Joe stared down at the withered husk of what had once been his father, curiously unable to feel anything but bewilderment. The circumstances that brought Dad to this hospital bed were so inexplicable, and happened so rapidly, that confusion was the only demotic that made sense. The man who, hours before, had been merely an older version of the strong, vital man he'd grown up with, now lay curled in a near fetal position, occasionally writhing, eyes rolling behind closed lids, muttering something that sounded like Italian but was mostly gibberish. The man who'd shaved without fail every day was stubbly and rough, his mouth crusty on the sides with something white. His hands...
"We had to restrain him during treatment," the doctor said, seeing where Joe's eyes lay, and taking an unconscious step backward at the look on his face. "He was thrashing, preventing us from putting in an IV. He had a spiking fever and was low on fluids and sodium. He's a little better now under sedation, but we may have to maintain this comatose state until the fever goes down. We're trying to figure out what happened, but at this point it's still a mystery."
Dad's mouth, whenever it wasn't uttering guttural pronouncements that made no sense, occasionally made chewing motions, and his hands strained against the cloth ties, reaching toward his mouth, as if he were miming feeding himself.
"See that?" the doctor asked, indicating the motion. "That's common in patients with low sodium. The body wants to feed itself to get the sodium it needs from food."
Mom sat slumped in a chair beside Dad's bed, wrung out from weeping. He couldn't blame her for freaking out. He still clearly remembered the panicked phone call she'd made, telling him Dad was sick, that he took a nap and wasn't waking up but was lashing out like he was in the middle of a nightmare. The events that followed had been a nightmare. He'd left Lauren with the kids at home, explaining that there was some kind of emergency at his mom's house, and rushed over, finding Dad on the couch, having what looked to the untrained eye like an epileptic seizure. Mom had tried calling Johnny first, apparently, but couldn't find him. Joe could see Dad had to go to the hospital. The only question had been whether to call an ambulance or drive him himself. He didn't know if Dad would have made it if they'd waited for an ambulance. Instinct had driven him to grab his father and throw him over his shoulder. Dad had been red hot, and his flailing arms and legs had made him hard to carry, and Joe had suffered a few hits, but they'd barely registered in his urgency to get Dad into the van. Mom had sat with him, trying to restrain him, but mostly just trying to prevent him from falling over in his seat while Joe drove.
Luckily Burnaby Hospital wasn't very far away from where they lived, but the seconds had seemed to slip away at every stoplight. He'd pulled up at the entrance to Emergency and carried him through the sliding doors calling for a doctor. Emergency staff had sprung into action, wheeling up a gurney, but getting Dad to stay on the gurney had proved an immediate challenge. They must have used the restraints as soon as Joe had left them to properly park the van.
Mom had stayed behind in the van, enduring the blaring horns of other cars trying to maneuver around the van to find parking. The horns had stopped when Joe had reappeared to climb into the driver's seat, either because the blockade had been about to disappear, or because no one had wanted to confront the driver when they'd seen his size. Nevertheless, once Joe had found a proper parking space, he'd escorted his frantic mother back to the emergency room, where people in scrubs had hovered over Dad, inserting needles and a drip line. Of course Mom had broken down immediately, fearing his imminent death. Joe had just stood there, numb inside, unable to tear his eyes away.
Finally, when it seemed Dad had been stabilized, the doctor had found the time to explain what they'd done so far. He then asked them to help him fill in a medical history form and, as he did, asked them questions about what had happened over the course of the day leading up to the "episode," as he called it.
"Umberto and me went grocery shopping," Mom said. "When we come home, he drive funny, almost hit the cars in the other lane, even on other side of the road."
"Jesus, Ma, you could have been killed," Joe breathed.
She nodded. "I had to grab the steering wheel so he don't crash. We get home, but he park funny, break the side mirror. I say, Umberto, you okay? He say he a little dizzy. I make us some dinner, he eats, but later he throw it up on the kitchen floor. He don't even go to the bathroom!" She said this last in amazement, as if this part, more than any other part of the episode, was what had alarmed her most.
"Ma, why didn't you call me then?" Joe asked. "You had to know something was wrong then."
She shook her head, furiously wiping tears from her eyes. "I know, but Umberto say he have a nap, maybe he feel better. Then... well, you see..." She gestured to the result on the hospital bed.
The doctor nodded along as if this all made sense, jotting notes on the intake form. "This disorientation, lack of motor control, nausea and fever, point to some kind of inflammatory event in either the brain or spinal cord. We're going to have to quarantine him and take a spinal tap in the rare case it's some kind of bacterial meningitis."
Joe took an involuntary step away from the bed, and it shamed him, but he said, "Jesus, doc, I have kids at home. Should I even be here?"
"It's a small possibility," he said, seeming unconcerned. "If you're worried, though, you can stay here until we have the results of the spinal tap."
"How would he even get meningitis?" he asked in dismay. "Isn't that a kid's disease?"
"Not necessarily, although it does occur more frequently in kids and teens. Again, we're just taking every precaution we can. Why don't you and your mom give us some room, we'll move him to the isolation room, and we'll do our tests."
While he waited out in the parking lot, with his poor mother under his arm, for them to move his father to a closed door room in the emergency ward, he called Lauren to let her know he was at the hospital and probably wouldn't be back for a while.
"What's going on?" she asked. "Is he okay?"
"I don't know," he said. "The doctor called it an inflammatory event in either the brain or spinal cord."
"What the fuck? How does that happen?"
"I have no idea. They're still trying to find out what caused it."
"Okay, well, take all the time you need. I'll hold down the fort here. Tell your mom my thoughts are with him and with her."
"Dad's going to need a lot of prayers," he said. "I've never seen anything like this before. I know you don't pray, but could you ask the kids to pray a little?"
"My thoughts will work just as well as their prayers, but I'll tell them. What should I say is wrong with him?"
He closed his eyes and felt the sting of tears. "Just... tell them he's sick, and that he'll be better soon, but he needs their prayers right now."
"Okay. I love you. We love you."
"I love you too."
He hung up and tried Johnny. This time he picked up, and he was dumbfounded by the news of what befell their father. He rushed over right away, and Mom got to receive comfort from her eldest son.
"Can I see him?" Johnny asked.
"They were moving him to an isolation room just in case he has something infectious like meningitis."
"Jesus, what?!" Johnny asked in alarm.
"They're doing a spinal tap on him to test for it. If he's negative, they'll move him out. They're just covering all the bases."
Johnny paced back and forth, running hands through his thinning hair. "How does this happen? How does he take such a spectacular dive in health in one day?"
Mom shook her head in dismay. "He always so healthy. I mean, he had trouble on Tuesday, but that can't have nothing to do with today."
"What trouble, Ma?" Joe asked. "You didn't say this to the doctor."
"He don't ask, he just ask, what happen today?"
"What happened, Ma?" Johnny asked. "Maybe it's relevant."
She shrugged. "Dad was lifting some weights. He want to keep strong, so he lift the dumbbells, you know, and the barbells. He only lift what he can alone, because I stay away from that stuff, too heavy for me. Anyway, later he say he have a sore belly. I say he do too many weights, he pull a muscle, but he say also that it burn when he go to the bathroom. So, we go to the doctor, and the doctor say he have a bladder infection."
"Really?" Joe asked. "I didn't know men got those."
She nodded. "Anyway, he get the antibiotic and we go home, and he take them every day, even today."
Joe thought about it for a while. Did a bladder infection have anything to do with an inflammatory event in the brain or spinal cord? "I think we should tell the doctor this," he said. "It might be relevant."
They found the doctor after Dad was moved and the spinal tap taken. They told him about the bladder infection, and he wrote it down on his form. "That's good to know," he said. "It may have something to do with what happened, or it may not, but we'll look for evidence of that in our tests."
With no one able to enter the isolation room, they waited in the waiting area with other patients still needing to be triaged, in a relatively sparser corner so they could have some privacy. They prayed the rosary together, quietly so other patients wouldn't be disturbed. They got through the five Joyful Mysteries, the five Sorrowful Mysteries and the five Glorious Mysteries, Johnny filling in as the eldest child when Mom became too emotional to lead them. Eventually Mom wore herself out praying and dozed against Joe's broad chest sitting up, and Joe wondered when his mother had gotten so old. Just yesterday she could have threatened to take him over her knee, and he would have been scared, big as he was. Dad's illness was laying waste to her, and he worried that if Dad took a turn for the worse, she might follow right behind.
Johnny called his wife and let her know what had happened. None of them left the hospital, even though no one asked them to stay. Night transitioned into day, and still they waited.
Eventually the doctor found them again and said, "The tests came back negative for spinal meningitis, so we're going to take him out of isolation, but he's still under sedation, and we're still trying to get to the bottom of this."
Johnny finally got to see Dad, and his face crumpled at the sight of him. Joe fought to keep his composure as his older brother pleaded like a little boy for his Daddy to wake up. "You're a strong man, Dad, the strongest I've ever known," Johnny said, sniffling. "You're a fighter. You've got to fight this, do you hear me? This is not how you're going to go out."
Mom hugged Johnny close, and the two wept into each other's arms. Dad slept on, with nothing but the beeping of machines to give any indication anyone was at home.
The doctor returned a little later, checked his readout, performed a pain test by pinching Dad's toes against a pen, something that looked quite painful, and Dad's toes curled. "That's a good sign," he said. "It means the signals are reaching the brain, so the spinal cord isn't affected." He turned to them and said, "You all look very tired. We've done as much as we can do here until we have more test results. We're treating him with antivirals in case this is a virus attacking his brain, and keeping his sodium levels up. He's going to keep sleeping for now, so he won't miss you if you need to go home and rest, change your clothes. We have your numbers, so we'll call if there are any new developments."
Joe was tired, but he didn't want to be a bad son. He turned to his mother and said, "What do you think, Ma?"
She took a deep breath and nodded. "I go home and sleep a while. You take me later?"
"Of course, Ma." He looked to Johnny. "After the weekend is over, we'll take shifts here while the other looks after the company."
He drove Mom home with a feeling of foreboding, as if, the minute they left Dad, he would take a turn for the worse. He made sure Mom got inside her house safely, and kissed and hugged her before he left, promising to return once they both got some sleep.
Lauren greeted him on his return with a hug; he knelt down to do it, feeling unable to even lift his little wife as he usually did, he was so tired. Naomi ran into his arms, asking, "Is Nonno okay?"
"He's sleeping, for now. We're going to go back later, Nonna and me."
He crashed on his bed like a tide against the breakwater and fell asleep almost instantly.
Over the next week they returned multiple times. Eventually the doctors discovered what was wrong with Dad. "It took a lot of tests, but we've finally eliminated everything else but Herpes induced viral encephalitis," the original doctor on the case said.
"Herpes?" Johnny asked. "How the hell would Dad get Herpes? Isn't that an STD?"
Joe wondered that too, and immediately unsavoury images of Dad cheating on Mom in his Seventies entered his mind, to be banished just as quickly. Dad was devoted to Mom; he'd travelled halfway around the world with her to build a better life for their family, didn't he? So how in the world did Herpes enter his system?
"Herpes is actually more common than you think," the doctor said. "It lives on your skin all the time. It's what causes cold sores."
"It does?" Johnny asked. "I had no idea."
"Sometimes, if Herpes infiltrates the system from some other infection, there's the rare case where it crosses the blood-brain barrier," the doctor continued. "Once that happens, the body does everything it can to get rid of it, thus the fever and the swelling in the brain, which caused his whole system to basically short circuit, which is what you see here." He looked down on Dad, still sleeping, and said, "Once we've eliminated the virus and reduced the swelling, we can work on waking him up."
That took longer than Joe thought, but eventually Dad's eyes began to open, if only for short periods. Day by day, they visited, and day by day, he would open his eyes, try to focus on them, and then fall asleep again, that little action taking so much out of him in his reduced state.
Over the months, to Lauren's credit, she volunteered to bring Mom to the hospital when she was available and Joe wasn't. What she didn't allow was the kids to see Dad. "They're too young to see him like this," she explained. "They won't understand. It'll traumatize them. And anyway, all he does is sleep."
Joe thought he might rally quicker if he saw his grandchildren; Vic and Tilly came to see him, and he seemed to focus harder when they were there. He didn't argue with her though, because Johnny's boys were much older than his kids and better able to handle the shock of seeing their Nonno like this.
Eventually Dad began to form words, even if they sometimes didn't make sense. He would open his eyes, focus on Joe and ask him to look after Mom, or inquire on how the business was doing. What he never asked, curiously, was where he was or how he'd ended up here.
The length of Dad's stay in hospital began to concern Joe. He wasn't dying, apparently, but his progress wasn't that fast. When they transferred him to a hospice, he thought that was where people went to die and feared the worst, but was quickly disabused of that notion. Dad was finishing his recovery there, but he still did little more than sleep, eat a little, talk a little, and sleep more.
He never predicted Dad's recovery would be the hardest part of this episode. The more he was able to stay awake and talk, the more he came to realize where he was, and where he was wasn't home with his wife. He made life hell for the staff at the hospice, asking every hour when he could go home, even though he could barely move. When he was able to get up and walk, he wandered all around the hospice, getting lost, even wandering into the room of a young woman, who screamed her head off when she found him sitting on the edge of her bed. The nurses even confessed that he tried to bribe them to drive him home. Joe never thought he would be put into the position of being parent to his father, but he had to give him a stern talking to.
"Look, Dad, you almost died," he said. "You're getting better every day, but you still need to stay here until they say you can go home. Stop being so hard on the staff, they're just doing their jobs."
"This is a nightmare," Dad said, sounding so petulant that Joe was tempted to smack him upside the head like Dad used to do to him when he was misbehaving, just a simple "snap out of it" tap to knock him out of this spiral. This was not the capable man he'd known, the man who'd never let anything get him down. Herpes induced encephalitis killed that man, leaving this... whiny baby in his place. Joe knew that was uncharitable, but he couldn't help it. Dad had never tolerated self-pity in his children when they were growing up; there'd been simply too much to do around the house and in the fields, and thus no time for navel-gazing. So, it was a little rich now for his father to bemoan his situation, and it made Joe hate him a little, something Joe never thought would happen.
He said, "I know you need to get around and you don't like people taking care of you, but you have to stay for now, until they say you can go."
"I can't sleep here. It's too noisy, all the machines beeping, all the other patients snoring and moaning."
"Dad, all you've been doing is sleeping!"
Eventually, Joe just had to leave, unable to reason with his father, who began to weep in despair. Joe's heart broke a little, but he didn't let himself look back.
It didn't help that Mom also wasn't dealing well with Dad not at home. She needed just as much looking after as Dad did, and she'd changed a little too. The woman who, all his life, warned him to watch his language, now swore like a sailor and was irritated at the slightest inconvenience. Joe knew her anger was a coping mechanism for her worry, but it frustrated him almost as much as Dad's petulance.
Finally, after months in hospital and hospice, the staff released Dad with an almost palpable relief, as if they were just as happy to see the back of him as he was to leave. He did improve when he had his own bed to sleep in, and Mom did seem happier to have him home again, but the tired look on her face never went away; Dad might have recovered, he might have been walking on his own, he might have talked and, indeed, all his motor functions seemed to be back to normal, but he was not the same man he was before he had his episode. Mom realized that soon enough. Instead of his wife, she was now every bit his caretaker as the hospice staff were.
"He forget things all the time," she confessed to him out of earshot. It was true; he did mix up his grandkids' names, or birthdays, and driving was a challenge because he often forgot landmarks he used to use when getting around.
"He get tired quick, too," she said. "He still take naps in the day, but he don't sleep a lot at night. I hear him get up, and I can't sleep when he walk around."
Joe felt powerless to help. "Ma, maybe you need some extra help around the house. Maybe a nurse?"
"Eh," she said, waving a hand in disdain. "They send someone like that in the beginning, but they no help. I don't wanna show anyone I don't know all around the house."
"You and Dad aren't young, anymore," he said. "Have you thought about moving to an assisted living facility?"
"Bite you tongue!" she hissed. He'd really offended her. Apparently, Dad's condition was only worthy of complaint, not of remedial action.
So, her tiredness continued, and eventually her worries for him curdled into a kind of perpetual exasperation. No longer was Dad her husband, her partner, her object of adoration. Now he was an overgrown child, always needing looking after, demanding her constant attention. That she still depended on him to drive her everywhere was alarming to Joe after he'd heard about the events leading up to his hospitalization. It was as if she was pretending everything was still the same when it clearly wasn't, and Joe feared for their safety whenever they left the house.
Joe wouldn't have been able to get through this dark time without Lauren, and without the surprising but pleasant reintroduction of Sunny into his life.
Westminster Law Group, Sunny's firm, had needed a new contractor for investigative services on their divorce files. They'd contacted Justiciar, and Lauren had been the only partner with the open time slot to meet with their liaison, who'd happened to be Sunny. Lauren had informed him of this serendipitous moment as soon as she'd returned home that day, and they'd planned to meet with Sunny and his wife and family that weekend. Except that had been the weekend Dad had gotten sick.
It was months before Joe felt he could make the time for leisure without feeling like a terrible son. Finally, on a Saturday in October, Sunny arrived at their house with his wife, Tej, and his children, Harpreet and Ajit. Joe stood on the front porch and watched his old friend approach. The man was tall, though not as tall as he was, and no longer the skinny kid he remembered, but a grown man nicely filled out; were he more comfortable with his sexuality, he would have admitted Sunny was a very handsome guy. He wore a turban now, and had a beard, but the smile on his face was unforgettable, as was the twinkle in his eye.
He was so affected by the sight of the friend of his youth that it took him a moment to notice Sunny's wife. He nearly did a double take when he saw Tej up close. She was stunning, and he had to stop himself from staring too long; he didn't want to offend Lauren or Sunny, or creep Tej out. Sunny was a very lucky man.
Joe and Sunny stood facing each other. Suddenly Joe didn't know what to do next. He offered his hand. Sunny opened his arms for a hug. They eventually made do with an awkward side hug/back pat thing that looked as odd as it felt. Lauren, laughing beside him, greeted Tej warmly, hugging her with no self-consciousness. Joe felt jealous of his wife for the first time in his life.
"Holy shit," Sunny said. "Did you get even bigger since the last time I saw you?"
"Maybe," Joe said. "When was the last time we saw each other?"
"I think we were just ending high school. You and Lauren moved away at almost the same time."
"Yes. I don't recall you having facial hair and a turban, though."
"You might have seen me in a patka. That's what younger Sikhs wear until they become proficient in tying a full turban. And I probably had some facial hair, but it was downy, not the extravagant beard you see now."
Joe chuckled. "You're probably right. We didn't see each other much in those final years, did we."
"No, not really. We were both quite busy at our equally far away high schools. You had football and work, I had studies and volunteer work at the gurdwara."
"Yes, it looks like you went all in on your faith."
"I did," Sunny confirmed. "It doesn't mean I'm suddenly an alien, though."
Maybe not, but Joe found out immediately that his old friend had changed a little, and it would take a while to get accustomed to the changes. His first faux pas was offering the couple wine or beer. They didn't drink alcohol. Luckily they had other beverages. His second was offering them meat from the barbecue.
"We're vegetarian," Tej said.
Joe smacked his head and said, "Oh, yeah, Sunny, I remember you telling me when we were kids that eventually you'd have to decide whether or not to go full vegetarian," Joe said.
"Yup. And I did," Sunny said.
"No problem," Lauren said. "We have salads, and I can whip something up."
"Don't go out of your way on our account," Tej said. "The kids aren't yet, so I'm sure they'll love whatever you have cooking there."
Eventually they settled into a comfortable conversation, watching the kids play together in the yard as they ate on the balcony, the day still warm if a little breezy. After their early dinner, Joe leaned against the balcony railing with Sunny, looking down on the four kids. "Isn't it awesome how kids just make friends so quickly?" Sunny asked.
Joe nodded. "It was like that for us, remember? Rachel and I were in the ditch, and we saw you at the top and just invited you to come down and play with us?"
Sunny chuckled in amazement. "Yeah! I remember. My mom sent me outside to play. I didn't expect to run into any kids my age, but there you were in the ditch, and I was so intrigued by what you were doing that I had to join you." He shook his head wistfully. "Those ditches were such a big part of our lives back then."
"We could imagine them as anything," he agreed. "We could walk from one end of the street to the other in them if we wanted. We just had to duck under the bridges. We took it all the way to Al's house that day."
"I wonder where Rachel and Al are," Sunny said. "I wonder what became of them. Do you?"
"Sometimes. Lauren definitely thinks about it more, though. Well, Rachel, for sure. They were very close."
Sunny nodded. "Lauren told me she would have been the maid of honour at your wedding."
"Yeah. She ended up asking a classmate of hers at the Justice Institute to do it." Suddenly Joe thought about Joanie for the first time in years, and it nearly left him breathless, so that when Sunny said something, Joe didn't hear him at first through the rapid beating of his heart. "Sorry, what did you say?"
Sunny laughed. "Oh come on, it's not that shocking, is it?"
Joe blinked in confusion. "What? I really didn't hear you. What was shocking?"
"Just that, when we were kids, I had a little crush on Rachel. Lauren too, later, when she showed up, but definitely Rachel. I only didn't say anything because Al was so clearly smitten with her."
Joe chuckled. "No, I'm not surprised. I think we all had a crush on Rachel at one time or another. Remember when we were seven, and Rachel announced we were getting married?"
"Imagine if you did, then I could have swooped in on Lauren."
"Careful, dude. My wife is right over there, and so is yours. Tej is a knockout, by the way. How did you two meet?"
"UBC, actually. She was doing a business degree, I was in pre-Law, but we were both part of the Sikh Students Association."
"Huh."
"So, how did you and Lauren stay together long enough to marry? You both moved away from Queensborough."
"Well, we both ended up in Burnaby, pretty close to each other, actually. Lauren engineered it that way, to tell you the truth. She was clever, finding houses for her parents to look at that were close to where we were moving. I credit her with keeping us together."
"Still, I mean, first love doesn't usually last."
Joe shrugged. "It did for us."
He watched the kids for a while. They were playing hide and seek, and it was interesting to see them from above; he could see where three of them were hiding from where he was, but knew the seeker didn't have his perspective, and it amused him to watch the seeker getting closer and closer to one of the hidden and not know it.
He said, "I feel like I let you down, at the end."
Sunny turned to him with furrowed brow. "Sorry?"
"When we moved, I didn't even get a chance to say goodbye to you. You were away and I had to tell your mom I was going."
Sunny shrugged. "I don't know. Both of us didn't really talk much near the end. You were dating Lauren pretty seriously by then, and with school and work and other things, it was hard to carve out the time. The friendship kind of just... fizzled out. Maybe that was just how it was supposed to go."
"Maybe. It's sad to think of it that way, though. When Rachel and Al moved away, it was different, because it wasn't their choice to go, they were too young. Maybe if they'd stuck around we could have kept things alive."
"I don't know about that. Remember that Christmas after Al moved away, but Rachel was still there? We were all bored, and it was only my Atari that kept our enthusiasm for being together on life support. By the time that broke, we had nothing left to keep it alive."
Joe put a hand on Sunny's shoulder. "It's good to see you again, though. You're married with kids of your own, and they're beautiful. You're a beautiful family."
Sunny smiled that big smile of his and said, "Yeah, buddy, you too. Your kids, wow! Naomi with your hair and her mom's features! She's going to be a heartbreaker, watch out."
"I know, I'm already worried she'll find love before I'm ready for her to."
"We'll never be ready."
Joe nodded in agreement and said, "Maybe this is our chance to start over. We have things bringing us together again."
"Yeah. Maybe with Lauren and my association for work, and the kids bonding, we can resurrect something, to use your Catholic parlance."
"You guys don't have a resurrection story?"
Sunny laughed out loud and said, "No, not like that, but you probably don't want a lesson in comparative religion right now."
Joe chuckled and said, "Maybe we'll leave that for the next time we see each other." He decided he'd leave the more serious stuff for later, too, like Dad's sickness. This was a happy time, and he didn't want to dampen the mood. "How do you feel about the Canucks?" The Vancouver Canucks were the hometown hockey team.
He expected Sunny to be uninterested, but to his surprise the man lit up like a Christmas tree. "Are you kidding? I love the Canucks. I watch them all the time on TV."
"Well, I have two season tickets, and Johnny and I alternate taking clients out for games when we can. I can take you now and then, and we can catch a game."
Sunny's smile was a mile wide. He offered his hand, and Joe shook it firmly. "You're on!" he said. "I'll buy your beer and hot dogs."
"Oh, shit, sorry, I never thought about what you'll eat and drink when we're there."
Sunny clapped him on the arm and said, "Don't worry, buddy, I'm a smart guy, I can figure it out. They have non-alcoholic beverages there, don't they? And I'll probably eat before I get there."
Joe nodded in relief. "You must be a healthy guy with your lifestyle. You'll probably live to a hundred."
Sunny shrugged and said, "We can only hope."
Later he would discover Sunny had also left his own serious stuff unsaid; he wouldn't find out until years later that Sunny's little sister had been murdered not long before they'd reunited, and he marvelled at how his friend had kept it together and never let on. The man was a lot stronger than he thought. Sunny, though, confided in him later that it was his reunion with Lauren and him that helped him endure the grief and gave him something positive to treasure. Finding his old friends again, he claimed, saved his sanity.
Joe would argue it saved his, too.
If you read the last novel in this series, you'll know I wrote a version of this chapter from Lauren's point of view, but she wasn't there in the early stages of Joe's dad's illness. I wanted to document the feelings Joe felt witnessing his dad's illness, which was pivotal in shaping his outlook on life after he reunited with his friends. He doesn't come off as very sympathetic, but anybody who's witnessed an illness in their family has experienced every emotion in the book, charitable or not. I write from experience. If you liked what you just read, hit "Vote" and leave a comment. To get back to Rachel's second visit with Logan, click on "Continue reading."