The stranger

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His feet are tapping to the music. Up, down, up, two fast taps like sharp knocks on a door, then up and down again. Long, pale fingers follow the rhythm on an ironed dress-pants knee. Index finger, thumb, middle finger, index finger twice, ring finger, and finally middle finger.

I sit with my head bowed, looking at those dancing fingers and those pitter-patter feet. Is he listening to that music on his phone? Or is it playing in his head, a memory from long ago when the times were different and he could move to a melody just as well as he could laugh, joke, and drink, with equal abandon?

I twist my hands together and swallow, shifting on the cheap hospital chair.

He moves his foot to the right and left this time, three quick motions, and his knees bob faster. He likes this song. Special then, something he wishes to take with him as he goes through those doors and the doctors begin their inquisition.

I imagine that leg at a wedding. Perhaps a daughter? She’s resplendent in a blushing pink dress, adamant on being different, her arm on a handsome man’s shoulder as she leans to whisper into her bridesmaid’s ear. She’s happy. She laughs loud, showing all those bright teeth, and he suddenly remembers how that mouth had looked without any teeth at all, when all she could do was grumble and clutch at his knee with her little hands so he might pick her up.

Now she was too big to pick up and he was too old to know how.

The song would start then, I fancy. It was their song, of the daughter and father, and he would instantly know that she felt what he did. As their eyes meet, he would believe decades from now she would still be his little girl.

His steel leg would not let him dance with her, but he would watch the new son-in-law twirl his daughter around the dance floor and he would keep time with his foot, moving to the rhythm and knowing he could have done better if only he hadn’t been so darn old!

He would remember dancing to that song with his wife once, when their world was fresh and the grass still looked green. He’d had wanted to serenade to her outside her window, but he knew her father would chase him away, perhaps with a bullet through the shoulder blades, so he’d settled for writing snippets of the lyrics, his words and his tune, on pieces of paper to slip into her locker. They didn’t talk about it on their dates or with their friends. It was just theirs, that song, and the world could stay well away for all he cared.

And then came his little angel and his world exploded into so many different facets, new angles of love and stress, worry and affection, that the nights found him falling onto the bed and wondering if he would have the strength to wake up tomorrow. But wake he would, for a little life depended on him. The woman was gone, she with the golden hair and too-bright smile, and she took his song with him, leaving him alone.

But soon he found it back, that song, for his daughter pulled it out of him. Every time she smiled, he felt a verse jump in his chest, every time she cried, he found himself humming the tune, and every time she grabbed his hand, he found his lungs strain with the urge to give voice.

Now she was gone too, her life her own and given freely to another, and he was on a cold chair in this cold room, waiting for his brain to be dissected and asked why he’d swallowed those pills. He wouldn’t have an answer, for there weren’t any reasons. There were only silence and that song; that song to which his feet stayed unwilling slaves.