Wednesdays At One: A Novel, page 20
Gregory’s rib cage tightened. He rubbed his face over and over trying to scrub away his confusion, his fear. He started to shut his laptop, but he stopped and forced himself to read:
Mira Patel, 29, of Brighton, was hit and killed by a car on Bosworth Street in Boston while riding her bicycle late Tuesday night. The Harvard Medical School resident was believed to be biking home from a concert when she was struck head-on by a driver who fled the scene. The victim was taken by ambulance to Brigham and Women’s Hospital, where she was pronounced dead on arrival. Anyone with information connected to this incident is encouraged to call the Boston police at—
Gregory’s body grew clammy. He pushed away from his desk and lowered his head between his legs. He stayed that way for several minutes, until he thought he could safely sit up without fainting or vomiting. He reached for one of the bottles of water that he kept on hand for clients, unscrewed the cap, and chugged it. When he finished, he twisted the empty bottle between his hands, transforming it into a stiff rope of plastic.
At nine o’clock, Jason V. spent his time bemoaning the fact that his girlfriend was always so frustrated with him that she never wanted to have sex anymore. Gregory was barely able to concentrate with the distraction of Mira-as-ghost literally haunting his thoughts. Was she eavesdropping now—attempting to help him? When he suggested that Jason should try showing more interest in his girlfriend’s art classes and new puppy, he reminded Gregory that he had tried that already. At which point Gregory looked at his client blankly and said, “Well then, let’s see. How about we both come in next week with three new ideas?”
At ten o’clock, Gregory saw Barry C., who had switched his Wednesday appointment to Monday and seemed uncharacteristically pleased with himself. He was down eight pounds (160 to go) and was happy to use the time to enthuse about the wonders of being in ketosis. He raised his travel coffee mug, explaining that there were two tablespoons of butter melted into his dark roast, and credited Gregory with helping him find the strength to try a restricted carb diet. Gregory managed some words of encouragement before sending him on his way.
At eleven he met with Marina K., who had become depressed after menopause. Gregory spent a half hour listening with whatever attention he could muster to something that had happened over the weekend with her grown daughter. When she finished her story, he offered no insight or guidance beyond recommending that she take a walk in the woods. “Why should I do that?” she asked. When he didn’t have an answer, Marina said, in her most motherly voice, “I should let you have a little extra time to get a coffee or something to eat.” Then she stood abruptly and headed for the door. He smiled weakly and didn’t try to stop her.
In those twenty extra minutes before his noon client, Gregory decided to run downstairs to Starbucks and grab a sandwich. With his routines disrupted, he hadn’t had time to prepare lunch at home.
All weekend, Gregory had worried about Mira leaving another sign for his family to find. On Saturday night, he had considered sleeping in the garage, but once he’d seen those eyes in the window, he knew he couldn’t leave Carrie alone in the house. So after picking her up from the club, they hung out in the family room, eating popcorn and binge watching Schitt’s Creek until one in the morning.
On Sunday, Gregory went back to Hartford Hospital, where nothing with his father had changed for better or worse, then returned home just as Liv was pulling in from her trip to New Hampshire. After unpacking the car in silence, they stood awkwardly in the kitchen while Liv filled Gregory in on her visit with Petey, mentioning at least three times what a wonderful time they’d had and how it was fine that Gregory wasn’t there, a detail that slid sharply into his gut like one of the well-honed Henckels in the knife block on the counter next to him.
When Liv went upstairs, Gregory grabbed a yellow legal pad and an envelope from the office and headed to the garage. He sat in his beach chair and wrote a letter to Petey, recounting the many things that felt special about his son’s childhood. Gregory wrote five single-spaced pages about standing on the soccer field on chilly Saturday mornings in the fall and spring, watching him play his heart out; about their weekend walks to Pemby’s for muffins; and about the forts they used to build in the yard. He wrote how lucky he felt to have a son and that he was brokenhearted he couldn’t see him on Visiting Day—but that Mom had said he was doing great. When Gregory finished, his fingers cramping, it had become so dark outside that he needed his cell phone flashlight to address the envelope. He thought about not sending it, wondering if Petey would even want to read five pages of his father’s sentimental ramblings. But Gregory ultimately decided he would mail it, suddenly desperate to be in communication with his son.
Now, as he stood in the waiting room, locking his office before he grabbed food, Gregory noticed a band of light streaming from under the door of the third office. Phil’s share of the rent included that small, extra room, but Gregory hadn’t seen him use it in several years. He had never been inside, and only Phil had a key to what briefly became a makeshift studio apartment when he was going through his divorce. Gregory suspected that this was the site of some indiscretions, too, although he never again wanted to discuss such a thing with Phil. Mostly the office sat mysteriously empty, but Gregory knew someone was in there now. He quietly crossed the room and opened the door from the waiting room into the hallway; if he had to yell for help, others on the floor would come to his rescue. With one finger on his phone’s keypad, poised to call the police, Gregory stood in front of the door and listened. He heard some shuffling around and throat clearing. He was about to knock, when the door swung open.
Phil, looking groggy and disheveled, took a step back. “Gregory! You scared the bejeezus out of me.”
“Sorry, Phil! I saw the light on and—”
Phil backed up into the room and sat down hard on a green pullout sofa bed that had not been restored to its daytime form. A rumpled sheet had freed itself from one corner of the mattress, and a gray fleece blanket hung over the side, pooling on a red, Oriental-style throw rug. Otherwise, the room contained a small wooden table with two matching chairs. On the table were three white takeout containers plus an empty bottle of wine. The tangy smell of unrefrigerated Chinese food hung in the air. Gregory tried not to let his eyes wander too much, but he couldn’t help himself, riveted by his first glimpse of Phil’s hidden world. He had no idea why Phil kept it like this when the office space, however small, could fetch at least $2,000 a month in Boston’s real estate market. For some reason, Phil wouldn’t give it up.
“Are you all right?” Gregory asked.
“I’m fine.”
But Gregory knew something was wrong. Was Phil having another affair?
“What about you?” Phil said, his voice uncharacteristically flat. “You doing okay?”
Gregory hesitated. “Yeah. I’m okay.” How could he say he was having a quasi-therapeutic relationship with the ghost of a woman he had killed thirty years earlier in a hit-and-run? And that she was possibly haunting him for it. Oh, and by the way, I’m starting to wonder if you had something to do with moving her scarf around in my bottom drawer?
Gregory continued gripping the door handle. He studied Phil, who looked like he wanted to collapse onto the mattress and go back to sleep, a feeling Gregory knew well.
“Can I do anything for you?” Gregory asked. “Get you a latte?”
Phil combed his fingers through his thinning mane. “I’m good,” he said, still not looking at Gregory. He held up his beefy arm and squinted down at his gold chronograph watch. “But I have to get to Mass General for a meeting.” When he made no effort to move, Gregory knew Phil had something to tell him.
After a few more seconds of silence, Gregory nodded at the sofa bed. “Not to pry, but is everything okay with you and Beth?”
Phil chuckled. “Beth and I are great. Just great.” Phil’s red eyes, with dark fleshy pouches beneath them, betrayed a different truth.
Gregory indicated the chair. “May I?”
Phil nodded and checked his watch again.
The inside of Gregory’s mouth felt like baked parchment paper. “This is going to sound crazy, but by any chance did you go into my office over the weekend?”
Phil looked up quickly, his eyebrows raised, his jaw slack.
Gregory held up his palms. “No big deal if you did. I’m just wondering.”
After a few seconds in which Phil seemed unsure if he had gone in or not, he drew a deep breath and exhaled slowly. “I did,” he said. “I did go in.”
“Well, that’s fine. I thought that maybe things looked a little moved around.”
Phil didn’t respond. He just sat there, his fingertips pressed together to form an orb. After a long silence, Phil said. “I ran out of scotch and thought maybe you had a bottle in your desk. Sorry, I should never have done that without asking.”
Gregory nodded, giving Phil a pass on what felt like a teenager’s risible lie. Phil knew better than anyone that Gregory, who could go months without drinking, would never have scotch in his desk.
“That’s fine,” Gregory said, forcing a laugh. “Sorry I couldn’t help you out in your moment of need.”
Phil’s mouth turned up in a quick, insincere smile.
“Another thing,” Gregory said, his voice hesitant. “Do you remember getting a call from me on Saturday night?”
Phil squeezed his eyes shut then popped them open again. “I’m embarrassed to admit I don’t. Was it important?”
“Just checking in.”
“On a Saturday night?”
Gregory paused. “Yeah.”
“Anything I can still help with?”
“All set.”
They sat there staring at each other, letting the strangeness of the conversation settle, each knowing the other was concealing something. Finally, Phil stood with a groan and held up his hand to usher Gregory out of the office. In that moment, Gregory decided to skip Starbucks to avoid a walk down four flights of stairs with Phil. He stepped inside his office thinking he should say something—See you later, Phil. See you tomorrow. Have a good day—but no words came out.
Gregory quickly locked the door and took the scarf from his bottom drawer. He also removed the Ziploc bag of pill bottles and emptied it into the drawer, shaking out any crushed residue from the sharp corners. He folded the scarf and slid the square of magenta cloth into the bag. He sealed it and buried the bag beneath some files at the bottom of his briefcase.
24
On Tuesday evening, with the air charged from a late afternoon thunderstorm, Gregory was out in the yard mindlessly fertilizing the strawberries, only able to think about one thing: how he had to get through the night and three morning clients (it would have been four, but Eleanor S. was on vacation), before he could see Mira again. When his cell phone rang, he plucked it from his back pocket with two dirt-covered fingers and glanced at the caller ID. Margaret. Gregory slid the phone back into his pocket and measured another scoopful of fish bone fertilizer into the green plastic watering can. He ignored the voice mail alert, but the text pings were too much. He went into the garage and dropped the phone onto the tool bench. His sister had been calling hourly, sometimes to report another eye flutter. Gregory needed a break.
He was back in the garden when Liv, talking on her cell phone, came out of the house. She carefully picked her way across the wet grass toward Gregory. “Of course, Margaret. Yes, I understand,” Liv said. “Here’s Gregory. If there’s anything I can do. Of course. You, too.”
Liv handed her phone to him without a word, but her eyes were wide with warning. She folded her arms across her narrow chest and pretended to be looking at the strawberries, while staying within hearing distance.
Margaret’s voice sounded broken, like she’d been crying. “The EEG results came in. Dad’s brain-dead.”
Gregory gripped the watering can tighter. He knew that brain-dead meant dead. There was no recovering from brain-dead.
“The priest will be here any minute for last rites.”
Gregory let the watering can fall from his hand. “Shit.”
“I know.”
He drew a breath, tried to steady himself. “What happens now?”
“Dr. Lee takes Dad off the ventilator tomorrow, and that’s the end of the road—his anyway.”
“Tomorrow?”
“First thing in the morning.”
Gregory didn’t know what to say. He thought this heart attack would be just another example of his father not backing down and Gregory would have several more years of ambivalent Sunday visits to room 109 at Pleasant Springs. Now Margaret was saying that their father was almost gone.
“I see.” Gregory kicked at an anthill, trying to dissolve the tiny brown volcano into a patch of grass. “So what should I do?”
“You should get your butt down here is what you should do. It’s our last night with Dad, and we have to sign some things, take care of paperwork, stuff like that.”
Gregory let out a long sigh. Liv was listening, so he spoke in low tones. “Is the timing up to the doctors? Can they wait until tomorrow afternoon?”
“What? Why?”
“Well, the thing is, I have another eight-hour day of clients tomorrow, and I already missed last Friday. If you’re okay with handling this tonight. I’ll be there—”
“Jesus! I’m sorry Dad’s death is such an inconvenience for your income stream.”
“It’s not that, Maggie—”
“So what the fuck is more pressing than your father’s last hours?”
As her words hung there between them, Gregory pretended to notice something around the other side of the house and walked quickly toward the blue spruce, away from Liv.
“Here’s the problem,” he said, hoping his sister would understand if he told the blunt truth. “It is crucial that I see my one o’clock client tomorrow. I obviously can’t say why for confidentiality reasons, but you need to trust me. This session is also a matter of life and death.”
“Is this the person you were telling me about? The love interest?”
“No!” he said in a firm whisper. “I mean it’s that person, but it’s not what you just said.”
“But it is her? That woman?”
He glanced back across the yard at Liv who was now inspecting the tomato vines. “I’m not discussing this with you. But if it’s possible to wait until tomorrow afternoon, I can be there by four.”
“Can you even hear yourself Gregory? ‘I can be there by four.’ Do you know how heartless you sound?”
“I know I do, but I can’t explain it right now. Either way, I’ve made my peace with Dad. I don’t need any more goodbyes. That’s your stuff to resolve.”
Margaret was silent for a long moment in which Gregory stood perfectly still, hoping that his sister would finally accept what he had been trying to tell her: she couldn’t force him to care about their father.
When Margaret began speaking again, her voice was low and graveled. “Well, I’m glad you’ve resolved everything with Dad. Congratulations. But you are absolutely right that I haven’t. I never felt like I was part of our family growing up, and it took me years to even have a relationship with Mom and Dad. Now I don’t have any close family except Jas and Dad and your kids. But not you. I’ve never had you. And even if you can’t be there for Dad tonight, I had this crazy idea that maybe—oh gosh, I don’t know—maybe you could be there for me. Or for us. As a family.”
She let out a deep guttural sound worse than crying. Gregory paused, wavered for a minute, but he knew he had to see Mira again if he was going to able to be there for anyone. How could he be a more present brother and father, with his thoughts consumed by another? How could he be honest with Liv until he’d achieved some clarity around this surreal situation?
Margaret stopped. Gregory waited. Soon she would say a snarky goodbye, and their phone call would be over. But she started speaking again, this time in a querulous whisper. “Do you know that for years I’ve wanted a brother? And now I’m asking you to be there while we help our father die, but you can’t do it. Not for yourself, or for me. So, fine. Stay there and fuck your patient’s brains out, or whatever it is you do with her. And if you need me, I’ll be at Dad’s deathbed with my wife, who cares way more about our father than you do.”
The phone clicked off and Gregory stood there holding it to his ear. He leaned his head back, looking beyond the pines at the fast-moving clouds. Everything was leaving him, and he couldn’t seem to stop it from happening. He had one moment in time to find out why Mira was coming to his office and to beg her for forgiveness. She had been so annoyed that time he delayed their session fending off Phil. If Gregory wasn’t in the office tomorrow at one, he doubted she would ever come back. If she had ever even been there to begin with. After thirty years of praying for this chance, he was going to miss it. And then what? A broken marriage and another thirty years of sending prayers into a void? Or worse, giving up.
He was about to slip the phone into his pocket when he realized it was Liv’s. But he couldn’t turn to face her, even when he heard the pad of her feet in the wet grass behind him. When his shoulders started to heave, she put a hand on his back, and he wanted to fall into her arms and tell her how he had ruined everything, every relationship. He’d been a shitty brother, a distant son, a useless husband, an incompetent father. He had destroyed his friendships and damaged his marriage because he couldn’t be truthful with anyone. He had not lived an honest day since that date engraved on Mira’s tombstone: June 20, 1989. As much as he had hoped their marriage would save him, it didn’t, and it wouldn’t. And he certainly couldn’t tell Liv that his one chance left for absolution—the thing he’d been waiting for since he was seventeen—was Mira. But now he had to choose between his dying father and his own redemption.
