The hospital room had white tiles with small gray speckles here and there beneath the polish. His bed was made with crisp white sheets. Gray shadows and purple bags sagged beneath his eyelids as if the force of gravity had been pulling them down without relent. Earlier, the room had been filled with people: cousins, aunts, uncles, and all the others one would expect to see at a man’s death bed.
His eyes traced the outline of the window to his right. When I replay the moment in my head I feel that it should be raining. In the movies it always rains at times like that, but the sky was impossibly clear.
“The sun will probably set soon,” He said quietly, his eyes still looking at the white frame of the window.
“Yeah, any minute now,” I responded.
My father offered a small smile. Given the circumstances, it was difficult for him to keep from grimacing, “Lacey, do you remember that boy who lived next door to us when you were growing up?”
I looked out of the window and recalled my childhood, “His name was Albert, Dad.”
He murmured the name Albert under his breath but showed no signs of recollection. His old age was getting to him.
“Did you ever forgive that boy for stealing your bike?”
I furrowed my brows and watched as he turned his head away from the window and towards the ceiling. Even though I knew he was losing it I didn’t think he was that far gone.
“Of course, Dad,” I reassured him.
The smile on my father’s face grew a little larger, “You know I was beginning to worry that you had been holding that grudge for far too long.”
The truth was, I hadn’t forgiven him, not because I was angry with him, but because there was nothing to forgive him for. Albert and his mother lived in the house next to us for four years before they moved to Seattle for some reason I never knew. In all those four years, Albert and I never spoke outside of the occasional ‘Good morning’, and he had never stolen my bike.
A nurse walked in to check my father’s stats. I watched as she wrote in a metal clipboard at the foot of the bed. My father’s skin was near the color of a pale yellow rubber glove. His liver was failing and all three of us knew there wasn’t much time left.
“How is everything Mr. O'Neill?” The young nurse asked.
He nodded to show that he was fine.
“Press the button if you need anything.”
Another nod.
After we heard her footsteps exit the room we both exhaled as if we’d been holding our breaths for some unknown reason.
My father closed his eyes and inhaled, “Have you forgiven me?”
I looked curiously at my father and clutched tighter to his hand.
“What do you mean, Dad?”
He kept his eyes shut as he spoke, “I tried to resist it. I really did,” his voice was split and bare, “It was just so hard to get away once I fell in.”
I asked him what he meant by ‘it’ but I knew very well what he was talking about. ‘It’ was the very thing that had caused my parents to separate when I was thirteen, the same thing that kept my father from me when I was growing up, the same thing that was making my father’s liver fail and was causing his skin to become pallid and yellow. ‘It’ was taking my father from me.
He never could keep the alcohol out of his system. There were times when he tried to stay clean, and he would, for a while. The longest he went without it was just over four years. But somehow, somewhere, he was drawn back to that burning liquid.
“Lacey,” my father said quietly. He turned and looked at me with woeful eyes, “Will you ever forgive me?” I felt his hand quivering in my own. After all this time, my father had never apologized for what happened in the past. He’d apologized for the separation, for the absence, but never before had he apologized for his addiction. Sometimes I think that it was the senile talking, but when I recount the moment in my head I always remember his eyes. They weren’t dazed or distracted like usual. There was a clarity in his sight that assured me he was thinking clearly. It was his last moment of lucidity.
“If I could relive it all,” He began, “I would have never touched a single drop of that wretched bottle. I would have been there. It would have been better for you… I shouldn’t have left you there like that, Lacey. You were just a kid…” He shut his eyes and turned his face back to the ceiling.
Within my heart there was a rock. A density that I hadn’t felt in years that I thought I’d lost long ago. But there it was: the pain from my childhood. Suddenly, I was sitting on the front steps of my house in my new blue sneakers waiting for my dad to pick me up, and there was my mom bringing me into the house as I tried to suppress the tears that came when he didn’t show. There I was at my piano recital looking for my father in the crowd but not seeing him, knowing he was probably at the bar. There I was the night my mother yelled at my father that she didn’t love him anymore, that he needed to leave. Neither of them knew that I was still awake behind my bedroom door, whispering quiet prayers that I would wake up from my nightmare.
I watched my father’s chest rise and fall. Deep in my ribcage I felt a burning anger that I thought I’d let go of. Pangs of anger, sorrow, disappointment, and anguish swelled within me.
Yet, even with this thick layer of solid rock over my heart, I still felt a soft molten swishing back and forth.
As I focused my eyes on the condemned sinner in front of me I saw not an enemy, but myself. I wasn’t a drunkard, and I wasn’t an absent father. I didn’t set fire to my insides to forget the pain I felt on the outside, but I sure as hell wasn’t any better than the man who did. There he was and there I was: broken, hurting, bleeding, and trying to find more faults in my neighbor so that I could feel better about my own. I, the condemned sinner had no choice but to forgive my fellow sinner. In the end, there was nothing we had left but to forgive and be forgiven.
In that moment I squeezed my father’s hand tightly in mine until I was certain that he felt it. He opened his eyes and looked at me with gratitude, knowing the meaning of my action.
Once again my father turned his head to the window to wait for the sun to set. I looked away from him and stared out into the city beyond.