George rang the bell, hoping Nick was not on some computer game with the volume cranked. No answer. He rang again. No sign of Lisa. He guessed she was off shopping, making sure she spent every dime of the fifteen thousand in living expenses George paid each month. By arrangement of the court and the “his and hers” divorce attorneys Villanueva paid for, Sunday was George’s day with his son this week. Still no answer. George balled up his fist into the size of small ham and rapped on the door. He could hear the sound of the knock dissipate in the chilled, dead air.
George rubbed his throbbing temples and bent over to look through the window. He was beginning to worry that Nick had given up on him. George was not always faithful about driving out to spend the day with his son. If he had too much to drink, or hooked up with a nurse or a barfly, George would blow it off. He’d call and tell Nick something had come up at the hospital. “No problem,” Nick would say. George put his conscience at ease by telling himself the last thing an eighth grader wanted to do was hang out with his father, although he knew that was a lie.
George had almost never seen his own father, who worked in the local meatpacking plant. He’d moved up to the day shift by the time George was in grade school but would often pick up extra shifts at night and on weekends to help make ends meet. The work was so bone-wearying, George’s father would arrive home from the plant, sit in the one nice chair in the house, and light a cigarette. With the cigarette burning between his lips, he would massage the knuckles on his right hand. Although George didn’t know this until later, his father would grip the same heavy saw for hours as one dangling carcass after another reached him on what could only be described as an assembly line. The fingers on his hand would lock around the saw by the end of the shift, and he’d have to pry them loose with his other hand. Gato still thought of his father as he held a scalpel in the OR and peered down into the muscle he was incising. Maybe he and his father weren’t that different after all.
Peering through the beveled glass, George could see his son in the living room, propped up on the enormous sectional couch playing some sort of handheld video game. Nick looked up, caught his father’s eye, and then returned to the video game.
The little shit
, Villanueva thought as his respiration ratcheted up a notch.
“Nick,” he said, and then, “C’mon.”
George gave a sharp rap on the glass and gave Nick a palms-up
sorry-about-last-week-but-things-happen
gesture. George had missed their day the previous weekend. He had spent the night with a nurse who worked in the NICU. She was a big woman, but who was he to cast stones?
Nick didn’t look up. The Big Cat could feel the blood rushing to his head.
“Nick!” Villanueva said. “Open the door. I’m sorry about last week. Hospital emergency. Nick, I said I’m sorry. C’mon.”
Nothing.
“Nick! Open the damn door!”
Villanueva’s nostrils flared. His face reddened. He ripped off his sunglasses and mopped the sweat from his face with a bare hand. He was considering the best way to apply his considerable force to the problem of getting into the house and pulling his son off the couch when Nick rose slowly from the overstuffed furniture and ambled toward the foyer. Nick opened the door, a rush of air-conditioning greeting Villanueva. Nick’s eyes were blank as he looked at his father. George resisted the urge to throttle the kid.
“Hey, Nick. How ya doing?” Villanueva said with as much enthusiasm as he could muster.
“Hi, Dad,” Nick said. His voice was flat. He was medium height and slight, in that awkward half-grown, fully self-conscious stage. George himself had skipped this phase, morphing from husky elementary school kid to man-child in a burst of hormone-fueled growth in sixth and seventh grades.
“Sorry about last week, Nick. Hey, I got Lions tickets for today.”
Nick looked down at his feet.
“Great seats, Nick.”
“I dunno.”
When Villanueva was a kid, he would have killed to go to a Lions game with his father. There was no money, and his father always seemed so tired. The first Lions game his father saw was the first game of the season of the Big Cat’s rookie year, and by then the smoking had already fried his lungs. He showed up at the game with his mother and an oxygen tank in tow.
Standing face-to-face with his own son, George pulled the cloth from the shoulder of his Hawaiian shirt and wiped his brow. Seemed awfully hot for an October day.
“All right, fuck it. Pardon my French. What should we do then?”
Nick remained focused on his black Converse low-tops. “I dunno,” he said again.
“Cat got your tongue?” George gave his son a playful swat on the shoulder, knocking him sideways and nearly off his feet. He’d forgotten how slight his kid was. Nick looked up, annoyed.
“Dad!”
“Sorry, Nick. Didn’t mean to,” George’s voice trailed off.
“I sort of made plans today.”
“Oh. Uh…okay. Just thought you might want to hang out with the old man. Catch a game. Got great seats.” George paused.
“Football’s not really my thing, either,” Nick added.
“Okay.” George was at a rare loss for words. He hadn’t come with a Plan B. He tried to think what his son’s
thing
was. As a boy, Nick had been obsessed with dinosaurs, extreme weather, asteroids, black holes. Either his nose was in a book, or he was watching a show on Discovery or Animal Planet or the History Channel. On the playground in preschool, while the other kids climbed the equipment or chased one another, Nick would sit off by himself, drawing in the sand or throwing it up in small handfuls and watching the wind carry it away.
George had signed him up for youth football, baseball, and basketball. Nick resisted every practice and played only the minimum required. He was awful. The kids on his team tormented him, their taunting and physical shots tempered only by the size of Nick’s father, who sometimes came to practice and watched. In short, Nick’s sports were torture for both father and son.
When Nick was ten, George’s ex put a stop to it. Much to George’s relief, she pulled Nick from all sports, signed the boy up for science camp and cello, and bought a family membership at the city’s natural history museum. Still, it puzzled George how a male child with half his genetic code could be so different. Shouldn’t Nick be twice as big as he was now? Where was the hunger for physical contact? Where was the desire to measure himself as a man?
Father and son passed an awkward moment of silence. “Well, have a good day, Nick. I’ll see you next Saturday, for sure. Okay?”
“Okay,” Nick said, his voice brighter. He was already walking back toward the couch.
As George returned to his Jeep, he found himself walking with a little more bounce in his step. He was relieved to be free of a day of awkward conversations and heavy silences. It was as though he and Nick spoke different languages. By Saturday or Sunday night, depending which weekend day Villanueva had with his son that week, George was usually spent.
Even before he reached the car, George’s palpable sense of relief was followed by a surge of guilt so strong he felt he could reach out and touch it. Shouldn’t he want to spend the day with his son? Isn’t that what fathers did? Good fathers, anyway. He sat down in the Jeep, gripped the steering wheel, and stared at the sunny sky. Then he put the key in the ignition, started the car, and backed out of the driveway.
P
ark loved operating on Sunday morning. The hospital was quiet. There were no scheduling problems or fights for OR time. Even the emergency room was at an ebb following the Saturday-night high tide of gunshot wounds, stabbings, drug overdoses, broken bones, heart attacks, and lesser maladies. As he walked from the physicians’ side of the garage through the general parking area, he didn’t encounter the usual tide of wheelchairs, walkers, strollers, and clots of families clogging the elevator down to the lobby. Nor were there the visitors or patients—usually older and whiter—who would gawk at him and then his hospital name tag and back. Chelsea was more diverse than much of Michigan but somehow it still managed to surprise a certain percentage of the population that the lean, intense Korean man sharing the elevator with them was a full-fledged neurosurgeon. They spoke to him as if he were a five-year-old, overly enunciating their words and amping up their volume. On Sunday morning, Park usually had the elevator to himself.
There was another thing Park liked about Sunday mornings. More often than not, he was the senior surgeon at the hospital. For a few quiet hours, he was king of Chelsea General. He knew this was a trivial thing. There was no real power in being the senior surgeon there, and Park realized the distinction was simply a statistical artifact, an error in perception, a product of his desire to work Sunday mornings while other attending physicians for religious or other reasons chose to take the day off. Technically, he could fire people if he wanted when he was the senior surgeon, and he had done it a few times. Of course, they always laughed it off because they would all be reinstated on Monday. Still, on Sundays Park walked the polished halls of Chelsea General with a magisterial stride.
This Sunday morning was better than most: Park had scheduled an elective deep brain stimulation. The patient’s name was Ruth Hostetler. She came from a town Park had never heard of near the Michigan-Ohio state line. Getting her to agree to undergo the operation on a Sunday took a little doing, but her husband convinced her that God would be on their side on the Sabbath.
Ruth was thirty-five, and for the previous two and a half years she had suffered from an uncontrollable tremor. Her hands shook so violently that she could not write or drive a car. Eating was a challenge, and Ruth had dropped almost forty pounds. She was plump when the tremors started. She had shed many pounds since. She passed through her ideal weight and now looked gaunt, almost haunted.
Ruth wore cotton print dresses and had a well-scrubbed girlish look. She looked to Park like an actress on a soap commercial or playing the part of a pioneer woman of the American West. The couple had come to Park two weeks earlier on a referral from a Pakistani doctor who had trained under Park and was now working as a general practitioner on a J-1 visa in an underserved area in rural Ohio.
Seated across from Park in his office at the time, Levi had kept his hands folded in his lap; Ruth’s flopped like bony fish pulled from some brackish backwater. The couple had asked Park if the tremors were a sign from God. Was Ruth being punished for something they had done? Park shook his head and dismissed the question with a wave of the hand. Park had once forbidden a family from praying in the waiting room. He had stormed in and said in loud, choppy English in front of a crowd, “If it is God you are looking for, He will be in Operating Room Three with your loved one, and right now He feels like He is being second-guessed.”
“God has nothing to do with this. It’s your brain that’s punishing you,” Park told the couple, smiling at his own joke. The Hostetlers did not return the smile.
“Doctor, we know God works in mysterious ways and has a purpose for all He does,” Levi Hostetler said. “We believe we were sent to you for a reason. Maybe so you could hear the Word. Do you have a personal relationship with Jesus Christ, Doctor?”
Park didn’t hesitate one second. He stood up and started ushering the couple to the door.
“This is a hospital, not a church,” he muttered loudly in his choppy English. “I don’t believe in God. I believe in science. I believe in data. Outcomes. Facts.” He let the word linger, while giving the couple a hard stare. “When you want to talk about these things, you tell Dr. Khan and he can make another appointment.”
Ruth stopped just outside Park’s office. She did not want to leave.
“You want facts. I had a glass of wine the other day. My MeeMa told me to drink it. Said it would relieve the stress. I don’t normally partake in alcohol. It’s against the Word. But you know what? For the first time in a year, those tremors went away.”
Park had been about to close the door on this annoying couple. Now he stopped. This case was interesting all of a sudden.
“You don’t drink alcohol normally?”
“No, sir.”
Park turned to the husband for verification.
“She doesn’t.”
“How about depression medicine? Lithium?” Park asked.
“No, sir,” Ruth said.
Park was intrigued. He turned to Levi.
“Does she have tremors when sleeping?”
“Yes, Doctor. As a matter of fact she does.”
Park now forgot he was showing the couple the door and walked back into his office. He waved for the Hostetlers to follow. He grabbed a pad, excited.
“Come. Sit. This may be true essential tremors,” Park said. “Might be something we can do.” Essential tremor had the somewhat unusual characteristic of getting better when someone drank alcohol, whereas most other tremors became worse.
The couple looked at each other, unclear on what the fast-talking Korean doctor was saying, but with his sudden optimism so strong, it made them smile. Levi leaned forward. He nodded toward the wedding ring on Park’s left hand.
“You’re a married man. If Ruth was your wife, what would you do?”
Park sat up straight, a wry smirk sneaking into the corners of his mouth.
“You didn’t first ask me what I think about my wife.”
Levi looked puzzled for a moment, then Park burst into a gale of laughter, the palm of his right hand coming down on his right quadriceps with a smack. The Hostetlers smiled wanly. Patients routinely asked Park what he would do if he were the patient, or his wife was the patient, or his daughter, and Park always responded with his joke. Park thought the question was utterly ridiculous: What would he do if this patient were his wife? Patients did not want to think for themselves. Why didn’t they ask him what the chances were for a complication?
When his own laughter subsided, Park told the Hostetlers in all seriousness, “I will do what the best science tells me to do. That is all.”