gently.
“Hope, please open your eyes for me”. It wasn’t the music talking to me. Where was the beautiful music?
“Hope, I love you.” I knew that voice.
“Daddy,” I sounded so small.
“Thank God you’re alright, Hope, I thought I’d lost you.”
“Daddy, where am I?”
“Just rest.”
As I closed my eyes, he rested his head on my hand. The hand he was holding and there were tears falling on it. My dad was crying.
Encounter
* An unexpected or casual meeting with someone
Chapter 3 - Daniel’s story
It was a quiet and peaceful evening, and the stars shown clear and bright. I had the large glass double doors open. I enjoyed the idea that I could lie in bed and see the heavens. That’s why I had picked this room. Out of all the empty rooms in Willy’s house, this one made me feel that there were only three walls closing me in. I wanted to be close to my stars, as close as I could get. And I loved the big glass doors, which helped me feel as though I was sleeping under the stars.
I awoke to a knock at the door. “Hey, Danny Boy, may I come in?”
“If you must.”
Willy came back in his excessively happy tone. “I must”.
The door opened and there stood Willy, his hair going in every direction. He was wearing a Hawaiian shirt and bright green pants with pink high top Converse tennis shoes. To call Willy eccentric was mild. He was always easy going, and always enjoyed a good laugh.
“I was hoping you could go to Seattle with me.”
“You mean would I drive you to Seattle.”
“I thought it would give us a chance to talk and a trip to the city would do you some good.”
Willy did this when he wanted to talk to me. He knew I could not go anywhere and he would have four and a half hours of my attention. I knew he was planning it that way. After all he was my mentor and I always felt reassured after his counsel.
“We would only be gone about a week.”
‘If only a week’ I thought, sometimes a week to Willy was more than seven days.
“Will Professor Noland mind?”
“No, the students are taking their final exams. I have to do some cataloging that would take me only a week so it wouldn’t be a problem. When do you want to leave?”
With a smile that said surprise, “Tomorrow” he came back. I should have known.
The next morning I woke to the sunshine flooding my room and it glistened off the mirrors on the closet doors. Which reminded me, I needed to get some cleaning and packing done before we leave. I hurried through my laundry and straightened the room. That was always easy since I didn’t feel the need for a lot of clutter. I just had a few personnel possessions. My bathroom was the worst. I had a bad habit of listening to music in the shower. The counters showed it with CD’s everywhere. It was always like a game of memory, finding which case and CD matched.
I washed my car and removed all the star charts from the back end. I even cleaned the passenger seat off. My car was a small, two-door hatchback. If I knew Willy, we would need all that space plus more and I was right; Willy walked out the back door with two large bags handing them to me to pack in the car. He looked at me with a sinful smile saying, “I’ll be back” in his Schwarzenegger voice. I just shook my head and walked to the car. I had finally got the bags in and the hatch closed but when I turned around there stood Willy with his picnic basket in hand. I gave him an expression, which begged, ‘do we really need that?’ He already knew what I was thinking. We had spent so much time together.
“I thought you might like to eat, at some point.”
It turned out to be a relaxing drive. The road wound through the evergreen forests. The trees were so tall it felt like driving in a canyon. There was such perfection and beauty in them standing regally along the river until you hit Interstate 5. From there to Seattle it was just one long highway.
It was a quiet ride. Willy wasn`t saying much; he just looked at the scenery. After a while I noticed Willy fidgeting in the passenger seat. He was looking at the dash with a funny puzzled expression while he twirled a shiny CD on his finger.
“Where is the CD player?”
“I don’t have one.”
“Daniel, it’s the twenty-first century you need to update the stereo in this thing. How do you listen to your music?”
I glanced his way and said simply “iPod.” I smiled at his dismay. “I didn’t want to change the classic dashboard so I had an adapter installed.” Willy just stared at the CD as if wishing it would play by magic.
The traffic was becoming congested as we were heading into rush hour.
“Daniel, I wanted to ask how are you doing? I know you’ve been busy and....” Willy said, in a concerned voice.
“You know. I’m doing like always, the best that I can.” Thinking to myself, some days I didn’t know if my best was ever good enough. I just kept doing what felt right and I prayed a lot.
“How are you really doing?”
“What do you mean?”
“Is your glass… half-full, or half-empty?”
“I don’t know if my glass is half-empty, or even half-full. Right now it’s an empty glass with just a few drops of water in it. Actually Willy, I feel like the angel of death. In the last few months we lost four of the children in the ward at the hospital.”
“And what about the girl you were tutoring?” Willy’s voice was soft and sincere.
“Kayla.” Her loss was still fresh in my mind. “I’ll see how I’m doing with that when I get back to class. I met her family and some of her friends at her memorial. I told them if there was anything I could do…. They said they had everything taken care of. Her parents had her cremated and they’re burying her ashes with her grandparents, in the Bahamas.”
Kayla was only one of the three young lives put to rest. I knew that the schools would have counselors on call for the friends, family and classmates. I didn’t fit in these categories. I already knew it was difficult to understand death, especially when they were so young. It’s always easier to cope with a death when the person is older, when they have experienced some measure of life.
As traffic came almost to a standstill, Willy grew quiet and I knew he was thinking about something important by the look on his face. I heard Willy take a deep breath before he spoke.
“Daniel… what do you see?”
“A big truck, with big red lights, stopped in front of me.”
