Sea Smoke

They sat in silence for a few moments. Billie looked him over. “I wish you’d taken better care of yourself,” she said.

“Don’t start,” he said, staring at the wall through the fog. “I lost too much. Once you start losing everything, you lose the wills, too. Will to get out of bed, will to eat, will to stop drinking, will to open your eyes.” He stopped, and shook his head slightly, brushing off memories he didn’t want to let come up. “Too much lost.”

“There’s more, you know. More to see once you let go of the losses.”

He stared at her, devastated, then said, louder than he’d intended, “I’ll never let those go. If I do that, it’s like they never existed.”

She smiled at him with a sympathetic look born from wisdom rather than pity. It was a look he gave her frequently when she was a teenager and she would dramatically claim in the face of minor adversity that her life was over. He knew that her life hadn’t even begun, but his words held little meaning with her in those moments. It was always something she had to experience for herself, and so he just smiled and stood in solidarity with her. He tried to be a confident guide to silently show her that it would get better and that there was so much more to experience.

They looked at each other in loving silence for a few seconds until Pam, not singing, came in with someone else. They looked at him and then moved more quickly, Pam gathering something as the other woman looked over him.

“Mr. Reynolds,” the urgent voice of the doctor said. “Are you able to respond to me?”

“Yes,” he said, his voice weaker than he expected, but irritated at the interruption to his visit. “This is my daughter.”

“She and I have met, Dad,” Billie said.

“Mr. Reynolds? It’s Dr. White. Can you hear me?”

“Yes, hello,” he said, then looked at Billie who stared at him with profound admiration.

“This next part is going to be a bit weird,” Billie said.

Multiple people came into the room and hurried to busy themselves with machines, bags, and his body. They poked, pulled, and shook him. He didn’t understand the fuss, and why they were ignoring what he was saying. He sat up, suddenly, throwing his arms out to make everyone stop.

“What the hell is going on here?” he screamed. “Y’all racing around like I’m in trouble, and no one’s even hearing what I’m saying!”

He stood up and pulled away from the bed, everyone else standing up straight then and staring down, scolded like naughty children.

“I want some goddamn answers now!” he said, backing up toward the window in the room. He noticed the crisp linen on the doctor’s white coat in contrast to Pam’s disheveled pink scrubs. He wondered if someone had put on his glasses.

“Dad,” Billie said behind him.

He turned and studied her face. The smell overwhelmed him, and he knew then that it wasn’t strawberries. It was Hawaiian ginger. The scent of Billie’s favorite perfume. He’d tucked a bottle in the casket at her funeral.

“Billie,” he said, terror in his eyes as realization hit him. “How are you here, baby?” He hugged her and wept mightily into her shoulder as he unleashed pent up emotion. The sound of a flatline replaced the beeps and buzzes on the machines.

“Time of death 8:42am,” Dr. White said.

“It’s time to go Dad,” Billie said.

He stumbled back and looked back at the doctors. He watched them look over his body, yellowing and laying still in the bed. He fell into a table and knocked a stethoscope off the surface, still having some physical connection somehow, even as he looked at his body lying dead in front of him. The doctors and nurses turned and looked at the fallen device, and then went back to unhooking machines from his lifeless shell.

“I grew up babysitting his daughter, Billie,” Dr. White said a few moments later, filling out a form rapidly with experience. “She died a couple of years back. Heroin. Just awful.” Pam sang a descending note of pity. White continued, “I spoke to him briefly at the funeral. I’d hoped I was wrong, but really, I knew he wouldn’t hold on for long. His wife had already died of cancer, and Billie had been all he had left. You could see it in his eyes, he’d given up.”

He felt a calm and clear curiosity as their voices faded, and he stopped caring what they had to say. He stopped caring about the hospital machines and where his glasses were. He stopped caring about his body and the life that it had seen. He looked at the sea smoke filling the room, concealing the bridge between the world he knew and the world yet before him. He felt light and uncontained. He felt Billie squeeze his hand, grounding him.

“Is this it?” he asked her, his voice wavering slightly with the lingering effects of mortality and fear. She held his hand as they watched Pam covering his body with a sheet. The scent of Hawaiian ginger grew stronger, swirling around him with the sea smoke.

She smiled at him and pulled him into the fog. ♦