I hung up. “I don’t know. I have to go to the hospital, though. Something’s wrong. I think it might be my mom. I feel sick.” I tried dialing everyone. My mother, my father, my grandparents. No one answered.
Gavin got up and started rushing around, collecting my shoes and sweater. He helped me put them on and then carried me very carefully down the stairs and put me into his car.
At the hospital, he hoisted my wheelchair from the trunk and brought it around to the passenger side, helping me in. He rushed me through the front sliding doors and yelled something at the receptionist. She pointed to the elevator and said, “Third floor.”
We were greeted by a swarm of crying family members standing just outside the elevators on the intensive care floor. Kiki was hysterical, sitting in a chair, hunched over and sobbing into her knees. My mother was on the other side of the room, near the waiting room, looking shocked, tears streaming down her face. When we made eye contact, she collapsed into my grandfather’s arms.
“What’s going on?!” I yelled. “Where’s Dad?”
My aunt Marla came to me and knelt in front of my wheelchair. “Penny, your dad had a heart attack brought on by the pneumonia. They brought him here and he coded three times. They did everything they could.” She could barely speak. “He’s gone.”
Gone? Where? Where did he go?
I stared at her, uncomprehendingly. “He fought hard, but they couldn’t save him. I’m so sorry. We’re all going to miss him so much.”
The earth shifted on its axis then. When someone says the wordshe’s goneto you, it’s hard to get your bearings. Your brain is fighting to process the information and protect you from it at the same time. In the immediate aftermath, the finality of death is impossible to accept.
“Where?” I didn’t shed a tear. “Where is he?” I said, blank faced. My insides felt cavernous; all I could feel was my aunt’s voice echoinghe’s gone, over and over again.
She took my hand as Gavin pushed my chair down the hall toward the ICU bay. Inside the room, my grandmother was sitting next to a bed, holding someone’s hand. There were no beeping machines, no monitors... just my father’s lifeless body.
I was in shock. My grandmother looked at me, crying, and said, “It’s not natural.”
“What do you mean, Gram?” My voice was weak.
“For a mother to bury her child.”
I looked at my father again.
He was her child.
Gavin pushed me close to the opposite side of the bed so I could take my father’s other hand in mine. That’s when I knew... when the reality finally hit me. Hewasgone. I couldn’t feel him anymore. His body was lifeless... soulless.
The moon, the sky, the stars, all the planets in the universe—they all crashed into me with one single, heavy thud. There was nowhere to go but sink into myself and try not to be crushed by the weight of it all. My head involuntarily dropped into my lap and I sobbed.
“Please God, no. Not you, Daddy.”
21.Fourteen Years Ago
GAVIN
You can’t feel anything but helpless when you see someone you love suffer such a momentous loss. What could I do?
Penny stayed in the hospital room, sobbing into her lap until they finally came in to wheel away Liam’s body. No one else was there; Penny was the only one who wouldn’t leave his side.
“What are you doing with him?” she asked the orderlies.
“We have to take him now,” one of the men said. At the same moment, a grief counselor and a priest came into the room.
“You can bless him,” Penny said, “but he wasn’t religious. I don’t even know if he believed in God.” She looked up at me as more tears fell from her eyes. “There was still so much I didn’t know about him, and I’ll never get to ask.” She broke down again. The priest said a prayer and knelt beside Penny’s chair. He tried to comfort her.
“Your father is at peace, my child. He’s not in pain.”
Penny continued sobbing.
I lifted her out of her wheelchair, her knee brace clinking against the side of a small couch. She didn’t flinch. I sat down, holding her on my lap. Her arms were around my shoulders, her face in my neck. Tears and snot were soaking the collar of my T-shirt. She was hyperventilating.
Rubbing her back up and down, I repeated, “Breathe. Take a breath. Breathe, Penny.”
