"Your dad." he said, "was shot about an hour ago. He was stopping a robbery."
I pressed my hand to my breast. My whole body felt as if I had fallen into a large pot of boiling water. I could barely move a muscle.
"How is he?" I finally managed to ask.
"He's in intensive care at the hospital. You and your mother should get over there." he said. "Sorry."
Sorry? It sounded so simple, so nonchalant, so nothing. Sorry to wake you. Sorry I stepped on your foot Sorry I snapped at you. Sorry I bumped into you. Sorry your father was shot.
"I can take you two there," he offered."I'll wait outside in the company car. okay?"
I nodded, closed the door, took a deep breath and started for Mama's bedroom.
There was no music in my mind, just the continuous, ominous roll of parade drums.
Almost as if she knew she would be facing unhappiness when she woke. Mama stubbornly clung to sleep as I shook her. I shook her again and called her and shook her until finally her eyelids fluttered, closed, and then snapped open.
"What?" she practically screamed at me.
"Daddy's been shot," I said.
She stared up at me a moment and then she sat up so quickly and firmly. I stepped back.
"What?"
"Mike Tooey is outside waiting to take us to the hospital in the company car," I said. "Daddy stopped a robbery."
"Oh Jesus," she muttered. "oh Jesus. Jesus."
She rose and began to get dressed. I hurried back to my room to do the same. Less than ten minutes later. I was ready, but Mama was still brushing her hair.
"I look a mess." she moaned at her own image in the mirror.
"I don't think that matters at the moment. Mama." I said dryly. She paused and looked at me as if I had gone crazy.
"It always matters. child. You think I want your father looking at a hag when I get there. The better I look, the better he's going to feel," she predicted, finished her hair and then joined me at the door. "I shoulda bought that wig the other day," she muttered as we hurried out. "You got a wig, you just throw it on and don't worry. I should have bought it."
Mr. Tooey either really didn't know very much or was too frightened to give us the details. However, we were told everything almost as soon as we arrived at the ER. Daddy had taken two bullets: the first had lodged in his shoulder, but the second had hit him in the abdomen and nicked his spine as it passed through. He had lost a lot of blood and was in critical condition.
"Is he going to live?" Mama demanded from the doctor.
"We'll see." was the doctor's best reply no matter how much Mama pressured him.
Different places have different kinds of silences, I thought as we waited in the lounge anxiously. Hospitals weren't really quiet places. Staff workers, interns, nurses, all spoke rather loudly to each other. There was much activity going on, too: people being pushed along in wheelchairs or on stretchers, doctors talking to relatives or to the patients themselves, technicians rolling machines from one room to another, nurses and doctors shouting orders across hallways.
The silences I did see and hear were the silences in the eyes of the worried wives, mothers, husbands, brothers, sisters and friends who lingered in corridors, quietly comforting each other, holding each other, standing in the shadows and gazing absently at the floors or walls or looking out the windows at nothing, just waiting in a world where all time seemed to have stopped, where everything said or done seemed so far off reverberating into the darkness.
There were many elective mutes here, many people who didn't want to speak, to hear the sounds of their own voices for fear it would make them crumble or turn to tears and cries of pain.
"Will my daddy die?"
"Will Bobby get better?"
"When will the doctor tell us anything?"
"When will my mammy come home?"
It was so much better not to hear these and similar questions, not to have to answer, not to have to look into the face of reality and recognize what tomorrow could be like. It was better to wait quietly, to hold your breath and not think about anything, anything at all.