Looking up at the spinning ceiling, I heard a voice exclaim, “Oh my gosh, are you okay?” Then some scrambling. Scuffling. Moving about. I closed my eyes and heard two final words: “I’m sorry.”
Some words stay with you forever. They imprint. They become the soundtrack of your life.
I’d imagine the wordsI doat the altar are those kinds of words.
Or the first time your soulmate saysI love you.
My soundtrack didn’t have those words yet. They had theIt’ll be okaymy mother offered me when I asked her if Dad would ever come back.
And theI’m sorrythat he said the day he left.
Those same two words shot through my airspace with the precision of a dart hitting a bull’s-eye. The exactitude of a GPS taking you back to your house in Floral Park, the sinking feeling in the pit of your stomach as you watch him drive away for the last time.
Behind my eyelids, his face was ten, twenty years younger. I saw him teach me how to ride a bicycle and play catch with me in the yard. I saw him clapping at my fifth-grade play and driving me home from my first boy-girl dance. I saw him crouch down next to me and watch as airplanes took off down the runway when I was just a little kid.
I tried to move, but my body weighed a thousand pounds.
My father was just steps away from me, on vacation with his new family.
After all this time, he was right there.
And then my world went black.
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, señor,” 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.
