The surgeon had to operate on his knee to replace the cap with a purselike suture that partially disabled the joint. As I watched the operation I thought of how much like sewing it seemed, and I hoped that my father was in more capable hands than if he had been brought to me. In home ec my hands had been clumsy. Zipper foot or baster, I got them all confused.
But the surgeon had been patient. A nurse had filled him in on the story as he washed and scrubbed his hands. He remembered reading about what had happened to me in the papers. He was my father’s age and had children of his own. He shivered as he stretched his gloves out over his hands. How alike he and this man were. How very different.
In the dark hospital room, a fluorescent bar light buzzed just behind my father’s bed. As dawn approached it was the only light in the room until my sister walked in.
My mother and sister and brother woke to the sounds of the police sirens and came down into the dark kitchen from their bedrooms.
“Go wake your father,” my mother said to Lindsey. “I can’t believe he slept through this.”
And so my sister had gone up. Everyone now knew where to look for him: in only six months, the green chair had become his true bed.
“Dad’s not here!” my sister yelled as soon as she realized. “Dad’s gone. Mom! Mom! Dad’s gone!” For a rare moment Lindsey was a frightened child.
“Damn!” my mother said.
“Mommy?” Buckley said.
Lindsey rushed into the kitchen. My mother faced the stove. Her back was a riddled mass of nerves as she went about making tea.
“Mom?” Lindsey asked. “We have to do something.”
“Don’t you see…?” my mother said, stopping for a moment with a box of Earl Grey suspended in the air.
“What?”
She put the tea down, switched on the burner, and turned around. She saw something herself then: Buckley had gone to cling to my sister as he anxiously sucked his thumb.
“He’s gone off after that man and gotten himself in trouble.”
“We should go out, Mom,” Lindsey said. “We should go help him.”
“No.”
“Mom, we have to help Daddy.”
“Buckley, stop milking your thumb!”
My brother burst into hot panicked tears, and my sister reached her arms down to pull him in tighter. She looked at our mother.
“I’m going out to find him,” Lindsey said.
“You are doing no such thing,” my mother said. “He’ll come home in good time. We’re staying out of this.”
“Mom,” Lindsey said, “what if he’s hurt?”
Buckley stopped crying long enough to look back and forth from my sister to my mother. He knew what hurt meant and who was missing from the house.
My mother gave Lindsey a meaningful look. “We are not discussing this further. You can go up to your room and wait or wait with me. Your choice.”
Lindsey was dumbfounded. She stared at our mother and knew what she wanted most: to flee, to run out into the cornfield where my father was, where I was, where she felt suddenly that the heart of her family had moved. But Buckley stood warm against her.
“Buckley,” she said, “let’s go back upstairs. You can sleep in my bed.”
He was beginning to understand: you were treated special and, later, something horrible would be told to you.
When the call came from the police, my mother went immediately to the front closet. “He’s been hit with our own baseball bat!” she said, grabbing her coat and keys and lipstick. My sister felt more alone than she had ever been but also more responsible. Buckley couldn’t be left by himself, and Lindsey wasn’t even able to drive. Besides, it made the clearest sense in the world. Didn’t the wife belong most at the husband’s side?
But when my sister was able to get Nate’s mother on the line – after all, the commotion in the cornfield had awakened the whole neighborhood – she knew what she would do. She called Samuel next. Within an hour, Nate’s mother arrived to take Buckley, and Hal Heckler pulled up to our house on his motorcycle. It should have been exciting – clutching on to Samuel’s gorgeous older brother, riding on a motorcycle for the first time – but all she could think of was our father.
My mother was not in his hospital room when Lindsey entered; it was just my father and me. She came up and stood on the other side of his bed and started to cry quietly.
