“Dad!” Amy said.
The aide reappeared in the doorway. “Family, close friends, and clergyonly. Oh, Reverend March. I didn’t see it was you.”
“Hello, Keisha,” our father said. He was always so polite. I remembered when my sisters’ friends came to our house, how they’d giggle and blush when he walked through the room.
“You know each other?” Amy asked.
“Keisha took care of your mother.”
“And the reverend’s here all the time,” Keisha said.
Of course. Along with stroke survivors and seniors with joint replacements, the rehab center treated wounded warriors with missing limbs and spinal cord and brain injuries.
“I can come back later,” our father said.
“No, we’ll go.” I glanced at Amy. “I don’t want to tire Mr. Laurence.”
“But you haven’t played for him yet,” Amy said.
“You came together?” our father asked.
“They came with me,” Trey said.
“I have other visits to make today, but I can bring Beth home when I’m done. If you’d like to stay,” he added to me.
I looked at the nurse. “Just don’t tire him out,” she said.
The room was quiet, the hum of fluorescent lights broken only by the rattle of dinner carts, the squeak of rubber-soled shoes, and the murmur from the nurses’ station down the hall.
Mr. Laurence watched me without speaking, his eyes like a wounded lion’s. The evening sun slanted through the window. I stood to adjust the blinds so the light didn’t shine in his face.
“Play or don’t play, that’s up to you,” Dan’s voice said quietly in my head.“Reckon he’ll be glad just to see you.”
Maybe I didn’t have to be perfect. Maybe I only needed to be present.
My heart thrummed. I opened my guitar case. “I’m a little out of practice.”
I sat, curled around the guitar, picking softly. The quiet notes vibrated against the silence. I played the old songs I knew he loved, “Sweet Baby James” and Paul Simon’s “American Tune.” The music sounded stiff. Stilted. My fingers stuttered on the strings.
I looked up, ready to apologize.
Mr. Laurence was weeping behind his closed eyes, a shining track sliding from his temples to the wrinkles of his face. Something inside me melted, rushing like breath, filling my lungs, flowing like water under ice.
I started again, quietly, building the melody, trusting the magic to come. The notes seeped and spilled from my guitar, and I slipped inside the music, letting go, letting the feeling come, carrying me away on cascading riffs and eddies of sound.
I don’t know how long I played, caught up in the current, my hands sure and supple, the music pouring from my guitar.
When I looked up again, Mr. Laurence’s eyes were still closed, his chest rising and falling in even breaths.
“Well done,” my father said from the doorway.
I put my guitar away and went into the hall, its walls decorated with crayon rainbows. “I made him cry.”
“Crying can happen after a stroke, even without emotional stimulus,” my father said. “It’s one effect of the stroke on the brain.”
“Oh.”
“But I believe,” he added, “it does his heart good to hear you.”
