“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 inEl 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.
Chapter 51
My phone rang early in the morning. My dad was being discharged tomorrow, and I thought it might be the hospital, still in a dreamy fog when I answered.
“Hey,” Jay said softly.
It was barely eight on the East Coast. I looked at the call to make sure I wasn’t still dreaming. “Hey?”
“Sorry to call so early. I just wanted to see how your dad’s doing. Are you okay?”
I rolled over sluggishly onto my side. “He’s fine. I don’t know what I am right now.”
“You don’t have to be or do anything. You can just be tired and confused or nothing at all.”
“Being nothing feels good.” I yawned. “Oh yeah, and my mom’s moving out in like three weeks. So now I’m the one who’s gonna have to clean my dad’s stinky foot, like, what the fuck.” I was laughing, my stomach muscles seizing. Jay laughed too. Then my laughter dried up, and I was walloped with exhaustion. “I’m sorry for hanging up on you. That was mean and unnecessary.”
“It’s all right. I can never really stay mad at you for long.” I grinned like an idiot against my pillow. He said, “Here’s a weird synchronicity for you. My dad has to get surgery on his knee again so I guess we’ll both be taking care of our dads’ stinky feet. Well, my dad’s knee. And actually it probably won’t stink now that I’m thinking about it.”
“When’s his surgery?”
“April.”
He told me about the latest saga with his students. I told him about my writing. We laughed at each other’s jokes. Our exchange felt so normal, easy, that it didn’t hit me until then that I had never told him about my dad.
