Part I
Things Fall Apart

1

It begins with a phone call, as these things often do.

I’ve been asleep for only a few hours when the ring shakes me awake. I’m behind on a looming book deadline and have been working through most nights. I’m dazed, and my eyes feel too heavy to open—until the sharp cold-water splash of panic.

I’m supposed to meet my publisher at nine. I’ve slept in.

I grab the phone expecting to see that it’s him, calling me from a table at Starbucks, wondering where I am. But the display says “Jai.”

Jai?

Jai is my older sister. We’re a year and a half apart. Two of three siblings. Our little sister, Jenna, is five years younger. We’re close. Close enough to know that neither would ever call me at seven a.m.

It’s that rare feeling that reaches beyond worry. You feel it in your chest. Something is wrong.

I answer.

“Jai?”

“Dan. Are you awake?”

Jai rarely betrays emotion when she speaks. She’s either happy or annoyed. That’s it, two modes. But this is different. She’s rushed. She’s scared.

“Mom just called. Something happened to Dad.”

“What?”

“She thinks he had a stroke. He’s okay. But they’ve taken him to the hospital. She wants us to meet her there.”

It’s the kind of news you know exists. You know it will come, one day—but you never expect it. Then it crushes you from the blind side.

Jai lives in the east end of Toronto. We agree to meet at Jenna’s condo in the west end, since it’s on the way to the hospital in Mississauga. Our mother’s a nurse. She’s requested that the ambulance take our dad straight to a facility that specializes in strokes.

To me that means she doesn’t think it’s a stroke. Mom knows.

I dress quickly while Jayme, my partner, turns towards me in bed, trying to catch up and trying to slow me down.

“It’s probably just something small,” she says.

Her father had a scare with his heart a couple of months ago. But it was just a warning shot. It’s likely something like that, she says.

“Yeah,” I say. “Probably.”

But I’m running down the stairs. I have to go and I’m not sure when I’ll be back.

“You need to take care of Henry,” I say. He’s our seven-month-old Goldendoodle.

I stuff my laptop into my bag, hoping to get some work in—hoping Jayme’s right. Probably. But it’s self-preservation. The sound of my heart beating deep in my ears tells me it’s not true. Bump, bump—bump, bump—bump, bump.

“Okay, love you,” I shout from the door. “Call you soon.”

Mom is in the waiting room when my sisters and I arrive. She is alone and looks scared. She’s pale. I’ve never seen her like this before.

Dad fell on the floor beside the bed, she tells us. She’d been downstairs, and when she came into their room she found him there. He tried to get up, but couldn’t. He tried to speak, but couldn’t. She called the ambulance. She stayed beside him, holding him until they arrived.

He must have been terrified.

Time is a blur now. A nurse tells us that a doctor wants to see us in a private room.

Mom used to work in an ER. She shakes her head, squeezes her lips tight, and then her voice breaks.

“It’s never good when they want to take you to a room,” she says.

She’s never flinched. She’s witnessed it all, no problem. But now she’s falling apart. I try to calm her as we wait in a lamplit room with two brown couches and flowers on side tables. I’ve never been more afraid.

I hold my breath when the doctor opens the door. He is a serious-looking man, probably in his sixties. The hospital’s lead neurosurgeon. The title sounds important. Reassuring.

He tells us that Dad is out of surgery and that it has gone well.

I breathe, quietly—but it feels like a gasp after being held under water. He’s suffered a large stroke, the doctor says. They managed to find the problem, and he’s stable. But there’s no telling what the outcome will be until he wakes up.

He seems positive. This is the lead guy. This man knows.

There is some swelling around his brain and that needs to go down, the doctor tells us. Best-case scenario, he’ll recover well—although he’ll probably need some rehabilitation. But the damage could be much worse and there’s a chance the damage could be severe.

“We won’t know until he wakes up,” the doctor says again.

A nurse takes us out of the bad-news room and down a white hallway, through double doors and into a very serious-looking area filled with beeping machines, blue curtains, and busy people walking around in gowns and masks. I try not to look between the curtains as we pass, but I hear a muffled sob and see hunched figures over a bed. I look at the ceiling. We pass another bed. Then the nurse turns and leads us in.

My father lies on his back, eyes closed.

There is an oxygen mask on his face, and tiny wires and tubes running from his body into the grey beeping machines beside him. But it looks oddly familiar.

For several years when I was young and scared of everything, I’d often wake up in the middle of the night and rush into my parents’ room. I wouldn’t be able to fall back to sleep unless I was beside my dad. He always slept on the same side, closest to the door. I’d sit next to him on the bed, too light for him to notice. I’d watch him breathe, his chest rising and falling with a baritone snore. It wasn’t peaceful. My father was never a great sleeper, which is a trait he passed on to me. He’d go to bed late and get up early. Rest seemed like labour to him. But I’d watch him take several breaths before giving him a light nudge.

“Dad?”

He’d stir and half open his eyes.

“Can’t sleep,” I’d say.

“Okay, buddy.”

And he’d shift over in bed, never fully waking, while I curled into him, safe from the wild beasts of my mind.

My father does not look peaceful here. This sleep is not rest. I know that somewhere beyond his closed eyes, he’s working hard to make it home.

We last spoke—really spoke—a few days ago. He was at the airport, on his way to meetings in Calgary. He was calling to check in, as we always did. He knew I was working towards a book deadline—as well as my regular job as a sportswriter, I write biographies of figures in the field—and that I was stressed. He could hear it in my voice. I wasn’t really paying attention to whatever we were discussing.

“I’ll let you go. You’re busy,” he said. “Don’t worry. We’ll talk soon.”

We hung up and I kept typing. But about ten minutes later, I felt sick. We never did that. We never sped through conversations. All my life, whenever I called, he’d never been too busy to talk. He’d step out of a meeting to answer the call. And here I was, thirty-one years old, facing a little stress and brushing him off.

I called him back and he seemed happy to hear my voice. We spoke for about ten minutes while he waited at his gate to catch his plane. I told him I was worried that I wasn’t going to be able to pull off the book I was writing in time. It felt like my world was going to collapse. He’d always been the person I called when I needed to be held up. There was something about the connection we had and the way I viewed him. I’d called him back that day because I wanted him to know that I’d never be too busy to chat. But it was a call that I needed much more than he did.

“I don’t know how you’ll do it,” he said. “But you will. You always do.”

He knew nothing about writing books, but I knew that his belief in me was real. It always had been, despite me. And even though the confidence he had might have been uninformed, it lifted me the way he always did. We hung up, and Dad took his flight. And I took a deep breath and wrote and wrote and wrote, feeling that confidence too.

We had one more conversation, a couple of days later. It was quick. He was still in Calgary, driving back to the airport. There had been a big construction contract on the line with a major gas company that the engineering firm he worked for desperately needed. He didn’t want to talk about that, though. He asked how the book was coming. I told him it was getting there. The call was cut short as he drove by a car wreck on the opposite side of the highway, just a few minutes outside the city. It looked pretty bad, he told me. There were several ambulances.

“I hate seeing that,” he said—and then he said something about people’s lives being affected forever in a moment.

He had to go. Traffic was heavy. He’d call me when he got back to Toronto.

“Love you, buddy,” he said.

“Love you too, Dad.”

I walk to the side of the hospital bed and watch him work through sleep. I know he’ll wake up soon. That’s all we’re waiting for; then we can figure out how to overcome whatever comes next, together.

I sit on the edge of the bed and lean towards him.

“Dad. It’s me,” I say. “I’m here.”

I take his left hand in mine.

“It’s Dan, Dad,” I say. “Can you feel my hand?”

He squeezes, twice.

Two times.

Love you, buddy.

He knows I’m here.

He knows.

We just have to wait.

There’s a chair in the corner of the room. I decide that I should sit there, take out my laptop, and work on the book until my father wakes up. He would be coming back, after all. He squeezed my hand to tell me.

And when he did wake up, he’d see me there—working on the book beside him, getting the job done, just as he believed I would. He’d shake his head at the commotion he’d caused and tell me to get back home to work. I’d smile and he’d smile and life would move on, and we’d all be better for this reminder of how fragile it all is.

But I can’t type a word.