“Linda, wait,” Steven said again from the doorway, and his voice cracked on the second word. “Before you watch that, you need to understand something about the will of Dad.” I did not turn around. I kept my eyes on the tablet, on the small dark picture of our father asleep with his mouth open and one hand curled on the blanket. “I know about the will,” I said. “Dad told me in August. He cut you out of the house, Steven. Because of the gambling.” The silence behind me was so complete that I could hear the refrigerator humming in the kitchen.
I pressed play. The bedroom door opened slowly, as it had in the preview, and the figure that came in carried a small glass of water and a saucer. It was Steven. He sat on the edge of the bed and gently shook Dad awake, murmuring, “Time for your pill, Pop.” Dad swallowed what he was handed, as trusting as a child, and Steven watched his throat. Then he took out a second bottle, the new orange one, tapped out four tablets, and ground them in the bowl of a spoon. He stirred the powder into a cup of applesauce and held it to the lips of Dad.
The officer beside me did not say a word. He took the tablet from my hands, rewound to Sunday, and played it again. Then to Saturday. Then to Friday. Every night for eleven nights, the same ritual, the same applesauce, the same patient whisper. On the last recording, Dad turned his head and said in a thick voice, “Why does it taste so bitter, son?” And Steven, in the lamplight, kissed him on the forehead and answered, “It is just the new vitamins, Pop.” I heard myself make a sound I have never made before.
Those who love us leave a light on long after we have forgotten to be afraid.
Steven did not run. I will say that for him. The officer stepped through the door, and my brother simply sat down on the hallway floor with his back against the wall and let the handcuffs be put on him. “I owed some people,” he said. “A lot of money. Dad was going to sign the house over to Linda on Friday, and then there would have been nothing. I only wanted to make him tired. I only wanted him to sleep until I could get him to sign something else.” He looked at me with wet eyes. “I never thought he would stop breathing.”
Dad woke up on Saturday morning at Kern Medical Center. I was in the chair beside the bed, where I had slept three nights with my coat for a blanket. His eyes found the ceiling, then the window, and finally me. “Linnie,” he said, in the voice he used when I was six. “Did I miss supper?” I laughed and wept at the same time. He was weak and gray and thin as a bird, but he was there. He squeezed my hand with a grip that still had forty years of firehouse in it.
It took the doctors two weeks to flush the medication from his system. Dad tried to apologize to me every single morning. “I should have seen it,” he said. “I saw him getting careless with money and I looked away. A father does that.” “A father loves his son,” I told him. “It is not a crime.” He turned his face to the wall and was quiet for a long moment. “He was a good boy once,” he said at last. “Where did that boy go?”
Steven was sentenced in March to eight years for elder abuse and attempted homicide, after he admitted every count. At the hearing he stood up and read a statement, and it was short and plain and had no excuses in it. Dad insisted on attending in his wheelchair, in the jacket of his old dress uniform, and when the judge asked whether the family wished to speak, Dad said only, “I forgive him. I want it on the record. But he will serve every day.” The judge looked at him over her glasses for a long time.
I sold my condo in Bakersfield and moved into the house of Dad. Not because I wanted the house, whatever my brother had told the paramedics, but because I wanted the Sundays. I put a new lock on the front door. I threw away every orange bottle in the cabinet and started over with a clear plastic organizer and a nurse who comes on Tuesdays. Dad watched from his chair with a patient smile. “You were always the organized one,” he said. “Steven was the fun one. Look where fun got him.”
In June the old firehouse invited Dad to the Fourth of July parade. They put him on the front of the engine, in the seat of honor, with a captain hat on his head and a flag in his hand. Children ran along the curb, calling his name. I walked beside the truck with my hand on the fender. When it turned the corner at Chester Avenue, Dad looked down at me from the high seat and shouted over the siren, “Best day of my life, Linnie!” and I knew he meant it.
On Sunday nights now I still fill the pill organizer for him, Monday through Sunday, morning and night. But I do it at his kitchen table with him beside me, and he reads each label aloud before I drop the tablet into its little door. “That one is for the heart,” he says. “That one is for the blood.” The camera is still on the bookshelf, and the green light is on. “Let it stay,” Dad says. “It watched over me when I could not.”