The Extraordinary Life of Sam Hell(81)

Dr. Laurence and I stepped outside the room. I noticed the slight pause when we made direct eye contact. “I didn’t want to say anything in front of your mother.”

“I know,” I said. “How bad is it?”

“The acute rehab unit will give you and your mother some time to consider a long-term care facility.”

“What do you mean, long-term? Are you saying he’s never going to come home?”

I could tell from Dr. Laurence’s expression he was trying to be honest without being an alarmist. “It will depend on how he progresses,” he said. “That doesn’t need to be determined tonight.”

I decided not to press him further. “When can we see him?”

“You can go in now. He’s in the recovery room. We’ve given him some drugs to sedate him. He’ll be in and out, but you can be with him.”

“Can he talk?” I asked.

“Not at the moment. But he’ll recognize you, and he’ll know you’re there. I think it would be a great comfort to him. Your father did manage to ask for you.”

“For me? Are you sure?”

“What’s your mother’s name?”

“It’s Madeline, but he calls her Maddy.”

“Then I’m certain he said ‘Sam.’” With that Dr. Laurence turned and walked away.

I watched Dr. Laurence depart, staring at his back as he went. I turned but did not immediately go back to the waiting room. The realization of what had happened hit me hard at that moment, as manhood often does. I imagined it was not unlike all those young men who join the military, go to boot camp, and then get deployed in a military zone, with no one there to wipe their noses or console them. My father had called my name for a reason. He needed me, and not the other way around. He needed me to be the man of the house. I was just eighteen, but then, so were some of those men taken from the jungles of Vietnam on a stretcher.

When I got back to the waiting room, Mickie said she’d go down the hall to call Ernie and the Cantwells, and I sensed she wanted to give my mother and me a moment of privacy with my father.

When we entered my father’s room, I almost did not recognize the man in the bed. Though he had just a single tube snaking from his right arm, my father looked so much older than he had that morning, his hair seemingly grayer and his face thin, his skin a sickly yellow. The nurse removed the mask covering his mouth and nose, and the side of his face had sagged like wax melted in a hot sun. I hung back as my mother bent and kissed his lips, whispering to him words I could not hear while gently smoothing his hair. After a minute or two, she motioned me forward, but I could not get my legs to move. My father was my hero, the strongest-willed man I had ever known. Nothing had ever defeated him—not the chain-store pharmacies, and not the monthly struggle to make his business succeed. I wondered if that was why he lay here now in this unforgiving hospital bed, if his unwillingness to ever give in, the incredibly long hours he worked at the store, had led to the stress and anxiety that caused his stroke.

My mother took my hand and brought me forward so my father could see me.

“Hey, Dad.” His face did not move, but his eyes acknowledged me. I touched his arm, which felt cold and soft, and bent and kissed his cheek. For better or for worse—and too often it is for worse for so many of us—adulthood had arrived, whether I wanted it to or not.

“I’m here, Dad,” I whispered in his ear. “And I’m going to make sure everything is okay. I’m going to take care of things. I’m going to take care of Mom. You just concentrate on getting strong again.”





19

The nurses brought in a hospital bed for my mother. “I’ve slept with that man for twenty years,” she said, weeping. “I’m not going to stop now.”

Mickie and I left the hospital together at close to morning. I passed the turn for our house and continued south on the El Camino. “I’m not going home, Sam,” Mickie said. “I’m going to stay at your house.”

“Okay,” I said without any further comment. “But I have someplace I need to go before we go home.”

I parked on Hillside Drive directly in front of the OLM church.

“Sam?” Mickie said.

“You can wait here,” I said. Mickie had stopped going to church years earlier. She said she believed in a higher being but not in religion. I had continued going to Sunday Mass to appease my mother. Anytime I suggested I would not go caused friction between us. It had been easier on all of us if I just bit the bullet, though I’d long ago begun to question my faith, or perhaps my mother’s faith. After all, I could not recall any occasion when God had stepped in and helped me, despite smashing my prayer bank repeatedly. I figured if there was ever a time for God to show himself, this was it.

“I’ll go with you,” Mickie said.

The front doors to the church were locked, but the side door remained open.

Inside, the stained-glass windows were dark. The overhead fixtures offered only a dull light. Shadows from the flames in the bloodred candles flickered and danced across the walls and the statues of the various saints as Mickie and I walked down the center aisle. She took a seat in the first pew. I continued to the railing, genuflected, and made the sign of the cross, but I did not kneel. This was not between me and the man on that cross. I turned to my right, walking to the alcove with the white statue of the barefoot Blessed Mother crushing the snake beneath her feet. I knelt and looked up at her brown porcelain eyes as I had done as a child on that aborted first day of school at OLM. I had the same strange sense I had felt back then, that the Blessed Mother was looking down at me, using the eyes of the statue to see me. I wasn’t sure where to begin or what to say. I was angry and upset. If God knows everything, then he knew that much.