Into the Inferno - Earl Emerson [65]
We found him in a wheelchair in the hallway outside his room, head lolled to one side.
Exuding the brutal honesty of the very young, Britney let out an “Ugghh!” Her sister elbowed her and put her index finger to her lips. Both girls looked to me for signals.
I took a breath and said, “It’s a little like he’s asleep. You would still love me if I was asleep, wouldn’t you?”
“Oh, we love you, Grampa,” Britney said. “Don’t we, Allyson?”
“You sure that’s Grandpa?”
Neither of them had gotten close, standing like tin soldiers with their feet together and their arms at their sides. A thoughtful nurse’s aide who’d been eyeing us showed up with a box of crayons and some scratch paper. We all went into the room, the nurse’s aide wheeling my father in behind us.
“He doing okay?” I asked.
She was a diminutive Asian woman, no more than ninety pounds, with long, lustrous black hair wrapped behind her head. “He do jus’ fine. I go every day a’ four, but he do jus’ fine. Every day. You from out of state?”
“No.”
“Have nice visit.” Smiling and nodding, she left the room.
“He ever talk?” Britney asked.
“No.”
“If I throw him a ball will he catch it?”
“Why don’t you throw him a rock?” Allyson said. “Don’t be stupid. Of course he won’t catch it. Look at him. Let’s draw something. Like that stuff we mailed Mommy.”
“I can’t do that many pictures,” Britney complained.
“Even one picture would be nice,” I said.
Twenty minutes later, a bored Morgan wandered in and waited as the girls colored. A moment later, when I saw Dr. Brashears walking past the door, I called out. He came back, smiling quietly, eyes filled with my fate.
“What are you doing here?” Brashears asked.
I gestured toward the room. “My father.”
“I just went over Jackie’s records. She conformed to your list of symptoms even more closely than I thought. By the way, I called Tacoma General. Got some doctor named Philbert. Holly Riggs and Jackie? Their symptoms match perfectly.”
“And neither one is coming out of it?”
“Doctors aren’t God, but I don’t think so.”
When the girls finished their drawings, we tacked them up on the bulletin board on the end wall in my father’s room next to the newspaper clipping about me. I gave Morgan some cash and sent the three of them over to North Bend Way to Scott’s Dairy Freeze. The pictures were directly under a note that said: There is banking and cigarettes at the floor dayroom every Mon & Wed & Fri at 10:00 a.m.
As if my father was going to be doing any banking. Or smoking.
Alone in the room with him, I pulled up a chair and held his hand. He’d been a poor father some of the time, but then I’d been a poor son some of the time. Hell, he was human. Just like me. Like most of us, he’d done the best he knew. The princely manner with which he’d treated my daughters was a hint of how badly his own demons had tortured him in the years when he’d been raising me.
After a while, I called the fire station to see whether anybody had left any messages. No one had. I took a calling card out of my wallet and called JCP, Inc., in San Jose, asked for Mr. Gray in their administrative offices. It took a while to reach him.
Once I had him on the line, I went through the whole thing again, the accident, our health problems since the accident. I mentioned Mr. Stuart’s denial that their company had been shipping anything in February. “I’ve got the shipping company’s manifest right here in my hand,” I said. “You guys shipped three packages, and they were involved in a serious accident.”
“I’m sorry you and Mr. Stuart got off on the wrong foot,” Gray said.
“There was no wrong foot about it. He said you guys don’t ship in February. I have a copy of the manifest right here in front of me that says you did.”
“Stuart is very well thought of around here. If he said