Just Life

by Neil Abramson

  But she said none of these things and instead locked the door behind him.

  Sam felt panic begin to swallow her anger. Too many living things were dependent upon the soundness of her decision-making and she knew that making choices had never been her strength.

  Sam retreated to her office, pulled a large volume from her shelves, and dropped it onto her desk. She ran her finger over the gold lettering on the cover—Studies in Zoonotic Pathogeneses, by Daniel Lewis, DVM, MD.

  Sam opened the book to an inscription inside the front cover, although she could recite the words from memory. “To my very best student. Love always, Dad.”

  She slammed the book closed and threw it against the wall, where it left a scar in the drywall before dropping to the floor.

  Another scar. Sam almost laughed. Her father still excelled at making scars.

  Sam had been only six, holding tightly to the bloody body of Hugo, her huge orange tabby, when she’d first learned that her father could perform magic.

  As an only child, Sam had delighted in the company of her animals. Two dogs, four cats, a parrot, and three guinea pigs brought her full and fun days, so much so that she never really felt the absence of a connection her own age and species. Her animals, having grown up together, generally shared their time without serious conflict.

  Her best days were filled with fancy tea parties, an animal at every place setting, discussing the serious matters of the moment—squirrels should not be chased, mice were friends, the dogs needed to respect the sanctity of the cats’ food dishes and litter boxes, toys were for sharing. Sam felt safe in their company and proud to have been included among them. Hugo, the oldest and wisest of her animal friends, always sat on her right and stood guard over them all. When Sam slept she was surrounded by fur and the soothing sounds of canine snores and feline contentment.

  During the day Hugo was as docile and comforting as a fluffy pillow, but at night he liked to prowl the woods around their house near Cornell. He would sometimes bring home a mouse or a mole from his nocturnal life and occasionally show up in the morning with a few scratches. But he always came back to take his place at the very top of Sam’s pillow.

  When he wasn’t in Sam’s bed that morning, she knew something was wrong. Sam ran out of the house and into the woods. She found him barely conscious by an old tree stump, his breathing shallow and blood leaking out of a gash in his abdomen. Sam scooped Hugo into her arms and yelled out for the one person she knew could help.

  “Daddy!”

  Sam’s father, Daniel, came running out of the house in the goofy slippers she’d given him for Christmas, his bathrobe flapping behind him and half his face still covered in shaving cream. He gently took Hugo and quickly examined the wound.

  “Fix him,” Sam begged. “Please, Daddy.”

  Her father squeezed the big cat against his chest with one arm, oblivious to the blood seeping onto his robe, as he reached for Sam’s hand with the other.

  “Can you fix him?” Sam asked in a voice terrified of the wrong answer.

  Her father looked upon his little girl’s face and smiled. “Nothing bad is going to happen in our house,” he said. “I promise.”

  Sam would learn much later in life that her father’s words had been a lie—not only did bad things happen, he was the vehicle that had brought darkness to their house. But on that particular day, with that particular cat, he was true to his word. On that day his hands were touched by whatever force or energy allows a healer to cheat death. He was a magician. He was golden.

  Hugo survived and the love Sam felt for her father that day lasted for a very long time.

  Sam adored her “Dr. Daddy,” and she watched closely in those early years as he treated Sam’s animals. He could prolong life and comfort her creatures when they were in pain. That was the best kind of magic. She wanted to do that.

  As a teen and through college, Sam began to see up close the characteristics that made Daniel Lewis a brilliant scientist: his tireless drive to find answers, his unwillingness to compromise, his ability to filter out all distractions, emotional and otherwise. She first emulated those characteristics and then took them on as her own as she followed his path to Cornell University College of Veterinary Medicine. While Daniel traveled the world looking for animal-related viruses to study and conquer, Sam volunteered her summers and holidays (at her father’s suggestion, of course) at the animal hospital run by one of his well-known research colleagues—Jacqueline Morgan.

  Sam’s mother, Grace, carefully insulated Sam from any consequences resulting from Daniel’s absences. If Sam noticed her mother’s growing sadness, the daughter was too busy “succeeding” and trying to earn her father’s approval to do anything about it.

  The cracks began to appear in earnest in Sam’s third year of vet school. Her father returned from some disease outbreak in Sierra Leone (or Liberia, or Haiti, or China) obsessed with finding what he called “the Bullet.” Daniel theorized that it was possible to develop a single vaccine that could prevent the transmission to humans of all zoonotic viruses—Ebola, SARS, avian and swine flu, rabies, and hundreds of other diseases that come to us from our winged, furred, or scaled earth cohabitants. According to Dr. Lewis’s research papers at the time, using the map of the human genome, it should be possible to take those genetic elements that define us as distinctly “human” and every other creature as something “other” and enhance them so that the viruses cannot take hold in the human body. “Exaggerate our inherent genetic differences to create a barrier to protect us,” he was often quoted as saying. By doing so, Daniel Lewis hoped to save untold human lives, but also the lives of millions of animals killed every year through culls designed to reduce the spread of these very same viruses.

  The quest for the Bullet vaccine became his singular reason for getting up in the morning on those nights he returned home from his very private office at all. It wasn’t just that everything else became secondary; there was nothing else.

  Years later Sam wondered why her father had become so obsessed, why unlocking the puzzle box of zoonotic disease transmission had grown into such an all-encompassing compulsion. She came to believe it hadn’t just been the quest for fame (he was already famous by that point) or money (they always seemed to have plenty of that), or even his desire to save lives. He was just missing a critical piece in a way that Sam feared was genetic and patrilineal. While others might have tried to fill that void with drugs, violence, alcohol, sex, or personal codependency, Dad had chosen science, and the results had been just as destructive for him and his family.

  Daniel Lewis missed birthdays, anniversaries, graduations, funerals, and every opportunity Sam offered him to show his approval if not love. Sam rationalized these repeated rejections through simple fantasy: her father was still “Dr. Daddy,” the healer, prolonger of life, magician, and savior of animals. Grace’s efforts to protect Sam from the truth about her father only deepened the delusion. Sam learned too late the true, steep price of that maternal shield.

  Sam’s vet school graduation was the last event she ever asked her father to attend. She was the class valedictorian and had worked hours on her speech to be delivered to the entire school and, more importantly, her father on graduation day. The speech was essentially a tribute to her father, whom she had not seen for months—about how he had instilled in Sam a deep and abiding respect for animals; how his work in zoonotic pathology had saved human and animal lives; and how he had demonstrated that you could live a life of both science and compassion. Daniel had promised to attend.

  Sam began to cry when she saw the empty chair in the auditorium next to her mother. She made it through her speech, distracted, angry at her father’s absence, and confused by some of the snickering at her comments.

  As soon as graduation ended, Sam drove alone to Daniel’s office—a place where she had never been invited. Security escorted her to a lab. She charged in, her speech in hand, ready to make him hear her words and prepared, finally, to ac
cept his approval.

  Sam stumbled at the vision before her. Twelve dogs stood in cages behind a tall man with gray hair and lifeless eyes. The dogs raised their heads to howl at her arrival, but no noise came from their open mouths. Their silence was monstrous, a distortion of nature itself.

  Ignoring the man, Sam approached the dogs. She saw the fresh sutures across their larynxes, sealing the incisions that had severed their vocal cords. For a moment Sam was as mute as the dogs. Then the rage overtook her and she spun on the man. “You debarked dogs?” She was about to yell for her father but realized with a surge of revulsion so powerful she began to gag that she was staring at him.

  Daniel initially looked annoyed at the interruption, but then his face softened. “Hello, Samantha. What are you doing here?”

  “You debarked these dogs?” she asked again.

  “Well, obviously,” he said. “Otherwise we couldn’t even hear ourselves think. Some of the protocols we employ in the Bullet vaccine research are of necessity somewhat invasive.”

  Sam shivered at that last word. She looked more closely at the dogs and noticed other surgical scars as well. “You’re doing vivisection on dogs?”

  Daniel turned annoyed again. “Dogs, cats, pigs, cows, among others. Why are you so surprised? You know full well the research I am leading.”

  “No!” Sam cried out, remembering Hugo. “You’re a healer. You’re a veterinarian. You do no harm. You took an oath.” You are magic, she almost said. Her voice sounded embarrassingly childlike even to her own ears.

  “Don’t be such an idiot, Samantha. We’re not at home anymore and you are not a child. These aren’t your pets.”

  “But, Daddy—”

  “I’m searching for something that can save millions. Of course animal experimentation is required. Now, what is it that brings you here?”

  That was the instant when the illusion Sam had worked so hard to preserve fell around her. There was no longer any way to maintain it; and when it failed, it did so in a very big way, with questions she couldn’t bring herself to answer: Was this the person she had always wanted to become? Had she wasted all those years seeking his approval while he was doing this? Had all the privileges of her life—the fine schools, the beautiful house growing up, the vet school she had just graduated from, the job with Morgan—been merely the fruits of this work?

  Worst of all, Sam couldn’t deny the small but persistent voice that told her she had known some version of the truth all along. Dr. Daddy, the kindly father who stayed up all night with her sick animals, the man who had saved Hugo and countless others, years earlier had been snuffed out by the search for the Bullet. It simply had been easier to believe her own bullshit and her mother’s lies than to deal with the dissonant truth.

  Sam knew that no one, other than perhaps the sociopaths of the world, simply woke up one morning and decided to become the type of human who severs canine vocal cords to stop the “distraction” of dogs howling in pain. It was always a series of incremental decisions that gradually led you further away from your own vision of your ideal self and your better angels—accommodations, rationalizations, compromises, greater ends overcoming more distasteful means. And Sam had been there all along throwing rose petals under her dad’s feet.

  She now understood why they had been snickering during her speech. They had always known the truth.

  Sam threw her speech at Daniel and fled.

  Those who deny the power of shame are neither students of history nor human nature. Sam had always planned to use her degree to help animals, but after that day she had a new purpose. She was no longer motivated by the desire to emulate her father or earn his approval. Instead she needed to wipe out the suffering her father had perpetrated in his quest. She needed to try to balance the ledger for her family. She needed to try to erase her shame.

  Sam didn’t speak to her father for six months. Because Daniel and Grace were a unit in Sam’s mind, she included her mother in the freeze. Besides, Sam was pissed at her too and needed to review the record of personal history to determine her mother’s culpability. Sam knew she couldn’t do that with her mother’s voice in her head. Grace’s calls and e-mails went unanswered.

  Late one night Sam’s home phone rang. Her father’s voice came on the machine. He sounded as if he had been crying. “Samantha, please, pick up the phone,” he pleaded. Sam tried to ignore his tone. “It’s your mother.” Sam grabbed the receiver and learned that her mother had flipped the BMW. Grace Lewis had not survived. The autopsy revealed Grace had had a blood alcohol content of twice the legal limit.

  Sam blamed Daniel for her mother’s death and she took his stony silence as evidence of mutual recrimination. More shame. Sam buried her mother, Daniel Lewis buried his wife, and together, father and daughter buried any hope of reconciliation.

  She had not spoken to her father in the two years since the funeral and believed that she could not start now and still hope to remain sane.

  Sam ran out of her office and into the room where her dogs slept in their cages. She needed to get rid of the memory of her father, to remove the image of dogs who could howl only silently, to stop the sound of cruel sniggering.

  She released Blinker and Scrabble first and, together with Nick, they escorted Sam around the room as she opened every other cage. Sam looked on with adoration as her dogs jumped one by one to the floor and barked, yipped, and howled with the joy of unexpected release. The room shook with their excitement. She took comfort in the noise.

  The dogs soon surrounded Sam as she offered them words and caresses of gentle kindness. Then Sam dropped to the floor with them and, for a few precious moments, lost her shame and anger in wet noses, rough tongues, and soft fur.

  15

  Gabriel dreaded the nights. Darkness brought a deep sense of futility, confusion, and loneliness. He often spent the evening hours in the increasingly useless pursuit of introspection—what Channa had always referred to as “suicide on an installment plan”—until the sun rose again and illuminated the false promise of an even slightly more meaningful day. On some nights Gabriel became so frustrated that he abandoned his tiny apartment a few blocks away from the church. Then he wandered the streets of Riverside, invariably ending up at the church just as the first light of dawn brightened the stained glass windows.

  This night, however, Gabriel sat quietly in the second-to-last pew. He stroked Molly and listened to the whimpering noises coming from Beth’s slumbering form sprawled out in the next pew. He knew too well the sound of nightmares, but did not feel he had the privilege of waking her.

  Before Gabriel could stop the cat, Molly leaped onto Beth’s head. “What the hell?” Beth yelled as she bolted upright and pushed Molly to the floor. The cat hissed at her and sprang away, all hurt feline pride but otherwise unharmed.

  Gabriel cleared his throat and Beth spun toward him with a surprised gasp. The haunted look on Beth’s face gave the priest pause. A mutual longing for a few minutes of peace made for strange but powerful connections in a lonely New York night.

  “What?” she asked. “I got drool on my face?”

  Gabriel shook his head.

  “Sorry. I fell asleep,” Beth admitted. “I’ll go now. Exit the embarrassed lapsed Jew from the church. Cue the treacly piano music.”

  “Should I even ask?”

  “What?”

  “What you’re doing here?”

  “I wouldn’t bother. I think you can find something better to do with your night.”

  “So you don’t want to talk?” Gabriel asked.

  “Nope. Not really.”

  Gabriel leaned back into the pew, stretched out his long legs, and clasped his hands behind his head. He was relieved he wouldn’t be required to try to help someone with his increasingly limited skill set. It wasn’t the trying that bothered him as much as the vague look of “that’s it?” he would see on their faces—the obvious disappointment with the quantum of comfort he could provide. So why did he still feel
the need to try? “You work at the shelter, right? I saw you walking one of the dogs this morning.” He extended his hand and Beth shook it. “I’m Gabriel.”

  “Beth,” she said. “Riverside’s newest basket case.”

  “We do have our share. Would you like some tea? I can make some, if you’d like.”

  “Nah, don’t put yourself out. I should get to my apartment.”

  “No bother. Back in a minute,” he said, and darted out of the sanctuary.

  Gabriel returned a few moments later with empty hands and a confused countenance. He stared at Beth as if she were an unknown intruder. Beth smiled at him and Gabriel’s face slowly brightened in recognition. “Ah. Tea,” he said, and left her again. This time he returned with two steaming mugs and handed one to Beth.

  Beth sipped. “It’s actually a pretty nice church,” she said.

  Gabriel sat next to her. “Thank you.”

  “The windows could use an upgrade, though,” she said, pointing to the broken stained glass window. “What wonderful Bible story is that?”

  “That was Abraham and Isaac on Mount Moriah.”

  “Old Testament? Something about a ram, right?”

  “Sort of. Want to hear it?”

  “Who doesn’t love a good Bible story with their tea?”

  Gabriel settled into the pew. “God tells Abraham to take his beloved only son, a teenager named Isaac, and offer him as a sacrifice. They start to head up this mountain, Moriah. Isaac knows that his father is preparing to make a sacrifice, but he doesn’t know it’s him—obviously. He also doesn’t see any ram to put on the altar. Isaac at this point is getting a bit nervous. He asks his father, ‘So where’s the ram?’ And Abraham says, ‘God will provide a ram.’ They get to the top of the mountain, but there is no ram. None. Nothing.”