Raising the Dad Read online

  But a year after Walt lost his wife, no further legal challenges could prevent Terri Schiavo’s husband from ending her life. The faithful—including George Bush and the social conservatives in Congress who had outdone themselves with sanctimony and indignation—were outraged when Schiavo finally died in the spring of 2005, fifteen years after the stroke that silenced her.

  “Not even the pope could stop it,” Walt said, putting on his glasses to read.

  “‘Even our brothers and sisters who find themselves in the clinical condition of a “vegetative state” retain their human dignity in all its fullness,’” the old man read meaningfully from the newspaper account of the pope’s official declaration. “‘The loving gaze of God the Father continues to fall upon them, acknowledging them as his sons and daughters, especially in need of help.’”

  He lowered his bifocals and trained his gaze on John.

  He shook the newspaper article dramatically. “This was the burning bush, and it was talking to me.”

  John said nothing, because there was no debating faith this deep.

  “I had shown weakness, I was about to give up, but then I heard that my mission was not through,” he declared. “For Larry, and for the sacrifice that my wife had made, I was charged with finding a way forward. And by this point, I figured whatever I came up with, God was going to see it through.”

  Thirteen

  Walt Bolger had seen patients abandoned to the hospital’s care several times in his nearly forty years at Holt Memorial. Maybe the patient had no family to begin with, or relatives simply stopped coming around when estrangement or dark family secrets exposed an utter lack of interest in their afflicted “loved one.” The families dumped the cost of care on the hospital, which in turn billed the state for as much government assistance as possible. Several balance sheets counted on the infirmed dying sooner than later. Most did.

  At the time Walt made his move, the hospital’s B wing, a dreary and crumbling corridor, already hosted two unclaimed patients trapped in perpetual sleep. He convinced himself that if he could slip Larry into a room on the wing, he could fake a file that would disguise his identity.

  The only trick would be getting him tucked into a bed. Walt saw a way.

  * * *

  Almost since the day it opened, the emergency room at Holt Memorial at four o’clock every Sunday morning hosted a swamp of wobbly humans spun loose from what daytime folk considered proper behavior. Even in the best of times, working-class bars in small Wisconsin towns encouraged Saturday night binge drinking that routinely set the standard for an alcohol-abusing nation. The Bush economy had sent the dollar to record lows as the seeds were sown for the economic freefall that would come at the end of the decade. Jobs were going away, and angry and aimless adults suddenly had less money with which to spend more time drinking.

  When bar time came, and dizzy, bitter adults were flushed out onto the streets to weave home while dodging their equally bombed children, carnage was as sure as the dawn.

  The gamble that Holt City made in building the new hospital had accomplished at least one thing. With the shiny new facility up and running, smaller rural hospitals within forty-five minutes in all directions soon went out of business, taking their emergency rooms with them. Now every carcass pulled from the glass and goo of a drunken car crash, every frowsy party girl whose evening concluded with her tipping over and shattering her skull upon the sidewalk outside her favorite bar, stumbled or was rolled into Holt Memorial’s ER.

  Added to this was the growing immigrant and working poor population, which had no choice but to use the emergency room for basic health care. They could be found in the ER throughout the day, waiting for hours to be seen, but it never failed that the direst health crises erupted in the dead of night.

  As Walt had gambled, this four a.m. slurry of humanity in the emergency room cleared the way for Lawrence Husted’s return to the hospital he built.

  * * *

  Larry barely weighed eighty pounds when Walt came for him. With a wheelchair borrowed from the hospital, it was only a slight struggle for Walt to ease Larry from his bed and roll him to the garage, where he laid him on a thick nest of comforters he had stretched out on the backseat of his Cadillac. Even at 3:30 in the morning, it was warm and humid outside; as this was Larry’s first time outdoors since 1985, it was a good night for him to be taken for a ride.

  The scrum surrounding the ER entrance was just as Walt needed it to be. The wounded came by ambulance, car, or forms of deliverance they would have no recollection of the next day. Friends and family smoked grumpily out front alongside those who had been treated and released with nowhere to go or no one to take them.

  Walt turned off his headlights and drove around back, where the old, abandoned hospital sat silent and spooky. Since 1982, few souls had ventured back here. Overgrown brush in surrounding fields walled off the dead building from the world.

  The dark was absolute; Walt grimaced and gasped as he fumbled blindly with Larry, easing him out of the car and into the wheelchair. For one awful moment, the chair began to roll and Larry nearly slipped through his hands to the pavement.

  With Larry safely bundled into the wheelchair, Walt rolled him toward the glow of the emergency room entrance. From a safe distance away, figures were already visible in the shadows. They huddled together with a bottle or a smoke; Walt kept moving, careful to not draw their attention. He hoped he was home free when he encountered a young man of about thirty, zipping himself up as he stepped unsteadily from behind a tree.

  His clothes were worn and ill-fitting; he looked as if he had gone without a bath for weeks. As he flinched sheepishly at being caught relieving himself, he projected a vulnerability that Walt found encouraging.

  “Evening,” Walt said genially.

  “Hi,” the man replied. Standing closer, Walt thought he might be in his twenties.

  “Everything okay?” the old man asked.

  “Yeah,” he said unconvincingly, looking toward the ER. “My girlfriend…” He trailed off worriedly as he lit a cigarette.

  “She’s in good hands in there,” Walt said gently. “They’ll take care of her.”

  The spindly kid seemed to find some peace with this. He fidgeted as he nodded to Larry, his chin dropped forward onto his chest. “He doesn’t look too good.”

  “Yeah,” Walt said with concern. “I need to get him inside.”

  He hesitated just slightly, and then produced his wallet.

  “I wonder if you’d do something for me,” he said casually as he produced a hundred dollar bill. If Walt had misread this kid, he was about to be mugged.

  The kid just stared at the money longingly.

  “I need you to roll my friend into the ER,” Walt said. “Once you’re through the doors, there is a row of chairs to the left and then beyond them there’s a corner that is hidden by some plants.

  “I need you to park him in that corner. I need you to not be noticed,” Walt said plainly. “Come right back, and this is yours.”

  The hundred dollar bill seemed to glow in the predawn darkness. Having lived the hardscrabble life Walt suspected, the kid had probably been in enough dodgy situations in his young life to not question someone else’s crooked scheme. But finding it in such a well-groomed old man at four o’clock in the morning felt like a trap. He studied Walt warily.

  “You’ve been in there, right?” Walt asked, gesturing toward the ER. “It’s a madhouse. You’ll be in and out in thirty seconds, and no one is going to give a damn what you’re up to.”

  The kid gave Walt one last careful look, and then stepped behind the wheelchair to grasp the handles.

  “I’m going to stand right over there,” Walt said firmly, “so I can see you all the way to the front door. Once I lose sight of you, I expect you back here—alone—in no more than a minute.”

  The kid swallowed nervously and nodded as he began to push Larry forward.

  “Hold on,” Walt whispered sharply, grabbing
the kid’s elbow. They both watched as a cop walked out of the ER and pulled out of the parking lot in his squad car. The coast was clear.

  “One minute,” Walt repeated, and then moved to watch anxiously as this total stranger took momentary care of the friend he had devoted his life to protecting.

  Fourteen

  “’Morning, Diane,” Walt smiled sleepily to the lead ER nurse as he strolled through the front doors with the sun rising behind him. After the kid had returned from delivering Larry and disappeared into the night with his money, Walt had gone across the street to Rocky’s and picked nervously at his breakfast until he knew the ER would be clearing out.

  Every conceivable body odor hung in the air, undercut by disinfectant and rubbing alcohol. The last untreated patients slept uncomfortably in waiting room chairs as a janitor mopped up a pool of vomit.

  The gaunt, sixtyish nurse, up all night and long ago hardened to the carnival of injury and despair that was her responsibility, reacted with the instinctive fear of a snap inspection at seeing Walt Bolger so early on a Sunday morning.

  “Dr. Bolger,” she said with a curious, husky rattle. “What brings you into my torture chamber this time of day?”

  He smiled as he approached the admitting desk. “I have a patient up on six who had a bad night. Judy asked me to come in and see if I can do anything for him, get him to eat something.

  “Rough night?” Walt asked with well-earned empathy as he looked around the waiting room.

  “Fellah brought his special lady friend in around two thirty when their night of passion hit a snag. We took one of those Sesame Street puppet things out of her rectum,” she drawled matter-of-factly as she tended to paperwork. “Plastic, maybe eight inches tall. Really big head.

  “It was still smiling when it finally yanked loose. She wasn’t.”

  Walt smiled sympathetically, then nodded toward the corner. “What’s the story with this one? Someone admitted him yet?”

  She looked to the other side of the waiting room and saw Larry slumped over in his chair, hidden behind a ficus.

  “Oh, Jesus,” she sighed. “Bonnie! Bring the cart.”

  A bleary-eyed young nurse emerged from the exam rooms pushing a rolling intake unit. She followed Diane toward Larry, while Walt trailed behind.

  Diane reached Larry and studied his face closely as Walt held his breath. He thought Diane’s time at Holt City dated back to Larry’s reign there. If so, she didn’t recognize him.

  She looked around the near-empty lobby as the nurse methodically began to check Larry’s blood pressure and other vitals.

  “Mark,” Diane called, “did you see who brought this man in?”

  The janitor shrugged.

  “Check the bathrooms, send security out to the parking lot,” she instructed him. “They probably just got tired of waiting and went out for a smoke.”

  Her frustration rising, Diane went through the pocket of Larry’s thin robe but found nothing.

  “How is he?” she asked the nurse, who had just taken Larry’s pulse.

  “He’s fine,” the young nurse said with surprise. “Blood pressure steady, temperature normal. Somebody’s been taking good care of him.”

  Diane turned to Walt, her wry attitude gone. “I’m sorry, doctor,” she said soberly. “We’ll take him back, give him a thorough workup. If no one claims him, I’ll call the police and hope that he matches up with a missing persons report.”

  She stepped behind Larry’s chair to wheel him to an exam room.

  “Hang on,” Walt said. The red folder he had slipped down the back of Larry’s robe was visible by just an edge. He pulled it out and read from its meager contents:

  “‘My father’s name is Peter. I have done all I can to help him for almost twelve years. He doesn’t die and I cannot afford to help him anymore. I’m sorry. Please take good care of him.’”

  Walt looked to the only other page in the file, where in a handwriting he had labored to fake he wrote all that was needed to be known about Larry’s care.

  “No last name,” he said convincingly, checking both sides of the pages and the file folder. He feigned contemplation for a moment as he reread the instructions.

  “Let’s admit him, as a John Doe,” he said, adding with a smile. “Peter Doe.

  “Put him on the B wing with the others, get a drip going. Looks like he’s been in this chair for a while, so make sure his pressure points are treated. I’ll check in on him later.”

  For all her gruffness, Walt knew Diane cared about her job. “I try to monitor everything that goes on out here,” she said defensively. “But when it all hits the fan, it’s just too much to stay on top of.

  “If this turns into a big investigation…” She trailed off with concern.

  “Tell you what,” Walt said with a comforting smile. “Let’s just keep this to ourselves.”

  He squatted down with his hands on his knees to study Larry closely.

  “I think the best we can do is make our friend here as comfortable as possible. To look at him, I can’t imagine he’ll be with us for very long.”

  * * *

  With Larry settled onto the B wing with the hospital’s other unclaimed patients, Walt provided his friend’s care while tending to his diminishing medical practice. Nurses stuck on weekend and graveyard shifts were glumly content to do the rest for Larry, barely bothering to learn his false name, let alone questioning his identity. The hospital’s nursing staff was either young and fresh out of school, or old and going through the motions. They monitored his feeding supply, changed his diaper and warded off his bedsores with all the engagement they gave watering the potted plants in the break room.

  It was the same rote, antiseptic attention that Walt and his wife had provided in their home for over twenty years. Now sustained by expert, government-financed indigent care, Larry’s rugged constitution ground on in the B wing for another seven years.

  God abided.

  Fifteen

  It would be a 2012 meningitis scare in the B wing that prompted Larry’s final desperate move into the old hospital.

  A steady flow of the unnamed or unloved had come and gone from the increasingly dreary B wing, with old Peter Doe the only constant. The compromised immune systems of the patients on the row required that they be moved out until the threat could be assessed and with vacancies up throughout the hospital, it was decided to resituate the disenfranchised among the regular population and leave them there.

  In the case of Peter Doe, however, administrator Dean Durning decreed that the time had finally come to transfer him to a county facility that could deliver his minimal care more cost effectively. With government funding being rationed more tightly, Holt City could no longer afford such charity cases, especially one that refused to check out.

  Walt’s plot was unraveling. But after all this time and such an extraordinary commitment, he was desperate to keep his friend from dying anonymously and alone in a wretched county hospital that would welcome his prompt death as a bookkeeping necessity.

  As he bore down on Dean Durning’s office, a long cardboard tube under his arm, he still had one last card to play. As with every new mad knot tied into his endless scheme, he had had years at Larry’s bedside to cook it up.

  * * *

  To the hospital’s administrator, Walt Bolger had just been one of those legacy cases who kept modest practices well past retirement age seemingly for lack of anything better to do. Durning would encounter the old man sporadically in the hospital’s corridors, and occasionally he was obligated to reverently recognize his place in Holt Memorial history at fund-raisers and other events, but Walt was primarily just one of those dusty old men whose portraits were on display in the lobby. When he barged creakily into Durning’s office one morning in the midst of the meningitis scare, he assumed it was to finally announce his retirement.

  Within minutes, it was Durning who was ready to quit.

  “We can’t!” Durning cried weakly after Walt
bluntly told Durning who Peter Doe was, and the macabre, flagrantly illegal acts that brought him there. Durning’s mind raced to keep up, but he could only blink dimly as Walt proceeded to announce the legal and media hell storm that was about to befall his hospital if they didn’t form an immediate, unthinkable alliance.

  As he would a few years later with John, Walt brought evidence of Schiavo and other high-profile right-to-life cases, this time emphasizing the ugly and relentless public protests that came to overwhelm the hospitals where the stories played out. The hospitals in these past cases weren’t guilty of anything, Walt stressed. They just had the misfortune of being the place where the stricken had been allowed to settle while strangers furiously batted around their fate.

  It would be a whole other kettle of fish, he prosaically threatened Dean Durning, if Larry’s story came out.

  Walt and the others carried out their unconscionable plot as employees of Holt Memorial. Walt—the ringleader who kept Larry in his home for two decades, essentially a kidnap victim—was still on staff. Dr. Lawrence Husted, beloved figurehead of the struggling hospital and life-giving legend to the town, had been residing on the B wing right under the administrator’s nose for seven years. The man’s family was betrayed for decades.

  Worse, if the tussle about what to do with Larry went public, and the Right-to-Lifers and Let-Him-Die-ers arrived to set up camp, and the satellite trucks rolled in behind them, and the cell phone videos of shoving matches and prayer circles started hitting the internet, the hospital would be found guilty long before any court ruled on it. At best, it would be a PR disaster; more likely, it would result in a legal judgment that would shut the hospital’s doors for good.

  The chill sent down Durning’s spine shook loose his resolve.

  “We will terminate the patient,” Durning announced abruptly with terse, unconvincing authority. He knew he was crossing into taboo legal and moral territory.

  “This is an untenable situation,” he insisted. “I cannot risk the solvency of this hospital. I cannot risk the care of the patients who need us to be here, because of this insane plot of yours.