Dying without a fight was a shameful way to go.
Walter knew, because he was giving it his best shot.
Hypocrite,
he told himself, but the word didn’t even leave a mark.
Mia’s door opened and she slid out into the hallway. She seemed so small these days, tinier than usual. Which was saying something.
She looked like her mother. As the girlishness left her face and womanhood settled in around the corners of her eyes and lips, the fact that Mia was Sandra’s daughter was unmistakable.
Sometimes, in a certain light, after enough to drink, Walter was sure Sandra was back. In his home. Bringing the warmth and laughter that had vanished when she left.
“Did he come out?” she asked, when she saw Walter standing outside Jack’s bedroom like a crippled scare crow, rooted to the spot.
Walter shook his head, gripping the rubber handles on the walker with his useless, trembling hands.
“You should go lie down,” she said.
Go lie down. Take a seat. Have a rest.
It was all he ever did.
That and think. And then drink to forget everything he thought about.
“He come here to die?” he asked, nodding toward the door and, behind it, the boy he hadn’t seen in more than five years.
Mia had always known Jack better than Walter did and if anyone could answer that, it’d be her.
“He has a sprained knee and a broken hand,” she said. “He’s hardly about to die.”
But Mia’s eyes were dark. Her face, pinched and drawn.
They both knew that whatever was wrong with Jack was way worse than a sprained knee.
He’d survived an air raid that had killed his best friend. Walter didn’t understand much about what was going on over there in Sudan, or who exactly the bad guys were. They all seemed to be doing their best to blast the country to hell and back.
But Jack, who’d only been trying to bring clean water to a desert, got caught in the middle of it.
“It’s the only reason he’d come back here,” he said. He knew the truth, had lived with it every day, practically since Jack was born. “Victoria drove that boy away and I let her.”
Mia tugged on the sleeve of his old blue sweater. “Come on, Walt. Don’t you have some drinking to do?”
He had so many of her sarcastic barbs in his hide, that one glanced right off. He shook his head and she stepped back to stand in front of him. Her eyes were skeptical. “You’re not drinking?”
“It’s seven in the morning.”
“Hasn’t stopped you before.”
Now that one hurt. Walter didn’t say anything, just turned his walker around in tiny increments until he faced the hall leading to the kitchen and dining room.
“Gloria is coming today,” Mia said. Gloria came and cleaned up and cooked every other day. Filling the freezer with casseroles and meaty soups to put in the slow cooker, and sweeping and dusting around him in the living room, as if he were just another piece of furniture.
In the kitchen, he watched Mia pour coffee into one of the travel mugs and take a big slice of ham out of a bag in the fridge.
“You want something?” she asked and he nodded, pointing to the coffee.
She grabbed a mug and filled it with black coffee, setting it down beside him as he collapsed into a chair.
He wanted to tell her to sit down, eat a proper meal. But he knew how much work she had to do, and how many hours of sunlight to do it in.
Shame burned through his veins and his fingers twitched, searching out the weight of his whiskey glass.
“I’m sorry,” he said and she turned toward him, chewing her meat.
“For what?”
For drinking. For screwing up the money. For getting sick.
“Three days ago,” he said. “The pilot light.”
Her smile was sad, sweet, and his shame burned hotter. She deserved better. Hell, that boy locked up in his room deserved better. She shoved the last of the ham into her mouth and wiped her hands on a tea towel. Then she grabbed three plastic amber bottles from the windowsill.
“If you’re really sorry,” she said, plunking the bottles down on the table in front of him, “take these.”
Mia grabbed her keys, her beat-up ball cap from the counter and left. Leaving him alone with the medication he refused to take.
Doctors told him Parkinson’s wasn’t a death sentence. That if he took those pills like he was supposed to, he could have a life.
But it wouldn’t be his old life.
No horses. No working cattle. None of the things he’d done and loved forever.
All those things that made him who he was.
A cattleman. A tough son of a bitch.
And without the work, who was he really?
He wasn’t a husband, hadn’t been for a long time. He’d never really been a father. Not much of a father-in-law, either.
He’d been a waste, and the disease was here to put an end to a miserable life.
Without the pills, death crept closer on shuffling feet, its face a thick, unmovable mask.
The booze helped, too.
And Walter went to bed every night knowing he was another day closer to leaving all the shame and the bitter regrets behind. And he liked it that way. The pain was bad, sometimes real bad, and the electrical currents that ran through his body as if he were water were getting worse.
But pain was nothing.
The booze helped with that, too.
Walter sniffed hard and felt the scruff of his beard with a shaking hand. He used to shave every morning, gave the guys a hard time if they didn’t.
When did I stop?
he wondered. When he first had trouble with his hands, two years ago? When Mia finally made him go to the doctor and get diagnosed a year ago? When he started drinking?
“My boy is back,” he said aloud, the words echoing through the empty kitchen. His empty home and life.
Well, he realized, not so empty anymore.
Jack was back for a reason. Signs and shit weren’t something he usually believed in, but his son was back, sleeping in the bedroom he’d grown up in.
Victoria, at long last, was gone, and it seemed as if Jack being here now was a chance to make things right between them.
It took a while to wrestle his hands into action, to put them where he wanted them, on the white caps on top of those amber bottles, and it took even longer to open them.
“Damn it,” he muttered as the pills scattered away from him, rolling over the table and falling onto the floor. But he got three, a yellow one, a big white one and a small orangish one, cupped in the valley of his palm.
If he lifted his hand, they’d spill from all the shaking, so he bent his head and licked the pills from his palm, tasting the salt of his skin. The bitter medicine.
He swallowed them dry and he turned, five small moves, pulling his ruined body around to go find the whiskey to wash it down.
I hate Africa,
he thought.
“Jack!” Oliver yelled again. “Why didn’t you tell anyone the maps were wrong?”
The guilt was a vise around his throat. And he couldn’t breathe for the pain.
“I meant to,” he gasped. “I did. But Mia—”
“Don’t blame her.”
“I don’t!” he managed to yell past the pain. “I blame myself. It’s my fault!”
He woke up with a start, jerking himself upright. Freezing despite his dreams of the desert.
His whole body was drenched in cold sweat.
The morphine beckoned but he ignored it. Looking at his father’s face three nights ago, at the ravages alcohol had made in that man, killed the allure of those painkillers.
He wouldn’t go down that road. Not if it meant being anything like his father.
He pulled himself from the bed, knowing from weeks of hard experience that once the nightmare woke him up, there’d be no sleeping.
Without turning on the light, he opened his bedroom door and made his way to the bathroom. Hazy moonlight slipped in the window on the far end of the hallway, but Jack didn’t need the illumination. Preferred things without it, truth be known. The dark was another layer he wrapped around himself, insulating him from the cold, harsh realities of the outside world.
Realities like Mia. Like his father. Like George Gibson, dean of Cal Poly, who called Jack’s cell phone yesterday to remind him of the board meeting in six weeks’ time.
Might as well call it a reckoning.
No. He’d take the dark.
The bathroom tiles were cool under his feet and he reached into the shower and cranked on the hot water, tempering it with very little cold.
Hilarious that he dreamed of the desert but couldn’t seem to get warm.
Once the shower was steaming he stepped in, the heat scalding his flesh and he gasped, welcoming the pain, until his body got used to it. He braced his hands on the wall of the shower, his cast thunking against the tiles. The plaster was getting wet, but he didn’t care.
The hot water beat down on the back of his head, rolling past his ears. He opened his lips and the water was warm on his tongue.
Why are you here?
he asked himself and spat out the water.
He thought he’d be able to hide out in peace, but there was no peace here. Not for him.
Christ, his father. He hadn’t anticipated how hard it would be to see him like that. Wasted by disease.
And even his old room, empty of every physical reminder of his childhood, was still filled with memories. Few of them worth having.
And Mia, here. The anger wasn’t fading. It was an ember in his chest, burning white-hot.
She hadn’t even known about the attack.
She hadn’t bothered to answer an email or a phone call or, apparently, watch the news. It was as if she’d left every tie to him behind on that roof in Santa Barbara.
While he’d been fighting hideous pain in a Red Cross helicopter with memories of her, she’d been oblivious. Unconcerned. And his anger about her abandonment made him uneasy.
He liked how he knew Mia, who she was to him. He liked the slot she occupied in his life. Wife but not wife. Friend from afar. It made sense.
Sex on a roof didn’t make sense. Being here didn’t make sense. Being hurt and angry about her didn’t make any sense.
What made sense was going back to his condo.
The reporters would be gone at this point. The university would get their pound of flesh in another month and a half. He could shower all night long at his empty apartment in San Luis Obispo. He could torture himself with guilt, staring up at the ceiling over his own king-size bed.
He didn’t need to be here anymore.
So why did he stay?
Because you deserve it,
a voice said, ugly and insidious.
Water seeped into his cast and the tickle turned to an itch. An itch that spread, as all the itches did. Spread like wildfire, like lice eating his skin. It was making him crazy.
With his good hand he turned off the water and yanked a towel off the rack, tucking it around his waist. He flipped on the light, blinking at the sudden brightness. The drawers in the old oak vanity didn’t have any scissors big enough to do the job. The hallway led him to the kitchen, where the big knives were stuck to a magnetic stripe over the stove.
He grabbed the biggest and slid it, sharp side up, under the loose plaster around his forearm. The knife sawed through the plaster, cutting it into ragged chunks. The tip of the knife pierced his skin but he didn’t let up because he needed the damn thing off. His leg was better. The cuts were healed. This cast was the last of the desert he still carried on his body and he wanted it gone. Now.
With a gasp he sliced through the last of it, right between his fingers, and the cast fell off like old skin.
He flexed his fingers, twisted his wrist, scratched all those places he hadn’t been able to get to for the past few weeks. His fingers scraped through a river of blood, smearing it over his fingers, across his palm. He watched, didn’t stop until his hands were covered.
“Son?”
He jumped at Walter’s voice, dropped his hands so fast they hit the counter, electric shots zipping up his arms.
“What?” he asked, turning to rinse his hands. Collect himself from whatever edge he seemed to linger on.
“You all right?” Walter shuffled into the room, his navy robe opening over a pale chest. Jack could barely see his grizzled face in the shadows.
It was as if the night was eating him. One of them, anyway.
“Just fine, Dad,” he said, shaking water off his hands.
He brushed past him in the dark, noticing the damp in the corner of his dad’s eyes reflected the light like diamonds.