The Apostate's Daughter

         Early in the evening, after her mother had accepted a visiting neighbor’s offer of a lift home, Jennifer’s father began to breathe fast and erratically. Jennifer rang for a nurse, then, afraid of waiting too long, ran down to the nurses’ station, where a familiar nurse was entering data into a computer. The nurse raced back with her, pausing briefly to watch the peaks and valleys on the monitor before she took the patient’s pulse. Apparently satisfied that there’d been no significant change, she checked the respirator and the drip and, with a sympathetic smile, said as she was leaving that these things knew no schedule, it could be five minutes, five hours, or five days.
         Jennifer wished there were something, anything, she could do to feel less helpless. Her father hated passivity. “Do something,” he used to instruct her as she was growing up, “even if it’s wrong.”
         She had read that dying patients sometimes hold on for the sake of the family until some family member gives them permission to let go. Again she recalled Bren’s comment that her father had held on for her. She walked to her father’s side and watched his labored breathing.
         “It’s all right, Daddy,” she whispered over the hiss of the oxygen, “if you’re too tired to go on. It’s all right, Daddy, if you want to stop breathing.”
         Her own breath caught in her throat.
         The noisy equipment hissed and beeped relentlessly, sucking out everything around it conducive to life. She was breaking into a sweat. She took a deep breath and blew it out upward. She drew a tissue from the box on her father’s table and blotted her face. She yanked the neck of her shirt forward to ventilate her torso where a rivulet of sweat was trickling down between her breasts. She stood stock still, inhaling deeply, but she was drowning, drowning in hot viscous air. She had to get out of there. She had to escape. She had to run out the door, down the stairs, and out of the hospital to inhale the cool fresh evening.
         But she summoned the strength to stop herself. All she could allow herself—she had to be here—was a brief cooling off. She slipped out of the room and walked down the corridor, passing open doors; a cart, where a nurse was dropping pills into tiny paper cups; and the nurses’ station, now unattended. She passed the elevators, bent down for some tepid sips at the water fountain, and, almost back to normal, aborted her flight at the airy visitors’ lounge.
         The lounge was painted peach-for-cheerful and furnished in bright orange vinyl. One huge photograph, a blowup of a sunflower, was hanging on the wall. The TV suspended high up in the corner blessedly was silent. A young man in work clothes was sitting, bent forward, on one of the sofas, thoughtfully gazing at his lug-soled boots. At the sofa’s other end a woman in a gold-spangled sweatshirt was idly flipping the pages of People. Opposite them, on another sofa, two blonde young women with identical swooping noses looked up expectantly, then resumed their conversation.
         Jennifer walked to the low table between the sofas, glanced at the few tattered magazines strewn across it, and reached for a copy of Time. Reading its date, more than a year ago, she wondered how many others had picked it up before her, how many had been holding it as they waited for news far more important to them than anything between its covers. She carried the magazine to the furthest corner, sat down, and dropped it into her lap, where it lay unopened as a free flow of memories flooded her mind:
         She, seated, high and secure, on her father’s shoulders, eye-to-eye with the man on stilts in the passing parade. She, on a summer’s evening, knee bloody and oozing cinders, wailing to her mother, “Get Daddy, get Daddy!” She, in cap and gown, marching out of her college baccalaureate, seeing her father up front in the waiting crowd, his tear-filled eyes fixed on her as she passed. Were they tears of sadness for the daughter now grown and soon to be gone? Or were they tears of pride for the dirt-poor boy who had worked his way through college and struggled through lean times eventually to be able to foot the bill for his daughter’s Ivy League education? Had she thanked him on that graduation day? Or had she been too full of herself even to think of it?
         That possible omission erased whatever comfort her last words to him had afforded her. But she could still put things right if, on returning to his room, she spoke other words into his ear—an essential postscript—words that, like the earlier ones, she could only hope he’d be able to hear: “Thank you, Daddy . . . for everything.”
         A young nurse in white nylon overalls was standing in the doorway. The nurse scanned the waiting visitors, stopping at her.
         “That nurse looks grave.” It was her father’s mock-serious voice.
         “Oh, Daddy, that’s awful!”
         The nurse’s voice was high and little-girlish. “Are you Mr. Miller’s daughter?”
         Jennifer stood up.