One for the Money

My phone rings with a tune that jolts me. There are only a few callers who can make that sound, and they’re all my father’s nurses and support staff. I hit answer, and a breathless voice says, “Mr. Hughes? I’m sorry to bother you, but—”

In the background I can hear yelling.

I’m out of the bed in seconds, reaching for my slacks from last night and a fresh white T-shirt. “Coming,” I say before ending the call. “I’m sorry. I have to go. There’s—”

Eva’s already rummaged through my drawers. She comes up with a pair of boxer briefs and another white T-shirt like mine. “Let’s go.”

“Stay here.”

“I’m coming with you. Don’t worry about me.”

Without arguing further, I turn and head down the hallway.

Whatever is happening right now, she shouldn’t see it. Then again, doesn’t she already know the worst of me? Then again, maybe she doesn’t. Maybe she’s romanticized it into something it’s not. She doesn’t know about the way fear and paranoia can take hold of him. They make him lash out. One nurse was punched in the face. He tore her cornea and fractured her nose. That’s when we moved to two nurses per shift, minimum, at all times. Part of their jobs is to protect the other person. They have strict orders to do whatever’s necessary to defend themselves, even if it harms my father. I won’t let him hurt another person.

She doesn’t know about the time he smeared his shit into the wallpaper. Or the time he pulled out his own breathing tube before the nurse could sedate him. He may have the reasoning skills of a child, but he has the body of an adult. We can’t restrain him. It’s considered inhumane, but sometimes…

Sometimes even existing in his state is inhumane.

We reach the apartments to find both nurses struggling with him.

The irony is that he loses sensation in his extremities. Which means he literally feels less pain. That makes him impossibly strong, even as he injures himself.

I rush past them and take him into my arms. It’s a delicate balance, keeping him from hurting himself while also keeping him from launching himself into the room. Or at one of the nurses. I have the briefest fear about Eva. She won’t know to defend herself from him. But I manage to get him onto his bed.

I’m still holding his arms, waiting to see if he’ll fight me. I look into his eyes, hoping he can see me past the fever-bright fear. “Dad. Dad. It’s me. It’s Finn.”

His familiar brown eyes are cloudy. “Who?”

“It’s Finn. Phineas. I’m your son. Remember?”

“I don’t—” His eyebrows draw together. “Do I know you?”

I swallow hard around a knot in my throat. It’s not the first time he’s ever gotten confused, but it’s hard to face after the raw emotion of my night with Eva. My defenses are down. “You taught me how to hit a baseball. And take apart a computer. And fly an RC plane, even though we lost three of them in the ocean.”

He looks bewildered. And sad. “I’m sorry, young man. I don’t know you.”

Sorrow rises like a tidal wave. It pricks the backs of my eyes.

“That’s okay,” Eva says, coming forward. She looks adorably tousled in a large white T-shirt, only the bottoms of my briefs visible from beneath its hem. “I’ll tell you about him.”

“You will?”

She sits on the edge of the bed and takes his hand in hers. It’s not a gnarled hand. Not arthritic. No age spots. He isn’t old enough for that. It’s just a regular male hand made more frail because he doesn’t like to eat. The doctors tweak his diet daily to try and pack more calories in. I worry for a moment that he’ll lash out, but he seems calm enough. And curious.

“Phineas Galileo Hughes,” she says as if she’s telling a story that starts a long, long time ago. And I suppose it does. “Phineas is a name on the Hughes side, I believe. An uncle.”

“He was a pirate,” I offer, my voice husky.

She glances back, a half-smile on her face. “A pirate?”

“A privateer during the Revolution, technically. There are rumors of a map.”

“You named him after a pirate and an astronomer,” she tells my father, who looks bemused but seems to be settling into this conversation. Whatever sent him spiraling is long forgotten under the sweetness of Eva’s presence. “Which means, I think, that you wanted him to have adventures. And to look up at the stars.”

I find myself captured by the sight of her, earnest and true. She’s done more than calm him. She’s calmed me. I never really thought about my names, aside from the fact that there were heavy expectations. And the fact that I got into fights over my middle name in boarding school. I didn’t realize my father could have wanted me to sail the seas.