The Seventh Plague

EPILOGUE ∑

Promise me.

Gray sat at his father’s bedside in the nursing home. Those words had haunted him for weeks after his father first uttered them in this room, but now he understood. He studied his father’s face, noting the broken blood vessels on his nose, remembering the drunken rages he could get into, especially after he lost his leg.

He was a proud man, brought low by disability and a disability check. Gray’s mother had to continue to work, while his father languished looking after two belligerent sons, who grew only more so with age. It’s your Welsh blood, her mother would excoriate the men in her house after some fight.

She was wrong about the Welsh part but right about the blood.

Gray had come to recognize the true source of the friction between father and son. They were too alike, too much of the same blood.

He continued to study that lined face, the sunken eyes, trying to find that fire. He wished the man would rail again — against him, against the disease that had stripped his mind, against chance, which had taken his leg.

Promise me.

Now his father fussed with the edges of his blanket as if trying to find meaning. He barely spoke any longer. He battled demons when he slept, pawing at the air, kicking feebly with his one leg, enough to get a bedsore on his heel.

Gray had spoken to the nurse practitioner yesterday. While Gray had been away, his father had a small stroke, and according to her, he was stable, on blood thinners, but he might never improve from his current baselines. The prognosis was that he could stay this way for months, if not years.

As Gray sat now, he held his father’s hand, feeling the bones. He rubbed a thumb over the thin skin, trying to remember the last time he had held his father’s hand, or really even touched him. So he took advantage of that now.

His father mumbled in his sleep, but when Gray shifted his gaze from those frail fingers to his father’s face, his eyes were open, staring back at him.

“Hey, Dad, didn’t mean to wake you.”

Lips moved, cracked and dry. He swallowed, then tried again.

“Gray…”

It had been ten days since his father had recognized him.

“Gray, your mother… your mother’s coming.”

He patted his father’s hand, long past trying to find significance in the needle-skips of the man’s memory. Better to just go along. “Is she? When’s she coming?”

His brow knit, as if posed a challenging question. “Huh?”

“When’s Mom coming?”

“Harriet?”

“That’s right.”

His father searched, even lifting his head from the pillow. He stared toward an empty chair in the corner. “What’re you talking about? She’s right there.”

Gray stared at the empty chair, then back to his father. His head had settled back to the pillow, but his gaze remained on the chair, his lips moving as if speaking to the apparition sitting there.

Then his eyes closed, and he was gone again, fingers twitching at the edge of his blanket.

Promise me…

He now knew what his father had been asking him, and filled in the words that disease had silenced.

… when the time is right…

Gray kept holding his father’s hand, but with his other, he pushed the plunger on the morphine syringe stabbed into the IV line.

Now’s the time, Pop.

He leaned over and kissed his forehead.

Fingers squeezed his, then relaxed.

He moved his lips to his father’s ear. “Go see Mom.”

Gray clutched that hand one last time, stood up, and left.

He strode through the nursing home, out the front door, and to the woman waiting in the bright morning sunlight. He took her hand, never breaking stride, and together they headed away.

“Are you ready to find that fire escape?” he asked.

She smiled and gripped his hand so very tight. “I thought you’d never ask.”