by Jake Wolff
* * *
When everything was ready, I set the dials on the machine. I watched my dad sleep, allowing myself a few seconds of quiet to consider the magnitude of the occasion. I’d spent a lot of time thinking about what would happen if the elixir didn’t work, but not until I had my finger hovering over that big yellow button—ANFANG—did I understand how much of a killer I would be if things went wrong.
I punched the button. My dad’s jaw clenched and puckered as if he’d bitten into a lemon. His arms pulled against the restraints, his shoulders rocking. For an awful second, his eyes opened, and I could see only the whites of them, like the bark of a birch tree. He dug his fingernails into his palms, and I tried to reach in, to pry his fingers apart.
After what felt like forever but had only been four or five seconds, his body went slack. I thought for sure I had killed him. I threw my face against his chest, listening for breath, for a heartbeat. It was there, but faint. I reached for the machine, turning it up to 600. My dad was so quiet I wanted to punch him right in his slack, yellow face. The safety features required a delay of ten seconds before I could press ANFANG again, and these seconds I counted out loud: “One Mississippi, two Mississippi, three Mississippi…” Normally, a heart-rate monitor would beep or flatline, making noise, speaking for my father. But none of that equipment was here. It was just me and my dad and the Konvulsator, surrounded by dust.
“… ten Mississippi.” ANFANG.
My dad’s body surged again, and he was alive, twitching and rocking. This time, a seizure took hold. His fingers waggled and danced as if he were playing the piano. His jaw worked around the mouthguard, trying to spit it out, but the mouthguard held. He tried to roll over in his seat, and I was worried he’d break his shoulder, so I threw myself on top of him, weighing him down against the leather padding. He didn’t make any noise, other than the sound of his body rubbing against the fabric. He just fought and fought, and I fought back, gripping his arms, leaning into him, giving it everything I had—because fuck him, that’s why. Because live. I needed someone to live.
When the seizure passed, he relaxed again, still sleeping. I could hear his heartbeat with my ear on his ribs. I turned off the Konvulsator and slumped, exhausted, to the floor. The adrenaline left my body, and I felt as if it had taken my lungs with it. I looked at my father, and I shook, and I asked myself if this was a journey you don’t come back from, even if you do.
* * *
An hour later, my father woke up. I’d removed the restraints, and he used his left hand to wipe the drool off his chin.
“Ugh,” he mumbled, his eyes barely open.
I pulled myself off the floor and stood over him. “Hey, Dad.”
“Conrad? We should get you to school.”
“No school today.” That was a lie. “How do you feel?”
He scooted himself up in the seat, but barely. “Like I’ve been drugged.”
He slept until noon.
* * *
At eleven, the color of his skin began to change, subtly at first, just a small, hesitant brightening. I tried different things to test it. I covered one eye, I put my own skin next to his. Everything I did stoked the fires of hope: my father was losing his yellowness.
When he first began to wake, I studied his eyes as he blinked, moisture forming in the corners. His pupils were small and pure glossy black, and the whites of his eyes were white only. The dark rings around his irises had faded. They were wide and brown.
“Whoa,” he said, after a moment. “Not so close, Con.”
I pulled away and touched his hand, which was upturned on the armrest. The redness and swelling in his palms had faded, though I could still see it there. “How do you feel?”
“Good,” he said casually, as though of course he was good, what else would he be?
“Okay,” I said hesitantly, not wanting to jinx it. “Can you stand?”
He looked around. “We’re in Winterville.”
“We drove here last night.”
He touched his head where the electrodes had been, but he didn’t ask any of the questions I was expecting. I helped him stand. His legs were firm under his body, and he led me down the hall, not asking why we were in the Health Organization.
Before we stepped into the cold sunlight, he turned to me. “Hey, mind if we stop by the old house before we go?”
“Okay?” I said, confused.
“Awesome. Vámonos.”
When we reached the car, he hopped into the driver’s seat.
* * *
“You hungry or anything?” he asked me an hour or so later, as we headed south toward Littlefield. We were in the part of Maine where all the lakes have either Native American names—Molonkus, Mattawamkeag—or literal ones: Pleasant Lake, Long Pond.
“I’m fine.” I was watching him, as I had been all afternoon. He was driving easily but attentively, checking his blind spots and using his turn signal. The color in his face was still good, but when he coughed—why was he still coughing?—I could hear the weakness in his lungs. He drove the speed limit. He hadn’t asked me a single question about what we’d been doing, or why he felt better. He didn’t even acknowledge that he did feel better.
We passed a police officer at the bottom of a hill who was camping for speeders, and my dad made the joke he always used to make, holding a shushing finger to his lips and ducking down in his seat. For me, it was like sharing the car with a ghost—my old father, back from the dead. When we’d gone to the house, just before leaving Winterville, he told me again about the red cedar roof, and when I didn’t say anything, he squeezed my shoulder and said, “Is it too hard for you to be here?” It had been so long since he’d shown real, nonsarcastic concern for me that I’d almost recoiled from the weight of his hand. If he noticed, he didn’t say anything. He just watched the house for a few more seconds, then put the car in reverse.
“Have you talked to Dana? She’ll be worried.”
I didn’t tell him that last time I’d checked, I had over thirty calls from Dana, plus an additional ten to fifteen texts from Sadiq and RJ. I turned on my phone and quickly typed a message to all three of them, individually, letting them know we’d be back at St. Matthias by seven. I pictured my dad a few months from now, working again, living on his own. I pictured him back at school, in front of a classroom.
“What are you smiling about?” he asked, stretching one arm, yawning. The car strayed into the breakdown lane, the tires catching the rumble strip.
* * *
When we reached St. Matthias, we were greeted by the flashing lights of an ambulance in the parking lot. The sky was pink and purple, the sun low against the water. We parked as far from the ambulance as we could, not wanting to be in its way. St. Matthias was full of sick people, and I assumed the ambulance was for one of them.
“Is that Dana?” my dad said as we exited the car.
It was Dana. She was running across the parking lot, Emmett behind her, signaling to someone. She was wearing her scarf like a bonnet, which made her look old, like a person who shouldn’t be running.
“They’re over here!” she was yelling.
The rear doors of the ambulance opened, and two EMTs emerged in reflective black-and-yellow jackets. They pulled a gurney out of the back and fell in line behind my aunt, and seeing her lead this team of men toward us was such a weird sight. As they came near, I braced myself for Dana’s anger, but she was too hurried for that.
She wasn’t even looking at me. “Ned, where the hell—it doesn’t matter. You’re going to the hospital. Now.”
“Whoa,” he said.
The EMTs were circling the car.
“What’s happening?” I said to my aunt.
She was trying to pull me away. “I’ll explain in the car.”
“Wait,” I said, freeing myself from her. The EMTs were laying my father down, securing him to the bed. I ran to him. He was watching the EMTs strap him in with a surprised but affable smile.
He r
aised his eyebrows to me. “This got interesting!”
The EMTs started to wheel him away, but I held on to the bed. “He’s fine!” I said, though I wasn’t sure if that was true. “He’s better!”
My dad uncurled my fingers from the frame. “Go with Dana. I’ll see you there.”
As he took my father away, one of the EMTs touched my arm. “Don’t be scared. This is a good thing.”
I could only stare as they loaded him into the back of the ambulance and shut the doors. What was I going to say? How could I possibly explain? Dana was standing next to me, with Emmett waiting to the side, strangely aloof, strangely angry.
Dana wrapped her arms around me. “We’re going to talk about where you’ve been. But I’m very happy to see you.”
Nothing made any sense to me. I hadn’t slept for almost thirty-six hours.
“Let’s go.” Dana released me from the warmth of her hug. She took my wrist and dragged me to her car, and we rode together to the hospital, where, by the time we arrived, my father’s liver transplant had already begun.
22
Goodbyes
Here’s that clue again, the Copper Code:
Cu+ + H2O2 → Cu2+ + •OH + −OH
This is what Dana told me in the car, though she expressed it in words: Wilson’s disease. It was a genetic disorder, and my father had it. He’d had it all along.
I’m not sure I said one word the entire drive. For a minute or two we hung close to the ambulance, its siren lights reflecting off our windshield. But then it ran a stop sign and we watched its red lights reduce, winking and disappearing. Dana talked and talked, and I listened to her voice, trying to follow it the way we followed the ambulance, failing hopelessly.
The Cu is copper. The human body takes in more copper than it needs, and to fix this problem, the stomach sends excess copper to the liver. There, transport protein ATP7B2 helps the body get rid of it. For this reason, ATP7B2 is known as the copper pump. My father had a broken copper pump, and this meant his liver and brain were being poisoned by copper deposits. The excess copper reacts with hydrogen peroxide (that’s the H2O2) to produce a hydroxyl radical (•OH) that destroys human tissue. The liver fails. The eyes turn yellow. And sometimes, though not often, Wilson’s disease produces remarkable changes in personality. Later, I would read the case of a twenty-five-year-old who had been prom king in high school and pursued a graduate degree in physics at MIT. Upon the onset of Wilson’s disease, he dropped out of school, renounced all ties to his family, and tried to kill himself by jumping into a sewer.
The disease is treatable, but first you have to diagnose it. In my father’s case, that proved difficult for a few reasons. First, Wilson’s disease typically arrives in much younger patients. Second, it’s easy to confuse the disease’s psychological symptoms with depression, which, since the disease manifested alongside my mother’s death, seemed the more obvious diagnosis. Third, my father’s DUI and recently developed drinking habit meant that every doctor viewed his symptoms through that lens. In short, everything about my father’s condition said depressed alcoholic widower, and no one was looking for the signs that pointed elsewhere. It was caught only because a nurse, who had just started working at the hospital, checked his last round of blood work and thought, You know, this looks more like …
The hospital, recognizing the screwup and potential for an expensive lawsuit, pushed my father to the top of the transplant list. This had all happened in less than a day. He would get a new liver, and he would be himself again—or something like himself—and I would never know for sure which aspects of his cruelty had been him and which he could blame on the disease. The car crash, the way he abandoned me, all the horrible things he’d ever said—those were real. They happened. I would have no choice but to swallow them, to begin revising every memory of him since the day my mother died. And yes, I would never know if the elixir had worked.
* * *
Hours later, I sat with Dana and Emmett in the hospital, our chairs pulled tight together. That talk Dana had staged for me earlier was about to happen. She’d intended to hold off until we were back home, but Emmett had been acting so coldly to me in the hospital that finally she said, “Okay, let’s huddle up.”
It was late, and the hospital mostly empty. My father was still in surgery. It would be another hour or more until I could see him. I kept waiting for a doctor to rush out, his eyes dark, and stare me down, saying, “What did you do to him?” But so far, nothing like that had happened. To everyone but me, my dad was just a really sick guy finally getting the help he needed.
I slouched in my chair. I was in desperate need of sleep. The world was blurry and gray, and only Emmett’s meanness kept my eyes open.
“What’s your problem?” I said to him before anyone else had the chance to speak.
“What’s your problem?”
“Boys,” Dana said.
“You’re acting like a jerk,” I said.
“Oh,” he stammered. He was almost too upset to speak. “How about this.” He began to tick off my offenses on his fingers. “One, you totally ditched me all summer and since school started. You and RJ never invite me anywhere. Two, I know what was going on with you and Mr. Tampari.”
“What—” I said, but he was still going.
“Three, you’ve been working on some kind of … potion with RJ.” Here he looked at Dana for effect. “Doing drugs. And four, you’ve been meeting with weird Middle Eastern guys about it.”
“Okay,” Dana was saying. “Okay—”
“That’s not true!” I said. The room was spinning.
“Yes, it is,” Emmett fired back. “I saw you.”
“You’re the one who’s been following me?” At the storage unit, at the hotel—it had been Emmett.
Emmett stared at the floor, and his voice went small. “Going where you guys go didn’t used to be following you. It used to be us hanging out.”
I opened my mouth to reply, but my anger had been silenced by guilt. On his list of offenses, I’d been most stunned by his knowledge of Sammy and me, but I realized he’d listed them in order of importance. Number one: I’d ditched him.
“All right,” Dana said. “Emmett, I’m going to speak to Conrad alone for a second. I think he has some things to tell me.”
Emmett began to protest, but she held up a finger, so he threw his headphones on and moved to the other side of the room. I looked at Dana, and I was much too tired to run.
“Listen,” she said. “I know a lot of what he said isn’t true. But clearly some of it is. Starting with the fact that you probably haven’t been including him lately.”
I lowered my face.
“Captain Carson told me you’ve been skipping class.” She took a breath. “You’re not on drugs, are you?”
I shook my head, happy for the chance to be truthful.
“I didn’t think so. And I know a lot of this stuff is just Emmett’s imagination. He felt left out, and he constructed this fantasy. That’s just him. That’s how he is.”
I shifted in my seat.
Over the intercom, a crackling voice summoned a doctor, but it wasn’t to surgery. Someone else’s crisis. Dana gave me a serious look. “I think we all could have done a better job paying attention to each other. What Emmett said about you and Mr. Tampari—it made me realize that relationship, and how much time you were spending together, is something I should have paid more attention to.” She paused, bracing herself. “That part of the story is true, isn’t it?”
I began to cry.
“Okay,” she said quickly. “Listen to me carefully: Whatever happened isn’t your fault.”
I shut my eyes. Even though the waiting room was empty, I felt as if everyone were looking at me.
“Hey.” She touched my arm. “I’m not mad at you. I’m really not. But I’ll be honest: some of the stuff I’m going to do next is going to feel like punishment, starting first and foremost with taking you to see a therapist.”
Imme
diately my mind flashed to Dr. Gillian Huang. I imagined a person like that seeing all the way through me, seeing all of the things I’d done. My therapist, however, would turn out to be a friendly, heavyset woman who made jams as a hobby, and whose little office smelled like blueberries.
Dana had said she wasn’t angry, but she was, just not with me. “That bastard,” she was saying under her breath.
I wiped my eyes and rubbed my nose on my sleeve. Confession had a hold of me. “I’m gay,” I told her, because this was the closest I could come to admitting how much I’d loved him.
Dana nodded. “I thought you might be.” She was looking at me but past me, as if she was weighing carefully what to say next. “Maybe I’m just tired now, and a little shocked by everything that’s happened, but I’m going to tell you the only problem I see with you being gay, and then I’ll shut up and support you for the rest of your life. Here it is: Being gay, it means you’ve cast your lot with the world of men. You’re going to surround yourself with them—you already have—and you’ve seen more than any teenager should how far that gets you, what it gets you. Your uncle was the exception, though I’m not sure you knew him well enough to see that. You always held him at arm’s length, and you’ve held me at arm’s length, too. You needed to grieve, and I let you. But that’s over now. I’m the woman in your life, God help us. Understand?”
I did understand.
Dana sighed. “I’m going to be very important to you.”
* * *
I had only a minute or two in the bathroom to recover from my talk with Dana when I received the text from RJ: S and I outside.