It was all a dream.
My eyes adapt. The light becomes less painful, less blinding.
And that’s when I see a man in the room too, and I know straightaway that it’s the man from the dream. And I wonder if I’m still dreaming. If this is like the purgatory of dreams and I’m trapped somewhere between sleep and awake, having to atone for my sins before I can fully wake up. His back is to me as it’s almost always been because he’s there on a chair before Mom. He sits, though I see it in the body posture, the carriage, and I know that it’s him. I’m not chasing him anymore because now he’s here.
Ping, I hear then. Ping. And I turn to watch the movement of lines across Mom’s EKG, the spikes and dips of her heartbeat.
“Dad,” I breathe, my voice gravelly and hoarse. My heart throbs. Because after chasing him for all those days and nights, after spending my entire life trying to find him, he’s here.
He’s been here all along, waiting for me to wake up.
Except that as the man turns to me, I see that he’s different. His face is not the face from my dreams. There’s no facial hair anywhere, and his eyes are a grayish-green like sage. They’re not brown. His hair is streaked with gray and there are lines across his face, forehead lines mostly, deeply set. His arms are blotched with pale pink scars.
It dawns on me then, slowly. Of course he’s different from the man in my dream. Because in real life I never saw his face. I only caught a glimpse of the back of him when I was a girl, before Mom snatched the photograph from my hand. Before we read a book, before we ate ice cream. Now I remember. I never saw that photograph again until it returned to me in a dream.
There’s a book on his lap.
He leans forward, gathering Mom’s hands into his. Hers are limp. He strokes her cheek, and I see in his eyes the look that he has for her. A look of adoration, a look of love. It makes me feel embarrassed, watching them. This moment of intimacy. It’s not for me to see.
In all my life, no one has ever looked at me that way. I doubt anyone ever will.
His smile is deferential, kind. “No, Jessie,” he says as he lets go of Mom’s hands and turns back to me. “I’m not your father,” he tells me, and at first I’m speechless because if not my father, then who? My eyes well with tears—wanting, needing him to be my father—as I sputter, “There was a photograph Mom had of you. I remember seeing it a long time ago. She took it away, she hid it, but it stayed with me. It was a picture of my father. It was you. You have to be him,” I say, and he leaves her side to come to me.
He sits down beside me on the bed, a gap spread between us. He pats my hand, tells me his name is Aaron. “I knew your mother a long time ago,” he explains. “We were married. She was my wife,” but then he pauses, his own eyes red, and gathers himself. He won’t cry in front of me. “I don’t have any children, Jessie,” he says, as if that should make it clear, but it only makes me more confused. More angry and more confused. Because how could he be Mom’s husband but not my father? Didn’t he want me?
My tone is more scathing, more exasperated than I mean for it to be. “Then why are you here?” I ask, and I see the anguish in his eyes, the grief. I pull my hand from his, seeing then that he doesn’t have a wedding band. He’s not married and I wonder if, after he and Mom were married, he ever was. He divorced Mom, he left her, I think, and there’s a groundless anger that swells up inside me.
This man hurt Mom.
“I loved your mother very much,” he says, as if he can read my mind. But then he rethinks and alters it a bit. “I love your mother very much,” he says, before holding up the book from his lap. “Eden,” he tells me, “your mother, she sent this to me,” and I look at it, a brown leather book with a stitched edge, and in his other hand a note, written in Mom’s handwriting on a piece of stationery. Stationery with her own name engraved along the edge. “It’s her journal,” he explains, though in all my life, I never once knew Mom kept a journal.
He hands the note to me. I skim Mom’s words. In them, she tells him she’s dying. She says that she wants him to have this journal so that he can finally have closure, so he can finally understand.
The last line reads, With love, Eden.
“Understand what?” I ask. And there it is again, that exasperation.
But his tone is compassionate and warm, his eyes soft. He rubs at his forehead, confesses, “There were some loose ends, Jessie,” he says. “Some unfinished business between your mother and me.” He asks, “What did Eden tell you about your father?” and I shake my head and admit, “Nothing. She never told me a thing about him.”
He passes the book to me, the journal. He says that he thinks I should read it, that it would help me understand.
“Everything she did,” he tells me, voice cracking, “she did for you. You should know that.”
And then he rises to his feet to leave, but not before first confessing, “I wanted to be a father, Jessie. I would have loved to be a father. I would have loved to be your father. But sometimes life doesn’t go as planned.”
I don’t know what he means by that. But I grip the journal in my hand; I press it to my heart, knowing I’ll soon understand.
He says that he’ll give Mom and me a few minutes. And then he leaves the room.
My eyes turn to Mom’s. They’re unfocused and disoriented, the top lid puffed up. She sees me but doesn’t see me all at the same time. I wave; she waves back. But not right away, as if there’s a broadcast delay. Her lips are a length of string, pilled and thin. They’re dry, chapped, some sort of gunk collecting around the edges, which no one bothers to wipe. Her skin is a washed-out shade of gray blotched with purple and blue. A lack of oxygen. Poor circulation flow.
And yet she’s there. Sitting upright. Waving.
“You’re alive,” I breathe as I go to her one last time.
*
The nurse leads the way as we drift into the hall. I take one look over my shoulder as we go, saying to her quietly, in a whisper, “It’s a miracle.” Because I don’t want Mom to know how close she came to dying. “She’s better. She’s all better. Just like that. Overnight, and she’s better,” I say, a smile as wide as the Grand Canyon on my face. And suddenly nothing else matters. All that matters is Mom. I clutch the nurse’s hand, wanting to celebrate the moment, to savor it. Relief consumes me, seeing that Mom has her strength back, some of it anyway. That she can sit up, that she can swallow. I’m thinking of next steps already. We’ll begin chemo again. Maybe there is some clinical trial that Mom can participate in, some new medicine we can give a try.
“Oh, Jessie,” the nurse says as we watch a family pass by in the hallway, flowers and balloons tethered to their hands. Her face drops. It gets overpowered with empathy, and for a minute or two she’s speechless. The only smile she has to offer is a comforting one. Not a happy one. Not a celebratory one like mine.
It’s a sympathy smile.
“Jessie,” she says as she ushers me to a nearby bench and we sit, just across the hall from Mom’s room so we can still see inside. “Your mother,” she says, hesitating. “She doesn’t have much time left.”