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Show And I could tell by the way he spoke that I didn't want to know, didn't want to own whatever it was that made his strong voice break. I remember looking at the white wall in the DeBobe's kitchen, holding the phone awkwardly to my ear, waiting for my father to continue, knowing nothing would be the same. There was an accident, a nurse, he was burned. He....And he stopped. Is it okay, I asked, unsure of what I even needed to be alright, only wanting the reassurance that parents provide, the promise they make from the moment of birth never to drop, never to harm, always to hold. I don't know, my father said. Words I had never heard him say before. For two years after my youngest brother Bryan was born, my father called him George. Come here, George, he would call, holding out his arms to his third child, then running his fingers through Bryan's softly curling hair. It wasn't that my father couldn't remember his name or that there had ever been the chance that Bryan would be a George. Rather my father called his third child George because for a long time it wasn't clear whether Bryan would live. Had he died he would have been named Morris, after my father. Minutes after his birth, blood and mucous still covering his tiny limbs, lungs hardly accustomed to breathing air, Bryan was taken from the delivery room to the NICU at Bethesda Naval Hospital where newborns were washed and measured. There, a grossly negligent nurse left him in a basin in the sink while she went to the next room but not before pressing the scalding hot pedal by accident. Bryan lost most of the flesh on the 56 |
