The Good Father

by Noah Hawley

  This is what led me to Fran after eight years of marriage to Ellen Shapiro. Though I had long thought of myself as a spontaneous and open person, I realized after my marriage to Ellen fell apart that I was, in fact, a creature of rigidity and repetition. I cannot stand living with uncertainty and forgetfulness. The bright-eyed, hippie ditziness that seemed charming in Ellen at first glance quickly became infuriating. Similarly, all the qualities that made me a good doctor—my meticulousness, my love of redundancy, the long hours I worked—proved to be qualities that Ellen found oppressive and dull. We took to fighting at every opportunity. It wasn’t so much what I did or what she did. It was who we were. And the disappointment we voiced to each other was disappointment in ourselves for making such poor choices. This is the learning process. And though our marriage produced Daniel, it was a union best dissolved before any real damage was done.

  I took a glass from the cabinet, poured the remainder of my beer into it. I was thinking about the patient who had kept me late at the hospital today, Alice Kramer. She had presented herself to me two weeks earlier complaining of leg pain. It felt like her legs were on fire, she said. The pain had started three months ago. A few weeks later she’d developed a cough. At first it was dry, but soon it became bloody. She had been a marathon runner, but now even a short walk exhausted her.

  I was not the first doctor she’d seen. There had been an internist, a neurologist, and a pulmonologist. But a valid diagnosis remained elusive, and despite their best efforts, the weakness and shortness of breath had persisted.

  Other than the cough she seemed healthy. Her lungs sounded clear. She had some mild weakness in her right hip, but her joints, skin, and muscle were all normal. The symptoms she presented with suggested that her illness involved the nervous and pulmonary systems. This was unusual. Could it be Sjögren’s syndrome? This was a disease where the body’s immune system mistakenly attacks its fluid-producing glands. Except patients with Sjögren’s usually complain of eye pain and dry mouth, and she had neither of these.

  Or maybe it was scleroderma, which is caused by an overproduction of collagen. The condition causes a thickening of the skin and can affect other organs of the body. I ordered blood tests. While I waited for them to return I went back over the patient’s medical files. As the doctor of last resort it is the rheumatologist’s job to reexamine every detail with fresh eyes. I reviewed her CAT scans and MRIs. On the chest CT, I saw faint cloudy patches on both lungs. By themselves they didn’t mean anything. It was the context in which I read them that gave them meaning. Looking at Alice’s film, another piece of the puzzle fell into place.

  I’d ordered a lung biopsy. The pathology report showed evidence of inflammation. When the tissue came back I sat with the pathologist and reviewed the slides under a double-headed microscope. And there I saw the pivotal clue: a granuloma, a cell formation made up of groups of cells up to one hundred times the size of normal cells. They are found in the lungs only in a few diseases. The most common are sarcoidosis and tuberculosis. And since the patient showed no symptoms of tuberculosis, I was certain she suffered from sarcoid, a chronic disease characterized by tissue inflammation.

  This afternoon when I told her I had a diagnosis, Alice had started crying. It had been months since the onset of her symptoms. She had been to dozens of doctors, many of whom had said her disease was all in her head. But it was my job to believe the patients who came to see me, to take pieces that didn’t seem to match and solve the puzzle.

  On TV, the game show was interrupted by a newscaster. Banner headlines. Crisis colors. None of us noticed at first. We were deep in the ritual of pizza. The dough was rolled. The cheese and sauce applied. Children were scolded for an overly liberal application of toppings.

  “I’m no structural engineer,” I told them, “but nothing round can hold up under that kind of weight.”

  Wally told us about what he’d learned that day. Frederick Douglass was a freed slave. George Washington Carver invented the peanut.

  “I don’t think he invented it,” Fran told him.

  “Discovered it?”

  “I think you need to go back over your notes,” I told him, finishing my beer and getting another.

  Fran was the first to notice. She turned to the television and instead of toothy hosts and eager guests found shaky camera footage of some kind of rally.

  “What’s this?” she said.

  We turned to look. On-screen were images of a political event in Los Angeles. We saw pictures of a crowd. Red, white, and blue banners hung on the walls. A presidential candidate stood onstage making a speech. The words were lost in the commercial mute of the TV. It is something the kids do when the ads come on, cutting the volume, letting the hucksters pantomime their sales pitches to the walls. As we watched the politician flinched, staggered back. Behind him two Secret Service agents pulled their weapons.

  “Volume,” said Fran.

  “Where’s the remote?” I asked, searching around.

  It took precious seconds to find the remote, then many more to locate the mute button. All the while the children yelled at me to push this button or that one. When we finally got the volume working we heard the newscaster saying, “… reports of at least two shots fired by an unknown gunman. Seagram has been taken to a nearby hospital. No report yet as to the extent of his injuries.”

  On-screen the footage played again. The candidate onstage, the sound of shots fired from the crowd. This time the frames played slower, the camera pushing in.

  “We are trying to find a better angle,” the newscaster said.

  I turned the channel. CNN had it. So did ABC and NBC.

  “To repeat, thirty minutes ago Jay Seagram, a Democratic senator from Montana and the presidential front-runner, was shot by an unknown gunman.”

  Back on CNN we found a female reporter standing in front of a hospital. Wind whipped her hair sideways. She spoke with one hand on top of her head.

  “Ted, we’re hearing that Senator Seagram is in surgery. He suffered at least two gunshot wounds, one to the chest and one to the neck. No word yet as to his prognosis.”

  This is how it happens. There is nothing and then, suddenly, something. A family is making dinner, talking, laughing, and then the outside world muscles in.

  Fran sent the kids into the living room. They were too young for this. She was upset. She had gone to Seagram’s rally the last time he came to town. She had even gone so far as to stuff envelopes for him one weekend last month. He was young and handsome and spoke with authority. She had come to believe he was what she called “the real deal.”

  “Who would do such a thing?” she said.

  As a doctor I knew that Seagram was in for a long night. Reporters said that the first bullet had punctured a lung and the second had severed the carotid artery. Paramedics had gotten him to the hospital quickly, but those injuries would cause extensive blood loss. The loss of blood would depress his circulation, hindering his already compromised breathing. It would take a skilled surgeon to fix the damage in time.

  We ate pizza in separate rooms, everyone glued to their TVs. Fran sat at the kitchen table, typing on her laptop, scouring the Web for the latest rumors. In the living room the kids watched Disney pirates seeking adventure on the high seas, the whimsy of the score offsetting our hawkish watching of the news. Every few minutes I would wander in and make sure they were okay. This is what you do when crisis strikes, check on the people you love.

  On TV a witness said, “I was watching and then, suddenly, blam blam blam.”

  Three shots? The news anchors had mentioned only two.

  “Two hours,” said Fran. “But you’ll have to connect through Dallas.” She was sitting at her computer trying to do two different things at once. Her Bluetooth earpiece was glowing. On her computer screen I could see the airline’s website side by side with a real-time political blog.

  “Turn on MSNBC,” Fran told me, looking up from the computer monitor. I changed the channel. We a
rrived in time to see the event filmed from a new angle. Camcorder quality, shot from the far right of the stage.

  “The footage you are about to see,” said the anchor, “is quite graphic, and may be disturbing to younger viewers.”

  I checked to make sure the kids were in the living room. On-screen the camcorder zoomed in on Seagram’s face as he spoke. The audio was shaky, homemade. This time the sound of the first shot made us jump. It sounded like the gunman was standing right next to the camera. Onstage the senator stumbled, blood spurting from his chest. The cameraman turned, and for a split second we saw the gun elevated above the crowd. The gunman was wearing a white button-down shirt. His face was blurred by motion and chaos. People were screaming in the background, running. As we watched, the gunman turned and started pushing his way toward the door. A Secret Service agent jumped into the crowd, trying to reach him.

  “Who does he look like?” said Fran. “An actor, maybe. Do you ever get that? That feeling that you’ve seen people before? Is it that they remind you of someone? Or maybe just déjà vu.”

  The camera swung wildly. Spectators grabbed the gunman. Agents and police reached him. They were lost to the camera.

  I got closer to the TV, but rather than make things clearer it made them harder to identify.

  “We are getting word,” said the anchor, “that police have identified the gunman.”

  The doorbell rang.

  Fran and I looked at each other. I reviewed in my head all the disasters of my life. The death of my father, a car crash in high school that required three separate surgeries, the demise of my first marriage, the deaths of every patient I had ever lost. I weighed them against one another. It was a warm spring night, and I was a man who had found contentment in life, happiness. A lucky man, who had come to expect good things. I wiped my hands on my napkin and moved toward the hall.

  There were two men in suits at the door, several others on the lawn. I saw a series of SUVs parked at the curb, blue-and-red lights flashing silently.

  “Paul Allen,” said one of the men. He was tall, a white man with an impossibly close shave. There was a plastic-coated wire winding from his collar to his left ear. The man next to him was black, broad shouldered. He may have been a linebacker in a former life.

  “I’m Agent Moyers,” said the white man. “This is Agent Green. We’re with the Secret Service. We need you to come with us.”

  The image I was seeing didn’t make sense. The words he spoke.

  “I’m sorry,” I said. “Are you sure you have the right house?”

  Fran crept up behind me and stood wide-eyed in the foyer. She had taken the Bluetooth from her ear. The orchestral narrative of Captain Jack Sparrow reached us from the living room.

  “They’re saying it’s Daniel,” said Fran. “The TV. They’re saying he did it.”

  I looked at the Secret Service agents. They were affectless, steel-eyed.

  “Mr. Allen,” said Moyers, “we need you to come with us.”

  I felt like a boxer who had taken an uppercut he never even saw.

  “Let me get my coat,” I said.

  I walked back into the kitchen, each step taken as if through water. I thought about the beers I’d had, the train ride home. I thought about the fences and the lawns and the neighbors I had known for years. How would they look at me now?

  On television I saw a photo of my son. This is the speed of the world. Before you can even think, an action has occurred. It had been less than an hour since the shooting. Where had they gotten a photograph? It was one I didn’t recognize. Daniel stood on a wide lawn in a sweatshirt and jeans. He was squinting against the sunlight, one hand raised to shield his eyes. He looked about eighteen. A college photo maybe. I remembered the day I dropped him off at Vassar, a skinny kid with all his belongings in a footlocker. A boy who had tried to grow a mustache at fourteen but ended up with only a few whiskers on each side of his mouth like a cat.

  What have you done? I thought. But even as I thought it I didn’t know if the question was meant for Daniel or for me.

  I rode alone in the backseat of the SUV. The new-car smell fed my underlying nausea. Ahead of us was a lead car. A third SUV tailed close behind. We drove fast, sirens on, lights flashing. Agent Moyers and Agent Green sat in front. Moyers was driving. They said nothing for the first few minutes as we hauled ass through residential streets, taking the bumps at full speed, the SUV bucking like a horse.

  I pictured Daniel the last time I’d seen him, the long hair, the bear hug, the final wave, and the feeling I’d had—like a man who is watching a movie he doesn’t understand. Why did I let go? I should have dragged him to my hotel. I should have forced him to come home with me. A shower, a hair cut, a good meal. To be surrounded by family, people who love you, isn’t that the deepest human need? Instead I’d watched him disappear.

  “Is my son okay?” I wanted to know.

  They didn’t respond. I watched the houses of my neighbors recede in the fading light, lit warmly from inside. Families in their dens, feet up, listening to music, watching TV. Had they seen Daniel’s picture yet? Had they made the connection?

  “My son,” I said. “Is he okay?”

  “Your son has a bullet in his leg,” said Agent Moyers.

  “Which leg? Did it hit the femoral artery? Please. I’m a doctor.”

  Green turned in the passenger seat. I could see the earbud in his ear. It was colored to match the flesh of a white man. I wondered if this bothered him, that the world did not believe technological advances needed to be made available to people of his race.

  “When Secret Service agents hear shots,” said Green, “we stand up tall to try to make ourselves bigger targets.”

  The words didn’t make sense to me, and for a moment I wasn’t even sure he was speaking English.

  “We attempt to draw fire away from our protectee,” he continued. “If you watch the tape again, you’ll see that this is what the agents were doing in Los Angeles. They ran toward the gunfire.”

  “Unfortunately,” said Moyers, “your son was a good shot.”

  “Please,” I said. “There must be some mistake.”

  Green turned away.

  “We have been told to take you to a secure facility for questioning,” he said. “This is the extent of our involvement.”

  “He’s my son.”

  “Dr. Allen, your son killed the next president of the United States.”

  The words flared around me. I heard a steady droning sound, blood rushing in my ears.

  “He’s dead?” I asked.

  Green looked out the passenger window, the blue-and-red lights of the lead car strobing cold, hot, cold, hot.

  “We’re taking you to a secure facility,” he repeated.

  “My family.”

  “Your family is safe,” said Moyers. “Agents have been assigned to your house. In situations like these people are upset. They act without thinking.”

  “Situations like what?”

  “Assassinations. Elections are about hope.”

  We were on the highway now, the blare of sirens drowning out the growl of the engine. The speedometer read 106 miles per hour.

  “I’m sorry,” I said, “did you just say elections are about hope?”

  He didn’t answer. I closed my eyes, took a deep breath. From my years in emergency medicine I knew that in order to think clearly in hectic circumstances, I needed to slow things down. Approach the problem in stages. As a scientist I had to stay clear, to put the facts together. I couldn’t afford to get emotional. Emotions cloud the mind. They make you careless. I tried to review the facts. My son was in Los Angeles. He’d been arrested at a political rally and accused of shooting a senator. There was videotape, but none so far that showed his face. The gunman had fired two shots, maybe three, and then disappeared into the crowd. It was possible the police had made a mistake. That they’d captured the wrong man.

  Racing down the highway I thought about the congresswoman in P
hoenix. The one who’d been shot outside a supermarket. What was her name? Giffords? A sunny day in January. Card tables have been set up. Come meet your representative. A crowd builds. The congresswoman steps out into the sun, smiles and waves. She shakes hands with her constituents, and then a pale, moon-faced man steps up beside her and opens fire with a semiautomatic pistol, one bullet passing through the congresswoman’s head at point-blank range. Six were killed. Thirteen injured by a Glock 9-mm that held more than thirty bullets.

  I thought of the mug shot. Jared Loughner, twenty-two years old. It was everywhere in the weeks after the shooting. An eerie grin on the suspect’s puffy face, like a fat kid who just won first prize at the state fair. There was something chilling about the image. The yellow glare of the camera flash giving his skin the jaundiced hue of an old bruise. His nearly bald head read unnatural, cancerous, misshapen. And on his face, an unblinking stare, one eye darkened by shadow, hovering over a Joker’s grin. From the photo alone you could tell. This was not a sane person. He was a madman, a droog from A Clockwork Orange.