…The More Things Stay the Same - Part IV
Stephen Atherton’s haunting tale of slow-rolling sorrow continues
An excerpt from this serial was featured in the Late Winter 2020 Monadnock Underground print quarterly.
We say some things to each other, Daddy and I. The kinds of things fathers and sons say to each other at times like this.
When Daddy starts to get sleepy, he closes his eyes. They seem to close very easily. I continue to sit there, continue to cry. While I am, though, I feel his hand groping blindly for —
No, wait… that’s not right. Yes, he is groping, for my hand. But there was nothing blind about it, not this time.
He takes my hand and squeezes it. I’m no kid anymore, not by a long shot…but somehow Daddy taking my hand like that reminds me again… of something. Something about being a kid.
“L-l-love…you…C-Cal…Calvie,” Daddy says.
My shirt is wet now, soaked through with my tears and the snot that runs out of your nose when you cry a lot. I kiss the hand that groped for and found mine. I lean forward and kiss his cheek. His forehead. My tears are running freely now. They pepper the needles and tubes and dressings that cover him. He doesn’t complain. “I love you, too, Daddy. Always. Now and forever. I love you so much.” It comes out hard, little more than a croak.
Sometime later, after Daddy falls asleep for the last time but well before the monitor’s beeping ceases to be as strong and regular as it was before, I place the hand that was still holding mine gently back down to the sheet. I get up, put the chair back against the wall, and walk out. Back up the hall, past the signs and doors and orderlies again. I wave or nod, whichever seems most appropriate, to any other hospital personnel I see. I say goodbye for the last time to the Incredible Multitasking Nurse at her desk. I even smile at her, believe it or not. But it is different this time. It isn’t manufactured.
It is real.
In the waiting room, I zip up my jacket, feeling the shape of the bottle in my pocket once again. I turn and grasp the exit door’s doorknob in a hand that was now cool and dry. Doing so, I can’t help but notice the woman who must have come in while I was visiting my Daddy. She had happened to sit down in what I had come to consider My Chair, with its lingering connotations of long ago school days. A short, slightly overweight brunette thirtysomething who would have been rather pretty, in that unique way overweight girls have, if she hadn’t been so obviously miserable. Her look, one I was all too familiar with from staring into the mirror over the last few months, is that of someone who desperately wants not to be where they are. She is doing an okay job of pretending that wasn’t the case, but I knew better. I can, as the saying goes, see right through her.
She is reading April’s People.
All yours now, sister, I think, as I step out into October sunshine — dazzlingly bright but weak, with little energy behind it. The door, urged on by a stirring fall breeze, closes behind me with a flat clap that smacks of utter finality.
I hit a fast food joint on the way home. When I finish my burger, I go to the men’s room to take a leak. On my way out, I bury Daddy’s empty pill bottle deep in the trashcan, under all those wet, used brown paper towels.