I did not wait for morning. I got my father into his coat, with the hearing aids in and his glasses on, and I drove him to the emergency room at Silver Cross Hospital in my truck with the heater on high. On the way he held my arm and said, over and over, “I am sorry, Ricky. I am sorry.” I told him there was nothing to be sorry for. I told him that a man who has put out fires for thirty two years had earned the right to be tired. He nodded and looked out the window at the dark highway.
The doctor on duty was a young woman with a ponytail and a calm manner who listened to my story without interrupting. She ordered blood work and a urine test and kept my father on a monitor for the night. At four in the morning she came to the chair where I sat and pulled the curtain. “Mister Delaney,” she said, “your father has traces of a strong sedative in his blood. It is a sleeping medication and a second drug I would not give an eighty three year old man without close supervision. He should not have been awake at all.”
I took out the small plastic bag from my coat pocket. In the kitchen, I had found the jar of applesauce in the refrigerator and a bottle of white pills in the cabinet above the stove, the one place my father could not reach. I handed both to the doctor. She called hospital security, and a few minutes later a Joliet detective named Marla Santos arrived, a heavyset woman in a brown raincoat with a notebook already open. She shook my hand. “Mister Delaney,” she said, “you did exactly the right thing. Let us finish the job.”
A person who cannot hear or see is not a person who does not matter. The loudest thing in the room is the love that notices.
The pills came from a pharmacy in Plainfield. The name on the prescription was a man named Curt Boyle, a pharmacy technician who happened to be the boyfriend of my sister. The man on the phone in the kitchen, the one who had said the pills were working, was not some stranger. It was Curt. He had been selling her the sedatives out of the back of the pharmacy for six months, in the hope of doing exactly what she told him she wanted, which was to keep an old man quiet until a check arrived in the mail.
Susan Hartnett, the lawyer from the firm in Chicago, drove down that same afternoon. A crisp woman in a gray suit, she sat at the bedside of my father and explained the settlement in plain words. The check, three hundred and forty thousand dollars, would be mailed to the address on file in twelve days. But there was a problem. The address on file had been changed in April. The beneficiary of the pension had been changed too. All of it forged, down to the shaky signature of my father. She smiled for the first time. “Mister Delaney, I can stop every one of those with a phone call.”
They arrested Colleen at nine the next morning at the apartment of Curt. She came out in a bathrobe with a cup of coffee in her hand, and when she saw the officers on the steps, she dropped the cup. She did not fight. She did not deny. In the back of the cruiser she began to speak, to nobody, in a thin shaky voice. She had been fired from the bank in February for taking money from the drawer. She owed ninety thousand dollars. She said she had only wanted him to sleep. She said she had only wanted it to be over.
I stood on the sidewalk and watched the car pull away. I had expected to feel rage. For nine hours at the hospital I had felt nothing but rage. But watching my sister through the glass, a gray faced, frightened woman of fifty two with her hair in a knot, I felt only a vast exhaustion. She had been my little sister. She had learned to ride a bike on the street in front of that house. I had held the seat. I could not make the two pictures fit. I got in my truck and drove back to the hospital, and I held the hand of my father.
By the end of the week, he was a different man. With the sedative cleared out of his blood, he sat up in bed and ate everything on his tray. His eyes were clear. He asked for the ball game. On Saturday, the men of Engine 84 came to see him, six of them in their dress uniforms, with their hats under their arms, and they stood in a row at the foot of his bed. The oldest one saluted. My father saluted back. Nobody said a word. A nurse in the hall wiped her eyes with her sleeve.
Colleen pleaded guilty in January to elder abuse, forgery, and the attempted poisoning of a vulnerable adult. The judge gave her nine years. Curt Boyle got twelve. My father asked me to take him to the prison to see her, and I said no. He said, “Ricky, she is my daughter.” So we went. We sat across a table from her in a bright room with a guard by the door. Colleen could not look at him. He reached across, took her hand, and said, “I forgive you. But I want you to get better.”
The settlement check arrived in February, as the lawyer had promised. My father put a third of it into a fund for sick firefighters, a third into a savings account that I would manage, and a third he held back for himself. With it, he bought the finest pair of hearing aids on the market and a new recliner. I quit the pipeline in the spring. I moved back into my old bedroom in Joliet and built a ramp for the front steps. On Sunday mornings, we sit in the living room with the television on low.
Last week the Cubs were behind by three in the ninth. My father leaned forward in his chair with his glasses on and his hearing aids in, his hands on his knees. “Ricky,” he said, “who is winning?” I looked at him. “Dad,” I said, “you can see the score.” He grinned, wide and wicked, the way he used to when I was ten, and he pointed at the screen. “I know, son,” he said. “I just like hearing you tell me.”