“And his face is really beaten up,” I added, trying to prepare her.
Carol tilted her head at me.
“That’s what Joe said on the phone,” I clarified.
Taylor gave me a sideways look. This might be harder than I thought.
When the elevator door opened, Olivia and Nicole rushed out first. We all tried to hurry to keep up as they raced past various nurses and doctors on the floor while searching room numbers for Joe’s room. Olivia found it first, burst right inside, followed by Nicole and Carol. I immediately heard a raucous reunion commence inside the hospital room.
“Papa! Papa!”
“My girls!” Joe was even louder than the girls in his exuberance at seeing them.
Taylor paused for a moment right outside the door and squeezed my hand even harder. She turned to me, her eyes already wet.
“Hey, I love you,” she said.
“I love you, too, babe. You ready?”
She nodded. We walked into the room together. In spite of my warning, both of my girls were already up in the bed with Joe, who had them wrapped in his arms. Carol was leaning over him and kissing him on the face. Tears were flowing down her cheeks. There were several butterfly bandages on Joe’s face, but he looked a hundred times better than he had when I’d left him earlier. It was surreal to think that I had carried him over my shoulder to safety just over twelve hours ago. As the girls wiggled all around him, my father-in-law grunted in some pain, but he never stopped smiling. I’m not sure any of us would for a while. Joe had been dead. And now he was alive again. That truth held up under any version of this event. We could all celebrate it.
Spotting Taylor inside the doorway, Joe held out his arms to his daughter. If Taylor had walked into the room with any reservations, she immediately let go of them. My wife raced over to her dad, fully embraced him, and buried her tear-soaked face into his chest. Joe wrapped his arms fully around her. Watching my father-in-law hold his daughter like that made me tear up. Soon all of us were on top of him, one big family group hug that threatened to suffocate Joe. I gradually pulled Olivia and Nicole back, but we all remained huddled closely around his bed.
“Papa, tell us how you escaped,” Olivia said. “I want to hear the story.”
“Yeah, Papa,” Nicole chimed in. “Did you have to jump off roofs and out of buildings like Aladdin?”
We had explained to the girls that Joe had not died in the car crash, like we had all thought, but had instead been taken by some mean men who probably wanted Papa’s money. And that he’d been held somewhere until he was able to courageously escape earlier today. I was concerned that this bit of truth might still be traumatizing for them, but it seemed as if the joy of the moment trumped everything else. I was grateful for that.
Standing at Joe’s bedside, Taylor took her father’s hand in hers. “Yeah, Dad, tell us what happened. You said on the phone you probably crawled the length of a football field.”
“That’s right,” Joe replied, then looked at the girls. “Maybe even farther.”
“Wow,” the girls both said in near unison.
With Taylor on one side of the bed, Carol on the other, and my girls still in his lap, Joe began to tell a story of being held captive in a barn not too far from the village, and how it had taken him several late nights to dig a hidden hole with his bare hands before he’d finally managed to crawl out today without being discovered. It was clear that Joe had rehearsed this story and covered all the angles. There were a lot of details that would need to hold up over time. Olivia, Nicole, and Carol hung on his every word.
I glanced over at Taylor. She gave me a subtle smile. She’d made her decision.
And I knew everything was going to be okay.