by Ann Packer
“Oh, sorry,” I said, retrieving it and handing it to her. “Are you Susanna? I’m Robert. I used to live here.”
“Ryan used to live here.”
“Ryan is my brother.”
She gave me a look that conveyed a good deal of doubt. “I babysit for his daughter.”
“Katya,” I said. “My niece. Actually, I was just leaving.”
“Obviously not.”
Somewhere deep in my mind I understood that this was a cheeky and therefore amusing remark, but I couldn’t even smile. “Well,” I said. “That’s the kind of thing people say. I am just leaving, how’s that?”
“I still have to tell.”
There was nothing to do but knock on the door and explain myself to her parents. The CEO greeted me with a surplus of pleasantries and, sweeping his arm to the side, welcomed me into my house. We stopped short of descending into the sunken living room, and while I grappled with the dissonance of his furniture and art—tasteful enough, but not my family’s—he dismissed my apologies and told Susanna that this was Dr. Blair, the owner, and why didn’t she go get her mother?
“What were you doing out there, anyway?” he called after her disappearing figure. “And how’d you get there?”
She’d gone out the laundry room door, of course. My father had always called this “taking the perimeter.”
The CEO’s wife came in trailed by both daughters, the smaller an even thinner and blonder replica of her sister. “Laurel,” she said when I asked her name, and her mother sighed and said to the child, a little sharply, “Honey, we’ve talked about this.” And then, to me: “Her name is Daphne.” At which point the child put her palm against her mother’s hip and pushed ever so slightly, and the CEO and his wife exchanged a look.
We passed an awkward five minutes talking about our summers, or theirs, anyway, which had consisted of trips to Greece, Montana, and the country club, while mine had been a matter of living inside a fugue state and waiting for the trust bestowed on me by patients and family to wither away. “Oh, you know,” I said when questioned. “Low-key stuff. Barbecues and picnics.”
Back in the car, I headed to Ryan’s via the downhill spur, which simply stopped, with no turning area; you had to back up to get out. I parked behind the Jetta that he and Marielle somehow, improbably, shared. Their house—bungalow, cottage, hut, shack—had started life as a storage shed, and though now twice its original size it still had a probationary look.
“We were just talking about you,” Marielle said, opening the door. “This second.”
Ryan stood behind her. “Robert, what’s the matter?”
I let them bring me inside, into the room that served as living room, dining room, kitchen, and bedroom. Katya had a tiny space to herself, and its closed door confirmed that she was in bed, hopefully asleep—a state for which I suddenly yearned.
“Why were you talking about me?” I said as Ryan produced a pitcher of ice water and Marielle hurried to clear a chair of unfolded laundry. They sat side by side on the love seat, a piece of furniture with a name in perfect harmony with its function in that room: Ryan put his arm around Marielle, and she idly laid her hand in his lap, as if it—the lap, the body—were her own.
They began to speak, interrupting or helping each other as they went, their voices a duet of kind concern.
“Just hoping that doof didn’t bug you today.”
“We know you love him.”
“We all love him.”
“Though he sometimes makes himself hard to love.”
“He’s going through something.”
“He’s not quite himself.”
“Were you hurt? We really hope you weren’t hurt.”
“It was just James.”
“Just James being James.”
“But more so.”
“Were you hurt?”
Abruptly they both stopped talking, and I said, “Not at all,” convincing no one.
The cottage had unfinished plywood walls and a kitchen area so small and rudimentary that they had to balance a cutting board over the sink to create a workspace. They slept on a Murphy bed that they had to rearrange the furniture to unfold, and they ate off folding TV trays acquired at a yard sale.
Marielle filled one of our mother’s hand-thrown ceramic mugs. “Here,” she said, and I brought the water to my lips and remembered how much I’d always hated my mother’s mugs, the walls of which were so thick it was like having some kind of dental instrument in your mouth while trying to drink.
The two of them watched me, Ryan in faded blue jeans so patched, with squares cut from old flowered dresses of Marielle’s, that they seemed less a pair of pants than a piece of folk art. His hair was long, pulled back in a ponytail. He was a teacher at Sand Hill Day School, which happened to be his alma mater, and the director had requested that he maintain his current style when one day he happened to comment that he was considering a haircut. Marielle had a wide, heart-shaped face and a friendly gap between her front teeth, and she wore her hair cut very short, like Jean Seberg in Breathless.
“I just stopped in on the CEO,” I said. “They spent two weeks in Europe this summer. I’m thinking we should raise their rent.”
“They’re nice folks,” Ryan said. “Very sweet kids.”
“Or maybe we should kick them out, do a little upgrade, and then we could really raise the rent, like maybe double it.”
“Does Jen know where you are?”
This question, innocent and doubtless well meaning, drove another stake into my perforated heart. I was a cause. For the first time I wondered what James had said to Rebecca when he got back there. And how had he gotten back there? All I could remember was his boisterous goodbye to the boys, and the grimace he gave me as he walked out the front door.
I said, “What the fuck is he doing here?”
Ryan and Marielle exchanged a glance. “Visiting us?” Ryan said. “He loves us, you know.”
“Yeah, which is why he lives five hundred miles away. Something’s up, mark my words.”
“Robert,” Ryan began, “these last few months—”
I cut him off. “You have no idea how hard it is to treat old people. It’s one thing after another, the hypertension, the bone weakness, the intestinal distress, the TIAs . . . and each time they come in with a new complaint, they express all this consternation, as if it isn’t the best-case scenario that their bodies are giving out. I want to tell them, Either you’re declining or you’re already dead. I mean, I don’t want to want to . . . I actually want to keep them in the dark, which, you know, I despise about myself. The dishonesty. My God, James was right. My entire life is a deception. Dad never had to go through this. He had CF, muscular dystrophy, childhood cancers, but that was the exception, not the rule. No wonder he was always in such a fucking good mood. He got to heal his patients.”
“This is about Dad?” Ryan said.
“There is no ‘this,’ ” I said. “Relax.”
Marielle turned to Ryan and said, “Did you just hear Katya?” and in a moment she was slipping through the door, leaving her husband to deal with his brother.
“Rob,” Ryan said. “Have you thought of taking some time off? We could stay with the boys, you and Jen could go away.”
He was so kind I couldn’t stand it, and I pushed myself up from the chair. I knew what it was to be James, the temptation to burn bridges nearly overwhelming.
Ryan followed me to the door. “I’m going to call Jen,” he said as I headed toward my car, and while he might have meant he wanted to give her the same suggestion he’d given me—that the two of us should go away and he and Marielle would babysit—I took it as a threat and gave him the finger as I unlocked my car.
I should have gone home, but I drove back up to the big house. Maybe half an hour had gone by; there were fewer windows lit. I retur
ned to the front door and sat down. In under ten hours I had to be at work, where I would see something in the neighborhood of twenty-five patients. And I needed to wade through the stack of applications we’d received for the position of office manager, a task better suited to an office manager, but ours had fractured her elbow ice-skating and decided, since she couldn’t work anyway, that she would take a year to reassess her priorities.
Why had I gone on and on with Ryan about treating the elderly? What monstrousness I’d introduced into that little house, visions of illness and coldness combined. I wondered how he and Marielle were restoring peace. Maybe they were just sitting on the love seat together again, drinking from those terrible mugs. Our mother had favored earthy colors for her pottery, glazes that fired to glossy shades of tan and brown. Surveying the fruits of her labor one day when he was thirteen or fourteen, James had pointed out that she’d gone to a lot of trouble to produce a bunch of stuff that looked like shellacked shit.
I got up and brushed off the seat of my pants. The temperature had dropped a good ten degrees since I’d left home, and I took the steps down to the driveway two at a time. I had a jacket in the trunk of my car, and I got it out as quietly as I could, carefully lowering the trunk lid until, with an inch to go, I pressed it closed.
Above me, another light in the house went off. I imagined the CEO and his wife getting ready for bed. By now Jen would be worried, though more so if Ryan had called, or less? She and I had spent a week in the house once, early in our marriage, when my father was away visiting my errant mother in Taos and wanted someone to water the plants and fill the bird feeder. Jen assumed we’d take the master bedroom, but it was too weird for me, so we slept in Rebecca’s room, where there was a double bed. Thinking about this now—the strange nights in Rebecca’s old bed, being wakened over and over by the creaking trees outside the uncurtained window—I was angry that the CEO could feel comfortable in, could view as his own, a bedroom I’d considered off-limits.
We hadn’t had any rain yet, and dry leaves crunched under my feet as I moved to the edge of the driveway and found the trail that would take me to the low edge of our property, the site of our tree house. I’d navigated this trail hundreds of times—dark or day, it didn’t matter—and I wanted to believe I had the muscle memory to stride down it without a thought, but some unease overcame me and I went slowly, using my toes to explore the terrain of each step before committing my entire foot. Just before the trail gave out there was a steep pitch downward, and I was so dismayed by my hesitation that I took the last ten yards at a jog and then had to stop short so I wouldn’t snag myself on the rusty barbed wire fence dividing our property from the neighbors’.
Our father had nailed short boards into the trunk of the tree, for a ladder up to the fort, and I tested them to see if they were holding. They were. The fort itself was about ten feet off the ground, and when I looked up I was a boy again, not sure I could manage the climb yet determined not to let either of my brothers see my hesitation or beat me to it.
But the boards were thin. I set the outside of my right foot across the top of the lowest board, launched myself upward, and then had to wrap my arms around the tree to keep from falling back. I knew that to truly climb I had to lead with my hands, but I couldn’t remember how our fingers had gotten any purchase on the boards above us.
I had never brought Sammy and Luke here. I’d thought of it but had decided to wait until they were older. I recalled how I’d sped through the Hardy boys earlier, turning the pages so I could get away, and a sob heaved out of me. Those boys, with their dirty necks: they were everything to me. Sammy, whose idea of heaven was being allowed to jump on our little backyard trampoline unsupervised. The trampoline was only a foot off the ground, but his point of reference was firmly rooted in the past, when he was a toddler and it had been a little dangerous, and so there he was, eight years old, exultant as a skydiver. Luke was five but in some ways more grown-up than Sammy. When I dropped him at a playdate he said, “Thanks for the ride, Dad,” breezy as a teenager. He thought kissing was for babies, so we kissed him only when he was asleep.
I felt another sob trying to break through and gritted my teeth. I reached with my hand, but the board above my head was far too thin to grasp. I let go of the trunk for an instant and clapped my arms around it again, higher.
Slowly, clumsily, I hauled myself up. My father had done this at my age, and with such a combination of grace and good humor. I remembered when we were building the fort, how he made it both extraordinary—that we were, with our hands, bringing this structure into being—and also an everyday accomplishment, the kind of thing we could count on pulling off, if we worked hard, for the rest of our lives.
I sat in the fort brushing wood debris from my chest and legs, then plucked a leaf from a nearby bay laurel for a dose of the medicinal smell. My father knew just how to sit up here with us: authoritative, benevolent, self-effacing. He was the opposite of the kind of father who makes his children into his own personal fan club—like my neighbor Jack Stillman, who I once heard say to his daughter, “Kelly, what’s the only major sport your star athlete of a dad has never played?” At which point Kelly, apparently the fan in charge of trivia, said, “Hockey!”
I couldn’t recall my father complaining—ever. His burden was the burden of loneliness, his marriage having given him a houseful of people but no one his own age to talk to. His conversations with my mother revolved around whatever had taken hold of her mind most recently, whatever it was she wanted, and while on occasion she may have sat still as he presented a thought, a feeling, a dilemma, she was not genuinely interested in him. In truth, they seemed closest when she was ill and he was more doctor than husband. How all of this didn’t sap something essential from him, I don’t know. Perhaps it did. Perhaps, with his wife’s love, he would have been even more than he was.
When he said good night to me, he always sat on the edge of my bed. He stroked my face, and his fingers smelled of the peppermint antacids he chewed after meals. He said he loved me. He said the oak tree would stand guard all night, and that a new day was scheduled to arrive first thing in the morning. Sometimes, to delay his departure, I asked about his day, what patients he’d seen, how sick they were; I would want to know if any of them had barfed on him, and he would say no, but come to think of it there had been a Charles on the ceiling (an upchuck). He never talked about the actual children he treated. This was long before HIPAA; he simply didn’t think it was right. And I think he knew it would make me jealous. His close friend and colleague Marvin Miller sometimes used phrases like “my boys and girls.” My father said “my patients.”
His family had not owned a car until he was ten years old. This was fantastic to me—he might as well have said they lived in a cave. The strangest thing about it was that they hadn’t needed one. They lived in a small town. They walked everywhere. And yet the first time I went there—on a visit we all took in the summer of 1969—it wasn’t the size of the place, the four short blocks that encompassed the downtown, that amazed me. It was the humidity. I didn’t see how he could have told us about his early life without mentioning it. Every moment coated your skin; to go from air-conditioned car to air-conditioned restaurant was to traverse a tiny hell. On our first afternoon in town, when it was 95 degrees out with 88 percent humidity, we knocked on the door of his childhood home, and the current owners invited us to come in and look around. The relief from the heat was minor, and there was an unpleasant cooked-meat smell. I wondered how you went about visiting people you didn’t know, but our father was very good at this kind of interaction, and after a compliment and an anecdote he beckoned us to the dark, narrow passageway that ran from the entry hall to the kitchen. “Come stand here, children,” he said. “Do you feel that little breeze? This is where I played on days like this.” And we stood in the passageway, the six of us making quite a crowd, and I thought that my father’s ability to make the best of a situation
was something I would acquire one day, like underarm hair or a deeper voice.
California enchanted him. He loved the dry air and the gold hills, the particular dust-and-tree-bark scent of our land. Long after everyone was gone—we kids and our mother—he stayed in the house, expanding his territory into the empty rooms so that, at the time of his death, he was using my bedroom for the TV, Rebecca’s for a guest room, and the one shared by Ryan and James for a snug library lined with bookcases, in the center of which sat a leather armchair and a lamp. When he had us all to dinner, he set the table with linens and the silver candlesticks our mother had rejected as too conservative and, with an unnecessary apology, served us undercooked broccoli and bland meat loaf procured at the prepared-foods department of the local supermarket.
A few months after his seventy-fourth birthday, he had a bout of pneumonia that put him in the hospital for several days, and not long after that he suffered a stroke that was mild enough to leave him with deficits in no area other than confidence, though there it affected him deeply. He seemed to age overnight, to begin refusing invitations, pleading fatigue when we urged him to accompany us on weekend trips, even visits to the city. Then, on December 27, 2003, after two days of constipation, vomiting, and intense abdominal pain, he drove himself to the ER, not wanting to bother us for something that might turn out to be a simple case of overeating at Christmas dinner. This was not the problem. We were called in, and within an hour he was referred to surgery for an intestinal blockage, apologizing to us as they wheeled him away for being a burden yet again.
He had a laparoscopic colectomy with so much colon removed he was given a colostomy that was likely to be permanent. Four days later, with his pain manageable, I wanted him discharged; I thought he’d be better off at home with twenty-four-hour nursing and a bottle of antibacterial soap at the front door than in the breeding ground of infection known as the Stanford Hospital. Rebecca disagreed, and we argued about it in the corridor outside his room.