yelling, but my mouth was filled with dust. Turning to my left, I saw him. His head was bleeding, and his eyes were locked on mine. He was trying to say something, but no words came out.
I had to get us out of there. I knew that if there was a gas leak, the whole truck could go up in flames. So I reached across him and unbuckled his seat belt. My right arm wasn’t working, but with my left hand I opened the passenger door, so I could stumble out of the cab.
There was smoke pouring from under the hood, and one of the wheels was still spinning. I ran to my father’s side and wrenched open his door. “You have to help me,” I told him. With my left arm I managed to hoist him against me, partnered in a horrible nightmare of a dance.
I was crying and there was blood in my eyes and my mouth and I tried to drag my father clear of the car but I couldn’t use both arms to pull him. I wrapped one arm around his chest, but I couldn’t bear his weight that way. I let go of him. I let go of him, and he slipped through my arm like sand in an hourglass. I let go of him and he fell in slow motion, smacking his head against the pavement.
After that, he didn’t move anymore at all.
“I let go of him,” I tell Edward, crying so hard that I cannot catch my breath. “Everyone was calling me a hero for saving his life, but I let go of him.”
“And that’s why you can’t let go, now,” he says, suddenly grasping what this has all been about.
“I’m the reason he’s going to die tomorrow.”
“If you had left him in the truck, he would have died
“He fell down on pavement,” I sob. “The back of his head hit so hard I
“There’s no way to tell which brain injuries came from the crash and which injuries came after that. Even if he hadn’t fallen, Cara, he might still be like this.”
“The last words I said to him were
Edward looks at me. “They’re the last words I said to him, too,” he admits.
I wipe my eyes with the back of my hand. “That’s a pretty shitty thing for us to have in common.”
“Gotta start somewhere,” Edward says. He offers a half smile. “Besides, he knows you didn’t mean it.”
“How can you be sure?”
“Because hate’s just the flip side of love. Like heads and tails on a dime. If you don’t know what it feels like to love someone, how would you know what hate is? One can’t exist without the other.”
Very slowly I inch my hand toward Edward’s, until I can slip it beneath his. Immediately, I am eleven years old again, and crossing the street on my way to school. I never looked both ways when I was walking with Edward. I trusted him to do it for me.
He squeezes my hand. This time, I hold on tight.
When I was a kid my father used to tuck me in at night, and every time he turned off the lamp, he blew, as if there was a giant invisible candle illuminating my room. It took me years to figure out that he was flipping a switch, that he wasn’t the source of all the light.
Standing in this weird deja vu tableau, I feel as if I’m the one blowing out that invisible candle, a spark I can’t see that somehow constitutes living, if not a life.
Edward is here, as are the same nurses and doctors and social worker and lawyer, and the donor coordinator. But Joe’s here, too, like he promised, and my mother, because I asked.
“Are we ready?” the ICU doctor asks.
Edward looks at me, and I nod. “Yes,” he says.
He holds my hand while the ventilator is dialed down, while morphine drips into my father’s arm. Behind my father is the monitor that marks arterial pressure.
When the machine stops breathing for my father, I focus on his chest. It rises, then falls once more. It stops for a minute. Then it rises and falls again twice.
The numbers on the arterial pressure monitor fall like a stock market crash. Twenty-one minutes after we have started, my father’s heart stops beating.
The next five minutes are the longest of my life. We wait to make sure he doesn’t spontaneously start breathing again. That his heart doesn’t restart.
My mother is crying softly behind me. Edward has tears in his eyes.
At 7:58 P.M., my father is declared dead.
“Edward, Cara,” Trina says, “you need to say good-bye.”
Because DCD requires the organs to be harvested immediately, we can’t linger. But then again, I have been saying goodbye for days. This is just a formality.
I walk up to my father and touch his cheek. It is still warm, and there’s stubble like flecks of fool’s gold. I put my hand over his heart, just to make sure.
It is a good thing that they whisk him to the OR for the organ donation, because I am not sure I would have been able to leave him. I might have stayed in his room forever, just sitting with his body, because once you tell the nurse that yes, it’s okay to take him away, you don’t ever get the chance to be with him again. To share the same space. To see his face, without it being a memory.
Joe takes my mother out into the hall, and pretty soon, it is just me and my brother, standing in the vacant spot where my father’s bed used to be. It’s a visual reminder of what we are missing.
The first time someone I loved left me behind, it was Edward, and I didn’t know how my family would balance. We had been such a sturdy little end table, four solid legs. I was sure we would now be off-kilter, always unstable. Until one day I looked more closely, and realized that we had simply become a stool.
“Edward,” I say. “Let’s go home.”
The wolves at Redmond’s howled for thirty days. People heard them as far away as Laconia and Lincoln. They made babies asleep in their cribs cry, made women search for their high school sweethearts, gave grown men nightmares. There were reports of streetlights bursting when the wolves howled, of cracks forming in the pavement. At our house, just five miles away from the enclosures, it sounded like a funeral requiem; it made the hair on the back of my neck stand on end. And then one day, abruptly, the howling ended. People stopped waiting for it when the moon hit the highest point in the sky. They no longer hummed the melody at traffic lights.
It was just as my father had said: the wolves knew when it was time to stop looking for what they’d lost, to focus instead on what was yet to come.
LUKE
