The Night Everything Stopped.

Those two seconds were the longest seconds of my life.

I dropped my cellphone; I stared at the cereal I was enjoying before my phone rang and  it looked like stone as my eyes became blurry from tears.

My dad involved in an accident?

Few seconds ago, my phone rang and the number was unfamiliar. I almost didn't pick up.

I almost.

"Is this Serena Holloway?"

"Yes."

"Miss Holloway, this is Officer Reyes with the State Police. I'm calling regarding a vehicle accident on the I-95 southbound corridor this evening…"

When I heard that, I went still; I wished him not to continue, but he did.

"...involving a Richard Holloway. We have him listed as your father. Is that correct?"

In those few seconds, everything in my head, everything, went completely, perfectly silent. The kind of silence that tells you a lot, the one that tells you what even you do not want to say aloud. The kind that arrives right before something permanent.

"Yes," I said. "He's my father."

There was a pause.

It was only two seconds long.

Those two seconds told me everything before the officer said another word.

I don't remember the drive to the hospital. How can I when my view was blurry, it was a miracle I arrived safely.

I know I drove because my car was there when I came back out, but I don't remember any of it, not the bridge, not the highway, not parking, not walking through the automatic doors. I remember the cereal bowl on the counter. And then I remember the smell of the hospital, that specific antiseptic smell that gets into the back of your throat and stays there, and a nurse asking me something I had to ask her to repeat three times before I understood it.

Are you the next of kin?

Yes. Yes, I was the next of kin. My mother had died when I was fourteen. My father had remarried eventually, Sandra, who was also in the car with him.

 And then I thought about Sandra's daughter Callie, who had become something like a stepsister.

I was all he had.

I was all he had left.

They walked me down a corridor that was too bright, with the kind of lighting that made everything look clinical and final, and a doctor was talking to me; I could see his mouth moving but I was watching the door at the end of the hallway. The one with the small window. The one that didn't have any sound coming from behind it.

He opened it.

I walked in.

I had seen my father sleep.

I had seen him exhausted, which was its own kind of stillness, head back in his office chair, glasses still on, the kind of man who fell asleep mid-problem because his brain didn't know how to stop. I had seen him ill once, a bad flu the winter I was seventeen, when he'd spent four days in bed and looked smaller than I'd ever seen him and I had sat on the edge of his mattress and felt for the first time what it meant to be afraid of losing someone.

This was not sleep.

I knew the moment I walked in and saw him. Not because of the machines or the stillness or the sheet pulled to his chest. Because of his hands. My father's hands were always doing something: signing, gesturing, holding a coffee cup, or drumming a rhythm on the steering wheel when he was thinking. I'd watched those hands my entire life. They were the most alive thing about him.

They were folded.

Still.

I walked to the side of the bed and I looked at him for a long time without touching him. I don't know how long. The doctor had said something about waiting outside and I had nodded and he had gone and now it was just us, the way it had been just us since my mother died, my father and me, two people who had learned to be careful with each other because they were the only family the other one had.

Hi, Dad. 

He didn't answer. Of course he didn't. He lay there with his folded hands and his face that looked like him and wasn't him anymore, and I stood beside him in the too-bright light and I let myself fall apart in the quietest way possible; no sounds, just tears, the kind that come before you even know you are crying, the kind your body decides on without asking your permission.

I pressed my palm flat against his hand.

Cold.

I thought about the last time I had talked to him. Four days ago. A phone call, we had laughed on the call.

I stayed until a nurse knocked gently on the door and I stepped back and I smoothed the sheet at his chest like that was something I could do for him, the way you make small gestures when the real gesture is impossible.

Then I walked out.

And I did not fall apart again.

I made myself a promise in that corridor, under that clinical light, with the antiseptic smell in the back of my throat and my hands trembling in a way I was going to pretend wasn't happening.

I was going to be the kind of woman he raised me to be.

Whatever came next.

I didn't know what was to come next would change my life for the worse... devastatingly.