’s what they do.”
I wanted to ask him, if he was so afraid of dying, why he’d been this careless with a gun, why he’d gotten one in the first place when, by design, all it brought was death.
Instead, I said, “Mommy’s moving out.” I hadn’t meant to say it. But also, I wanted to talk to him about it. It was the both of us she was leaving after all.
He paused. “I know.”
“Do you wanna… talk about it?”
“What’s there to talk about?”
He groped for the remote and unmuted the TV.
The sound of CNN filled the small, blue room: the miserable soundtrack to my life.
It was the sound of people wailing in a foreign language, the self-important monotone of network anchors, a biblical flood of bad news.
They were now talking about a man in Maryland who was deported to a prison in El Salvador even though that was the one country he wasn’t supposed to be sent to.
I wondered if his family lived close by.
My dad’s eyes were pink and tired. He was blinking quickly. I thought he was going to start crying. Instead, he turned up the TV volume, then held the remote to his chest.