The Wally Lamb Fiction Collection: The Hour I First Believed, I Know This Much is True, We Are Water, and Wishin' and Hopin'

by Lamb, Wally

  I asked if I could see Ray. Sure thing, he said, but he had just had a shot; he’d probably be out for most of the morning. But I was welcome to go in and take a peek.

  I went down the hall, found Ray’s room. Pass at your own risk, I thought.

  He was breathing hard through his mouth. There was dried crud on the front of his hospital johnny, a thin ribbon of blood floating in the fluid just above his IV insertion. He looked so small and gray.

  Acute therapy, subacute. Wet and dry gangrene. How could I have missed the fear in his voice? . . . This is your old man calling. You home yet? . . . Past history or not, who else did he have?

  Look at it, I told myself. Do your penance. Face it.

  And so I willed my eyes down from Ray’s gray face to his rising and falling chest, then down to the bottom of the bed. My stomach lurched a little. I faced the flatness where his right leg was supposed to be. . . . Remembered my brother’s shiny pink scar tissue—his grafted, upholstered stump. Somewhere along the way, I’d heard that when they amputated, they didn’t use some high-tech laser procedure; they just used a saw. Sawed through muscle and bone and then just threw the dead leg . . . where? In a Dumpster or something? Jesus.

  He’ll need to stay at a rehabilitation center for a while—a nursing home—so that he can learn how to walk again. Jesus, he was going to go off the deep end, grounded like this. Always puttering with this or that—Ray couldn’t sit still to save himself.

  The woman who entered made me jump. She was chubby, Asian. We exchanged nods. “I, uh . . . Dr. Azzi said I could see him. I know it’s not visiting—”

  “That’s fine,” she said. She fitted a blood pressure cuff above Ray’s wrist, pumped her little black bulb. Read her gauge, pumped some more. Corrie something, R.N. In the old days, nurses wore white uniforms, not UConn sweatshirts.

  “Uh, there’s a little bit of blood in his IV tube,” I said. “Are you aware of that?”

  She squinted, leaned toward it. “Not a problem,” she said. She positioned a thermometer under Ray’s tongue and closed his mouth, held his jaw shut. Ray slept on, oblivious. Whatever was in that shot they’d given him had really knocked him out. The box beeped. She pulled the thermometer and jotted the results. I asked how he was doing.

  “Temp’s down a little, his BP’s good,” she said. “Are you his son?”

  I stood there, unable to answer her. When she lifted the sheet to check his dressing, my eyes jumped away.

  “Looking good,” she said. “Looking good.” She let the sheet fall again, tucking it around him. He’d probably sleep most of the morning, she said, but I was welcome to stay. I shook my head. Told her I’d stay just a little longer, then come back in the afternoon.

  “Sure,” she said. “I’ll leave you guys alone, then.”

  I stood there for a while, watching him sleep.

  Reached out. Reached toward his hand. Passed a finger over the hills and valleys his knuckles made.

  Like any other living thing. You starve something long enough, it dies. Dr. Azzi was more right than he realized. . . .

  Thomas’s drowning out at the Falls had only been the official cause of death; he’d died down at Hatch, cut off from hope, from family. My brother had starved to death. . . . And my grandmother: she’d died in prison, too. The Old Man had installed that guard dog—had kept her captive in that goddamned, godforsaken house of his. Had raped her on weekends because she was “his.” And so, in despair, she’d done what she’d done before. Run. Escaped. Dragged her daughter out to that pond and . . .

  Papa was a wonderful man, Dominick. Why was that, Ma? Because he looked good in comparison? Because over on Hollyhock Avenue, everything was relative? . . .

  I have to go because you suck all the oxygen out of the room, Dessa had told me that morning she left. I have to breathe, Dominick.

  I stood there, touching Ray’s hand, and finally getting it. . . . Dessa hadn’t stopped loving me, caring about me. About us. But she’d needed to save herself. Had needed to amputate me from her life because . . . I was starving her. Infecting her. Because if she’d stayed, I would have begun shutting her down, system by system.

  Well, good for you, Dess, I thought. I’m glad you got out alive. And my tears fell fast, splashing against Ray’s bed railing, sinking into his sheets.

  I got home around noon—left a message for Dr. Patel that I needed to see her as soon as possible. I heated up some soup, flipped through Newsweek without anything really registering. When I went to wash the dishes, I realized I’d just washed them.

  Domenico’s ruined manuscript was in there: lying all over the bedroom where I’d left it. Okay, I told myself, you finished it and then you trashed it. So it’s trash. Right? Go in there and get rid of it.

  I grabbed a garbage bag and went into the bedroom.

  Stuffing page after ruined page of the Old Man’s “history” into the plastic bag, I thought about Ma—what she had told me about the day her father died. He’d just finished it: his long-in-the-making confessione, his failed act of contrition. . . . She’d heard him crying out there—had wanted to go to him, to comfort him, but it was against the rules. He would have been too angry, and it was his anger that had ruled that house. . . . I sat back on the bed. Saw her out there, harvesting Papa’s story. She must have felt her whole life shift that day, I thought. Her father was dead; her sons were growing inside of her. . . .

  She had been brave after all. Brave enough to go on—to raise us as best she could. And earlier: the sober girl in those photographs, standing next to her father in a starched pinafore, her fist to her face to cover her disfigured mouth. A brave eight-year-old girl, dragged that night into the bitter cold by a mother who’d been starved of hope. Made crazy from despair. . . . There’d been evidence of a struggle out there, the Old Man had written. A story told in footprints. But that brave, serious girl had kept her mother’s terrible secret—had said nothing to the police, or to her father. It was the footprints that had told. In her anger or her crazy despair, Ignazia had meant to take her with her—take her daughter’s life. But Ma had struggled. Had saved herself. Had hidden in the shack and survived the night and then gone home and lived with her father. . . .

  Had she loved Papa as much as she’d always claimed? Hated him? Had my brother and I been conceived in evil? . . . “The History of Domenico Onofrio Tempesta” had turned out to be just another hall of mirrors, just one more maze inside the maze. Because by the end of his story, the Old Man had confessed everything and nothing. Like father, like daughter, I thought. They had both known how to keep their secrets. . . .

  I reached down, pulled a page from the garbage bag. Flattened it and read. “I have always had that small satisfaction, at least: the memory of that moment when I won my battle against the Monkey, when I used my God-given cleverness to punish that she-devil for the sins she had committed against Domenico Tempesta. . . .”

  I shook my head at his hopelessness, his isolation out there on that last day of his life. Domenico had starved to death, too.

  “I’m not saying it’s impossible, Dominick,” Dr. Patel said. “I’m saying it’s highly improbable. You’re not retarded. You don’t suffer from hemophilia or any of the other myriad complications. If you are, as you fear, the product of incest, you seem to have come away remarkably unscathed.”

  Unscathed? I reminded her that my brother had been a schizophrenic, that my daughter had died in the fourth week of her life.

  A specious argument, she said. As far as she knew, there was no scientific evidence linking father-daughter incest to either schizophrenia or SIDS. I was welcome to research the topic, of course, but she doubted I would find anything. That left me with what she saw as a somewhat neurotic fear and one vague remark in my grandfather’s book: that my mother had known how to keep secrets. It could mean anything, she said. Secrets her mother told her, secret recipes. And, of course, the terrible secret that the mother who had given her life had tried, that night, to take it
away.

  Father-daughter incest: Dr. Patel’s giving it a name, a label, somehow confined it. Put a cage around it and made me feel safer. What had she just accused me of? A “somewhat neurotic” fear?

  From what I’d told her, she said, my grandfather had been a terribly unhappy and misguided man—cruel, self-serving, paranoid, perhaps—although she was always reluctant to diagnose the dead. But none of what I had told her meant, necessarily, that he had raped his daughter and fathered my brother and me.

  “Then I’m exactly where I was before I read the damn thing,” I said.

  “And where is that, my friend?”

  “Fucked up. . . . Fatherless.”

  She said she begged to differ on a couple of counts. First of all, I was certainly not fatherless, provided I was willing to think beyond sperm and egg. If one defined one’s father as the male elder who attended one’s passage from childhood to adulthood, then my father was lying in a hospital bed over at Shanley Memorial, recovering from surgery. Whatever Ray’s parental shortcomings had been, whatever trauma he had caused me and my brother, his presence in my life had been a constant. He had borne witness.

  Nor did she feel that the completion of my grandfather’s history had left me exactly where I had been. “Indulge the anthropologist in me, please, Dominick,” she said. “Let’s think for a moment of the manuscript not as a mystery with a maddeningly inconclusive ending, but as a parable. Parables instruct. One reaches the end of an allegory and confronts the lesson it offers. And so I ask you: what does your grandfather’s story teach you?”

  “What does it teach me?” I shifted in my seat. Looked away. “I don’t know. Watch out for thin ice? Steer clear of monkeys?”

  She clapped her hands together like a fed-up schoolteacher. “Seriously, please!”

  Our eyes met. I leaned forward. “That I should stop feeling so goddamned sinned against,” I said. “That I have to let go of grudges.”

  She smiled. Nodded. Clapped again, this time in applause.

  Intentionally or not, Dr. Patel said, my grandfather had given me a valuable gift: the parable of his failure. And I should not forget who had been the conduit of that story. It had come to me by way of a mother who, Dr. Patel suspected, had loved me deeply—a woman who, despite her meekness, had been quite courageous. In fighting for her life out there at the pond that night, she had made possible mine and Thomas’s lives. She had made mistakes along the way—yes, yes, there was no denying it—but she had nevertheless raised her two sons in good faith. Had done her best. And it was to me, personally, that she had bequeathed her father’s story.

  “Use your gift, Dominick,” Dr. Patel said. “Learn from it. Let it set you free.”

  “Is he finished yet?” the dietary aide asked me, a little huffy this time. She’d been in twice before to collect Ray’s untouched lunch tray. At the nurses’ station, they’d told me he’d woken up around eleven, been given another shot of morphine, and then drifted back to Dreamland.

  “He’s still out,” I told the aide. “Go ahead. Just take it.” It was three-thirty. Who the hell had been prescribing his painkillers, anyway—Dr. Kevorkian?

  I watched the aide attempt the impossible: balancing Ray’s tray atop her already overflowing cart. It slid clattering to the floor, and the two of us bent to sop up soup, reconstruct his sandwich, locate a runaway apple. By the time I looked back at Ray again, his eyes were open. “Who are you?” he said.

  I told him I was Dominick. Asked him how he was feeling.

  “Who?”

  “Dominick,” I said. “Connie’s son. One of the twins.”

  “Oh,” he said. “I thought you were the hall monitor.”

  The hall monitor? I asked him if he knew where he was. He surveyed the room, studied the hallway outside and then looked back at me. “The hospital?”

  I nodded. Reminded him he’d had an operation the day before. He asked me when the football game was starting.

  Football game? I glanced up at the ceiling-mounted TV. I’d been watching it without sound while I waited for him to wake up. “There’s no football on now, Ray,” I said. “It’s May. Baseball season. Basketball playoffs.”

  He leaned forward, looking down at his amputation without any observable understanding of loss. “Has Edna been here to see me?” he asked.

  “Edna?” I said. “Who’s Edna?”

  “Edna,” he said. “You know. My sister.” He shook his head, disgusted. “What’s this?” He had picked up the tethered TV remote.

  “Changes the channels,” I said. “On your TV up there. Go ahead, try it. The blue button, not the red one. The red one calls the nurse.” He pressed the red button, then the blue. Held his thumb down on it. Channels whizzed by: soap operas, CNN, the Maytag repairman. He stopped when he got to Oprah.

  “Yes?” a staticky voice said. “How may I help you?”

  “Oh,” I said. “He . . . we just pushed the wrong button. Sorry.”

  Click.

  “What time is the football game starting?” Ray asked again. When I reminded him that it wasn’t football season, he interrupted me to lead a cheer.

  Strawberry shortcake! Huckleberry pie!

  V-I-C-T-O-R-Y!

  Can we do it? Yes, yes, yes!

  We are the students of the B-G-S!

  I glanced out into the hall. Up at Oprah. “What’s the, uh . . . what’s BGS?”

  “The BGS!” he said. “The BGS! The Broadway Grammar School! What are you, slow or something?”

  “I don’t know. I guess there probably is a God. There has to be.”

  Dessa dangled the tea bag in and out of her cup. Looked up at me.

  “He’s not merciful, though. That’s a crock. He’s more into irony than mercy. He’s a gotcha! kind of god. A practical jokester. Because this is just too perfect to chalk up to random coincidence.”

  Dessa said she wasn’t following me.

  “Well, think about it,” I said. “First my brother dies. Then my stepfather loses an appendage, starts talking crazy. Stump II: the Sequel. It’s perfect.”

  Dessa said she was pretty sure that God dealt in challenges, not practical jokes.

  We were seated at a back table in the hospital cafeteria. An hour earlier, I’d held open the elevator door for hurrying footsteps that had turned out to be my ex-wife’s. Now, with the exception of the white-haired woman at the cash register and a couple of whispering candy stripers two tables over, we had the place to ourselves.

  “And anyway,” she said, “didn’t they say he was probably just disoriented from the pain medication? Didn’t you just tell me that you woke up disoriented after your surgery?” A few minutes earlier, I’d alluded to my strange morphine dream without going into the details: suffocating my brother as he hung from that tree, cutting him down and lugging him to the river. Kind of funny, in a way: in my morphine hallucination, I’d been a murderer. Ray had become head cheerleader in his.

  Neither of us said anything for a minute or so. I finished my coffee. Began unraveling the Styrofoam cup, apple-peel style. We both sat there, watching the long, continuous spiral. “You still go to church?” I said.

  It was weird I was asking, she said. She hadn’t been—had stayed away for years—but she’d just started going again.

  “Yeah? Why’s that?”

  “Oh, I don’t know,” she said. “Because of this place, partly.”

  When I’d run into her on the elevator, I’d assumed that something else was wrong with her mother, but Dessa had said no—she’d started volunteering in the children’s hospice. “You should see some of these kids I’m working with, Dominick,” she said now. “They’re so sick, so brave. They all seem like miracles to me.”

  She told me about a six-year-old girl with a brain tumor and a giggle so infectious that she could start a whole room laughing. About the AIDS babies with their string of infections, their need to be held and rocked. About Nicky, a seven-year-old boy with an enzyme disorder that had gradually robbe
d him of speech, balance, the ability, even, to swallow. Nicky was her favorite, she said. “You should see the way music lights up his eyes. And lights. Remember those lava lamps everyone used to get stoned and stare at? Nicky will just stare and stare at one of those things, as if it makes sense—explains something to him that the rest of us don’t get. He’s got such beautiful brown eyes, Dominick. That’s one of the places where I see God, I think. In Nicky’s eyes.” She laughed, embarrassed suddenly. “It’s hard to explain. I must sound so New Age.”

  I poked my foot against her foot. “Well, there’s probably still hope,” I said. “You haven’t bought any Yanni tapes yet, have you?”

  The AIDS kids had the hardest struggle, she said. They didn’t want to eat, because eating made them sicker. So on top of everything else the poor little guys were contending with, there was the real danger of malnutrition.

  Starve something long enough and it dies, I thought.

  “So what do you do for these kids?”

  She said she read to them, rocked them. Did a little pet therapy.

  “Pet therapy?” I said. “What’s pet therapy?”

  The kids really responded to animals, she said. There was a cool dog named Marshmallow that visited once a week. They had fish. And rabbits—Zeke and Zack. “We’ve got to be really careful because of infection—there’s all kinds of restrictions and regulations—but the kids love animals so much.”

  Mostly she just held the kids, she said. That was probably the most useful thing she did. “Kids this sick want physical closeness more than anything else. They just want to be held.”

  “You sure this is good for you?” I asked. “You sure this doesn’t cost you too much?”

  She smiled, shook her head. She knew it sounded depressing, she said, but it wasn’t. That was the miracle. It made her happy to be around these kids—to be a part of their precious days. She felt more at peace with herself than she had in years.

  I smiled. Said I thought she’d kept her promise after all.