Fresh tears fell as I walked through my sister's quiet home, up the stairs and to the window seat overlooking the Manhattan street. My sister and her husband were at work, and the kids would be asleep for a little while yet. I had time to help, and I'd do whatever I could.
First, I texted my sister Mary and told her what happened. My phone dinged within minutes with a reply, rare because she was a resident at Mt. Sinai and was always busy. Also uncommon because she was one of the least affable people on the planet, rarely showing concern for anyone other than herself, outside of her job. Her cold detachment helped her disconnect from her patients, and her bedside manner left something to be desired. But today she was obliging, offering promises to have Charlie come home early to take care of the kids so I could go to the hospital with Sophie.
After that, I texted Sophie's younger sister and asked her to text me when she was home from school in the hopes I could keep the lid on it all until her brother was home.
Wade.
His name again, the sting of it ever unexpected.
As I sat in the window seat, bathed by the cool winter sun, I thought of him, worrying as I so often did. I imagined him on the plane over the Atlantic, not knowing what was going on. Not knowing what he was walking into.
I knew what his father meant to him. He'd already lost his mother, and now … now everything would rest on his shoulders.
More tears fell, and I pulled my legs into my chest, head pressed to my knees, shoulders sagging, heart aching as I mustered the strength to calm myself so I could check on the kids.
I climbed the stairs to the third floor, peeking in on the sleeping children. They were peaceful, faces slack and lips puckered, lashes against their cheeks and chests rising and falling. I wished for a long moment that I could find relief that complete.
Down I went again to the second floor and took my seat once more, my head resting against the glass as I sifted my way through all that had come to pass.
In an hour, my world had been brought to a stop. In five hours, it would begin to turn backward, back to my past, back to the boy I loved. The boy I ruined.
The first time I saw him, I was fifteen and he was sixteen, the boy with the dark shock of hair and broad shoulders, with eyes gray and cool as December and a smile as bright and warm as June. I remember walking into their house with Sophie just a few days after we met and finding him there in the living room, tall and beautiful, the light shining in through the window as he worked on his homework. He saw me, and I stopped, and he stopped, and time stopped.
The last time I saw him, I was seventeen, and he stood before me with tears in his eyes as he begged me to say yes. Begged me to go with him. Begged me to be his forever. Begged me to change my mind. But I couldn't. Didn't matter how much I wanted to, because I did. I would have given him the world. But in the end, it hadn't been up to me.
He left the next day for the Army. That was seven years ago.
It felt like yesterday. It felt like another lifetime. It felt like I relived the moment every single day.
I'd written him almost every day, pleading at first for forgiveness, telling him I'd changed my mind, begging him to come back to me. After a year, my letters grew angry, accusing, my hurt and rejection pouring out of me and onto the paper, though the transference never relieved me. And then I found resignation, and I'd stopped sending my letters completely.
He never answered me. Not once. Not a single word, not from any avenue.
But I was still connected to him through Sophie and her dad, though they rarely mentioned his name around me. I knew when Wade came home, though he never stayed for more than a night or two before moving on, back to wherever he was based, back to Iraq. Afghanistan. Now Germany. I knew very little, but I took comfort in that he was alive — fear had weighed on me every moment he was deployed throughout the course of the war.
That was the sum total of my knowledge, but I was never able to let him go. Didn't matter that I knew nothing. The boy who I walked away from lived on in the wreckage of my heart, and I never stopped wishing things had been different.
Maybe he hadn't gotten my letters. Maybe he'd never know how I felt. Or maybe he'd read every one. Maybe he'd burned them all without breaking the seal of the envelopes.
Maybe I'd never know.
My niece Maven woke from her nap — her little voice carried over the monitor as she played in her crib. And with that, I wiped my tears and made my way to her room, grateful for her love, which she gave freely and without condition. She hugged me around the neck, reminding me just what it was like to feel tenderness after so long without.
Wade
I took a deep breath as the cab pulled to a stop outside of Mt. Sinai, eyeing the entrance to the hospital with my throat in a clamp. My father was in that building, lying in a hospital bed.
I had no idea what I would find inside those walls.
The second Sophie had called me, time began to move differently, fast and slow. The words had turned around and around in my mind as I spoke with my supervisor, who granted me leave. I'd packed my bag and rushed to the airport, getting on the first commercial flight I could. And I spent eight hours on the plane, staring out the window with every fear whispering to me.
A stroke. I didn't know what it meant other than he needed me, so here I was.
My mind was everywhere but where I was as I paid the cab driver and unloaded my duffle bag. I didn't feel the fatigue of the flight or the hunger from not having eaten, only icy dread as I walked to the nurse's station, then down the cold hallway to my father's room.
The door swung open, and I stood in the threshold, still and silent as my eyes found my father. He looked smaller than I remembered him, lying in that hospital bed with tubes and wires twisting away, connecting him to machines that blinked and beeped. They didn't seem to disturb his sleep. Even at rest, I could see the slackness of the left half of his face from the stroke, his mouth downturned and drooping open.
He'd always been strong, larger than life. But lying there, he was vulnerable, shrinking under the weight of his body.
My bag fell to the ground with a thump next to my boots, my chest rising and falling painfully with every breath.
Sophie drew a breath from the corner of the room; her face bent and tears streamed as she flew across the room and into my arms. That was all it took for my composure to crack and crumble, emotion climbing up my throat, stinging my eyes, burning my nose. I closed my eyes to stop the tears, but it was no use. They seeped from the corners, defying the physics of my pinched lids, and my sister sobbed in my arms, clinging to my shirtfront.
I held her tight, wishing I could change everything, rearrange time and space and make it all right again.
She stilled after a moment, pulling away. Something in her eyes stopped me dead.
"I need to talk to you," she whispered, casting a furtive glance over her shoulder at our sleeping father.