The night my dad almost died, something broke my grandmother’s window. She lived on the second floor of my parents’ house and was in bed reading, waiting for the phone to ring. The object caught the curtain, bounced and rolled. She army-crawled out of her bedroom, all bone and skin, then called my brother who called the police.
 
It was the first occasion of sirens that day. My father had taken his own car. “He threw up six pints of blood and drove himself to the hospital,” my brother said. “Badass.”
 
When the police asked my grandmother why she hadn’t looked at the projectile, she said it was because she thought it might be a bomb. They asked her again and again until she stopped saying “bomb.” A rock, they said. They were sure of it.
 
My dad was put into a coma. What he was going through, no one should be awake for, the doctors said. The shock alone could kill him. They were pretty sure he was going to die anyway, they told my mother in words gentler than that, I think, but that’s what she told me.
 
My brother volunteered to investigate. He liked being a hero. Besides, he said, who would want to bomb an eighty nine year old. But that’s not what she was afraid of. She was afraid because she’d heard the air raid sirens during the war, run drills in her classroom as a teacher, soft-spined Latin workbooks over skinny necks. She had no reason to be afraid except that she had every reason.
 
My dad’s doctor told him to stop drinking two months before, said that it would kill him sooner rather than later. But it’s hard to believe that anything will kill you if nothing ever has before, when you have a pattern of so many days alive, all you’ve ever known so far.
 
The police found a girl in the bushes, seventeen. She was on the curb crying, hands cuffed behind her back so she couldn’t wipe her eyes, a face of wet salt. She’d meant to hit our neighbor’s window. He broke her heart, she said. The cops told her she’d scared an old woman half to death, that she was lucky she didn’t give her a heart attack. “Then you’d really be in trouble,” they said.
 
I fumbled my goodbye but in the end it didn’t matter. I held his swollen hand. A heart still beating. Eyes yellow and wide.
 
“You have to come see this,” my brother said. On the floor, a frozen plum leaking purple into the carpet. From the window pane, shards hanging like broken teeth, the late spring air carrying sweetness of fruit.