Page 59 of Slanting Towards the Sea
FIFTY-FOUR
THE INSIDE OF THE cab reeks of spring onions, the taxi driver burping silently, exuding new invisible clouds every few minutes.
The streets blur together as we go. When we pull up in front of my house, I notice with slight annoyance that the windows are all dark.
Even though it’s dusk, Dad has not turned the lights on, and is likely sitting in the living room in front of the gleaming TV screen in an eye-hurting darkness.
I pay the taxi driver and thank him for the ride.
The house is not only dark when I enter, there’s no sound of the TV either.
Dad must have gone to bed early. It was probably one of his bad days.
I should’ve called to check on him, asked him how he was doing.
Not that it would’ve helped him, but it might’ve made him feel less alone.
I make a pact with myself to get up early tomorrow and have coffee with him, maybe even talk about politics, let him vent a little.
I go to the utility room, put my towel and wet bathing suits inside the washing machine to rinse.
“Dad?” I say, entering the living room, in case he’s awake. “I’m home.”
Everything is as I left it this morning.
Exactly as I left it.
The food container with schnitzels in gravy I left to defrost on the kitchen counter now sits in a pool of water, untouched. The sink is empty, not even the cup he eats his oatmeal in every morning is inside. No d?ezva on the burner. The curtains unopened, the air unstirred, slightly stale.
An eerie feeling rises up my back. “Dad?”
The door to his room is half open. “Dad?” I move fast, but it feels as though I’m extra slow, like wading through oil. I see his leg before I see the rest of him, lying on the floor in the doorway of his bathroom. “No.” I’m running now, both wanting to look and not to see.
He is lying on his side, facing away from me, in his pajamas.
I fall to my knees, turn him over slowly.
I can’t look. I have to look. His skin is cold, but I can’t tell if that’s because he’s been lying on the tiles for so long, or because he’s dead.
“Daddy?” My voice transmutes to that of a little girl.
The sharp smell of urine. His pajama pants wet, the floor below my knees wet.
I press my fingers against his jugular, feeling for a pulse.
I can’t sense anything, but I don’t know if that’s because I’m not looking in the right place, or because it’s not there.
A series of indistinguishable grunts and gurgles mix in my throat as the panic builds.
I press harder. A faint flutter of his pulse against my fingertips.
The relief is transient, replaced with more panic.
“Hang in there, I’m calling for help,” I tell him as if he can hear me. I scramble up, run for my phone. I struggle to steady it in one hand as I’m punching in 112 with the other.
“Emergency center,” a dispassionate male voice says.
“Hi, yes, hello. My father’s unconscious. I think he had a stroke.”
The man asks for details—what I know about the patient’s condition, current status, brief medical history, our address. It sounds as though someone else is responding as I’m filling him in. “The ambulance is dispatched,” he says. “They should be there within minutes. Ma’am?”
“Yes?”
“Are we within the golden hour?”
My stomach drops. I know enough about stroke to know what he’s asking, that any reasonable means of therapy, as well as recovery, depends on bringing the patient to the hospital within that first hour.
I bend and press my forehead into my father’s unmoving side.
In all likelihood, he’s been lying here since early this morning.
While I was away sailing, swimming, making love, fighting, he lay here, unconscious, half dead. “We’re way past the golden hour.”