The Visit

Jessie Watkins slipped her sandal strap over her heel and scrambled out of the truck, fearful of her once-crisp blouse sticking to her back. Mama smoothed her satiny pink sheath, a firm grip on Randall’s tiny wrist with the other hand, as she stalked the parking lot. Cars and trucks filled the narrow spaces, another Sunday stop for reverent Christian families.

“Jessamine, let’s go. Now.”

A young woman rolled past them, a newborn in her arms, trailed by a tall man clasping an array of billowing light blue balloons. Clusters of visitors milled about and carried small totes of gifts and essentials as they spoke in hushed tones at the black marbled reception desk.

Jessie caught up with her family at the elevator bay. Mama’s lacquered nail clacked and illuminated the up button. Randall tugged his mother’s sleeve. “I’m hungry, Mama.”

Jessie crossed the threshold and held the door open. "You're not coming up with me?”

Mama grasped Randall’s hand “Your brother needs to eat. We’ll be back. Go see your father, Jessamine.”

“Yes, ma’am.” The climb rocked Jessie’s stomach. She clutched the rail and snagged down a blood donation flyer with her elbow.

The elevator door rumbled to reveal a dimly-lit corridor lined with IV poles and gurney.. A handful of staff manned the nurse’s station, a low counter strewn with thick black binders and ceramic sepia coffee mugs. No one acknowledged her, a first for Jessie, and she followed the overhead sign to her father’s wing, Room 452.

During their first visit, she watched her mother check Daddy’s vitals and chat with his nurse, while Randall perched on his bed. Jessie stood by the window, unable to speak and caught between surprise and dread at her father’s condition.

Now, she peeked through the cracked door and resisted the urge to bolt before he woke up. Yeah, I saw him, he was asleep, so I thought I’d come find y’all. She doubted Mama would believe that excuse and take them home, where Jessie could wake up to realize this was all a bad dream and—

“Carrie? Is that you?” Daddy’s voice was barely a whisper.

Jessie schooled her features into a smile that failed to reach her eyes. “It’s me, Daddy.”

He pulled the thin blue blanket up to his chest. “Where’s your mother?”

An oversized Naugahyde green chair and an overbed faux wood table made the room bleaker than she remembered, and Daddy looked ashen and shriveled in the harsh light cast through the blinds, even weaker that he appeared after the accident a week earlier.

“Mama says you’re doing much better.” The corners of Jessie’s chapped lips twitched upward.

“I guess so. Still hurts kinda.” Daddy patted the rough, wrinkled linen to invite his daughter closer.

Jessie wrinkled her nose. “Isn’t that a good sign, that you’re healing?”

Daddy shrugged and inched forward, but Jessie’s didn’t move. “Maybe I am. You can come sit, Jessamine.”

Just apologize and say Mama’s waiting. She hated to lie, but she didn’t want to stay a minute more than necessary. The antiseptic smell turned her stomach, and the sweetness of the mint she popped earlier had dissipated.

“Y’all went to church?”

“Of course, Daddy.” Jessie twirled a loose thread on her sleeve.

Daddy winced when his leg slid off the pillow. She asked, “Do you want me to get someone?”

“I’m OK.” A sliver of sweat edged his hairline. Jessie snatched a tissue from the overbed table and laid it on his blanket.

”Thank you, baby.”

“You’re welcome, Daddy.” Jessie inhaled a sharp breath. ”I wanted to apologize for lying to you and Mama. I just really wanted to play, Daddy.”

He leaned back against his pillow. “I know why you did it, Jessamine. It was wrong, but I understand.”

Jessie smoothed her skirt. “I know you don’t like me getting in the dirt and acting like a boy, but I love softball. I think I can be a really good pitcher someday, Daddy.”

“I know you can be great, because I watched you, Jessamine. Your papa would love seeing you, too.”

Tears blurred her view, but she continued. “I guess I wanna be like him a little bit. He made me love baseball.” The bandage on his leg, the spider-like cuts above his knee, the gown that dwarfed his frame clashed with her image of him that night in the kitchen—imposing and menacing as he stood above them, her mother unconscious and bloody crouched on the linoleum. Her father was no longer the man whose angry, booming voice kept her awake in fear.

Daddy squeezed his eyes shut, and his index finger hovered over the PCA, or whatever her mother had called the handheld device. A few minutes later, the lines in his forehead faded, and his entire body sighed. He looked this way when Jessie held him before help arrived, so calm and peaceful under the darkened sky of the eclipse.

“I was so scared, Daddy.” Jessie looked down at the floor, as if another look at him would break her apart.

Daddy lifted his hand toward her, and she trembled under his leathery hand littered with healed gashes that resembled threads of braided scarlet rope.

“I wish you hadn’t seen me like that, but I’m so grateful you were there, that y’all got help to me so fast.”

Tears gathered in Jessie’s eyes. “Just in time.”

“Jessamine, I hope we can start over after this. I don’t want you to be scared or hurt anymore, because of something I did.”

“I’m fine, Daddy. We all just want you to come home, and get better.”

He pressed his lips to her knuckles. “I hope that you can forgive me one day, Jessamine. I love you and your brother more than anything.”

Jessie said, “I prayed for you, for all of us, and I hope you and Mama will forgive me for lying to you about what I was doing after school.”

“You prayed for me?” The corner of her father’s lips twitched, and Jessie rose to wipe a tear from his cheek. His breath was warm and minty when she kissed his forehead.

Jessamine needed to be honest, but she couldn’t tell Daddy about the unanswered prayers that he would leave them, not unlike what actually happened to him.

Daddy’s eyelids fluttered, and Jessie released her grip to let him rest now that the pain meds eased his pain, his breathing evened and his soft snores filled the room. She didn’t want to leave her father to wake up alone, but she had no idea how long Mama and Randall would return.

Just tell her you needed a minute. Jessie tiptoed out of the room and rushed past a nurse from her mother’s unit as she wheeled an elderly woman past her father’s door. Jessie took the stairs this time and pushed past the dull ache in her knees as she descended. She hadn’t run for a few days, and her stiff muscles were the price for her inactivity.

The warm breeze applied a fresh, soothing balm to her face, a welcome caress unlike the dry, compressed air of her father’s room. Jessie spotted a patch of weeds under a knotty towering oak. She groaned when she realized how similar it looked to the patch in the corner of Mama’s garden that she left untended.

Starting over wasn’t easy, but rebirth remained inevitable. Beginnings are blessings, proof that despite toil or discomfort, change is the path to renewal.

If pain was the price that her father paid to come back to them, Jessie hoped that the healing brought peace to all of them. He survived the accident, her mother survived the abuse, and they loved each other and their imperfect daughter.

Jessie wandered further into the unkempt garden. The snowfall from last week could have happened months ago for how dry the soil looked. A closer inspection revealed something she hadn’t expected to find amid such chaos. A single pale pink bud nestled in the towering crabgrass and winked a noble greeting, determined to carve its place in the warm sunshine.

Some believers, like Jessie, might call it hope—a welcome, fresh start.