Sit and wait (#weekendfreewrite)
This is my last second contribution to #WeekendFreewrite, the amazing weekend edition of #freewrite.
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Dad gave me a wink, like we were pals or something. Well, we weren’t. Never had been. He never had done this before. Winking, smiling. Now he was doing it all the time. At me, at the nurses, no matter if male or female, he just kept winking and smiling. I sat beside his bed. What had happened to the man I used to fear for almost all my life? Who was huge as a rock, strong as a Grizzly? Who would chop the wood in the back of our house for the whole day? Who would go after anybody who came into his way, who disturbed him, who didn’t agree with him?
He was gone. He winked again, smiled at me, like we were sharing some kind of naughty secret that would forever give us a laugh. The truth is, we did share a secret, but it would never give me a laugh. I stood up, went to the mirror above the sink. I needed to shave again. Days had gone by since I had been at home for more than only a few hours, mostly to catch sleep, maybe check on Carol, but I didn’t really have time for her. And my mother would call almost the moment I got home, like she had put some kind of tracking device into my pockets.
“How is he today?”, she would ask. And I wasn’t sure if she was even expecting an answer.
Her name tag said Iris but he didn’t have to look at the tag anymore to know her name. She was standing behind the counter, giving him this root beer-float kind of a smile.
"Mr Keen?"
She was apparently talking to me. I liked her. I liked all the nurses here, they kept being nice, even with dad. It was maybe easier for them, though, I thought, now that dad was this completely different person. I wasn’t able to enter the room without feeling the anger come back again. Still, I came back every day.
“Can I help you with something, Mr Keen?” she asked me. I hadn’t realized that I was still standing at the counter, looking at her, seemingly a bit lost. I shook my head. “No, Iris, you’ve already done so much, thank you. I just don’t know what to do with myself at the moment.”
“He’s asleep, isn’t he?” she asked.
“Yes”, I lied. I would never leave the room when he slept, this was the only time I felt a bit of peace and quite in his presence. And thought about putting a cushion on his face.
“Well, we’ve just got a delivery of new magazines, if you’d like to take a look” ...
I thought that what I really wanted to do was to ask her out.
“Sure”, I said, let me have a look.
I sifted through an art magazine, some amazing photos of paintings, I thought I would like to meet the artists. Connect to something nice, something creative. I wanted to feel something other than destruction and decay.
For some reason, I remembered a moment when I was in forth grade, the time Leslie called me a leech. I didn’t even know what a leech was, so first I thought it was a compliment and was blushing. But when I finally had asked my mom what a leech was and she had explained it to me, I was so humiliated. Why would Leslie say something like this? What had I done to her? Why would people just keep hurting other people for no good reason.
I put the magazine onto the table, got up and went to my dad’s room. He gave me another wink as he saw me. I couldn’t wink back, even if I wanted. He had forgotten about everything he had done. I hadn’t.