by Nick Trout
I’m hoping to find my reception on the opposite side of the waiting room less hostile. “Denise, how are you? Out of hospital so soon?”
Denise Laroche is considerably less round than I remember. And she looks well, no need for a blood transfusion, thanks to a little restraint with the vampire makeup. In fact, I barely even notice the piercings.
“Doin’ great but I hate hospitals. I was like, get me out of here.”
“And who’s this?”
Beside her, lying in a stroller, snuggled in blankets, I make out the face of her sleeping son.
“This is Michael.”
Once again I squat down. I’m conscious of not waking him, and having not washed my hands and, strangely, of how good he smells. “Michael. Good name. He’s … adorable.” For a moment there I had hoped she was going to say, and this is Cyrus.
“Yeah. I think so too. But I’m here to pick up Tina and her kitten. And to get him registered as your patient.”
The way she says the phrase “your patient” has a strange effect on me. It’s part pride and part fear. Until now, every case I’ve seen has been acquired, originally under the care of Cobb or Lewis. Tina’s kitten promises to be the first case generated solely by me.
“Of course. Come on through to the back.”
Denise and Michael follow me and, apologizing to Tina, I open her cage and extricate a writhing fur ball. “You want to hold him?”
Denise smiles as I hand him over for her inspection. “Sure,” she says. “I just wanted you to know that I’m, like, naming him Cyrus, after you, after what you did for him. For us.”
A sentimental wave washes over me, a powerful, ridiculous notion that I am honored to receive such a silly but genuine show of gratitude from a girl who has almost nothing else to give. I become uncomfortably aware of the possibility, however faint, that I might actually shed a tear.
And that’s when I realize, while I’m feeling as though I’ve just been asked to be a godfather, that I’ve never properly examined her kitten. There was no time during the frenzy of Denise’s delivery, and it’s never crossed my mind since. So it should come as no surprise when I discover a detail that averts any threat of tears and ensures a blush of embarrassment. Cyrus is a girl.
It wasn’t as though I didn’t know what I was getting into. Not exactly High Noon or Gunfight at the O.K. Corral, but one way or another there’s going to be confrontation. This certainty is based on the venue where Lewis suggested we meet for coffee. It’s late afternoon, and I walk into a flat, two-dimensional world where corpse white snow meets dishwater gray sky. It’s visually chilling. Think more haunting than serene. Stubborn cold adds to the foreboding. Dormant trees gather like a crowd of sinister onlookers, and the caw of a distant crow is unnaturally amplified in the hush. It’s stark, it’s sacred, and it fills me with dread. But then I guess it should because, for the first time in my life, I stand at my mother’s graveside.
“Here you go,” says Lewis. “Cream, no sugar.”
I nod, more grateful for the warmth than the drink itself. “I could think of cozier places to chat.”
“Cozier, maybe, but more pertinent, I doubt it.”
Lewis watches me, undoubtedly noticing that I’ve barely glanced at the tombstone.
“Sounds ominous,” I say, and I’m not striving for levity. “But I’m used to living a life without looking back, without nostalgia. I’m pretty sure any attempt at a frostbitten intervention won’t make that much difference.”
Lewis takes a step closer, sips his drink, and eyes me over the rim.
“The other night, down in the basement, you asked me whether I thought you misjudged your father.”
I’m wary of where this is headed. “Yes.”
“Well, it all depends on your perspective.”
“Perspective? Perspective suggests that there’s more than one way to interpret the facts, and the facts about what happened when my mother died are incontrovertible.”
Lewis is not smiling. “The thing is, I think there might be three versions of what happened here fourteen years ago.”
I laugh and it sounds too jumpy, too defensive. “Three? Where d’you get three? This is all about me not knowing Ruth Mills was dead until after she’d been buried. This is all about never getting to hold her one last time, never getting to say good-bye. I don’t really care about being branded as the absent son. This was my mother. I never got to lose her. The person I loved most in this world was amputated from my life, and it was Bobby Cobb who cut me out.”
I wait a beat, swallow my drink, which is too bitter. Feeling this much is like an awakening and part of me is ready. Part of me wants the walls to come crashing down.
“But, Cyrus, why would Bobby Cobb want to hurt you?”
“Because he could. Because he resented what Mom and I had. Because he’d rather be a veterinarian than a father. I’ll never know and I really don’t care because whichever way you slice it, what he did was unforgiveable.”
The old man’s breath lingers, swirling around him like a lazy cloud. My breath looks more like a steam train struggling up a hill.
“It sounds like he punished you, so you punished him right back?”
“Damn right,” I say, letting the same Pavlovian anger of that fateful phone call kick in. “How else are you going to respond? I never wanted to see or hear from him again. No phone calls, no letters, nothing. I couldn’t stand the thought of being tethered to his last name but I couldn’t get a court date until after graduation. Yes, it was Cobb who insisted I go to boarding school, and yes, I know I got a better education because of it, but Ruth was the one who inspired, guided, and yearned for me to be a vet. Taking her maiden name was the least I could do to honor her.”
Lewis’s lips part enough for me to catch the neat rows of his Scrabble-tile teeth. But he doesn’t look pleased. “So when did you acquire Ruth’s sense of objectivity and need for deliberation?”
I flash to one of my mom’s favorite truisms: the harder you have to convince yourself, the more you need to listen to your inner doubt.
“Hey, don’t get all preachy on me.” My interjection comes out fast and animated and I know I’m hooked. “At least you’re getting to be there with your wife at the end. The day Cobb put me in that much pain I earned the right to be reflexive and narrow-minded.”
I feel sick. I want to apologize. I want to let him know, it’s more than pain. It’s guilt.
Lewis waits, choosing his moment, like he needed to read my remorse before moving on. “Bobby told everyone you couldn’t be at Ruth’s funeral because you were doing volunteer work overseas. He said you were totally unreachable. He said by the time you found out, chances were you wouldn’t be able to get back before Ruth was laid to rest. Nothing anyone could do.”
I stare down at the snow, trying to focus on the eerie blue glow filling the holes I’ve made with my boots. “That’s what Doris told me, and even she didn’t buy it. She said Cobb was covering for me, as if I chose not to be there.”
“I’m telling you what he told me, some years back. No reason not to believe him.”
“Please, he just wanted to save face. You say your son can’t make it, so you avoid the confrontation, the ugly scene in front of friends and clients. Cobb made sure he gave Ruth a sanitized funeral where he was in total control.”
Lewis makes to squeeze my arm. “You and I both know Bobby was far from perfect, but …”
I shake off his hand. “No, he wasn’t, and what kills me is the fact that everyone in this town thinks he was. Everyone.”
Lewis is silent, begins to dig around in his coat pocket.
“Far from perfect. Ruth was my mother and Ruth was my father. Bobby Cobb’s only child was his work. As far as I’m concerned he made a choice, and in the end, so did I. You don’t get to choose your parents. You don’t get to choose your childhood. You don’t get to choose that moment when your mind realizes that being constantly overlooked feels pretty much the same as bei
ng rejected. So when the time comes and you finally get to choose, the path you take is less about what it is, and more about what it is not.”
Lewis pulls out a stick of balm, applies it to his lips. They must be too dry and stiff to worry that cracked incisor. “You asked me if he and I talked. We talked a lot, especially at the end. Believe me, your father knew he let you both down.”
I frown, wanting him to know I don’t believe him, and Lewis takes a moment, considering how best to prove his point.
“D’you know when Bobby first knew something was wrong with Ruth? When she started to go bald from the chemo. What kind of a husband never notices his wife getting sick, never shares the fear of her diagnosis, or the horror of her treatment until the poor woman’s hair falls out in clumps? I’ll tell you what kind. The kind whose obsession with work creates a divisive isolation. The kind who finally must face what he has become. When it came to Ruth, Bobby knew there could be no redemption for what he had done.”
Hearing this I want to say “nor should there be,” but I keep my mouth shut.
“But he never gave up hope that he could somehow turn things around with you. That picture of you running track, the one in his bedroom, that was from way back. It proves he was there, even though you never saw him. Same with your graduation.”
“He wasn’t at my graduation. I wouldn’t let him be there.” I want him to hear the desperation more than the outrage. “It was Mom’s day. She was the one who made it happen. It was nothing to do with him.”
“Look in his office. It’s not a great shot, a lot of heads in the way, but I could tell it was you walking across the stage to pick up your degree. He was there.”
I flash to the day of my graduation from veterinary school, standing without a family, brandishing my isolation. I didn’t want to, but I walked for Mom; no cheers, no whoops, no name calls, just polite applause. Why does this revelation feel more like a betrayal than a display of Cobb’s anonymous support? Mom would have given anything to be there. Defeated, but with a sense of obligation, I say, “You said there were three versions.”
Lewis nods. “Yours, Bobby Cobb’s, and”—Lewis waits a beat—“what I believe to be the truth.”
“The truth?” No sarcasm, genuine surprise. Mom comes to me in a slow blink, stern but sympathetic. When someone tells the truth, someone takes responsibility. Always her voice in my head.
“It came out right at the end, and I mean the very end, as these things often do, before Bobby asked me to do him one last favor.”
“Lewis, please, you mean well, but this is getting to be a little much.”
The old man considers me, stern but sympathetic. “I know, but I think you need to hear this.”
He may be right but over the last fourteen years I’ve learned to accept that this particular story doesn’t have a happy ending.
“According to Cobb, the truth lies right here. You’re looking at her, or at least you should be.”
“I’m not with you.”
“Ruth Mills. Ruth Mills was the reason things turned out the way they did.”
For the first time I take a long hard look at her tombstone. Big mistake. Lewis has obviously dusted off the snow, enough for me to read, chiseled in the granite, LOVING MOTHER OF DR. CYRUS COBB, DVM. Me, wearing his last name, on her tombstone, even before I graduated.
“He told me you visited her a few weeks before her death. He said at that stage she didn’t look too bad, all things considered.”
I can’t even nod.
“The end came real quick, real unexpected. He said hours not days. And this was right when you were starting your finals. All the same, Bobby wanted to pull you out, wanted you home.” He’s watching my reaction. “It was Ruth who stopped him.”
Here’s another chance to lash out, but something in the old man’s eyes holds me back. It’s more than “hear me out,” it’s “let me in,” it’s “trust me.”
“Sadly, I never got to know Ruth, but if there was anything bad anyone said about your mother it was that she could be incredibly stubborn and pragmatic, sometimes to the point of being a total pain in the ass.”
An authentic smile gets away from me.
“Bobby swore she argued that if you couldn’t sit those crucial exams, if you were absent, you would fail, and that meant you would fail because of her. She’d wanted this for you from the first time you told her ‘I want to be a vet.’ Everything had been about these exams. She knew you were ready, poised to get it right first time. She couldn’t be the one to deprive you over something as inevitable, as predictable, as her own death.”
I think about the last letter Mom sent me. I read it as a pep talk before my grueling finals, a fond recollection of every important moment growing up that had brought me to the brink of graduating from veterinary school. Did I get it wrong? Was it really her way of saying good-bye?
“Remember, we’re talking about a pathologist here. Death, and things that cause death, was her life’s work. That’s why she insisted Bobby Cobb promise not to tell you how sick she was until you were all finished. And he did. He reckoned he owed her. Bobby kept his promise, in part because he believed Ruth would hang in there long enough that he could call you and you could get back in time.”
I breathe in Lewis’s speech bubble, suck down each sentence, deep inside, and slowly the words begin to register and have meaning. That’s when my body kicks in, no longer simple “fight or flight,” not this time, this is war and jet fuel, and it doesn’t come on in increments, it explodes like a shock wave resonating through my gut and my chest. The coffee cup leaves my hand. I feel like I’m either going to be sick or pass out. Lewis is still speaking but I can barely hear let alone comprehend.
“Ruth knew your exam schedule. Bobby called first chance he got, as soon as you were done. Two hours after she had been laid to rest.”
I come back enough to realize this must have been the phone call Doris said she overheard. My vocal cords feel weak, as though they’ll fail me. It’s all I can do to ask, “Why didn’t he tell me?”
Lewis looks anxious, like this is just as painful for him. “He told me he wanted to be punished. In the sorry aftermath of Ruth’s death he felt like he deserved it. Eventually, over time, he wanted to explain. He reached out—letters, phone calls, he even tried e-mail—but you sealed him off and shut him down so completely he stopped trying. His will was all he had left, his last attempt to let his son know just how sorry he was. He had no expectation of whether you would or could take on Bedside Manor, but if you did, his one hope was for you to finally walk in his shoes, to feel how the work becomes all-consuming, the way you get lost in the lives of the people and the animals who come to depend on you. He wanted you to get it, to understand their fear, to appreciate their joy, to recognize the challenge of balancing a life inside and outside of work.”
For a moment there, Lewis seems so very old and fragile, and I realize that here, in this graveyard, he’s like a man on thin ice, with not much separating this world from his next.
I’m open-mouth breathing, my lower jaw slung like a hammock rocking side to side. “Why? Why did he need me to do this?”
“Because he wanted you to understand. Because he wanted what we all want when our time comes.”
“And what’s that?”
Lewis leans in, places both his hands on my upper arms. This time I let him. “A chance to be forgiven.”
I wince, lick my lips, and squeeze them together, wringing the blood out of them until the pain makes the scream inside my head go away. It’s as though he’s wedged a knife in deep, pried me open, and I already know there’s nothing good inside worth shucking out. Nothing except shame.
“When you left this town,” says Lewis, “you left something of yourself, something essential, behind. Possessing a sharp mind doesn’t make you a genius in the same way that possessing a heart doesn’t make you compassionate. As far as I can tell you’re back, in more ways than one. It’s time to reclaim what you l
ost.”
His kindness feels misguided and so much more than I deserve. “You said he asked you to do one last thing.”
“That’s right,” says Lewis, unzipping the front of his coat and fumbling inside. “He wanted something from the basement, from the workshop. He said it was what he wanted to be looking at when he died.”
Lewis hands over a Polaroid, and I take it, keeping my eyes on his, catching the way he raises his chin, encouraging me to look, and I don’t want to, and I’m afraid to, but slowly I bow my head and take it in, all the way. I notice the four small holes in the white border, precise, neat, one in each corner. The picture from the heart of the collage. I’m sitting on his lap and his arm is out to the side, wrapped around Mom’s waist. I’m smiling, my mom is smiling, and though his eyes are almost closed, my dad is smiling too. The three of us are together, a family, trapped in a moment of genuine happiness.
That’s as far as I got. And as I knew he would, like he’s been from the moment I came back, Lewis is there to catch me, joining me in the snow, holding me so tight as the tears come, letting me let go, and helping me to turn fourteen years of misplaced anger into fourteen years’ worth of grief.
19
All of a sudden I’ve got work to do. And it’s not because I’ve found a solution to my problems. I wish. In fact I’d be exaggerating if I described it as a plan. It’s more of a tactic—risky and irreversible and embarrassing and it could totally backfire, but for the first time in a long time, I’m all in. Dispose of the water wings and send the lifeguard home. Look what proof, objectivity, and deliberation got me. Time to believe in the power of my conviction. Time to let go of the sides and wade out until I’m completely in over my head.
I go down to the basement. Dad’s workshop seems different. I dig around and check it out with a fresh eye. There’s a half-eaten pack of Oreos in the top shelf of the fridge, unopened quart of vanilla ice cream in the freezer—fine antidotes to the cravings of a sweet tooth. I run my fingertips over two pieces of wood sitting in a vise, set at a right angle to one another thanks to a perfect dovetail joint. No weeping glue, no nails, just precise craftsmanship. There’s a pocket-size, dust-covered transistor radio, sitting on the bench, telescopic aerial extended, divining a signal. I’m about to turn it on when I stop myself and try to guess what I’m about to hear. Right now everything is about the truth, however painful, and the truth is I’ve no idea. I play the odds, guess sports, or talk radio, flick on the power, and once more Bobby Cobb proves how little I knew about the man—I’m listening to a string quartet.
