what?” I replied.
“Of everyone,” he said in a whisper.
He coughed, and blood appeared on his lips.
“Where is that damn ambulance?” I shouted at no one in particular.
But it was the police who arrived first. Two officers appeared on foot. They were probably more used to dealing with race-day traffic than a violent stabbing in broad daylight, and one of them was immediately on his personal radio calling for reinforcements. The other one knelt down next to me and tended to my father by placing his large, traffic-stopping right hand on the wound and pushing down.
My father groaned.
“Sorry, mate,” said the policeman. “Pressure is the best thing.”
Eventually, the ambulance arrived, with the driver apologizing for the time taken. “Going against the race traffic,” he explained. “Jams everywhere, and half the roads made one-way—the wrong way.”
My father was rapidly assessed and given oxygen through a face mask and intravenous fluids via a needle in his forearm. He was lifted carefully onto a stretcher and loaded into the vehicle, the pressure on his stomach being maintained throughout.
I tried to climb in with him, but was stopped by one of the policemen.
“You wait here with us, sir,” he said.
“But that’s my father,” I said.
“We will get you to the hospital shortly,” he said. “It looks like you need a stitch or two in that head anyway.”
The paramedics closed the ambulance doors and bore my father away just as the police backup arrived in two blue-flashing cars.
I spent much of the evening in a hospital, but not the one where I had planned to be.
I knew my father had been alive when they had placed him in the ambulance at the racetrack—I’d heard him coughing—and, according to one of the nurses, he’d still been alive when he’d arrived at the hospital. But he didn’t make it to the operating room. The combination of massive shock and drowning in his own blood had killed him in the accident-and-emergency department reception area. So sorry, they said, there was nothing they could have done.
I sat on a gray-plastic-and-tubular-steel chair in a curtained-off cubicle next to the body of my dead parent, a parent I hadn’t known existed until three hours previously, and wondered how the world could be so cruel.
I was numb. I had grieved for my father when I was about eight, when I was just old enough to begin to realize what I was missing. I could still remember it clearly. I had seen my school friends with their young mums and dads and, for the first time, realized that my aged grandparents were different. I could remember the tears I had shed longing for my parents to be alive and with me.
I had wanted so much for my father to be there and to be like the other dads, shouting encouragement from the touchline during my school soccer matches, carrying me high on his shoulders when we won, consoling and wiping away the tears when we lost.
I had amused my teammates with made-up stories about how my father had died bravely saving me from drowning, or from enemies, or from monsters. Now I discovered that even the story I had been told, and had believed unquestionably, had itself been a lie.
I looked at the figure lying silently on his back in front of me, covered by a crisp white sheet. I folded the sheet down to his chest so I could see his face. He looked as if he was just asleep, peaceful, with his eyes closed, as if he could be wakened by my touch. I placed my hand on his shoulder. His flesh was already cooling, and there would be no awakening here ever again. I stroked his suntanned forehead for the first and last time in my life and considered what might have been.
I should be angry with him, I thought. Angry for going away and leaving me all those years ago. Angry that he had then taken so long to come back. Angry that I’d had sisters for nearly thirty years whom I’d never met. And angry that he’d come back at all and added complications to my already complex existence.
But I have always believed that anger is an emotion that needs to be expressed, to be vocalized with passion, towards someone who can respond or be hurt. Somehow, directing anger towards my dead father’s corpse seemed pointless and wasteful of my energy.
I would save my anger, I decided, for the young man who had so abruptly taken away any chance