It was a mistake. She knew before waking up, before opening her eyes even. Before looking up through the skylight to see the faint purple brightness of a drizzly day sprinkled across the treetops out back.
There was too much of him. As if his flesh had fused, through heat and exertion and perspiration, to her own and threatened to hold her there, mashed into the dirty drop cloth forever. All she felt was the need to run. From the weight of his bare leg draped across her thighs. The hairy arm flung across her abdomen. The damp T-shirt bunched beneath her elbow. His hot breath stroked her neck like a fever, and the stubble on his chin stung her naked shoulder like hundreds of tiny insects.
Another someday come and gone. When she’d imagined losing her virginity, she’d filtered out her own aversion
to human touch. There she was in her reveries, stroking and being stroked, caressing and being caressed, like some kind of slippery and practiced nymphomaniac. Sure, sex with Adam had been lovely while it lasted, momentous even, but how long was one meant to endure the touching? The aftersex was like a bad bout of the chicken pox, an itch you suffered to avoid pockmarks.
It was becoming a pattern. The somedays of her life would teach her not to look forward to anything. Because life is passive aggressive. Once it finally gets off its ass and allows you a wish fulfilled, that wish will come with a heavy price. You want your mother? She’ll come with a kidnapping on the side. Sorry, no substitutions to the order. Menu items are unchangeable. In other words, someday will cost you your future dreams.
Very slowly, careful not to wake him, she slipped out from under his sweaty limbs and hunted for her clothes. Jean shorts in the corner. Panties and sweater on the stool. Socks…Forget socks—she could do without them. She slid her feet into boots, then pictured him alone, sad, two days from now when he came across her cable knit knee-highs. But hunting through the mess of strewn artwork and clothing was too risky. He might wake up. Instead, she mouthed “good-bye” and stole out into the feeble daylight.
IT HAD RAINED
hard during the night. She’d heard it once or twice as she lay pinned beneath Adam’s limbs. It made walking across the wet slope in the hills behind her house a challenge. More than once, she skidded down onto her hip and wound up covered in mud. The dampness, however, made it the perfect morning for a cigarette.
So stupid. Everyone knew better than to have sex with a c
lose friend. Things would turn ugly now. She could never again look at him without imagining that terrible, claustrophobic moment of waking up covered in his never-ending parts.
She should have thought ahead. Lost her virginity with one of those arrogant, immature males from school. The kind your mother—should you have grown up with one—warned you about when you hit puberty.
Adam was different. Lila’s taking off would wound him, especially after Nikki. The thought of it, the guilt, propelled her frantic pace through what was becoming an annoying, prickly, on-again, off-again drizzle.
After rounding a corner, she stopped. There was a smallish coyote in the clearing up ahead.
With fur much blonder than Slash’s, this animal—though sodden—was delicate. A female. She just lay there, right out in the open, light rain pattering against her big ears. Panting, staring out at nothing in particular.
Lila dipped her cigarette butt in a puddle, squeezed the water out of it, and slid it into her pocket, then crawled up the slope and crouched behind a cluster of bushes. More movement. Sure enough, Slash, just upslope, walking through the scrub with a dead animal in his mouth. Something small and dark. A groundhog maybe.
The female jumped up to greet him, her body curled in submission, her tail tucked low as she reached up to kiss his face and fuss over him. He ignored her attentions, continuing across the incline to a crevice in the rocky hillside where he set his tiny prize on the ground.
Slash yipped and circled his offering. A smaller, darker coyote emerged from the den, pausing at the entry to sniff the air, look around. This coyote’s blackish snout was even more refined, petite. Another female, Lila guessed. Maybe
younger. She moved toward Slash, her tail low as well, shimmied into him, and nosed his chest. Slash was having none of this emotional nonsense and neither was the first female, who rushed at her and drove her to the sidelines. The jealous wife.
The alpha female nosed the den and backed right out to make way for pups—one, two, then three, four, five. Not squat and tubby, these youngsters. More leggy and pubescent and awkward. They leaped all over Slash, nipping at his bad ear, his tail. One pup was more businesslike and started poking at the dead rodent, dragging it closer to his mother as if to ask her to cut his meat.
Lila watched Slash sit back, satisfied. He made no move toward the food himself, but seemed content to watch his offspring dig in. As the mother helped them tear the kill apart, the patriarch began to groom himself.
She’d been wrong about Slash. He was not the bloodthirsty killer she’d thought. He was nothing but a father, doing what was necessary for his brood.
The darker female—a kindly aunt perhaps, or a youngster from a past litter—kept her distance from the other two adults, from the pups and their dinner, lurking as she was in the brush nearby. When the pups had eaten their fill and seemed to be looking around for more, Slash and his wife made eye contact with this female before trotting off into the fog. Now the female’s role became clear. She allowed the pups to tumble around in the grass, but when one of the youngsters started to follow his parents, she rounded him back up and ushered them all into the den.
Lila backed out of the bushes as silently as she could—not wishing to give the sitter cause for alarm—and pointed herself back toward the cabin.
Later that morning, Victor hung up the kitchen phone and sunk into a chair. That was that. He had his answer and, in spite of having suspected it for some time, the finality of it knocked the bluster out of him. The nurse hadn’t come out and said as much—the patient never received such news over the phone. She’d called to ask him to come back to see Dr. Barrow. They’d made the appointment. Only what happened next absolved him of the need to show up. The woman dropped the telephone receiver as she tried to hang up, and said to someone nearby, “No, it was Victor Mack. Early-onset Alzheimer’s.”
Diagnosis by fumble.
He sat with it for a bit, horrified, validated, relieved. Some sort of justice, he supposed. He could just hear Fate up there, laughing its pimply ass off. As terrible as it was to hear it said out loud, it was what he had hoped for. Mightn’t thrill the next man, but the next man had likely
led a more dignified life and had every right to hope for more.
Anyway, as he’d told himself for a couple of months now, it was all for Lila. Or damned near all. As long as he could keep it together long enough to follow through with his plan.
Enough for one day. He was tired. Needed a nap. He stood up and steadied himself using the back of the chair. He’d gotten clumsy lately. Bumped into things, tripped over a magazine on the living-room floor. It made navigating his own house a frightening endeavor.
Standing there, swaying side to side, he tried to think why he’d gotten up. He’d been headed someplace. A place of his own choosing, none of that sense of dread he’d been having surrounded it.
He heard a noise from the cellar. Lila. He’d feel better if he were close to Lila. After wandering out the door and around the house, he found her dressed in a navy sweater and jeans, bare feet, pulling clothes from the machine. Though he couldn’t remember if this machine was meant to wet the clothes or dry them.
She looked up. “I heard the phone. Was that the doctor?”
Her face, such a sweet young face, was paler than usual. “I don’t recall the phone ringing. Likely that dog next door.”
Slinging a laundry basket onto her hip, she stared at him. “I wonder why these tests are taking so long. Maybe your file got misplaced. We should call them.”
“That won’t be necessary. They said the tests would take a bit of time. We don’t want to be nudniks.”
“You want lunch?” When he nodded, she motioned toward the machines. “Switch that last load, will you? I’ll heat us some soup.”
He watched her leave and felt his pulse quicken. “Where will you be?”
“The kitchen.”
Not wishing to upset her, he turned to the closest machine and opened the lid. Wet clothes lay twisted and wound together in a basin rather like a centrifuge. He shouted into the air vent overhead, “You still in the kitchen up there?”
“Yes,” she hollered. “I told you I’m making soup. Chicken noodle sound okay?”
“That will be fine.” Trying to calm his nerves, he began to pull clothes out of the machine and drop them, wet, into a cotton-lined wicker basket. Each piece fell with a sloppy
thunk
, spattering the floor with drips and drops. Didn’t seem to make much sense, as no one could wear such nasty sopping garments.
The sound of footsteps, then Lila’s face in the doorway. “What’s that—” Tipping her head to one side, she watched what he was doing. “No. Dad, no.” She threw the clothes, piece by piece, into the other machine and spun a few dials. He watched her move around the cellar, so sure. Strong. Able. Still willing to feed him and care for him after all she knew. What did she do to deserve such a father? When she was done, she stared at him, hands on her narrow hips. “I want you to give me the phone number of that doctor you saw, okay? I’d like to talk to him.”
“I’ve never claimed to be perfect. Not once.” It wasn’t an apology. Just a fact.
“What?”
“Did I ever tell you there’s a window company called Shattered Glass? They called us earlier. I’ll have to tell Gen. She gets such a kick out of that kind of thing.”
“Why don’t you go upstairs and lie down, Dad. I’ll bring you your soup once it’s ready.”
L
ILA WHEELED THE
bike out of the shed and laid it on the grass. It had been Elisabeth’s idea to get the child a bicycle for her birthday next weekend, but neither she nor Lila had much in the way of extra cash, so when Lila had seen this little blue bike at a garage sale down the street for thirty dollars, she’d bought it. It was a boy’s bike, but she didn’t think Kieran would mind. In all honesty, she didn’t think her sister would ride it—not unless she could strap a basket to it and use it to haul home cartons of friends for her wall.
The bicycle hadn’t been well cared for. But Lila was hoping a bit of oil would work some life back into the rusty chain and that a lick of paint would revive the scratched frame.
She’d gone to him. Lichty. Offered—even though her mother refused to part with it—to give his bracelet back. But even if she had been able to pry it out of Elisabeth’s clutch, it was too late. Lichty’s attentive partner had replaced it with something finer. A thick twisted rope of tricolored gold that winked at her the entire time she stood at Lichty’s desk. She’d explained having found the bracelet on the ground. She’d admitted she was wrong not to turn it in, but still. Mr. Lichtenstein had stood up, pointed toward the clock, and asked would she mind clearing out before his seniors started to arrive and got excited that she might be their model.
Strangely, the loss of her stealth art education bothered
her less than the loss of Lichty’s barbed voice in her life. His words had a sting, but his sarcasm was real and true. It didn’t tear you down because you understood, as he criticized your rib cage or the turn of your ankle, that this was a man whose aim was to build professionals, not bolster himself.
As she left his studio, she couldn’t help but look back. Instead of turning to the stack of charcoal drawings he’d been evaluating when she’d walked in, he was staring out the window, his face stilled by an expression that seemed, more than boredom or disappointment, to closely resemble despair.
Now she popped the lid off the oil can and dripped it along the chain, continuing to soak it until the pedals turned smoothly. It was far too small for her, but she couldn’t resist. It had been years since she’d ridden a bike—Victor had always been against it—so she removed her sweater, tied it around her neck and pedaled around, all giant knees and elbows, on the grass. It wasn’t until she’d fallen onto her side and scraped her elbow that she noticed Victor watching her from the porch, sipping from a cup of coffee.
She got back on and waved, calling out, “Look, no hands,” as she wobbled along the bumpy ground past the front steps. When she turned to ride back, she saw her father drop to the steps, his hands covering his forehead.
“Dad!” She ditched the bike and raced across the property to find him breathing hard. His eyes had a wild, faraway look to them and he stared at her as if he had no idea who she was. On the porch beside him, his coffee mug lay broken, coffee with cream trickling toward his pant leg. “What’s wrong? Are you sick? Is it your heart?”
He shook his head, still fighting for breath.
“Should I call 911?”
“No…I’m just muddled up. I’m not sure. I thought I saw my daughter, but that’s not possible.”
“It’s me, Dad. Lila.”
“No, my Delilah is dead.” His face crumpled in pain.
She took him by the shoulders. “Dad. It’s okay. I’m Delilah and I’m not dead. Do you hear me?”
The world in front of him grew nightmarishly large as he listened to the words coming out this young woman’s mouth. He couldn’t comprehend. The bike, the sun coming through the tree just so, the smell of spilled coffee: It was all very obvious to him what day it was. He started to speak.
J
UNE
6, 1996It would be three months before he would take her.
He was at the open window of his second-floor office on Bloor Street, staring down through the lacy, impulsive branches of the locust tree on the sidewalk at the heavyset girl from the jewelry shop below. She was juggling a key ring, a cigarette, an overstuffed purse, and a tray of four large coffees for her coworkers, and in her attempt to open the door, the tray toppled to her feet, sending paper cups, lids, and hot brown liquid all over the tiled stoop. The smell of coffee drifted all the way up to Victor’s window.
Gabrielle was her name. Victor knew this because she’d helped him pick out a necklace for Elisabeth a few months back in the hopes of rekindling his dying marriage. His wife had wanted a thick, gold necklace. Had spoken about it for years, but the sort of piece she described cost thousands of dollars. Victor could never afford it, not after buying the house in Cabbagetown and
supporting his wife and daughter. But that year, pharmaceutical sales had been strong. His bonus had been twice what it was the year prior, and Victor was determined to give Elisabeth what she’d coveted nearly her entire life.“Take this one,” Gabrielle had said, holding up a white gold necklace, fourteen inches long with a smooth, flat chain that clinked softly as it moved. Polished to such a sheen that it reflected light around the room in jagged rainbow shards. “It’s our newest link,” Gabrielle explained. “Just in from Europe. Your wife will love it.”
Elisabeth had been so excited upon seeing the black Yorkville Jewels box, she could barely pry off the lid. But, once she pulled out the chain and held it up to the light, she made no attempt to hide her revulsion. “Silver? You finally buy me jewelry and you pick silver?”
“It isn’t silver, Elisabeth. It’s white gold. And the clasp is engraved with your initials.”
She dropped it back into the box and replaced the lid. “Looks like silver to me. Everyone will think it’s silver.”
“Who cares what anyone thinks?”
“After nine years—nine goddamn years—this is how well you know me?”
When he’d tried to take it back the next day, Gabrielle explained they had a policy. No returns on engraved goods. Victor had given it to Ross Chapnick from accounting, whose wife adored the white gold so much she was happy to ignore the e.l. on the clasp.
Now, staring down at the spilled coffee and the frazzled Gabrielle, Victor moved away from the window to run down the steps and help her get inside. But his intercom buzzed. “Victor, grab line one. Something’s happened…”
Victor ran through the wide sliding doors of the emergency room entrance, the side entrance, of Toronto’s Hospital for Sick Children, his heart hammering so hard, so fast, he wondered if he’d live long enough to even find her. Inside, the mood in the waiting room—decorated with cutout butterflies and posters warning parents of dangerous symptoms to watch for while their loved ones waited to be seen—was remarkably quiet, almost amiable compared to how Victor felt. A mother fed a fussing baby as she watched a triage nurse position a thermometer in the child’s ear. A man wheeled his teenage daughter past, her hair strewn across her face and her arm cradled in a sling fashioned from a sweatshirt. Younger families seemed to have settled in for a long wait, watching their little ones—most of whom appeared far too energetic to require a visit to the hospital—play with blocks or sit, eyes fixed, on the cartoon playing on overhead monitors.
The banality of it, the normality, was surreal. Victor seemed to float as he raced past the lineup of people, some of whom informed him he needed to take a number and wait in the row of plastic chairs facing the nurses’ area. Victor burst into triage and took hold of a doorway for balance. “Delilah Lovett. Where is she?”
The nurse, a bony young redhead with a high ponytail and ultrashort bangs, looked up as if unsure what to say.
Victor repeated himself. “Delilah Lovett. I’m her father.”
“You beat the ambulance,” she said, forming her words too carefully. “They just radioed; they’re pulling in now.” She took his arm and pulled him to the side of her desk. “You just stay with me.”
A flurry of loud voices rang out in the entryway. Two female paramedics appeared, clearing the way for a stretcher. Victor recognized Delilah’s tangled blond hair but not the white tape pressing her forehead onto the board. Nor the plastic neck brace.
He rushed toward the stretcher as paramedics moved to hold him back.
People in hospital scrubs and white coats blocked him as they continued through a set of double doors and down a winding yellow corridor. Doctors, nurses spoke, but their words were gibberish to Victor. A stethoscope fell to the floor. It dawned on him they’d been standing by these doors when he’d run through them.
They were waiting for Delilah.
He trotted alongside the stretcher and grabbed the side rail. For the first time, he caught a glimpse of her face. Her forehead and temple were cut, covered in dried blood, dirt, gravel. She strained against the tape holding her head down, eyes closed, murmuring. Blankets covered her to the chin.
“She had an accident,” said a firefighter as they rushed down a long hallway. “Something about a bike. A jump on the driveway. She’s been in and out of consciousness. We’ve stabilized her neck and back, just precautionary.”
“How bad—is she going to be okay?” asked Victor.
“She spoke a bit when awake, asked for you. Knew your phone number even.”
“Who was with her? Where’s her mother?”
“She was with a neighbor. There’d been a sitter apparently, but he’d gone…”
Friend of Elisabeth’s. Probably stoned out of his mind, Victor thought.
“Talking’s a very good sign,” explained a nurse. “Oftentimes these things look a lot worse than they are.”
On cue, Delilah opened her eyes. Blinking furiously, she strained to lift her head. “I’m stuck. And I can’t see anything. Why is it dark? I can’t see!”
Without a word, doctors, nurses, paramedics took hold of the stretcher and broke into a run.
The stretcher barreled through swinging doors and into a huge operating room—more of an arena—that read stuebben family trauma center on the door. Victor tried to move closer, at one point got close enough to hold Delilah’s hand, but frantic doctors inadvertently butted him out of the way in an effort to yank down overhead lights, pull off the tape holding her head still. So many people, some doctors, some nurses, some—who knew? There had to be fifteen to twenty people bustling around his girl.
Delilah began to thrash around again, swearing as if possessed, shrieking, “Turn on the lights! What are you people doing? I want the lights!” A nurse instructed several others to hold down her limbs as she sliced the child’s jeans from ankle to waist.
A woman nearby tapped his arm. She barely came up to Victor’s chest, so tiny as she was. She wore a dark skirt and sweater, dark hose and sensible shoes. Her graying hair cut short and permed. A stiff cap perched on her head like a caregiver from another era.
She handed Victor a pair of fairy wings—part of a Halloween costume from years past, now mangled and flattened and smeared with blood. “She was wearing these.”
He took the wings and held them close. A glint of gold caught Victor’s eye. A thin cross dangled from the woman’s neck. He looked back up at her cap, chilled. “You’re not a nurse.”
She moved closer. Placed an impossibly small hand on his upper arm. “I’m the hospital chaplain. I’ve been assigned to you.”
Victor shook his head.
“I’m here to make you more comfortable. Make sure you’re okay.”
The floor rushed up at him and he realized his knees had buckled. There was only one reason they would assign a chaplain.
“She is going to be fine. I don’t need a chaplain.”
“Mr. Lovett, they’re prepping your daughter for emergency brain surgery.”
“I’m Dr. Heller.” The pediatrician’s hair was thick, nearly as white as his lab coat. His face, even with its burgeoning early-summer tan, was surprisingly unlined, only a faint softening of his skin belied his age, which Victor guessed to be around sixty. Eyebrows hooded his eyes, shadowing them in kindness. Behind him, Delilah was still conscious, combative. As quickly as nurses set up IVs, she yanked them out of her hand.
“We’re going to do a CT scan right away,” said the doctor. “We can’t begin to treat her until we know what’s going on in terms of possible trauma to the brain.” He turned and motioned toward the scene around the stretcher. “She’s a fighter. As difficult as it makes our jobs, it’s something we like to encounter.”
“Why can’t she see?”
He didn’t answer. “We need her to keep still. We’re going to administer a drug that will essentially paralyze her.”
Victor rubbed his forehead. “I don’t understand—like an anesthetic?”
“Sort of. This particular drug will quiet her nervous system. Slow some of her organ functions. Her lungs may cease to function. A nurse will do her breathing for her with a manual pump.”
“Her heart?”
“Her heart will beat just fine.”
“But if I stay by her side,” said Victor. “Surely I can keep her calm for the length of time it takes for the scan. I’ll talk to her…”
“She’s volatile. Reactive. Her behavior isn’t voluntary, which is why we need to act quickly. Please.”
A nurse approached with a clipboard. The doctor handed it to Victor. “We’ll need you to sign.”
Victor squeezed the wings. A piece of broken wire pierced his palm. “So there are risks to this…this paralyzing her?”
“The release is standard procedure.”
Victor couldn’t read the release form, his eyes swimming as they were. It was too much to take in. The accident. Being kept back from her. The chaplain who wouldn’t stop staring at him with that sympathetic smile. And now they needed his okay to take away her ability to breathe? Victor’s knees liquefied and he slumped into a chair behind him.
What if her breathing never returned? If she never woke up? What if the nurse with the pump suffered a stroke on the way to the scan and no one reacted quickly enough? The whole thing sounded medieval—breathing for her with a hand pump. With the stroke of a pen, Victor could be signing away her life, his own right along with it. Her behavior, other than this loss of sight, was a good sign. The doctor had said that himself. She was conscious. And who was this doctor, this total stranger, to say that Victor couldn’t calm his daughter long enough for the x-ray?
On the form, the words “accidental death” caught his eye. Jesus Christ, why was this happening?
Shouting from the other side of the room. “Dr. Heller, we’re losing consciousness again.”
Dr. Heller’s body turned, but his eyes didn’t leave Victor’s face. “We have to move quickly. Every second counts…”
Victor signed the paper.
Seconds later, they were jogging down the hall again, Victor directly behind the nurse who held a large black rubber ball over Delilah’s chest. Keeping her alive by squeezing in regular intervals. This woman, nearly six feet tall, with her wildly patterned scrubs, long French braids, and fat pink pen hanging from a string around her neck, was all that stood between his daughter’s life and death. Victor willed the nurse not to trip, sneeze, lose her
rhythm in any way. Should a natural disaster strike, right there in the brightly lit halls of the hospital, this stick-thin nurse, with all the power in the world, would be the only one, aside from his girl, whom Victor would save.The smiley buttons on her scrubs clicked together, chattering above the sleeping face as she moved, their merriness unappreciated by her patient, whose eyelids had been fastened shut with transparent tape.
For protection, Dr. Heller had explained. Just for protection.
The only light in the hospital room came from a sliver of moon that hung so low in the sky, it appeared to be pulling back the curtains and peeking through the window. The calm, the quiet, the relief, of being in this room, this tiny recovery room, wrapped itself around Victor like a down jacket.
It had nearly killed him. Waiting for the outcome of the CT scan. Imagining Delilah slipping away from her little body with no one who loved her by her side. How long had it been? An hour? Maybe more, until they came for him. By that time he’d convinced himself it was over. The very best scenario was his daughter was blind. The worst…too horrific to contemplate.
When Dr. Heller finally came into the dim parents’ waiting area, his face had been tired. Stern. Victor hadn’t been able to stand, so sure was he that his world was about to collapse. But then the doctor smiled and said she was fine. Her sight was back.
The scan had showed a slight brain bleed, a subdural hematoma, just beneath the skull, that would not require surgery. There would be strict limits for physical activity the next six months—no skateboards, no bikes, no skiing or skating. Nothing involving jumping—no trampolines or pogo sticks or leaping on beds. No gym at school, no boating, no swings. There might be
dizziness, nausea, and confusion. With any luck, the doctor said, she won’t even remember it happened.Delilah stirred in her sleep, tucked into the nook of his arm, then settled into a quiet slumber. Glowing monitors behind her bed beeped rhythmically, almost soothingly; fat bags of intravenous fluids dangled from poles; wires and tubes leading down to their unconscious beneficiary, some piercing the flesh on the back of her hand, others snaking under her green gown, attaching themselves to her body.
Her face. Impossibly oblivious, impossibly pale. Angry red patches, swollen, skinned, groused from her forehead, her nose, her cheekbone. A bruise was already forming under her left eye. Victor settled back against the pillows and wrapped himself around her, careful not to jostle the hardwiring. He kissed her cheek, the right side.