“Dr. Nilchek arrived just before your father died and was with him, as was Ms. Antrim,” the nurse said. Nate looked at her and
nodded, stupidly and instinctively, and she continued, “It was his spleen. The doctor can explain it. He’s in the waiting room whenever you’re ready. Feel free to take your time.”
“Thanks,” Nate said. He felt a gaping nothingness in his heart. A deep and dark hole where he’d been full before. The threat of George—of him reappearing, disapproving, looming either as a flesh and blood figure or in his buildings—had perpetually, subconsciously been a part of Nate. In its place, he now felt nothing. In this room (between these chalky blue walls and the pockmarked and paneled ceiling, beneath fluorescent lights and the glow from a call button that hung precariously low beside the head of the bed) on a night when the last mosquitoes of the season were biting and the stars and the moon were hidden by a dense fog, at a moment when Nate’s own life felt remarkably tenuous, this was where it all came to an end.
CHAPTER
30
Remember Him as He Was
E
MILY LOOKED ON FROM
the doorway to George’s room. It was wrong, spying on Trevor and Nate, but she’d felt even more displaced biding her time down the hall. There, in that waiting room, the neurologist (not the no-nonsense doctor they’d met with this morning, but a younger colleague, one junior enough to still be saddled with overnight call on holiday weekends) was consoling Philippa Antrim. Emily had felt like an imposter. She wasn’t a blood relative and she’d never met George while he was awake.
George was dead. That’s what the doctor said. Emily’s first reaction was guilt. She’d called George Bedecker an asshole. If anything could cause a notoriously reticent blowhard’s heart to stop, that was it. He was an icon and she’d sworn at him in a high-pitched scream mere inches from his comatose face. She’d killed the man.
“I’m sorry,” Emily said to the doctor, her voice timid and quiet, “but do you know exactly what caused his heart to stop?”
She tried to feign ignorance, sure that her culpability was obvious, trickling out of her pores and percolating under her words. She was a thief and a murderer! George deserved her strong reprimand, but she hadn’t meant to shock him into death (into submission, yes, but not death). If Emily had been patient (Emily, who had never been patient) he’d have died on his own. Between the car crash and Huntington’s, he can’t have had many years left.
“His problem wasn’t cardiac,” the doctor said, and Jeanne translated (pausing to offer Emily a pill from her purse; Emily said no without even asking which particular sedative the capsule contained) explaining how it happened, how George had sustained abdominal trauma during the crash that hadn’t been detected. He’d died from an undiagnosed ruptured spleen. The doctor continued to talk, apparently covering his tracks, trying to fend off a malpractice suit against the hospital. Emily was focused on the diagnosis. His spleen had ruptured yesterday, and hadn’t bled out until today when he’d died. It wasn’t Emily’s fault.
Her second reaction was shameful: She felt relief. Not over the fact that she hadn’t murdered the seminal American architect, but relief that he was dead. Nate would be free of the weight of his father. The thought wasn’t just shameful. It was also incorrect, she saw now from her perch in the doorway of room 207B. Nate had been denied closure, and it could be a long time before he reckoned with the ghost of his father. And if Nate turned out to be carrying the Huntington’s gene, it would be as if his father had never died at all. His father would be inside of Nate, a part of him.
Emily could already see the change in Nate. He looked older. His shoulders were rounded in the posture of a man well past middle age. His knees were bent as if shirking from the heft of
Trevor, who was in his arms. He looked down at the body in the bed and rocked back and forth, as if steadying himself against an ocean tide. Emily walked into the room.
“Nate,” she said tentatively, putting a hand on the low of his back.
He passed Trevor to her and then laid his own hands on his father’s arm. “He’s still warm,” Nate said. “I’ve never thought of my father as warm before.”
“He looks exactly as he did this morning.”
“I know.”
“The doctor and Philippa both want to talk to you. They’re in the waiting room.”
Nate nodded and for the first time turned his attention from George’s body. “You’ve met her?”
“I didn’t talk to her, but I’ve seen her. She looks harmless. She’s what I expected from a Philippa, I guess. She’s like a Midwestern Oompa Loompa. Short and round with a shock of red hair.”
“That’s what you expected?”
“Minus the roundness.” There was a boldness and brashness to Philippa, an unapologetic frankness to her look, which Emily respected. The woman was wearing a kimono-style silk dress that would have looked wrong on anyone else, especially anyone else her height—five feet flat, if Emily estimated right—but which gave her an appearance of fierce confidence even in this milieu, the monotonous environs of a hospital waiting room, a place that drained even the thickest skinned fighters of their strength.
“Let’s go then, I want to get this over with.” Nate took his hands off his father’s arm and then lightly touched the man’s forehead, as if feeling for a fever. He made no motion to leave the room.
“I’ll be down the hall. It’s the waiting room right past the nurse’s desk,” Emily said.
When Nate rejoined Emily a few minutes later, the hunch was gone from his shoulders. He caught her eye and she got up, leaving Trevor asleep on a bench next to Jeanne, who was leafing through a tattered copy of
Fit Pregnancy.
The doctor had left to see another patient, but Philippa Antrim was still in the room. Her head was bent over an open book, a cheap mass market mystery with a scythe on its cover and fake blood dripping off the letters of the author’s name. Emily had been watching her glare into the book, unmoving, not flipping the pages. Emily had been tempted to prod her, to toss a chlamydia prevention pamphlet in her lap just to get a reaction.
The woman didn’t stir until Nate had fully entered the room. Then, she rose from her seat and carefully laid her book on the chair next to her.
“Fuck,” Nate said when he saw her, the expletive slipping out just loud enough for Emily to hear as she came to his side. “My mother must be rolling over in her grave.” Emily understood. Philippa couldn’t be any less European if she was wearing an American flag. And she was the only clue left to who Nate’s father had become over these past few years. As Philippa neared him, Nate opened his mouth to speak.
“Hi, I—” was all that Nate got out before Philippa interrupted.
“Nathan, yes?” she said. She barely came up to Nate’s shoulder. When she reached out her hand to him she extended it up, instead of out. Emily was jarred by the motion. She’d thought perhaps the two would hug. Nate was George’s only living progeny, the remnant from his old family; Philippa was the closest thing he had to kin today. Some form of affection must be called for. Emily focused her attention past Nate, down the hospital
hallway. The doctor said he’d be right back, but he’d been gone for forever, it seemed, and the hallway was empty.
“I’m Philippa,” the woman said and without warning she started to bawl, fat bulbs of water dribbling down her face, leaving track marks across her makeup like the cracks in a fossil. Oh God, Emily thought, this woman really loved George. She must have. Emily reached into her pockets for a tissue but had none. Nate looked dazed, as if he were having an out of body experience that had taken him to Morocco or Mumbai, somewhere far from here.
“Hold on,” Emily said, and ran back to Trevor and the diaper bag. She returned with a moist wipe and handed it to the woman. Nate eyed Emily suspiciously. George had just died and Emily was offering a butt-wipe to the man’s grieving lover. The woman took it and swiped her cheeks, removing a swath of her makeup along with her tears.
“Whoo!” Philippa said faking a smile, a wan smile. “Whooee!” Her voice was airy and drained. “I was hoping to save the crying until I got back to the hotel. I hadn’t expected to be at George’s deathbed today. No one prepared me for this.” She shook her head and wiped her nose with the same wipe she’d used on her face. “I’m glad you called me, Nate. I need to thank you for that.”
“We didn’t know you’d make it out here so soon,” he said. “Your son, he didn’t say you’d be getting here tonight.” Nate turned to Emily, “Did he?” Nate, after all, wasn’t the one who had spoken to Pete Antrim. “We didn’t tell him it was urgent. We didn’t know. My father looked as if he could linger for a long time.”
“Well, he’s always been one for surprises. But what would you know?” she said. Nate only shrugged. Philippa’s tears started up again. “Eight years with a man, and this is what it comes to.”
Eight years. If George had been with Philippa for eight years, that meant the two were already dating, Emily figured, when Nate and George last spoke. Yet according to Nate, George had never mentioned her. Nate looked sad, but Emily was sure that he never mentioned
his
lovers in their father-son talks, either. Nate had conceived and born a child with Emily, and never even tried to tell his father about it. The wall had been built up and cemented from both sides.
“Eight years?” Nate said.
“Ever since he consulted on the annex.”
“The annex?” Emily asked.
“At the library. At Loyola.”
When Emily continued to look at her expectantly Philippa went on gently, as if reminding Emily of something she should already know, “I archive the rare books and academic papers? That’s how we met? Great Lord, I’m glad I flew here in time to see him today.” Philippa’s tears, which had barely abated, were overpowering in the face of Nate and Emily’s lack of them. Emily knew she would cry later, when they were home. Not over George, but for Nate.
“He’d told you he was going to a conference? That’s what your son said,” Nate said.
“Well,” she finished with the wipe and handed it back to Emily, as if Emily were a bathroom attendant, “that’s what he said. I don’t ask questions. He lives—lived—his life. I led mine. And when we were lucky, they intersected. We were alike in that way. Habitual companionship is a shackle. Who needs it?”
“Me!” Emily burst out before she could stop herself. It came out more like
meep,
like a chirp, a call for attention. Nate might die young, but while he was here, she would shackle herself to him. There would be no part-time love in Emily’s life. She
wrapped her hands around Nate’s arm while Philippa kept talking.
“The doctor is still here, somewhere. He’s flighty, a rat, you wouldn’t know that his VIP patient had just passed, but you should talk to him. And we have to make arrangements with the hospital, as you can imagine. I’m happy to make the arrangements, I can’t go to my hotel, it’s too sad. I’ve been here an hour and already I feel rooted in place. You have a son. Talk to the doctor and get that child home to sleep. Call me in the morning,” she scribbled the name of her hotel on a small bit of paper she took out of her pocket. “We can talk tomorrow. We’ll need to talk, and now, obviously, now is not the time. It’s certainly been a long day for all of us. I’m just”—her tears started again—“bless me, I’m just glad I got here to see him one last time.”
“He was awake when you got here?” Nate asked.
“He woke up when I was by his bedside,” she said. “He was only alert for fifteen minutes before he died.”
“Did he say anything?” Nate asked.
Emily saw the look in Nate’s eyes, the hope that his father had explained the meaning of life—the meaning of Nate’s life—before collapsing into the great unknown.
“He was disoriented.”
“The nurse told me,” Nate said.
“You should be thankful that you didn’t see it. It’s not the way to remember your father. Remember him as he was.”
Was
when?
When he was an embryo? Emily wanted to ask. Because Nate hadn’t told a single story involving his adult father in which he was a character worth memorializing.
“But he said something?” Nate asked again.
“He said something.”
“What?” Nate said.
“It was barely a sentence. He wasn’t himself. There was no
George
there. He was delirious and could only manage a few words.”
“Just tell me what my father said.”
“You know, no matter what, that he loved you, Nate.”
“But what did he say?” Nate said.
“Please,” Emily pled to Philippa, if only to end the agony. “What did he say?”
“Emily is a cocksucker,” Philippa said. “He said, ‘Emily is a cocksucker.’”
Nate laughed, hysterical hyena laughter, as he sat behind the wheel of the rental car. Trevor and Jeanne were both asleep in the back. Next to Nate, Emily assumed the classic subway straphanger position, gripping the handle above the passenger side door. She’d just finished explaining to Nate how she’d ranted at his father this morning. “My name is Emily!” she’d screamed before calling the guy an asshole. Apparently coma patients were like infants, you had to watch what you said in their presence. They took in more than you knew. Emily now clung to the car in case Nate tried to eject her.
The light had turned green but Nate didn’t move the vehicle. He paused his laughs to catch his breath, and just as Emily thought he was done with the hysterics they started again.
“It’s—” he said, and then the cackles rose in intensity, sounding like chokes as he tried to get a breath into his lungs. “Okay,” he said, after the light turned red again. At nearly 2:00 a.m. on the back roads of Rhode Island at the tail end of a long weekend, the streets were empty. The air was dead, the atmosphere recouping for the day and the season ahead. “Okay, my father called you a cocksucker.” He got one final laugh in. A small, tired guffaw to end the tirade. “It’s true, Em. You are a cocksucker.
I’ve seen you suck cock.” He wiped a tear away from his eye. He’d laughed so hard that he’d cried, more tears than he’d shed over his father’s body. “You know, George was always a stickler for the truth. There was no small talk with George Bedecker. And calling you a cocksucker, it’s as honest as calling Trevor a bastard. Even his insults were ultimately fact-checkable.” Nate wheezed, the last bit of laugh he had left, and then inched the car forward as the light changed.