Dare (13 page)

That he was really a good guy, underneath it all.

Maybe I’d made a huge mistake leaving him at that loading dock and telling him that everything was over. One mistake in a long line of many.

I set my shoulders and took a deep breath. “I will transfer my savings into the farm’s business account,” I said, hoping my tone conveyed that I wasn’t about to entertain any arguments about it. “That won’t dig us completely out, but it might buy us some time. Don’t try to talk me out of it. I’ve already made my decision.”

“What did I say, Rachel?!” Dad shouted, making me flinch. “No! I won’t accept your money!” He slammed his fist hard enough into the wall to punch a hole through the sheetrock, surprising us both. Dad clutched his hand, then his shoulder.

“Did you hurt yourself?” I asked when I could find my voice again. I had never seen Dad raise his hand in anger in my entire life. He expressed his displeasure through sarcasm and outrage, sure, but he was never violent, not even when coaxing one of the dilapidated tractors to work.

Now, though, he cringed at the damage he’d done to the wall, turned back to me, opened his mouth, and collapsed to the floor.

I thought perhaps, at first, that he’d crumpled because of the pain in his hand, at the shock of my many betrayals, the fact that I’d discovered his deepest, darkest secret. I exhaled a heavy sigh and walked around the desk for him, feeling that our roles had been reversed. I was the responsible parent calling out the child, who was having a tantrum on the floor, for doing the incorrect thing. Dad should’ve known better. He should’ve been more honest with me, regarding my choice of colleges. He shouldn’t have gotten sucked into the trap of short-term loans and their sky-high interest rates. He should’ve sold equipment on the farm, or leased part of the land to pay for the bills that he’d started to incur, not take on more debt to try and dig himself out of one hole by jumping into another. These were all things I’d learned in my business classes at my impossibly expensive college experience, all things that Dad apparently didn’t know himself. It hurt my heart to contemplate the idea that I knew more about running this farm than he did. We’d reached a strange crossroads together, me becoming the more knowledgeable individual in this partnership. I’d always felt like I’d continue learning things from Dad about the farm—the right kinds of natural pesticides, the exact time something needed to stay on the branch or vine or stalk or beneath the ground to taste the best—for the rest of my life. What were we doing here now? We were switching roles. I was the one who was fussing at him for messing up whereas it had been the other way around for my entire life up until this point.

“Don’t feel bad, Dad,” I said finally. “Everyone makes mistakes. We’ll get through this one. It’s not the worst thing to ever happen.”

I had no idea what would be worse than what he’d already done to the farm—a decade-long drought, maybe, or a plague of locusts—but I was trying. He was lying on the floor, his head turned away from me, his injured hand still cradled against his chest. I wondered if he’d let me take him to the urgent care center, or if he’d be stubborn and simply wrap his wrist in an improvised bandage. I hoped he hadn’t broken anything in his hand. He’d hit the wall so hard. I glanced up and assessed the hole he’d made, wondering if the entire sheetrock would have to be replaced or if we could just get away with a creative bit of carpentry.

“Dad, come on,” I tried again. “Let’s get you up and get that hand checked out. How are you going to do your chores if you don’t have one of your hands to use? I’ll let you off the hook for dinner tonight, but you’ve got another thing coming if you think I’m going to be the one in charge of the repair for that wall.”

But still nothing. He didn’t even turn to look at me while I was talking. I was just babbling at this point, trying to get a response from him, feeling more and more uncomfortable with each passing second that he didn’t even acknowledge my presence. Maybe he hated me after realizing that I’d been involved with Sebastian and had emailed my mother. I couldn’t help either of those things anymore. There was no use dwelling on the past. It would’ve been like Dad’s thoughts looping around over and over again about my mother leaving. There was no point. She was gone.

“You’d better not be taking a nap,” I joked weakly, taking him by the shoulder and shaking him. His head lolled alarmingly, and I realized with a surge of adrenaline that Dad wasn’t just having a petulant tantrum on the floor. There was something wrong with him—something really wrong.

“Dad?”

I took his head and turned it toward me, and that’s when I realized he wasn’t breathing, his gray face even more ashen, his lips turning blue.

“Dad!”

All of the little things I’d observed starting to add up into one big and terrible understanding—how he’d been out of breath and sweating for nearly our entire confrontation, barely able to stay on his feet, how he’d clutched his arm after punching the wall and collapsed.

He wasn’t ignoring me. I’d wasted precious time not understanding fully what was happening here.

He was having a heart attack. He was dying right here in front of me.

I held my hand over my heart, trying to time its beats to the beeps of Dad’s heart monitor. His pulse was so slow, but mine fluttered wildly like a caged bird inside of my chest. I’d felt out of breath from the moment I dialed 9-1-1, throughout the excruciating commute into the city, racing behind the wailing ambulance in my truck, and pacing throughout the waiting room while they took Dad into the operating room, put him under the knife, and poked around his heart to see what had stopped its beating.

I could’ve told them.

It was I who stopped it.

My dogged insistence on raking him over the coals over the state of our farm—tanking, as it turned out. My pushing him to sell it, after all, to Sebastian Clementine in order to get out from under the crushing debt Dad had incurred. And the fact that it was my education that had contributed to the debt that piled up on the farm, Dad’s dream, hurt me even deeper. That he hadn’t told me that he couldn’t afford to send me to my dream school to save me the disappointment. That he hadn’t even let me try to take out loans on my own to help pay for it, attempting to spare me the agony of something he knew all too well—interest payments.

Dad was having a heart attack now because of me, because of the things I’d revealed to him in that awful confrontation. That not only had I snooped and discovered evidence of the farm in its last gasps, but that I’d also been romantically involved with Sebastian, whom Dad hated. Sure, the romance was more than over and had been rocky at best, but that didn’t matter. It was enough to wound Dad like this, enough to make whatever channel inside of his heart that had been narrowing clog a little bit more. And maybe it had been the nail in the coffin, so to speak, to tell Dad that I’d been in contact with my mother, the woman who had left us, left behind Dad’s dream in pursuit of her own.

It had all been too much, and all I’d been trying to do was relieve some of my guilty conscience.

This was my fault.

In his tiny room in the intensive care section of the hospital, Dad looked like he was made of tubes more than he was made of flesh. The doctors had let me know, as gently as they could, that the situation right now was tentative, at best. That the reason Dad looked like more tubes than flesh was because machines were conducting the business of his body right now, not him. If it were left up to his body, things would be over right about now.

“You’re going to have to ask yourself some hard questions,” the doctor said. “How long are you willing to leave your father in this state? Is this what he would’ve wanted? Are you willing to let him go naturally, as his body wants to do?”

I’d shaken my head, panicked at this barrage of uncertainties. “We…we never talked about what to do if something like this happened. I don’t even know if he has a will, any wishes about how to do things if this ever took place.”

“Well, you don’t have to make any decisions right now,” the doctor told me, kindly.

That was a relief in the moment, but it didn’t relieve me of the responsibility to figure out what to do. Surely Dad had mentioned in passing his views on the topic of dying, hadn’t he? We’d talked about everything else under the sun—the cycles of crops, the status of the tractor, the families of farmworkers we’d worked with for years and years. Dad’s life had been consumed by the farm, and I realized that was the capacity in which I knew him. He was a farmer, plain and simple, and we hadn’t ever really gone beyond that. No late-night conversations of metaphysical mysteries because we both had to be up in the morning. We never had very much time to talk about anything other than the farm, now that I really got to thinking about it. The farm had been a consuming pastime, a demanding passion, an almost selfish way of making a living. The farm didn’t leave us with weekends or lazy mornings or anything of that nature. It demanded our full attention, all day and every day, from before sunrise to after sunset.

To me, it had seemed like the farm was immortal, like it would always be there, no matter what. It had taken me snooping in the office to discover the opposite—that the farm was fallible, was failing, and we had a limited time with it.

And along with the farm, I’d sort of expected Dad to live forever, too.

I knew that I was old enough to observe things—Dad’s graying hair, for example, or the fine lines on his face deepening, or spots that hadn’t been there before marring his working man’s hands. All of these were signs of change, of the inevitable aging that none of us could escape, no matter how hard we tried. And yet, Dad’s mortality had never crossed my mind. He had been the one constant in my life—besides the farm. He had always been there for me, especially when my mother had elected to leave, and the idea that he would be taken away from me so suddenly was disturbing.

I watched the hills and crevasses mapped on his heart monitor, examined the maze of wires and tubes covering his body, and wondered where Dad was right now. If he was dreaming, I hoped it was a pleasant dream. I hoped he was somewhere on the farm, doing the things he loved the most.

I was almost jealous of him, of the possibility he was somewhere safe and happy while I was left behind here in the hospital, a most unnatural place. I couldn’t stay here right now.

I slipped out of the intensive care unit and paced the waiting room before riding the elevator all the way down to the lobby. I didn’t feel better until I was outside, a sea breeze lifting my hair away from my face and neck, cooling my panic at the situation. I looked up at the sky—only one or two of the brightest stars were visible in the glare of the city lights—and wondered what I was supposed to do. Was I supposed to just chalk Dad up as a total loss, march right on back upstairs, and pull the plug myself? Or was I supposed to fight through this, just as he might be fighting to get back to me?

I had no idea what to do.

I fished my phone out of my pocket and stared at the display. It didn’t really surprise me that I had two missed calls from Sebastian. I’d told him to stop calling me, that I didn’t want to see him again, and yet I found us tossed together time and time again, whether it was through my own weakness or his. I hesitated only a moment before listening to the voicemail he’d left me.

“Rachel, I don’t know if you’ve even been listening to the messages I’ve been leaving you, but I’m willing to tell you why I want to buy the farm,” he said, his voice sounding too far away to give me any sort of comfort. He’d probably left this message while I was driving back to the farm, fuming after our rendezvous at a loading dock in the city. “I know I told you that I couldn’t tell you the reasons behind it, that it would betray your father’s trust in me, but I decided that I care about your trust more than your father’s. You can trust me. I know you don’t feel like you can, but I promise that you can. Call me. I want to talk about this.”

I called him, but I wasn’t interested in any secrets he might have to tell me about the farm. He answered after just one ring, as if he were staring at his phone and willing me to call him.

“Rachel, excellent,” he said. “Now, just give me a few minutes to explain to you what’s going on.”

“What’s going on is that Dad’s in the hospital,” I said, my own voice sounding foreign to my ears.

“What?” Sebastian asked, perplexed. “What happened?”

“A heart attack. Massive.”

“Which hospital?” I could hear rustling in the background of the call, footsteps, and a jingle of keys, as if Sebastian were moving around.

I looked at the sign on the side of the building, just visible if I craned my neck upward to read it. “Memorial. In the city.”

“I’m on my way,” he said. “I’ll be there in less than ten minutes. I promise you.”

“You don’t have to come,” I sighed, but he had already ended the call, probably to focus on weaving in and out of traffic in that little sports car of his, the one that had scraped up against my truck on the highway all those weeks ago, acting as the impetus for all of this. What would’ve happened if I’d simply picked another route home instead of that one and I’d avoided knowing Sebastian Clementine altogether? Could I have avoided all of this, everything that had led up to Dad being hooked up to life support, in a hospital, away from the farm he loved so much?

I shook my head. I couldn’t think like that; I couldn’t blame the butterfly that flapped its wings for the hurricane engulfing my life right now. I continued tapping on my phone almost just to have something to do until I had another thought.

My mother should know about this.

I didn’t think I was doing her a courtesy as much as I was laying this at her feet—to do with as she willed. We’d corresponded, however briefly, via email, and she’d expressed interest in talking again. Well, here it was. We were going to talk again, though probably not about anything she really wanted to talk about.

I opened up my email and found her message, hitting reply before positioning my thumbs over my phone’s tiny touch keyboard.

“I thought you should know that Dad is in the hospital,” I typed. “He had a heart attack and it doesn’t look good. What I need to know from you is whether he had some kind of will or had expressed his wishes to you when it came to life support. I don’t know if he would want to linger or continue on his way.”

I swallowed hard at that prospect and pushed send. There it was. I was relying on someone who had left the both of us to help determine our future. I didn’t know if Dad would’ve approved, but I was trying my best here. He hadn’t left me with many options or really any real place to turn to.

I slipped my phone back in my pocket, not expecting my mother to answer right away. It had taken her a while to formulate her initial response to the first message I’d sent to her. And I hadn’t seen her or spoken to her in person for ten whole years. There was that.

I figured that I should get back inside and be there in case Dad was up to making any decisions on his own, but I noticed a lone figure jogging across the parking lot, someone with a shape I recognized.

I didn’t know how glad I was to see Sebastian until I flung myself into his arms, holding onto him for dear life. It surprised and angered me at the same time just how isolated my life was on the farm. There wasn’t anyone there I could rely on except Dad, and he was currently laid up in the hospital. I hadn’t had anyone to talk to, choosing social media exile rather than witnessing my old high school and college friends pairing off and getting married and moving away and working their dream jobs and having babies. I’d been stuck there at that damn farm all because I hadn’t wanted to hurt Dad’s feelings like my mother had hurt him, and I’d turned my back on what I’d really wanted at the same time—connections and feelings and the chance at love. Everything.

“Don’t cry, Rachel,” Sebastian said, holding me tightly. I hadn’t even realized the tears were running down my face until he said something about it. “Everything’s going to be all right.”

“I don’t think it will be,” I said, my face burrowed into the front of his shirt, wetting it with my tears and not caring. “He’s more machine than man right now. They’re the only thing keeping him alive.”

Sebastian let out a long sigh. “I’m so sorry.”

“I don’t know what to do,” I said. “I emailed my mother.”

“Emailed?” Sebastian winced. “Don’t you think you should’ve called her?”

“We haven’t seen her in years,” I said. “She left us. The only reason I contacted her in the first place is because Dad and I have never talked about what should happen in a situation like this.”

“Okay,” Sebastian said decisively. “Let’s go back inside and be with your father. All the details will work themselves out.”

Those words didn’t really mean anything, especially since I was the one who was supposed to be working out the details, but I was so relieved to have someone else in charge that I meekly followed him inside, let him puzzle over how to get us back to the intensive care unit even though I already knew the way myself. Sebastian even located and made the doctor explain the situation to us once more just so I could be sure that I understood what was happening.

We sat with Dad until I lost count of the beeps to his heart monitor, until the whole situation became abstract, until I sat up with a jerk and realized I’d been sleeping on Sebastian’s shoulder, his arm around my waist, pulling me close.

“Sorry,” I blurted out, fuzzy and confused. “I didn’t mean to fall asleep.”

“Don’t worry about it,” he said. “I think you probably needed it. Have you even had dinner?”

I grimaced as my stomach grumbled at the thought of food. “No.”

“Then let’s get out of here.”

I opened my mouth to protest, looking over at Dad, but the sight of his gray, expressionless face frightened me. I realized that I really did want to leave, if only to take a break from the magnitude of the situation, so I shut my mouth, nodded, and let Sebastian lead me out of the hospital and into the night.