“Hi, where are you?”
“Downstairs,” I say. “They said I have to wait for nurses’ rounds to be done.”
“I’ll come down.”
She hangs up, and I shoot off another text to Leo.
At hospital. Waiting to be let up.
The elevator doors open and out step a variety of colored scrubs, a young man pushing an older man in a wheelchair, and my mother.
She looks smaller than she usually does, thinner, and it’s this that hits me first. Not her call, not the hospital, not him being here, but her physical form.
I go over to her. She gives me a tight hug.
“Let me just talk to them,” she says, gesturing toward the help desk.
She goes over and exchanges a few words with the same mid-thirties man who helped me. This time the man smiles and nods his head toward me. I hand over my ID and am printed a name sticker.
“You’re all set,” he says.
I follow Marcella back to the elevators. When they close us inside we are, miraculously, alone.
“How is he doing?” I ask.
“Pretty good,” she says. “We just saw the doctor. He says we have to make a decision about how to move forward.”
“What does that mean?”
“It means his heart is weak right now. It’s not getting enough blood.”
The doors open. The cardio floor is calm but buzzing, Nurses move in and out of rooms and around one another. Phones at the station ring. I suddenly realize how unprepared for this I am. How woefully ignorant I’ve been. How could I have questioned her? How could I not have raced here even sooner? Run across the country on my two bare feet?
“He’s in here,” Marcella says, and her tone is soft, kind. She sounds like my mom.
She peels back the curtain, and there Dad is, low in bed, the machines beeping, low and slow.
“Dad,” I whisper, and he stirs.
He’s not sitting up, not all the way, but he’s not lying down, either. When I take another two steps inside, I can see his face.
“He’s OK,” my mom says. The first cheerful thing she’s said to me since that phone call, and I know it’s for his benefit. She smiles, tight and even, as I move closer. In another two steps, I’m at his bedside.
There are wires in his veins and under his nose, and his hair is flat to his face, the result of no showers, no product, but other than that he looks like Dad.
He opens his eyes and smiles lightly at me. Happy I’m here. Unsurprised.
“Honey,” he says softly.
“Hey, Dad.” I feel my throat constrict. “How are you?”
“Been better,” he says, but the first word gets swallowed so all that comes out isbetter.
“You’re doing good,” my mom says. She goes to the other side, smooths the hair off his forehead. I notice some stray iodine on his cheek. “We are just waiting for Dr. Gupta to tell us what he thinks.”
“They want to open me up again,” Dad says to me. His words get stronger and clearer the more he speaks. “You heard that.”
I look at my mom. I feel, all at once, like I don’t want to betray her. “We should listen to the doctors,” I say.
