10 More than God Can Count
My daddy’s Amish friends live in Kentucky. They taught him how to plow with a mule and they broke his horses. When I was growing up, he would visit them every few months to watch the careful way they worked with their hands. They gave a gentle, loving touch to the most unforgiving labor: sanding lumber, wringing out their plain-colored laundry, butchering the animals they raised. He would bring them Honey Baked Hams, Tony Chachere’s seasoning, and used books from his school. On very special trips, he would bring them turducken. The Amish go wild for turducken. In exchange, they sent him home with taut-skinned tomatoes; fresh, still-sweaty apple turnovers; and words about God and humanity that never, ever left his head. He drove them one town over to visit the doctor and go to Sam’s Club and see their relatives who lived in simple, sturdy homes nearly identical to their own. He respected them. They were his best teachers and they loved him, flaws and all, just the way that we did. They became his family too.
My daddy’s Amish friends baked yeast breads and sold vegetables by the side of the road, and they were loyal and humble and kind. They were the last people to see him alive.
* * *
My mom calls just after sunset. It is the middle of April 2009 and I’m leaving an Anthropologie store in the fancy part of town, just down the road from the slab of Starbucks sidewalk that changed everything. I have a new dress in a tissue paper–stuffed shopping bag, the air is the warmest it’s been since winter, and my daddy is coming to see us tomorrow at 2 p.m. For the first time in a long time, I’m not thinking about surgery or pain or spines today. He’s in Kentucky picking up a new donkey from his friends and wants to stop in on his way home. I don’t know why he needs a donkey, but I laugh out loud when I think about him parking his livestock trailer beside our pretty yellow house in the middle of the iced coffees and MacBooks and beards that keep cropping up in our neighborhood. He left a voice mail yesterday and called me “baby girl.” He sounded so excited to see me.
My phone buzzes like a wasp in my purse and the sound bounces off the cement beams of the quiet, covered parking lot that belongs to the Whole Foods one block over. I haul my body up into the too-tall seat of Jack’s Expedition and I answer.
There are a lot of things my mom could say:
“Your daddy is going to be early.”
“Your daddy is going to be late.”
“Your daddy forgot to charge his phone again.” There aren’t a lot of places to charge your Motorola in Kentucky.
But instead, she says this:
“Your daddy fell. They found him unconscious at the bottom of a staircase. All we know is that they’re taking him to Nashville, to Vanderbilt. He’ll be there in two or three hours. Be ready to go see him then.”
She doesn’t really know what else to say because she doesn’t really know what’s happening. Nobody does. Tim’s trying to get in touch with the doctors but the doctors are busy. She promises to keep me posted and I promise to pick up the phone. I stuff my things onto the passenger seat and drive.
Jack is at home when I get there; he’s just gotten back from tour and we haven’t even seen each other yet. He’s wearing a shirt with a picture of a mountain on it and eating a messy, paper-wrapped bagel sandwich from the coffee shop across the street. He knows something is wrong as soon as he sees me. He hasn’t seen a feeling on my face in weeks and suddenly, they’re everywhere. The sandwich drops onto the floor from the table and he comes to me. I open my mouth to explain.
“Daddy… Daddy.”
I can’t get anything else out.
My body is shaking and I feel cold. The gravity of the not knowing pushes me into Jack’s chest and he holds me, he hangs on to me as I go limp. We haven’t been this close in weeks, not since we found out about the wire. After a few minutes, I tell him everything I know and we wait melted together on the couch for more news.
Tim calls an hour later. Outside the day has gotten dark but the sidewalks are still alive and gleeful like they were in the afternoon. Hipsters in too-tight jeans blow cigarette smoke from their noses and try to look aloof but I catch them through our front window looking up at the bright white, glow-in-the-dark dogwoods and smiling.
Don’t they know what’s happening in here? I ask myself as they stroll by grinning. Don’t they feel it?
When the phone rings, I put it on speaker. Tim’s using his doctor voice and I don’t want to have to hear anything alone. Jack and I are on the couch but holding on to each other like we’re in a lifeboat.
“Not good. Not good, Ru. It’s time to go, he’s not going to make it.”
No. NOOOOOOOO! Nothing’s meant to die in springtime. Poor sweet Dr. Tim, I can’t imagine how many phone calls like this he’s had to make. I can’t imagine what it must be like to make that call to your own sister, to your family.
Before I can make a thought, we pack a bag. We drive past the chili-pepper lights of the Mexican restaurant with the three salsas that my daddy loves, the rough-looking grocery store he wishes I wouldn’t shop at, and straight into the arms of the city that will hold him when he dies. We swerve and honk and accelerate under a big, bored moon that has seen everything before but on nights like this must wish it didn’t have to. We get to Vanderbilt at 9 p.m.
* * *
They have a special room at the hospital for the people who are about to lose someone but it isn’t really special at all. The walls are covered in lumpy, beige-colored wallpaper and there is an ivy plant that shivers under the AC vent the way everybody does in a hospital. We sit downstairs for an hour until a man with a sad, serious face comes for us. Two Amish people are already in the room when we get there, accompanied by their neighbor who drove them, Mr. Harold. He’s a longtime friend of their Amish community and is also very close to my daddy. They’re sitting at a conference table with their chins at their chests saying nothing at all, just staring at a box of tissues like it’s a television set. There are enough chairs, the wheelie ones I love with whooshing hydraulic seats, but Jack and I collapse on the floor and drag our bodies to a corner. I hug my pillow into my chest, look up at the artless walls, and say, “Daddy, Papa, Dad. Daddy, Papa, Dad. Daddy, Papa, Dad.”
If I call him the right way, maybe he’ll come back to me.
A lady named Vicki comes to get me a few minutes later. She wears a turtleneck under her sky-colored scrubs because it’s forty-four degrees inside. She has a soft, soothing voice that knows what it’s doing, that sounds the way it should sound to do her job right. Her job isn’t caring for my daddy, it’s caring for us, leading us into the most sacred, horrible place in the world and coaching us to the other side.
“Follow me,” she says.
She takes us down the hall past a pristine vending machine, full of Pringles and Nutter Butters, that I bet nobody has ever used before. People don’t need movie concessions to watch this part of their story unfold. Jack holds my hand and swallows big as we walk, until we enter a very quiet room full of brain-damaged bodies behind walls of curtains and he has to let go from the shock of it.
“Take your time,” she says, but there is no time left, it’s already gone.