“Okay,” I said, making myself take deep breaths. “What can I do?”
“Help your sister,” my mom said, and I felt immediately ashamed of myself that I’d spent the afternoon trying to avoid doing exactly that. “And don’t tell her we went to the hospital. She’s looking forward to tonight. I’ll tell her when I get back.”
I felt my breath catch in my throat, noticing the singular pronoun. “But Dad will be coming back too, right?” I asked slowly.
My mother shrugged, her chin trembling, and I felt my stomach plunge. She pressed a hand to her eyes for a moment and took a deep breath. When she spoke again, she was more composed, back in her efficiency mode. “I’m going to need your help getting your dad into the car,” she said. “And then please be either here or by your phone tonight, in case I have updates.” I nodded, feeling a second wave of shame crest over me that I had been actively ignoring my phone all afternoon. “And,” my mother said, biting her lip. She seemed to be weighing something in her mind. “I’m going to need you to call your grandfather.”
“Oh.” This was not what I’d been expecting to hear. “Sure. But why am I doing that?” My father’s father was a former naval officer who now taught at West Point and had always reminded me of Captain Von Trapp from The Sound of Music—just without the easygoing personality or penchant for songs about flowers. He’d always terrified me, and the few times a year I saw him, we never seemed to have all that much to talk about.
“He wanted to know… when we got to this point,” my mother said. “He wanted to come and say good-bye.”
I nodded, but it felt like the breath had just been knocked out of me. “What point?” I asked, even though I didn’t really want to hear the answer, because I was afraid that I already knew it.
“He wanted to come,” my mother said, slowly, like she was having to think about each word before she spoke it, “when your father would still understand what was happening. When he would still… be here.”
I nodded again, mostly just so that I would have something to do. I couldn’t believe that only twenty minutes ago, I’d been eating icing and making out with Henry. “I’ll call him,” I said, trying to sound competent and together, and not like I was feeling, which was the exact opposite.
“Good,” my mother said. She rested her hand on my shoulder for just a moment, and then she was gone, heading upstairs, calling to my father.
Fifteen minutes later, each of us taking one arm, my mother and I got my father down the stairs and into the backseat of the car. The change in my dad from just that morning was startling—his skin had taken on a grayish tone, and there were beads of perspiration on his forehead, and his eyes were, for the most part, closed tightly against the pain that he was so obviously feeling. In the past, I could not remember my father ever complaining about his own discomfort, and I’d never seen him cry. But now his forehead was furrowed, and he was making a low moaning sound in the back of his throat that scared me in a way that nothing else yet had.
When Murphy saw us loading my dad into the car, he rushed full-out down the driveway, and scrambled up into the backseat. I reached for him, but he darted past me and settled behind the driver’s seat.
“Taylor, would you get the dog?” my mother asked, as she put a large duffel bag on the passenger seat. I was about to ask what it was, when I realized that it was probably clothes in case she—or my dad—had to stay over.
I reached for Murphy, who tried to get away, clearly only wanting to be where my dad was. “Stop it,” I said, more sharply than I needed to, as I snatched him up and shut the car door.
“I’ll call with updates,” my mother said, climbing behind the wheel.
“Okay,” I said, holding tight to the dog, who seemed to be ready to make a break for it again. “I’ll be here.” I made myself smile and wave as the car backed down the gravel driveway, even though my mother was concentrating on reversing, and my father’s eyes were closed.
When it disappeared from view, the dog seemed to droop a little in my arms. I stroked his wiry head, and felt myself let out a shaky breath. I knew exactly how he felt.
Fortunately, Gelsey was too excited about the carnival to ask many questions. When she got home from Nora’s, I told her that Dad had a doctor’s appointment, which I figured sounded much less scary than going to the hospital, and she simply accepted it without question.