She smiled sadly. ‘I tried to apologize to Ruth, almost at the end. She was lying in bed, snoring, and I had come over to wash some stuff for her-it was after she was too weak to go down the stairs to the washing machine in the basement. I stood over her bed and told her that I was sorry, and that we’d been acting like assholes for years. She didn’t hear me, though.’
‘But that counts, though, right?’ I asked in a small voice. ‘Just saying it aloud?’
Stella’s dim eyes met mine. ‘I can see why your father depended on you. He always needed someone. The way he was with his mother…he looked to her for everything. Every decision.’
I stared at the rising and falling lines of Stella’s EKG. He doesn’t need me much anymore.
Stella ran her fingers over the folds in the bedsheets. ‘Ruth never cared about Gerald-before Skip, after Skip. Their marriage-well, they should’ve gotten divorced after he found out. It would’ve been so much better for both of them. He was so cold, so emotionless, even before he found out. I forgave her, in a way, for going after Skip, faced with a lifetime with that man. She needed some warmth and intimacy. But she ended up pouring that love into your father. She cared so much about him, sometimes too much. She wouldn’t let him breathe. ‘Get a girlfriend,’ I always said to your dad, always behind his mother’s back. ‘Live a little.’ ‘I’m fine,’ he always said. I always told him there were plenty of pretty girls in Cobalt-I even tried to fix him up with some of them, girls whose hair I used to wash, that sort of thing. He never went out with any of them. Until the one. The important girl. I saw them together, once. He never knew. He always thought he was being so stealthy, but I saw them taking a walk near the train tracks, and I could just tell.’
The clock on the wall was too loud. The second hand skipped like it had tremors. ‘What girl?’
‘And then she was in that coma,’ Stella went on, as if she hadn’t heard me. ‘After all that time in the hospital, although everyone knew she was going to die. Even if she’d lived, her life wouldn’t have been much of anything. We talked about how tragic it was for her boyfriend, but no one talked about your father, what he was going through. No one could. Even if people knew, it was indecent to talk about it, with the boyfriend standing by her while she was supported by those god-awful life-support machines. Your father left Cobalt shortly after that and never came back. If people knew why, they never said anything. They pretended like it hadn’t happened.’
The weight of what she was saying began to take shape. ‘Wait. Stop.’
Stella hesitated.
‘Wait.’ My voice cracked. ‘You’re telling me that the girl who was in the car accident with my dad, Kay Mulvaney, she and my dad were…’ I waved my hands, trying to understand. ‘…together?’
Stella nodded just slightly. ‘It destroyed him when she died. Especially because he’d been the driver.’
I sat up straighter. ‘He was the driver?’
She shifted in her bed. ‘He never told you.’
I ran my hand over the top of my head, trying to remember. He’d never said one way or another. It was always we hit a deer, we got into a crash.
‘The boyfriend was dead drunk,’ Stella explained. ‘If he’d have been the driver, he would’ve been arrested. Or they all would’ve died.’
It took me a while to catch my breath. ‘Why didn’t I know about this?’
‘I guess it wasn’t the right time to tell you. And I don’t know what your father’s going to think, if I tell him that I’ve told you. Maybe I shouldn’t. Maybe I should just leave it up to you two to talk.’
There was a laminated sign near Stella’s door that said PAIN CHART. Patients could describe their pain based on different facial expressions, numbered one through ten. I searched through them, but none of the faces rightly described what I felt. ‘Have you been talking to him?’ I sounded out slowly.
Stella looked away. ‘A little, honey. Here and there.’
The fluorescent light flickered and shivered. Outside, two elderly people were walking up the sidewalk into surgery. A man in an electric wheelchair sat by the curb, waiting for a ride. I looked up, recalling what my father had told me the last time I saw him. ‘Kay was pregnant.’
Stella clucked her tongue. ‘It was a big deal for the time. Especially for Cobalt. That boyfriend of hers married her while she was in the coma. There was a ceremony and everything.’
I tried to hold on to a single thought, but my head felt like it was caught in a windstorm. Things were whirling everywhere. This was like working for sixty years on a scientific theory and discovering that the principle underlying your idea was incorrect, so your research was useless. It couldn’t be possible, any of it. My father couldn’t have been the one driving. He would’ve wrapped the car around a tree rather than hit a deer. And Kay Mulvaney was in love with Mark Jeffords. They were going to get married; my father was their friend. He met my mother in college; that was when he fell in love. That was where his story started; he escaped Cobalt because there wasn’t enough here for him. There wasn’t anything more. There couldn’t be.