Raising the Dad Page 3

  But above all else, it was a spooky old building that few people got to poke around in. A building where people had died, where ghosts might still stir the cobwebs.

  John liked recognizing the little boy inside him who answered back:

  “Sure!”

  Five

  Dr. Bolger led John through the heavy service door leading out of the hospital and up a rusted set of stairs that brought them back to ground level. John had lost his bearings during the winding tour; they were now standing at a distant corner of the hospital where it joined with the empty building.

  John followed the old doctor behind the abandoned hospital, struck by the utter desolation. The corners and crevasses of the long-abandoned building accumulated decades of wind-blown debris: leaves, fast-food wrappers, grocery bags. John smiled to see a Bob Dole ’96 flyer tangled in the mess; Dole would’ve definitely had his old man’s vote.

  A rusted industrial dumpster blocked another door, this one leading into the old building. Dr. Bolger squeezed behind the dumpster with surprising ease and brought a key to a heavy padlock. His hand was shaking.

  The door swung open, and a chalky mustiness rolled over them. The old man reached inside and grabbed a flashlight. “Watch your step,” Dr. Bolger cautioned. “It’ll take a while for your eyes to adjust.”

  * * *

  The light became patchy as they moved deeper into the dead hospital. The walls were a dour institutional green. The floor tiles, cracked and fading, were ancient. The sun came through in dust-speckled beams pricking through boarded-up windows. The stale, unbreathed air hung heavy. John stopped and took in the ghostly surroundings.

  “Dr. Bolger?” John whispered, realizing he was alone. He immediately felt a little boy’s chill as his adventure turned scary. “Hello?”

  Through the pale light he noticed that a path on the floor cut through decades of dirt and debris. In every other direction, not a single footprint, and yet down one hall, a clear trail had been nearly worn clean. The old man seemed to know John would follow.

  He found him sitting on a bench outside a long row of closed doors. John assumed the old man was winded, his shoulders heaving as he looked to the floor. But as he turned John saw he was crying.

  “He asked me to do this,” the old doctor pleaded. “When it began, I was just doing what he wanted. Please believe me.”

  Something grave was suddenly in play.

  “Do what?” John asked, his heart beginning to race. “What are you talking about?”

  “We knew—that very first day—that the stroke was too severe, the damage was too extensive. But his body wouldn’t let go.

  “He was fighting. And he went on and on, for almost a year,” the old man pleaded.

  “You and Mike were young, we were all determined to shelter you from more harm, but your mother … The pressure, the not knowing, it was killing her. We needed to bring it to an end, John. We needed to say it was over. For her.”

  He turned and stared at John.

  “But Larry just kept on fighting.” A pause. “He never stopped.”

  John looked to a door across the hall. The trail leading from the new hospital ended there.

  Room 116.

  Something heavy and immutable broke loose in John’s mind. He looked to his father’s friend for passage back from a dream that could not be happening.

  The old man softly gripped John’s forearm. “He’s never coming back, John, you need to understand that. He’s never coming back.

  “But he’s still here,” the old man said simply.

  John looked again to the door, then turned slowly back to Dr. Bolger.

  “What are you…?” John pleaded, the words queasy in his ears.

  The old man buried his face in his hands. “I swear, I just didn’t know what to do.”

  John’s feet slowly took him down a dusty trail to the closed door. His hand reached for the knob.

  Six

  The room was carefully preserved, in jarring contrast to the deterioration of the abandoned building. A single lamp burned softly, casting the bed in the corner in a cloak of shadows.

  Photographs of the Husted family were throughout the room: Rose as a young doctor’s wife, a preadolescent Mike and John smiling with abandon at Disneyworld. Larry Husted and Walt Bolger in seventies era golf clothes, tipping beers on the veranda of a golf course clubhouse. But mixed in with the distant past were a handful of more recent images, candid photos of Rose and John caught smiling at unremarkable gatherings held years after they lost Larry. A class picture of Katie, taken when she was in sixth grade, was on a shelf viewable from the bed.

  The door closed behind John as he eased in. The nurturing tableau before him and the inconceivability of what waited for him in the shadows threatened to send his mind careening into shutdown. Some instinctive self-preservation mechanism kicked in as he knew to take his time acclimating himself. To hold onto for just a few moments more the reality he had believed for thirty years.

  He glimpsed a sturdy bookcase filled with medical texts, along with the Ian Fleming and John le Carré novels his father had loved. A Donald Duck figurine stood at the end of a shelf. A framed photo clipped from the Holt City Times was propped up among the books. It was Mike at twenty-one, onstage and preening in his full heavy metal finest. Gravel Rash was beginning to draw big crowds down in Chicago, with rumors around town about a pending record contract. The article in the local paper back then had called Mike the next Axl Rose.

  Gazing farther along the shelf, John stopped short when he saw it: chips of concrete, set in Lucite. He solemnly took the smooth cube into his hand. That day at the new hospital, with the sledgehammer and the applause and his father hailed as a hero, was a moment around which John fixed all his memories. John long ago assumed the Lucite block had simply been misplaced.

  John felt its cool surface as he grimly looked back to the door that would return him to the old man who had the answers.

  John’s steps were deliberate as he committed to crossing the room. He felt time spinning backward, to a point where two lives diverged, he thought forever. One became a man, formed a life, fell short sometimes but carried on. The other, he had been told, had not.

  The faint, sterile tapping of the medical machinery grated against the solemnity of the moment. Vital signs silently triggered spikes on the screen of a digital monitor.

  As the form in the bed took shape in the dim light, John met the scent. It was antiseptic, the chilly moist bite of alcohol fused with something warm and human: The muted sour milk smell of a body long dormant. A whiff of breath. The traces of body waste discreetly collected.

  Larry Husted had a smell. A living smell.

  John arrived at the bedside and looked down.

  His father was a gauzy husk of a man, the trauma of his decades-long internment reducing his body to a cruel hollowing out of the human form. He was in a fetal position, facing his son. His eyes were closed; a faint scar ran across his left cheek.

  His chest rose and contracted almost imperceptibly.

  A tinfoil sting pricked the base of John’s skull as he recognized the face despite the effects of age and distress. He gripped the railing at the bedside and felt the reconnection.

  His mental processing was blunt and simple:

  “Here is Lawrence Charles Husted,” John silently explained to himself. “Larry. Dad. Here is my dad.

  “I have a dad.”

  His knees began to weaken as he reached to brush his hand along his father’s forearm. The warmth of Larry’s body proved to him that his existence was real, and John’s steadiness collapsed. Gravity brought him to a chair at the bedside, his fingers never once breaking the connection now that his touch found his father’s living skin.

  John gently traced the line of a vein in his father’s reed-like arm. Their blood flowed here. The son’s tears came in jagged surges that wracked his body.

  * * *

  When the door to Larry’s room rattled open an ho
ur later, the sound echoing down the abandoned corridor, Walt Bolger stood slowly with his shoulders back, ready to honor his obligation. But the ravaging of John’s emotions and the inconceivability of the truth left him too numb to assail the old man with questions or furious disbelief.

  Something vastly intricate was at play here. The same man who had engaged in the most macabre deceit imaginable, who had kept John from his father for three decades, had just allowed John to stand again in the presence of that father.

  Something mad and tragic had been allowed to live on in this long-dead building, but Walt was now owning up to it when he didn’t have to. Time may come for rage, John realized as he met Walt’s mournful look, but it would have been profane unleashing it in the reverent quiet outside his father’s room.

  Instead, John collapsed into the embrace of the old doctor.

  “It got away from me,” Walt whispered as he wept. “I never wanted to do this to your family, to Larry. He’d be so disappointed in me.”

  John pulled back from the embrace and grasped the haunted old man at the shoulders:

  “What happened?”

  Seven

  Larry was reading the newspaper that morning in 1985.

  “Donald Duck has died,” Larry Husted observed to Walt Bolger, who raised a skeptical eyebrow. Walt was going over the chart of a difficult case he’d be seeing later that morning.

  “The guy who did the voices in all the cartoons. He died,” Larry explained from behind the front page. “Clarence Nash. Leukemia. Eighty.”

  “Hmm,” Walt mumbled.

  “He made his first cartoon in 1932, and he retired just two years ago,” Larry read. “We save lives, and this guy goes into the office and talks like a duck. For fifty years. Think you can get rich doing that?”

  Walt said nothing as the medical records before him absorbed him. Ignored, Larry turned the page on the obituary. “I liked Daffy Duck,” he shrugged.

  Like most mornings, Larry and Walt shared a cup of coffee as they went over the newspaper before their rounds. Just the other day the paper had reported that a third artificial heart had been installed successfully in a man down in Kentucky, and now there was word that the owner of the second mechanical heart had just become the first to venture outside the hospital—for a whopping fifteen minutes.

  These were days of miracles and marvel, but there was still no saving Donald Duck.

  Larry’s nurse stuck her head into Walt’s office to tell Larry that his workday was due to commence. He rose from his chair in mock anger, doing a credible imitation of a grouchy cartoon duck as he headed back to his office. Walt shook his head at his friend with a familiar, bemused smile.

  “I think I’ll talk like Donald Duck to my patients this morning,” Larry said. “I don’t think that would worry them at all.”

  Walt finished his first file and opened the second when there was a commotion and the rustling of papers from the other side of the wall. Engrossed in the next case history, he didn’t give the noise much attention.

  “You okay in there, Donald?”

  * * *

  By the time Walt’s wife, Marie, brought Rose to intensive care, Walt was gravely concerned by the initial assessment of Larry’s condition. He summoned a show of strength as he met Rose with a measured hug—not too long to foreshadow the worst, not too short to underplay the seriousness of the situation. It was not in him to tell Rose what he feared to be true as he led her to her husband’s bedside.

  Larry looked peaceful, trapped in a nap that had quietly, violently short-circuited him. He hit his desk as he fell, and a gash under his left eye was crudely stitched and stained by drying blood.

  “What happened?” she asked, her voice a trembled whisper.

  “He had a stroke, honey,” Walt said. “We can’t tell yet how serious it is, but we’re concerned.”

  He looked past Rose to Bart Ladmore, the neurologist on duty; his face was ashen as he studied Larry’s chart. Nurses who worked daily with Larry, who routinely rode out trauma events with professional detachment, hovered anxiously. It would be invisible to a civilian, but their wordless interplay confirmed for Walt that his friend was being swept away while they flailed impotently for lifelines that would all prove to be yards too short.

  They all knew. Except Rose.

  Walt took her hand. “We’re doing all we can. Bart has been on the phone to a neurologist in Chicago, one of the best in the country. He’s on his way. But right now, all we can do is monitor his condition and pray he has the strength to fight this.”

  Rose gently pulled away from Walt and took Larry’s hand. She stroked his hair and concerned herself with the cut on his face.

  “We’ll get this stitched up right,” she whispered to her husband. “I can’t be staring at a scar for the rest of our lives.”

  * * *

  John remembered coming home that February day in ’85 to floorboards that were heaving. Screw Tool, Mike’s latest band, had settled into the basement months earlier, and the hours after school were prime for jamming. From whenever Mike bailed on his classes until shortly before dinner, the jackhammer ditties of Mötley Crüe, Judas Priest, and the Scorpions thudded up from the cellar in bone-rattling waves. As he headed home from school, John could hear the bass end as it pummeled the core of the Husted home, a modest but pristine house in a historic part of town.

  Neighbors had already called the police a few times about the noise, creating an awkward civic standoff as Larry’s status necessitated delicate treatment. Larry had been furious that Rose allowed the band into their home, unswayed by his wife’s logic that if Mike was determined to run with a bad crowd, better to have him where they could keep an eye on him.

  Larry was not a fool; he knew the band was smuggling liquor in along with their gear, he could smell the pot that hung in the air. While he toiled at work, he imagined Mike and his friends giggling in the basement and exhaling smoke into the window wells, thinking they were getting away with something.

  A blowup loomed, and Mike was about to find himself kicked out of the house along with the band equipment. If Rose protested, that was a strain Larry was prepared to subject his marriage to. The level of contempt between father and son would not continue under his roof.

  Arriving home that snowy winter day, thirteen-year-old John shoveled the driveway as his father had instructed over breakfast, then he came in through the back door. His dog, Jerry, who cowered in the coat closet whenever the band played, skittered his way to John’s ankles and begged for escape. John held the door open for him.

  He grabbed a cup of chocolate pudding from the refrigerator and dug his homework from his backpack as the Crüe’s “Looks That Kill” tingled the soles of his feet. John and Mike had a relationship that was typically ambivalent for teenagers born a couple years apart. John resented the perpetual tension that Mike’s presence brought to the house. On the other hand, Mike’s rock-and-roll status and his rep with the outlaw crowd at school provided John some tangential cool.

  And Screw Tool rocked. The sonic assault that cleared bird feeders three houses down resonated with John in a way that was not unconducive to homework. He dumped his textbooks on the kitchen table and set to studying, his heels dancing in rhythm to Eric Alvin’s kick drums.

  Only a desire for more pudding forty-five minutes later broke John’s focus long enough to find the note lost under his homework. He read it twice, then headed down the basement with a rising sense of fear.

  From the bottom of the stairs, the sound of the five-piece band was clean and furious. John shouted fruitlessly into the gale force onslaught of Van Halen’s “Hot for Teacher” to get them to quit playing.

  Only when he flicked the basement light on and off, traditionally the sign that their mother was on her way down to change over the laundry or alert Mike to a phone call, did the music crash to a ragged stop.

  Mike quickly stashed an open beer while lead guitarist Jay Taggert stubbed out a joint and waved away the smoke
, only to see that it was just Mike’s kid brother.

  “Dude, what the fuck?” Mike sneered at John. “Get outta here!”

  The band glared at John, then Eric exploded into the stuttering drum pattern that kicks off “Hot for Teacher.” John threw himself into the middle of them—all older and easily provoked into kicking his ass—and demanded that they stop.

  Mike slammed his mike stand to the floor with a hateful stab and shoved his brother backward. “You want me to kick your ass, faggot?”

  John met his threat with uncommon spine as he waved the note in Mike’s face. “Something’s wrong with Dad! We’re supposed to go to the hospital!”

  The staticky buzz of the amps filled the silence as Mike read the note and quickly ran the calculus of how he should respond. Even if it mattered only in how it impacted him, he sensed he should care that something was up with his father.

  But here in front of his friends—his dead-souled, heavy metal friends—it would be faggot indeed to show that he cared.

  “Fuck it,” Mike drawled, flicking the note back at John. “If it was serious, she wouldn’t leave a fucking note.”

  John felt the anxiety rising; he worried that he would cry. “I can’t get there by myself! You have to drive me!” Mike, license-less at fifteen, had been known to help himself to the family car when his parents wouldn’t know.

  Mike studied his little brother, some distant twinge of affection piercing his hard-ass pose.

  “Shit,” Mike sighed as he turned to his band. “I’ll be right back. Keep practicing.”

  Eight

  Over the ten months following Larry’s stroke, Screw Tool became Raz’r Gash then BitchBlade (for a week and a half), before falling into what would become Gravel Rash. Mike and Jay Taggert remained the only constants as new players came and went, either kicked out by Mike for lack of commitment, or hobbled by parents unwilling to let their sons practice and party at the Husted house at all hours.