The Space Between Us(63)

“Hey man,” Phil said. His voice sounded worried. “We just got a call from Willow Falls Memorial.” My heart plummeted at those words because I already knew what they meant. I’d been waiting for this call every day for the last month. Waiting for the news that I knew would change my world forever. I’d been dreading this phone call, but knew there was nothing I could do to avoid it.

“Yeah?” I said, even though I could feel the words before he said them.

“The nurse on Charles McBride’s floor says it’s time.”

“Damn it.” I rubbed my hands up and down my face. “Ok, thanks. I’ll leave right now and head down there.”

“You gonna be ok?” Phil asked sincerely.

“Yeah, thanks man.” Was I going to be ok? Probably not. But that didn’t matter. I hadn’t been ok in a long time. I hadn’t been ok in over thirteen years. That’s how long ago it was I made the biggest mistake of my life, and I was still paying for it. But that was ok; I would gladly pay my debt forever. Pay for my mistakes. Nothing that happened to me would make up for what I had done thirteen years ago, so this was just a drop in the bucket of pain I would endure because I knew I deserved it.

I closed my laptop and grabbed my suit jacket off the coat rack by the door. I rode the elevator all the way down to the bottom floor and walked through the lobby and out the doors of Libman & Carmichael Law Offices.

The drive to the hospital was one I was familiar with. I drove to the hospital to visit Charles once or twice a week since he was admitted. The fact that I pulled into the parking structure with no real recollection of how I had actually arrived there wasn’t surprising. I had a million things running through my mind, and driving to that particular hospital became second nature to me recently. I walked through the main doors to the hospital and wound my way through the corridors, took the elevator up to the fifth floor, and found the room that was home to Charles for the last three months.

I’m not sure what I expected once I arrived at his room, but I wasn’t expecting it to be so quiet. In the past when I had walked into this room, Charles greeted me with a smile, a wave, and a quiet hello. As the weeks passed, his strength waned, and in the last week I was lucky if he’d been able to speak. But the silence in the room now was filling the empty space like water, pouring in, making me nervous. Drowning in this silence was inevitable. The only noise to be heard was the heart monitor beeping at regular intervals, keeping time to the emptiness.

After a few minutes of sitting in the uncomfortable chair next to his hospital bed, Rachel, a nurse I was familiar with, entered the room.

“Hello Asher,” she said sweetly with a sad look on her face.

“Hi, Rachel,” I responded, rubbing my hands over my face. She walked to the other side of his bed, checking his IV and looking at the paper printing out of the machine monitoring his heart.

“You seem comfortable, Charlie,” she said to him. My heart lurched at the name. His name was Charles. Charlie was someone else entirely. Charles always understood how it affected me whenever someone called him Charlie and tried to correct them for my sake. But he was unconscious now and probably would never be awake again. These were his final hours and I’d let Rachel call him whatever she wanted. I’d deal with the pain of hearing her name; it was the least I could do. Today wasn’t about me or the guilt and pain I carried around. Today was about Charles. “Do you need anything?” She asked me. I smiled at her thoughtful question. She was more than likely accustomed to helping families dealing with the loss of their loved one. But I wasn’t family.

“I’m fine, thank you.”

“Let me know.”

“Rachel?”

“Yes?”

I looked over at Charles and then back to her. “How much longer?”

“Not long. Hours, maybe.”

“Has anyone called his daughter?”

She shook her head. “He said he didn’t want anyone to be called but you.” I nodded, understanding. She left, quietly shutting the door behind her. I turned back to look at Charles McBride. The man who I had grown so close to over the last thirteen years. The man who became a friend, but more like a second father to me. The man who I selfishly and admittedly used as a lifeline to the one person I knew I had to live without.

“Charles,” I said, moving closer to the bed, seeking out his hand. I never held a man’s hand before, but I figured that if I was trying to cross over, if I was on my death bed, I would want someone to hold my hand. “I’m here, Charles. I’m here. I came.” I paused, looking down at our hands, mine clasped around his. His hand was limp in mine, not responding to me. “I don’t know if you can hear me, but I want you to know that I’ll take care of everything, Charles. You’ve done a great job planning for this, making sure everything is laid out right, and I will make sure it gets done.”

Over the last thirteen years Charles and I developed a friendship. At first, I needed him in order to feel close to her. I went around to try and breathe in a piece of her, to soak up any part of her I could. But, eventually, after it become obvious that any relationship between him and I wouldn’t involve any piece of her, our own friendship developed. As the years passed, we only spoke about her in theory and only recently. He never told me any detail about her life now. He never discussed where she was, what she was doing, how she was. If I was going to be his friend, it wouldn’t include her in any way.