The Door

She never said I’m going to die. I was with her nearly every minute that week, reading, sleeping on the cot beside the high-tech bed that kept shifting her slight weight while the window shadowed over, then grew brighter, and she drifted or got changed or was given another shot. None of us said it, though finally when she was barely talking anymore, I asked something like Mom, are you ready?—I just want Brad to be ok was what she replied. I told her he would be, as if her wish or mine could preside at his sentencing hearing. After that she was almost entirely silent, but when Dad came the last afternoon, edgy without a cigarette, checking over the monitors, Mom said she wanted to see him for a while alone, and he was startled.Pull the door closed, I heard her tell him, and he did. Out in the hall, staring at the pattern of alternating tiles, I thought of Saturday mornings when Brad and I were little, and Dad and Mom’s room would be not just shut for a time, but locked. Secretly I tried the knob once. In that house nobody was allowed to lock a door but Dad. Grandma would shoo us to the TV with cinnamon toast to watch cartoons, one fool panic after the next—bolted dungeons, lies and threats, a saw-blade inching toward the tied-up body. Then real people like us, finally: Roy Rogers saving them with his amazing calm.