by Lisa McMann
“Mom?” Janie doesn’t know what to do. As they turn toward the kitchen, Janie gives Cabel a helpless look and he shrugs. “Mother.”
Dorothea pulls orange juice from the fridge, ice and vodka from the freezer, and pours herself some breakfast. “What?” she asks, sniffling.
“Is this Henry guy my father?”
“Of course he’s your father. I’m no whore.”
Cabel makes a muffled noise from the other room.
“Okay, so he’s dying?”
Janie’s mother takes a long drink from the glass. “That’s what they say.”
“Well, was he in an accident or is it a disease or what?”
Dorothea shrugs and waves her hand loosely. “His brain exploded. Or a tumor. Something.”
Janie sighs. “Do you need me to go with you to the hospital again today?”
For the first time in the conversation, Janie’s mother looks Janie in the eye. “Again? You didn’t go with me yesterday.”
“I got there as soon as I could, Ma.”
Janie’s mother drains the glass and shudders. She stands at the counter, one hand holding the empty glass, the other holding the bottle of cheap vodka, and she stares at it. She sets both glass and bottle down hard and closes her eyes. A tear escapes and runs down her cheek.
Janie rolls her eyes. “You going to the hospital or not? I’m”—she grows bold—“I’m not sitting around all day waiting.”
“Go do whatever you want, like you always do, you little tramp,” Dorothea says. “I’m not going back there anyways.” She shuffles unsteadily past Janie, down the hall and into her room, closing the door once more behind her.
Janie lets out a breath and moves back into the living room where Cabel sits, a witness to it all. “Okay,” she says. “Now what?”
Cabel looks peeved. He shakes his head. “Well, what do you think you should do?”
“I’m not going back to see him, if that’s what you’re asking.”
“Me? Of course not. It’s totally up to you if you want to see the guy.”
“Right. Good.”
“I mean, he’s a deadbeat dad. Never done a thing for you. Who knows, maybe he has another family. Think of how awkward that would be if you just showed up and they were all there . . . . ” Cabel trails off.
“Yeah, God, I never thought of that.”
“I’m trying to think if there were any Feingolds at Fieldridge High. Maybe you have half-siblings, you know?”
“There’s that one guy, Josh, that freshman who played varsity basketball,” Janie says.
“That’s Feinstein.”
“Oh.”
And then there is a moment, a pause, as Cabel waits for Janie.
“So, Feingold, that’s Jewish, right?” she asks.
“Does that change anything if it is?”
“No. I mean, wow. It’s interesting, anyway. I never really thought about my roots, you know? History. Ancestors. Wow.” Janie’s lost in thought.
Cabel nods. “Ah, well. You’ll never know, I guess.”
Janie freezes and then looks at Cabel.
Winds up and slugs him in the arm.
Hard.
“Ugh!” she says. “You loser.”
Cabel laughs, rubbing his arm. “Dang! What’d I do this time?”
Janie seethes, half-jokingly. She shakes her head. “You made me give a shit.”
“Come on,” he says. “You cared before. Didn’t you ever wonder who your father was?”
Janie thinks about the recurring dream her mother has—the kaleidoscope one where Dorothea and the hippie guy hold hands, floating. She’d wondered more than once who her father was. Wonders now if that was Henry in the dream.
“He’s probably some suit with two-point-two kids and a dog and a house by U of M.” Janie looks around her crap-hole of a house. Her crap-hole life, playing mom to an alcoholic twice her age. Knowing that without Dorothea’s welfare check and Janie’s income to supplement it, they are just one step away from being homeless. But Janie doesn’t want to think about that.
Janie takes a deep breath and lets it out slowly. “All right. I’m grabbing a shower now, and later I’ll head over to the hospital. I suppose you’re coming with me then?”
Cabel smiles. “ ’Course. I’m your driver, remember?”
11:29 a.m.
Cabel and Janie take the stairs up to the third floor. By the time they reach the double doors that lead to the ward, Janie’s moving more and more slowly until she stops. She turns abruptly and goes into the waiting room instead.
“I can’t do this,” she says.
“You don’t have to. But if you don’t, I think you’ll be pissed at yourself later.”
“If he has any other visitors, I’m leaving.”
“That’s fair.”
“What if . . . what if he’s awake? What if he sees me?”
Cabel presses his lips together. “Well, after what your mother said about his brain exploding, I highly doubt that will happen.”
Janie sighs deeply and again walks toward the double doors with Cabel following. “Okay.” She pushes through and does an automatic cursory glance, like she used to do at Heather Home, to see if any of the patients’ doors are open. Luckily, most are closed, and Janie’s not picking up any dreams today.
Janie approaches the desk, this time with confidence. “Henry Feingold, please.”
“Family only,” the nurse says automatically. His name tag says “Miguel.”
“I’m his daughter.”
“Hey,” he says, looking at her more carefully. “Aren’t you that narc girl?”
“Yeah.” Janie tries not to fidget visibly.
“I saw you on the news. You did a good job.”
Janie smiles. “Thank you. So . . . what room?”
“Room three-twelve. End of the hall on the right.” Miguel points at Cabel. “You?”
“He’s—” Janie says. “He and I. We’re together.”
The nurse eyes Janie. “I see. So. He’s your . . . brother?”
Janie lets out a small breath and smiles gratefully. “Yes.”
Cabel nods and remains quiet, almost as if to prove to Miguel that he will behave despite being completely unrelated to anyone in the vicinity.
“Can you tell me what his condition is?”
“He’s not conscious, hon. Doctor Ming will have to give you an update.” Miguel gives Janie a look of sympathy. A look that says, “Things are not good.”
“Thank you,” Janie murmurs. She sets off down the hallway with Cabel close behind. And when she opens the door . . .
Static. The noise is like top-volume radio static. Janie drops to her knees and holds her ears, even though she knows that won’t help. Bright colors fly around her, giant slabs of red and purple; a wave of yellow so shocking it feels like it burns her eyeballs. She tries to speak but she can’t.
There’s no one there. Just wretched static and blinding lights. It’s so painful, so void of feeling or emotion, it’s like nothing Janie’s ever witnessed before.
With a huge effort, Janie concentrates and pulls hard. Just as she feels herself pulling away, the scene blinks and clears. For a split second, there’s a woman standing in a huge, dark room, and a man sitting in a chair in the corner, fading as Janie closes the door on that nightmare.
Janie catches her breath and when she can see again and feel her extremities, finds herself on her hands and knees just inside the doorway of the room. Cabel’s right there beside her, muttering something, but she’s not paying attention. She stares at the tiles on the floor and wonders briefly if that dream, that chaos, is what hell might be like.
“I’m okay,” she says to Cabel, slowly getting to her feet, dusting invisible floor-dirt particles from her bare knees.
And then she straightens. Turns.
Looks at the source of the nightmare, and sees him for the first time.
The man who is her father. Whose DNA she carries.
Janie
sucks in a breath. Slowly, her hand goes to her mouth and she takes a step backward. Her eyes grow wide in horror.
“Oh, my God,” she whispers. “What the hell is that?”
WHAT THE HELL IT IS
Still Friday, August 4, 2006, 11:40 a.m.
Cabel puts his arm around Janie’s shoulders, whether to show support or to keep her from bolting from the room, Janie doesn’t know. Doesn’t care. She’s too horrified to move.
“He looks like a cross between Captain Caveman and the Unabomber,” she whispers.
Cabel nods slowly. “Whoa. That’s some funky Alice Cooper frizz.” He turns to look at Janie. Says, in a soft voice, “What was the dream like?”
Janie can’t take her eyes off the thin, very hairy man in the bed. He’s surrounded by machines, but none of them are attached, none turned on. He wears no casts, no bandages. No gauze or white tape.
Just a look of incredible agony on his face.
She glances at Cabel, answers his question. “It was a strange dream,” Janie says. “I’m not even sure it was a dream. It was more like a nondream. Like . . . when you’re watching TV and the cable goes out. You get that loud, static, fuzzy noise at full blast.”
“Weird. Was it black-and-white dots, too?”
“No—colors. Like giant beams of incredibly bright colors—purple, red, yellow. Three-dimensional colored walls turning and coming at me, coming together to make a box and closing in on me, so bright I could hardly stand it. It was awful.”
“I’m glad you got out of it.”
Janie nods. “Then for a split second, the walls disappeared and there was a woman there, way at the end, but it was too late for me to see. I was already pulling out of it. It felt like I was about to glimpse a piece of a real dream, maybe.”
“Can you go back in?”
“I don’t know. I’ve never tried that,” she says. “Maybe if I go out of the room, shut the door, and come back in. But I don’t really think I want to, you know?”
Cabel nods. He takes a step closer to the man. Picks up the chart that dangles from the foot of the bed. Stares at it intently for a moment and flips the top page over to look at the next page. Hands it to Janie. “I don’t really understand this stuff. You want to know what’s going on?”
Janie takes the clipboard uncertainly, feeling like she’s intruding on a stranger. Still, she looks at it. Tries to decipher the terminology. But even with her experience working at Heather Home, there’s not much Janie can understand.
“Huh. Looks like they detected sporadic, mild brain activity.”
“Mild? Is that good?” Cabel sounds worried.
“I don’t think so,” Janie says. She puts the chart back.
“Can he hear us?” Cabel whispers.
Janie’s quiet for a moment. Then she whispers too. “It’s possible. At Heather Home, we always talked to the Hospice coma patients as if they could hear us, and told the families to do it too. Just in case.”
Cabel swallows hard and looks at Janie, suddenly tongue-tied. He nudges her and nods toward the bed.
Janie frowns. “Don’t rush me,” she whispers.
She peers at the man. Steps closer. A shiver overtakes her and she stops when she’s just a step away from her grizzly father. What if he’s faking and he jumps up at me? Janie shivers again.
She takes a deep breath, and for a moment, she’s Janie Hannagan, undercover. Looks more closely at Henry’s distressed expression. Under all the long, black facial hair his skin is rough. Pockmarked. Janie wonders if he’s the one she has to thank for her occasional zitbreaks. The hair on his head is patchy and thin in spots—as if great bunches of it had been pulled out. In places, she can see Henry’s scalp. It’s covered in red scratches.
She looks at his hands. His fingernails are clean but chewed down to the quick. Little scabs dot his cuticles. The hair on his chest that protrudes from his hospital gown is also patchy and decidedly grayer than the hair on his head. His complexion is grayish-white, as if he hadn’t seen much sun all summer, but his arms have a light farmer’s tan line.
“What happened to you?” She whispers it, more to herself than to him.
He doesn’t stir. Still, the look of agony on his face is more than a bit unsettling. She wonders if the static is still going on in his mind. “That must be very painful,” she murmurs.
Abruptly she looks at Cabel. “This is too weird,” she mouths. Points at the door. Cabel nods and they step out. Closing the door again. “Too weird,” Janie says aloud. It’s more than she can deal with. “Let’s go. Let’s just . . . go work out or mess around or get lunch or something. I gotta get this guy out of my head.”
12:30 p.m.
They stop at Frank’s Bar and Grille and run into half a dozen cops who are on their way out.
“Come back from vacation early just because you missed us?” Jason Baker teases.
Janie likes him. “You wish. Little family emergency brought us home early. It’s all fine now,” she says lightly.
Cabel and Janie sit up at the counter for a quick lunch. Janie gets a free milkshake for being narc girl.
It’s not all bad.
1:41 p.m.
Janie slings her smooth leg over Cabel’s hairy one.
Their toes play together quietly while they work in Cabe’s basement.
Janie searches WebMD for brain illnesses and injuries and gets nowhere—there are way too many to narrow down.
Cabel Googles “Henry Feingold.” “Well,” he says. “There’s no information on a Henry Feingold in Fieldridge, Michigan. There’s a pretty prolific author with that name, but he doesn’t appear to be the same guy. Whatever your dad does—er, did—for a living, it’s not out there on the Internet. At least not under his real name.”
Janie closes the lid of her laptop. Sighs. “This is impossible, trying to figure him out. I wonder why they’re not doing anything for him, you know?”
“Maybe he doesn’t have insurance,” Cabel says in a low voice. “Not trying to judge him by the way he looks, but he’s no corporate exec, obviously.”
“That’s probably it.” Janie closes her eyes. Rests her head on Cabel’s shoulder. Thinks about the two people that are related to her. Her mother—alcoholic-thin, greasy, stringy hair, old and brittle-looking in her mid-thirties; her father some sort of weird cross between Rupert from Survivor and Hagrid. “How can you even stand to think about what I’ll look like in fifteen years when I’m all blind and gnarled, Cabe? Good fucking grief, what a familial circus of deformity.”
“Why do you care so much about how you’ll look?” He strokes her thigh. “You’ll always be beautiful to me.” He says it casually, but Janie can hear the strain in his voice.
“Still, they’re both such freaks.”
Cabel smiles. He sets his laptop on the floor, takes Janie’s from her and does the same, and then slowly pushes against her until she’s lying on her back. She giggles. He lies on top of her, pressing against her, squeezing her just like she likes. She wraps her arms around his neck, pulling his nose to hers. “I lurve you, circus freak,” Cabel says.
It almost hurts to hear him say that.
“I lurve you, too, you big lumpy monster man,” Janie says.
That hurts even more to say.
And then they kiss.
Slowly, gently.
Because with the right person, sometimes kissing feels like healing.
Still, something edges to the front of Janie’s mind. Wonders if it’s worth it—worth going blind, when there’s another option.
Besides, what if Cabel won’t own up to his fears about being with her?
It’s fucking scary, is what it is.
It’s like Cabe’s the one who’s blind.
The kissing slows and Cabel rests his face in the crook of Janie’s neck, nibbling her flushed skin. “What are you thinking about?”
“Uh . . . besides you?”
“Clever,” Cabel says, a grin spreading, his moving lips tickling
Janie’s neck. He nips at her. “Yes, besides me. If it’s possible for you to think about anything else, that is.”
“Oh,” she says. “If there were anything else, it would probably be how I need to get some cajones and go confront my mother.” Absently, she smooths his hair away from his eyes. “Try and figure out what happened with them, and with me, and what we’re supposed to do now with hermit dude.”
Cabel sits back and nods. And then he hoists himself up with a grunt. Pulls Janie to her feet too. “You want me to come with you?”
“I think it’ll be better if I do it alone. But thanks.”
“I figured. Call me, ’kay?”
Freakishly, Janie’s phone rings as he says it.
“It’s Carrie—I gotta take this.” Janie blows a kiss to Cabel as she ascends the stairs and she answers it. “Carrie!”
“Yo, bitch, my phone’s charged up again. How’s the whole family soap opera going today? You okay?”
“It’s weird, and it’s a mess, but it’s okay. Thank you again for taking care of my mother. You’re the best.”
“No problem. Somebody’s gotta clean up the neighborhood, right?”
“Ouch. Jeez, Carrie!” But Janie chuckles anyway.
“Well, you know where to find me if you need me,” Carrie says. “Hey?”
“Hey what?”
“I’m engaged.”
“What?”
“Stu asked me last night.”
“Oh Em Gee what the Ef barbecue!” Janie says. “And you said yes?”
“Obviously, since I just said I was engaged.”
“Wow, Carrie. Are you . . . are you sure? Are you happy about it?”
“Yeah. I mean yes, totally! I know Stu’s the guy I want to be with.”
“But?”
“But I wasn’t quite expecting it yet.”
Janie, having walked from Cabel’s to her own house, walks to Carrie’s instead. “Are you home?”
“Yeah.”
“Can I come in?”
“Sweet,” Carrie says, sounding relieved. “Yeah, come on in. My room, of course.”
“Okay, bye.” Janie hangs up her phone and lets herself in. She barges into Carrie’s room and flops down on the bed. Carrie sits at a little dressing table, working her hair with a straightening wand in front of the mirror.