BAD INK

I had arrived at the hospital that morning, and I was feeling like crap. It's not an elegant way of expressing my physical and mental state, but saying I was low, tired, or exhausted would not be a fair description. The night before, I had barely slept, drove my car for four hours at dawn, and arrived at my destination needing caffeine as if my life depended on it. The only thing that helped me wake up was the cold air that slapped my face as soon as I opened the car door, but as soon as I entered the building, my body seemed to switch off. It could be because I was "just" tired, or maybe my brain was playing games with me. After all, I did not want to be there. The whole situation made me think of those days when I was little, and my mother told me I had to clean up my room. I dragged myself in those ten square meters for hours, waiting for a miracle to happen, one that would dust and tidy up all my stuff before she opened the door to ask how things were going... But this was no cleaning exercise. That day was my second time visiting my father during his cancer treatment.

The day my aunt told me my father had cancer, I had not seen him for five years. I had finished my university degree, moved to another country, and started to work on something I loved, but he did not know any of it because we never spoke. He had been busy with his businesses, and I had been trying to keep up with adulthood, so the day my aunt called me, I felt like a teenager again, called to face reality, and I did not like it. I should say I was worried about his illness, his chances to survive, and his feelings, but that was not it... I was afraid because I did not know what to tell that person who had become a stranger, who I was supposed to love... but was I?

The first time I visited him in the hospital, I was nervous, but he wasn't. He did not seem to repent for what he had done or hadn't. When I saw him sitting in his bed, in his blue pajamas, he asked me if I had read a good book lately. He always liked music and books; things had not changed so much after all, and we kept talking about the things we liked and the rest that kept us busy for a couple of hours until he was too weak to continue. That day, I promised him I would return, and he told me he would not run away from there. As if... I thought first, but then I remembered worse things had happened before.

I visited my father for the second time a week before Christmas, and sadness and happiness were in the air. The sound in the background was a mix of Christmas Carols, pop music, and machines beeping, depending on the patient's stage in each room. There was no music where I was going, but the noise of loud conversations and laughs. When I reached the door, I saw him talking to a short man and a tall woman. He was Spanish and had the same accent as the rest of my family. She wasn't. She looked like a supermodel taken from a fashion magazine, in a short, tight, blue dress and the most fabulous high heels ever created.

They all looked at me and smiled

"I am Bruno, and she is Stella," said the man.

"They are friends," continued my father.

I waved at them, not sure of what I should say because the options that crossed my mind were not politically correct:

"I'm the kid he abandoned."

"I am the soon-to-be orphan."

"I don't care"

With too much to say, but little energy to do it, I just said "Hello" and threw at them a smile for which I should have won an Oscar.

"We'll take care of this later," said my father. Bruno gathered some papers, and Stella put them inside her bag—a fabulous and tremendously expensive one I recognized because it was one of my work colleagues' dreams, and I had been bombarded with images of it for months.

"I need to take some rest, don't you mind?" he continued, and I took it as an opportunity to go and fetch the coffee I needed so much. I left my stuff in one of the empty chairs close to his bed and left the room.

As I walked the white and cold corridors of the oncologic wing of that building, looking for a coffee machine as my life depended on it, someone called my name. When I turned, the woman, Stella, was smiling at me, with a wallet in one hand and a pen in the other.

"I spent hours looking for your dad's fountain pen and finally found it stuck in the back of his car. Isn't it funny? Now, it seems I cannot leave it anywhere."

She laughed, and I smiled back at her as I approached the coffee machine at the end of the corridor. I thought about my father's collections: the records, the crystal figurines, the postcards from all over the world, but I did not remember expensive pens. I didn't know he had a car either because he did not live in Spain at that time, but I did not pay attention.

"I need some coffee; the flight was horrendous!" she continued, looking for coins in her wallet.

The only thing I wanted was the dark liquid that the machine was pouring painfully slowly. The last thing I needed was a new friend to talk to me through the day, and then, again...

"It's something new," she continued.

"Sorry?"

"The pens. It was a new investment of his."

I was not interested in my father's investments, that lady, or anyone else, really, but then, once more, she spoke.

"She loves you very much, you know? He speaks about you all the time."

And in that very moment, I lost it. I turned to that woman and asked, as politely as I could, to leave me alone. Maybe I was not as polite as I try to remember, but I asked it. I took my coffee and walked to my father's room, where he was taking a nap, and I read a magazine someone had left behind.

An hour later, my aunt arrived.

"You've met Stella?"

"Yes, I have," I said.

"She was your father's girlfriend, you know?"

"No," I replied. Sometimes, I wonder if my family thought I had paranormal powers, to know the things no one told me and I did not care about...

"She's nice. She traveled all the way here to visit your dad," my aunt continued.

"And to find a pen," I replied instinctively. I don't know why I said it, but I did, and my aunt's smile changed to an expression I cannot even describe. Then, she changed the conversation topic to something else I was expecting and dreading equally.

"Will you stay for Christmas? He will come with us to enjoy the holiday."

My father's prognosis was bad, and the doctor had agreed he could leave the hospital for a few days. It was humane to allow him to spend the season with his family. Unfortunately, his family remembered that I was part of it as well.

"No," I replied. "I'm going to my mum's. She's alone."

"You cannot do that!"

She yelled at me, and my father woke up wondering what was happening.

"Later," whispered my aunt to me, and the day continued as if nothing had just happened.

The day passed, and I told everyone I was returning to my place. My uncle called me selfish, and my aunt said I was heartless. My grandparents refused to speak to me, and Bruno, the man I had met in the morning, told me I would regret it.

Two months later, my father passed away. I attended the funeral and spoke with my family. Everyone was cordial, grieving the loss of someone they loved and facing someone they tolerated. Weeks passed by, and someone called me, a woman, Stella. Only then did I know who she was: a lawyer. She had visited my father to say goodbye to an ex, but the main goal was another. She had traveled to gather the signatures needed to sell all my father's assets: the houses, the cars, the records, the crystals, the pens...

"You have nothing," she told me.

"I have exactly the same as I ever did," I replied.

But it was not true: that day, I realized that the ink in that fancy fountain pen made half of my family disappear...