No Coming Back (23 page)

Chapter Twenty-Nine

W
hile I’ve been away, the Harper Community
Hospital
has undergone a major renovation: out with the blue carpet tiles, the teak veneer, and the dowdy pink paintwork—in with the beechwood, chrome fixtures, and high-shine vinyl floors. It’s all new, fancy, but it still smells of disinfectant and death.

“Someone left me a message,” I tell the silver-haired woman seated behind the horseshoe-shaped reception counter.

We’re alone. The place is quiet, dead. Hardly any
hospital
employees scuttling around at this time of the night. Patients dosed up and dozing. For a second she studies my pulped face—my
general
thuggish appearance, my pale and sweaty pallor, the dried blood on my collar and down the front of my coat—unsure whether to call security or a nurse.

I smile awkwardly.

“What name is it?” she asks.

“Jake Olson. I think it was a Dr. Townsend who left the message on my answering machine? Maybe a day or two ago? She said she was here, working nights, all weekend, and that I should call and speak with her.”

The receptionist’s eyes scan a computer screen. “Here we go. Follow the red line down the hall. It’s the fifth door on your left. Room one-eleven.”

“Thank you.”

A woman’s voice answers with a “
Come in”
as I rap knuckles against the specified door.

“Dr. Townsend?” I say, entering.

“Yes? Can I help you?”

She’s a small brunette with soft features and chestnut eyes. She’s sitting behind a desk, inputting patient notes into a computer
terminal
. She’s a few years younger than me, maybe enough for her not to remember the murder of Jenna Luckman and who was convicted for it.

I reach out a hand. “Jake Olson. I got your message. I’m here about my father.”

She accepts the handshake. Her fingers are delicate but their grip is strong. “Oh, yes. Thanks for coming over. Nice to meet you, Jake. Please, take a seat. I know it’s early, but can I offer you a
coffee
?”

“No, thanks. I’m good.” It’s a lie. I look anything but good. I look like somebody with a bullet hole in their belly. She knows it. If she could see the bloodstains beneath my coat she’d have me admitted in a heartbeat.

“Rough night?”

“Something like that.”

She nods out of courtesy rather than belief. “You need a stitch or two, on your forehead, near the hairline. Maybe some
analgesics
?”

“I’ll survive.”

My words don’t persuade her, but she doesn’t argue the point. We seat ourselves on opposite sides of her desk. On its busy surface is a coffee mug with the words
I Heart Heart Surgeons
on it.

“Jake, do you want to talk about what happened to your face, and why you look like death warmed up?”

“No.”

“Okay. Maybe later, then?”

“Maybe.” I shift my weight on the chair, wince at the stabbing pain in my side, one hand pressing at the wound.

“Did the administrator who contacted you in the Cities tell you in any detail about what happened?”

I shake my head. A week ago, the hospital contacted the prison. The prison put them in touch with Denis Flannigan, my PO. He relayed their news, secondhand.

“What I got was sketchy, at best. They mentioned some kind of a stroke?”

She nods. “A ruptured aneurysm, to be exact. It’s when a
swelling
in a blood vessel puts too much pressure on the weakened wall, resulting in a bleed. In your father’s case, he suffered what we call an intracranial aneurysm in one of his cerebral arteries. It’s a mouthful, I know. The translation is, it’s critical. We don’t have the
facilities
here to cope with that kind of an emergency. Your father was
airlifted
to the Regions Hospital at St. Paul for
specialized
treatment
. He underwent neurosurgery to repair the damage and was returned to us, Friday morning, for convalescence. We would have contacted you sooner, but he didn’t have you listed as his next of kin. We tried contacting your brother but were unsuccessful.”

My father had spent the best part of last week in St. Paul, within spitting distance of me and my job at the mall, and I never knew.

She leans forward. “Jake, I’ll be brutally honest with you, your father’s condition isn’t rosy. Right now he’s stable, but his outlook is very poor. What I am about to say is probably very difficult for you to hear, to accept.”

“His insurance ran out.”

She looks startled. “No, and I wish that were it. The money isn’t an issue here; your father’s hospital expenses have all been taken care of by a third party. It’s where we go from here that we need to work out. What happens next, after this meeting.” She sees the crease dividing my brow and adds, “Maybe it would be best just to show you what I mean.”

Great men change the world. Great men win respect and loyalty and make a positive difference in the lives of those around them. Great men are measured by the scale of their good deeds. Great men have nothing in common with my father.

On heavy feet, I follow Dr. Beth Townsend to his dimly lit room at the end of a quiet ward. It smells faintly of him: musky, with traces of Marlboro Red. The only illumination is from silvery moonlight seeping around the edges of the window blind. The reduced lighting makes the readings on his monitors all the more vivid, real. I have not seen my father in eighteen years and my stomach is in knots, but not from excitement.

He is flat on his back in the bed, arms straight at his sides, as though he’s standing at attention, lying down. Wires connect him to machines. Soft bleeps and spiking lines. A tube runs from his mouth to a medical ventilator, allowing breathable air to be pumped in and out of his lungs. Under the linens, his chest rises and falls, rhythmically, keeping pace with the mechanical respirator.

His eyelids are closed but I feel his mean stare burning into my soul.

The gravity of his situation draws me closer.

He’s aged, radically. The sockets of his eyes are dark-rimmed craters on a lunar landscape, overshadowed by the angular bluntness of his nose. He resembles somebody in the late stages of cancer: gray skin draped over brittle bone. The leftovers from his brain surgery are visible through the prickly gray fuzz coating his scalp.
Everything
colorless, stiff, like he’s carved from a plank of silvered wood.

This is the calmest I have ever seen my father.

Dr. Townsend lingers at the door, voice hushed. “It was a major rupture. Most people don’t survive that kind of bleed. They die then and there. He’s been in a coma ever since.”

“Can he hear us?”

“It’s a possibility.”

“Will he pull through?”

“No.”

I glance at her.

“I’m sorry, Jake. They tried their best. The repair was a success but the damage was already done. I’m afraid this is as good as it gets.”

Her words ought to quake me at the knees, make me break down in tears, have me trash the place and plead with God to give my father a second chance, miraculously return him to life so that we can reconcile and finally have the relationship we never had. But he’s not that kind of dad and I’m not that kind of son.

“So what happens next?”

“Medically speaking, we have two clear choices: we can
keep him on life support indefinitely, providing his organs don’t fai
l, or . . .”

“You unplug him.”

She lets out a quiet breath, “Like I say, Jake, I’m sorry. I know this isn’t the prognosis you were hoping for. This is the worst news ever, and I hate that I’m having to tell you. There’s no immediate rush to make a decision either way. We can accommodate whatever you decide. As I say, the treatment cost is taken care of, but there will come a time when artificially maintaining your father’s life becomes counterproductive. As clinicians we have a duty of care to save life, but as realists we know there’s a tipping point.” She opens the door. “Look, I’ll leave you with your dad for a while. I’ll be in my office when you’re ready.”

“Thanks.”

She closes the door and suddenly I am on my own with my father, left with the choice between keeping him here inside a living hell or sending him to the real one.

All my life he was more powerful than me, bigger, tougher,
stronger
. Now he’s just a shell, fragile and weak, and I have all the power.

It doesn’t make me feel victorious.

I want so much to scream at him, to shake sense into him, to berate him for being a terrible dad, for despising me for my biology and for never finding a morsel of love in his heart for me. But he’s just a shadow, almost a ghost, and I can’t bring myself to be like him.

Stooped with pain, I pull up a chair and sit at his side, take his hand in mine. His skin is cool to the touch, waxy—not much
different
than my own. This will be the first and last time I hold his hand. Gently, I squeeze his bony fingers. He doesn’t squeeze back. This spindly old man is not my dad, but he’s the only one I have eve
r known.

There’s a leather-bound Bible on the trolley-table, gold-edged pages, dog-eared and well-used. Rosary beads curled around it. A
Thinking of You
card with the Virgin Mary on the front,
nursing
baby Jesus, my uncle’s handwriting visible on the inside. Now that I look, there are more cards stuck to the walls behind the bed. A mosaic of color. Dozens of well-wishes, children’s paintings, hopes for miracles.

Despite his drinking, my father was a popular pillar of the community, loved, respected, worshipped. In public, he wore his cloth with pride, hiding behind heavenly virtues that were never his. In the privacy of our home he was demonic.

If only they knew him the way I knew him.

I cup his hand in mine and bow my head—but not to pray. No amount of prayer can save his soul, or mine. If God exists then my father will never meet him, and neither will I.

Eighteen years ago, my prison counselor told me to save my confession for my priest. I have waited patiently all this time,
holding
my own, biting my tongue, pressing down on the black smoke churning away inside of me.

No more. The time has come to let go.

For here lies my minister: Senior Pastor Olson of the Harper Community Church and former navy chaplain. At my fingertips.

“Father,” I begin, “I have a confession to make.”

I clamp my eyes closed and I am instantly transported back in time:

It’s the evening Jenna disappeared. My father and Aaron have been arguing for days. My father has always wanted Aaron to join the ministry, but he’s leaving for the military, mind made up and no way to change it. Neither of us want him to go, most of all me. It’s the first and last time my father and I will ever agree on anything. He’s said some vile things to Aaron. Hurtful words that are hard to come back from and normally reserved only for me. Aaron has stormed out. My father is seeking solace in the bottom of a bottle. I catch up with my brother in the backyard, pleading with him to have a change of heart, for my sake.

“Don’t leave me alone with him,” I beseech. “Who’ll protect me?”

Aaron’s face is florid, anger tightening his jaw. “Get over
yourself
, Jake; it was going to happen sooner or later. I can’t be here forever, wiping your snotty nose. It’s time you stood up for yourself and grew a pair.”

His words are hard, cutting. I know he doesn’t mean them. Nevertheless, a red veil descends and I launch myself at him. We scuffle on the lawn. Not exactly landing blows, but not exactly
play
-fighting the way we used to, either. We roll together, limbs
flailing
, teeth gritted, sweat flying. Then we’re on our feet, gasping for breath, staring each other down like dueling stags.

Insanely, Aaron scoops up a shovel and rushes me. He swings it like a batter hitting a home run. There’s a glint of something in his wild eyes that reminds me of our father. I duck aside at the last second, landing heavily on the grass. His momentum pitches him forward and he falls headfirst through the open hatchway leading to our grandfather’s defunct bomb shelter. One moment Aaron is there, raging and snarling, and the next he is gone.

The silence is deafening.

“I didn’t mean for him to die,” I whisper to my father, back in the hospital room. “I was going through grandfather’s stuff, down in the shelter. I can’t remember why. The hatch was up. Aaron’s head hit the metal ladder. It snapped his neck. When I got down there he was still alive, but he couldn’t feel anything from the neck down. Couldn’t move, not even a finger. He begged me to end it, pleaded with me. He was all about fitness and health; he couldn’t bear the thought of being paralyzed. I didn’t want to do it. It was a mercy killing. I loved my brother. I worshipped him.”

In my mind’s eye, the image of Aaron lying dead in my arms is burning through my brain. Fingers still throttling his throat. My beloved brother. My idol. Eyes wide and staring. Warm but lifeless. Fear wells up within me. It isn’t the authorities I’m scared of, it’s my father. He’s a man of the cloth. His whole life is based on Old Testament teachings. He will surely kill me for taking the life of his firstborn son. It must never come out. I can never let him know.