Rescue Me

tossed it on a wingback chair. Wearing just her bra and panties, she moved down the hall to the bathroom. She flipped on the light and turned on the faucet to the claw-foot bathtub.
    She caught a glimpse of her face as she opened the medicine cabinet and looked inside. The only items there were an old bottle of aspirin and a box of Band-Aids. No prescription bottles.
    Her panties and bra hit the white tile floor and she stepped into the tub. She shut the curtain around her and turned on the shower.
    The warm water hit her face, and she closed her eyes. This whole night had gone from bad to worse to horrendous. Her daddy was in a hospital in Laredo, her hair was as stiff as a helmet, and she’d let a man stick his hand up her dress and down her panties. Out of the three, her hair was the only thing she could deal with tonight. She didn’t want to think about Vince, which wasn’t a problem because she was consumed with worry for her father.
    He had to be okay, she told herself as she shampooed her hair. She told herself he would be okay when she wrapped a towel around her body and went through the medicine cabinet in his bathroom. All she found was a half tube of toothpaste and a pack of Rolaids. She told herself he’d be fine when she went to bed. She woke a few hours later and grabbed the small bag she’d packed before leaving Arizona. She told herself he was strong for his age. She called Renee on the drive to the airport and filled her in. She estimated that she’d be gone a week and instructed her assistant on what to do while she was away.
    A s she boarded the flight from Amarillo to Houston, she thought about all the times her father had been thrown from horses, or knocked around by twelve-hundred-pound steers. He might have walked a bit stiff afterward, but he’d always survived.
    She told herself that her daddy was a survivor as she waited three hours in the Houston airport for the hour flight to Laredo. She kept telling herself that as she rented a car, plugged the coordinates into the GPS and drove to Doctor’s Hospital. As she took the elevator to the ICU, she’d half convinced herself that the doctors had overestimated her father’s condition. She’d half convinced herself that she’d be taking her father home that day, but when she walked into the room and saw her daddy, gray and drawn, with tubes coming out of his mouth, she couldn’t lie to herself anymore.
    “Daddy?” She moved toward him, to the side of his bed. He had a bruise on his cheek and dried blood at the corner of his mouth. Machines dripped and beeped, and the ventilator made unnatural sucking sounds. Her heart squeezed and she pulled a ragged breath into her lungs. Tears pinched the backs of her eyes, but her eyes remained dry. If there was one thing her father had taught her, it was that big girls didn’t cry.
    “Suck it up,” he’d say as she lay on the ground, her bottom sore from getting bucked off one of his paint horses. And she had. She couldn’t remember the last time she’d cried.
    She stuffed everything way down and moved to the side of his bed. She took her father’s cool, dry hand in hers. He had a pulse oximeter clipped to his index finger, turning the tip a glowing red. Had his hand looked so old just yesterday? The bones so prominent, the knuckles big? His cheeks and eyes looked more sunken, his nostrils pinched. She leaned closer. “Daddy?”
    The machines beeped, the ventilator moved his chest up and down. He didn’t open his eyes.
    “Hi there,” a nurse said as she breezed into the room. “I’m Yolanda.” Happy rainbows and smiley suns decorated her scrubs; the cheery fabric was in direct opposition to the dire cast of the room. “You must be Sadie. The nurse you talked to last night told us you’d be here this afternoon.” She looked at all the mechanical readouts, then checked the IV tube.
    Sadie placed her father’s hand on the sheet and slid out of the way. “How’s he doing?”
    Yolanda glanced up and read a tag on the IV bag. “Have you talked to his doctors?”
    Sadie shook her head and moved to the foot of the bed. “They returned my calls while I was on the plane.”
    “He’s doing as well as can be expected for a gentleman his age.” She moved to the other side of the bed and checked his catheter bag. “We interrupted his sedation this morning. He was fairly combative.”
    Of course he was.
    “But that’s normal.”
    “If it’s normal, why interrupt the sedation?”