Then the floor seemed to tilt and rise toward me.
I remember the white tablecloth rushing up to meet my face.
I remember a voice screaming from somewhere that felt far away, muffled like sound traveling through deep water.
I remember Curtis’s voice saying, “Dad,” in that same mildly impatient tone he used when I interrupted him midsentence.
Not the voice of a son watching his father crumble onto a restaurant floor.
A young woman in scrubs, off duty, happened to be sitting two tables over.
She reached me first, checking my pulse and calling for someone to dial 911.
Meanwhile, my own son hung back a few feet with his hands raised uselessly in front of him, as if he wasn’t sure physical contact was something he was permitted.
The paramedics arrived within ten minutes.
A young man named Trevor, steady as still water, got me onto the gurney and asked whether I had family with me.
“My son’s here,” I managed to say.
I heard Trevor ask, right there at the ambulance doors, “Curtis, is someone riding along with him?”
And I heard Petra’s voice, close enough that I know I heard it clearly.
“We should probably just follow in the car so we have it at the hospital.”
Not, “Of course, I’ll ride with him.”
Not, “Let me be there.”
Pure logistics.
A woman thinking about parking.
The ambulance doors swung shut.
Through the window, I could see my son standing under the lights outside the restaurant, his hands in his pockets.
Not taking a single step toward the vehicle carrying his father away.
At Shore Memorial in Parksley, I lay on an examination table while a surgeon pressed across my abdomen and read my face like a map.
Whatever she found there had her moving fast.
Within twenty minutes, I was being prepared for emergency surgery.
A ruptured appendix, she told me afterward.
Or close enough to rupturing that another hour could have tipped things somewhere much darker.
“You were cutting it close, Mr. Corbett,” she said, delivering it in that same matter-of-fact way doctors deliver news that would level anyone else.
“Another hour, maybe two, and we’d be having a very different conversation with your family.”
Family.
The word settled strangely.
I was lying there in a hospital gown with a stranger’s hand on my shoulder because my actual family had not yet come through the door.
They rolled me back to the room around eleven that night.
Before they put me under, I asked the nurse for my phone.
Some old reflex, like pressing your tongue against a tooth you already know is going to hurt.
No missed calls from Curtis.
No text.
I opened Facebook, already half braced for what I was about to see.
And there it was.
Petra had posted a photograph from the parking lot of that seafood restaurant.
All four of them.
Curtis, Petra, Ruth Ann, and Dougal.
Lifting glasses of white wine they must have ordered to take outside.
Big grins.