Page 26 of The Damage Man

He takes his father’s hand.

Callused and dry, the back splotched with bruises.

Jacob’s head rolls on the pillow. His eyes take on a softness. Words leak out with his breath. “Evan … tell you…”

Evan leans forward.

It takes a full thirty seconds for him to realize that Jacob has died.

It’s the silence that lets him know. No more beeps from the pulse ox.

Evan wants to scream. He wants to shove on Baridon’s chest and heave air out through the memory of his vocal cords to hear what the final words would have been.

The song finishes on the radio and something new comes on.

And another song after that.

Evan is still dumbly holding Baridon’s hand.

He cannot believe that this is what happened, that this is how this ends.

There’s movement at the door and then the harried nurse enters.

“Oh,” she says. “Oh dear.”

Gwendolyn meets him in the hall. It’s bizarre how empty the place feels, all closed doors, vacant stations, and beeping machinery.

She’s already peeked inside room 12 and knows the score. “Must have been hard for you,” she says.

“Not really.”

“No matter how ready we think we are, it still comes as a shock.”

Bright Texas sun shines through the sliding doors ahead. As he keeps toward them, they seem to recede, a cruel trick.

“Nothing can quite prepare you for it.”

Evan is eager to get out of this place with its dying flowers and ghostly corridors. He has to tell himself not to sprint.

“Would you like to speak to a grief counselor?”

“No.”

At last the doors part before them, heat rushing at his face along with the smell of hot asphalt. He steps onto the pavement and blows out a breath, clearing the air of this place from his lungs.

Gwendolyn hovers at his back. “Would you like some more time inside with him? To say goodbye?”

Evan says, “No.”

The rental Jeep is right there in a front parking spot, seven and a half strides away.

He starts for it.

Halts.

He turns around. Walks back to Gwendolyn. Her scrub top has settled down over her shoulders, the V of the collar exposing a wider isosceles of skin. Only now does he notice the four pinpoint tattoos on her throat. Calibration dots prescribing the treatment area for radiation therapy.

This woman, in distress herself, has gone to such lengths to comfort him. He feels utterly incapable of meeting what this moment demands.