by Sara Shepard
“My brother’s in California,” I volunteered.
“Lucky.” She clucked her tongue. “What’s he doing out there?”
“He’s at Berkeley, taking some graduate classes. Or at least that’s what he was doing last time I talked to him.” After my father told Steven that my mother had written him a letter, proving she was alive, Steven had dropped his fascination with terrorists, which made me wonder if he truly had linked the two things together. He’d taken off for California that following year. We got letters from him every once in a while—he was taking computer science classes and doing freelance work for various Internet start-ups. Everyone in Northern California, he intimated, was doing freelance work for Internet start-ups.
Dr. Hughes settled down and looked at the menu, her many bangle bracelets rattling. She dressed more like an artist than a scientist, and had stiff, frizzy, salt-and-pepper hair, a long, thin nose, and glasses that magnified her eyes. She liked to yell at people during class, to give impossible exams, to say, on the first day, while passing out the syllabus, “We move fast because science moves fast. If you can’t keep up, I suggest you study something in the liberal arts.” She called everyone by their last name—Davis, Cameron, Lorie. She never specified gender, and admitted to me once that she hated how the science departments were disproportionately male.
“You have any trouble getting down here?” Dr. Hughes asked, spreading her napkin on her lap. “I heard there was a water main break uptown.”
“No,” I said. “I only had to come across the bridge, from Brooklyn Heights.”
“Ah.” She held up a crooked, bony finger. “Right. You’re in Brooklyn. For some reason I keep thinking you’re uptown. So many other students are, I guess.” She leaned forward. “So. Let’s talk about your fellowship application. I got everything. It all looks good.”
I blushed. “Thanks.”
“You have one more class you need to take to graduate, right?”
“It’s just an independent study. I can work on it this summer.”
“Your essays make sense. Your recommendations, of course, are impeccable. As are your grades. If you want to study genetics, Dublin is perfect right now.” She laced her fingers together. “But there’s a problem. You forgot to submit your personal statement. You read the application, right? You were supposed to include one.”
“I read it.” I scratched the back of my elbow, listening to Mrs. Claus’s plastic body parts squeak. “I just…I didn’t know what to say.”
“And so you just didn’t include it at all?”
“Yeah. Basically.”
“That’s not like you.”
And it wasn’t, from what she knew of me. For the remainder of her class, I’d aced every single one of her exams. I loved crossing green flowering plants with white flowering ones and knowing exactly what I would get. I loved locating a mutation on a gene or an indication that a certain gene to code a protein-making enzyme was present.
“Do you want to do this?” Dr. Hughes inspected me carefully.
“I do. I think I do. It’s just…I don’t know. When I see the words write a personal statement, I just freeze up.”
She dumped some sugar into her coffee, which had magically appeared before her. “It’s a simple paragraph. Why you like genetics. Why you want to study this before going to medical school. Why this field speaks to you. We’re not talking Shakespeare.”
I sighed.
“Perhaps you don’t feel comfortable with making a big change like this right now.”
“No, I am,” I answered slowly. Then realization wound around me. She knew.
I knew this, of course. I shouldn’t have been so surprised.
When she leaned forward again, the vinyl booth made a helpless, merciful squeak. “I heard about your father. The type of treatment he’s going to try.”
I swallowed very slowly.
“Leon mentioned it to us,” she added.
Leon was my father’s partner at the lab. And Dr. Hughes’s husband was Leon’s best friend. That first time Dr. Hughes and I met here, she’d asked me if I had any other doctors in my family, and I said my father was a medical researcher, studying melanoma. She let out a note of delight and said what a coincidence; a friend of her husband’s did the exact same thing. And then I laughed. It’s not Leon Kimball, is it? Dr. Hughes’s mouth parted and she said, Yes, how do you know that? And it went from there. Afterward, my father told me he had met Dr. Hughes and her husband plenty of times—she often came into the office to say hello to Leon, to pick him up so they all could go to lunch. Why didn’t you mention it? I asked my father angrily. Hadn’t Leon told you that his best friend’s wife teaches in the biology department at NYU? Isn’t that something that would stick out in your mind, considering I’m a biology major? My father had blankly shrugged, telling me not to be so hard on him, that he had a lot on his mind.
“It starts tomorrow, doesn’t it?” Dr. Hughes asked gently.
“That’s right,” I answered quietly.
“Does it make you uncomfortable that we’re talking about this?”
“It’s fine.” Pickle, I thought—a little sadly.
“Where is he now?”
“He’s at…home. But, I mean, he’s okay. Really.”
“It’s just that, I want you to know what you’d be getting yourself into. This is an amazing opportunity for you, if you want it. But it’s a lot of money we’re giving away, the stipend and the travel and the tuition. Please don’t think I’m trying to pressure you, or that I’m not sensitive to the magnitude of your situation right now, but there are other students who could use the scholarship if you’re not interested. And it does mean you’d be in another country for quite a while. It would probably be good to know, one way or another, which way you’re leaning.”
I’d known this whole time she could only sponsor one student. There were so many other people begging for this kind of attention.
“My dad has help,” I said hoarsely. “There’s a woman there, Cora, who is sort of…I don’t know. His assistant, I guess. I mean, she cleans the house, she makes sure he’s taking things…I don’t know what else. But she’s always there. She lives there. I arranged it. I mean, I’m there, too…and I’m going to be taking him to his actual appointments. I guess people wake up disoriented, so…”
I began to pick apart my paper napkin. “It’s not as if he’s really…ill. He just gets sad. His brain is resistant to drugs, we think. Apparently they do the…procedure all the time. They say he won’t feel anything…”
I trailed off. My voice was shaking too much.
“I know that.” Dr. Hughes folded her hands. “It’s none of my business. I shouldn’t have brought it up.” She drained her coffee, put her napkin on the table, laid down a few crumpled bills, and stood. I followed. “You know what you can handle. I trust you. Just turn in the essay and the statement and I’ll put in the paperwork.”
“Okay,” I said. “Good.”
“I’m sorry, again,” she added.
“It’s all right,” I answered, a beat too late. “I’m sorry.” Although I wasn’t sure what I was sorry for—showing emotion, maybe.
On that snowy day a few months ago when Dr. Hughes and I first made the connection—“you’re that Richard Davis’s daughter?” she’d asked—her face had registered a small, unrehearsed moment of horror. It was the look. The look that told me that Leon had told her all he knew and had witnessed—which included a few of my father’s public breakdowns.
I allowed the look to cross her face without challenging it. I pretended not to see it at all, deciding to give her a chance to have a new, more tempered response. “My father’s not doing so well right now,” I’d said, my eyes on the table, giving her space to properly react. “He has clinical depression. He’s been on disability for a while, but I think he’s going to have to resign from the practice altogether.”
And she got to say, “Yes, Leon mentioned it. I’m so sorry. It’s got to b
e hard.”
Perhaps that was why Dr. Hughes didn’t intimidate me: I loved the fearless way she taught, but I know she was just as impressionable and sensitive as anyone. When I left the diner, that first time, I thought about how I let her reaction pass by without commenting. It was the easiest thing to do, of course—if I had called her out on it and asked her to explain, then I would have had to explain, which might have meant admitting everything that scared me.
And then, seconds later, I felt somehow responsible—perhaps there could have been a way for me to have warned Dr. Hughes, told her who my father was in advance so she could have her moment of horror in private. But warned her how, exactly? I felt so uncomfortable with myself and the situation, I stopped in the middle of the sidewalk, closed my eyes, clenched up my fists, and breathed. When I opened my eyes, I was so amazed that the submarine-round windows of the St. Vincent’s medical facility were still there. And the Two Boots Pizza takeout across the street. The entire city was in its right place. I sort of thought it couldn’t be.
twelve
Later, when I unlocked the front door to the apartment, all of the dogs—Fiona, Wesley, Skip, and Gracie, the Smitty dog—greeted me. “Where’s Dad?” I asked them, their eyes wet and bright. They ran excitedly into the living room, comprehending. My father was in his usual spot on the couch, propped up on his knees and looking over the back of it at something out the window. Seven glasses of water, all at varying levels, were on the coffee table, along with a bunch of newspapers and the TV remote.
“Hi,” I announced.
He jumped and turned around. “Summer.”
He was wearing the T-shirt and gym shorts I had given him the Christmas of my freshman year, during one of his active spells when he said he was going to start lifting weights at the Y. And even though I saw him every day, I still wasn’t used to the beard, or that his hair was so much longer, or that he wore oversized square glasses instead of contacts. He had gained thirty pounds from the latest drug he was on. When he took other types of medications, he drooled. Or he twitched, an arm or a thigh, the side of his hip or an eyelid. When he turned his hand a certain way, I saw the mark from the snow globe in the pit of his palm. There were new scars, too, as distinct as tattoos: crosshatchings on his elbow from the time he broke a plate, the half-moon on his wrist from the hunting knife, the puffy, wrinkled crater near his collarbone from the lit cigarette.
“They towed another car,” my father announced, his eyes bright and wide. The dangerous look. “The blue Volvo, the bastards.”
“Ah.” I dropped the apartment keys in the bowl on the credenza.
“It was this morning. Three trucks. And the police came this time. It must have been stolen. They surrounded the car.”
He hefted the window open, hot wind swirling in. He put one hand on his hip. “I’m thinking that white Lincoln might be next. It’s got a sticker on it. See?”
I looked at the white car he was pointing at. “Uh-huh.” I stepped away from the window, leaning against the credenza. I gazed at an old photo of my father and me standing at the top of a snow-covered hill in Prospect Park, wearing snow pants and heavy coats and carrying a single plastic sled between us. We always used to go down the hill using just one sled, my father lying on my stomach, me piled on top of him.
“How do you feel today?” I asked.
“Like shit,” he singsonged, not turning from the window.
“What kind of shit? Cat shit? Dog shit?” I never meant to sound frustrated, but I always came off that way.
In another room, one of the dogs barked.
“Where’s Cora?” I asked, trying to soften my voice.
My father pressed his head against the glass of the window. “I let Cora go. Look! Didn’t I tell you? Here comes the tow truck. I thought they’d give that Lincoln another couple days, but I guess not.”
“You fired Cora?” I sank into the couch. “Why?”
“Summer! This is our lucky day.” He pointed at the tow truck. “Watch how they load it up. Have you ever seen this? It’s beautiful.”
“Dad. Why did you fire her?”
His shoulders lowered. He turned around and picked up the rain stick that was leaning against the couch. It was supposed to simulate the sounds of the rain forest; he’d bought it a few months ago when we went into the Nature Store. Sometimes, late at night, I heard him turning it over and over, a million tiny downpours. “I didn’t need her,” he said, sulking. “She was always here. She was watching me.”
“Of course she was always here! That’s her job, to be here!”
“She brought a Neil Diamond CD here. Neil Diamond, Summer.”
“I’m sorry.”
“Even your mother didn’t listen to Neil Diamond.” He shuddered. “I’m fine. This is so exaggerated.”
“You think so?”
“I feel all right. I’ve been feeling all right.”
At least he was talking today. At least he was watching the cars. Some days he couldn’t even do that. I wondered if I should call up the clinic in the hospital and cancel the whole thing. Because you couldn’t do just one treatment and decide, Nah, I don’t like it. Once you started, you had to do all six. Or eight. Or however many the doctor deemed appropriate. For my father, the doctor had decided on eight. Words repeated in my head: He will have eight seizures. His brain will be electrocuted eight times.
“So do you want me to cancel tomorrow?” I asked quietly. “Is that what you want?”
He didn’t answer. Outside, the guy operating the tow truck attached the illegally parked Lincoln to its hitch. My father’s shoulders hunched.
“I’m going to call Cora.” I walked into the hall toward the kitchen, all the dogs following. “She needs to come back. She’ll come back, right? You didn’t say anything really terrible to her?”
“Summer…” My father was behind me fast.
I curled my hand over the receiver. “What?”
He gave me a pleading, desperate look. Then, without answering, he walked into the kitchen, bumping a stack of mail teetering precariously on one of the island barstools. A magazine fell to the floor. On the back was an ad for perfume: a naked woman kissing a naked man. I turned the magazine over. Vogue.
“I thought I canceled this.” I held it up to show him.
He shrugged. “I renewed it.”
“Dad…” I slammed it down on the island too hard. Some of the subscription renewal forms fell out and slid across the tile.
“What? I might read Vogue. Ever think that?”
“You wouldn’t read Vogue.” I turned it over and looked at the mailing address. RICHARD DAVIS. At least it wasn’t in her name. “I don’t understand these magazines.” I held up the cover, Cindy Crawford in a bikini. “She looks constipated.”
“I think she looks nice. She looks like a woman.” He glanced at me.
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“What’s what supposed to mean?”
“That look.”
He flipped through the mail. “I didn’t give you any looks.”
“What, I should go around wearing a bikini like she does?”
“No. Of course not.” He bent back the edge of a flyer. “Although it wouldn’t kill you to wear something other than jeans once in a while.”
“There’s nothing wrong with wearing jeans,” I snapped.
“Except that a dress is more ladylike.”
And a suit is more masculine, instead of pajama pants. “Got me there. You win. Someday when I go off in the world, I’ll wear lots of dresses. Someday when I leave.”
I should have known better. My button: jeans. His: leaving. But who dared press the buttons of someone who was depressed? Someone who could turn on a dime, and—just like he was doing now—start to cry? My father shut his eyes and tried to hold it in. Who dared do this? What dark, evil person?
I crumpled. “Dad, no…stop. Let’s not do this.”
“I wish I were someone else. I wish I weren’t m
e.”
“But…come on. You’re wonderful.”
“No.”
“Dad.”
I leaned into the crook of his neck, but he refused to touch me. “I can’t have you mad at me. You’re my good girl.”
“I’m not mad at you.”
“Yes, you are. You want to leave.”
I slumped against the fridge. It’s a huge opportunity, Dr. Hughes said about the fellowship. You’ll be away from home. I had told my father about the fellowship—that it was a prestigious chance to study in my field. I changed one detail, however: I told him it was in New York, not wherever the interesting fieldwork was happening over-seas—in my case, Dublin. I didn’t know I was going to get this far in the application process. It just happened. Dr. Hughes had said, Apply, you’ll certainly get it, we all believe in you, but I really hadn’t thought she’d meant it.
Later, I told myself. Tell him later. Tell him everything later. I thought of the flyer I found the other day, the one with her name printed in large block letters, a date, a place, a topic. I’d kept that from him, too.
He looked straight at me. “I’m terrified, Summer. Of tomorrow. I don’t know if I want to do it.”
Then don’t, I wanted to say. “But it might help you feel better.”
“What if it doesn’t?”
“It will.”
I didn’t want to take him to the procedure tomorrow, either. It sounded medieval. When trying to imagine how it might work, I felt like I was wandering into a wilderness where I had no compass or bearings.
“Are you sure?” he asked.
I nodded furiously. “The doctor says eighty percent of patients feel better.” I held on to anything. I held on to percentages, hearsay, catchphrases.
“Eighty percent? But that means there are twenty percent that don’t.”
“You’ll feel better,” I assured him. “Don’t worry about it. So what are you going to do today?”
He shrugged.
“Do you want to do something? Go out to lunch?”
“I don’t think so.” He glanced at me. “You know what you should do today? You should give that coat back.”