Page 109 - Too Much and Never Enough - Mary L. Trump

she looked for me in the auditorium. It would only occur to me much later that she already knew.
“What’s the matter?” I asked.
“Your mother just left,” he said. “She should be home in a few minutes.” I could picture him in the poorly lit library standing next to the telephone table wearing his starched white shirt, red tie, and navy blue three-piece suit, impatient to be done with me.
“But what’s wrong?”
“Your father has been taken to the hospital, but it’s nothing to worry about,” he said as though reporting the weather.
I could have hung up then. I could have gone back to trying to fit in with my new classmates at my new school.
“Is it his heart?” It was unheard of for me—for anyone but Donald—to challenge my grandfather in any way, but there was obviously a reason I’d been told to call.
“Yes.”
“Then it’s serious.”
“Yes, I would say it’s serious.” There was a pause during which,
perhaps, he was deciding whether to tell me the truth. “Go to sleep,” he said finally. “Call your mother in the morning.” He hung up.
I stood there in the stairwell with the phone in my hand, not knowing quite what to do. A door slammed on the floor above me. Footsteps followed, growing louder. A couple of students passed me on their way to the first floor. I put the receiver back into the cradle, picked it up, and tried my mother again.
This time she answered the phone.
“Mom, I just spoke to Grandpa. He told me Dad’s in the hospital, but he wouldn’t tell me what’s going on. Is he okay?”
“He had a heart attack,” my mother said.
From the moment she spoke, time took on a different quality. Or maybe it was the next moment, which I don’t remember, and the effect of the shock was retroactive. Either way, my mother kept talking but I didn’t hear any of the words she said. As far as I could tell, there was no gap in the conversation, but part of it never existed for me.
“He had a heart attack?” I said, echoing the last words I’d heard, as if I hadn’t missed something crucial.