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.
* * *
There is always something that can hurt more, a place to go inside yourself that you haven’t explored, that you don’t even know about. This morning when I woke up, I thought my pain was at a ten. I thought I was hurting as much as a person could, but when I pull back the curtain and see him there, it’s an eighty-five, a 612, it’s infinite. I’m being electrocuted from within all over again. The right side of his head is covered in a big, puffy bandage and he has a black eye making purple shimmer on his cheekbone. The left side of him looks complete, whole, normal. All his major injuries are concealed on the inside, just like mine were. They had to shave his mustache to fit the tube down his throat and it feels like an invasion, something I should have had to sign off on—and never would have. His tongue is out and he’s wearing a gown covered with little diamond shapes that’s too short for him, it hits just above the knee. He’s sort of my daddy, but he’s sort of something else, too, a magnificent shell.
I pat his hand the way he has always liked to pat mine.
“Pat, pat. Rub, rub. I love you, God loves you. I love you, God loves you. I love you more than God can count.”
I look at his eyes and not in them, because they have forced them closed. He is more of a place than a person now, just a big empty house.
* * *
Katie and John show up, my surrogate family. Jack called them on the way when I was looking at the moon and wondering if it hated its job. Katie comes to me with her arms as wide as wings when we’re back in the beige-colored room. She wraps me up, kisses me on the head, and lets me weep onto her shirt while she empties her cache of magical, limitless mom energy all over me. John talks politely to the Amish and then hugs Jack, who lets him do it even though I don’t think he wants to. Jack doesn’t want a set of arms pulling him further into the reality of today. They’ve come to take care of us because we are too broken to take care of each other, because we’re suspended over grief, not sure when our tethers will be cut, and they don’t want us to be alone when we