The Sudden Farewell

"Excuse me, Sir, Ma'am, you-"

The nurse held up a hand, but stepped aside as Artemus and Amanda West brushed past her, walking fast. They were a tall, formidable couple and the matched grim expressions on their faces brooked no argument. 'Tem' West, with his athletic build, handsome features that matched his father's, and piercing green eyes would have stood out in any room; marching down a hospital corridor like a thundercloud in human form, even at age twenty-four, he made people scurry out of his way. His wife, equally striking, but with brown eyes and long, dark tresses that contrasted with her husband's lighter brown hair, kept up with him step for step – a two-person unstoppable force determined to reach their goal.

Rounding a corner of the hospital corridor they saw, seated on a bench, a lone figure who stood up to greet them rather than flee. The gawky young man with unkempt clothing had curly, dark locks that were a match for Amanda's. His dark brown eyes, behind their wire-frame glasses, were puffy and red from crying. With a gulping half-sob rather than any spoken word, the spindly youth embraced his older sister and wrapped an arm around his brother-in-law. He all but buried his curly-haired head in Amanda's shoulder with a snuffling sound as though he might start crying again at any moment.

Tem's hard expression softened and became fearful at once, complexion paling.

"Is he . . . ?"

"In there," the younger man croaked, looking up from his sister's embrace and pointing to the closed door of a hospital room. "Mom's with him."

Tem turned and reached for the doorknob as if it might be a red hot object, painful and dangerous to the user. From Jimmy Gordon's reaction, he couldn't tell if he was about to find his father in that room, or his father's corpse. Sucking in a deep breath and feeling the supportive touch of his wife's hand on his back, he gripped the knob, turned it, and opened the door he almost couldn't bear to walk through. The last time he'd been in a hospital and smelled these same smells, he'd been six years younger and it had been his mother who lay dying from a snakebite. Now if the message he'd received by telephone an hour ago was correct, it was his father passing. Artemus West was about to become an orphan. But this time the culprit wasn't a startled copperhead among the blueberry bushes.

"Tem," Aunt Lily's voice came softly as he stood there in the doorway. That sound, like Amanda's presence, gave him the courage to enter. If she could face this for his father's sake, then so could he. But he also heard Jimmy's voice whispering to his wife.

"Mandy, it's bad . . . ."

And it was. Tem's father, James West, lay in the single hospital bed in the room, so gray, so waxy and motionless that Tem still didn't know if he'd made it to the deathbed in time. Then he saw the slightest of movements of the sheets. His father was still breathing, perhaps only just, but he was alive. There was still time to say goodbye at least. He'd been given that much.

Aunt Lily stood up out of the chair she'd been sitting in at the dying man's bedside and came forward to give her honorary nephew/son-in-law a hug. Lily Gordon's face, lovely in spite of her many years, was tear-stained too, but in place of Jimmy's misery she wore a sad and dignified resignation. She'd already lived through the sudden shock of Adele West's death and for her, the far more terrible loss of her husband all too recently. At her age, Death was no longer a stranger, but a familiar if unwelcome visitor. Tem returned her hug and dared to look back at the figure in the bed again.

"Dad?" he called softly.

The rhythm of the breathing underneath the sheets changed ever so slightly, and the patient's tired eyes opened, bleary at first, but with recognition and intelligence still behind them. Tem reached down and placed a hand on the wrinkled, shrunken cheek. He wished he could embrace his father one last time, but he didn't dare. A gunshot wound, the voice on the telephone had explained but hadn't said where. His father had suffered so much pain, so many injuries, so many times already that Tem didn't want to add to them. What could he possibly say that would be any comfort to the old man at a time like this?

"Dad, I love you." It was nothing but the truth.

His father rewarded him with a weak smile. His lips started to move. At first, Tem thought that his father would be too diminished to say anything, but a raspy, papery voice that was unmistakably Jim West's came out.

"Too old," his father whispered. "Wanted to have more time with you kids." Those were almost exactly Uncle Arte's dying words too, but Jim West wasn't finished. Those tired eyes conveyed their love to his son, but then moved from Tem's face over to Aunt Lily's. "Any messages?" the old man asked her. "I'll be seeing him soon."

Lily Gordon's sad, bright gaze glistened with tears again. Like Tem, she gently laid a hand on the dying man's head and smiled just a little.

"Tell Artemus . . . ." she choked. "Tell Artemus that I miss him, and that I love him, and that I have always loved him." She ruffled the patient's still abundant hair before wiping away a tear and sighing. "It will be my turn to join the rest of you under the apple tree soon enough."

"Mom!" Amanda's voice protested in a whisper at that last sentence. Lily Gordon squeezed her daughter's hand, but said nothing more before sitting back down by the patient's bedside. The patient had closed his eyes and was silent again, but the rise and fall of the sheets gave evidence that he was sleeping, not yet gone. Tem pulled up chairs for his wife and Jimmy before taking a seat himself at his father's side. Time would be up all too soon, but there were so many questions Tem still had and not the philosophical kind.

Who did this to you, Dad? And why? What were you doing while we weren't watching? Only last Sunday at dinner Tem had felt a different kind of worry for his elderly father. But Jim West hadn't been dying then, or gone in the head like poor Uncle Jeremy. No doubt about it – the older West had been failing more and more since Uncle Arte's death from pneumonia last year. Deprived of his best friend as well as his wife, his old wounds had been catching up with him fast. He'd been depressed, restless, irritable (and when hadn't he been that?), a bit vaguer than usual. But he'd still been Jim West. Tem of all people should have known that could mean trouble. Only the legendary James West could manage to die at the age of sixty-five from a bullet wound suffered in broad daylight in a public place in a peaceful city like Chicago!

Not that Tem hadn't chosen to follow in his father's footsteps, or Amanda in hers.

But this . . . .

Stunned with grief, Tem sat by his father's side wishing he could allow himself to cry along with the family he had around him. He didn't. Jim West wouldn't have wanted it. Tem let Amanda rub his shoulders, grateful as always for her presence. He tried to give Jimmy a reassuring pat on the arm every now and again. The poor kid had been utterly crushed by his own father's death not that long ago, and now he looked to be taking his Uncle Jim's just as hard. Tem and Amanda had been raised together, trained and educated by their fathers together, to be made of stern stuff. Jimmy, the late-in-life, eccentric genius child was different, though, always more fragile and emotional, not as tough. Tem was going to have to bear up and set a good example now that he and Jimmy were about to be the only men left in this family. If only bearing up when a person who meant the whole damn world to you was dying wasn't so damn hard . . . .

You really need to stop swearing, Tem scolded himself, even if he wasn't swearing out loud. What would Mom think if she were here? Tem looked back at his father. Maybe his mother was here, watching over them all at a time like this, waiting to collect his father like an angel. In which case, he really needed to guard his words and wash his mind out with soap. Tem was normally good at praying, he thought. Why couldn't he do it now when he needed it most?

He hadn't kept track of the time either, but the sun was doing it for them all, starting to set. At this time of early summer, that meant that eight o'clock at night was approaching. Six hours they'd been here? Seven since that terrifying and horrible telephone call? In spite of his desire to remain stoic, Tem stretched out his long arms, feeling how stiff he was getting in his hard wooden chair. He was mortified as he heard the gurgling of a stomach, hoping it was Jimmy's and not his own betraying him. Poor Aunt Lily had been here longer than any of them, and she was his father's senior by a good seven years. She must be exhausted by now, but she was enduring this vigil better than he was. Only Amanda could match her for strength.

As if reading his thoughts, Aunt Lily looked out the window at the fading daylight and sighed.

"You three should be getting some supper for yourselves before it gets too late out," she said. "We're going to have a long night ahead of us."

"I can't leave Dad at a time like this," Tem objected. His father hadn't awakened again, but every so often had appeared to twitch a little as if he might.

"I'll stay with him," Aunt Lily offered. "It may be hours yet, and you three need to keep your strength up. He will certainly understand." She saw Tem about to argue. "And you can bring me back something while you're about it," she suggested.

Tem looked over at Amanda and saw her biting on her lower lip with worry. Jimmy's head was practically in her lap and her face was sticky with tears now too. This wasn't a night any of them had wanted to face, inevitable as endings always are. They'd been expecting it sooner or later, and sooner had become now. But the violence – that had caught them all by surprise. Artemus Gordon, in spite of his enemies' best efforts, had died at the ripe old age of seventy-two, at home, in bed, surrounded by his loved ones. This wasn't like that. This wasn't natural. Amanda looked back at him and he could see the unanswered questions in her expression too. They needed to talk, and she and Jimmy needed relief from this vigil as much as he did. But how could he leave even for a little while? And how could he not, knowing they'd be reluctant to go and see to their own needs without him?

"It's all right," Aunt Lily reassured them all. "I don't think it's going to come that quickly. Jim's a strong, brave man. He'll still be here when you get back."

Stiffly and reluctantly, Tem stood up from his chair, stretched again, and saw Amanda and Jimmy do likewise. He'd been in such a fog during his mother's final hours that he only vaguely recalled other people from time to time walking him around as if he was a puppet. He felt a little like that now and he couldn't afford to. Jimmy was definitely at puppet stage though. With Amanda on one side and Tem on the other, they walked him out, holding hands behind his back.

"I wish the nurses would check on him," Tem said, looking back at the hospital room door.

"They did." Amanda squeezed his hand. "Twice."

Guess I'm still a puppet too, Tem thought, feeling hot and numb at the same time. But he's my Dad!

How was this possible? Why was this happening? How could his father, his big, strong father, his hero, be dying? How could his father be that shrunken, worn out, gray husk in the bed? And how would they all survive without him?

Tem wanted to snap out of the fog of his grief but he couldn't. He let his wife herd him and Jimmy both down the hallway and around the corner to the hospital's entrance corridor. The front doors of the hospital, even at this hour, kept swinging open and shutting with people traffic. Tem shivered as he felt the cool air of an un-summery night drafting over them in choppy wavelets.

"Do you think . . . ." he started to ask, when the blast came that knocked him off his feet. Even without warning, even in this state, Tem's reflexes were fast enough to allow him to twist himself in mid-air to try and shield his wife and her brother from the force of the explosion that flattened them all. From behind, a sideways tornado of debris enveloped them, pelting them in the backs. Sudden smoke and plaster dust blocked vision just as a reverberating boom blocked out other sounds. But smell was still working and what Tem dreaded most in the immediate survival part of his brain was the smell of gas. His family was here and able to see or no, he had to get them out. Springing to his feet even as he felt his wife beside him doing the same, he pulled Jimmy up. They'd fallen in the direction that the hospital entrance – and exit – lay and that's where they had to go. Holding Amanda with one hand and Jimmy with the other, he forced his path through the smoking, stinking cloud in search of their escape.

The way out was fast, but not easy, moving in this very different sort of fog, tripping over objects they couldn't see and couldn't take the time to care about. Other human beings stumbled against them, all seeking the same objective – escape, survival, fresh air. Somehow, they made it through. Tem coughed and parts of his back felt like he had little wasp stings in him, but he emerged into mostly clear air with his firm grip holding onto Amanda and pushing his young brother-in-law out ahead of them. He saw Jimmy turn around as much as he could, coughing and choking too, but lips managing to form a screamed-out word that Tem saw rather than heard through the ringing in his ears – "Mom!"

Aunt Lily! Dad! Tem had to go back in for them, had to save them!

He and Amanda both turned to stare back in the direction they had just staggered out of, to see what was left of the hospital's ground floor and the wing they had been in. All they could do was react with the same shock at what they saw. It left no room for doubt. There was no point in either one of them rushing back in through the flames and smoke and collapsed walls to rescue their loved ones. There was no more Dad. There was no more Mom. No Aunt. No Uncle. Not anymore.

James West and Lily Gordon were gone.