Sometimes I dream my father is alive. He shows up at home like nothing ever happened. "The doctors made a mistake," he tells me between bites of a ham-and-cheese sandwich. "It was like that guy in Cuba who doctors said was dead, but he woke up right before the autopsy." He pauses. "Only I woke up in the basement of St. Luke's."
He says we cannot let everyone know he is back. "There are a number of my friends, Elisa, who would die if they learned about this." (He doesn't see the irony in that statement).
He begins life as if it wasn't interrupted, and soon the scents and sounds of my father envelop our home. I hear a baseball game on the bedroom TV, the morning paper crinkling as he turns the pages, the song he sings as he makes the dog some breakfast. I smell Irish Spring combined with big sky, farm fields and, as they say in some wine tastings, a hint of forest floor.
Sometimes I dream my father is alive. As I begin to awaken, however, all the pieces of his being start to separate and swirl and spiral together like they are being sucked into a vortex. The scents fade. The sounds go quiet. And as the light of morning comes to me, everything goes dark.
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