When the Lights Go Out(86)

Shortly after the memory left, Mom got tired. The nurses and I helped her back to bed. Minutes later, Mom fell asleep. She drifted back into some sort of minimally conscious state and passed away two hours later with me there at her side.

*

It’s only after the funeral director comes to collect Mom’s body that I finally rise from the chair. The room is remarkably quiet. No music playing, no familiar sound of the EKG.

The only sounds I hear now come from down the hall where other people lie dying.

Before he leaves, Aaron asks if I’ll be all right and I tell him that I will. “I may not be your father,” he says, “but it would mean the world to me if I could be your friend,” and I tell him that I’d like that very much. He goes, and after he does, I see the nurse has already begun to strip the sheets from Mom’s bed. Soon another patient will be here, another family surrounding them, watching as they die.

“Where are you going to go?” she asks, and I shrug and say stupidly, “Coffee,” because nothing else comes to mind.

Beyond that, I have no idea where to go, what to do with my life.

But there’s a part of me that thinks I can figure this out in time.

I try to reconstruct the dream. As I move down the bright, buzzing hospital halls, I try to piece it back together. But dreams have a way of fading fast, the mind a habit of deleting nonessential things. It’s as if there’s a fifty-piece puzzle before me and I’m missing all but five pieces. I’ve lost forty-five and only some of them connect. I remember only squirrels. Hot dogs. A hippopotamus. But I don’t know what any of it means.

It’s only as I cut through the hospital lobby, passing by the cafeteria, that I’m struck with the sudden sense that something is missing. Something that makes it harder to breathe. I come to a sudden stop and as I do, a body plows into me from behind, making my bag drop to the ground, contents spilling across the hospital floor. Mom’s stuff—her lotion, her ChapStick, her journal—as well as mine. My driver’s license, my credit card, dollar bills.

“My fault, my fault,” I hear as I turn to see a man scramble to the ground to pick up my stuff. “I didn’t see you. I wasn’t looking where I was going,” he admits as he rises to his feet and holds out the bag for me, my things shoved indelicately back in.

As he does I catch a look at his face for the very first time, and only then do I remember. I gasp. It’s him. “Liam,” I breathe, taking in that shaggy brown hair and the blue gum-ball eyes, knowing with certainty that he was there in my dream with me. There’s the vaguest recollection of sitting on a sofa beside him, of his hand stroking my hair. It’s a thought that makes me blush as I take a step closer to him. And though I don’t know him, there’s the greatest sense that I do. That we’re already friends. “Liam,” I say again.

But his face only clouds over in confusion. He shakes his head, stares vacantly at me like I’m mistaken. He looks tired. Stubble has all but taken over his face, and his hair stands on end. His bloodshot eyes are even bloodier than they were before, rivers of red running through the white. He shakes his head. “Jackson,” he says. “Jack.” And I find that I’m thrown completely off, feeling out of sorts because he’s not Liam. Of course he’s not Liam. Because Liam was only a dream. This man is a different man completely, though our late-night confessions over coffee were real. That was real, I remind myself, finding it suddenly impossible to remember what’s real and what’s not.

“I’m sorry,” I stammer. “I thought,” and I feel silly all of a sudden. “I should go,” I say, taking the bag abruptly from his hands, excusing myself, trying to sidestep him and leave. But he doesn’t let me leave. Instead he steps in front of me, reaches out his hand and says, “You never told me your name,” and for a second there’s the sense that he doesn’t want me to leave. That he wants me to stay.

His handshake is warm and firm. He holds on a second longer than he needs to.

I reply, “Jessie,” knowing for the first time in a long while that I am. I am Jessie Sloane.

“You’re leaving, Jessie?” he asks, and I say, “No reason to stick around here any longer.”

I don’t have to tell him that Mom is dead, because he already knows. He can see it in my eyes. “Your brother?” I ask, thinking of the motorcycle accident. His brother flying headfirst into a utility pole. “Is he going to be all right?” For a moment Jack—Jackson—is silent, but then he says, “Bit the dust last night,” and my heart breaks for the both of us.

But there’s also a sense of relief because, though we lost the war, the battle is finally through.

“Where are you going?” he asks, and I tell him I’m not sure. Anywhere. That I just have to get out of here, and he says he knows what I mean. His family waits upstairs in his brother’s hospital room for the funeral home to arrive, to carry the body away. That’s the last thing he needs to see. That’s what he tells me. He shuffles from foot to foot, looking antsy and strung out, desperately in need of a good night’s sleep.

I ask him if he wants to go for coffee, and together we leave.

*

That night, at home alone, I find the courage to open the journal. I caress its cover for a good fifteen minutes first, scared to death of what I might find inside. Maybe my father. Maybe not.