My dad walks on broken bones when he enters the house. My mom cannot let the telephone ring more than once. My brother decided to run. My sister, to stay. My dad wears gloves because he fights sickness and dirt and death for a living. My dad is the hero of this story because he has failed at all of these.

He lines the carpet of my room with antibacterial soap and scolds me of blushing. Blushing is bleeding internally. He eats with his hands after washing them ten times, one for each finger. I can hear him breathing when he runs. It is hard for him. The treadmill knows the force of his joints, and sometimes the noises from the television show he watches scare me. He does not play golf.

It was take your daughter to work day. When I found myself standing in the midst of a white shell of sterility, the only thing that the artist inside my head could paint in color was the red of his hands. Everything else was drawn with pencil. The gloves were once blue. The red conquered. He told me he was healing – setting the bones straight. The snap under his knuckles did not sound like recovery.

It sounded like pain.

That was the first time I realized that the only difference between my dad’s hands and a killer’s were the gloves.
He sounded like he was running. Running away from the blood, or towards. The nurses standing around him were swimming, holding their breath. I wondered if my dad scared them too.

I wondered if my artist would paint my dad as the healer or the killer. Because you couldn’t see the only thing that mattered under the blood. My dad’s hands were lost in the cavity of a woman I didn’t know. I wondered if he would find whatever it was he was searching for. By the crunch of his boots on the doorstep – he didn’t.