Ask Bob: A Novel

by Peter Gethers

  It took Hilts a while to ask me about Anna. He remembered her but not clearly. Her death had assumed a kind of glamorous patina to him; coming to New York after she died had been an exotic vacation for the small boy, a glimpse into a scary but somehow exciting future. I told him as much as was appropriate and appreciated the fact that he didn’t just absorb the information; he used it to round out his understanding of me. Hilts was beginning to learn that with knowledge came a certain amount of power and that he had to use it carefully and delicately, unlike his father, who used it only to slice, dice, and butcher.

  He also asked about Camilla, and I was honest with him there, too. I said I didn’t really know why she had left. I said that I had hurt her but in a way that didn’t really have anything to do with her. I’m sure he didn’t understand—how could he?—but he didn’t press me when I wouldn’t go any further. When I said I didn’t think she’d be coming back, I saw the sorrow in his eyes and liked him all the more for it. He was not just expressing his own sadness, he was appreciating mine.

  As time went on, he accepted discipline from me. In fact, he seemed to crave it—he wanted to better understand the difference between right and wrong. He was grateful that I talked to him like a man while acknowledging that he was still a boy. One evening, after a particularly good talk, I realized a surprising truth: He liked me and I liked him. Love was not there, not yet. But liking was a big step for both of us.

  Hilts did love his grandmother, and it was a wonderful thing to watch them grow closer every day. She wanted nothing from him, demanded nothing from him; she took him for who he was and loved him for it. Whatever fears she’d had about making mistakes with Ted or me seemed long gone; she was confident and decisive when dealing with her grandson. She encouraged him and doted on him, but she was not uncritical. When he boasted or hinted at something unethical, she called him on it immediately. She could produce in him instant shame or regret or embarrassment. He wanted to live up to her standards. And though she kept her standards high, they were not unrealistic.

  Their relationship was not a one-way street. He worked with her, helping her in small and large ways to get better. He wheeled her to museums and to the grocery store. He confided in her and treated her with gentle respect. As tough and stubborn as my mother was, I believe it was Hilts who gave her the will to push herself to get healthier. Now more than ever, she had a great incentive to live: She wanted to see her grandson grow up.

  Hilts also began to love Lucy. He spent more time with her than with anyone else. She was the unlikeliest of roommates, but he delighted in bringing friends home from school and introducing her to them. He could joke with her and make fun of her—but if one of his school friends ever went too far, ever made the wrong kind of comment, there was hell to pay. She fell hard for him, too; she treated him like a puppy left in her permanent care. She made sure the apartment was clean and that he got off to school okay. He often made dinner for her, insisting she eat healthy and watch her weight. One holiday weekend they watched the entire boxed set of The Wire together, and it may have been the happiest seventy-two hours either of them had ever spent.

  The clinic, meanwhile, seemed to have become the social mecca of the West Village. Most afternoons I would come out of my examining room to find my mother in her wheelchair, along with Isadore, Hilts, and one or two of Hilts’s friends. Someone was always chatting with Lucy, who sat behind the receptionist’s desk, and everyone else was talking with the patients who’d managed to squeeze into the room with their animals.

  When I’d closed the door on my childhood home, I’d left behind the idols of my youth and all the memories. I had never quite understood where home had gone and how I had lost it. I had loved the feeling of having one place in the world that was my place, a place where I believed I belonged and where the center did indeed hold. For years, I’d been positive that this place had been real, even if I could no longer define it or even prove its existence. I’d found that feeling with Anna, and then it had been yanked away from me. And then I’d begun to doubt the veracity of its existence. Now I felt something very similar about my new home, and I believe Hilts shared that feeling. Neither of us was exactly sure how it had happened. Or exactly what it was.

  But it most definitely was.

  * * *

  I didn’t hear from Camilla after our e-mail exchange.

  I had almost deleted my response to her without sending it. But I just couldn’t do it. That may be the craziest thing about life: The door might slam in our face ten times in a row, but we always have hope that it’ll stay open the eleventh time. Where that hope comes from is an exquisite mystery. All of which is to say I pressed the send button and spent the next month checking my e-mail approximately seven hundred times a day. But no. Nothing.

  Six weeks after Camilla had briefly interjected herself into my life again and then once more disappeared, I got a call from Elizabeth. She said she was in town and asked if we could have a drink. I said yes, and we met at a wine bar we used to go to. The waitress remembered us and said she hadn’t seen us in a while. I shrugged, and Elizabeth looked uncomfortable. I don’t think the waitress noticed.

  “So,” Elizabeth said. “How’s … Kevin?”

  It took me a moment; then I nodded, acknowledging her subtle bitterness. “Over,” I said.

  She looked surprised. “For how long?”

  “A while.”

  “Does it hurt?”

  “Yes.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  I must have looked surprised because she said, “What? You think I’d enjoy it?”

  “I guess I did think that.”

  “I don’t want you to be unhappy.”

  “Thank you.” Then: “I don’t think I’m unhappy, actually. I just hurt really a lot.”

  “Well, I don’t want you hurting, either.”

  I clinked her glass with mine in appreciation.

  “How’s your mother?” she asked.

  “Toughing it out,” I said. “She’s kind of amazing. I think she’s at the ballet with Hilts.”

  “Hilts?”

  It seemed natural to be talking to her and I’d momentarily forgotten that she’d been out of the loop, so told her a bit about what had been going on: with my mom, with Hilts, with Ted, even a little about Camilla.

  When I finished, Elizabeth said, “Would you like me to spend the night tonight?”

  I actually thought that would be pretty swell, but what I said was “No.”

  “Why not? No strings attached.”

  “There are always strings, Elizabeth.”

  “I suppose. But really—why not?”

  “I don’t know. I’m being faithful.”

  “To whom?”

  I laughed. “Nobody really. Maybe just to myself.”

  She kept her eyes on my face. I remembered that scrutinizing gaze: It meant she was trying to figure something out and wasn’t having any luck.

  We finished our wine. I walked her to a taxi and kissed her on the cheek before she got in.

  “I don’t think I’ll call you again,” Elizabeth said.

  “I understand,” I told her.

  “I still don’t,” she said. Then she got in the cab and headed uptown.

  * * *

  Three weeks later, I was home alone. Well, I was never home alone. I was home feeding, petting, and brushing various three-legged, four-legged, and feathered friends before cooking dinner when my phone rang. It was Lucy.

  “Could you come down to the clinic?” she said. “We have an emergency patient.”

  “Can’t you send him to Fifteenth Street?” I asked. There was a twenty-four-hour pet emergency room on Fifteenth and Fifth.

  “I think you’d better come down,” Lucy said.

  I sighed. Gave Larry a final pat on his tiny green head and climbed down the one flight of stairs. The door to the clinic was open.

  Camilla stood in the waiting room. Lucy was nowhere to be found.

  I trie
d to speak, but my goddamn heart was beating so fast I couldn’t manage it.

  “Don’t be mad at Lucy,” Camilla said. “I didn’t think you’d see me unless she called.”

  “Nice trick,” I managed, a little surprised to get even that much out.

  “I did think it was kind of clever. Are you glad to see me?”

  “How can you ask me something like that?”

  “Are you?” she said.

  “No,” I said. Then: “Fuck. Yes. I’m unbelievably happy to see you.”

  “Me, too,” she said. “The good news is, a safe didn’t fall on my head while I was walking over here.”

  I didn’t say anything.

  “Well,” she said, “at least I thought it was good news.”

  “I guess you got my e-mail.”

  “I got it. Thank you.”

  “For what?”

  She smiled. “Not sure. It just seemed appropriate to say, ‘Thank you.’ How is everyone?”

  “Everyone’s fine.”

  “And how are you?”

  “How can you be so goddamn casual about this?”

  “I’m not casual. I think I’m being pretty determined. And I’d like to know how you are. It’s important to me.”

  “I’m fine, too. I’m glad we’re both fine. You want to talk about the weather now? Why are you here?”

  “Because you invited me.”

  “Cam—”

  “You invited me. You asked me to be part of your family.”

  “I invited you months ago. And you never bothered to answer me.”

  “Yes, I did.”

  “When?”

  “Now,” she said. “This is my answer. You said to be me. This is me. This is what I am. And this is my answer. Now it’s up to you where you really want to live.”

  “Do you mind if I sit down?”

  She swept her hand in the direction of one of the patient chairs. I sat slowly.

  “Your leaving almost destroyed me,” I said.

  She nodded. “I know. But you left me, too,” she said. “I might have been gone physically, but you left emotionally. That didn’t do wonders for me, either.”

  “It’s the history of the world, I guess. People do their best to destroy each other, and then they want someone to help put everything back into place.”

  “We’re doctors. That’s our job. To put things back into place. To repair things after the destruction.”

  “I don’t know how to repair people,” I said. “I only know how to fix dogs and cats. And Vietnamese pigs.”

  “I don’t believe that. But that’s why I came back. To see if you want us to learn how to put each other back together.”

  She looked beautiful and vulnerable and perfect. She looked dangerous as hell.

  I wanted to hold her. I wanted my lips against hers. I wanted to run for my life.

  “Do you want to come in?” I asked. “Upstairs, I mean.”

  “Do you want me to?”

  “I want you to,” I said.

  I turned and stepped out of the clinic and climbed back up the one flight of stairs. Camilla followed.

  I opened the door to my apartment. She hesitated.

  “Are there any changes?” she asked. “Anything I should be prepared for?”

  “New curtains,” I said.

  “Seriously?”

  I nodded.

  “Are they nice?”

  “You’ll have to see for yourself.”

  She nodded, then took a deep breath, as if bracing herself.

  She put one foot across the doorway, hesitated yet again. Then Camilla stepped forward, into my apartment. She looked back into the hallway, a lingering look, as if memorizing what she was leaving in the outside world.

  Various pets came forward. There were meows and barks. Larry screeched, as loud as a bird can screech. “Fuckin’ A,” he said. “Fuckin’ fuckin’ A.”

  Camilla closed the door behind her.

  BOB HELLER

  One of the things that happens as you get older—and while Camilla was away, I celebrated my forty-second birthday—is that you begin to realize that your life isn’t really about you. It’s about all the other people around you. That’s both an unnerving and a strangely reassuring realization. It’s unnerving because you begin to suspect that you’re not so crucial in the overall scheme of things. It’s reassuring because if the people around you are good and truly care about you, then you might not be so insignificant after all.

  Soon after his seventeenth birthday, Hilts was accepted at Syracuse University. I was happy he would be staying reasonably close to home—it was an easy weekend trip back and forth. He was even happier because his girlfriend, Tracy, also got into Syracuse. She was a lovely girl, smart and polite, with just the right amount of wild streak to her. Hilts spent much of his time staring at her with a loving gaze—a very familiar loving gaze—and I often heard them making plans for their future. I thought about telling him that the odds were approximately a million to one that they’d even recognize each other by the time they got out of school. But my job was not to save him from the roller coaster he was about to ride through the rest of his life. My job was to tell him how proud I was of what he’d accomplished. When he told me that he intended to pay me back every penny I was spending on his college education, I was extremely happy to tell him that it was my gift to him. He hugged me when I gave him the news, the first time he’d ever reached for me like that. We held each other for quite a long time. Then he called Tracy, told her what I’d done, and went back to talking like a lovesick idiot.

  I’d never seen my mom as thrilled as the day she went to Hilts’s high school graduation. For her, it seemed to be some kind of validation of the past, when my father had seen his baby grandson and decided he was the Second Coming. He certainly wasn’t that, but Hilts had turned out all right, in no small way because of my mother’s support. He didn’t remember his grandfather, but he knew all about him. On his graduation day, my mom gave him a gift: a month-long trip to Europe, ticket and cash included. On the same day, Hilts gave my mother a gift he said he’d found at the bottom of a suitcase: a CD recording of my dad singing that goofy little song he’d made up just days after Hilts had been born. I suspected that Ted had sent it to his son, but I could never prove it. Ted didn’t come to Hilts’s graduation. The last any of us had heard, he was living somewhere in Central America. Nobody knew exactly what he was doing.

  My mother died while Hilts was in Europe. She had another stroke, and this one killed her instantly. Hilts wanted to fly back from wherever he was when he found out, but I told him that my mother wouldn’t have wanted him to. She would want him to continue his adventure and to enjoy life, not mourn her death. I told him to have a glass of wine and toast her memory, toast her strength and her life. He burst into tears on the phone. I let him cry and then told him I loved him.

  When he stopped crying, I also told him that Camilla and I had had dinner with his grandma the night before she died. Her speech was as good as it had been in years. She’d talked about my dad and a little bit about Ted—she was still guilty and full of regret—and a lot about her grandson. She talked about Anna and to Camilla, and while I was eating a slice of pecan pie, for dessert, she reached across the table and patted my hand. Her skin was loose, what there was of it, but her touch warmed me through and through. I told Hilts that she was happy; she was grateful to be alive and glad to have seen all the things she’d seen along the way. The next morning, when Isadore came to tell me that my mom was dead, she said that the stroke had occurred while my mother was listening to the CD of my dad singing his song to Hilts.

  I e-mailed Ted with the news of our mother’s death, and though I gave him the details of the service I didn’t expect him to come. When he walked up to me just before the funeral started, it was jarring. I didn’t recognize him at first—he had aged tremendously. He was not yet fifty, but his skin was slack and his hair was bone-white. He was subdued and nervous. Furtive.
He brought a young Spanish woman, whose name, he said, was Angel. That was all he told us about her. When he met Camilla, he leaned over, kissed her on the cheek, and mumbled something indistinct to her. After the funeral, he handed me a piece of paper with his address on it and told me that’s where I could reach him after the will was settled. He also went to hug me, but I drew away. Then I shook my head, as if clearing it, and embraced him slightly. Refusing to touch him at all seemed as ridiculous as giving him a warm and loving hug. I did not feel good or bad when he left. It was like saying good-bye to a stranger.

  Not long after that, I took a new partner into the clinic, a young woman who had just graduated from Cornell’s veterinary school. At Elizabeth’s instigation, I’d recently gone up to Cornell to give a lecture, and Kendra Boudreaux had driven me around during my time on campus. Kendra was a pretty good drinker and a very good driver, and she was a superb listener when I told her all about Rocky and Waverly and Larry and Scully and Margo and Che. She moved into the apartment I’d first lived in with Anna. Lucy stayed on the fourth floor and kept Hilts’s bedroom ready for whenever he returned. Izzy didn’t really have a job anymore, now that my mom wasn’t there, but it never occurred to any of us that she should leave. So she stayed and took care of all of us in some unofficial way—cooking sometimes, cleaning sometimes, scolding any of us who needed scolding, helping out at the clinic. Whatever anyone needed.

  Camilla got her old job back, partnering with the physician she’d worked with before she’d run. She had said he was her Marjorie Paws, and she was definitely right about that. He put her through the wringer when she went to see him, but he did take her back. She loves her work this time around. She is saving people in bits and pieces instead of putting them back together after explosions and gunfire. The process appeals to her.