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“Why?” were growing into a terrible beast that would be poised to pounce on her life and rip it to shreds sooner than she could have imagined.
    Since then, she decided that words like: “goodbye,” “affair,” and “syndrome,” though innocuous on their own, could be pieced together in such a way that they could come alive. Like Frankenstein’s monster, they’d wreak havoc on the landscape of a person’s life and destroy everything except the vaguest notion of what could have been.
    They ate breakfast and left the cafeteria to go to the ICU. They located her father’s room but didn’t go in. Jack sat on the floor of the hallway and thumbed through his book while Emily watched through the big window. Green lines hurtled across the monitors next to her father’s head. His hospital gown was draped off one shoulder to expose a large piece of gauze taped close to his clavicle. His face was nearly unrecognizable.
    She’d heard people describe loved ones tangled within the setting of an ICU room as looking weak or helpless. That wasn’t how her father looked at all. Not that she considered him to be a loved one. To her, he was angry and abusive, controlling, constraining, and small. Yet in a coma, with Levi’s future depending on him, he was enormous and dangerous. For the first time she could remember, Emily cared if he lived or died. She needed him to live.
    A nurse went into the room, switched a full bag of clear liquid for an empty one, and checked Norman’s IV. When she walked out, Emily asked, “Excuse me?”
    The woman faced her while still continuing to back away slowly. “Yes?”
    “Is he going to be okay?” Emily asked, afraid the nurse’s words were about to confirm the grim look on her face.
    “Are you family?”
    “I’m his daughter.”
    The nurse said, “We don’t know yet.” Then she hurried off.
    After ten more minutes, Emily and Jack went to the ICU waiting room. She sighed at the sight of her mother sleeping on a makeshift bed of old connected chairs, using her own coat as a blanket. She sat Jack in a chair and then touched her sleeping mother’s arm.
    Gail opened her eyes, sat up, and smoothed her long skirt at her thighs. She looked at Jack and then at Emily through confused eyes. “Seth Folsom died,” she said. “He was president of the National Peanut Association.”
    Emily was concerned. Seth Folsom had been dead for twenty years. “Mom?”
    Gail flinched as though she’d been slapped. Then she blinked a few times and recognition hit her eyes. “When did you get here?”
    “Yesterday.”
    Gail took a tube of lipstick out of her purse, along with a compact mirror, and applied a shade of orange that Emily remembered from when she was in junior high. “This lipstick is almost as old as you, ya know?”
    “Old makeup is not safe, Mom.”
    Her mom scoffed as she dropped the tube back into her purse. “What took you so long?”
    “You know it’s hard for me to travel with Jack.”
    “Where’s that husband of yours?”
    “We’re divorced, remember?”
    “Oh yeah. I guess giving up comes easier to some people.”
    “Mom, I didn’t…” Emily decided to let it go. Nothing she could say to her mom would change the low opinion she held of the way she lived her life. Nothing.
    Jack turned the page from Mercury to Venus. “We can’t go home. It’s toxic.”
    Gail raised an eyebrow.
    “Long story,” Emily said. “How’s Dad?”
    “Alive. Comatose.”
    “I don’t understand. How did this happen?”
    “Well, I don’t know, Emily. Levi knocked Norman down and slammed his head into the floor. Now thanks to the police,” she brushed invisible crumbs off her sleeve, “the whole town knows.”
    “I thought Levi was in Chicago. What was he doing here?”
    “Working on some installation for a hospital in Georgia. He said he needed the space and the right climate. The patina on the metal was wrong or something like that.”
    “Was he acting weird at all? Was