“Because I think he was someone’s dad. And his baby probably misses him. And he might have had a lot of friends. And they probably miss him too.”
My dad smiled. He didn’t smile often, but when he did, it was always a stamp of approval. It was his expression of pride. Pride in himself. Pride in me. “Then he’s alive,” he said, picking up his knife and resuming his diagonal cuts of skin on the buck’s back. “He has a spirit. As long as his spirit touches something living, he’ll always be alive.” He looked at me, and I swear to this day, it was the most strength I’d ever seen in his faded eyes. And then he said, “Nothing ever dies. Not really.”
Snake was speeding to the hospital, flying fifteen over like he was bolting from the cops. I was wearing his baggy, uncomfortable basketball shorts and couldn’t stop pulling on the string and thinking about my dad and bucks and dying.
My mom had told me he wasn’t looking good. His heart attack had been severe enough that the doctor insisted she call my brother in New York. He said my dad had coronary heart disease, where the arteries to his heart were tightened and clogged and couldn’t pump the blood the way they were supposed to. Basically, his heart didn’t like him very much. It didn’t want to keep him alive. And maybe he was right about hearts doing a sucky job at keeping people alive. But I didn’t want my dad to be the buck. I didn’t want him to only be alive because I felt a certain way about him. I wanted his heart to like him. But I guess Snake and I weren’t the only ones with untamable hearts.
It was eleven when Snake dropped me off in front of the hospital. He called to me as I was hopping out, something about parking the car or going home or good luck. I wasn’t listening.
When I got inside, I rode the elevator to the third floor. That was where the people with sucky hearts went. They ended up lying in hospital beds on the third floor, with IVs tacked under their skin and crappy hospital food served to them on trays once their bodies decided they could eat again. My dad was on the far end of the hall, with the people whose hearts were just a little too greedy for their own good.
I spotted my mom standing outside his room once I got there. She was in ill-fitting pants (see: mom jeans) and a Winnie-the-Pooh pajama shirt, a tissue clasped tightly in her hand. I fidgeted with the string on Snake’s shorts and looked down. I couldn’t face her because I might have been wrong to run away, and all of this might have been my fault, and she might have hated me. I didn’t know how to handle it if she did.
She looked up briefly to scan the hall and saw me standing by a nurse’s cart, in clothes not my own, with hobo hair and a guilty twitch on my lips. It was too late to avoid her now. I trudged forward, still pulling on the string.
“How is he?” I whispered once I got close enough to be heard.
She paused for longer than she needed to. It was like she was trying to spite me in between her words and the stillness. “He’s stable,” she answered. Her voice was as aloof as her eyes.
“Can I go in and see him?”
“No. He’s sleeping right now.”
“Oh.” I twisted the string around my finger.
“Those aren’t your clothes,” she pointed out. Immediate judgment. I should have been prepared for it.
“They’re Snake’s,” I muttered.
“I see. So that’s where you’ve been.”
“Can we not talk about this right now?”
“We tried to find out where he lived, but not many people knew him.” Her voice was trembling, leftover frustration trying to find a passageway out. “Little Carla told us his address. We rang the doorbell ten times, but no one ever showed up. I assumed you weren’t there.”
“Technically, I wasn’t,” I said, staring at a brown mark on the tile. “I went with his family to Cedar Point for the day. We just got back an hour ago.”
A tear slid out from under her glasses. It was an inevitable repercussion. Hurting others. A side effect of me.
“Your dad was so desperate to find you,” she whispered as another tear fell. “He regretted letting you walk out that door. He said he forgot how stubborn you are.”
“It was only one day. You guys didn’t have to be so dramatic.”
“One day?” Her eyes were wet and angry and terrified in one look. “What day was it, Regina? Hmm? Do you know what day it was?” She glanced at the clock on the wall that read 11:10. “What day it is?”
“Saturday . . .” I said slowly.
“Guess again.”
“I’m not doing this, Mom.”
“It’s your dad’s birthday.” She wiped her eyes with the tissue in her hand. “He spent his entire birthday looking for you.”
“I’m sorry. I didn’t know.”
“Of course you didn’t know. Because you spent the whole day thinking about you, just like you always do. It’s always about you, Regina.”
“I said I’m sorry!” I yelled. She put a finger over her mouth to quiet me, which only made me angrier. “What do you want me to do about it now?”
“I want you to open your eyes. I want you to see that your depression is selfish.”
“What?” I mouthed.
“You heard me,” she continued. “It’s selfish to be so miserable that you let your own unhappiness consume everything around you. You hate your life so much that you’ve let yourself believe it doesn’t matter, that the things you do don’t affect people.” She motioned to the door. “But I want you to look at how loved you are and still try to convince yourself that your life is worthless and the things you do don’t matter. Because all-consuming hatred is selfishness. And the people who love you, really love you, don’t deserve to be victims of your depression.”
She took an accomplished breath, like she had been rehearsing that speech since the day I was diagnosed. Her words rushed into my brain all at once. I couldn’t subdue them. I couldn’t arrange the sensations they stirred into any cohesive whole. All of the emotional mush produced one dominating response. Anger. How could she hate me so much that she didn’t even try to understand?
“I’m selfish?” I whispered. I wanted to yell. Scream. Explode. Do something that would get her attention. I wanted her to see me. To listen. And then, after everything was bared, I wanted her to look me in the eye and tell me who I was to her. But I couldn’t find it in myself to fight anymore. “Do you even know why I’m depressed? Do you know what day I go to therapy each week? Do you know one single thing I’ve talked to my therapist about? Go ahead. Guess, since we’re obviously playing games.”
“Reggie.”