Into the Inferno - Earl Emerson [67]
“Are you asking out of professional curiosity, or just for something to talk about?”
“I really want to know.”
“I’m thinking I’m going to be like him in four days.”
“No, you’re not. We’ll—”
“Find a cure?”
“Of course we will.”
“In four days? Get real.”
“You can’t give up hope.”
“I’m not giving up anything. I’m just being practical. The worst part is I don’t know what’s going to happen to my girls.”
“Your ex-wife still in the picture?”
“She’s wanted by the law.” Two years ago I might have outlined the details of Lorie’s misdemeanors ad nauseam; in the first years after our divorce I’d complained bitterly about Lorie to anybody who would listen and quite a few who didn’t want to but couldn’t get away from me. Ultimately, I ran out of listeners before I ran out of words. Now, more than anything else, she was a blot on my history. If she was a disgrace to parenthood, what did that make me for choosing her to be the mother of my children? She was just one more piece of evidence that I was an idiot.
I sat on the bed and picked up my father’s limp hands.
I thought about how over the years I’d blamed so many of my problems on him, how I’d measured, infantile as it seemed now, each woman I’d dated by the impression I thought she would make on him. About how badly I’d needed to impress him with my companions. He must have chosen my mother for a lot of the reasons I was choosing women now.
I was the young male expelled from the troupe, wanting to come back and conquer, if only psychologically, the alpha male. As religious as he was, my father had frequently betrayed himself with a lingering look at a slim ankle or a prolonged gaze into a pair of pretty eyes. At fifty-seven, and still turning heads, my mother was a testament to his need to be surrounded by beauty. She’d been twenty-four when they married. He’d been forty-four.
Within the limitations of his life, my father had been good to me. Later, when he needed me the most, I had abandoned him, just as the rest of the world would abandon me at the end of the week.
“You’re a good son,” Stephanie repeated.
“I’m hungry. How about you?”
“Driving over here I saw a little Italian place on the corner. Any good?”
“Sure. Trouble is, my daughters—” Just as I said the word daughters, Allyson and Britney burst into the room. Morgan remained in the doorway, eyeing Stephanie with a malevolent intensity I could never have predicted. The girls were each towing a gas-filled balloon on the end of a long yellow ribbon, raving about a clown they’d seen down the hall. Britney had a pink mustache. “Strawberry shake, little girl?”
She wiped her mouth with the back of her hand.
“Allyson? Britney? This is my friend Stephanie. Stephanie’s a doctor. And, Morgan? This is Stephanie.”
Morgan remained sullen. The girls immediately let me in on their plot: they wanted to go to E. J. Roberts Park, a small public park a few blocks from the fire station. If they’d been scarred by our brush with death that morning, they weren’t showing it.
“They’re adorable,” Stephanie said after they’d paraded out with Morgan. “You’ve done a wonderful job with them.”
“They’re great, but it’s not all my doing. Lorie was a good mother before she left. At least part of the time. You interested in seeing somebody else with the syndrome?”
“Where?”
“Right down the hall.”
In Jackie’s room the television was playing to an audience of one. I turned the volume down and let Stephanie make a quick examination of the patient while I read some of the notes and cards on the bulletin board, some for her, some for her roommate, who was out. There’d been two unsigned Christmas cards on my father’s bulletin board, both from the same insurance company. Somebody who felt sorry for him must have tacked them up. “She in an accident?”
“Crashed her car.”
“She a firefighter?”
“A volunteer. Aid calls only.”
“She’s got the hands.”
“Yup.”
We ended up walking to a restaurant a block away.
As we started to cross the railroad tracks, I looked up and suddenly realized I was sitting on the ground. I had been walking alongside