Ten Letters

My father had a terrible stomach ache one night. It wasn’t the first time, nor was it the first time he had to take a trip to the hospital. I was not worried; he simply had a weak digestive tract. When my mother’s friend Nancy picked me up from school because my mother was at the hospital, I did not think twice of it.

Nancy talked to me about school, her kids, and aspirations for college. She drove me down to the city where my father was staying. When we parked, she led me to a sitting area in a special part of the hospital. My mother was the only person in the room.

The three of us talked. Nothing about this alarmed me, not until suddenly everyone became quiet and Nancy decided to leave, as though my mother had given her a signal.

And then my mother turned to me, her voice suddenly trembling.

“Now Charlie, I need to explain something to you, and I need you to focus.”

I saw the weather change inside of me. A cooling and draining sensation washed over me, and I realized something was different.

“The doctors ran tests on Dad…”

I felt the senses of my body changing faster than my mind could keep track.

“And they found a tumor.”

That was years ago. My father’s tumor was supposed to move at such a slow pace that he would die of natural causes before anything else.

Like I said, that was years ago.

I sat in the family room this weekend working on a crossword puzzle I had started in the plane coming home from Philadelphia to Chicago to see my dad.

“Fifty-two down, four letters… twerp.”

“Torque?” he asked.

“No, twerp.”

“I would say ‘spin.’”

“Spin?”

“Because torque is a physics term…”

“No, Dad. The clue is twerp, not torque.”

“Twert?”

“Twerp.”

“Twert…”

“No. Twerp with a ‘p’… Twerp.”

“Oh, twerp, I don’t know…”

He had on his white v-neck undershirt, his blue sweat pants that were loose enough to cause no pressure on his stomach, and his black slipper shoes. And he had his TPN bag in the black backpack.

“Okay… Seventy-four down, ‘rude person,’ starts with a ‘b’.”

“…Boor.”

“Really? Isn’t that a boring person?”

“That would be a bore, b-o-r-e. B-o-o-r is a rude person.”

“Hmm,” I remarked. And I filled out ‘boor’ in the crossword puzzle. I started searching for another word that would interest him, something he could get.

“This doesn’t annoy you, right?” I asked.

“No, it’s fine.”

“Because I would imagine some people don’t like these questions…”

“It’s okay. I might not be very good…”

“I’m not either…” I started scanning the words I hadn’t done yet. There was one that had been bothering me, ‘one of five.’ I knew triplets, septuplets, but I could not remember the word for one of five. This was something my dad would know.

“Okay, what’s the word for ‘one of five’?”

“One of five? Quintuplets.”

“Perfect.” I smiled and wrote in the answer.

“I once took care of quintuplets… The Baer quintuplets we called them, because their last name was Baer, or is Baer. Back then I was not in charge of my practice. Ernie Weis was the lead doctor, and I was second up…”

He speaks with a slow voice of recollection, like a car idling down a street searching for an address.

“We received a call from the hospital,” he continued. “We were there in case any of the babies would need resuscitation. We did not know how many babies there were. Ernie must have been my age at the time,” I commented matter-of-factly. “…Seventy-eight…”

“You were there for the deliveries?”

“No, we didn’t do the deliveries, but we were there in case the baby needed resuscitation,” he repeated. “I remember the first baby came out and wasn’t breathing. Ernie went to work on him. We didn’t know how many more there were. The second one came out and also wasn’t breathing. She wasn’t crying. I held the baby up and whacked her feet,” he said, motioning the smack of his arm through the air down against the feet of an invisible baby. “And the baby lived. Elizabeth was her name…”

“From smacking the baby’s feet?”

“When you hit the baby’s feet…you make the baby cry… To cry, the baby has to take a breath. So you hit the baby’s feet to make her breath…” He leaned his head down on his fist, his elbow on the armrest of the chair. “It was amazing, this person being brought to life…”

I stared at my father in awe. In a moment I saw more heroism in one day of his life than I had likely experienced ever before in mine. “Did all the babies live?”

After a long moment of silence, my father lifted his head up and gazed away, squinting his eyes as if strained by the act of memory, or emotion.

“Not only did they live… They thrived…”