by Lisa Tucker
They’d gone out to shut it, but first they’d gone inside to turn the light off, and that’s when they discovered that Father’s shed wasn’t for storage as Jimmy and I had always thought. It wasn’t even a shed, but a full room where Father seemed to have been living during the time I was gone, judging from the pillows and blankets on the couch and many cigar stubs in the ashtray. He also had a phone out there, over on the desk, and a small bathroom off the main room. When I saw his glasses on the table in front of the couch, I picked them up and carefully placed them in my purse. I couldn’t imagine he’d left his glasses behind unless he was very ill, and I was even more anxious to get to Pueblo.
Lucy seemed shaken by all the pictures Father had of her: an entire wall of them. She stared at them without speaking, and when Jimmy came over and stood next to her, she leaned her head against his shoulder.
I wanted to give them a minute, so I went to the desk to look at Father’s computer. I wished I’d known he had this, because I loved Stephen’s laptop. Of course I also loved Stephen’s television, and Father had a very nice TV as well, though Lucy said later that the only thing he could have watched were movies, since the TV wasn’t hooked up to a cable. But his DVD stack was so small, without a Blockbuster I couldn’t imagine that he’d used his TV very often. I wondered how much time he’d spent out here over the years, presumably when Jimmy and I were in bed, since I’d never seen him go out here unless he needed a tool.
It must have been quite a lot of time, according to Lucy. A few minutes later, she was answering Jimmy’s question about the papers on Father’s desk, and she told him they were scripts. “A script is a story for the movies.” She picked up one. “This is more like a shooting script because it has camera angles and other production notes telling how the movie should be made.” Since Father had written no fewer than forty of these, and maybe as many as sixty or seventy, Lucy estimated, she said he had to be working out here almost constantly whenever he wasn’t taking care of us.
“I wonder why he kept writing,” she said quietly.
“I really think we should go,” I finally said. “Pueblo is quite a distance from here. Dr. Humphrey told me it will take at least an hour and a half.”
Lucy and Jimmy agreed, but before we left the shed, Lucy picked up a pile of Father’s movie stories to take with us. I didn’t understand why, but I felt it wasn’t my business to ask.
The drive to Pueblo took closer to three hours; Lucy had to stop twice and walk around because her leg was bothering her again. I told her several times how sorry I was that she had to do this for us, but she said she didn’t mind. Otherwise, she didn’t talk much and neither did Jimmy and I. I knew my brother was too busy worrying about Father, just as I was.
When we arrived at the hospital, Lucy told us to take our time. “I’ll find the cafeteria and wait there,” she said. “We’ll figure out what to do next once you find out how your father is.”
Jimmy and I rushed to the room the clerk told us was Father’s. It was on the first floor, but at a distance from the lobby, and by the time we got there I was out of breath.
The first thing I saw was Stephen, sitting on a plastic couch outside the room, with his head cradled in the crook of his arm, and his eyes closed. It occurred to me that he was asleep only after I’d blurted out his name; I was so amazed that he was here.
The first thing he saw was me panting, which must have been why he assumed I was having an attack. He quickly told me to relax; everything would be all right. He stood up and pointed at the chair. “Here, sit. Lean your head down.”
I told him I was fine though. Jimmy asked if he could go in and Stephen said yes. “But he’s resting, so you won’t be able to talk to him.”
“How is he?” I said, when the door closed behind Jimmy.
“They’ve just upgraded him from critical,” Stephen said. “That’s a good sign. He’s going to recover.”
He put his arms around me, and I didn’t speak or move for fear it would end.
“I’m so glad to see you,” I finally whispered. I leaned back and looked at him. “But why are you here?”
“I came to your house last night and found your father pretty sick. I drove him here, and then this morning, I tried to track you down in L.A. They didn’t have a listing for Lucy Dobbins, and the number for Al Goodman was unlisted. I was planning to ask your father how to get a hold of you, once he was more awake.”
“You know who Lucy is? Al too?”
He nodded. “Your father told me the whole story.”
“Why did you come to my house?”
“I was looking for you. I wanted to tell you that I’m sorry for the other night.”
“Please don’t apologize. I’ve been so worried about you.”
“I have to talk to you about that night,” he said, looking off into the distance. “I have to talk to you about a few things.” He paused. “But let’s go see your father first.”
“Thank you. I’d like that.”
As we walked into Father’s room, he took my hand in his.
Poor Father, he looked so pale and terribly thin and weak, lying in the middle of the bed, connected by many wires to what Stephen told me were monitors. He was asleep; Stephen said it was partly his illness and partly the medicine they were giving him. “He’ll be awake later,” he said.
I leaned down and kissed him softly. The wrinkles under his eyes were much more visible without his glasses, and he looked older and so fragile and alone.
Jimmy was sitting on the windowsill, looking out into the dark. When I walked over to him and touched his arm, he muttered, “I don’t care what his name is anymore.”
“I know.”
“I don’t care if everything he’s ever told me is a lie.” His voice was breaking up. “I keep thinking about when I left. I saw his face in the upstairs window. I knew he wasn’t spying on me or even thinking I would see him. He just wanted to see me.”
I put my arm around my brother.
“God, he’s so crazy. When I saw all those pictures of Mom on the wall, I thought, My father is fucking crazy.” Jimmy was laughing and crying at the same time. “You know how I felt then, Thea?”
“No,” I said.
“I’d never felt closer to him.”
twenty-four
LUCY WAS SITTING in the rental car, on her cell phone with Al, trying to explain why she was in Colorado, parked outside of a hospital that was treating her seriously ill ex-husband. She’d already told him what she’d discovered about the bizarre way Charles had raised Jimmy and Dorothea, keeping them away from everything and everyone, as if their house—which was twice the size of their place in Malibu, and as lavishly furnished as the fanciest Hollywood palaces—were some sort of fortress against the world.
“He’s all they know,” she said. “For nineteen years, he was all they had other than their grandmother, and Margaret could never go against Charles on anything.”
“But if he’s as sick as you’re saying, and he doesn’t die, it could be weeks before he gets better.” Al’s voice was impatient. “Even if they let him out of the hospital, he might not be able to stay alone. What are you and the kids going to do then?”
“I haven’t thought that far,” she admitted.
“Lucy, you can’t let yourself feel sorry for that jerk. He never felt sorry for you, did he? For all he knows, you could have died years ago. You could have jumped off a bridge and he wouldn’t have lifted a finger to help.”
“I don’t feel sorry for Charles. I feel sorry for my children.”
“So do I,” he said. “That’s why I think you should get them away from Keenan as soon as you can.”
“Maybe you’re right,” she said, turning the key to start the engine, so she could turn on the heater. Tomorrow was the first day of May, but here it was still surprisingly cold.
“They should have been with you all this time. Then none of this shit would have happened.”
Lucy didn’t say anything.
Over the years, she’d spent countless hours wondering what it would have been like if Charles and the children had never left. She wanted to believe that she would have stopped the pills and been a good mother, but there was no evidence this was true. She wanted to believe that she wouldn’t have driven drunk or high with her children, that she would never have risked their safety—except she knew this wasn’t true. She had tried to drive with them, several times, but Charles had always stopped her. She’d even laughed in his face when he’d said it was too dangerous.
Al exhaled. “I hope you’re not wearing yourself out, babe.”
“I’m not. Really, I’m not even tired.”
He paused for a moment. “You said you haven’t seen him yet. Are you going to?”
Lucy looked at the fluorescent lights of the hospital, stark against the dark mountain sky. “I don’t think I can be in the same room with Charles. Even if Dorothea and Jimmy want me to, I don’t think I can.”
“Well, I sure could,” Al said. “If I got to hit him.”
Lucy laughed a little, but when she hung up, she wondered why she didn’t want to hit Charles. She’d told Al the truth: she really didn’t feel sorry for him. How could she feel sorry for him when he had what she wanted so badly—the affection of her children?
Even Jimmy had changed his tune completely when he heard Charles was sick. Of course she understood, but still it hurt, knowing it was possible, even probable, that they would never feel that way about her. How could she hope to compete with the nineteen years he’d had the children to himself? No matter what she did to make up for the past—and she was determined to do damn near anything—if Charles ever needed them, she could end up stuck in another situation like this, alone in an empty car, with her leg hurting and her stomach growling and her face muscles literally sore from trying not to let on what a strain this was.
The moment when she’d walked into his house was almost more irony than she could bear. After all those years of looking and looking for this place, it was right in front of her, and the door wasn’t even locked. As she walked around with Jimmy, her own son, she felt the same sense of being an outsider that she’d had at the party with Janice, the first time she’d gone to Charles’s house in Beverly Hills. She’d even stolen something, come to think of it, though she planned to give Charles’s scripts back. Not to him, but to Dorothea or Jimmy. She wouldn’t want him to know that she was curious, actually more than curious because there was an emotional side to it too. She was hoping the scripts would tell her what Charles had been thinking all these years, and especially why he did this.
She turned on the map light and grabbed the pile from the seat behind her. She needed to eat, but she thought she’d wait to see if Jimmy or Dorothea would come out and want to grab a bite. She had no intention of reading even one script all the way through, but an hour passed, and then another, and she was still turning the pages. Even when she went into the hospital cafeteria, to make sure the kids weren’t waiting for her inside, she carried the one she was reading with her, and juggled it on the way out with the large coffee and donut she’d bought.
It was 4:12, according to the clock on the dashboard, when she finally put down the sixth script, finished, and decided to read only the first few pages of the three that remained in her pile. She was pretty sure she knew what they’d be about at this point, and she was right. They were all about the same thing, though Lucy felt sure most people wouldn’t realize this. Even if all of the scripts were produced—and they could be because, God knows, they were all really good stories—only a few people who’d been their closest friends would ever see what connected them together. The settings varied from Texas in 1860 to New York in 2002; the characters ranged from coal miners to hotshot executives on Wall Street to people in Hollywood who were an awful lot like people they’d worked with (especially one particularly corrupt director named “Brant Markus”). Even the action was different enough in each script that it had taken Lucy hours to see what was always the same.
The characters always started out happy and then tragedy struck. Once Lucy saw this, she understood why every script had a first scene that was so peaceful and beautiful it seemed like a paradise. The pattern was even more striking because Lucy knew it was the opposite of the kind of movie Charles used to write, especially the Westerns, where the movie opened with a mess and then used the rest of the film to solve it.
Sometimes the characters made it through the tragedy, but usually only one or two were really happy at the end. And always, there was a man who was ruined by it all. Maybe the man was the father of a boy who had leukemia, and even when the boy got well, the father had already lost his job and self-respect. Maybe the man was the cause of the tragedy, as in the only Western in the stack of scripts, about a man who accidentally shot his best friend and was so eaten up with remorse that he became more dangerous than the bad guys.
Lucy thought they were all autobiographical in theme, but the sixth one, the one Lucy stopped after reading, was the only one she knew was actually about Charles’s life. The script was called Sins of the Father, and it was about an eleven-year-old boy whose father is a policeman. The boy, Frederick (Charles’s middle name), adores his dad, Joseph (Charles’s father’s middle name). But the boy doesn’t know that Joe is really a bad cop and a bad man. He spends his nights in bars and strip clubs, and he accepts protection money from half the drug dealers in town. As in The View from Main Street, the son tries to save his father, but this time the threat isn’t a car, but his own corruption. The boy is in the wrong place at the wrong time and ends up being the only witness to a robbery that his father pretends to stop, but is really part of. His dad is killed during an argument about splitting the money, but not before he tells his son to go home, and when Fred keeps clinging to him, his father elbows him in the face, hitting his right eye and sending him sprawling to the ground.
The person ruined by the tragedy in this script wasn’t the father, who started out bad, but his son. Fred starts to change when he lies to everyone and says that his father really did try to stop the robbery and that’s how he was killed. He even lies to his mother about his eye, saying one of the bad guys hit him. “Dad was trying to protect me,” Fred says. “He died trying to protect me.” His mother believes him because she could never think of her husband as anything but perfect. Everyone believes him, but Fred himself starts to go crazy.
Everywhere he goes, he thinks he sees these guys. He’s sure they’re going to come back and kill him and his mother. Whenever she’s late at work, he has visions of her lying on the street, covered in blood, the way his father was. He starts skipping school, and loses all his friends because he can’t go to their houses, and he’s afraid to have them at his, in case the bad guys come and kill them too. By the end of the script, Fred is grown up, but alone in a dive in downtown L.A., still terrified to be involved with anyone for fear something will happen to them. The last scene is Fred talking to himself. “My father was a good man. A good father tries to protect his children, the way my father protected me.”
The impact of this script on Lucy was like everything about this day. On the one hand, she wanted to scream that Charles had never told her about this. Even when the eye doctor asked Charles if his eye had ever been injured, since injuries could cause dropsy like his, he said no, not that he remembered. When Lucy herself asked him how his father died, he said he’d died in the line of duty. “Did you really see it happen?” Lucy said, remembering the tabloid version. “Yes,” he answered, “but I can’t discuss it. It’s something I’d give anything to be able to forget.”
On the other hand, Lucy wanted to cry, thinking about him as that eleven-year-old boy, and later too, when he found her on September 21. She wanted to cry thinking about all the times he’d begged the police to try harder to find the two men. She even wanted to cry thinking of the way he’d lived with Jimmy and Dorothea for all these years, as if he were so desperate to protect them that he was willing to give up abso
lutely everything in his own life, from his work to any friends to even the possibility of love.
Charles’s scripts had a compassion for his characters that Lucy hadn’t had for either herself or him. This was what she most wanted to cry about. For nineteen years, she’d blamed herself for her addiction and for losing her family and she’d blamed Charles for taking them. But in the scripts, the tragedy just happened. It wasn’t anyone’s fault. Their reactions were their fault, and eventually their downfall, but first there had to be the terrible event that they couldn’t control. The act of fate or God or just bad luck that sent them spinning out of their good lives into something they just couldn’t find their way out of.
All this time when Lucy was feeling guilty about her role or angry about Charles’s, she’d never thought that the blame had to be at least shared with the man who’d attacked her, whose unbelievable cruelty on that day had started it all. If that day hadn’t happened, what would her life have been like? She would never know, but she was sure of one thing. She wouldn’t be sitting in this parking lot while her ex-husband, a man she never denied she once loved, was lying in a hospital, seriously ill. She wouldn’t just sit there, knowing her children were inside that hospital now, possibly watching their father die.
Lucy got out of the car just as the sky was starting to turn pink over the mountains. She’d been up all night, but she was still wide awake. Even her leg didn’t hurt as she walked across the parking lot and inside the door and down the hall to Charles’s room.
If she’d had to think about what she would say to him, she would have turned back. If she’d had to think about how she’d explain it to Al later—because of course she would have to tell him about this—she might have decided it was a bad idea, after all. But she didn’t think of anything other than the family they’d once been, before that horrible day, when she and Charles had still been living the first scene, the paradise of hope.