If I Stay

“But you were a good dad when you played in a band. The best dad. I wouldn’t want you to give that up for me,” I said, feeling suddenly choked up. “And I don’t think Teddy would, either.”

Dad smiled and patted my hand. “Mia Oh-My-Uh. I’m not giving anything up. It’s not an either-or proposition. Teaching or music. Jeans or suits. Music will always be a part of my life.”

“But you quit the band! Gave up dressing punk!”

Dad sighed. “It wasn’t hard to do. I’d played that part of my life out. It was time. I didn’t even think twice about it, in spite of what Gramps or Henry might think. Sometimes you make choices in life and sometimes choices make you. Does that make any sense?”

I thought about the cello. How sometimes I didn’t understand why I’d been drawn to it, how some days it seemed as if the instrument had chosen me. I nodded, smiled, and returned my attention to the game. “King me,” I said.

4:57 A.M.

I can’t stop thinking about “Waiting for Vengeance.” It’s been years since I’ve listened to or thought of that song, but after Gramps left my bedside, I’ve been singing it to myself over and over. Dad wrote the song ages ago, but now it feels like he wrote it yesterday. Like he wrote it from wherever he is. Like there’s a secret message in it for me. How else to explain those lyrics? I’m not choosing. But I’m running out of fight.

What does it mean? Is it supposed to be some kind of instruction? Some clue about what my parents would choose for me if they could? I try to think about it from their perspectives. I know they’d want to be with me, for us all to be together again eventually. But I have no idea if that even happens after you die, and if it does, it’ll happen whether I go this morning or in seventy years. What would they want for me now? As soon as I pose the question, I can see Mom’s pissed-off expression. She’d be livid with me for even contemplating anything but staying. But Dad, he understood what it meant to run out of fight. Maybe, like Gramps, he’d understand why I don’t think I can stay.

I’m singing the song, as if buried within its lyrics are instructions, a musical road map to where I’m supposed to go and how to get there.

I’m singing and concentrating and singing and thinking so hard that I barely register Willow’s return to the ICU, barely notice that she’s talking to the grumpy nurse, barely recognize the steely determination in her tone.

Had I been paying attention, I might have realized that Willow was lobbying for Adam to be able to visit me. Had I been paying attention, I might have somehow got away before Willow was—as always—successful.

I don’t want to see him now. I mean, of course I do. I ache to. But I know that if I see him, I’m going to lose the last wisp of peacefulness that Gramps gave me when he told me that it was okay to go. I’m trying to summon the courage to do what I have to do. And Adam will complicate things. I try to stand up to get away, but something has happened to me since I went back into surgery. I no longer have the strength to move. It takes all my effort to sit upright in my chair. I can’t run away; all I can do is hide. I curl my knees into my chest and close my eyes.

I hear Nurse Ramirez talking to Willow. “I’ll take him over,” she says. And for once, the grumpy nurse doesn’t order her back to her own patients.

“That was a pretty boneheaded move you pulled earlier,” I hear her tell Adam.

“I know,” Adam answers. His voice is a throaty whisper, the way it gets after a particularly scream-y concert. “I was desperate.”

“No, you were romantic,” she tells him.

“I was idiotic. They said she was doing better before. That she’d come off the ventilator. That she was getting stronger. But after I came in here that she got worse. They said her heart stopped on the operating table . . .” Adam trails off.

“And they got it started. She had a perforated bowel that was slowly leaking bile into her abdomen and it threw her organs out of whack. This kind of thing happens all the time, and it had nothing to do with you. We caught it and fixed it and that’s what matters.”

“But she was doing better,” Adam whispers. He sounds so young and vulnerable, like Teddy used to sound when he got the stomach flu. “And then I came in and she almost died.” His voice chokes into a sob. The sound of it wakes me up like a bucket of ice water dropped down my shirt. Adam thinks that he did this to me? No! That’s beyond absurd. He’s so wrong.

“And I almost stayed in Puerto Rico to marry a fat SOB,” the nurse snaps. “But I di’int. And I have a different life now. Almost don’t matter. You got to deal with the situation at hand. And she’s still here.” She whips the privacy curtain around my bed. “In you go,” she tells Adam.