The next morning I didn’t wake up until after eight, a luxury I hadn’t had in years, and one I certainly couldn’t afford at that point.
“Fuck,” I muttered, rubbing the sleep out of my eyes. I’d forgotten to set my alarm, but usually the sun woke me up before it went off anyway. The light in the room was weird, though. Dim and sort of yellowish.
Forcing myself to get up, I wandered over to the window and opened the semitranslucent curtains.
“Well, that sucks,” I muttered. The sky was deeply overcast with smoke, giving everything an orange tinge. Very post-apocalyptic. We’d had it happen before during fire seasons, so I knew it wasn’t necessarily a big deal. Still, it was a little unsettling, given the evacuation warning.
I grabbed my phone and searched for the county’s Facebook page, then sighed with relief. Still just a level one, although it looked like the fires had grown. Reaching for my robe, I pulled it on over my sleep shorts and top, then started down the stairs in search of coffee.
“Morning, sweetheart,” Dad said when I walked into the kitchen. He had a piece of toast in front of him, along with the newspaper. Blessedly, he’d also made coffee.
“Morning,” I said, giving him a kiss on the head.
“Fires are getting bad,” he told me. “They’ve put out a level-two alert for Lamont. Still forty miles away, though. We should be fine.”
“I was thinking you should pack a bag this morning just in case,” I replied. “I know they’ll protect the town, but we have to go to Seattle tomorrow anyway. Kills two birds with one stone. Oh, and we need to send in your medical history today, too. Let me grab the paperwork. Can you go get your prescriptions?”
“I hate doctors,” he said, frowning. “I still don’t see why we need to do this. So what if I’m forgetting things? Hate to break it to you, but that’s what happens when you get old.”
“Humor me,” I said tightly. “Maybe there’s a medicine that will help.”
He snorted, shaking his head, but he shoved the rest of his toast in his mouth and then left the kitchen to get his meds.
• • •
The forms were more complicated than I’d realized.
We started working on them at eight thirty, and an hour later we still weren’t finished. In addition to the basic history, there’d been a behavioral questionnaire for me to fill out, and one for him to fill out, too. Now we were down to listing his prescriptions, thank God.
“What’s this for?” I asked, holding up a bottle.
“Blood pressure,” he said. I wrote it down and then reached for another, feeling vaguely guilty that I hadn’t gone through these before. He’d always been such a private person about his health, though.
That and you were in denial, my common sense pointed out.
Yeah, you got me on that one.
“Be right back,” Dad said. “Need some water.”
“Sounds good—grab a glass for me, too,” I murmured, reaching for the last bottle. Amitriptyline. I wrote down the name, then rotated it to see the dosage. My mother’s name stared up at me accusingly.
Huh.
I thought I’d cleared all her stuff out. Weird. I started to set it down, then noticed something very strange. The date was from just last month.
What the hell?
“Dad!” I shouted.
“Yeah?”
“C’mere. I found this bottle and it doesn’t make any sense.”
He ambled back into the dining room, setting a glass down in front of me. I held out the little bottle to him, and he frowned.
“Don’t worry about that one. That’s your mother’s.”
“It’s dated from last month,” I said. “If it’s Mom’s, why are you getting refills? And I don’t recognize the pharmacy name, either.”
He sighed, then shook his head. “It’s embarrassing, Tinker Bell.”
“Dad, I’m your daughter—I love you. You never have to be embarrassed in front of me, because we’re in this together, okay? But I really need to know what’s going on here. It could be important.”
He sighed heavily and sat down.
“It’s hard to admit,” he said. “But your mother . . . well, she was having a rough time that last year. And then when the baby died . . .”
The knife twisted inside just like it always did. Would it ever stop hurting? But I guess in a weird way that would be almost worse—I never wanted to forget Tricia. The pain reminded me that she’d been real. She’d been loved.
“Your mom got depressed, sweetie,” he said. “Real depressed.