So Much for That (49 page)

It was a pilgrimage. There was nothing to learn here besides that what had happened had happened, but this was information that Shep had needed to absorb.

He took the duffel upstairs to load it with school books and clothes. He rifled the filing cabinet in Carol’s study, locating the wills and insurance policies she had asked him to find; with an instinct that would impress him in retrospect, he also snagged a pocket file that she had not requested: the family’s passports. He picked a few choice selections from Flicka’s cell phone collection that she hadn’t requested, either. All the while he felt stalked, eyed by a presence behind his back, and he jumped when a hanger clattered from a rail, or the transformer on Carol’s computer cord smacked to the floorboards. At last at the front door again, he turned the key to lock not burglars out but something in. The sharp white February air was cleansing, and he took in thirsty lungfuls like gulps of water.

As a salutary gesture, Shep spurned the toll-free Brooklyn Bridge and took the less congested Battery Tunnel. Four bucks on E-ZPass, but after this next errand he could afford the toll. Trolling Lower Manhattan inevitably recalled Jackson, and his rant about the area’s wholesale confiscation of parking spaces by their overlords. In tribute, he pulled into an “Authorized Vehicles Only” space to invite a ticket. He could afford that, too.

In Rick Mystic’s office on Exchange Place, he signed the nondisclosure agreement. Incredibly, Mystic promised that he could indeed get Forge Craft to cut the check by Monday. These people were in such a hurry that they could as well have been eavesdropping on yesterday’s shattering appointment with Philip Goldman. Meantime, even twenty-
four hours of keeping “one more” secret from Glynis had been intolerable. Her prognosis sat undissolved in his gut like a kidney stone.

The notion had first entered his head during the phone call with Mystic the night before, when the lawyer delivered the settlement offer: his nest egg for The Afterlife, miraculously restored. With every sluggish homeward mile in horrific Friday traffic, idle whimsy had crystallized to solid game plan.

T
he scene he walked in on with the duffel slung over his shoulder made him sorry that Carol’s family didn’t have the privacy to lick its wounds—or open them—out of another family’s earshot. Still, it would have been unnatural to have made a U-turn in the foyer when it was his house.

Flicka had long been impatient with her mother, intolerant of that smothering concern for her welfare, but ever since they’d got here the girl had been outright cold. Save for the odd logistical request, she hadn’t been speaking to her mother at all, which, considering what she said when she did speak, may have made Carol lucky.

“All he wanted was a little admiration,” Flicka was delivering in a hot nasal snarl. She was bunched in the corner of the living room sofa, while Carol was sitting stiffly in the farthest chair. “He went to all that trouble to learn stuff, and think about stuff, and not just be some lame-ass
handyman
. He
told
you he hated that word, too, and you still said it all the time:
handyman, handyman, handyman
!”

“Honey, I’m glad you’re proud of your father, and you should be,” Carol said with rigid self-control. “But if I sometimes called him a ‘handyman,’ that’s only because there isn’t any other word, and that’s what he was. Which is nothing to be ashamed of.”

“You never paid any attention to him! He’d start talking and you just
turned off
. Think he didn’t notice? You listen more carefully to the radio! And I mean like, the ads!”

“Your father sometimes used talking as a substitute for saying some
thing. I guarantee you that when he spoke to me about anything important, I did listen. Very carefully.”

“You mean important
to you
, not to him. And nothing that was important to him was important to you! No wonder Daddy killed himself! Every day, you made him feel
useless
, and
boring
, and
stupid
!”

Carol bowed her head soundlessly, until tears ran off her chin and spattered her hands—the kind of slow, insistent leak that any handyman would recognize as difficult to stanch.

“Sweetie,” she said at last, looking back up at Flicka. “You’re not the only one who’s lost your daddy. You’re not the only one who feels bad. You might have a genetic disease. But that doesn’t mean you can say whatever you want—when it doesn’t help anyone or change anything and it’s terribly hurtful. I’m sorry you have FD. But you still have to be kind.”

It was the stern parenting of which, out of fear of the emergency room, Flicka had been too long deprived. Dovetailing the silence of her mother’s weeping, Flicka began to sob, but without the tears. When emotionally demonstrative, her eyes didn’t cry; they got infected.

“It’s not your fault, it’s mine,” the girl got out between shudders. “I was the one kept saying sticking around wasn’t worth the bother. I was the one kept saying that being here isn’t so great. I think I talked him into it. I think he got the idea from me.”

Carol crossed to the sofa and took Flicka in her arms. “Shush, now. It’s an idea we all get from time to time. You didn’t invent it. But I’ll tell you this much:
I
think one of the biggest reasons he left us? He was afraid that something would happen to you, and he couldn’t bear it, sweetheart. He couldn’t bear the idea of this world without you. He loved you so much, honey, more than you may ever know now, and it wasn’t very brave of him, or even very nice. But whenever people do something out of love, then you have to be extra forgiving. Because I think he couldn’t face your getting worse, or something worse than getting worse. I think he wanted to go first.”

T
he following Saturday morning, Shep threw some blankets in his backseat. Entrusting Glynis to Carol’s care, he headed for Berlin.

He worried that he’d encounter resistance. He wasn’t accustomed to telling his father what to do, and the elderly were famously averse to change. Driving north, Shep had to remind himself that a nursing home was not, technically, a penitentiary. Surely springing your own father from its clutches wasn’t actually against the law. But it was surely in violation of some institutional rule or other to simply scoop up one of their charges absent a stack of paperwork. That said, to whatever degree he was breaking the rules he was beginning to enjoy it.

At reception, he informed the nurse that he was taking his father on “an excursion.” She frowned. “He’s pretty weak. And it’s nasty out there. Looks like snow.”

“Don’t worry,” said Shep. “Where I’m taking my dad it’s very, very warm.”

The painfully diminished patriarch was dozing. Shep consoled himself that at least a man that thin was easy to carry. He whispered in his father’s ear, “Hey Dad, wake up.”

Once the old man’s eyes opened they widened further, and he wrapped his arms around his son with the same surprising strength with which Glynis had thrust him away three days before. “Shepherd!” he croaked. “I was afraid I’d never see you again!”

Shep gently pulled from his father’s clasp. “Shh. Now, listen. We’re going to have to play it cool. As far as the staff is concerned, I’m just taking you for a spin, right? But I want you to think about anything here that you have to have with you. Because you’re about to be kidnapped.”

“You mean—we’re not coming back?”

“No. Can you live with that?”

“Live with that?” Gabe hugged him again. “Oh, son. Maybe there is a God!”

Quietly packing up a few clothes and sweeping up the bottles of
tablets from the bureau, Shep mumbled that they were driving back to Elmsford “first.”

His father ceased to ease his spindly legs over the side of the bed. “But what about Glynis? Your dad is the personification of one of the Ten Plagues of Egypt. You told me yourself. I mustn’t come near my daughter-in-law. You warned me I could kill her.”

“
C-diff
? If we’re going biblical here, then Glynis has hit the Book of Revelation. She’s in the end of days, Dad. Being around a little more germ warfare isn’t going to make any c-difference.”

“Are you sure?”

“I—I’ve never done this before. You’ve been through it countless times with your parishioners. We could use your company. I could use your advice.”

“Advice? On what?”

Shep took a breath. “How to help my wife die.”

W
hen Shep informed his father on the long drive back to New York that they were all going to Africa, the old man took the news in stride—merely remarking with standard Knacker pragmatism that unfortunately his passport had expired. (Shep explained that It’s Easy, Inc., in midtown could turn around an application overnight for a price, and when his dad asked how much, Shep said with a blissful smile, “I don’t care.”) The summer they’d spent together in Kenya may have made the “dark continent” seem less forbidding. For that matter, his father didn’t seem bothered by any itinerary that took him away from Twilight Glens. The sing-alongs, apparently, had not been a big success.

Shep wondered if he should have said goodbye to Beryl. But she’d been incensed when he suggested transferring their father to a public nursing home a few miles away; on being informed that instead her father was being kidnapped to Africa, she’d have gone apoplectic. Besides, she’d made it all too plain just what she thought of her brother’s aspirations to any so-called Afterlife. At least now that the nursing home would
no longer ravage the family’s finances like a necrotic disease, she could keep the house. If that seemed a generous reward for short-of-generous behavior, in Shep’s experience the house of one’s childhood was more curse than windfall. And even if the past failed to exert its commonly crippling influence, Beryl would find those tall three stories on Mt. Forist Street considerably less of a jackpot once she paid her own fuel bills.

The drive was interrupted more than once for pit stops. After half-carrying his father to a gas-station men’s room, Shep would support the torso with one arm and work the pajama bottoms below the buttocks with his free hand—a move at which, from his wife’s periods of similar incapacity, he had grown expert. He’d leave his father to get on with things with the stall door closed, though this pretense of privacy would never last. Dad’s assurances that he could see to his own cleaning up proved exaggerated, and of course getting the pajama bottoms up again entailed more assistance. In the Middle East, it was considered the height of humiliation to glimpse your father’s genitals, but for Shep it was merely another exercise in getting real. So they both had penises. Big deal.

Inevitably, during the last late-night leg in northern Connecticut, too many stations and diners were closed. His father didn’t make it. A stinging brown smell infused the car, and his father started to cry.

“Dad,” said Shep. “I’ve been up to my elbows in shit for months, and I’m not being figurative, either. I still love my wife, and I’m intimately acquainted with her body’s every ooze and spew. I’m going to take care of you now, and instead of hiring some stranger to wipe your backside I’ll wipe it myself. It’s nothing to be embarrassed about. The only people who ought to be embarrassed are me and Beryl, for ever offloading the ass-wiping onto someone else.”

They got back to Elmsford at 1:00 a.m. After fifteen hours of driving, Shep should have felt bone tired. But ever since Pemba had been resurrected from pitiful pipe dream to definitive destination, he’d been riding a curious high. There was still a spring in his step as he cleaned his father up and settled him on the couch in the den downstairs, close to the ground-floor bathroom.

W
hile Glynis was still asleep Sunday morning, Shep tackled the Zach issue. Once his son allowed him reluctantly into the inner sanctum, he bounced onto the boy’s bed and announced, “We’re moving to Africa.”

Twisting around from his computer screen, Zach looked at his father with a humoring deadpan. He no more believed in the guy’s screwball “Afterlife” than Beryl did. “Uh-huh. When.”

“I have to hit the BA website, but hopefully before the end of the week.”

Zach inspected his father closely. Shep looked pleasantly back, satisfied to assess that, as expected, his son’s features were squaring up, and at sixteen the young man was almost handsome. “You’re not kidding.”

“Nope. So you’d better start collecting a few things. Pack light. Even if we can’t find everything we need on Pemba, I think Zanzibar is pretty well stocked, and we’ll be a half-hour’s flight from Stone Town.”

“We’re ‘moving to Africa’ for how long?”

“For me? Forever. For you? That’s your decision. Once you turn eighteen, you’re a free agent. But hey, you don’t like that new school anyway.”

“I thought…” Zach licked his lips. “I thought it was kids who were supposed to get these sudden ideas in their heads to do something crazy. And then it’s the parents who sit them down and make them be, you know.
Realistic
.”

“I’ve been ‘realistic’ for forty-nine years, sport. And when you make something real, then it is realistic. By the way, Pemba does have broadband. I knew you’d want to know.”

“What if I don’t want to go?”

“Well…You could go stay with your Aunt Beryl at your grandfather’s in Berlin—though as you know it’s a pretty small town. So you’d still be in the boonies, but without coconut palms or snorkeling on coral reefs. Gets pretty cold up there. Pretty soon, if I’m not mistaken, your grandfather’s house is going to get a whole lot colder, too. Alternatively, you could stay with your Aunt Deb, though you’d better be ready to
do plenty of babysitting and to at least pretend to become a born-again Christian. There’s Aunt Ruby, but she’s a workaholic who won’t even make time for a boyfriend, much less a live-in nephew. Your grandma in Tucson would love to have you, although you always complain she treats you like a six-year-old. She’s seventy-three. I bet she won’t stop now.”

“You’re seriously planning to dump me on relatives?”