catch up to his long-legged strides.
“Not your fault or his,” Braden assured me.
Fault, no. But responsibility was different. Violent patients could be removed from the facility and placed in secure mental wards. Deena was just looking for an excuse to give him the boot. There wouldn’t be knitting lessons and dance classes and chair yoga and comfort foods in a secure facility. There wouldn’t be a piano for Dad to play on his good days. Or staff who filled his Christmas stocking with his favorite treats.
It was late, and the lights were low in the hallway, making the crash that came from my father’s room even more jarring. I pushed past Braden and hurried into the room.
Dad was on his feet in his cast, dumping his clothing out of the dresser into a pile on the floor. The pile already included everything that had lived on top of the dresser, including his Bluetooth speaker, a digital picture frame with a lifetime of memories, and a framed photo of the two of us on my high school graduation day.
The glass was broken, and there was a jagged tear over my beaming face. I’d had a world of beginnings in front of me then. Now it was just one more erasure of the only thing I’d ever been completely sure of in life: My father’s love.
“Get out of here, Claudia!” Dad limped toward me, crushing the photo under his cast. “Haven’t you taken enough from me?”
“Dad.” I held up my hands. “I’m not Mom. I’m Ally. Your daughter.”
“You stole it, didn’t you?” he demanded. The sound of crushed glass under his feet made me wince.
“Dad, come over here so I can clean that up,” I begged.
“You took my father’s pocket watch! I had it in that drawer, and now it’s gone. I want it back, Claudia. I want it all back!”
“Mr. Morales, why don’t we check your nightstand for your watch?” Braden suggested, trying to coax my dad away from the glass.
But Dad wasn’t open to suggestions. “You think you can just leave and take everything from me? I want it all back. You ruined everything!”
I felt hot tears cutting tracks down my still cold cheeks.
“Dad, please.”
He took another step in my direction and stumbled.
I reached out to steady him, but in his eyes it wasn’t me, the girl who had loved him her entire life. It was the woman who had built a family and a future on lies and then abandoned it all.
I saw his hand pull back and registered the sound of the crack before I ever felt the pain blooming bright and white-hot.
The man who had insisted on trapping spiders and setting them free in the backyard backhanded me with every ounce of strength he could muster from his frail body.
Stunned, I stumbled backward.
Braden hustled in, another night nurse on his heels.
“No! Wait,” I insisted, stepping between them. Restraining him would only make it worse. My eye and cheek felt like they were on fire. Shame and sadness made an ugly brew in my stomach. It was selfish, but I knew that seeing them restrain him would very possibly break me into a thousand pieces.
I reached for my work phone and with shaking hands cued up the song.
The battered speaker on the floor picked up the piano tune and began to play over tiny slivers of glass.
Dad’s breath was coming in heaves. The anger was still in his eyes, and I bumped the volume higher. We stared at each other for a long minute while the familiar song wove its way around us. His shoulders slumped, the violence and agitation slowly leaving his body as if he recognized that it didn’t belong inside him.
His fingers began to move rhythmically against his pajama pants. Tears slipped from the corners of his eyes, and I felt my heart break yet again into more microscopic shards.
I glanced over my shoulder at the nurses. “It’s him playing,” I explained.
Carefully, I reached for his arm again. This time, he didn’t fight me as I guided him out of the glass and over to the bed. I took off his slippers, his glasses. The nurse helped me tuck him under the quilt his mother had made decades ago.
His hands continued to follow the song on top of the worn blue and brown patches.
“I think I’d like to play piano tomorrow,” he said softly.
“You can absolutely play tomorrow,” the nurse promised him, brushing a wisp of hair off his forehead.
But promises didn’t mean much these