Sometimes you had to hit bottom, somebody had said in some context. Surely this was the bottom. He had intended to take decisive action to get rid of a horrendous problem, but he was over his head and events had gotten out of control.
Would he be able to live with himself now? How could he have sunk so low? What was the word that Dr. Moyer, the psychiatrist, had used when Arthur had called him after the deed was done? Dissociation. Part of a person’s mental processes splitting off from his consciousness under extreme stress. He was under extreme stress. He hadn’t felt like himself in weeks.
Arthur pulled his car off onto the shoulder of the road and coasted to a stop. He rested his head on the steering wheel and groaned. “What a feeble excuse,” he said aloud. He felt a rush of anxiety. What if Dr. Moyer violated physician/patient privilege and blabbed? Never should have confessed to him; that was weak and stupid.
Feeling cramped in the Lexus, he got out and stood at the side of his car, filling his lungs with moist, cool air, looking up at the spectacular night sky. What had T. S. Eliot likened it to? An etherized patient? Arthur wished he were etherized. He looked down the quarter mile of road illuminated by his headlights. A pair of eyes glowed at him from the thicket at the margin of the woods. An eight-point buck emerged, gamboling casually up the incline to the roadbed, head high, displaying confidence that this was his turf, he belonged on this land. The buck trotted across the road, took one oblique leap over a guardrail, seeming to hang motionless in midair for an instant, then vanished into the underbrush.
Arthur heard a vehicle approaching from behind him. He turned and saw the high beams and running lights of an eighteen-wheeler approaching and had an impulse to wait until the truck was almost upon him, then step out in front of it. He stood motionless as the semi rumbled toward him, wondering if he would do it, until the driver hit the horn. Arthur flung himself across the trunk of his car, clinging to it as the giant Mack truck whooshed by, its ear-splitting horn blaring, abruptly dropping a half octave as it passed.
When the noise of the truck’s horn stopped, Arthur found himself sobbing. In the returning quietness his own crying sounded infantile, so he stopped and straightened himself up. At that moment he realized that ever since the awful night he had found out about his wife’s disease, his worst feelings had been the result of things he had done, not the things that had happened to him. He slammed a fist onto the trunk lid and screamed at the top of his lungs.
“Grow up, Arthur!” His words bounced off a distant bluff and echoed back at him. Grow up, Arthur.
Arthur got back in his sedan and slammed the door. At his house, a seventeen-year-old girl was alone, a child who needed strength from him, who needed the truth from him. He swore to himself: no more evasion, no more iniquity. More self-discipline, less self-pity. No looking back. What was done was done.
When he pulled up to the garage of his sprawling Tudor mansion constructed of brown brick and half-timbers slashing across white stucco, he noticed a sliver of light at the bottom of the overhead door. This meant that the garage door, which had an automatic light on a timer, had been closed within the past few minutes. Sure enough, when he got out of his car he heard clicking from the exhaust system of the Infiniti. Four o’clock in the morning was way too late for a seventeen-year-old to be getting home. Arthur did not need more proof that he had been ignoring his duties as a parent.
He strode through the kitchen, not noticing the blinking light on the answering machine. He bounded up the stairs to Amy’s room, ignoring the twinge in his knee from the old football injury. Hip-hop was reverberating from Amy’s room. That junk isn’t even music, he thought. Then he remembered his father saying the exact same thing about Chuck Berry. He knocked before entering.
Amy turned down the volume on her stereo without being told, and Arthur sat on her bed. Where were all her stuffed animals, and when did her walls fill up with movie posters, some of them vaguely erotic? At least her bed still had its frilly white canopy.
“Where have you been?” he asked, trying to sound paternal but benign.
“I went to see Mom at the hospital. She didn’t look too good. Then I hung out at the mall until it closed. Then I went to a friend’s house.”
Her failure to specify the sex of her friend probably meant the friend was male. Alone with a boy in the middle of the night. Was Lorraine monitoring whether Amy was sexually active? Arthur hoped so. He wasn’t.
“A boyfriend?”
“He’s a boy, and he’s a friend,” said Amy, “but he’s not a boyfriend.”
Amy sounded sad when she said this, and Arthur switched from being concerned that his daughter was getting too much romantic attention to being concerned that she was getting too little. Was that possible? He tried to see his daughter the way a teenage boy might. She had a pretty face, blue eyes and a shy, beguiling smile. Her blond hair, cut pixie style, would draw male attention. But she also had acne blotches that were more than a match for makeup and medication, and smallish breasts for a girl who was, well, on the plump side. Lorraine had always been a wizard at making herself up. Was she instructing her daughter in the art of womanly beautification? A topic for another day.
“We need to talk about Mom and Huntington’s chorea,” said Arthur. “You know, it’s genetic.”
“I know all about it, Dad. Dr. Treacher told us, remember?”
Okay, here goes. Arthur’s hands were sweating. He rubbed them on the chenille bedspread. The little bumps tickled his palms. Put a positive spin on it, Dr. Moyer, the psychiatrist, had said. Arthur smiled at his daughter with all the loving kindness his face could muster.
“It’s not something you have to worry about for yourself, sweetie.”
“I know, Dad. I was adopted.”
The smile dropped from Arthur’s face like a collapsing snowbank.
“How long have you known?” What else didn’t he know about his daughter?
“I started suspecting a long time ago. I wasn’t tall and thin, like you and Mom are in the old pictures. You guys didn’t have this skin. I’m only blond ’cause I dye it.”
“Mom dyes her hair.”
“That’s ’cause she’s gray now. She used to be naturally blond. Besides, I never really believed it until about a month ago, when Mom told me.”
“Mom told you?” Arthur felt he must have been living on another planet for the last few years. How could Lorraine have disclosed the adoption to Amy without consulting him, or even telling him she did it?
“Did she ever! I suppose she told you about the Ecstasy she found in my dresser.”
Arthur didn’t want to admit that Lorraine had not confided such a major incident to him, but he wasn’t going to lie to his daughter either. He remained silent, chagrined at how marginalized he had allowed himself to become in his own family.
“She started going nuts, making out like I was some kind of major junkie or something. Everybody does Rib. So I got ticked and told her to go look in her own medicine cabinet. She’s got a freaking pharmacy in there. I said if I did drugs, I got it from her. That’s when she told me.”
“That you were adopted.”
Amy’s eyes moistened and she swallowed with difficulty. “What she said was that I got nothing from her, that I wasn’t even her child. She said my birth mother did drugs and that’s where I got it. She was ranting and waving her arms around like a lunatic. I said my real mother was probably better than her, and she totally lost it.” Amy started to tremble, and her lower lip quivered. A tear ran down her cheek to the corner of her mouth, and she collected it with the tip of her tongue. “Mom was screaming and throwing things, yelling at me that my mother was a whore and . . . w-was probably in the gutter n-now or dead from taking drugs. I screamed some things just as bad back at her. Then she just sort of collapsed and I put her to bed. I s-straightened up the mess and went to bed before you got home.”
Amy began to sob and Arthur immediately gathered her into his arms. He ached to think Amy had been exp
osed to such an exhibition from her own mother. He pictured Amy helping her mother into bed after the fracas and then cleaning up the place, and he wondered how his daughter could have turned out so well with someone like him as a father.
“You know Mom loves you,” he said. “All of that was just her illness. It doesn’t mean anything more than . . . sneezing.”
Amy sniffled. “I-I know. After we t-talked to Dr. Treacher, I apologized to Mom for the things I said. I think I already knew something was wrong with her. Didn’t you notice how for the last six months she sometimes walked kind of lopsided?”
Arthur had noticed, but by that time Lorraine had gotten so irritable that he was hesitant to bring it up and hoped it would pass. His inaction had caused no harm. Early detection made no difference with Huntington’s.
The phone rang and Arthur uncoiled himself from Amy to answer it.
“Hello? Yes. I just got home. No, I haven’t. What? When? I . . .”
The next thing Arthur knew, he was on his knees looking down at the receiver on the floor. He had taken a sinker, and it was only the pain shooting from his knee that had brought him to before his face hit the floor.
“Daddy!” Amy ran to her father, who was pushing himself up with both hands on a nightstand. She grasped him and helped him to his feet with a hand under his elbow and an arm around his waist. “What’s wrong?”
Arthur hugged his daughter again. There was no way to tell her. There was no way not to. Out with it.
“Amy.” His mouth was dry, his voice raspy and pinched. “Amy. Mom is dead.”
PART II
“You cain’t lose what you ain’t never had.”
—MCKINLEY MORGANFIELD A.K.A. MUDDY WATERS
CHAPTER
11
Karen faced the same problem every June 18, Jake’s birthday. What do you get the man who wants nothing? This wasn’t literally true, of course. In spite of his attempt to achieve Buddhist nonattachment, Jake still had many desires. Learn to play the drums, have his own recording studio, write the great American love song. But Karen couldn’t think of anything Jake wanted that could be purchased and gift-wrapped. He was impossible to buy for.
She had tried getting him clothes, but that didn’t work. When he was not performing, Jake wore only blue jeans, black T-shirts, heather gray sweatshirts and sneakers with white socks. For gigs, he always affected a precise “look,” which for the past couple of years had been a black silk shirt, gray silk sport coat and black pleated gabardines. Karen had tried giving him a pair of pants once—black pleated gabardines—but Jake never wore them in the act.
“Wrong kind of pleats,” he explained.
The solution was for Karen to just forget about buying Jake anything for his birthday. But her parents were coming, and they would expect her to give Jake some gift, however inappropriate. The presents Karen’s parents gave Jake were always a source of amusement. The year before, a Ward Cleaver cardigan sweater had given Karen and Jake a spell of hilarity as soon as her parents were out the door.
Feeling she had been a bit harsh about Jake’s fishing outing with McKinley, Karen found herself at a sporting goods store, discussing tackle with a twenty-something salesman. The variety of lures available was mind-boggling. The store had several aisles filled with boxes and bubble packs of spinners, plugs, plastics, stick baits, crank baits, spoons, jigs and spinner baits in an assortment of colors and sizes. Were there that many kinds of fish in the world?
“Uh, I think he fishes for bass,” she said hesitantly.
“Largemouth, smallies, white bass or stripers?” said the salesman.
“Um, I’m not sure.”
“Does he fish with a fly rod, a spinning rig, bait-casting, or spin-cast?”
Karen chewed her lip. “What’s the difference?”
The salesman pointed out the various styles, and Karen guessed the open-faced spinning reel was similar to the one Jake used.
“Ultralight, medium or heavy?” said the salesman. Karen answered with a blank stare. “What pound-test line does he use?” clarified the salesman. Karen shrugged, her stare acquiring an aura of bewilderment.
“Ma’am,” said the salesman, “have you ever seen your husband fishing?”
“Sure,” said Karen, wondering exactly when it was she had become “ma’am” to salesmen.
“Is he usually out in the middle of the lake, or along the shore?”
Karen’s eyes brightened. Something she knew! “Along the shore, always. He fishes out of a canoe.”
“A finesse fisherman,” said the salesman. He snapped his fingers. “I’ve got just the thing for him.” He led Karen to the counter and showed her a pair of large, horn-rimmed sunglasses. “Polarized, UV protectant with a patented antiglare coating,” touted the salesman. “On a sunny day you can see fish in shallow water as clear as if they were on dry land.”
Jake liked sunglasses. He loved to fish. He would understand that the gift was an olive branch, and one that showed Karen was savvy about the latest in fishing gear.
Perfect!
HER PARENTS, GENE Decker and Elizabeth Decker, had the oddest relationship of any man and woman Karen knew. Married for twenty-five years, divorced for fourteen, they had reestablished a friendship a year and a half before, around the time Gene was diagnosed with prostate cancer. If they were more than friends, they kept it to themselves.
Gene, a tall, owl-faced man on whom casual weekend attire was discordant, contrasted sharply with his ex-wife, who looked as if she belonged in shorts and sandals. Karen hoped that her mother’s ability to hang on, seemingly forever, to a pair of legs that looked great in shorts was carried on a dominant gene.
The day was warm and humid; a low ceiling of stratus clouds suggested rain without making a firm commitment to it. Gambling on the weather, Karen and Jake set up a portable grill and a folding table in their tiny backyard, a thirty- by sixty-foot rectangle of grass, dandelions and chickweed hemmed by shapeless junipers and a few fatigued peonies. Gene and Jake stood with sweating glasses of gin and tonic in their hands, silently watching ground chuck patties yield juice into the charcoal. Elizabeth joined Karen in the kitchen, supposedly to help frost the cake.
“Have you done anything yet about the baptism?” said Elizabeth.
Karen licked frosting from her forefinger. Damn. The dreaded baptism topic again.
“No, Mom. We haven’t decided what we’re going to do about that,” she replied.
“What’s to decide? We’ll have it at Our Redeemer, Pammy and Uncle Wayne will be godparents, and we’ll have coffee at the house after.”
Karen coaxed the second layer into place and swirled the frosting to cover the seam. She felt a knot forming in her neck.
“We’re not sure we’re even going to do a baptism.”
Elizabeth took a slug of her gin and tonic. “McKinley has to be baptized, Karen. Gene thinks so, too.”
“You know we’re not members of Our Redeemer,” said Karen. “Jake is not into conventional organized religion. He’s sort of . . . eclectic.”
“Is that why you’ve got that silly Hindu thing on your mantelpiece?” asked Elizabeth.
“That’s a Buddha, Mom. It’s not Hindu, and it’s not silly to Jake. Why is a formal baptism so important to you and Dad? You guys both went to church about twice a year, the way I remember it.”
“Aunt Miriam and Aunt Constance are both agitating about it. Gene says even Uncle Wayne has brought it up.”
Ah, the aunts and uncles had weighed in. Resistance was futile. “I’ll talk to Jake again,” said Karen. “I just don’t want to pressure him to do anything he thinks is hypocritical.”
Elizabeth drained her drink, pouring an ice cube into her mouth and cautiously chewing it. “What’s hypocritical got to do with it?”
GRILLSIDE, IT WAS only a matter of time before impatience and Gordon’s gin provoked a similar conversational gambit from Jake’s father-in-law. For some reason he could not fathom, Jake had never been
able to sustain an enjoyable conversation with Karen’s dad. Was it his imagination, or did Gene go out of his way to steer the discourse toward topics he knew Jake found dull or annoying?
“The Cubs look good this year,” said Gene.
“Yep,” said Jake. “They’ll have to drop even more than usual in September to avoid the playoffs.”
“I played some ball in college,” said Gene. “How about you?”
“Nope,” said Jake, wishing the burgers would hurry up and get done already.
“You play any intercollegiate sports?” said Gene.
“I was varsity on the Hartford College Frisbee team.”
Gene glowered and rattled the ice cubes in his glass. “Those plastic plates kids toss around on the beach? That’s a sport?”
“It was,” said Jake wistfully, bending over to blow gently on the coals. Cook, little patties, please cook.
“McKinley is going to be a ballplayer,” said Gene. “I can tell.”
“What position?” asked Jake, with thinly disguised drollery.
Gene held his gin and tonic at arm’s length. “With that reach of his, maybe he could play first base.”
Right now maybe he could be first base, thought Jake. What are these burgers made of? Asbestos?
“I hope you and Karen are thinking about the boy’s future,” said Gene, sipping audibly. “Are you? Thinking about the boy’s future?”
“We buy disposable diapers in quantity,” said Jake.
“It’s important he gets a solid religious foundation,” said Gene. “Isn’t it about time he was baptized?”
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