26
Waiting for Moving Water
Dad didn’t leave his bed for two months unless one of my brothers was
carrying him. He peed in a bottle, and the enemas continued. Even after it
became clear that he would live, we had no idea what kind of life it would be.
All we could do was wait, and soon it felt as though everything we did was
just another form of waiting—waiting to feed him, waiting to change his
bandages. Waiting to see how much of our father would grow back.
It was difficult to imagine a man like Dad—proud, strong, physical—
permanently impaired. I wondered how he would adjust if Mother were
forever cutting his food for him; if he could live a happy life if he wasn’t able
to grasp a hammer. So much had been lost.
But mixed in with the sadness, I also felt hope. Dad had always been a
hard man—a man who knew the truth on every subject and wasn’t interested
in what anybody else had to say. We listened to him, never the other way
around: when he was not speaking, he required silence.
The explosion transformed him from lecturer to observer. Speaking was
difficult for him, because of the constant pain but also because his throat was
burned. So he watched, he listened. He lay, hour after hour, day after day, his
eyes alert, his mouth shut.
Within a few weeks, my father—who years earlier had not been able to
guess my age within half a decade—knew about my classes, my boyfriend,
my summer job. I hadn’t told him any of it, but he’d listened to the chatter
between me and Audrey as we changed his bandages, and he’d remembered.
“I’d like to hear more about them classes,” he rasped one morning near the
end of the summer. “It sounds real interesting.”
It felt like a new beginning.
Dad was still bedridden when Shawn and Emily announced their
engagement. It was suppertime, and the family was gathered around the
kitchen table, when Shawn said he guessed he’d marry Emily after all. There