“Sweetheart.” He pats my shoulder and brushes his dry lips against my cheek. His voice is faint, and his greeting—sweetheart—is one he hasn’t used since I was a small child. “I hoped you were still coming.”
“Of course, Dad. I told you I was,” I say.
“It’s been so long…” He closes his eyes, leaning back in his chair, as if even the small physical effort has exhausted him.
I resist the urge to apologize. He knows why I haven’t come sooner. Everyone knows—about his temper, about his fits, about his dark moods. For weeks after my mother died, everything I did made him erupt in a fury. And then, just as quickly, he would withdraw into silence, would pretend I didn’t exist at all. But everything he did was okay, because he’d “found the Lord.” In town, he wore his religion like armor, and somehow that kept him untouchable. At home, he wielded it like a weapon.
Everyone knew, and at the same time, no one saw; no one said a thing. In the city, everyone is anonymous; but in a small town where everyone knows everyone, it takes real skill to look the other way when you’re looking at a face you recognize.
Nothing has changed in here, aside from the addition of a single photo—one I sent from college graduation—tacked above the mantel. My mother’s china on display in the hutch. The painting of Jesus on the cross in the corner of the dining room. An old box TV with a VCR—God, a VCR—just opposite my dad’s easy chair. A fine layer of dust on everything. And my dad’s slippers—the same slippers he had ten years ago—nearly worn through. It’s as if time stopped when I left.
I didn’t know what to expect coming here. My aunt Jen—Dad’s sister, older by four years—sent me a note last Christmas after she’d passed through. She was the one who told me about Dad’s decline. Alzheimer’s, she thought, though of course my dad refused to go to the doctor.
It’s just little things, she’d said. Where his keys are. Mood swings. He falls down a lot. He still knows who we are, though.
“How was the drive?” His voice sounds old, worn to thinness, and makes an unexpected swell of pity rise inside of me.
“Fine. Traffic stopped up on 83, but only for a half hour or so.” Ten years and we’re talking about traffic. There’s a long, awkward silence and I fumble for something to say. What did we ever talk about? Did we talk?
Instinctually, I count the steps to the front door in my head: twenty-three. Thirteen to the door that leads through the kitchen to the backyard. Seventeen to the stairs, in case I need to flee to my room.
My old room. This isn’t my house anymore. This isn’t my life.
“I’ve made dinner,” he says, almost proudly. This time he succeeds in pulling himself out of the chair and, leaning heavily on one hand, fumbles for his cane. “I need this thing now.”
I don’t really know what I’m supposed to say, so I just give him a tight-lipped half smile and follow him into the kitchen. He’s slow, hunched over his cane, and seeing him like this is beyond confusing. That feeling again—sadness, pity, yearning to make it better—flares up in me, unbidden. I’ve prepared, but not for this. Suddenly I feel a new kind of fear—that I will have to learn all over again how to survive in the presence of this man, how to find myself. That he will make me love him again, and then disappoint me, and I will have to learn all over again how to unlove him.
My dad has made lasagna—“from scratch,” he says, “not the frozen ones”—and I feel another pang when I imagine him stumping around the kitchen on his cane, cutting onions one-handed, layering the sauce and cheese. It’s vegetarian, too. Although the signs of his illness are there—he forgets the word for potholders, and mentions my mother once in the present tense—he hasn’t forgotten that I don’t eat meat.
I suddenly wonder if he remembers the night we sat at the table and I asked if he knew what happened to Little Bubsy, the pet rabbit I kept as a kid. I was probably five. My mother stared down at her plate, her eyes milky from drugs and illness.
“You just ate him,” my dad said. I haven’t been able to stomach meat since.
I wash my hands in water so hot it sends billows of steam toward the ceiling.
We have our lasagna mostly in silence. It’s only after dinner, when I’m washing the dishes by hand, that I realize we didn’t say grace over our meal.
Did he forget?
Sweat gathers under my armpits.
He falls asleep in front of the TV while I clean. I grab a quilt—a quilt my mother made—and cover him in the chair. He rouses slightly and grabs my arm so hard I nearly gasp, unreasonably—afraid.
“I’m happy to have you back,” he says. “I’m happy you’re here.”
Suddenly I want to cry. This is the worst trick of all.
“Only for a visit, Dad.” I fight to keep my voice from breaking. After so many years. How dare he? Anger was the only thing I had, the only thing I’ve ever been able to depend on.
How dare he take that from me, too?
Chapter Six
Only the second day on the job and the potential civil suit is imploding: in the morning, I find out that two of our half dozen complainants, the Davies and the Ioccos, have now withdrawn their complaints. Rich Iocco is coach of the local Little League team, and funds for new uniforms and a bus to away games mysteriously dried up after Optimal learned he was planning to talk to us.
Which means that either we might be onto something or we might be running straight toward a brick wall.
Unfortunately, the two aren’t mutually exclusive.
I send Portland out to speak to some local GP’s, to swing by the hospitals and befriend the nurses—brutal, often fruitless work, but he’s easy on the eyes and his beard should make people feel at ease. Portland and Flora will head up the door-to-door canvass to try to suss out potential support. A handful of farms top the list of water usage per acre, so I direct them to start there: if anyone should be worried about supply, it’s the people whose livelihoods directly depend on it. Farmers don’t get their subsidies from Optimal, and may be easier to persuade. It will be my job to track down Carolina Dawes, whose kid has been complaining of rashes.
Joe and Raj get to geek out on data: two years ago Optimal subcontracted IBC Waste to deal with hazardous chemical disposal and environmental protocol.
In other words, they passed the buck, big time.
“Even if we prove Optimal is pumping goddamn uranium into the kiddie pools, they will just point the finger at IBC,” Joe says.
It’s not even nine thirty, and already, my mood is cracking. I take a deep breath. “So we’ll have to show that Optimal had direct knowledge. We’ll have to prove they’re the ones behind the steering wheel.”
Joe sighs. “Hooray. Two cases for the price of one. I always loved me a twofer.”
—
Carolina Dawes lives in a converted hunter’s cabin in what counts for a zoning error: just beyond it lies a now-defunct dump within shouting distance of the shore of the reservoir. The only car in the driveway is mounted on cinderblocks.
I have to wedge my car in behind a rust-eaten Geo Tracker so filmed with dirt the original color is impossible to measure. Someone has written Wash Me on the rear window with a finger. Real original.