The child on the doctor’s table lay motionless, her eyes wide, her breaths shallow, not
unlike her father now, eighty years later, lying in a hospital bed, seeing again that dimly lit room.
Now almost sixty, the child takes his hand, watches the illness take him. He does not open
his eyes, does not speak. Death has stolen his words, its first triumph. But he remembers.
“How many stitches, doctor?” the child’s mother asked, shrinking back, furtive glance at
her husband.
“The gash is deep. How did it happen?”
He’d smacked her, of course, but how was he to know she’d skid across the floor, slam
into the heating vent.
“She tripped,” he said.
Earlier that week he’d told her to stay inside the crosswalk. She had, ginger step after
ginger step, walking the tightrope of the painted white line. She never listened, that’s what, he’d
thought. Well, this will make her listen.
And again, the week before that, trying to take a photo of the happy family, her face
screwed up, sunlight too bright. “Open your eyes and close your mouth!”
She didn’t listen, that’s what.
Too many years later, her mother left him. And the other children too.
But she, she sits beside him. Her hair falls in gray strands over her forehead, over the
scar.
The child had come too close to the new baby, tried to peer inside the cradle. He’d meant
only to push her back. Maybe. Four-year-olds shouldn’t be so slight. She’d lain quietly in the
back seat as they’d driven to the clinic. He felt bad. Of course he did. He felt bad every time
before and every time after.
Is this what grown men did as they lay dying, he thinks, inhabit buried memories?
Somewhere along the way, this daughter had found God. Maybe from him. He’d been a
preacher, after all. But hers had been a better God. She’d returned, asked him to walk her down
the aisle, sent him birthday cards from the grandchildren. He’d been a good grandpa, maybe now
even a good dad.
The scar always reminded him, though, even when the hair covered it.
A nurse comes in, checks his tubes. His eyes open. She is young, pretty. But he sees only
his daughter. He needs to ask her.
“What, Dad?” She leans close to him, her hair falling to the side.
He thinks the question that his lips can’t speak. He breathes it on his shallow breaths. How many stitches?
“Oh, Dad,” she says. “Don’t you know?”
He does know. But he needs her to tell him one more time.
Seven? he breathes.
“No, Dad,” she says softly. “Not seven. Seventy times seven.”
He closes his eyes, exhales the memories. How sweet, he thinks, that the final word is a
number.