Borrowed time

CHAPTER ONE

Aurelia

The machines breathe for him.

So I know it’s not a dream, every morning I walk into my father’s hospital room. It is a steady, mechanical sound that does not care. A rhythm that is not his, yet has all but consumed him.

I put my bag down softly, just in case noise might tear the whatever it is that’s barely keeping him here. The room smells as it always does — clean, razor-thin and artificial. It smells nothing like home.

“Morning, Dad,” I say softly.

He doesn’t respond.

He hasn’t for two months.

I approach the bed, absorbing the details I’ve memorized. His shallow furrow between his brows. The gray in his hair spreading faster than it ever used to. How his chest goes up and down because some other thing tells it to.

I take a seat in the chair next to him. The vinyl feels cold against my skin. I ignore it now and just go with it. Comfort feels unseemly here, self-indulgent.

I take his hand.

It’s warm.

That’s what brings me back. That simple fact. Warm means alive. Alive is hope, even when hope seems foolish.

“I have your jacket,” I say, nodding toward the folded coat that has been placed on the chair. “The blue one. You said you hated that hospitals were so cold.”

My voice sounds normal. Too normal. I’ve gotten good at that over the past year — sounding as if nothing is wrong, like a c***k didn’t run through my life quietly and entirely.

Elias would’ve hated this.

The notion steals in without warning, and I grip my father’s hand tighter.

My brother would have laughed so as not to choke, if only to spare the rest of us a little room to breathe. He would have grumbled at the machines, at the chairs, at the waiting.

I swallow hard.

It has been a year since Elias died. A year since the accident. It’s been a year since the argument I still replay in my head when there is no longer strength to stop it.

The house has not recovered from his absence. Neither has my father.

Neither have I.

After Elias was buried my father grew quieter. Not the hyperbolic grief — that type of sadness can convert to anger in the blink of an eye. His grief was slow. Heavy. It rooted deep in him like a second spine, and it canted him inward day by day.

I was consumed with my own guilt to see how much he was falling apart.

I notice everything now.

“I’m here,” I tell him. “I’ll be here as long as you need me.”

No idea if he can hear me. The doctors say it’s possible. They always say possible. Never certain.

So I talk.

I tell him about the weather. The neighbor who still forgets to bring out her trash. Of the café on the corner that has, at last, repaired its broken sign. Ordinary things. Safe things.

I avoid Elias’s name.

I’m not sure I trust my voice not to c***k if I say it aloud.

⸻

Time passes creakingly, as if time isn’t willing to move on.

A nurse enters the room to check the monitors, her actions swift and delicate. She smiles at me the way people do when they don’t know what else to give.

“You have been here every day,” she says softly.

I nod. “He’d do the same for me.”

She stops, and then exits without another word.

There’s no one around, so I lean back in my chair and close my eyes for a split second.

I don’t sleep. I never really do anymore. I am in a peculiar middle, where fatigue is like doing too many shots but never getting to go home.

My phone buzzes in my bag.

I ignore it.

Never in the history of that screen has there been anything more important than this room.

I watch my father’s chest rise and fall, rise and fall. I keep the seconds between breaths. I’ve been doing that without knowing, as if I could measure time exactly enough to control it.”

I can’t.

The feeling weighs on me, heavy and stifling.

I think of the night Elias was killed. Of how time moved cruelly fast in those days, and got ahead of itself without waiting for permission. It drags now, thin but stretched taut, trying my patience, my stamina.

Time is inconsistent like that.

It takes when it wants.

It never goes when you’re begging it to do so.

⸻

The doctor comes in the afternoon.

I stiffen at once, all my muscles tensed. I’ve become adept at sniffing out these moments the way they pause before speaking, the deliberate neutrality of their expressions.

“Ms. Vale,” he says gently. “May we talk for a moment?”

My heart drops.

“Sure,” I say, getting to my feet, which seem to be collapsing from the knees down.

And he doesn’t say anything at first. He glances between me and my dad, finally looking back at me again.

“There’s been some changes,” he said.

Not good.

Never good.

I hold my breath.

“We need to do a few more tests,” he says. “There are worries about long-term coma effects.”

Concerns.

I nod like I understand. I mean the word doesn’t scare me.

“What kind of concerns?” I ask.

He waits just the teeniest, tiniest bit too long.

“We’re going to have a lot more to say once we see the results,” he says cautiously.

That tells me something is off.

After he goes, I slump back in the chair, my heart throbbing in my ears. I look at my father, searching his face for something he can’t tell me.

“You cannot leave,” I whisper. “Do you hear me?”

The words spill out before I can stop them.

“I’ve already lost him,” I add softly. “I can’t lose you too.”

The machines are working in that even thumping pace.

Unmoved.

Unconcerned.

⸻

Evening comes to rest outside the window and turns the sky dark blue and purple. The hospital becomes more and more quiet, the sounds farther away. The visiting hours are over, but no one asks me to leave. They never do anymore.

I press my head gently against the side of the bed, my fingers clutched around his hand.

“I needed to be better,” I mumble. “I should have been able to tell how exhausted you were, or there wouldn’t be.”

I regret all those occasions when I didn’t fully appreciate the moment. All the tomorrows I thought were promised.

They aren’t.

I sit up at the sound of footsteps again.

This time, it’s not the nurse.

It’s the doctor — with another one that I don’t recognize.

They exchange glances and both face me.

My stomach twists.

“Ms. Vale,” the doctor says quietly. “There is something that we must talk about. I’m afraid he doesn’t have much time anymore”

Suddenly, the room feels too small .