by David Walton
Her expression remained serious. “I’ll be here first thing tomorrow. I don’t think we have much time to waste.”
“First thing tomorrow,” I said.
I hauled myself out of the car, found the key under the mat on the back stoop, and let myself inside.
I felt my way through the dark house until I found the light switch and flicked it on. The house was just as it had been before I left, comfortably cluttered and full of memories of my father. Fishing photos and knickknacks covered the tops of bookshelves and end tables. Throw pillows lay piled on the couch, along with a ludicrous stuffed trout I had given him as a joke years before. Photos of Paul, Julia, and I as children. Scrabble and chess sets on the dining room table.
Had he really walked away and left all this behind? Was he ever planning to come back? The fact that he had left Mom no way to contact him made it seem more sinister than a simple vacation. He owned an iPhone, but I doubted he had it with him. It was probably in a drawer in the house somewhere.
The thought reminded me that I needed to buy a new phone. I had left my old one in my luggage in my hotel in Brasília, which meant that it was now in the hands of the Agência Brasileira de Inteligência, and thus the property of the Ligados. I couldn’t imagine it would do them any good, but it was certainly annoying to me not to have it.
I traipsed upstairs toward my bedroom, turning lights off behind me as I went. It was creepy to walk around in an empty house at night, even one as familiar to me as this one. I resisted the urge to look over my shoulder or leave the lights on, though the normal creakings and tickings of the old house sounded unnaturally loud. I wondered if I had locked the doors, though I knew I had. I had even kept the key in my pocket instead of returning it to the mat outside.
I used the bathroom, rinsing my mouth out with water and wishing I had my own toothbrush. Another gift left behind in Brasília for the Ligados. I dabbed at my mouth with a towel and flipped the bathroom light off. Not wanting to be left in total darkness, I crossed to my bedroom first and turned that light on before coming back to the hallway switch and turning it off. For a moment, as I stood in the hall with the only illumination behind me, I thought I saw a tiny light coming from my father’s room.
I sighed, my hand still resting on the switch. It was probably nothing. An LED alarm clock, or else the reflection of a streetlight through the window. If I didn’t look, however, I’d end up lying in my bed, wondering. I walked to the other end of the hall and reached my arm around the doorframe to find the switch for his room. I flipped the switch, flooding the room with light.
A figure lay slumped on the end of the bed, his back to me, wearing a hospital gown. I couldn’t see his face, but I knew that head of curly gray hair better than I knew my own face in a mirror. It was my father.
I couldn’t move at first. Adrenaline flooded my system, sending my heart into a gallop, and my skin flushed with a heat that felt like fear. An eternity passed in seconds. Was he dead? But no, he held something bright in his hand. What was he doing here? Was he hurt? Where was Paul?
Eventually, my fight-or-flight reaction subsided, and I took a deep breath. My father hadn’t yet moved or acknowledged my presence, or even reacted to the light. I took a step closer and saw that the object he held was his iPhone. The glowing rectangle, perhaps reflected in the window, must have been what I’d seen from the hallway.
“Dad?”
I stepped closer and peered at the screen. He was paging through the photographs of Julia and her daughter, Ash, his thumb sweeping across the device every few seconds to bring up the next. Finally, he shifted his head a fraction to regard me. There were tears in his eyes.
“How did you get here?” I asked.
He didn’t answer me. Instead, he flipped to the next photo, this one of Julia’s husband holding the baby, and stared at it with an expression of intense despair.
“That’s Hisao,” I said. “He’s married to your daughter, Julia. The baby is Ash, your granddaughter.” I slipped easily into the soft, calming tone of voice I had grown accustomed to using with him in recent years.
“I know who it is,” he said. “Don’t patronize me.”
I sat down on the bed across from him, just an arm’s reach away. “Dad? What’s going on? How did you get here? Are you . . . ?”
“Am I of sound mind?” he said bitterly. “Who knows? I certainly can’t be trusted to have an opinion on the matter.”
“Dad—”
“Do you know those dreams, where nothing makes any sense, but you know there’s somewhere you were supposed to be, or something you were supposed to do? You wake up with that feeling of urgency and panic still lingering, but you can shake it off because, hey, it’s just a dream. Only it wasn’t for me, was it? I woke up to find that the dream was actually the last two years of my life.”
He seemed lucid enough. On the other hand, he still wore the same flimsy gown he’d been wearing when he left the hospital, smelling like a sick room and with a few days growth of beard darkening his face. He wasn’t exactly back to normal.
“Do you remember how you got here?” There had been no car in the driveway when I arrived. Mom would surely have checked the house, and although he might have hidden up here in the dark, she would have noticed if his car had been here.
“Paul dropped me off. I haven’t seen him since.”
“He just left you here?”
“He was called away.”
“Called away? By whom? Have you been here all this time?” I assumed my mom had checked the house, but maybe with all the lights out, she hadn’t realized he was home.
“I slept a lot,” he said. “I think.”
“Have you eaten anything?”
“I don’t know,” he said, and his voice rippled with anger and frustration.
“Are you having memory lapses?”
“Yes? Maybe?” He groaned and sat up, holding his head. “I don’t know whether to thank Paul or curse him. It’s like torture, this glimpse of what I should be, what I’ve missed.” He held out the phone with a close-up of Ash’s pudgy face. “I’ll never really know her, will I?”
I met his eyes. “I don’t know, Dad. You might. We never expected you to regain any mental ability, but here you are.”
He gave me an acid smile. “Here I am.” He sucked in a breath and let it loose in a great sigh. “Don’t you think losing your mind once is as much as anyone should have to endure? I’m afraid to go outside now, in case I can’t remember how to get back to the house. Earlier today, I couldn’t remember where the bathroom was. In my own home.”
“You’ll need someone to stay with you, at least until we figure out what you can and can’t do now. Does Mom know you’re here?”
“I don’t think so. When she came, I hid in the closet until she left.”
“Dad! She’s been worried sick.”
“Please don’t call her. I don’t want her seeing me like this.”
“She loves you.”
“That’s exactly why I don’t want her here. She’s already been through this once. I know it hasn’t been easy, dealing with someone who doesn’t remember how much you’ve done for them. She shouldn’t have to go through that again.”
I put a hand on his arm. “I’m sorry,” I said. “I shouldn’t have gone to Brazil. I should have been here with you. But this is a gift. Maybe not a perfect one, but we’ll figure it out. Mom will want to be here.”
He pushed himself up on one elbow and stared at me. For a moment, I thought he didn’t know who I was. “Neil,” he said. “I want you to admit me to a psych hospital. Somewhere they’ll watch me. Where they won’t let me leave.”
“I don’t think we need to resort to that yet.”
He grabbed my sleeve. “Listen to me. You don’t know how hard this is to say.” He tried to continue, but it turned into a hacking cough that he couldn’t control. I patted him ineffectually on the back until he waved me away. “I almost killed her,” he said urgently.
<
br /> “Who?” I said. “Mom?”
“That young doctor. Chen or Chu. I wanted to kill her.” He ran the fingers of both hands roughly through his hair. “I wanted to so badly.”
I pulled away. “Dad, what are you talking about?”
He propped his feet up on the bed and hugged his knees. His arms stuck out of the short sleeves of the hospital gown, and I noticed how thin he’d become. “It came on all of a sudden,” he said. “The doctor came in to take a blood sample. She didn’t have a nurse do it; she came in with a syringe herself, looking around like she didn’t want anyone to see her. And suddenly, I had this tremendous urge to take her throat in my hands and squeeze until she died. It seemed natural and obvious, like something I might do every day. Just something that needed to be done.
“Instead, I told her to leave. I told her they’d already taken samples, but she said I had very special blood, and she was trying to understand what made it so special. She told me I’d been infected by a fungus, and that other people had been, too. I shouted at her and called her names and told her to get out before I called security.
“She said she would let me rest and come back in an hour. While she was gone, I searched through the cabinets in the room until I found a scalpel. I hid the scalpel under the sheet and waited for her. All the while, I imagined slashing it across her carotid.”
“Why?” I said. “Why would you do such a thing?”
He grimaced. “I don’t know. It was like she was evil. She had to be stopped before she did irreparable harm. It wasn’t rational; it was just this powerful feeling. The idea of killing her felt so right, so clear. Like if it were the last thing I did before I died, it would make my whole life worthwhile. I knew that if she came back, I wouldn’t be able to stop myself from cutting her throat. So I left.”
The temperature had dropped since the sun set. I pulled a knitted blanket off of the bed and wrapped it around my dad’s shoulders while I tried to process what he had said. I thought of Mariana de Andrade and her attempted assassination of the Brazilian vice president. She had shown no regret, no sense that the decision hadn’t been hers. And yet it went against everything she had apparently dedicated her life to up until that moment. I had no doubt that it was the influence of the fungus in her brain that had prompted her actions.
My father, however, had apparently been able to resist the urge to kill. More to the point, he’d been aware of the compulsion as something outside of himself. What was different? Was it his Alzheimer’s that altered the equation? Or did he just have a particularly strong will? Obviously, the fungus had been able to create the connections that Alzheimer’s had previously robbed from him. But now he was losing those connections again, presumably because the fungus was receding. Was it my father’s resistance of the fungus that caused its integration with his brain to reverse? Could the physical growth of mycelia in the brain really be affected by a frame of mind?
I tried to think, but my exhausted brain just traveled in circles without getting anywhere. I needed to sleep.
“We can’t do anything until the morning,” I said. I pulled a pair of pajamas out of a drawer. “Put these on,” I said. “Sleep. We’ll figure it all out in the morning.” I headed for the hallway.
“I’ll try,” my dad said. “I haven’t been sleeping well lately. Too many dreams. And Neil?” I stopped in the entranceway and turned to face him. The anguished expression on his pale face combined with the hospital gown to give him a spectral appearance. “Lock your door.”
CHAPTER 22
I locked my door.
Despite everything on my mind, I slept like the dead, and when I woke light streamed through the window, illuminating my bedroom. It was almost as if none of it had happened: my father’s Alzheimer’s, my brother’s infection, the deaths of thousands in Brazil. I dragged myself out of bed, afraid I would discover my father gone, or worse.
Instead, I found him downstairs at the breakfast table, dressed in jeans and a brown sports coat over a clean white t-shirt, eating a mix of scrambled eggs and potatoes with his usual liberal dose of malagueta hot sauce. I was no stranger to spicy food but just smelling his plate made my eyes water.
“If you can survive that breakfast, you can survive anything,” I said.
My dad harrumphed. “I just wanted to be ready.”
“Ready for what?”
He cut his eyes at me over a forkful of eggs. “You want to get me checked out. You want me poked and prodded and scanned five ways from Tuesday. It’s inevitable, I suppose. So, I’m ready. If we have to do it, let’s do it.”
“I’ll have to call Mom, too,” I said. “We can’t keep it from her. She’s afraid you’re dead.” In fact, I felt guilty for not calling her the night before.
“One step ahead of you,” my dad said. “Already rang her this morning. She’s on her way.”
I bit my lip. “There’s someone else coming over this morning,” I said. “Somebody to help with the poking and prodding. Or at least the scanning.” I swallowed. “The thing is, it’s Dr. Chu.”
“No.” He dropped the fork with a clang against the porcelain bowl. “No, Neil. Didn’t you hear what I told you? I tried to kill her. I still want to kill her. It’s like, I don’t know, an alcohol addiction, or gambling, or something like that. I can’t stop thinking about slitting her throat.” He spread his fingers like a helmet over his head. “It’s in here, and I can’t get it out. She can’t come here. It’s like putting a bottle of whisky in front of an alcoholic and expecting him not to drink it.”
I sat down in the chair next to him and put a hand on his shoulder. “We’ll sedate you, if that’s what it takes,” I said. “But she’s the only person I know with both the knowledge and willingness to figure this out.”
The house phone rang. I crossed to the kitchen counter and picked it up.
“Hello,” I said. “Mom?”
“Neil!” It was a man’s voice.
“Yes?” I said.
“This is Andrew. Where have you been? I’ve been trying to reach you since yesterday morning.”
“Sorry,” I said. “My phone is gone. I lost it in Brazil.”
“Well, you’ve got to get in here. We’ve got all kinds of things going down, and we could really use your help.”
“Are Melody and Shaunessy all right?”
“As of five minutes ago, they were alive, but it’s looking touch and go. You were the guy who cracked this whole Johurá thing, and we could really use another miracle right now.”
A key turned in the front door, and my mom entered. She looked both relieved and angry to see my father sitting at the breakfast table. I gave her a short wave.
“I’m a little tied up right now,” I said into the phone. “My dad . . .”
“I’m not kidding about this, Neil. This is life or death. It’s all falling apart over there.”
“I’ll get in as soon as I can,” I said.
“We’ll be waiting for you.”
Just as I hung up the phone, the doorbell rang. I opened the front door. Mei-lin stood on the stoop, her dark hair pulled back, looking trim and professional.
I hesitated. “My father is here,” I told Mei-lin.
“That’s great,” she said. “I need to get a look at him.”
“There may be a problem with that,” I said. “He’s been having some trouble with violent thoughts. Honestly—”
“It’s okay,” my father said.
“What?”
“It’s okay. She can come in.”
In retrospect, I should have seen it coming. He’d warned me, after all. And I knew how crafty an addict could be. It’s just that I didn’t associate those things with my father.
I beckoned Mei-lin through the door and introduced her to my parents, even though they had met her previously at the hospital. My dad put his breakfast dishes in the sink, and came around the table to shake her hand.
“Now, what I really want to know is how you are feeling, Mr. Johns,”
Mei-lin said. “A fungal infection can be—”
I didn’t see the knife until it was too late. My father must have slipped it out of the dish drainer when he put his plate and fork in the sink. I wasn’t expecting deception, despite his warnings of the night before. Mei-lin was quicker than I was. As my dad slashed the blade up toward her rib cage, she brought her left forearm down to deflect it. The blade cut through her blouse and instantly drew blood.
I launched myself across the room, toppling a chair, and tackled him. He went down easily, a bundle of cloth and bones, and the bloody knife skittered across the floor. My mom screamed, but she had the presence of mind to snatch up the knife. Mei-lin left me to control my father, and rushed to the sink, pulling back her ruined sleeve and sluicing the wound with water from the tap. She swore as bloody rivulets ran down her arm.
I hauled my dad to his feet and pushed him into the chair, where, for lack of a better idea, I sat on him.
“I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m so sorry,” my father said, over and over.
I bound his wrists and ankles with duct tape. I felt like some kind of psychopathic kidnapper, but my father kept urging me to use more and to make it tighter. My stomach rose when I saw his face, so helpless and horrified by his own violence. I wanted to comfort him, and at the same time, I wanted to shake him. He didn’t struggle as I carried him out to my mom’s car.
I apologized to Mei-lin as she wrapped her arm with bandages from a first aid kit, but she waved me away. “I was stupid,” she said. “I should have been more careful.”
“Are you okay?”
“It hurts,” she said, with a wincing smile, “but I’ll live. I can still drive. Let’s get your father to the hospital.”
We drove to Baltimore Washington, Mei-lin following behind in her silver BMW. Once there, I cut the tape off my father’s arms and legs and looped my arm around his elbow to walk inside. With Mei-lin’s help, we sidestepped a lot of the process to get him admitted, and she found him a room on an orthopedic floor. She said he would be less conspicuous there than, say, on a psych floor, where they would ask more questions about his condition. It wasn’t unusual for patients to end up on floors where they didn’t strictly belong, and she had told the floor nurses to page her if there were any issues. She wrote in his chart that he was a risk for violence and strapped his arms and legs to the bed with medical restraints.
