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

  He goes over to the closet and gets a fresh Depends. Takes off the one I’ve been wearing, then sponges and powders me down there. “Funny how we’ve exchanged roles,” I tell him.

  “Hmm?”

  “I used to diaper you.”

  He smiles, nods. Out of the blue, he asks me if I miss sex.

  “Sometimes. The closeness more than the act itself, I guess. Touching, caressing. Spooning against another warm body. And boobs. I really miss boobs.”

  “Yeah, boobies are good.” He asks me if I ever hear from Tracy.

  “Uh-huh. She called me from Key West last week. She’s on sabbatical down there.”

  “Was that why you two broke up? Because of . . . you know?”

  “That was a concern. Sure. It was my decision, not hers. Wouldn’t have been fair to her, you know? Why should someone who’s in her sexual prime have to be tethered to a guy who’s dead below the waist?”

  “Yeah, but if she’s still calling you . . .”

  “No, no. Tracy’s moved on, more power to her. When we talked last week, she mentioned that she’s seeing someone down there—a guy who runs a charter fishing boat.”

  “Yeah? How’d you feel when she said that?”

  “Oh . . . made me a little sad, to tell you the truth. But it’s for the best. It’s like something Marissa said to me this morning when I talked to her: you can look back on the past. Just don’t stay stuck there. What about you?”

  “What about me what?”

  “Don’t you miss sex? I mean, hey, I’m an old geezer. But a young guy like you—”

  “Dad, don’t start,” he says. “I already got the pitch from Mom tonight about how I should be dating. And anyway, who says I don’t have sex? What do you think the Internet’s for?” He means it as a joke, but I can’t muster a smile. This self-imposed loneliness of his breaks my heart.

  “Not the same thing,” I tell him. “What’s your resistance about? The secret you’re keeping? Because there were extenuating circumstances. And if you put yourself out there, you might find someone who you could trust and—”

  “And what? Saddle her with it? Or hook up with someone, marry her, and not ever tell her what I did that day? Keep my deep, dark secret from her like Mom kept hers from you? Marriage is about trust, isn’t it? Open communication?”

  “But that’s what I’m saying, Andrew. Maybe if you find the right girl—”

  “Yeah, and what if after a couple of years of being married, she decides I’m not the right guy? That she wants a divorce? It would be a pretty juicy piece of ammunition for her to use against me. Wouldn’t it? The fact that I killed a guy and stuffed him down a well?”

  He finishes diapering me in silence. Yanks my sweatpants back on and pulls the covers up. I can tell he’s pissed. “Are you mad at me?” I ask him.

  “No. I just wish you and Mom and Marissa would stop harping on me about getting a girlfriend. And that Ari would stop trying to fix me up.”

  “Okay, kiddo. Got it. I’ll lay off.”

  “Good.” He walks over to the door and turns back. “Anything else you need?” I shake my head. “Okay then. Get some sleep.”

  I reach over and tap the book I’ve been reading. “Yeah, I think I’ll read a little while first.”

  “Okay. G’night then.”

  “Night. And Andrew? Thanks.”

  “Sure. No problem.”

  “Not just for helping me tonight,” I say. “For everything. Moving back here, hanging out with me. I’m not sure what kind of shape I’d be in right now if I didn’t have your support.”

  He nods, gives me a sad smile, and says it again. “No problem, Dad. Thanks for your support, too. You want your door open or closed?”

  “You can leave it open.” He nods again and leaves.

  I open my book, stare at the page I’m on for the next few minutes without really reading. . . . It’s theoretical: this ex-wife who’s going to turn around and betray him. But I can understand his hesitation, his fear. I think about that bumper sticker I read in the parking lot yesterday when Belinda ran into the pharmacy to get my prescriptions: JUST BECAUSE YOU’RE PARANOID DOESN’T MEAN SOMEONE’S NOT OUT TO GET YOU. When I look up, he’s at the door again. “Hey,” he says.

  “Hey. What’s up?”

  “I was just thinking. Got a proposition for you.”

  “Oh, yeah? What’s that?”

  “I’m off this coming Tuesday and Wednesday. What do you say the two of us take a road trip?”

  “Sounds intriguing,” I say. “Got any particular destination in mind?”

  “Yeah, I was thinking maybe . . . the Cape.”

  I flinch. “Return to the scene of the crime? Nah, I don’t think so, buddy. But thanks for the offer.”

  “No, listen. We could steer clear of Viveca’s. But what if we drove up there, got a motel room in Wellfleet or P’town? I could drive you over to Long Nook Beach. Haven’t you always said it’s your favorite place?”

  “Used to be,” I tell him.

  “The crowds will be gone by now, and the weather’s still nice. We could go up there, stay overnight, and come back the next day.”

  He stands there, looking at me. Waiting. “Let me think about it,” I tell him. Okay, he says. I can let him know.

  I give up on reading. Put my book down. When I close my eyes I can see it: the view when you look down there from the top of the dune, the sandbar that forms when it’s low tide. I can hear it, too—the crack of the surf, the waves rolling in. . . . When I reach over to turn off my light, it’s smiling at me: that little soapstone dolphin my Grandpa Valerio carved for me when I was a kid. I pick it up, smile back at it. . . . Maybe we can go up there. Being at their trial and testifying against them didn’t give me any closure, and neither did their conviction. But this might. Going up there with Andrew, being able to look out at the ocean again. I don’t know, though. Like I said, I’ll have to think about it.

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  Orion Oh

  We arrive at Long Nook at about one in the afternoon. It’s a warm, overcast day, but the rain we hit on the drive up has stopped. The parking lot’s empty. Andrew swings into the spot up front and cuts the engine. I tell him my handicapped tag is back at the motel inside the bag Belinda packed. He laughs, scanning the empty lot. Says he doesn’t think it’s much of an issue.

  He gets out of the car and grabs the folding patio chair he’s thrown in the back. Jogs up the path with it and unfolds it up at the top. The wheels on my chair won’t work in the sand, so the plan is that he’ll carry me up there and put me in the folding chair. That way, I can look out at the ocean below. When he comes back down, he opens my door, swings my legs around. “Ready?”

  “Yep.” I put my arms around his neck and he lifts me up and over his shoulder like I’m a sack of potatoes. When we reach the top of the dune, he bends his knees and slides me down onto the chair. “Houston, we have landed,” I joke, but Andrew, born after the space race, doesn’t get it.

  I look out on the horizon. Gray sky, choppy gray-green waves. The sea breeze feels good against my face, my arms. I fill my lungs with ocean air. A sunny day would have been nicer, but this is still pretty damned terrific.

  Andrew sits down on the ground beside me and hugs his knees. “Nice,” he says. “I think this may be my favorite place, too.”

  I tell him about the whale Ariane and I saw from this same vantage point three years ago. Back when I had working legs and a new girlfriend, I think. Back before Andrew took another man’s life and it changed the course of his own. . . . Okay, but what have you gained since then? I ask myself. It’s something I used to advise my university patients to do to combat self-pity: replace negative thoughts with positive ones. So, okay, what have I gained? Well, my work on the novel. My grandson. . . . And this road trip. This time with my son. Despite how hard it’s been to keep his secret, and to see how much keeping it has limited his life, it’s brought us closer. Andrew and I are closer now tha
n we’ve ever been.

  “Hey,” he says. “You want to go down by the water?”

  I shake my head. “Don’t forget, my friend. What goes down must come back up again. I’d probably give you a heart attack halfway back up.”

  “Pfft. What do you weigh now? One-sixty-five? One-seventy? Piece of cake compared to what I’m lifting at the gym. And I can stop and rest if I need to. Which I won’t. Come on, Papa Bear. Let’s do it.”

  He stands up, lifts me out of the chair. Carries me in his arms the way I used to carry him when he was a boy—when he’d fall asleep coming home from someplace and I’d lift him out of the car and bring him up the stairs to bed. Now we’re like some screwed-up version of the Pietà, the child cradling the broken parent instead of vice versa. But no, that would make me Jesus, and I’m not that by a long shot. I didn’t die for my own sins, let alone everyone else’s. I’m still here. “You okay?” I ask him. He says he’s fine.

  When we reach the bottom, he says, “Where to?”

  “Maybe a little closer to the water?”

  “You got it.”

  He puts me down about six feet up from the high-water mark. We sit side by side in the sand, looking out at the ocean, neither of us speaking. A few minutes later, he stands up, pulls his shirt over his head. “Can’t resist,” he says.

  “Go for it.”

  “You want to come in?”

  “No thanks. I’m good right here.”

  “Just wish I’d thought to bring some trunks.”

  When I suggest that he just drop his drawers and go skinny-dipping, he looks up and down the beach, back at the path. I laugh. Tell him what he told me up there in the parking lot—that it’s not much of an issue with just the two of us. He nods, shucks his clothes, and heads in.

  Looking at his naked body, I think back to the day he was born. Ariane had been birthed with no complications, but not him. The umbilical cord had wrapped itself around his neck, and we didn’t know if he was going to make it or not. But then the doctor had somehow saved him from strangulation and he had emerged from his mother’s body squalling and blue. The nurse had cut the cord and placed him in my arms. Cradling him, I watched him breathe in oxygen and turn pink. Looked at the little nub between his legs and thought, wow, a son. I’ve got a son. Seeing him now, I realize that blessing is something my own father deprived himself of, and for the first time in my life, I pity him his loss, his cowardice. And pitying him robs him of his power over me. He never got to see his son grow up the way I have. . . . I recall Andrew’s skinny frame when he was a kid, his teenage body after he started lifting weights and getting some muscle definition. Now he’s got a grown man’s body, solid and muscular. Powerful. So powerful that he killed a man. . . .

  He goes in up to his knees, then takes the plunge. When he comes up again, the water’s up to his chin. I smile at his dolphinlike swimming—the way he goes under, comes up for air, shakes his head, and submerges again. I think of something I read recently, I forget where. A life I didn’t choose chose me. That’s true for both of us. . . .

  When he comes out, walks back to me, he’s shivering a little. “How was it?” I ask him. Awesome, he says. He towels off, pulls his underwear and jeans back on, and sits down beside me. When I ask him about the tattoo on his shoulder, he says he got it the night before he left Fort Hood.

  “Those are Chinese characters, aren’t they?” He nods. “What’s it say?”

  “Says, love wins.”

  To hide my sorrow, I smile. “No matter which way our lives turn out. Right?” He doesn’t answer me. We both stare out at the water, neither of us feeling the need to speak. But a minute or so later, when I look over at him, I see that his eyes are closed and his lips are moving. Is he praying? Does Andrew still pray? And if he does, for what? Forgiveness from his god? Salvation for the soul of his victim? I look back at the ocean and think about what his mother told me: how she prayed for his safety every single day when he was in the service. Sometimes I wish I could believe in some bigger scheme of things the way people of faith do—some merciful overseer who you could pray to, ask things of. Can’t do it, though. But even if I can’t pray—can’t express my gratitude to some higher power up there in the sky—it doesn’t mean I’m not grateful, because I am. Grateful that he wasn’t at work the day that shrink lost it and went on his shooting rampage. That he wasn’t deployed over there to either of those wars. He’s here beside me, as safe as any of us ever gets to be.

  “Where’d you just go?” he asks.

  “Hmm?”

  “You look like you were deep in thought just now,” he says.

  “Oh. Well . . . I was just thinking about your mother.”

  “Yeah? What about her?”

  I’m not going to get into the god thing with him, so I come up with something else. “She’s pretty excited about some new art project she’s planning. Going to work on it over there in Greece.”

  “Is that the one she told me about? Where she uses yarn or whatever to connect her life to that painter who used to live out back on our property?”

  “Oh, you mean ‘Josephus’s Thread.’ No, she finished that one. You remember that Greek myth about the labyrinth? How the hero—Theseus, I think his name was—goes in there, kills the Minotaur, and then gets out again, thanks to Ariadne’s thread? So he won’t stay lost in the maze forever?”

  He shrugs. Asks who Ariadne is.

  “The king’s daughter. She gives him a skein of thread so he can save himself after he slays the monster. He unwinds it as he walks through the maze and then follows it back to the entrance. Your mom’s proud of that piece. Says it’s the most directly autobiographical one she’s ever done. I guess the point she’s making is that Joe Jones’s art not only led her to make her own, but that it also led her to being able to confront what happened during her childhood. Slay those monsters, okay? The flood, the abuse. She says that piece came out of all of the therapy she’s done.” I think about the monster Andrew killed on her behalf. How he hid the body in the same place where Jones was killed. How he’s entwined in Josephus’s thread, too, but may never get himself out of the maze his life has become.

  “It’s all Greek to me,” he says. “So she’s working on another one now?”

  “Yeah. Says she might call it We Are Water.”

  His face darkens. “Is this one going to be about that flood, too?”

  “No, I don’t think so. I guess the other one dealt with that, pretty much. Allowed her to move on. From what I gather, this next one is going to be about the gods and goddesses, the mysteries of the Aegean. She’s excited about some ruin she’s going to check out while she’s over there. An altar built by some group that worshipped the sea.”

  “Yeah?” He picks up a flat stone. Stands and scales it into the surf.

  “It’s true when you think about it, I guess.”

  “What is?”

  “We are water.”

  He nods. “Sixty to seventy percent, if I remember my physiology textbooks. And the brain’s something like eighty-five percent.”

  The brain, I think. That miraculous, mysterious organ. One part of mine is blocking me from using my legs, and another part is helping me to reconnect with my grandfather—to hear his voice, listen to his story. And who knows? Maybe my father will finally begin to speak to me, too. “Yeah, but that’s not what I meant,” I tell my son.

  He looks at me, waiting. And so I open my mouth and try to articulate what it is I do mean. “All of life came from the ocean, right? Even us. We flip-flopped out of the water, grew feet and bigger brains, stood up and started walking. Makes sense, doesn’t it? For the first nine months of our lives, we float underwater. Then we hit the cold air, the glaring light of day, and start crying salty tears. Begin the lifelong challenge of trying to figure out why we’re here, what it all means.”

  “Getting pretty philosophical in your old age,” he says. “Aren’t you?”

  “Maybe. But think about it. We are l
ike water, aren’t we? We can be fluid, flexible when we have to be. But strong and destructive, too.” And something else, I think to myself. Like water, we mostly follow the path of least resistance. Wasn’t that what I advised Andrew to do the day he confessed what he’d done: told him to shut his mouth about it? Take the path of least resistance?

  “You know what I’ve always liked?” he says. “The sound of water. It’s, I don’t know, kind of comforting or something. You know? Rain on the roof, rivers flowing. I always liked listening to the brook out in back of our house—the way it gushed during the spring thaw, trickled in summer if there hadn’t been much rain. And the ocean. Close your eyes and listen for a minute, Dad.”

  I do what he says, taking in the sound of the breaking waves, the surf lapping the shore. When I open my eyes again, he’s looking at me. “I’ve been wrestling with something,” he says. “Praying on it. Asking God for clarity.”

  “About what?” I ask, although I already know what he’s going to say.

  “I’ve been thinking lately about turning myself in.”

  I want to open my mouth, make the case again about why he shouldn’t. Rescue him from what will happen to him if he does. But I’m not my son’s knight in shining armor or anyone else’s; I’ve given up that conceit. And whether or not I’ve let my license to practice expire, this time I’m Dr. Oh as well as Dad. Isn’t that what the best therapists do? Hold their tongues and listen? Let the sufferer follow his own path out of the labyrinth?

  “I haven’t decided yet, though,” he says. “I keep going back and forth.”

  I ask him the question I’m not sure I want him to answer. “You leaning more one way than the other?”

  “Depends on which hour you’re talking about,” he says.

  I look away from him then, look out at the rolling waves and think about umbilical cords, nooses, the skeins of string that tangle and connect us. If he does go to the police, does end up in prison, maybe he’ll save himself from this choked-up life he’s been living. Be able to breathe again like he did the morning of his birth when the cord between his mother and him that had sustained him for nine months now was strangling him. When I look back at him, I tell him to do what his gut tells him to. Wish him luck making his decision.