Sam nodded, because no normal person would find humor in the explanation.
“I hope he’s better soon.” The cashier ripped off the receipt and handed it to Sam.
She walked back through the lobby. The hospital doors slid open. Rusty was still by the bench. Sam held up the mug. “Look what I got.”
Rusty did not turn to look.
Sam asked, “Dad?”
Rusty wasn’t just leaning in his chair. He was listing to the side. His hand had dropped down. His lit cigarette had fallen to the ground.
Sam stepped closer. She looked into her father’s face.
Rusty’s lips were parted. His eyes stared blankly into the bright lights of the parking lot. His skin looked waxy, almost white.
Sam put her fingers to his wrist. To his neck. She pressed her ear to his chest.
She closed her eyes. She listened. She waited. She prayed.
Sam pulled herself away.
She sat down on the bench.
Her eyes blurred with tears.
Her father was gone.
14
Sam woke up on Charlie’s couch. She stared up at the white ceiling. Her head had not stopped aching since she had left New York. Last night, she had been unable to navigate the stairs to the guest bedroom. She had barely been capable of making it up the two steps into the house. Her body had started shutting down, her brain unwilling or incapable of fighting off the stress and the exhaustion and the unexpected despondency after finding Rusty dead in his wheelchair.
Normally, at the end of particularly bad days, Sam negotiated with herself about whether or not to add more pharmaceuticals to her daily cocktail of Celebrex for joint paint, Neurontin to ward off seizures, Paroxetine to treat chronic pain, and Cyclobenzaprine for muscle spasms. Did she really need another anti-inflammatory? Could she sleep without another muscle relaxer? Was the pain bad enough for half of an OxyContin, all of a Percocet?
Last night, her body had ached so badly that she had to keep herself from taking everything.
Sam turned her head away from the ceiling. She looked at the photographs lining Charlie’s fireplace mantel. Sam had studied them more closely last night before the drugs had taken effect. Rusty sitting in a rocking chair, elbow propped, cigarette in hand, mouth open. Ben wearing a funny hat at a Devils basketball game. Various dogs that had likely passed away. Charlie and Ben standing together at the edge of what looked like a Caribbean beach. Suited up for skiing at the base of a snow-covered mountain. Standing beside a cable suspension for a bridge painted in the unmistakable red of the Golden Gate.
Proof that things had been better at some point in their lives.
Sam felt understandably drugged as she sat up on the couch. Her legs moved stiffly. Her head pounded. Her eyes would not focus. She stared at Charlie’s giant television that took up most of the wall. The shadow of her reflection stared back.
Rusty was dead.
Sam had always assumed she would get the news while she was in a meeting, or when she landed in a different city, in a different world. She had assumed his death would elicit a sense of sadness, but a temporary one, the same way she had felt when Charlie had told her Peter Alexander, her old high school boyfriend, had been killed by a car.
Sam had not thought that she would find Rusty herself. That she would be the one required to deliver the news to her sister. That she would find herself so paralyzed by grief that she sat on the bench beside Rusty for half an hour before she could alert the hospital staff.
She had cried for the father she had lost.
She had cried for the father she had never known.
Sam found her glasses on the coffee table. She stretched her legs, starting with her ankles, moving into her calves, then her quads. Her back arched. She pushed her hands out in front of her, raised her arms over her head. When she was ready, she stood up. She performed more stretches until her muscles warmed and her limbs moved with only a modicum of discomfort.
There was no rug on the hardwood floor. Sam doubted Charlie had a yoga mat. She sat cross-legged beside the couch. She stared out at the backyard. The sliding door was cracked open to let in the morning breeze. The rabbit hutch, Charlie’s long ago Brownie project, was still standing. Sam had been too overwhelmed with grief to comment on it last night, but she was glad to see that Charlie and Ben had built their home on the old lot where the red-brick house had been.
Not that Ben had stayed here last night. He’d gone upstairs for only a few minutes. Sam had heard the floorboards squeak as he walked into Charlie’s room. There was no screaming. There was no crying. Ben had sneaked down the stairs and left the house without telling Sam goodbye.
Sam straightened her spine. She rested the backs of her hands on her knees. Before she could close her eyes, she spotted Charlie pushing a wheelbarrow through the yard. Sam watched her sister spread hay in the rabbit hutch while stray cats mewed at her feet. Bags of food were in the wheelbarrow. Kibble, birdseed, peanuts. Judging by the way Sam’s eyes were watering, a dog had at some point lived in the house.
So this was how Charlie spent her time: feeding a menagerie.
Sam tried to push her sister’s problems from her conscious. She was not here to fix Charlie, and even if she was, there was no way that Charlie would let her.
She closed her eyes. She pinched together her fingers. She considered the broken parts of her mind. The delicate folds of gray matter. The electrical current of synapses.
Rusty slumped in his wheelchair.
Sam could not clear her mind of the image. The way the left corner of his mouth had curved down. The total absence of his spirit, his spark, that had always been there. The sadness she had felt when Sam had realized that he was gone.
The need for comfort.
The need for Charlie.
Sam did not have her sister’s phone number. She was too ashamed to admit this to the hospital staff. Instead, she had emailed Ben, then waited for him to email back. Again, the task of delivering bad news to Charlie had fallen on his shoulders. Her sister had not driven to the hospital, as Sam had expected. Charlie had sent Ben to pick up Sam. She had not come down the stairs when Sam arrived at her home. Sam might as well have been a stranger, though Charlie would never be so rude to someone who was not family.
“Are you having a stroke?” Charlie stood in the open doorway. Her eyes were swollen from crying. The bruises under her eyes had gone completely black.
Sam said, “I was trying to meditate.”
“I tried that once. Irritated the shit out of me.” She pushed off her boots. Hay was in her hair. She smelled of cat. Sam recognized the logo on her T-shirt from math club, the symbol PI with a snake curling around it. The Pikeville Pythons.
Sam adjusted her glasses. They had not been right since the judge had handled them in the courtroom. She stood up with less difficulty than she expected. She told Charlie, “A possum stared at me through the door all night.”