Raising the Dad Read online

  “It could have been really bad,” she said fearfully.

  Once upon a time John would have hugged her at seeing her so distraught, but she was really mad at him. He would have made things worse if she took his consoling as insincere or designed to lessen his guilt. That’s how he read the moment, anyway.

  Hugging came with complications when a marriage wasn’t working the way it should.

  “And you think Katie was with them?” John asked doubtfully.

  “I don’t know,” Robin admitted. “It was the same crowd she’s always texting with, Johnette saw someone running out that could have been her.”

  “I really don’t think it was,” John said softly. Robin just shook her head wearily.

  “Well, you would know, wouldn’t you, if you had been paying attention,” Robin said dryly. John knew that this was a subject that was not going get resolved right then.

  “What do you want me to do?” he asked, punctuating each word coldly.

  “I don’t know,” she sighed. “Check that Starbucks they always hang out at. Go to the mall. If Connie Frederick is working at Foot Locker this afternoon, she might know something. Just try to find her.”

  “Fine,” John said.

  “But don’t go home without me. If she’s there, we need to deal with this together. I want to be there.”

  John knew what she was saying. She didn’t want him having a first crack at their daughter, to help her get her story straight if he decided for himself that she was innocent. He resented the charge, but he just turned and headed out.

  “Fine.”

  * * *

  John and Robin came through the back door at 6:30 to find Katie at the kitchen table doing homework. This in itself was a confession of guilt, a fifteen-year-old’s limp attempt to deflect parental wrath by pretending to be more conscientious than all three knew she was.

  Posing herself with her schoolbooks like the diligent student they kept wanting her to be was the right move. She knew her dad, in particular, would be impressed.

  “Where were you?” Robin asked before even closing the back door.

  “I’m sorry,” Katie pleaded openly. She wore layers of black and her understated makeup still had a hard-edged severity. “Gretchen had to return something at the mall and she said it’d just be a few minutes, but we ran into some friends. And then we missed the four twenty bus. I tried to call you, but my phone was dead.”

  “None of your friends had their cells? They’ve taken out all the pay phones at the mall?” Robin asked. Katie looked to John for backup, but John clearly was not going to get in the middle of this. His silent head gesture to Katie said, “Don’t make this any worse.”

  “I said I was sorry, okay?” Katie sighed petulantly.

  Robin took off her jacket and set down the schoolwork she brought home, seeming to idly move on to regular business while keeping her eye on her daughter. Now that Katie locked herself into her “look at me doing my homework without being asked” pantomime, she had to sit there and actually do it.

  Robin took on a studied nonchalance. “Did you hear what happened at school this afternoon?”

  “Yeah,” Katie said, a tone of wonder and disapproval in her voice. “I mean, it’s all anyone’s been talking about.” Her phone was on the table beside her. John saw the usual scroll of incoming texts.

  He listened hard to Katie. He was not as clueless about his daughter’s changing behavior as Robin thought he was, but he wasn’t going to apologize for giving her the benefit of the doubt until they heard her out. Still, he was already on guard for the crack in her story that would break his heart.

  “Anybody talking about who might have done it?” Robin asked.

  Katie kept her eyes on her paper. “Just some kids,” she muttered, pretending to concentrate.

  Robin drew closer. “Were you with Brendan or any of those other kids you’re always texting with?”

  “I told you,” Katie sighed, the tension escalating. “I was with Gretchen at the mall, and then we met some other girls, and then I came home on the bus.”

  “You weren’t given a ride home?” Robin persisted. “You weren’t riding around with any of your goth friends?”

  “No one calls us goths anymore,” the teenager sulked.

  “Answer my question!”

  Katie slammed down her pen with righteous rage. “They didn’t do it! God!” She pointed to her phone. “Everybody’s already saying they’re guilty and they weren’t even there!”

  Robin sat down in the chair beside her. “How do you know?” she asked.

  “Because they just weren’t!” Katie insisted bitterly. “You don’t even know them! Just because you don’t like the way they look doesn’t mean they’re guilty of everything!”

  Katie rose to storm out; Robin grabbed her wrist.

  “Sit down,” she said firmly. Katie threw herself back down, radiating raw contempt. John saw this fury in his little girl, and it drew fine razor knicks across his heart.

  Robin spoke evenly. “How do you know where your other friends were after school if you were at the mall with Gretchen?”

  Katie appeared cornered. “Fine! Call Gretchen if you think I’m lying! She’ll tell you where I was!” she shouted defiantly. It was a classic teenager ploy, daring her parents to seek out the confirmation that she knew would blow her story. It was remarkable how often parents don’t call their bluff by picking up the phone. It was almost as if they didn’t want to know.

  “We just want to be able to trust you,” John said earnestly.

  Katie turned on her father, just like that. Just to hurt him.

  “Maybe you’d know where I was if you weren’t sleeping on the couch all day!”

  John recoiled as Robin processed this new information.

  “It’s not all day,” John offered stupidly to his wife, blindsided to find himself on the defensive. “Sometimes, if I’m—”

  “I know you’re out all night, Dad. I’m not stupid,” John’s daughter continued, delighted to lay bare a parental secret. “Nice how you expect me to be perfect when you’re not.”

  John’s mind ping-ponged for a response.

  “Your father has been taking care of your grandmother at night,” Robin shot back at Katie reflexively. “She’s having real problems, which you would know if you cared about anyone but yourself.”

  John turned to his wife—a lifeline was the last thing he expected. Her glare back at him quickly disavowed him of any sustainable truce. It appeared Robin was merely prioritizing her anger on the fly.

  John’s head spun. His daughter just betrayed him, and his wife—at least for the moment—lied in his defense despite being dangerously unhappy with him.

  His inability to respond seemed to stretch on for minutes. Seeing her father struck dumb, disillusioned, and exposed, Katie felt a little girl’s ache of empathy that her teenaged peevishness quickly suffocated.

  “Whatever!” she sneered as she fled the kitchen and raged up to her room.

  John’s eyes followed her up the stairs. He turned to Robin, who was looking at the couch in the living room.

  Now that it was just the two of them, Robin found nothing left to say. She shook her head wearily and headed up to their room with her grading work.

  Twenty-seven

  Where once there were babies lurked spiders and rats. As John swung his flashlight through the nursery in old Holt Memorial, the creatures skittered grumpily into the dusty dark corners. The return of Larry Husted’s boy violated decades of peaceful rot.

  With hours to kill between Larry’s treatments and desperate for a distraction from his writing projects, John began exploring the old building within the first couple weeks. He didn’t stray far at first, rattled by the creepiness of the world he had passed into. A living hospital was unsettling enough, its coldly institutional offer of salvation constantly mocked by the ghosts of those who insisted upon dying no matter what the gauzy brochures in the lobby promised.

&n
bsp; But a shuttered hospital spoke only of death: the death of patients not saved, and the death of the dream that took flight when the building’s doors first opened. Back in 1922, when the hospital opened, there had to have been another eager young man just like Larry Husted, inspired by the cutting-edge medical care of his day and impatient to get to work healing the sick.

  Now what was once cutting edge was a blighted ruin too burdensome to tear down. The shiny and new never hear the knowing titters of the dustbin.

  Larry walked these halls as an ambitious young doctor, only to eventually declare them obsolete. And now he was the building’s last living patient. Maybe that’s why he refused to check out. Someday a new Larry Husted would come to tear down his hospital next door. Larry, like the building itself, refused to let time do away with him.

  When John began to feel bold with his strolls away from Larry’s side, he started to venture up to the higher floors. First he just aimlessly poked around but after enough deep four a.m. reveries at his father’s bedside, John became fixed on a destination. When his flashlight refracted off a large, dust-clouded window partitioning off two separate rooms, John knew he had found the nursery.

  Feeling a time-traveler’s sense of disorientation and awe, he stood on the baby side of the viewing window. It was a small room, with space for about a dozen cribs laid out in neat rows of four. John drew a grid in his head and paced off each square, standing for a moment in each. Somewhere within this private dance, he figured he stood upon the very spot where his newborn self once lay, swaddled and cranky. If baby John had already begun hearing from that pesky new brain of his, he might’ve been reflecting on the previous nine months and his violent, wet ride into the world, and thought, What the fuck?

  This recollection of events then caused John’s brain to issue him an image of his mother’s vagina and his passage through it. Thanks, brain!

  John grimaced, then stepped to the other side of the viewing window. Now he stood where his father once stood. John stared into the abandoned nursery through the glass, choosing to believe that Larry once pressed his hands to the window with awe as he beheld his son. He wondered if forty-three years later a fingerprint expert could find a trace of his father’s presence here buried beneath the layers of evidence left behind by decades of anxious fathers.

  But an expert wasn’t required to prove Larry’s presence here; his existence was everywhere in the old building. And he waited there still. John looked at his watch. It was just about time for Larry’s six a.m. treatment, and then John would go home to wake his wife and daughter to begin their day. John sent out his latest Next Step grant the day before. His out-box momentarily empty, he looked forward to catching up on his sleep.

  Twenty-eight

  John and Mike sat in the doctor’s waiting room, Mike fidgeting between put-upon sighs. Standing out in his down-market rock star wear (scuffed boots, ripped jeans, a cheap leather vest over a Quiet Riot T-shirt), he drew the attention of a little girl fascinated by his tattoos. She leaned over the row of chairs behind him and he was oblivious as she intently sounded out the word inked into his right shoulder.

  “Tits!” she finally pieced together proudly. As she was right next to Mike’s ear—and no more than seven years old—this made him jump.

  The girl smiled as Mike struggled to make sense of the moment he shared with her, until she nodded to his shoulder. A cartoon cat salivated there, its eyes popping out of its head with a Tex Avery ba-boiinng, as the tastefully austere caption explained: Tits!!!

  Mike got this one at nineteen, when he and Taggert hitched to Detroit to see Anthrax. He couldn’t recall the inspiration for the design; he was so high that night that he didn’t discover he was inked until the next afternoon, when he regained consciousness beneath the seesaws outside an elementary school. But someday soon, when the little girl in the waiting room learned about punctuation marks, she would understand that three exclamation points in the context of a cat viewing tits suggested that these were tits that exceeded commonplace expectations. Or the cat just really liked seeing tits.

  Mike covered up his shoulder grumpily as the girl’s mother pulled her away with a mortified scowl. John, who watched this from the corner of his eye, shook his head with a goading smile.

  “Nice.”

  “Fuck you,” Mike whispered, betraying just the trace of a blush. The mother heard this, too.

  “Time was,” Mike said cockily, “chicks were all about the tats. You wouldn’t know.”

  “Who’s going to hire you looking like that?” John shot back.

  “I have a job.”

  “That’s not a job!” John insisted. “You have no health insurance. They’re barely paying you. After gas and dope—”

  “I’m not using!”

  “Fine. But you can’t be making any money.”

  “What do you think we could get for the house?” Mike asked abruptly in a tone that suggested he had been considering this for a while.

  John was dumbstruck. “We’re not selling the house! Where would she live?”

  “She doesn’t need all that room. We’d find her an apartment. Or maybe…”

  “What? She’d move in with me?”

  “Some families do that,” Mike said piously.

  John stammered at Mike’s nerve. “That is her home. She doesn’t want to move,” he said. “Besides, nothing is selling right now, especially those old houses on the east side. The place is falling apart, thanks to us.”

  “Maybe we could—”

  “I can’t believe you,” John whispered through grit teeth, a long-suppressed rant rising to the surface. “Find a lawyer to sue somebody. Kick your mother out of her house. Anything to keep you from getting a goddamned job like the rest of us.”

  “I have a job!”

  “That’s not a job!”

  A nurse stood before them awkwardly as their spat spilled into the waiting room. “You two can come on back now.”

  * * *

  John and Mike were led into the examining room, where Rose sat demurely opposite Dr. Kelly. A button on her blouse was not done up, exposing her bra. There was no script provided to a son to alert his elderly mother that she was showing skin, so John grabbed the only remaining chair in the cramped room and averted his eyes.

  “Well, the good news is that your mother is physically doing great,” the doctor began blandly, consulting his notes. “Her blood pressure, all her vitals, the blood work—she’s fit as can be. I’m seeing a little osteoporosis, which is to be expected, and I’m seeing just the earliest signs of cataracts, which we’ll want to keep our eye on. But we should be very happy with what we’re seeing here.”

  The doctor smiled to the brothers and stifled a double take as he beheld Rose’s oldest son. He focused his attention on John as he flipped through Rose’s file.

  “You remember when I saw Rose about a year ago I had her take a little test for me, just so that we could begin tracking these memory issues we were concerned about. It took some convincing but I just had her take the test again, and I’m seeing some things we need to discuss.”

  Rose looked defeated as the doctor preceded to talk as if she wasn’t in the room.

  “For instance, I asked Rose how many different kinds of animals she could name in thirty seconds,” the doctor continued. “Last time, she named eighteen. Today, she named eleven. That was a little disappointing.”

  The doctor had a dry, insensitive tone. John shrugged to his mother with an understanding smile and then turned to Mike, hoping to see him offering similar support to their mother. Instead, Mike was deep in thought, probably testing his own animal-counting skills. John could tell by his brother’s dim twitching that it wasn’t going well.

  “And I asked her to draw me a clock showing five o’clock,” the doctor said, putting the two drawings side by side. Last year’s drawing was shaky but showed five o’clock dead on; this year’s was more like 3:05, with an extra hour hand bisecting an edge of the ragged circle
before being scribbled out.

  Rose bristled defensively. “I never could draw. I have to pay a doctor to tell me that?”

  The doctor pushed on. “And, well, there are six or seven things we test for. And in all areas, we’re seeing a diminution of cognitive skills that we need to be concerned about.”

  “Can you say for sure it’s Alzheimer’s?” John asked. Mike saw his mother recoil at the word.

  “I would say it’s dementia,” the doctor said. “Alzheimer’s is a form of dementia. There are distinctions, but even we can’t define them too clearly.

  “These things can always level off, and we have her on medications that have shown great results in slowing down the process in other patients,” he continued. “But just going by the testing, we need to recognize that the disease is advancing at a pace that is on the high side of the scale.”

  The doctor’s arid assessment of the situation brought a leaden pause to the room. John felt the usual push to step up and tend to his family’s business. But Mike spoke first. “How fast are we talking?”

  “It’s impossible to say,” the doctor replied, turning his attention to Rose. “You are physically strong, Rose. You’re still engaged with life, with your friends, and your two sons here. You have challenges ahead of you, but I have every reason to believe that things don’t have to change for you for a good long time. Will you trust me on that?”

  He smiled and squeezed her hand. She appreciated his kindness, but then he immediately returned his attention to her sons. “The changes you’ve been seeing will continue. You need to monitor them and determine when things have advanced to a point where it’s not safe for her to be on her own.”

  “She’s not alone. I’m living with her,” Mike said firmly.

  “That’s terrific,” the doctor said. “Still, there will come a point where she’ll need more help than you can provide.

  “There are some excellent memory care facilities in the area, but the best of them have long waiting lists. It would be prudent to start checking them out, see where Rose would be comfortable, and get her name on some lists.”