Repairman Jack [07]-Gateways (7 page)

“Well, he went into atrial fibrillation last night—that’s a chaotically irregular heartbeat—and again this morning. I called for a cardiology consult and Dr. Reston saw him. Both times your father converted back to normal rhythm spontaneously, but it does indicate some level of heart disease.”

“How bad is this atrial fibrillation?”

“The main worry is a clot forming in the left atrium and shooting up to the brain and causing a stroke.”

“Swell,” Jack said. “As if a coma isn’t bad enough.”

“Dr. Reston started him on a blood thinner to prevent that. But tell me about his medical history. I’ve been working in the dark, knowing nothing about him beyond the address and date of birth we got off his license. Has he been treated for any illnesses or heart problems in the past? Does he take any medications?”

“I think he once mentioned taking an aspirin a day, but beyond that…”

“Do you know if he’s been seeing a doctor down here, for checkups and the like?”

Jack was embarrassed. He knew no more about what his father had been doing down here than what he’d been doing in Jersey before the move. He knew his father’s new address but had never seen the place. Truth was, he knew nothing about his father’s life down here or anywhere else, and even less about his health.

But he was getting a crash course this afternoon.

How to put this…

“He wasn’t much for talking to me about his health.”

Dr. Huerta smiled. “That’s a switch. Most people his age talk about nothing but.”

“Is he going to be okay?”

“I wish I could say. If his cardiac rhythm stabilizes, I believe he’ll come out of this with little permanent damage. He won’t remember a thing about the accident, but—”

“What about the accident?” Jack said. “What happened?”

She shrugged. “I have no idea. All I know is that he was brought in unconscious from head trauma. You’ll have to ask the police.”

The police…swell. The last people Jack wanted to talk to.

She fished in her pocket. “I’ll be looking in on him again in the morning. If you learn anything about his medical history, give me a call.” She handed him a card.

Jack slipped it into his pocket.

11

After the doctor bustled out of the room, Jack turned back to his father. As he stepped toward the bed—

“So, you’re one of Thomas’s sons.”

Jack jumped at the sound of the voice, raspy, like someone who’d been gargling with kerosene. Startled because he hadn’t heard anyone come in, he looked around and found the room empty.

“Who—?”

“Over here, honey.”

The voice came from behind the curtain. Jack reached out and pulled it back. A thin, flat-chested old woman sat in a chair in a shadowed corner. Her black hair was pulled back in a tight bun and her skin was dark, made even darker by the sleeveless canary yellow blouse and bright pink Bermuda shorts she wore, but in the shadows he couldn’t tell her race. A large straw shopping bag sat on the floor beside her.

“When did you come in?”

“I’ve been here the whole time.” She pronounced it “Oy’ve been here the whole toym.” The accent was from somewhere on Long Island—Lynn Samuels to the Nth degree. But that cinderblock-dragging-behind-a-truck voice…how many packs of cigarettes had it taken to achieve that tone?

“Since before I came in?”

She nodded.

That bothered Jack. He wasn’t usually so careless. He’d have sworn the room was empty.

“You know my father?”

“Thomas and I are next-door neighbors. We moved in the same time and became friends. He’s never mentioned me?”

“We, um, don’t talk a lot.”

“He’s mentioned you, many times.”

“You must be thinking of Tom.”

She shook her head and spoke at jackhammer speed. “You don’t look old enough to be Tom, Jr. You must be Jack. And he did talk about you. Hell, sometimes I couldn’t get him to shut up about you.” She rose and stepped forward, extending a gnarled hand. “I’m Anya.”

Jack took her hand. He saw now that she was white—or maybe Caucasian was a better term, because she was anything but white. Her skin was deeply tanned and had that leathery quality that only decades of dedicated sunbathing can give. Her skinny arms and legs had the shape and texture of Slim Jims. Her hair was mostly jet black except for a mist of gray roots hugging her scalp.

Jack heard a faint yip from behind her. He looked and saw a tiny dog head with huge dark eyes poking over the edge of the straw shopping bag.

“That’s Oyving,” she said. “Say hello, Oyv.”

The Chihuahua yipped again.

“Oyving? How do you spell that?” Jack said.

She looked at him. “I-R-V-I-N-G. How else would you spell it?”

He released her hand. “Oyving it is. I didn’t know they allowed dogs in hospitals.”

“They don’t. But Oyv’s a good dog. He knows how to behave. What they don’t know won’t hurt them. And if they find out, fuck ’em.”

Jack laughed at the unexpected expletive. This didn’t seem like the kind of woman his father would hang out with—she couldn’t be more unlike his mother—but he liked her.

He told her so.

Her bright dark eyes fixed on him as she smiled, revealing too-bright teeth that were obviously caps.

“Yeah, well, I’ll probably like you too if you hang around long enough for me to get to know you.” She turned back to the bed. “I do like your father. I’ve been sitting with him for most of the day.”

Jack was touched. “That’s very kind of you.”

“That’s what friends are for, hon. The benison of a neighbor like your father you don’t take for granted.”

Benison? He’d have to look that up.

He cleared his throat. “So…he’s mentioned me?”

Jack was curious how his father had depicted him but didn’t want to ask.

He didn’t have to.

“He speaks of all his children. He loves you all. I remember how he cried when he heard about your sister. A terrible thing, to outlive a child. But he speaks of you the most.”

“Really?” That surprised Jack.

She smiled. “Perhaps because you so vex him.”

Vex…another word you don’t hear every day.

“Yeah, I guess I do that.” In spades.

“I don’t think he understands you. He wants to know you but he can’t get near enough to find out who you are.”

“Yeah, well…”

Jack didn’t know what to say. This conversation was sidling into uncomfortable territory.

“But he loves you anyway and worries about you.” Her eyes bored into his. “Sad, isn’t it: The father doesn’t know his son, and the son doesn’t know his father.”

“Oh, I know my father.”

“You may think you do, hon,” she said with a slow shake of her head, “but you don’t.”

Jack opened his mouth to correct her—no way this woman who’d met Dad less than a year ago could know more about the man he’d grown up with—but she held up a hand to cut him off.

“Trust me, kiddo, there’s more to your father than you ever dreamed. While you’re here, maybe you should try to get to know him better. Don’t miss this opportunity.”

Jack glanced at the still form pressed between the hospital sheets. “Maybe I already have.”

She waved a dismissive hand at the bed. “Thomas will be fine. He’s too tough for a little bump on the head to put him down.”

More than a little bump on the head, Jack thought.

“The doctors don’t seem to think so.”

“Doctors.” Another dismissive flip of her hand. “What do they know? Most of them have their heads up their
tuchuses
. Listen to Anya. Anya knows. And Anya says your father’s going to be fine.”

Foyn?
Jack thought, taking on her accent. He’s gonna be
foyn
because you say so, lady? Let’s hope so.

She looked up at him. “Where are you staying tonight?”

“Not sure. Passed a Motel 6 on the way—”

“Nonsense. You’ll stay at your father’s place.”

“I…I don’t think so.”

“Don’t argue with Anya. He’d want you to. He’d be very upset if you didn’t.”

“I don’t have a key. I don’t even know how to get there.”

“I’ll show you.”

She walked over to the bed and took his father’s hand. “Jack and I are going now, Thomas. You rest. We’ll be back tomorrow.” Then she turned to Jack and said, “Let’s go. Where’s your car?”

“In the lot. Where’s yours?”

“Oh, I don’t drive. Trust me, hon, you wouldn’t want to be on the same road as me. You’re taking me and Oyv home.”

12

As soon as Anya got in the car she placed Oyv on her lap and lit up an unfiltered Pall Mall.

“Mind if I smoke?”

A little late to object now, Jack thought.

“Nah. Go ahead.” He lowered all the windows.

“Want one?”

“Thanks, no. Tried it a few times but never picked up the habit.”

“Too bad,” Anya said, blowing a stream out the window. “And if you’re going to tell me to stop, save your breath.”

“Wouldn’t think of it. It’s your life.”

“Damn right. Over the years I’ve had five doctors tell me to stop. I’ve outlived every one of them.”

“Now I definitely won’t say a word.”

She smiled and nodded and directed Jack onto a road leading west of town.

The sinking sun knifed through his dark glasses and stabbed at his eyes as he drove westward. He watched what passed for civilization in these parts fall away behind them. The land became progressively swampier, yet somehow managed to retain that burnt-out look.

They passed a freshly tilled field of rich brown earth and wondered what had been growing there all summer. Most of the cultivation seemed given over to palm tree nurseries. Odd to pass successive acre plots, each packed with successively larger palms, all of equal height within their own acre.

Anya pointed a crooked finger at a twin-engine outboard motorboat in someone’s front yard.

“‘For Sale By Owner’?” she said. “I should hope so. Who else would be selling it? Do they make ‘For Sale By Thief’ signs?”

A few turns later, past stands of scrub pines, they came to a block of concrete with a blue-and-white-tiled mosaic across its front.

GATEWAYS SOUTH

GATEWAY TO THE FINEST IN MATURE LIFESTYLES

The droopy plants and palms framing the sign looked like they were on their last legs.

“Here we are,” Anya said. “Home sweet home.”

“This is it? This is where he lives?”

“Where I live too. Turn already or you’ll miss it.”

Jack complied and followed a winding path past a muddy pit with a metal pipe standing in its center.

“That used to be a pond with a fountain,” Anya said. “It was beautiful.”

All of Gateways South must have been beautiful when it was green, but it looked like it had been particularly hard hit by the drought. All the grass lining the road had been burned to a uniform beige. Only the pines— which probably pre-dated the community—seemed to be holding their own.

They came to a checkpoint divided into VISITORS and RESIDENT arches, each blocked with a red-and-white-striped crossarm. Jack began to angle left toward the visitor gate where a guard sat in an air-conditioned kiosk.

“No,” Anya said, handing him a plastic card. “Use this at the other gate. Just wave it in front of the whatchamacall it.”

The whatchamacall it turned out to be a little metal box atop a curved pole. Jack waved the card before the sensor and the striped crossarm went up.

“I feel like I’m entering some sort of CIA installation,” he said. “Or crossing a border.”

“Welcome to one of the retirement Balkans. Seriously though, as we all get on in our years, and become more frail than we like to admit, sometimes this is what it takes to let us feel secure when we turn out the lights.”

“Well, as the song says, whatever gets you through the night. But I can’t see this place as much of a crime risk. It’s in the middle of nowhere.”

“Which is exactly why we like a security force guarding the gate and patrolling the grounds.” She pointed straight ahead. “Just take this road to its end.”

Jack shook his head as he followed the asphalt path that wound past what looked like a par-three golf course. The grass was sparse and brown and the ground looked rock hard. That wasn’t deterring the hardcore hackers; he spotted half a dozen golf carts bouncing along the fairways.

“Can’t they even water the greens?”

Anya shook her head. “Drought emergency restrictions. No watering at all in South Florida now, even if you have your own well.”

He drove on, passing tennis courts—at least their Har-Tru surfaces were still green—and shuffleboard areas, all busy.

“There’s the assisted living facility,” she said, pointing to a three-story building done up in coral shades. Then she pointed to a one-story structure. “That’s the nursing home.”