Page 30 of Keep Me

She held out a black pen. It was cheap, generic, the cap missing completely. I looked at the yellow sticky note. The paper beneath it was clean, white, and divided into small, functional boxes that required names, dates, and relationships. Relationship to patient. I pressed the nib to the paper. The ink came out black, trailing across the page in a hurried, slanting cursive that looked exactly like my mother’s handwriting from the cardboard boxes.

The heavy swinging doors did not make a sound when they parted. The man who walked through them was wearing a dark green scrub top under a white coat that looked a little too wide for his shoulders. He was not rushing. In the hospital, when they are not rushing, it means the clock has already run out of minutes. Time playing tricks. Time is a bitch and I hate her.

He stopped two feet away from us, his eyes moving from Zane’s face down to my hand, where the black pen was still pressed against the clipboard.

“Seren Garcia?” he asked. His voice had that lower, slower drop. The staircase voice.

“I signed it,” I said, pointing the pen at the white paper. “He had a heart attack, right?”

No one had mentioned anything about a heart attack. For some reason I was so sure of it.

The doctor looked at the yellow sticky note, then back up at me, his face completely flat. “Seren, I’m Dr. Santoli. Your father was brought in around one this morning. During our evaluation, he lost consciousness, and his pulse stopped. We continued resuscitation efforts for twenty minutes, we did everything we could, but we were unable to establish a return of spontaneous circulation. He died. I am very sorry.”

The words were English, but they did not have any edges.

“His heart,” I repeated, my teeth finding the dry skin of my lower lip. “The attack.”

“It was cardiac arrest,” Dr. Santoli said gently, his hands coming together in front of his coat. “But it was not a myocardial infarction. It was cardiac arrest secondary to a massive internal hemorrhage. The bleeding was a complication of his oncological diagnosis.”

I blinked. The linoleum flecks below my sneakers seemed to spin. Hemorrhage. Diagnosis. Dead was dead so I was not sure it mattered.

“Oncological?” Zane’s voice broke the bubble. His grip on my waist did not just tighten; his fingers dug hard into my ribs, a sudden, rigid line of muscle framing my back. “What do you mean oncology?”

Dr. Santoli looked at Zane, then back at me, a heavy, sorrowful hesitation crossing his eyes. “Tom was diagnosed eight months ago with stage four pancreatic cancer. The tumor had locally advanced into the retroperitoneal space, eroding into the celiac axis. He did not pursue treatment. The hemorrhage was sudden and catastrophic.”

“Cancer?” Zane repeated.

The words sat in the middle of the bright lobby. Stage four. Pancreatic. Cancer. Cancer. Cancer. The syllables were too heavy. Stage four meant the end. It meant the counter was already closed. I had bet on death.

But my mind did not stay on the word cancer. It went to the kitchen island on Friday afternoon. It went to the face-down phone on the granite. It went to the four minutes of nothing on Tuesday night, his voice coming through the speaker slower, ending things first, gently. Leaning into the work-life balance thing. Stepping away from the heavy lifting. Gave it to Weston. He had not been learning how to breathe. He had been learning how to stop.

“I want to see him,” I said. My voice was entirely distinct from the rest of my body. It did not belong to the woman who was standing inside the freeze. It was a request, a logistics problem to be solved.

Zane shifted his weight, his chest cutting off the space between me and the swinging doors. “Seren,” he murmured, his eyes wide and terrifyingly dark as they searched my face for the shadow of a breakdown. “Are you sure? Wouldn’t you rather remember him… not like this?”

“Move, Zane,” I said.

I did not have the energy for performance. I just pushed my palm against his chest, right over his heart, and for the first time in three years, the wall did not hold. He let his arms drop. He let the perimeter break.

The hallway behind the swinging doors was cooler than the lobby. The blue walls ran along both sides of me, the fluorescent lights overhead. The doctor opened a door on the left. The room was small, cramped, dominated by a large gurney in the center.

My dad lay under a thin white sheet that was pulled up to his armpits. His hair was messy, unstyled, the way it had been on the porch three weeks ago. But the portrait was different now. The silhouette was just a silhouette. Empty.

I walked straight to the side of the bed, my knees hitting the frame with a dull, hollow click. I reached out, my fingers wrapping around his right wrist, the one where the luxury watch had slid down. The watch was gone. They had put it in a plastic bag somewhere.

But it was the skin that hit me. I thought he would be so cold, but he was not. His skin was still warm. But it was different. Warm with no life. Dead but… just dead. I squeezed his wrist. I pressed my thumb into the skin beneath the bone, waiting for the thud. Nothing moved. The silence was permanent.

The door behind us clicked open again. A nurse in blue scrubs walked in, carrying a small plastic tray filled with discarded gauze and empty plastic syringes. The wreckage of the algorithms. She stopped when she saw me holding his wrist, her face turning into pity under the lights.

“Oh,” she said. “I am so sorry. I just needed to clear the line before the transport arrives. I didn’t realize you were in here.”

I looked at her badge. Her name was Lina. Her scrubs did not have butterflies on them.

“Were you his nurse?” I asked. My voice was flat.

“Yes,” she said, setting the tray down on the counter with a quiet rattle. She looked at me with a tenderness that felt completely unengineered. “I was with him since the ambulance arrived. He… he was conscious for a while. Before the pressure dropped.”

I stared at her. “Did he say anything?”