“My back—oh, it’s bad.”
“We need to go.” I reach for the key, but he grunts in a way that tells me not to start the engine. He’s breathing hard and shaking his head. “It’ll pass,” he gasps. “Nothing to be done anyway.”
“You don’t know that. I want Jack Kirby to see you.”
“Let’s just sit here, son. I don’t think it’ll be long.”
A wave of panic hits me, sending adrenaline crashing through my veins. “I’m taking you back,” I tell him, cranking the motor.
“Damn it—”
“I’m taking you back and that’s an end to it!”
He settles back in his seat. “All right. Hit the gas, then.”
The Flex has a truck engine under the hood, giving it a surprising amount of power. Once we clear the cemetery gate, I switch on my hazard lights and use every cubic centimeter of horsepower as we roar down Cemetery Road, making for the intersection with Highway 61. I drive with my left hand only. My right rests on Dad’s left forearm, gently squeezing at brief intervals to let him know I’m with him.
“Won’t be long,” I say every few seconds.
“Okay,” he says once. A mile down the road he whispers, “Not bad . . . not as bad.”
As I screech onto Highway 61, the vehicle swaying on its shocks, I realize there’s something wrong with his breathing. The silences last too long, and when the breaths come, they’re like gasps. Something like a snore follows these gasps, but it’s not a snore. It’s almost like he’s trying to talk.
Lifting my hand from his forearm, I lay it across his forehead. The skin is cold. Unnaturally so. As this realization sinks in, somewhere out of the deep reservoirs of trivia in my brain—accumulated during the writing of thousands of news stories—two words rise: agonal breaths. That’s what I’m hearing now. My father’s in cardiac arrest. The gasps are his body’s last-ditch effort to get oxygen to his starved organs. His brain has already winked out, like a guttering candle. Oh, God, I think, an image of my mother filling my mind. Why did I take him out there?
“Dad? Dad!”
Nothing.
He hasn’t inhaled for thirty seconds. Maybe forty. Just when I think he’s finally gone, he gasps again, a long inhalation like a breath—and yet not a breath. Then comes the long, rippling sound like a snore.
“I’m with you,” I tell him, wondering if he knows I’m here. Maybe he can feel my hand, at least. “I’m with you, Dad,” I tell him. “I’m with you . . .”
My hand is still on my father’s forehead when we reach the hospital, but his skin feels like the flesh of a mushroom. He didn’t breathe or gasp as I drove the final mile. He never will again. Dr. Kirby and my mother stand outside the ER entrance. Jack has his arm around Mom, comforting her as best he can.
When I stop, Jack leads her to the passenger window. I press the window button with my left hand. As the glass sinks into the doorframe, Mom sees my hand resting on Dad’s forehead. Thankfully, his eyes are closed.
“I shouldn’t have taken him,” I say helplessly.
“You did right,” Dr. Kirby says. “He wanted to go.”
“Did you talk about Adam?” Mom asks.
“We did. I learned a lot. I’m so stupid.”
“No. You did the right thing.” She looks up at me at last, and her eyes are clear. “I’m glad you were with him at the end.”
“Me, too,” I say, my voice breaking. “I talked to him all the way back, so he’d know he wasn’t alone.”
Dr. Kirby nods his approval. A single tear runs down my mother’s cheek. “I know he heard you,” she says softly. “It’s over now. He’s with Adam now.”
Chapter 49
Paul Matheson trudged up the fourth-floor hallway of the University of Mississippi Medical Center, watching his father’s half-open door. He hadn’t eaten in a while, so he’d gone down to the McDonald’s on the first floor of the hospital for a cheeseburger. Paul was no health-food nut, but he wondered if Mississippi’s medical center was the only one in the union shoveling Big Macs and fries into patients and their families during medical crises.
He was functioning on four hours’ sleep. After the ER docs had evaluated and admitted his father last night, Paul had rented a room at the Cabot Lodge, just across Woodrow Wilson Drive, to have a place for Kevin and Jet to crash if they decided to stay over. They had stayed about six hours, but his father had been sleeping a lot, and Kevin had baseball practice, so they’d headed back to Bienville in her Volvo. Paul hated to miss the practice, especially since his father would also be absent, but the other dads would just have to handle it.
From what the doctors said, Max was lucky to be alive. If Warren Lacey hadn’t managed to get him to a hospital when he did, his vital functions would have shut down on Parnassus Hill. Max had a depressed skull fracture, a subdural hematoma, and a bruised cerebral cortex. Surgeons had drilled a small hole in his skull to relieve the pressure on his brain, and now he was doing as well as could be expected. The neurosurgeon who’d informed Max about his close call during his post-op visit was surprised to hear his patient answer: “Doc, I walked out of an army hospital in Chu Lai and returned to my unit six hours after suffering worse than this.” That was Max all over. Had to show the doc he was the toughest SOB he’d ever operated on.
But maybe Max was. For when Paul turned into room 437, he was shocked to find his father sitting up in bed—or at least he’d raised the bed to where he appeared to be sitting up. Max had his cell phone in his hand, and he appeared to be texting with somebody.
“What’s going on, Pop?” Paul asked. “You trying to kill yourself already?”
Max looked up. “Duncan McEwan just died.”
Paul felt a momentary dislocation in time.
“Seems Marshall drove him out to the cemetery, to Adam’s statue. He had a heart attack out there.”
“Mr. McEwan never got over losing Adam,” Paul said. “Not even after, what, thirty years?”
“Thirty-one.” Max was looking at his phone. “I remember it like yesterday. I put my boat in the river and spent two days searching for that boy. Damn shame. Adam was the best natural athlete to ever come out of this town. Best white one, anyway.”
Paul nodded. “Them trying to swim the river that morning was the stupidest thing I ever saw.”
“And it was Marshall’s idea, you said. At least you were smart enough not to try it. Shows your sense. It’s a miracle Trey and Dooley didn’t drown, too. Idiots.”
Paul went silent at the mention of his cousins. There was something about that morning he’d never shared with a soul.
“What’s the matter?” asked his father. “You look like you saw a ghost.”
“I’m just tired.”
“Bullshit. Spill it, boy.”
Paul wished he hadn’t said anything about the river. “Two weeks after Adam drowned, I was over in Jackson with Dooley and Trey, staying at Uncle Richard’s house. I heard them talking about that morning. They were high as hell, really out of it. Apparently while Marshall and Adam were separated out there, Dooley and Trey swam around and messed with Adam in the fog. Pulled him underwater eight or ten times. He eventually got away, but Trey was pretty sure they wore him out doing that.”