Play Me Right (Play Me 5)

I place a hand on my father’s, say “Good morning, Dad,” before turning back to Nancy. “I didn’t realize you took him for a walk every morning.”

“Oh, yes, as long as he’s feeling up to it. He loves the Strip in the early morning. Tells me it’s his favorite time of day to be out there.”

Her words hit me like a fist to the gut. I look down at my father, who for the first time in my memory actually looks every one of his seventy-one years. He’s thinner than I’ve ever seen him, more frail, and he looks tired. Bone-deep, soul-crushingly tired.

It’s so hard to reconcile this man with the dictator of my childhood. With the man whose decisions shaped not only who I am and but who I refuse to be.

As I stare at him, the rest of her words sink in. “Wait. He’s speaking again?”

“A word here or there,” she tells me, looking pleased. “The occupational therapists are greatly encouraged. But no, I meant he writes things down for me. It’s his right side that’s so badly affected, but he’s left-handed so while his mobility on that side isn’t perfect, he can hold and use a pen pretty well.”

What goes unspoken but is still perfectly clear are the words, “which you’d know if you spent more than five minutes with him during your obligatory daily visit.”

The guilt starts to press down on me, but I try to ignore it. After all, he’s just reaping what he has sown. I don’t want to spend time with my father because he’s an unbending bastard with ambiguous morals who, when he let Dylan die, turned us both into murderers. Though, to be fair, he might have been one long before that fateful night.

Still, even knowing that my coldness to my father is well deserved, I can’t help feeling bad for him. Can’t help wanting to do something, anything, to make him feel better about the awful way things have ended up for him.

“Here,” I find myself saying before I even know the words are going to leave my mouth. “Let me take him for a walk today.”

Nancy looks startled, and pleased. “Oh. Do you really want to?”

Not even a little bit. For a moment, the knowledge that I can still back out runs through my head. After all, she is giving me an out. I can just say that I’m too busy or that I was running out to my car for something I forgot or…anything and everything but the truth. That I’m still too angry about what went down ten years ago to want to have anything to do with my father.

But in the end, I just nod and say, “Yeah. I’m sure.” I glance down at my father. “That okay with you, Dad?”

He looks at me with dazed green eyes the same color as my own. One more thing I’ve always hated—that the eyes staring out at me from the mirror every morning look so much like the ones I’ve despised for so many years. But then he nods, slowly, painstakingly. The closest thing to a yes that he can manage.

I nod in return, then move to take over the handles of the wheelchair. “When should I have him back?”

“We leave for physical therapy at eight, so maybe an hour? Then he can have his breakfast, get dressed and all that.”

An hour. Yeah. I can do anything for an hour. Even this.

“Okay. We’ll see you then.”

She nods, and with an encouraging smile, turns back toward the elevators. And I’m alone with my father for the first time in more years than I can count.

I don’t know how I feel about that. But it’s not like I’ve exactly got time to psychoanalyze myself right now. So I steer him toward the automatic doors in the center of the exit bank, and we walk out into the early morning coolness.

I push him down the sidewalk that runs alongside the huge circular driveway in front of the casino and take a left when we finally get to the Strip. I don’t know where he likes to go on these early morning walks and since I didn’t think to ask Nancy, he’s going to be stuck with where I want to take him. Which for now is down the Strip toward the center of it all.

We walk past New York–New York, the Monte Carlo, the Aria. I don’t talk much—I don’t really have anything to say to him—and he can’t talk, so the walk is as peaceful as it can be, considering the circumstances. And if I pay attention to the scenery instead of what I’m doing, I can almost forget that he’s here with me. And that we actually share an interest in the early morning Strip.

It isn’t until we start to pass the Bellagio that my father makes a noise—half-moan, half-slurred word, it chills my blood. Has me stopping in my tracks.

“What’s the matter?” I ask, walking around the wheelchair to crouch in front of him. “Are you okay?”

He nods in that awkward way he has, slurs out something else that is totally unrecognizable. But then I notice he’s pointing with the fingers of his left hand. Pointing toward the Bellagio and the huge choreographed fountains in front of it.

“You want to see the fountains?” I ask, glancing at my watch. “I don’t think they start until eleven today, Dad.”

He shakes his head, slurs some more words. And keeps pointing.

“You want to walk by them anyway? They aren’t going to do anything. You know that, right?”

He just glares at me, keeps pointing.

“Okay. We’ll get closer to the fountains.”