Page 1 of Fever: Love In Scrubs

WYNTER: AGE FIFTEEN

I sat at my desk, looking over my notes for the history test I had tomorrow.

The sound of the doorbell ringing broke my concentration.

I would have ignored it, but the visitor started knocking and it was clear that my father wasn’t going to answer.

With a heavy sigh, I dropped my pencil, stood from the desk, and strolled over to my bedroom window.

Peering out, I saw an unfamiliar car parked along the street with the logo for DCFS printed on it. A tall blonde woman stood next to the car talking to our nosey Karen of a neighbor from across the street. She’d moved in a couple of months ago and our house seemed to be a target for her.

She complained about the yard.

She complained about the trash can being beside the road too long.

She complained about the amount of trash being taken out.

One day she came over banging on the door complaining about a smell. When my father opened it, she stormed inside yelling and got the shock of her life. She threatened to call the police and DCFS if my father didn’t clean up the house.

I’d tried.

I’d been trying to get him to let go of things. We’d called an organizer to help us, and Daddy still wouldn’t budge on removing half the things. When we started taking things out, he became extremely overwhelmed and yelled at everybody to get out.

That was a few weeks ago and now here we were.

I sprinted from my room, almost tripping over the mass of clutter in the hallway and made my way downstairs as fast as I could.

“Daddy!” I called. “Daddy!”

I found him in the living room, eyes fixated on the wedding tape of him and my mother. Whenever he got like this, it was hard for him to focus on anything else. I grabbed the remote and turned the TV off. Only then did he blink and look up at me.

“Why did you do that?” he asked.

“Daddy, you didn’t hear the doorbell?”

“No… I guess I was somewhere else.” He struggled to pull himself up from the old, tattered recliner that had seen better days. I reached out a hand to assist him.

“Thank you, baby girl.”

“Daddy,” I said, gripping his hand. “It’s DCFS at the door. She called them.”

He looked at me, eyes full of sadness and regret.

“I’m sorry, Wynter.”

“You can’t let them take me from you.”

He looked around the house as the doorbell rang again. The Karen bitch yelled from the other side.

“I know you’re in there, Mr. Driscoll. Think of your child for once!”

“It’s out of my hands.”

“Daddy, please!” I begged.

Tears streamed down my face as he went to open the door. Karen and the blonde woman stood on the other side. The DCFS worker offered him a warm smile.

“Are you Frost Driscoll?”

Daddy nodded. “Yes, ma’am.”

“My name is Jessica Frank. I’m with the Department of Children and Family Services. We received a very serious call about a possible case of child neglect. Do you mind if I come in?”

My father sighed and stepped aside. Jessica stepped in, and when Karen tried to follow, I walked over and slammed the door in her face.

“You must be Wynter,” Ms. Frank said, extending her hand.

I crossed my arms and remained silent. She offered a faint smile as she withdrew her hand and looked around the cluttered living room.

“Mr. Driscoll… I’m sure you’re a loving father, but this is not a safe environment for you or your daughter. It’s a fire hazard to say the least. There are piles of trash. Boxes to the ceiling. The smell suggests that something is dead in here, Mr. Driscoll.”

My father nodded. “I know. I’m sorry. It’s just… it’s hard.”

“You understand that I have to report these living conditions, right?”

“Please,” I begged, walking up to her. “Just give us another chance to clean this up. I’ll make sure he throws everything out. We can start over.”

“Wynter,” my father said firmly.

“Daddy, please! They’re gonna take me away from you! You’re all I have. You and I both know if they take me, they’ll never give me back.”

“That’s not true,” Jessica said, shaking her head.

“Look around, lady. You people live for things like this. I’m not a baby or a small child. Who’s gonna want me?”

“In cases like this, if it comes down to it, we would try to place you with family first.” She turned to my father.

“Is there anybody that can take her until you get the house in order, Mr. Driscoll? We’d be willing to work with you.

Contrary to belief, we don’t enjoy taking children from their families. ”

My father looked from her to me, defeat in his eyes. I saw the moment he gave up on me… on himself… on us. He’d given up the moment my mother died, but this was the final nail in the coffin.

“Baby girl,” he said softly. “You deserve better than this. I can’t give that to you right now, no matter how bad I want to. I just need some time to get myself together. For real this time. I promise.”

“Daddy… you’re throwing me away?”

Tears streamed down my face as I looked at him. We didn’t have the best relationship. He was barely present, but he was mostly all I had. He was my only parent and I loved him.

“I could never throw you away, Wynter. I’m giving you a chance to live a normal life. I’ll call your Aunt Kira.”

I shook my head as I backed away from him and Jessica.

“No.”

“It’s only for a little while ? —”

“No!” I screamed.

Grabbing the doorknob, I swung the front door open and bolted from the house, almost knocking Karen down in the process. My heart was broken. Not because he was sending me away, but because I knew I’d never be able to come home.

I hated my house.

I hated living in clutter and barely sleeping because I was afraid something was going to crawl on me, even though my room and bathroom were the cleanest spots in the house. I hated that my father was stuck in a constant state of grief that was so consuming he forgot about me most of the time.

I hated it all.

But most of all, I hated that he didn’t fight for me. Repeatedly, he chose the ghost and memories of a dead woman over being what I needed. Just once… I wanted him to choose me.

Present Day

“Hey, Daddy. It’s Wynter calling for the umpteenth time,” I said to my father’s voicemail. “You know you can’t ignore me forever, right? I promise, I won’t ask you to move here again. Just pick up the phone or call me back, old man. I miss your voice… I love you.”

I hung up the phone and placed it on the bathroom counter so I could finish getting ready for work.

Frost Driscoll was the most stubborn man I’d ever met.

Of course, I knew this a long time ago. I realized growing up that my father wasn’t like most people.

He had his fixations and they controlled him.

After losing my mother during childbirth, he became a shell of his former self.

Sometimes it was like I didn’t exist to him.

Once I was old enough to fend for myself, he left me be.

He spent most of his time trying to preserve my mother’s memory.

He held on to her like a fiend to a pipe.

His life revolved around her vacant presence and our home became a graveyard for all things Lianna Driscoll.

A childhood memory crept in uninvited, as it always did when I thought of him.

“She would have kept it clean,” he’d mutter sometimes, running his hands over his collection of junk. “Your mother, she would have known what to do with all this.”

My home was nothing like the pictures I’d seen in an old photo album growing up.

The once open space was now filled with narrow pathways carved between towers of newspapers, magazines, boxes of things my father bought and never opened.

The smell of decay and neglect clung to every surface and seeped into every item of clothing.

I used to wash my clothes with so much detergent and scent boosters before storing them in air tight containers to keep the smell out.

I’d learned to navigate the house by feeling around in the dark because I was afraid that turning on lights might reveal just how bad it had gotten. If I pretended it didn’t exist, maybe it wouldn’t seem as bad as it was.

I lived nothing like that now, though. My bed was always made with perfect hospital corners and sheets pulled tight enough to bounce a quarter.

My kitchen, living room, and bathroom were spotless.

Everything had to be in its designated place.

My shoes were lined up by size. My books were arranged by height.

My clothes were categorized by season, color, and occasion.

Not a single surface of my home was cluttered with the remnants of daily life.

Everything was in pristine condition, just how I liked it.

It wasn’t that I was a neat freak…okay, maybe I was.

But after living in chaos for so long, I deserved peace and order in the place I rested my head.

It was my biggest fear that I would inherit my father’s hoarding habit.

Fifteen years.

That’s how long it had been since I stepped foot in my childhood home or the town of Silver Run. I could only imagine how it looked now. It was crazy to me that the city hadn’t condemned the property. I knew he had complaints out the ass for the yard alone.

I kept telling myself that I was going to go visit, but I couldn’t.

Every time he said he was going to visit me, he found some excuse not to.

I knew the state of that house would sadden, enrage, and give me severe anxiety if I broke down and finally went there.

I was bound to call the city on him my damn self.

The last thing I wanted to do was lash out at my father over unresolved childhood trauma.

It was bad enough that he hadn’t answered my calls in a few weeks.

It wasn’t the first time he stopped talking to me because I tried to get him to leave that house and come live with me. I had to have been crazy to invite a hoarder into my space, but he was my father. In spite of his flaws, I loved the man.

My phone buzzed with a text from my cousin Tinka asking about dinner plans.

I stared at it, thumb hovering over the keyboard.

I could use a night out, so I accepted. Tinka was always the life of the party, and I was sure I’d have a good time.

She responded with the details and I confirmed I’d meet her there.

I unhooked my phone from the nightstand charger so I could go make myself some coffee before work.

Walking into my kitchen, I smiled. This was my favorite room in the house and the one I always cleaned first. I loved to cook and bake, so a clean kitchen was a must. Growing up in a house where I couldn’t see the kitchen floor through the piles of junk, it was a must that I kept it clean.

If nothing else was clean, the living room, kitchen, and bathroom were in tip top shape.

Logically, said three spaces were high traffic areas.

You entertained in the living room, cooked in the kitchen, and the bathroom…

well I wouldn’t use a dirty public bathroom, so that was the only logic I needed.

In the quiet of my controlled space, I could almost hear Dad shuffling through his maze of accumulated grief, keeping Mom alive in the only way he knew how.

He never let anything go, never threw anything away, and never admitted that, for him, death meant emptiness.

He filled our home in ways he couldn’t fill the empty space in his heart.

“Get your shit together, Wynter,” I mumbled to myself as I prepared my travel mug of coffee. “Don’t take your ass too far down memory lane and end up crying like a bitch in here.”

With that thought in mind, I finished making my coffee and warmed up one of the breakfast burritos I’d prepped yesterday morning. With my hands cluttered with my coffee, food, work bag, purse, phone, and keys, I left out my front door.

I’d just gotten in my car and cranked up when my phone rang.

Looking down, I saw that it was my Aunt Kira.

She was part of my morning routine, making sure she called me every morning at the same time.

It didn’t matter that I was about to see her at work.

She was going to call. Swiping the screen, I answered the call after three rings.

“Hey, Auntie.”

She sniffled. “Hey, baby.”

“What’s wrong?”

“Where are you?”

“I’m about to leave for work, auntie. I’m still in the driveway. Please tell me what’s wrong. Why do you sound like that? I don’t like it.”

“Stay right there. I’m almost to you.”

“Auntie, you’re scaring me.”

“I’ll be there in a second just?—”

“Why do you have to come here to tell me what it is? Tell me right now. I can handle it.”

“Wynter… baby, I’m afraid I have some bad news.”

My heart skipped a beat. I swallowed hard as I put the car back in park.

“What is it?” I whispered.

“It’s your dad, sweetheart. He’s… he’s gone, Wynter.”

“W-what? What do you mean he’s gone?”

“He passed away. He hadn’t shown up to work in a couple of days and someone went to check up on him. That’s when they found him?—”

The phone fell from my hands. I sat there, struggling to breathe as the realization hit me. The screams and cries that left my body didn’t feel like my own. My shoulders shook as tears fell tenfold. As hard as I tried to get it under control, it was to no avail.

The driver’s side door opened, and I looked over to see my aunt reaching for me. She pulled me out of the car and into her arms, where I immediately crumbled.

“I’ve got you, baby. I’ve got you.”

My heart ached. I didn’t get the chance to meet my mother, but in spite of everything, I loved my father.

Daddy?

Gone?

It just couldn’t be real.