by Sara Shepard
My father careened to the window and crouched next to it, trying to heft it open. “What are you doing?” I called out.
“If I just…it’s so…” he grunted. “I need to get out before they find me.”
“Richard,” Dr. Frum said wearily.
“Dad, stop it,” I pleaded. So many people were staring at us. Even people from other offices. “Dad, please.”
He didn’t listen. He just kept straining at the window, his hospital gown now completely open at the back, the knobs of his spine poking through.
“Dad.” I managed to get between him and the window and pushed him a little, back toward the office door. He wagged his head stubbornly, lunging for the window again. I pushed him harder, spinning him sideways. He lost his footing, stumbled, and collapsed to one knee. Someone by the door gasped. My father gaped at me in disbelief, then turned away.
“Dad…” I began.
A man moved toward us, a big guy with dark hair and thick eyebrows that grew together. “Mr. Davis? It’s Michael. Do you remember me?” He had a German accent.
“I didn’t sign any papers,” my father shouted, still on the ground. “And I’m Dr. Davis.”
“Dr. Davis,” Michael corrected fast. “I apologize.” He helped my father up. “It’s much cooler back in our office. The air-conditioning works better in there. You need to get some rest, okay?”
“You aren’t taking me back in there.” My father’s protests were wearier.
“You’ll be safe. You’ll just rest.”
His hospital gown was completely undone. As he turned, I looked through the slit in the side. He wore something strange underneath it, something made of plastic that went the whole way around him. My hands twitched with instant realization. It was a diaper.
Michael helped my father back into the hall. They passed by me without saying anything. “Thanks, Michael,” Dr. Frum said. Michael shrugged, as if he had to do this all the time. Perhaps he did. Perhaps tonight he’d go home and recount this story. We had a guy today who was an extra nutcase, he would say, laughing over a beer. And his daughter was something else, too. Shoved him hard, the bitch.
The nurse glanced at me, her eyes cold. I wanted to tell her—I wanted to tell all of them—that I loved my father. That I felt constant terror and guilt and pain for him. I wanted to tell them that we played cards together, we watched the boats on the East River, we went for walks. And all of those things were, in their own way, wonderful.
But instead I pressed myself against the radiator next to the window, watching as they coaxed him into submission. And then I walked away.
sixteen
I dreamed I was in Dublin, walking over the brick-lined squares to work. The buildings were stately and old. Red buses whizzed by. Men wore top hats. When I came to a park and walked the whole way around a large, smooth pond, my skin started to pale. It became translucent, so much that I could see straight through my hands to my bones and my veins. When I moved a finger, tendons and muscles flexed before my eyes. And my heart was a black knot. Then my brain slipped into focus. My father was trapped inside my head, sitting on a rocking chair with a blanket thrown over his legs. He stopped rocking and peered out at me. “There’s a secret I never told you,” he said. “All you have to do is find it.”
I woke up sweating.
My room was dark and hot. Two dogs were snoring at the foot of the bed. I heard my father’s voice through the wall and sat up, cocking my head toward the living room. And then I remembered: he wasn’t sleeping on the couch anymore, but in his bed again. His last appointment, the bad one, was two days ago. When he came home, he slept for eight hours, and since then, he’d been quiet and peaceful. We had decided to skip today’s session and resume next week, giving him some time to recuperate.
I tiptoed to the edge of my room. At first his voice just rolled up and down like waves, and I couldn’t pick out individual words. But when I walked into the hall, I heard him clearly. There was a slice of golden light spilling from the gap at the bottom of his bedroom door. He was talking into a tape recorder Dr. North had given him to help with his memories. He was supposed to explain to his future self exactly what he was doing in a particular moment so he could go back, listen, and remember.
I heard a crinkle of paper. “There are certain things I don’t remember, but I have a list,” he said.
I ran my tongue over my teeth.
“I don’t remember how she and I met,” he said. “I don’t remember the place. Was it a football game? In a hallway? Was it Dairy Queen? No, wait. That was…”
He paused.
“And…what’s next?” he said. “Oh. What was her mother’s maiden name?”
He went through little things. Her favorite meal at the Italian restaurant in Park Slope was risotto. She loved Hall & Oates and Lionel Richie, much to his chagrin. A good friend from the gym was named Marissa. He talked about words they used to say to one another. Nicknames they used. Gifts they got for each other. Gifts they got for Steven and me.
It shocked me that he’d lost this much. Then I heard him bumping through the box he kept at the end of the bed, looking through the receipts. “I don’t think I wrote it down anywhere,” he mumbled.
He sighed. “There’s so much I don’t remember,” he said, louder. “There’s so much I need to clear up. It’s like…I have emotions but sometimes I’m not sure why I have them. Everything reminds me of everything…and at the same time, nothing.” After a pause, he continued. “Like today, I was looking out the window and saw this man on the street. A neighbor, maybe, but I couldn’t remember his name, and I had no idea what he did or how long I’d known him. The only thing I knew was that I had a strong feeling about him, but I didn’t know what that feeling was: Friendship? Hate? Irritation? If I’d have run into him today, I would have ignored him. But what if he’s a good friend? What if I pretend the wrong thing?”
I walked back into my room and retrieved my journal. I should be writing this down, I thought—but for what? Posterity? Still, I took it back to the hall and opened to a fresh page.
“But Summer,” I heard him say.
I wrote down my name, waiting.
“This is so much better for Summer,” he said. “This is what I have to do. It’s not worth putting her through…all the…I was so…”
This is what I have to do. Maybe he knew I was listening. Maybe he was saying this—that he was making a sacrifice—because he knew I was on the other side of the door.
It felt as though there were ping-pong balls jumping inside my stomach. When I went back to my bedroom, I climbed under my desk. The computer above me hummed. I could smell the remains of the apple I had eaten for lunch. In the darkness, it probably seemed like I wasn’t even there. Hide and seek. Now all someone had to do was come and find me.
There was a vase of flowers on the table in the little waiting room outside Dr. Hughes’s office at NYU. Out the window, I watched as a girl in a red dress ran down University Place. Her mother followed, yelling at her to slow down.
The door opened, and Dr. Hughes stuck her head out. “Hi, Summer.”
I stood up. “Hi.”
Her calico dress had pockets meant for spatulas and wooden spoons. “Do you have something for me?” she asked.
I looked down at my bag. “I’m not sure.”
“Not sure?”
“I have something, but I’m not sure if you want it.”
She leaned against the door. There was a sign taped up in the hall talking about guidelines on locking up at night. There have been many theft’s, it said in sloppy handwriting. There was an unnecessary apostrophe. “I was cutting you some slack for a while,” Dr. Hughes said. “But I don’t know. Maybe you don’t want me to.”
She held out her hand. I ran my fingers over the edges of my leather bag. This morning, I typed out my journal. Some of it wasn’t even complete sentences, just lists of drugs and symptoms. I even included the scribble from when my father was talking into the tape r
ecorder. I found another flyer for Acting for Beginners and put it in there, too. The date printed on the flyer was today’s date; the class was starting in less than an hour from now. I stapled all those things together and wrote, at the end, If this can happen to a person, and if this is genetic, I want to be able to fix it. Except I can’t. I can’t take this fellowship. I’m sorry.
But I also typed out a perfectly normal essay. One that talked about my love of genetics, how I’d like to find the cause of the things that went wrong inside of us, because I was certain that so many of them began at the smallest level, at a mistake in our gene sequences. I wrote about my father, saying that he had an influence on me when I was very young, encouraging me to excel in science even though I was a girl and people expected girls to do better in things like English and art.
My hands curled around the normal essay. I pulled it out, leaving the crazy one in my bag. I passed it to her, wincing.
“I should go,” I said as soon as the papers transferred hands.
“Wait.” She caught my arm. “I’ll read it right now.”
“Don’t. Please. Just…read it later.”
Dr. Hughes’s phone rang. She glanced toward her office, disappointed. “I want to talk to you, at least. Can I talk to you?”
I paused. The phone rang again.
“I should take that.” Dr. Hughes gestured to the waiting room chair. “Sit. Don’t move.”
But as soon as she turned her back, I crashed through the front door and down the stairwell. The exit sign burned into my retinas. Out on University, I looped around people and bus kiosks and phone booths. A cab was parked at the curb outside the deli. The door was open, and the driver was just sitting at the wheel, his eyes closed. I wobbled on the sidewalk, and then threw myself into the backseat. The cabdriver opened his eyes and glared at me. He was a large black man in a blue work jacket. He had a beard but no hair on his head; there was a small roll of skin at the back of his skull, leading into his neck. “I’m not on duty,” he said gruffly.
I didn’t answer.
He shifted in his seat, making the leather crinkle. “Are you going uptown, at least?”
People briskly passed. NYU students, with book-filled backpacks. Dr. Hughes was probably reading my essay right now.
“Well?” the driver demanded.
“Yes,” I heard myself saying. “The Mayflower Hotel. Central Park West and Sixty-first.”
He sighed and started the car. A jazz station, the same one my father listened to, came on the radio. The driver glanced at me in the rearview mirror, then yanked his door closed. We started up University, stopping at the light at Union Square. People paused in front of a shoe store, walked in clumps, edged around a man in an electric wheelchair. The insides of my elbows wouldn’t stop sweating.
We paused at another traffic light; more people crossed. A man wheeling a hot dog cart. A couple with their arms around each other’s shoulders. The guy looked like Steven. It was amazing, suddenly, that Steven and I hadn’t really spoken for years. After my grandmother’s funeral, he disappeared back to NYU, finishing school, applying for a graduate degree in California, then going. The times he flew home were perfunctory and businesslike: he cleaned out his bedroom, he helped Dad with tax returns. He had an excuse to stay away for both holidays that following year: a hiking expedition in Chile over Thanksgiving, a cabin with friends in Martha’s Vineyard from Christmas to New Year’s. Only, two days after Christmas, I had gone into the city to tour NYU’s library, already knowing I was going to attend there the following year. When turning onto Broadway from Waverly, there was Steven, standing in front of the Astor Place Barnes & Noble. We stared at each other two whole green lights.
“You should be going to the beach,” the cabdriver interrupted my thoughts. I jumped.
“Sorry?”
“The beach. In this weather. Everyone should be going to the beach today.”
I ran my hands over my bare legs. “Yeah, well, not me.”
The cabdriver glanced at me in the rearview mirror. The whites of his eyes had a yellowish tint to them, or maybe they just looked that way because his skin was so dark. “Maybe you’re not a beach person, huh?” He gripped the wheel tightly. “My wife’s not a beach person, either. Likes climbing mountains, camping. Me, I like the beach. You’d think I’d want something quiet, like my wife. Out in the middle of the woods. Especially after driving through this city. But I’d rather drown myself in noise and just…drift off, you know? Places that are too quiet make me nervous. I get to thinking, and when I get to thinking it’s not always good.”
He chuckled. I tried to smile back but I could feel the outer edges of my eyes and the corners of my mouth doing strange things.
“You gotta take a break once in a while, though,” he went on. “I mean, you have to. I have a daughter, you know. She’s a little older than you. She had a baby that died. It’s tough, man. It’s tough. My wife’s having a hard time getting through it. We all are, I guess. But sometimes, I say, You know what? Let’s just go to the beach. And they say, Carl, are you nuts? But we go. We go to Long Beach.” He met my eyes again. “You know Long Beach?”
I could barely move.
“It’s nice enough,” he said, putting on his blinker to switch lanes. “Better during the week, when you don’t get the crowds. But sometimes, you know. You just have to do it.” He shook his head, turning onto Broadway. “Sorry I got into all that. You probably want a peaceful trip up, and look what you get. Well, that’s what happens when you get in when I’m not on duty.”
I swallowed. “How did it die? The baby?”
An air freshener Jesus spun from his rearview mirror. “She drowned. In a neighbor’s plastic swimming pool. It was a Memorial Day party last year. Beautiful day. Not a cloud in the sky.”
“I’m sorry.”
“Anyway. It just happened so fast…the pool wasn’t even deep.”
“That’s terrible,” I whispered.
“Well, it happened, you know? And there’s nothing we can do about it now. You can blame and blame yourself, thinking of the things you might’ve done differently, or ask if maybe it was her time, and ask if this has something to do with God, maybe, but sometimes I think things just happen. There’s nothing you can do about it—you just gotta deal with it. Sometimes life really sucks. You know? Sometimes it just sucks.”
He cleared his throat. “But then there’s the beach. Right? There’s the beach.” He eyed me. “Or maybe, for you, there’s something else.”
We passed the flower district, the garment district, the glittering lights of Forty-second Street and its surrounding craziness. A group of tourists—one of them staring perplexedly at a New York City guidebook—stood in front of an enormous electronics store, holding giant Barnes & Noble shopping bags. That day I saw Steven outside the Barnes & Noble downtown, I finally crossed the street to meet him. He had a Barnes & Noble plastic bag in one hand and an Other Music bag in another.
“I thought you were at Martha’s Vineyard,” I said to him.
“Plans fell through.” Steven zipped up his jacket.
“So why aren’t you staying at home?”
“My friend’s away for the holiday. He’s got a place on Ninth and First.”
I gawked at him, amazed that he’d avoided the question so cavalierly. He wouldn’t meet my eye. “You guys have a good Christmas?” he asked.
Our Christmas dinner had been lonely, pointedly quiet. We imagined Steven doing wonderful things in Martha’s Vineyard: sledding, eating an enormous dinner with his friends, exchanging brightly wrapped gifts. After dinner, my father curled up next to our small Christmas tree and cried. I rubbed his head, sending the Swiss men down the plastic ski slope again and again.
I tilted my chin up to Steven. “Do you remember that ski slope Mom and Dad got for us when they went to Switzerland?”
He glanced at me warily. “Huh?”
“You know. The little Swiss skiers? You loved it when they got i
t for us. You played with it constantly. It was your favorite toy.”
The wind had turned the tip of Steven’s nose red. “Sorry, no.”
Years of words lodged in my throat. Please just tell me something real, my mind clawed desperately. Anything. I wanted Steven to answer the same questions I had always longed to ask my mother. How did he manage it, suppressing everything, detaching so completely? Had that terrorist obsession been it—had he gotten his emotions out of his system, vowing never to explore them again? I had never felt so lonely, standing on that corner. How was it that a cabdriver, a stranger, could unburden himself far more than my own brother could? How was this so backward?
“Here you are,” the driver said after a wall of silence. “Mayflower Hotel, right?”
We were in front of a modest hotel with a few stone steps. The bellhop opened a door for an old lady. Across the street was Central Park. A magazine vendor rearranged a stack of newspapers. I gave the cabbie money and, just like that, he peeled away up Broadway, cutting off another cab as he changed lanes.
The hotel’s lobby was shabby yet stately, with old wooden fixtures and gilded details, the carpet worn, the chandelier missing some crystals. A tired-looking Indian woman hunched at the front desk, sleepily taking my money. The flowers in the vase next to her were slightly wilted. A placard by a conference room said, Acting for Beginners here! Someone had propped open the conference room’s double doors with a dictionary. Inside were five rows of folding chairs. A few people were already sitting. They weren’t the East Villagers I imagined, but jowl-faced old ladies, Upper East Side to the core in their stiff suit jackets, their brooches, their magenta lipstick. Two women sat at the front, whispering. An older man wearing a houndstooth cap slumped at the back, doing a word-find puzzle.
I wanted there to be a bigger turnout. If I stayed, she’d survey the crowd and recognize me. Or would she? I was taller, older, my oval face thinner, and I wore mostly oversized black sweaters and black jeans, a far cry from the bright, preppy colors I’d worn in tenth grade. But it was still my same green eyes, my dark hair that couldn’t hold a curl, my petite ears, features that were half hers. She would look out and know.
