“Drop me here.”
I threw a dirty look to my left. I meant business.
It worked.
He pulled up to the red curb, where regular folks were never to stop their cars, and pushed the gearshift of his sleek, black Mercedes into park.
I looked at my father, the man I’d once adored. The one who’d taught me to ride a bike and who’d picked me up and dusted me off after I’d wiped out so hard I had gravel stuck in my knee.
The same man who’d helped me with my math homework and who held me when I cried because the girl down the street had been mean to me.
That man—that father—no longer existed.
He was completely and tragically gone.
The man I looked at now had cold, dead eyes, sallow skin, and two thin, straight lines for lips. The cords on his neck disappeared into a too-big dress shirt collar, which was unsuccessfully cinched up with a blue silk Zegna necktie.
Sometimes the best money can buy still looks like shit.
“Don’t forget what we talked about. So help me, Char,” he said, his tone menacing.
Even his voice was ugly. Hateful. Poisonous.
The pain of losing your dad to a person you no longer know? There are no words for it.
A screeching ambulance pulled up behind us, turning up the velocity of its siren to warn us to get the hell out of the way.
Yeah, we were parked where the ambulances pulled up to the emergency room. And my dad did not give a shit.
He was like that.
Instead of moving, he rolled down his car window, leaning out to unceremoniously scream at the ambulance driver. “Turn that goddamn thing off,” he bellowed.
I whipped around in my seat, clutching the fluffy white towel absorbing the blood flowing from the palm of my hand. The driver, when he realized who my dad was, flipped off the siren, which died with a sad, slow whine. Meanwhile, the EMTs jumped out of the vehicle to wheel their patient into the ER, muscling the gurney up and over the curb since Dad was blocking the ramp that would have made their job much easier.
Such. An. Asshole.
As the transport team rolled their patient through the doors, one of them turned around and hollered through the open passenger window, past me, to Dad.
“‘Morning, Mr. Biddle. Good to see you.”
I looked down to hide my face. I didn’t want the guy, or anyone for that matter, to see me. My father was not a good person to be associated with.
Harsh, but true.
Dad started to open his driver’s side door, but I quickly put a hand on his arm before he got out.
“You don’t have to come in. I can take care of this.”
I pulled my hand back. I didn’t like touching him.
He looked at his watch. “Fine. Just as well. Your mother and I have that charity luncheon. We can’t be late.”
I hated that he called my stepmother, my mother. He should just call her Iris, like I did.
But I didn’t bother reminding him Iris was not my mother. I’d been doing it for years and it didn’t stop him.
He put the car in drive before I’d even opened my door, and looked over my way as if to say you can leave now.
In the minutes since we’d sat parked outside the ER, I’d been scanning the people coming and going. When I was confident no one would see me, I hopped out, cradling my bloody hand. Without so much as a goodbye, Dad pressed the gas. The car’s forward momentum pulled my open door shut before I could do it myself, with the solid thud cars of that caliber have. Dad was hermetically sealed in his little fort of luxury he believed only people like him were entitled to.
I’d had a Prius until recently, when it went into the shop. It was taking a strangely long time for its ten-year-old engine to be serviced—something, I was quite sure, that had to do with my dad’s instructions to the mechanic.
Dad accelerated with a screech and was out of sight before I’d even reached the doors of Headlands Hospital’s ER. The hospital where my father was CEO. And served as general overlord.
“Hi,” I said to the intake clerk.
Her head snapped up from her computer. It was clearly, and thankfully, a slow moment there. I was not down with being around a bunch of people right now, especially well-meaning ones who would ask me what had happened to my hand and how.
The clerk looked me up and down, trying to assess my reason for coming to the ER, convinced that since I was still standing on my own two feet, I couldn’t be that bad off. I raised my hand for her to see, the white towel bundled around it now pretty much soaked red with blood.
“Oh my,” she said, reaching under her desk. “Here, please put this around it.” She handed me a plastic bag.
Smart.
I should have thought to take one of those before leaving the house, but in my adrenaline-fueled state, all I’d done was grab one of my stepmom’s expensive Frette towels from the linen closet. Now encircled in a plastic baggie, my bloody mess was contained, but the towel was a lost cause. I’d have to find somewhere to chuck it before I went back home. Would Iris notice it missing? In the past, I’d ask a maid to take care of a problem like this and no one would know any better. But my dad and stepmom didn’t have a maid anymore. For that matter, they didn’t have any household help any longer.
“Here’s my ID and insurance card.”
The clerk took them from me, and as she entered my name in the computer, did a double take. I knew what she was thinking. And I knew what she wanted to ask.
Is your dad…?
But she didn’t. Thank god.
“Okay. Charleigh Biddle,” she said to herself, banging loudly on her keyboard.
Finally looking up at me, she asked, “What did you do to yourself?”
“Cut myself slicing a bagel.” I shrugged, pretending to be embarrassed over such a silly kitchen accident.
She nodded knowingly and continued typing into the computer. “Okay. We see a lot of those. Go have a seat, Charleigh. Someone will be with you shortly.”
I grabbed a hard, plastic chair in the ER’s clean but utilitarian waiting room. There was a tattered copy of Soccer World on the seat next to me, the only reading material in sight, and a wall-mounted TV, which was thankfully turned off. A scruffy old man in the corner dozed in the otherwise empty room.
Dad had dropped me off at the ER at just the right time. When I glanced back at the clerk, there were already three people waiting in line and a family of four just arriving.
I scrolled through my phone with my good hand, relieved the clerk had either not realized or just not mentioned I was her boss’s boss’s boss’s boss’s daughter—or however many layers of management there were between her and the hospital’s executive office. Biddle wasn’t the most common name, but I’d often passed it off as pure coincidence that I shared the same surname as the head of the hospital. And I planned to continue to.
Since I’d started nursing school, I’d spent time in several different hospitals, rotating through every medical specialty as part of my training. Not surprisingly, none had ER waiting rooms quite as drab as the one I was sitting in right now. My father was a notoriously cheap CEO, unwilling to spend a dime more than he had to in order to make patients comfortable.
Another reason to distance myself from him. As if there weren’t already enough.
