Still, I dawdle, deliberating over whether I should go. On the one hand, itismy father—the closest person who shares my DNA. And from what he said to Gwendolynne, neither he nor Magecorp are responsible for the surges.
On the other hand, he held Gwendolynne at gunpoint. He threatened her life. He lied to me, not just about being in Wales but about so many other things.
I’m floundering, trapped in a spiraling vortex of indecision. Inthe end, it’s Pudding who convinces me.Go, she says.At the very least it’ll give you a chance to speak your mind, for once.
Thirty-six minutes later, I’m pulling into the basement car park at the hospital. I’m pretty sure my father donated a wing here once; in any case, I’m greeted like an old friend as I stride past the main reception, Pudding perched high on my shoulder.
Father is in the intensive care unit, up on the fifteenth floor. He has a private room all to himself, and out his window is the most phenomenal view of the River Thames. It’s almost a pity he can’t appreciate it, because my tyrant of a father is still completely unconscious.
He’s on an intravenous drip that feeds fluid into his body. A second line feeds him the magical anesthesia. His gown is splayed open, his chest dotted with round circles, cords trailing to the ECG. I squint at the small writing printed on each machine:Powered by Magecorp, it reads.
I snort. Figures.
Beside him, a ventilator creaks, performing the task that his lungs won’t, because of too much swelling.
Noncardiogenic pulmonary edema, the consultant had said, back when they phoned me yesterday.Compartment syndrome. Persistent cardiac arrhythmia. Marked swelling of the brain.The doctors have healed his burns and broken bones with magic, but internal organ damage—especially all the excess fluid—is much harder to treat. And the list of things wrong with my father’s body islong. I understand the terminology on a theoretical level, but hearing it out loud still makes my mind reel.
As I stare down at him, an odd, hollow feeling creeps outward, into my extremities. He looks so small in the big white bed. Usually, even though I’ve outgrown him—I’m taller by several inches—healways manages to make me feel small. But now he’s the one looking thin, ill, and, dare I say it, fragile.
I pull up a chair, which scrapes across the linoleum, and collapse into it. It feels strange to have gone from one sickbed and come straight to another. I’d spent so long waiting for Gwendolynne, hoping that she would wake up. Now I am waiting beside my father, half hoping that he won’t.
“Father,” I say, and for a moment I wonder if he can somehow hear me. Whether I’ll see a spike in his heart rate or a flicker of his eyelids—anything to tell me he’s still there, locked inside. But there’s nothing, of course. Just the wheeze of the ventilator and the beeps of the machines, dividing his life force into neat little packets of time.
I’m sure he can sense you’re here, Pudding says kindly. She’s still sitting on my shoulder.
Carefully, I shift her to my lap. I don’t even know if I want him to sense my presence. My voice drops to a whisper. “When you wake, Father, I need you to tell me…what on earth have you been hiding?”
There’s no answer, of course. Pudding was wrong; I won’t get to speak my mind, since I’m quite certain that he cannot hear me.
This all seems so utterly pointless. When he wakes—ifhe wakes—he probably won’t remember anything. Gwendolynne didn’t; a small blessing, since it would pain me if she’d noticed how distraught I was for her safety. How my knees almost gave way as I ran to her. How, when I called out to her, my mouth could barely form her name because my throat was closing over.
How, even though my own father was buried beneath the rubble, all I could think about was Gwendolynne. Gwendolynne being in danger. Gwendolynne getting hurt. GettingGwendolynneto safety.
Gwendolynne, Gwendolynne, Gwendolynne.
I’d cared more about her than I had about my own blood relation.
Is that how desperate Father felt, when my mother disappeared? Perhaps I’m following in his footsteps—maybe I am my father’s son. If that is true…then I really am royally fucked.
Pulling out the stolen listening book, I flip it open, trying to see if there’s anything more I can glean, anything that I’d missed. I’d started reading it in Gwendolynne’s bedroom, but then I had to stop. For when I reached the part where my father had tried to explain Hani Nguyen’s disappearance, the grief and fury that had risen inside me had threatened to rupture me open.
People run away all the time. Does there have to be a reason?my father had said to Gwendolynne while they were both locked inside the vault.
Already, I’m feeling that tide rise again, prickling at the backs of my eyes.But you never know what someone is going through internally, he’d gone on to say later.She might have been deeply unhappy. She might have had a breakdown. She might have needed to escape.
I pinch the bridge of my nose, squeezing my eyes shut. When he’d said that, it didn’t sound entirely like he was talking about Hani Nguyen.
Pudding makes a sympathetic noise that burrows inside my brain.I know it hurts, she says from my lap.But you have me. I’m here for you. I’m here.
I grind the heels of my hands against my closed eyelids and force myself to take several deep, drawn-out breaths. Despite my best efforts, though, the memories still flood back, threatening to pull me under.
I was only four years old when it happened. Too young to really understand it, or to comprehend why one day my mother was there—hugging me with her warm body, comforting me when I got hurt, playing with me on the floor—and the next day she simply wasn’t. My memories of those times are indistinct, as though I’mdeep underwater, looking up, watching the wavy shapes of things shifting and moving somewhere above the surface.
But what happened afterward is sharp and clear: how not even a day after she had disappeared, my father had hired a dumpster and started systematically discarding all of my mother’s things.
It was only because I managed to break open a box and pull out a pile of her clothes that I was able to salvage anything at all. My father threw out every photograph, every keepsake, every piece of jewelry…But I distinctly remember dragging a small cache of my mother’s garments—blouses, T-shirts, a pair of shorts—into my bedroom and stashing it in my own wardrobe. Oh, and the tweed suit that Gwendolynne wore: That too was one of the pieces that I somehow managed to save. Seeing her in it was confusing, distressingly so. She looked beautiful, yes, but also it was awful—a knotted web of emotions all snared together. Grief. Wonder. Attraction. Shame.
I remember that every night, in the darkness, four-year-old me would pull out a piece of my mother’s clothing. And I’d hug it, smelling the faint trace of perfume that reminded me of my mum, as I drifted off to sleep.
