Raising the Dad Page 9

For the first time Gloria was pulled from her routine. She looked with concern to Walt, who smiled easily.

  “Éste es Larry hijo de, Juan,” he said. Gloria’s sullen face registered a trace of surprise, then she nodded respectfully to Larry’s son.

  “This is Gloria,” Walt said, completing the introductions.

  John smiled gently, but the woman was eager to leave. John was an intrusion into a rigidly regimented course of action that did not welcome deviations. And there were secrets here that an outsider might bring down upon all of them.

  Once the door closed, John turned on Walt for answers.

  “Gloria has been with me for almost a year,” Walt explained matter-of-factly. “She’s a trained nurse, from El Salvador.”

  “She’s illegal?” John asked. Walt nodded.

  “She knows how to not be seen,” the old doctor said. “She’s been the least of my worries.”

  John tried to process this. What he observed was eerie and beautiful, this choreographed ceremony to keep his father alive. But what it suggested boggled John’s mind.

  “How often…?”

  “Pressure sores should be addressed every two to three hours. I have pushed the limits by seeing it done about every four hours, with immediate treatment if there’s inflammation. But what you just observed still has to happen six times a day, every day. Around the clock.”

  John was dumbstruck. “Jesus…”

  “She’s here every night, at eleven, three, and six. I still try to be here during the day but as it’s become more than I can physically handle, Gloria has taken on more and more. She’s got an apartment a couple blocks away,” Walt said.

  “What you just saw is the extent of the treatment. It’s simple, but it is relentless,” he continued. “You say your job allows you to work on your own schedule, maybe you could cover the day shift.

  “You might need to work on your upper body strength, though. Larry looks like he’s wasted away to nothing, but manipulating him—several times a day—takes more strength than you’d think.”

  John looked to his father. The miracle of him still being alive had become clearer.

  “But I guarantee you that your marriage and your career will not survive if you try to do this full-time,” Walt said. “Right now, I am paying Gloria two hundred dollars a day. Cash.”

  John gulped as he tried to do the math.

  Walt pushed on.

  “You can buy the nutrition drip at Walgreen’s. If he needs medication, Gloria gets it through the black market in Chicago. It’s quality medicine, but it’s expensive.”

  John saw the price soaring. “But, it … It’s just going to be for a while.”

  “That’s what I thought,” said Walt.

  * * *

  The insurmountable weight of it all sent John back to his father’s bedside. The nurturing perfumes of the lotion still hung in the air. John knew his father was clean and safe. Despite the atrophied contortion of his body, Larry seemed at peace. And John, despite it all, felt a kind of peace standing beside him.

  “Go ahead,” Walt said softly as he approached the other side of the bed. “Ask him what you should do. I’ve been asking for years.”

  The idea struck John as mawkish, but Walt’s nurturing smile encouraged him. John stepped closer and gently stroked his father’s gray, matted hair.

  “How about it, Dad?” he murmured awkwardly. “You’re kinda leaving me with a lot to figure out.”

  “See?” Walt smiled down on his friend. “He’s no help at all.”

  Walt brought the blanket up to Larry’s chest, and then tenderly began manipulating the joints in the fingers of his left hand. “Your boy’s got a lot on his plate, old man. I’m trying to give him good advice, but you Husted men can be stubborn sons of bitches.”

  John took his father’s other hand and began mirroring the massage procedure Walt administered. Walt feared that this physical connection was exactly the thing that would make it hard for John to let go, but he knew from years of experience that these simple intimacies with Larry had a powerful allure.

  “Not too hard,” Walt tutored softly as John caringly kneaded his father’s hand. “We just want to keep the blood flowing. That’s it. Good.”

  Twenty-one

  “What do you want me to say?” Robin said tersely across their kitchen table. This is what she said whenever she wanted to say what John didn’t want to hear. She’d been saying this a lot the past several years.

  “I don’t know,” he sighed. “I just know I only have one shot to do this right.”

  Her empathy was not a question. For all their problems, this was deeply sensitive stuff. Which still didn’t make it anything they could handle right now.

  “Right for who?” she asked. “I know you have to figure this out for your mother. Mike can go to hell, as far as I am concerned. But where are you on this?”

  His silence red-flagged the conundrum. It was now almost two weeks since John found out about his father, and he was stalling on doing anything about it.

  “He’s never coming of out this, right?” Robin demanded. “I know this Dr. Bolger told you this, but you believe it, right? This isn’t about you holding out hope that he might still come around?”

  “On the morning of February 21, 1985, my father told me to make sure that I shoveled the driveway before he got home from work that night,” John said. “Those were the last words he ever spoke to me, and I don’t expect that to change.”

  “You don’t expect it?”

  He pushed back at her grilling. “That will not change.”

  “So he’ll be just there, beyond communication, beyond reach, for who knows how long. Like a goldfish.”

  “Jesus!” John recoiled.

  “You cannot put me in this position, John! I know what you’re doing. You’re forcing me to make all the coldhearted arguments you’re afraid to make for yourself,” she said. “Fine, I’ll do that. You’re suggesting we get into Katie’s college money, shoot a hole through our finances, so that you can take over the expense of keeping your father alive. The father who, up until a few days ago, you were content with being dead. And who is never coming back, not really.”

  John winced. Robin kept at him.

  “Do you have any idea what your mother’s care is going to cost us when the time comes? Her insurance is not going to keep her in the sort of home we want for her. Not even close.”

  He drew himself inward, and trusted her to understand.

  “You can’t know, Robin,” he said quietly. “Unless it was your father, you can’t know what it felt like to be in that room. To feel … something that we were sharing. I can’t let that go any sooner than I have to.”

  She took his hand. No matter where this marriage was headed, that she took his hand right then … He appreciated it, more than she could ever know.

  But she still had to speak the harsh truth.

  “We can’t afford this, John.”

  “I know.” He hung his head. “But I need us to make it work. Just for a while. Please.”

  She squeezed his hand to signal him to look to her. And to really listen.

  “For a while,” she said evenly. “A little while. We have a responsibility to Katie’s future. And your mother’s. What you’re hanging onto—and I swear I understand what you’re struggling with—is the past.

  “You’re getting to touch something powerful, in a way no one ever has. Be grateful for that. But when the time comes, I am trusting you to do the right thing for this family.”

  Twenty-two

  The small plant John bought sat on Larry’s bed stand. He spent some time picking it out, wanting it to fit in with the simple but warm décor Walt Bolger had shaped over the years. Seeing it now in the room, it looked puny, insubstantial for the circumstances—entirely the wrong statement to make. This was why men don’t bring each other flowers.

  He had come to observe Gloria’s eleven o’clock visit; he would sit with his father until she came b
ack at three. She was still apprehensive after Walt explained the situation to her, but John believed she wasn’t going to protest working for him going forward—she was making good, tax-free money for a few minutes work. If she worked other jobs during the day, she probably earned a better living than John. She would take his money just as she had Walt’s, and hope that Larry continued to have a long, secret life.

  Seeing his father’s treatment a second time drove home the methodical simplicity of it. The diapering and tooth-brushing still made John squeamish, but he quickly saw the parallels. As a hard-charging doctor in the early seventies, Larry Husted may not have been the most evolved father in the world, but John chose to believe that he diapered and brushed John countless times when he was small. John certainly did it for Katie.

  What’s a little spit and shit between family? It all washes off.

  If Larry got sick, Gloria would take care of it. Or maybe that’s when John would tell Gloria to not come back. If Larry got sick, maybe John would just sit and let nature take its course.

  Until then, there would just be the routine: lotion the pressure points (gently, never rub), brush the teeth, change the diaper, change the IV bottle, reposition the patient. Wait and repeat. It was important work, but it was only difficult for its frequency and the need to remain unseen. After watching Gloria that second time, John felt almost cocky about his ability to take over.

  “Gracias,” John said as Gloria left, using his high school Spanish for the first time in his adult life. If he ever needed to tell her that he had a burro named Pepé, he remembered how to say that, too.

  He meant to find Katie’s English-to-Spanish dictionary and take it for his own. Based on her grades, it wasn’t doing her any good.

  “How do you say ‘flunk’ in Spanish?” he asked Katie recently.

  “Do you know they don’t even have sarcasm in Spanish?” she responded glibly.

  “Is that true?”

  “Sure.”

  Once Gloria slipped out, the density of the solitude in the room pressed in on him. The lateness of the hour didn’t help; John’s thinking always got wispy and weird when he was sleep deprived.

  Unable to find an acceptable position on the chair near Larry, John slid it closer, causing a scraping sound that rattled the still. He instinctively looked to his father with alarm.

  “Sorry,” John whispered.

  Gloria left Larry turned toward him. Eyes closed, his face drawn taut by the ruinous toll of this unnatural existence, John nevertheless recognized himself in his father. Every time one of Larry’s friends or colleagues encountered John around town, they all made the same observation: “You look just like your father!”

  He studied his father’s face. If John currently resembled Larry at forty, then here was his face at seventy-seven.

  If I had spent the past thirty years plugged into a wall, John thought to himself mordantly.

  Larry’s hair was unwashed and speckled with dandruff. Clearly hair care did not have the same urgency as dental hygiene, but was it ever washed? This was not three decades of hair. Who cut it? How often? He added this to the list of questions he wished he had asked Walt. There were finer points of “Larry care” that hadn’t occurred to him in light of the grimmer realities he was going to be addressing.

  John brushed the hair back from Larry’s temple; he didn’t approve that it was so brittle and dirty. He’d find out how to do the shampooing and make it a regular part of his care. He used to love doing that when Katie was little.

  Drawn in close, the time was right for a private word with his father. Not because he believed Larry could hear him, but because he hadn’t spoken to his father since he was thirteen and never expected to have the chance again.

  He cleared his throat and instinctively made sure no one else was around to hear.

  “I shoveled the driveway,” John began awkwardly. “You probably don’t remember, but that last morning, when all this started, you told me to shovel the driveway. So I did it after school, before homework.”

  The absolute vacuum into which he spoke mocked him. He winced and scolded himself: You open with that?

  Oh, well, he reasoned. Maybe specifics weren’t all that important to start.

  “Haven’t stopped shoveling, every time we get snow. If I don’t have Mom dug out by lunch, I hear about it. Still trying to get Mike to do his share, but…” he trailed off. No point in getting into that yet.

  “And I have to do my own driveway. We’re on Kern Street, right down from where the Fredericks lived. Katie—she’s fifteen—says shoveling’s not a job for girls. No grandson. Sorry.”

  Would Larry care that he had no male grandchildren? John decided he would. From this point forward, Larry became pretty much whatever John projected on him.

  “But I have a snowblower, so…” John shrugged, not even interested in his own story. The lateness of the hour lubricated that part of him that encouraged his thoughts to ramble to odd places. “I figured you’ve been lying here, wondering how the driveway turned out.”

  He leaned back; exhaled self-consciously. The chair pinched his spine, defied him to settle into one spot for more than a few minutes. He wanted to prop up his feet at the foot of his father’s bed, certain that this position would be the most conducive to keeping the vigil, but he instinctively recoiled at the casual disrespect.

  He couldn’t help using humor to take the edge off the burden that fell on him, but the full weight of reality never left him. His father had this profane stasis forced upon him for longer than the mind could grasp, and no one would ever know if the best intentions of Larry’s closest friend had turned out to be a torture sentence.

  The shittiest of hands was dealt to the gnarled body before him. Solemnity was due.

  “So…” John exhaled, already feeling spent. He coughed weakly, then settled back into the chair. Maybe that was enough talk for now.

  They had all kinds of time.

  Twenty-three

  The ground had shivered beneath eleven-year-old John’s feet, the dragon-like skip loaders gouging into the earth, swinging around abruptly as if tapped on the shoulder, and then emptying the soil into dump trucks to haul away. For almost a year, since his father came home with an expensive bottle of champagne and celebrated with his family the final go-ahead on the new hospital, the cornfield alongside old Holt Memorial took on the relentless bustle of a life-sized ant farm.

  Young John was not conscious in the slightest of the ordeal leading up to this: the fevered pursuit by his father and his doctor friends to get the project approved, the tension between his parents as Larry’s commitment to his patients and the new hospital left his mother feeling abandoned and overburdened in raising their sons. John just knew whenever he was allowed to come by the construction site, burly men in hard hats and the musky funk of BO and cigarettes treated him like a prince.

  Scores of local laborers earned top union wages bringing the new hospital to life, and the public grandstanding of Dr. Lawrence Husted throughout the project’s evolution made him a hero to those now prospering as a result of his efforts.

  Johnny Husted, who hung timidly at his father’s side and recoiled at the bone-shaking clamor of heavy industry, was welcomed by men on the construction team who were so unlike his crisp, well-spoken father. John was lifted up into the cabs of cranes and bulldozers and allowed to shift the levers, and escorted down into the enormous hole in the ground that would one day house the new hospital’s boilers and generators.

  Standing below ground, the din up above muted by the cold, moist denseness of the earth, John was handed a flat rock by a squat crewman with a lazy left eye. “It’s an arrowhead,” the man said with dramatic flourish. “Finding ’em by the dozens down here. You hang on to that, for good luck.”

  John did, for years. Over the subsequent decades, he would sometimes see a short, rough-hewn old man with a go-funny eye around town and wonder if it was the same guy. If getting your father back from the dead coun
ted as good luck, John figured that had to have been some kind of arrowhead.

  Once, John’s fifth grade class came to the work site for a tour. For an hour or so he was a celebrity, the kid who not only helped get their class sprung from school for a whole morning, but who was hailed by workmen who greeted him by name. Even Kelly Hogan, for whom John longed with a chaste desire so all-consuming that he worried something was wrong with him, stood close to him at the lip of the new hospital’s pit for fear she might fall in.

  Later that day—and in silly, unprovoked bursts of memory that announced themselves intermittently well into adulthood—John wished he had produced that arrowhead that was never out of his pocket.

  “Here,” he could have said to Kelly, telling her the story of the Indians who once lived there, embellishing the tale with the fertile imagination that had already begun sending transmissions. He could have offered it to her with a somber flourish, and she would have accepted—how could she not? And in the transaction, her fingers would have brushed his hand. That indefinable something that overnight seemed to be radiating from pretty much all girls, but in great, woozy ray gun blasts from Kelly Hogan, would be exchanged skin to skin. There would have been a connection.

  And as they passed each other in the hallway, the next week and maybe here and there up through senior year, maybe she’d give him a glance. Maybe just a look of acknowledgment, a remnant of the moment they shared at the edge of the great hole in the ground. Something none of the other plain boys in the hall got.

  John could have built upon the arrowhead moment. A week or so later, he could have found himself passing her in the hallway. He could have caught her eye, and he could have asked, “So. How’s that arrowhead doing?” But something much more clever (“How’s that arrowhead doing?”???). Something delivered with a sly, loopy wink. Like Bill Murray in Meatballs.

  “Hey!” John could have begun with mock urgency. “The school is surrounded by Navajo, give me back that arrowhead or we’re doomed!!!”

  The fantasy version of her, who would love all things about him if she would only give him a chance, would have laughed. And that might’ve been it. A laugh, and she’d move on. But now they had reaffirmed the arrowhead as something they shared, just the two of them. It was the grain of sand in the gullet of the oyster of love. Who knows how it might evolve?