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turned downward with age and become beaklike. I also thought she fluttered when she entered a room, always doing a little shiver as if she were throwing off some chill she had anticipated in coming to our home to speak with my father.
When she saw me, she reached up and put her hand on the nurse's wrist, and the nurse turned.
"Oh, it's my niece, his daughter," I heard her say. "Finally."
The look on the nurse's face was as good as a sword through my heart. I barely felt myself walk up to them. Aunt Agnes shook her head.
"We lost him," she said. "Just twenty minutes ago."
I stared down at her and smiled with incredulity as if she had said the most ridiculous thing. Lost him? How can ire lose Daddy? Because of my silence and my expression, the nurse felt obligated to add to it.
"There was just too much heart damage. I'm sorry," she said.
Margaret, who finally caught up with me, just went right into a tirade about greeting me at the airport and our trip back to the hospital.
"You've got to speak to whoever got you that car service, Mother. The driver wasn't around, and we had to take an ordinary taxicab. Willow wanted to get right over here. I told him to wait at the curb, but he was an unpleasant man. and..."
"Shut up!" I screamed at her.
She looked as if I had slapped her. She brought her hand to her cheek and stepped back.
"Willow's father has passed away, Margaret Selby," my aunt explained.
"Oh," she said, her eyes widening with the realization. "Oh. dear."
I turned to the nurse. "I want to see my father," I said sharply. I don't know how I managed that many words. My throat had already begun to close and felt as dry as soil in a drought.
"Of course." she said, reaching out to touch my arm. "I'll take you to him."
I set my bag down to follow her.
"I'll start seeing to arrangements, dear." Aunt Agnes called after me.
"Oh, Mother," Margaret moaned, "a funeral."
I felt as if I were sleepwalking. Everything around me seemed vague, foggy. I kept swallowing down the urge to scream. So often people feel that they can scream away their troubles like some giant blowing unpleasant and ugly things out of his way. My heartbeat was so tiny. I imagined my heart itself was withering, closing up like a clam somewhere deep in my chest. In fact. I thought I was shrinking, growing smaller and smaller until I was just a little girl again, a little girl being brought to see her daddy.
I stood in the doorway as if I were waiting for him to sit up on the gurney and beckon to me. The nurse stood at my side, wondering why I was so hesitant. I'm sure.
"I'm sorry," she said. "It's never easy losing a parent, no matter how old they are My mother was eighty-six when she died last year, but I still felt as if the world had dropped out from under me."
I looked at her and nodded. "I'd like to be alone with him for a while," I said.
"Of course. Just call for me if you need anything." she said.
If I need anything? I need a second chance. I need to have gotten here before he died. Could you please arrange for that? I thought.
I looked at Daddy lying there so peacefully. His reddish-brown beard was as trim and neat as ever. He hadn't been gone that long, so his skin wasn't the pale of the dead yet. They had closed his eyes. I wished they hadn't. I needed to look into those eyes one more time, even though they would be empty. At least I could remember what had been there.
It took a few more moments for me to draw close enough to take his hand. Funny. I thought as I held his hand in mine, my father had never once raised his hand to me, not even to pat me on the rear end. His anger, his chastising, lived in his voice, in those eyes, in his whole demeanor, and for as long as I could remember, that was sufficient.
My adoptive mother didn't hesitate to take a swipe at me now and again, even if it was always more like waving away a fly. She was very protective of her hands. Too many women her age showed their age in their hands, and she was determined that wouldn't