Night Blindness (28 page)

I watched him. He seemed perfect in that enormous space. “I'm afraid,” I said.

“Fear,” he told me, “is just resistance to the unknown.”

This little lecture, delivered in Luke's reassuring, easygoing voice, made me feel better. But I said, “Until death do us part.”

“Death can mean a lot of things,” he shot back.

I didn't want to talk anymore. I wanted to play the piano. I wanted to play until my fingers bled. That's what I did. I played pieces that must have been living in my cells, songs whose names I couldn't remember, my feet moving on the brass pedals, my fingers liquid. I played hard and sometimes very fast, played until my knuckles rebelled, my hands stiffened, and my back hurt from sitting on that bench.

When I finally finished, the light had shifted. Luke was still sitting in William Howard Taft's oversized seat, tears running down his cheeks.

 

26

When I got back to the hospital, a man in blue clogs with a bunch of pens stuffed in his breast pocket was standing by my dad's bed. “I'm Dr. Waller.” His name didn't sound familiar, but lately there'd been a constant stream of men and women with clipboards and white coats. They had a seeming inability to smile. “Infectious diseases.” His accent sounded Australian.

“Jensen Reilly.” I offered my hand. “Sterling's daughter.” We shook. “I thought they already ruled out all the scary stuff.”

“Well, we need to keep at it until we have an answer.” The monitor near the top of the bed beeped, and he reached up and pressed a few buttons until the machine quieted. My dad never moved.

“Have you ever seen anything like this before?” I asked.

I wanted him to reassure me, but he dropped his eyes. “It's unusual for a fever not to respond to meds, even if only temporarily.” He hung the chart on the metal hook at the foot of the bed. “There's a saying in the medical profession. ‘When you hear hoofbeats—'”

“‘Think horses,'” I said, finishing for him, “‘not zebras.'” By now, I knew all the jargon.

“That's right.” His smile was a little crooked. “We're all out of horses, so I guess I'm the zebra guy.” He checked his watch. “I'm going to borrow him for about thirty minutes to examine him.”

It took a second for me to understand he was asking me to leave. “I'll run down to get something to eat.” I touched my dad's foot. “I hope you can find out what's wrong.”

*   *   *

“Demetri and I went to Corfu,” Nico told me as soon as he picked up. I was standing at the vending machines, trying to decide what to get. “I didn't get your messages until we got back.” His voice sounded echoey and unfamiliar.

My phone beeped. Low battery. “Did you have a nice vacation?” I asked. I'd forgotten my charger at the house.

“Come on, J.,” he said. “I went for us.”

I chose a bag of pretzels, even though I was never hungry anymore. “Find any girls to paint on the nude beaches?” The bag dropped down. My phone beeped again.

“Jensen,” he said, then stopped. I heard him take a deep breath. “How is he?”

Confused. Terrified. Dying.
“It's been several weeks, and he still has a high fever.” I slid down the wall and sat on the dirty floor with my pretzels. “When he comes to, which isn't very often, he has no idea where he is.”

“Did the tumor grow or…”

“They don't know, okay?” I snapped. “No one fucking knows. He won't wake up, and all these supposed experts poke and prod him and stick needles in his arm, and he looks like a fucking refugee.” My phone beeped again. “So ask me something easy, Nico, okay?”

“J., I'm coming,” he said. His voice was calm, sure. This is what I loved about him. “My flight leaves in—” And then my phone beeped in my ear and went dead.

I stuffed it in my pocket and slid down the wall to sit on the floor. I let my mind go numb, I didn't want to think about Nic or Greece. I didn't want to think about anything. I stared into space and just let myself do nothing. I don't know how long I sat there before I walked back to my dad's room with the bag of pretzels. Waller was gone.

“Will?” my father said as soon as I walked in. “Will?” He squinted at me. “Is that you?” His words were garbled. “Will?” He tried to sit up in bed.

“Dad.” I shook him by the arm. “It's me, Jensen. You were dreaming.”

He reached for his glasses. “I can't see.” His voice was panicked. “I can't goddamn see.”

I gently pulled his glasses away from his face and turned them right side up, slipping the arms over his ears. “Is that better?”

He stared at me. In the dim light, he seemed so much older. “Who are you?”

“Jenny.” I thought he might recognize that name. “Your daughter.”

“My daughter?” This seemed to panic him more. He pulled the sheets up to his chest. “What did you do with Will?” He reached for me, patting my face, pressing too hard. “Is that you, Will?”

My skin went cold. The monitor above his shoulder said his temperature was 105. I reached for the call button, but he threw up all over both of us. “I'm sorry.” His voice was scared.

“It's okay.” The vomit smell was medicinal, almost sweet from the glucose running through the tubes to his veins.

“I have to go to the bathroom,” he said, and I immediately smelled urine. I lowered the bed rail, threw the covers off, and managed to get his feet over the side. Then I used all my weight to leverage him to a standing position. He wobbled for several seconds then grabbed the IV pole to steady himself. At first, I wasn't sure I could get him to the bathroom, but he was lighter than I expected. I thought about the dead dove Nic and I had found in a fallen nest last spring, how it almost felt like nothing when I put it in my palm. “We can do this,” I told him.

He started to cry.

The bathroom was a few feet away, but it felt like a mile. Diarrhea puddled on the floor between his legs. I guided him around it. “Take small steps and don't let go of the pole.”

But the walk to the bathroom took forever, and by the time I got him lowered onto the toilet, we were both exhausted. I curled his hand around the railing. Then I took off my sweatshirt, threw it in a corner, grabbed the trash can from under the sink, and placed it between his knees. “Will?” He waved his arms like a blind person; then he threw up again.

I turned on the shower, untied the strings of his gown, and wrestled his arms out of the holes. I was too scared to disconnect his IV, so I left his johnny hanging off his arm. I tried to pull his glasses off, but he pushed my hand away and held fast to them. I checked the water. It was lukewarm. “Dad,” I told him. “I'm going to try to get you into the shower.” I pried his fingers loose and helped him across the tiny bathroom, finally managing to lower him onto the handicap seat. Leaning his head against the wall, he closed his eyes. I went to work, squirting soap out of the dispenser onto a plastic loofah. As I made sudsy circles around his chest and arms, water seeped into my clothes and soaked my hair, and the vomit fell off him onto the shower floor.

The door swung open, and the nurse on duty poked her head in. “What's happened here?” Her eyes were wide with alarm.

“He's vomiting.” I worried then that I shouldn't have moved him. “And his fever's gotten worse.”

She put her hand through the water and turned the knob. Cold hit me like ice. I jumped back. “Sorry, we need to get his temperature down now. How many times did he throw up?”

“Three.”

“Why didn't you call me?”

“I was all alone,” I told her. My father's face was flushed, and he was sweating. “I didn't know what to do.”

“You did fine,” she said, her voice neither compassionate nor hostile. She unhooked his IV and tossed his gown in the corner. “Just keep him under the cold water, and I'll call the doctor and get someone to clean up. Can you handle this for now?”

“I don't think I—” But she was gone.

I moved farther down my dad's belly, soaping away the vomit, shivering in the cold. His eyes were wide open now, and he looked scared. “Hey, are you okay?” I asked him. He didn't answer. I felt like crying. I wanted to tell my dad about this. I wanted to call him on the phone and tell him I'd had a dream that he was really sick and that I'd had to get in the shower with him after he threw up on me, that I'd had to soap his bare body just as if he were a child. I wanted him to call me Whobaby and tell me how sorry he was for me. He didn't seem like the same person, this thin, naked man.

“Will?” he said again.

I stopped washing him. “Yeah?”

His eyes were still distant, but they got peaceful, like he'd slept a long time and had awakened satisfied.

“Jensen?” The nurse poked her head in again. “I brought help.”

My father squinted at her and then at me. “Who?” he asked.

I watched him. “I'm Will,” I said to her. “Sterling's son.”

She drew the curtain back and reached in to turn off the shower. “Yes, you are,” she said. She had a fresh johnny and two towels draped over her arm. “And what a handsome son you have, Mr. Reilly.” She stepped in. “Let's get you up and at 'em.” She toweled him off expertly while I stood there shivering in my wet clothes. She slipped his arms through the new gown and tied it in back. “You'll be fine, won't you, Mr. Reilly.”

But I didn't think he'd ever be fine again.

When we got back to the room, the sheets had been changed and the floor was clean, but I could smell vomit beneath the antiseptic. “Can you lie down, Mr. Reilly?” the nurse asked.

My father's breathing was quick and labored. She managed to get him on the bed and pull his legs onto the mattress. I took off his glasses and dried them while she tucked the new sheet around him. She had two syringes in her pocket, and she put them between her teeth. Pulling on one, she left the cap in her mouth and inserted the needle into the port below his elbow. “Phenergan for nausea.” She did the same thing with the other. “And lorazepam to help him sleep.” He seemed to drift off before she even got the second shot in, but his breathing was still labored, and his skin was jumping all over the place.

While she hooked him back up to the monitors, I stood there in my dripping clothes with a towel around my neck, watching him. The vein on his head was raised like a lightning strike. It beat a one-two rhythm, and once in a while a muscle in his cheek would twitch. I thought of the card tricks he used to teach me on the back deck while Jamie was doing the dishes and Will was at practice. The secret was having superfast moves.

The door opened, and Ryder came in. He was dressed in wrinkled brick red scrubs. A surgical mask hung around his neck. “A spiked fever and vomiting,” the nurse said. She told him what medicines she had given him.

Ryder picked up my father's hand and took his pulse. He did that more than he checked the monitors, and there was something humane and reassuring about it. “He might be hemorrhaging.” I didn't know if he was talking to the nurse or to me. A little louder, he said, “Hey, Sterling, my good man, what happened here?” But his voice wasn't cheerful or happy.

“What does that mean, hemorrhaging?” I asked.

“It's not good.” His jaw flexed. “I need you to wait outside.”

“Jesus, Ryder, why? What's the—”

But two nurses came in as if they'd been beckoned by some silent whistle, and he said something to them I couldn't hear. They went to work, unlocking the rails of the bed and gathering the plastic tubing that tethered my dad to his IVs. “Wait in the hall,” Ryder told me. “Please.”

I didn't move. A yellowish liquid dripped from the IV bag into my dad's veins. I counted the drips. “But he's had a fever for a couple of weeks,” I said. “Why is he hemorrhaging now?”

“Please,” the nurse said to me irritably. I waited for Ryder to say something more, and when he didn't, I let myself out.

In the hall, the cinder-block wall was cold and smooth on my back.
I'm not ready,
I kept saying in my head.
I'm not ready.
Finally, I got myself together and went to the nurses' station. “Can I call my mom?” I asked an older woman behind the desk. “I forgot my charger at home.”

“Come back to the hospital as soon as you can,” I told Jamie when she answered. “And call Luke.”

I waited by his door, watching nurses run in and out, listening to their murmured voices. Ryder came out once, but he kept his back to me. He disappeared down the hall. A minute later, I heard a doctor being paged on the intercom. Ryder came back down the corridor. “Sorry for the wait,” he said to me before he went back in the room.

Finally, Jamie rushed in, wearing old leggings and a zip-up hoodie she never wore out of the house. “What happened?” Right away, she started for the door.

“You can't go in there.”

She jigged in place, like she was hopped up on pills. Her pupils were huge and her voice was too quick. “What in the world are you talking about? Of course—”

I put my hand on the door. “Ryder's in there with a shitload of nurses, and we have to stay out of the way.”

She slumped against the wall. “I shouldn't have left him today.” She glanced at the clock above me. It was just past eight. “I knew something bad was going to happen,” she said, as though I had denied it. “There was something different in his eyes.” Her face was bone white, and her movements were too quick, jerky. She was very sleep-deprived. It scared me to see her like that.

Two nurses went into his room, and then a doctor I'd never seen before, followed by an orderly pushing a gurney. “What are they doing?” Jamie put her hand over her heart.

“I'm here now.” Luke was jogging down the hall in jeans and a Muddy Waters T-shirt. He went right to my mother and hugged her, and then he put out his other arm, and I fell into it. While we stood there, it occurred to me that everything Ryder and Dale had told us was bullshit. A clean scan didn't mean anything. Weeks of poisoning him with radiation had done nothing but make him sick. For all my willing and wishing and hoping and, thanks to Luke, praying, my dad might be dead before sunrise.