The Wally Lamb Fiction Collection: The Hour I First Believed, I Know This Much is True, We Are Water, and Wishin' and Hopin'

by Lamb, Wally

  She looks from me to Larry and winks. “Oh, both of you cutie pies,” she quips. I crane my neck back at Larry. Tell him he’d better go back out to the van and get his shovel so we can deal with this bullshit she’s slinging.

  They both laugh. “Speak for yourself, Doc,” Larry says. “Me, I can’t wait to get up every morning because I get better-looking every day.”

  “Oh, brother,” Paula says. “Well, what do you say, Orion? You ready for your workout?”

  “Ready as I’ll ever be.” I sigh. And with that, she rolls me into the torture chamber. Sandie’s working with an amputee who’s gotten a prosthetic leg and Kathy’s passing a beach ball back and forth with a gray-haired woman with a contorted face. Stroke, I figure.

  The transport guys? They don’t wait for you. They drop you off, then move on to their next assignment. After your appointment’s over, the receptionist calls the company for a pickup and you sit and wait. Patience is a virtue, my mother always used to say, and if that’s the case, I guess I must be pretty virtuous by now, whether I pray or not. Paula added a few new exercises this time, and I struggled with them. I’m spent. Itching to get home and maybe grab a nap. But by the time Javier, one of the younger drivers, strolls in, I’ve been parked and waiting for over an hour like a bag of groceries. It’s futile to complain, so I keep my mouth shut. “Hey there, Javier. How’s it going?”

  “Going good,” he says. Whistling, he releases the brake and wheels me out into the midafternoon sunshine. He spends most of the drive home mumbling into his cell phone. They’re not supposed to use them unless it’s the dispatcher who’s called. But I’m guessing that’s not who he’s talking to, unless the dispatcher’s name is Babe. “Yeah, I hear you, babe. I’m just saying. . . .”

  When we get to Jailhouse Hill, he signals and takes the turn. Halfway up the hill, we pass a kid learning to master her two-wheeler, her dad running alongside her. Twenty years ago, that was Ariane and me. Her brother got the hang of it right away, but not Ari. Skinned knees, tears . . .

  Javier pulls into the driveway. Hops out. As he’s lowering my chair to the ground, I see my aide coming around from the backyard. It’s the second time this week that she’s done that. A couple of days ago, I looked out and saw her coming up the path from down where the cottage is. Makes me uneasy that she might be poking around down there. Not that I think she suspects anything, or that she’d be able to lift off that granite slab. And Andrew says if anyone did go nosing around, look down the well, all they’d see is rocks and cement. But still. What’s drawing her back there? “Getting a little fresh air?” I ask her as she approaches us. She nods. Looks a little guilty unless it’s my imagination, which it very well might be. Still, I’d better keep an eye on her. Or call up the agency and tell them she’s not working out. I won’t say anything to Andrew, though. He’s jumpy enough about what’s back there. No need to get him worked up over nothing.

  Javier drives off and she wheels me around to the front. Pushes the chair up the ramp and inside. She asks me if I’m going back to work. “Nah, I think I’ll just watch a little TV—see what my buddy Dr. Oz has to say today. You start supper yet?” She says she’s got something simmering in the Crock-Pot. Asks if Andrew’s coming over to eat tonight. “Not that I know of. It’ll just be Ariane, Dario, and me.”

  As if on cue, Ari and her boy burst through the front door. She’s carrying the mail in one arm, his backpack in the other. “Package for you, Dad,” she says. “Looks like something from Amazon.”

  “Oh, good. I’ve been waiting for a book I ordered.” I turn to my grandson. “Hey there, buddy. What’s up?” He holds up something he made in day care: a drawing with crayon scribbles and glued-on doodads. “Wow, this is cool,” I tell him. “You’re an artist just like Grandma. Do you think we should send this to her and Grandma Viveca?” (Gamma and Gamma Bibeca, he calls them. I’m Bumpa.)

  He shakes his head. Says it’s for me.

  “Is it? Gee, thanks. Then maybe we should put it on the refrigerator, huh?” He nods emphatically, crawls up onto my lap. This kid has done more for my recovery than all the doctors and therapists combined. I ask his mother how things went at the group home today. Chaotic, she says. “Business as usual, eh?” She rolls her eyes and smiles. Ari loves her work, though. She’s crazy about those Down syndrome adults she supervises. Last year she did some fund-raising and took them all to Disney World.

  “Come on, kiddo,” she tells Dario. “Let’s put you in a clean pair of big boy pants.” When he whines that he wants to stay down here with Bumpa, she reminds him that he had an accident in the car and needs to get changed. His toilet training’s going pretty well overall, but he’s still having slip-ups from time to time. He slides off my lap and follows his mother out of the room.

  It’s funny how things have worked out. The way my two daughters have exchanged coasts. Marissa’s moved out to California and Ariane’s come back home. Eight months pregnant when she finally made that decision. Thank god I hadn’t sold this place after all. I’d taken it off the market even before Andrew told me what had happened the day of the wedding.

  Out in the hallway, I hear Dario talking to “Bewinda.” They’ve really taken to each other, those two. The only time I see her smile is when he’s around. I remarked the other day how good she is with him. Asked her if she had any kids of her own. She said no. No children, never married—that she took care of her mother until she died and then went into home health care. Guess I’ll hold off for a while on calling the agency. So what if she’s wandering around the property? I’m sure it’s got nothing to do with that well.

  “Dr. Oh?” she says. I jump a little. Like I said, she moves around here like a ghost. “Can I get you anything?” She’s got the feather duster in her hand.

  “No thanks, Belinda. I’m good.”

  She nods, then heads toward the living room. She dusts that room more than any of the others, I’ve noticed. Noticed, too, how she always stops and looks at that painting over the fireplace—the only one of Joe Jones’s that I’ve held on to. I wheel myself out of the den and join her in there.

  “What do you think?” I ask her. “You like that painting?” She nods. When I tell her it’s Adam and Eve beneath the Tree of Life, she nods. Says she reads her Bible every night and every morning. “You know, the artist who painted it has a connection to this place. You’ve seen that dilapidated old cottage down in back, on the other side of the brook? He used to live out there once upon a time. He and his brother. They worked for the builder who lived in this house.”

  “Oh,” she says. “He did?”

  “Uh-huh. Josephus Jones. That’s him in the painting. Adam, I mean. It’s a self-portrait. He put himself in a lot of his paintings.”

  “Oh.” What’s she looking so uncomfortable about?

  “Sad story, really. He died young. Left a lot of his paintings behind, in that cottage. Never could interest anyone in them while he was alive, but now his work has gotten pretty valuable. Before his time, maybe. I’ve sold most of the paintings that were down there. I could have gotten a lot for this one, too. It’s the largest one he ever did, far as anyone knows. But I couldn’t quite bring myself to part with it. Kind of figured it belonged here rather than in a museum or in someone’s private collection.”

  She opens her mouth to speak, then stops herself. “You looked like you were about to say something just then,” I note.

  She looks back at the painting. “I knew him,” she says.

  “Jones? Really? How?”

  She says she used to work downtown in the library when she was in high school, and that he would come in to read the newspapers and magazines. And that he’d talk with her when she was working the front desk.

  “No kidding. What was he like?”

  “He was a nice man. Very kind.”

  “So you were friends?”

  She shakes her head. “I just knew him from the library. That’s all.”

  “From what I heard,
there was some speculation about how he died—whether or not it was an accident. Some suspicion that someone might have killed him. Ever hear anything along those lines?” She shakes her head. She’s got that same guilty look she had earlier when I saw her coming back up the path. The feather duster’s shaking in her hand. “This is probably just idle gossip, but I heard somewhere along the way that they suspected his brother might have done him in. That the brother’s wife lived down there at the cottage with them, and there might have been some hanky-panky going on between her and Joe. And that the brother—”

  “Excuse me, but I better go check on dinner,” she says. Looking more upset than guilty now, she rushes out of the room.

  I sit there, thinking. Wondering. Is that why she’s gone down in back those times? Because she knew Joe Jones? Maybe they were friends, and she just doesn’t want to admit it. A lot of the locals around here are pretty set in their ways, about race along with everything else. It probably would have been frowned upon back when she was growing up: a high school girl having a black man for a friend. I suddenly remember something the woman from her agency told me: that she was going to assign me someone else, but that Belinda asked her for this placement. She had told the boss that she’d grown up on Jailhouse Hill and thought it would be nice to come back here to work. Were they neighbors, her and Joe? And if so, why wouldn’t she have told me that?

  “Dr. Oh?” Jesus, she’s just done it again—appeared out of nowhere and spooked me.

  “Yes?”

  “There was nothing going on between him and his brother’s wife. That was just a rumor.” I look at her, studying her expression. She looks defensive, maybe even angry.

  “Oh. Okay.” I open my mouth to ask her how she knows, but before I can get my question out, she turns and goes. Subject closed. She’s a mystery, this one. . . .

  A few minutes later, I hear her and Dario in the kitchen, singing and playing. “Ashes, ashes. We all fall DOWN!” Laughter from both of them. That kid must be magical, that’s all I can say. He pulled me out of the quicksand of my anger and depression. And now another miracle: he’s made the ghost giggle.

  That night, in bed, I start reading the book I got in the mail, underlining some of the best details, scribbling notes in the margins for later referral. Then I stop. Put the cap back on my pen and think about why I’m doing this. . . .

  I had started writing during the long months of my recovery as a way of stimulating my brain and dealing with unfinished business. I’d been reflecting about my life, everything that had happened. And thinking back to my childhood—writing about it—I had run up against a familiar wall. Behind that wall, as impenetrable as ever, was Francis Oh. Who had he been, this father who had disowned me, denied my existence? She was exhausted the day she disclosed all this— three or four days before she died. . . .

  “At first, he tried to deny that Francis was the father. How did I know this child was his son’s? ‘Because your son is the only man I’ve ever been with,’ I told him. I could tell he believed me, but he still wouldn’t tell me how to find Francis!” And so I reveal something that up until then I’ve been withholding from her: that, in one of my subsequent visits to Grandpa Oh’s restaurant, he gave me my father’s contact information. And that I had held on to it for years before I mustered up the courage to write to him. And when I finally did, my letter came back to me unopened a few weeks later with the word deceased scrawled across the front. She stares at me for the next several seconds, then sighs and says, “Well, all right then. That ends that.”

  But it hadn’t ended it—not for me. He had escaped again, permanently this time—this father who had denied my existence, and whose existence I had denied in return as a defense mechanism. I hated him more than ever.

  Yet in the months after my assault, when my brain functioning had returned and I faced the fact that my paralysis was permanent, I printed out that photo of the Oh family reunion my cousin had sent me, stared at the sober-looking boy in the striped shirt, and wrote down in a notebook the few things I knew about him: that he had been a skinny kid, a college student who’d studied math, and, later, had been an accountant. That he had liked gangster movies. Smoked Viceroys. When I put down my pen, I stared at the quarter of a page that my writing had taken up and the three-quarters of a page of blank space. It seemed hopeless. But then I picked up the pen again and scrawled a page and a half of questions about Francis Oh. What had his childhood been like? Had he enjoyed baseball and Big Band music? Why had he settled in Dayton, Ohio? Did he have other children? Not that she knew or her sister Doris knew of, Ellen had e-mailed back when I queried her about the possibility that I had half-siblings. Later, I bought an old Dayton city directory on eBay and found the listing for Francis and Alice Oh. No mention of offspring. Apparently, I was my father’s one and only child.

  Eventually, I came to believe that if I wanted to break through the fortress Francis Oh was hiding behind, then maybe the chink in the wall—no pun intended—was the grandfather I had known only slightly. I had two photographs of Henry Oh: the one taken shortly after he’d arrived in America and the one of him among his family at that California reunion. I also had my in-person memories of Grandpa Oh: his lined, unsmiling face. The way he would scan the open room of his big, noisy dim sum palace, overseeing his staff of dour waitresses wheeling their carts. The way he would stop tableside to chat with customers he knew, go back and forth through the swinging doors of the restaurant’s kitchen.

  But I’d been blocked for a while in my efforts to bring Grandpa Oh’s story to life—jammed up to the point that I started thinking about giving up. Henry Oh began to seem as elusive as his son, Francis. But then I read an article in the Times, “Your Brain on Fiction,” and what a gift! The article talked about studies that examined how the language of fiction—metaphors, sensory details, emotional fireworks between characters—activates different parts of a reader’s brain. It said brain scientists at Emory and in Canada and Europe—Spain, I think it was—had studied the MRIs of subjects when they read fiction and found out that the olfactory cortex and the motor cortex were being stimulated in the same way as if these subjects were experiencing the real deal: smelling, feeling textures, running away from bad guys. And that narrative—the opportunity to get inside a character’s head and think what he’s thinking and feeling—takes the reader beyond the boundaries of his own experiences and hones his ability to empathize. I tore that article out of the paper, reread it a few times, and then bam! It hit me. What if, instead of writing about my grandfather, I became him? Traveled back in time and simulated his life as he was living it? And so I crossed over the border from nonfiction to fiction, and the floodgates opened up. I pinned that picture of Grandpa Oh my cousin had sent me to the bulletin board over my desk, the one of him when he was a pigtailed adolescent who’d just entered the country. Started tapping into his hopes and fears, his homesickness. And now it’s a ritual. Every morning when I start my work, I stare into those dark eyes of his and ask him to take me back into his life. And most days, it works. Transports me into “the zone” so that, for the next two or three hours, I get to climb out of my own skin and into his. Zip it up the way Ariane zips Dario into his sleeper when she gets him ready for bed. My guess is that my own motor cortex and sensory cortex must be lighting up while I’m writing. Because the writer has to live the vicarious experience before the reader can. Right?

  Is it any good, this novel I’m constructing? Will it ever get published? Probably not. But at least when I’m finished, a document will exist. Something that, should they ever want to pick it up and read it, my kids will be able to know that their ancestor was more than the stereotypical Chinaman who came here and worked hard to achieve his version of the American dream. Grandpa Oh looks so stoic and unreadable in that early photo, so unattainable. But I’ve gotten inside his head. I know him now—a version of him, at least. I can see behind those inscrutable eyes. And maybe this process will help me to come back full circle to
my original goal. Help me to crack the mystery of my own inscrutable father—if not the factual Francis Oh, then a fictional construction of who he might have been. . . .

  It’s another big part of what saved me—pulled me out of my anger and despair about the brain stuff, the paraplegia. Not to mention the despair that Andrew’s confession had left me with. I went down for the count for a while after he unburdened himself that day. Got stuck in a depression so dark and deep that it might as well have been me down there in that well. The SSRIs didn’t touch it: Zoloft, Luvox, Lexapro. . . . After I gave Tracy her walking papers—told her I didn’t want her to waste the rest of her life taking care of an invalid, and that in some ways I wished she hadn’t even found me alive that night—I started flirting with the idea of suicide. Considered how I might do it, looked again and again at the Hemlock Society’s Web site. I couldn’t do it, though. Couldn’t saddle my kids with the aftermath—Andrew, especially. I’d kept my promise to him. Kept that cell phone with me day and night. What if I did myself in, and a minute or so later, he called me? Needed my help? . . .

  And hey, this may not be the kind of life I ever imagined for myself, but I’m resigned to the fact that it is a life. I’ve got my writing, my daughter and her son here with me, Andrew living nearby. Every morning when Dario comes into my bedroom sleepy-eyed and climbs up into bed with me—with his Bumpa—I thank my lucky stars that I’m still around. That that SOB up there on the Cape didn’t kill me that day when he went after me, or that I didn’t finish what he started when I thought there was no way out. That it was all just hopeless.

  I get through another thirty or forty pages of Chinese Immigration 1868–1892: Oral Histories, then start to get drowsy. Put the book on the night table. I’ll read some more in the morning before Annie and Viveca get here. Mr. Agnello’s funeral is at ten, Annie said, so they’ll be by sometime around noon and bring lunch. I’ll have to remember to tell Viveca what Belinda said: that she knew Josephus Jones. Or maybe I shouldn’t tell her. If I did, Viveca would want to speak to her, give her the third degree about him. And I don’t think Belinda would appreciate . . . I don’t think . . . I’m starting to doze. I reach over and turn out the light. That’s enough for today. Get some sleep.