Brad's been gone maybe ten minutes when the door swings open and Coach Dugan steps into the room. Every organ in my body contracts at the sight of him. After last night's episode, his presence here is impossible to process, and I just sit up in my chair and stare at him.
“Joseph,” he says, taking off his baseball cap as he enters the room.
“Hello, Coach,” I say, hoping my voice doesn't sound as shaky as it feels. Dugan is one of those men whose very presence commands attention, even in a crowded gymnasium. In the confines of the hospital room, he is a giant, much too large and powerful for so small a venue.
He walks over to the bed and stares down at my father. “He doesn't look very good,” he says. “What do the doctors say?”
“It's pretty bad,” I say.
Dugan grunts. “He's a good man. And if he knows he's in a coma, I'll bet he's pissed about it. He deserves better than this.” His words seem to contain a shadow of rebuke in them, but I can't quite pin it down. It's too weird to be engaged in a conversation with him at all. Dugan's deep, hoarse voice is designed to address teams and groups, and there's something overwhelming about being addressed by him on a personal level. “Where's Brad?”
“He had to run over to the office for a few minutes.”
“You'll tell him I stopped by.”
“Sure.”
To my surprise, Dugan leans forward and plants a dry kiss on my father's temple. Then he straightens up and steps over to the door, pulls it open, and turns to me. “Sean Tallon can be a dangerous man,” he says. “He's somewhat unstable. If I were you, I'd steer clear of him.”
“A bit late for that, don't you think?” I say, indicating my bruised face.
The coach shakes his head and squints at me like I'm an idiot. “He's capable of much worse.”
“Well then, I guess I owe you one for intervening when you did last night.”
“I did that for Brad,” Dugan snarls at me. “He has enough to contend with without Tallon sending him to the emergency room.”
“It looked to me like he was holding his own.”
Dugan gives me a withering look. “I forgot who I was talking to,” he says.
“And who's that?”
“Someone who doesn't have a fucking clue.” He steps out of the room, closing the door behind him. I'm not surprised to discover that even in the heavily air-conditioned room, I'm sweating slightly.
“Just you and me now, Dad,” I say somewhat self-consciously, and sit back with an Esquire magazine. A little while later I move on to Newsweek, and then, somewhere in the middle of Us Weekly, I doze off. I dream about Carly, as I often do, something warm and sweet and ultimately sad, and wake up to find my father staring at me. I sit up with a start, my elbow upsetting the Styrofoam cup resting on the windowsill, which falls to the floor, splattering my Rockports and the cuffs of my khakis with tepid coffee. “Dad,” I say, my voice still thick with sleep. “It's me, Joe. Can you hear me?”
There is no response, but his stare, while somewhat dull, appears to contain some fragile semblance of clarity. I grab his hand, so much bigger and rougher than my own, and give it a soft squeeze. The hand remains limp, but I now see that his eyes are opened wider, his thick eyebrows raised inquisitively in two congruous arcs. I reach over him, rising slowly on my feet, afraid of breaking the spell, and thumb the nurses' call switch repeatedly. His eyes never leave mine, even as I move, and when I return to the edge of my seat, there is a large, bulbous tear, trembling and bulging as it forms on the red membrane of the inside corner of his left eye. The tear achieves critical mass and descends in a lazy diagonal across his cheek, being absorbed into his pasty skin as it goes, until it finally fades just shy of his sideburn. “It's okay, Dad,” I say dumbly. “It's going to be okay.” I reach for the call switch again and press it frantically. “Just stay with me. Someone will be here in a minute.” But even as I say it, I can see his eyelids starting to close again, his eyeballs rolling upward in his skull. “Dad!” I shout at him, but his eyes remain closed, which is how the nurses find him when they come scurrying in a few moments later.
Dr. Krantzler, the young, tired-looking resident who shows up soon thereafter, reviews the folded rolls of printouts from the EKG machine and seems utterly unimpressed. He quizzes me for a moment, his eyebrows never once falling from their skeptical perch. “I'm not necessarily saying you didn't see what you saw,” he says, although that's clearly his implication. “But there have been no fluctuations on any of his vitals. And you did say you'd been sleeping.”
“What does that have to do with anything?”
He smiles condescendingly and rubs his eyes. “It's not unreasonable to think that given the monotony of waiting and the emotional stress you're under, you dreamed you saw him open his eyes, or experienced a brief optical illusion. It's quite common, actually.”
“I know what I saw,” I say hotly.
“Well then,” he says huffily, backing out of the room, “let me know if you see it again.”
I call Brad's cell phone and he arrives twenty minutes later, slightly out of breath, despite my repeated disclaimers that medical science has not embraced my version of events. He looks at me intently as I retell my story, frowning and shaking his head in frustration. “Why didn't you call the doctor immediately?” he says.
“I rang for a nurse,” I repeat defensively for what seems like the twentieth time. “I was scared to leave him.”
“Did you talk to him?”
“Yes.”
“Did he give any sign that he knew what was going on?”
“He seemed to be somewhat aware.” I don't mention the lone teardrop that I witnessed. A section of my brain is still replaying that in a continuous loop, and it feels to me like something personal between my father and me. Besides, I'm starting to get pissed. Brad seems thoroughly convinced that things would have happened differently if he'd been here, as if it's a direct result of my general failings as a son that our father has slipped away for a second time. “Listen,” I say. “He opened his eyes and he closed them. That was it. There was no time for me to do anything else.”
“I should have been here,” Brad says, shaking his head and turning away in disgust. My newfound ambivalence toward him is fast dissolving into the old, familiar resentment as I come face-to-face with the older brother I remember, arrogantly superior and egocentric.
“I'm sure the sight of your face would have made all the difference,” I say sarcastically.
“At least it would have been a familiar face,” Brad says bitterly.
And there it is. A day late, but perfectly timed just the same. “Nice,” I say, heading for the door, my voice uncharacteristically thick and bending under the weight of some as yet undefined emotion. Brad snorts, but makes no effort to stop me.
I walk quickly down the hall, struggling to regain my equilibrium even as I feel the improbable tears coming. I find my way to an abandoned stairwell and sit down with my head in my trembling hands, wondering what the hell is going on with me. Things are coming apart inside me, tearing loose from their foundations and scraping my innards as they fall. I need a plan, something to give me direction, but I can think only as far as the parking lot, which is where I'm headed when I run into Carly in the lobby.
An old girlfriend is a gun in your belly. It's no longer loaded, so when you see her, all you feel is the hollow mechanical click in your gut, and possibly the ghost of an echo, sense memory from when it used to carry live rounds. Occasionally, though, there's a bullet you missed, lying dormant in its overlooked chamber, and when that trigger gets pulled, the unexpected gunshot is deafening even as the forgotten bullet rips its way through the tissue and muscle of your midsection and out into the light of day. Seeing Carly is like that. Even though we haven't spoken in almost ten years, it's an explosion, and in that one instant every memory, every feeling, comes flooding back as fresh as if it were yesterday.
She's carrying a small, elegant bouquet of tulips and baby's b
reath, and as soon as I see her, I know she's here to see me. She hasn't yet noticed me, and I have to fight the overpowering impulse to duck back into the stairwell and hide until my stomach stops its nervous acrobatics. Dressed in a white pullover blouse that's tucked into a short gray skirt emphasizing her trim waist, she looks pretty much as I remember her, the only change being her hair, which she always wore short and off her face. Now it hangs at a luxurious shoulder length, framing her face and somehow emphasizing its simple, graceful aesthetics. When she sees me, her tentative smile falters as she takes in my bruises and reddened eyes, still a bit raw from the absurd crying fit I just had. For a minute it appears as if she's ready to turn on her heel and flee, but she waves the bouquet at me, her face breaking into a small, wry grin as she approaches. There seems to be some genuine warmth behind her smile, and as I look at her, registering with satisfaction that her eyes still contain those little flecks of yellow, I feel a familiar flutter in my chest, a highly irrational burst of euphoria. Before I know what I'm doing, I step forward and hug her tightly.
I want the hug to last forever. I want it to be one of those intense, slowly building movie hugs that start out awkwardly but then, on some nonverbal cue, come into their own as the feelings behind them are suddenly released, and we just melt into each other, all the distance and bad feelings between us unable to withstand the epic nature of our universal connection. A nothing-matters-but-this-very-instant hug. Within a second or two, though, it becomes evident that this particular hug has maxed out at awkward.
Carly exhales softly, clearly taken aback, but recovers quickly and hugs me back. “You look great,” I say, stepping back as I release her.
“You don't,” she says, still grinning as she hands me the flowers.
We smile, and it's comfortable for a few seconds, just like old times, but then it gets weird, so I look away and thank her for the flowers.
“They're for your dad.”
“Yes. Of course.”
“Of course,” she repeats awkwardly, and now I can feel every day of the years that we haven't been in touch. “How's he doing?”
“Not good,” I say. Even under the auspices of a genuine medical crisis, the small talk is offensive to me, a yardstick for the immeasurable distance between us, pebbles dropped into a bottomless well while you wait to hear the faint splash from below. “I think of you,” I say, my voice, so unreliable lately, tripping on the threshold of the last word. “A lot.”
“I have that effect on many men,” she says, and we smile, not at her joke but because of it.
“How have you been?” I say.
“Fine, I guess,” she says, simultaneously shaking her head and flexing her eyebrows at the abject worthlessness of the question. As if ten years could be encapsulated into short answer form. As if she would even want to try.
“I guess what I mean is, how are you. Really?”
“I'm good,” she says. “Hit a few rough patches here and there. 'Ninety-eight was a particularly gruesome year, but these days I'm okay. And you?”
“Apparently, I'm a controversial novelist.”
She laughs. “You, of all people, should know not to believe everything you read.”
“Did you write the article?”
“I edited it. The first draft was . . . strongly worded.”
“I can imagine,” I say. “They're throwing books at my house.”
Carly laughs. “That would be the book club. They met last night and decided to return their copies to you en masse. How many have you gotten?”
“Three or four.”
“There'll be more.”
“Hey,” I say. “Did you ever get the one I sent you?” I'd sent her one of the first copies of Bush Falls to come off the presses.
“I did,” she says. “I read the entire book that weekend.”
“Oh. Good.”
“I meant to call you afterward,” she says, her voice trailing off.
I wave my hand dismissively. “I didn't expect you to,” I lie. “I just wanted you to have one, from me.”
“No, I really meant to. I was going through something then, something bad, and I don't know, nothing seemed very real to me at the time.”
I nod as if I understand. “We should get together,” I say. “Catch up and everything.”
“Okay.”
“Good. I'll call you tonight.”
“Only if you want to,” she says. “Don't feel obligated.”
“I want to.”
She considers me for a moment, and then shakes her head lightly, as if whatever she thought she'd seen has turned out to be a trick of the light. “Wayne has my number,” she says.
I look at her, nodding stupidly. I'm still not fully comprehending that after so many years of being canonized in my mind, this is really Carly again, standing in front of me, ever so slightly weathered but fundamentally unchanged.
“Well,” she says. “I have to get back to work.”
“Sure.” I say her name as she starts to walk away.
“Yeah?” she says, turning back around.
I hesitate, unsure of what I'm going to say until the words are out of my mouth. “I still know you,” I say.
Carly smiles, a genuine smile so heartbreakingly familiar it takes my breath away. “Joe,” she says softly, “you don't know shit.”
I watch the soft curves of her calves as she walks away, the smooth muscles beneath them flexing and extending with each step. I always loved her legs. She was glad to see me; I'm pretty sure of that. Of course, that doesn't really mean anything in the overall scheme of things, but maybe it does. Since I came back, my past has achieved a fresh, reckless immediacy and nothing seems completely out of the question. I sit down on one of the attached styrene chairs in the lobby, suddenly incapable of standing. What it all comes down to is this: I still love her.
Maybe.
eighteen
I don't know where I'd been planning to go when I stormed out of the hospital room after my argument with Brad. Probably I would have just cooled down in the cafeteria for a half hour before going back upstairs to rejoin him. But after speaking to Carly, sitting still to eat a soggy prewrapped tuna sandwich is out of the question, and so is returning to the silence of the hospital room to squirm in the harsh glare of Brad's disapproval. Something lying dormant in me has been stirred up by seeing Carly, and now I'm a pulsating bundle of raw energy, twitching, antsy, and surging with adrenaline. I am suddenly claustrophobic in the white, sterile hallways of the hospital and feel as if I might start bouncing off the walls if I don't get out. I leave my cell phone number at the nurses' station and head outdoors, feeling strangely keyed up. Later I'll get Carly's number from Wayne and give her a call. We'll sit and talk, and eventually the strangeness will start to wear off and then . . . Well, I can't really see past that, but it still feels exciting in an old, familiar way. In the meantime, I decide as I climb into my car, I'll go visit Wayne.
The damp aroma of steaming vegetables and curry engulfs me as Wayne's mother lets me in with a mumbled greeting before retreating through the swinging door of her kitchen. Her frown makes it clear that I will not soon be forgiven for my borderline blasphemy the night before, and my counterfeit smile and cheery greeting make it equally clear that I couldn't care less.
Wayne is propped up in his bed on pillows, scrupulously smoking a preposterously fat joint when I enter his room. He looks pale and remarkably haggard, his eyes squinting deep in their sockets, his lips heavily chapped. When he smiles at me, his teeth look like large, jagged stalactites in his receding, colorless gums. I wonder if he's possibly lost even more weight since last night. “I really shouldn't have let you drink like that,” I say, alarmed by his deathly pallor.
“You're not the boss of me,” he says with a wan grin. “And besides, you're not looking so pretty yourself.” I look pointedly at the fatty hanging loosely between his fingers. “For medicinal purposes,” he says. “I shit you not.”
I wheel over the le
ather desk chair and sit down at his bedside. “I don't want to be a nag, but don't you think you should be in a hospital?”
He frowns and closes his eyes. “They recommended a hospice,” he says. “But I'm not going to lie in some white room, doped up on painkillers and antidepressants, waiting for the end. How would I know when I'd actually died?”
I nod sadly, for the first time fully comprehending how far along Wayne is. He isn't looking at a matter of years or even months. Weeks is probably more like it, or maybe even days. It must have taken a Herculean effort for him to get dressed and come over to see me the way he did last night, and I feel like an idiot for not having recognized the full extent of his condition. I should have driven him home and put him right back into bed. Instead, I took him out drinking.
“Have you seen Carly yet?” he says.
“Why do you always go right to that?” I say, although I've been waiting for him to ask.
“Because it's what matters.”
“Other things matter too.”
Wayne opens his eyes, takes a short drag on the joint, exhaling a thin gray plume of smoke as he sits up a little. “Here on the cusp of the hereafter,” he declares with mock gravity, “I've been granted a certain wisdom, for lack of a better word. An ability to see things with a clarity I never before possessed. It's a parting gift, I guess. You won't be advancing to the next round, but here's a consolation prize, and thanks for playing. That sort of thing.” He pauses to smile ironically at his analogy before continuing. “I suppose that not being weighed down with the normal, self-absorbed concerns over health, wealth, and the future, my brain is freed to finally see the greater truth in everything. Or in other words”—he pauses, giving me a sharp look—“what really matters.”
“And what does really matter?” I ask, inhaling a whiff of secondhand ganja so strong it stings my throat.
He grins at me, not answering, and looks out the window. The sun hangs low in the purple sky over the roofs of the houses across the street, and the afternoon light is quickly fading into the soft pink hues of evening. “Do you remember that day we cut school and took the train into the city—you, me, and Carly?” he says.
The Book of Joe Page 13
