Raising the Dad Read online

  “Your father felt terrible any time he lost a patient,” she said sternly. “Nobody else saw that, only me. And even then, he tried to not let it show. But I knew. Nights he’d come home for dinner, and then he’d lock himself up in his den. I knew.”

  She looked again at the smudgy copy of the old newspaper article.

  “What kind of parent leaves their child to suffer for days? You don’t treat a dog that way.”

  * * *

  The law office of Henry Getch sat in a strip mall between a Domino’s Pizza and an empty storefront that had once been the larger law office of Henry Getch. He was pushing sixty now, rickety-thin and his hair swept back and dyed black.

  When John first called and asked if he could come in to talk about his work for the Farraguts thirty-five years earlier, Getch said he would have to charge John his hourly rate for the conversation. But as Getch became incensed at remembering the case, it appeared that having a chance to rail against it after so many years was reward enough.

  “Your father killed that little girl,” he said bluntly the moment John settled into the folding chair opposite Getch’s desk. “Plain and simple. He killed her.”

  John flinched, instinctively rising to his father’s defense despite his suspicions.

  “You remember all this, all the details?” John said skeptically. “After over thirty years?”

  “That was one of the first cases I ever tried. You know how many lawyers had to turn that family down before they got to me?

  “You want me to tell you that Randy Farragut and that wife of his were saints, just some down-on-their-luck losers who couldn’t catch a break?” Getch asked. “They weren’t. They were assholes. They were shitty parents. But they brought that girl into the hospital alive and she died because your father didn’t do his job.”

  The lawyer seemed to take satisfaction from watching John recoil. “Sorry now you gave me a call?”

  John wasn’t sure.

  “He fucked up,” the lawyer continued matter-of-factly. “It happens, even to doctors. Especially to doctors. That’s why they have malpractice insurance. It wasn’t his cash on the line. He should have just settled.

  “But this wasn’t about the money. It was ego. And reputation. His, and the hospital’s. The town was already pushing back on the new hospital. The financing wasn’t coming together. This wasn’t the time for losing a court case. And there was no way your father was going to admit to doing anything wrong. So that fucking Bob Schurmer went and gutted the family, and your father let him. Everybody walked away, hands clean.”

  An uneasy realization rattled John as he absorbed Getch’s venom: If John told Mike about Larry, and Mike did insist on suing the hospital and Walt, John was sitting across from a lawyer who had waited decades for another shot at them. Even a strip mall shyster like Henry Getch would be almost guaranteed the payoff of a lifetime, given the flagrancy of the acts and the shitstorm of attention that would surround the case.

  “I hadn’t lived here that long, I had no idea how the whole town spit on that family,” Getch continued, surprising John with a sincere tone of regret. “I should have known. I should have never let that jury decide things. That was on me. If they could have found a decent lawyer, they should have sued me.”

  “Do you know what happened to them?”

  “I had a trail of unpaid bills sent to them for years,” he recalled hazily. “I think the last one bounced back from an address in Iowa. Meth World magazine named them Parents of the Year in 1997,” he chuckled.

  “Just between you and me,” the lawyer belched moistly as he squirmed in his chair. “Your father probably did that little girl a favor.”

  * * *

  Eastlawn Cemetery sat between the town and the interstate, along a busy stretch of road that had grown thick with mini-marts, big box stores, and fast-food restaurants in the thirty-five years since Vicky Farragut was buried there.

  Vicky’s headstone was small, surely the cheapest her parents could find. It read simply: VICTORIA DENISE FARRAGUT, 1971–1980. LOVING DAUGHTER. Here is where grieving Farraguts had stood, maybe cleaned up in secondhand clothing that John’s mother and her volunteer friends had given them.

  John winced at finding himself wondering how genuine the parents’ sadness could have been when they seemed to care so little when these kids were alive. He remembered the picture that ran on the front page of the paper when they lost their lawsuit. If one chose to believe the parents were crying and holding each other over a lost payday rather than a dead child, they had a harder heart than John Husted.

  John didn’t know why he came to the cemetery. The bad TV movie version of this would have him bring a teddy bear or a single rose to lay on Vicky’s grave, but he rejected the mawkishness of it with a queasy cringe. Coming here seemed like gesture enough.

  As John stood at the grave and listened to the flow of the interstate a cornfield away, another maudlin movie scene coalesced in his imagination: Could Larry Husted have stood here once? All alone, for just a moment? To convey some silent sentiment to a little girl that he shouldn’t have let die?

  John decided he probably did not, and he left it at that.

  Thirty-five

  Between his lack of sleep and the emotional battering he brought upon himself on so many fronts—the unrelenting servicing of Larry, the truth he kept from his mother and brother, the escalating dysfunction at home, the ghosts of his father’s past—John’s mind was wobbly and getting worse as he arrived for another night of caring for his father. When he opened the door to Larry’s room and saw a figure sitting in the shadows of his father’s bedside, John’s brain hazily grasped that someone else had stepped into his secret world. Or maybe he was asleep on the couch at home and a dream was commencing.

  The air took on a queasy charge as John drew nearer to his father’s bed. The closing of the door behind him clicked thunderously in the tomb-like room; the man at the bed didn’t flinch. This is a dream, John comforted himself. Just hover above it and see what freaky places it takes you.

  When the bland, smug face of Dean Durning looked up to greet him, John jolted abrasively into reality.

  “He looks better than the last time I saw him!” the hospital administrator said with sleepy exasperation, pointing at Larry.

  John impulsively pulled at Durning’s chair to get him away from his father. “Get the fuck outta here,” John seethed.

  Durning jumped up but made no moves to leave.

  “I don’t think so,” he said with simpering courage. “This is my hospital. This is continuing because I allowed it. But…” He pointed again at Larry. “Why is he still here?”

  “I told you,” John said, coldcocked by this unexpected demand to defend the situation. “Until I am ready to—”

  “No!” Durning shot back. “It’s been almost two months. I don’t care anymore how hard it is for you to tell your family. They have to be told. Or they have to not be told, but you have to end this. That’s it!

  “And if you won’t take care of this,” Durning said darkly. “I will.”

  “Don’t threaten me,” John said.

  “You’re threatening me every day you’re in here!” Durning shot back. “If this is exposed in a way we can’t control, we’re both going to be fucked. But your problem will be over. I’ll take the fall for this!”

  John struggled for a return volley as Durning exploited all the angles. “That nurse of yours would be on a bus back to El Salvador by the end of the week if this is discovered. I know what she has done for your father. Would he want that to happen to her?”

  Because of their alternating shifts, Gloria had become a shadowy angel for John. He left her cash on the nightstand beside Larry’s bed, she left language-hobbled notes for him when they were running low on the nutrition drip or lotion. Larry was always diapered perfectly when John arrived for the night shift, his skin oiled silkily and without a trace of infection.

  Everything John was able to do for his fathe
r was what Gloria had scripted for him. If keeping Larry Husted ticking was some kind of mad miracle, Gloria made it possible. When this was over, she needed to slip away without consequence.

  Dean Durning was just reinforcing what John already knew was true: This could not continue. Tell the family, don’t tell the family—something had to be decided.

  Bringing this to a conclusion would be right for everyone involved, including John, who was finding his mind going to some very strange places lately. As he spent more and more time with Larry, John feared some lines were about to be crossed.

  Specifically: John wanted to put a pointy party hat on his brain-dead father. John would wear one, too. This made sense to him.

  John relearned his father’s birthday; it was coming up next month, on the sixth. Larry would turn seventy-eight. Larry had been denied thirty birthday parties, and John was certain no one, not once, thought to blow out a candle for him.

  So on one of those long, late-night vigils at Larry’s side, when John’s brain rambled off on loopy tangents, he decided he wanted to put a pointy party hat on his father because the old man was due a celebration. He wanted to put a pointy party hat on his father just to bring some color and some lightness into this room.

  Mostly, he wanted to put a pointy party hat on his father because it’d be really wrong but weirdly funny, and John wanted to believe that if Larry knew his son did it, he’d think it funny, too.

  Walt Bolger told John a wealth of stories about his father; John was stunned and gratified to learn that Larry was a really funny guy. Walt thought Rose never really understood many of the things her husband found amusing, which is probably why John never heard about them. John had come to learn that wives just don’t always know what’s funny.

  But his own sense of humor meant a lot to John. To know that he got it from his father was a gift he now knew to cherish.

  So John sat there very late one night, staring at Larry and anticipating his birthday, and he thought, Yes, I will put a pointy party hat on my father. I think this is something I will do.

  But then he thought, What if that is the precise moment Dad decides to wake up?

  John really, truly knew that this wouldn’t happen. But, he reasoned, if you had asked him six months ago if any of this could have happened, he wouldn’t have thought that possible either. You never really know.

  So just suppose: Larry Husted goes off to work in 1985 and wakes up three decades later in a strange little room, hooked up to tubes and staring at a guy who looks just like him when he was thirty years younger, with a pointy party hat on his head. Who could explain such a thing?

  John would say to his father, “Yes, it is pretty odd, but I hoped you’d find it funny in a Weekend at Bernie’s kind of way.” But Larry wouldn’t have a clue what Weekend at Bernie’s was, so John would have to explain all that.

  Then, what if that was the moment Larry finally died? Really died. Miraculously back to life after all this time, finally—for just a moment—there with his son to exchange a few words of compassion and wisdom, and they spent it talking about Weekend at Bernie’s? Wearing pointy party hats? Like that wouldn’t fuck a guy up for the rest of his life.

  John found himself thinking about all this the other night. A lot.

  So, yes, maybe it was time to let this end.

  * * *

  “A couple more weeks,” he said weakly to Durning in his father’s room.

  “But—” Durning protested.

  “Please,” John said. “I understand. But … please.”

  Durning screwed up his spine. “I have a first year resident who is on thin ice. Talented kid, but screwing up too many times on procedure. If it comes to it, he’ll do whatever I tell him to save his career.

  “I will bring him here. He will withdraw your father’s feeding tube and he will humanely tend to him until it is done. Then you, with or without your family, will be afforded as much dignity as possible to see that the dispensation of the body is discreetly managed.”

  John simmered at the cold efficiency of the threat.

  “Two weeks,” Durning said tersely, then left.

  John drew closer to Larry, once again hoping to gain some unspoken guidance from him. But it was on John alone to act. His heart told him all along that he could not not tell his mother about Larry, but that he could not tell her and hope to still keep it from Mike.

  So since Mike was going to know eventually, he was going to know first. For all that had gone dead inside his brother, John was prepared to gamble that Mike would know not to hurt their mother as she struggled to accept the truth.

  For all he had been through, for all the damage he had done to himself and others, there had to be something decent left inside Mike Husted.

  Thirty-six

  On that day that Mike lost everything twenty-two years earlier, the morning elbowed its way in through a familiar dope afterburn. He wavered toward wakefulness, the coke and whiskey providing alternating surges of spikiness and immutable unconsciousness. As he fought off the daylight through still-closed eyes, he also felt the residual tweak of some pretty rank heroin.

  The band had been dry for weeks, unable to score from their fans or local dealers as they played their way up the East Coast from Georgia, but the girl who brought him home the night before was connected. As he scratched himself beneath her sheets and felt her lying beside him, he assumed she provided the smack.

  Most days on the road began like this for Mike, who hadn’t yet turned twenty-three when it all fell apart. After tearing up whichever club Gravel Rash performed in, the lead singer had first dibs on the tail assembled backstage to carry the party into the dawn. Sometimes they went at it in the dressing room or on the bus, sometimes the girl had a hotel room if she and some friends took to following the band from stop to stop. And sometimes she just took him home.

  Shit, Mike thought that morning as he fought to stay unconscious for another hour. He had to piss. He was going to have to get up, take a leak, and get himself back to the tour bus before it left for the next town. The girl usually drove him back to the previous night’s venue to hook up with the rest of the band.

  “Hey,” he grumbled over his shoulder, jabbing an elbow into the girl passed out behind him. “C’mon, you gotta get me outta here.”

  His eyes were thick with sleep gunk; what the fuck did she give him last night? He rubbed them clean and then squinted in the morning sun piercing in through her window. The girl had dingy pink sheets and a pillowcase lined with hearts. The room was shabby and small. Mike vaguely remembered the house and the whole neighborhood being low rent when they stumbled in at whatever time that was. The place smelled like bologna and old onions.

  He sat up and felt the full toxic headbutt from the previous night’s party. His stomach sloshed queasily as he rubbed his forehead.

  “Hey!” he growled, rolling to face the girl and finally seeing all the red. In the same instant, he realized that the dark matter caked into his eyes was her blood.

  He swiped away the sheets to see a syringe drying in the sticky mess. Her skin cold and blue, her forearm still dribbled blood at the point where she pierced an artery. Mike bolted from beside her, standing cold, naked, and tattooed at her bedside.

  “Fuck!” he whispered desperately, his body painted in streaks of red. “Fuck me!!!”

  He pushed the girl at her hip, hoping for signs of life. “Hey…” He didn’t know her name. “Hey!”

  Mike’s heart raced as the dope fog left his brain. He sized up the room, went to the window: it wasn’t a house, it was an apartment. Four floors up. Just one way out.

  His clothes were thrown throughout the room and tangled with hers. He found his tight, tattered jeans and tried to pull them on, hopping on one foot and then the other. One fake snakeskin boot was right where he needed it to be; the other finally turned up under her bed.

  His shirt had ended up in bed with them; it was too bloody to put back on. He went to her closet and found a t
oo-small yellow blouse that he wrestled to make fit. He spit into another of her shirts and tried to scrub the blood away from his face and arms.

  Ready to bolt, he turned again to her naked body. He darted around to her side of the bed and touched his fingers to her throat. There was no pulse; not a trace of body temperature remained.

  “Fuck me!” Mike whimpered, then tried to not rattle the doorknob of her room with his violently shaking hand.

  He walked briskly and dead sober down the narrow hallway. She lived a dumpy, just-getting-by life; the place was small and the door out was an easy reach. Only when near escape did he hear Rugrats jabbering from the curtain-cloaked living room. A boy of four or five sat in a trance in front of the TV, but he turned long enough to stare blankly at Mike from the shadows.

  Mike ran.

  * * *

  The early morning sun was a bitch as he hit the sidewalk, trying to hold himself to an inconspicuous trot.

  Her apartment building was on a main drag, the street already choked with people heading to work. Mike kept his head down as he bustled past dog walkers and blacks and Hispanics mottled glumly at bus stops.

  When he came to a public park he hit the open field and broke into a fast jog. His mind was churning frenetically, his mouth parched.

  It was her smack, he told himself. Her rig she killed herself with. Mike didn’t like needles. He knew from the raw-nerved sizzle in his nostrils that he snorted some with her, but no way would his prints turn up on that syringe.

  Just get to the bus, he commanded himself, his lungs starting to burn. Get to the bus, get out of town. Eddie and the label’s lawyers would help him deal with whatever he was responsible for.

  He reached another busy street and took the sidewalk east before stopping: he didn’t know where he was. He couldn’t remember the name of the club they played the night before, or where he would find the tour bus.

  He didn’t even know what town he was in. Passing license plates said Rhode Island.