One Second After

“John, I think you better go home. You’re running a fever. I’ll see if I can dig something up for it and come by later,” Kellor said.

“I told you. That nurse, the tall good-looking one, Makala’s her name. She’s giving me Cipro.”

“Well, it should have kicked in by now. I don’t like this,” and Kellor sniffed the bandage again, his nose wrinkling.

John looked down at his hand. It was swollen, red streaked, the exposed wound red, the edge of the flesh where it had been stitched puckered.

He was suddenly worried. God damn. An infected hand, now? He had images of Civil War era surgery.

“What the hell is it, Doc?” Kate asked, coming closer.

“Maybe staph, but I don’t have the lab to test for it.

“Crops up in hospitals, nursing homes. Resistant stuff. Go home, go to bed, I’ll be by later today or this evening.”

“I said I was going up to the college to get some volunteers for the elementary school.”

“Last thing I want is you walking around at the college or in the elementary school with that hand. If you got a staph infection, you’re a spreader now. So just go home.”

John nodded and stood up, feeling weak.

He headed to the door, Kellor walking alongside him. Starting the car up, John headed for home… and as he pulled into the driveway… he knew.

Jen was outside, sitting on the stone wall of the walkway leading to the door. Elizabeth was on one side of her, Jennifer on the other. As he got out of the car the dogs came up, but a sharp command warned them to back off.

“It’s Tyler, isn’t it,” John said.

Jen forced a smile and nodded.

Jennifer started to sob and he put his good arm around her, his little girl burying her head in his chest.

“Pop-pop,” was all she could get out.

Jen put a hand on her granddaughter’s shoulder.

“Pop-pop is in heaven now, dear. But it’s OK to cry.”

Elizabeth leaned against John’s shoulder, forcing back a sob, but then looked up at him.

“Dad, you’re burning up.”

“I’m ok,” he said.

He looked at Jen.

“Let’s go in,” she said.

He followed her into the house, which was all so silent, and into what had been Jennifer’s room.

Tyler’s features were already going to a grayish yellow.

John remembered the first time they had met, Tyler coldly looking at this Yankee, worse yet from New Jersey, who obviously had but one intent only, and that was to seduce his only daughter and take her away.

John smiled. Oh, I understand that now, Pop, he thought.

And then so many other memories, of the gradual thaw. The first time they’d gone out shooting together while the “girls” went to the mall to go shopping, Tyler fascinated by the old Colt Dragoon pistol John had brought along, roaring with laughter over the encounter with the local rednecks that had happened but weeks before. That had been an icebreaker, father and potential son-in-law shooting, talking guns, then sitting on the patio and having a cold beer.

And then the grudging acceptance that had turned to friendship and at last had turned to the love a father would have for a son, a son who then gave him two beautiful granddaughters, granddaughters who allowed him once again to relive the joy of raising a child.

He was gone now. War or not, he would have died, but he had indeed died far sooner as a result of the war. In the cold figures of triage, he was an old man, someone whom villages, town, and cities all across America, this day, but ten days after an attack, were being forced to “write off.”

For an old man in the advanced stages of cancer, there would be no medicine. That had to be rationed now to someone who “stood a chance” or who, in a colder sense, could be of use. If the old man were not dying at home his would be a body whose departure would free a bed in a hospital flooded with the sick and injured. In a starving community his would be one less mouth to feed, even though his last meals were from a can poured into a feeding tube… but even that can of Ensure was now a meal, perhaps for an entire day, for someone else.

Tyler was dead, and there was a war, though it did not in any sense seem like a war that any had even conceptualized this way… and he was dead as surely as millions of others were now dead or dying after but ten days… as dead as someone lying in the surf of Omaha Beach, the death camp of Auschwitz, as dead as any casualty of war.

Frightened for a moment, John looked back at Jennifer, who stood in the doorway, clutching her grandmother’s side. The last of the ice had given out two days ago, the bottles of insulin now immersed in the tank of the basement toilet to keep them cool. And there was a flood of panic in John. He knew, almost to the day, how much insulin was left.

He caught Jen’s gaze; the way he was staring at her granddaughter, she pulled Jennifer in tighter to her side.

He turned back to look at Tyler.

“I think we should pray,” John said.

He went down on his knees and made the sign of the cross. “Hail Mary, full of grace…”

* * *