Pharmakon (56 page)

“Your father doesn’t like to dance.”

“You mean he doesn’t know how.”

“I mean I have made up my mind there’ll be no dancing, and the party will be at our house. That way, no one will feel shortchanged.”

“Mom, no one feels shortchanged. We like to fight.”

“It will be a picnic lunch. I’ll leave the food to you all, but I’ll make the cake.”

Lucy was looking at the guest list Michael had handed out. “Why isn’t Zach’s name on the list?”

Everyone looked at Michael. “I didn’t have an address for him, and wasn’t sure you wanted him.”

“Of course we want him. He’s our brother.” Lucy was adamant.

“The last time he came to our apartment, he was so fucked up he spent half the time in the bathroom and the other half embarrassing our friends, pestering them for work.”

“He’s better.” Lucy tried to sound convinced.

Willy was curious. He had sent his younger brother a long letter volunteering to pay for rehab but had received no answer. “When did you see him?”

Lucy lied. “A few days ago.”

“Christ, why didn’t you tell us? Where is he?” Whenever Fiona felt low about her own life, the thought of Z cheered her up.

“He doesn’t want anybody to know where he is until he’s well.”

“That means he’s still getting high.”

“He isn’t. He’s been clean for fifty-seven days.”

Fiona rolled her eyes. “Of course he’s going to say that, Zach’s an addict. Addicts are liars.”

“He’s not lying this time.” Lucy was on the edge of tears.

“Lucy, I love Zach, too, but the way he’s ruined himself is so pathetic and depressing, I just don’t want to inflict that on Dad on his birthday. I mean, Jesus, remember the Halloween party we had? He came dressed as Casper.” The table went silent. Fiona wasn’t finished. “Our children still have nightmares about it.”

“So does Zach, for Chrissake.” Willy stood up. “After the shit he went through as a kid, it’s no wonder he’s a drug addict.”

“We’ve all been fucked up by that.”

“If you don’t stop saying ‘fuck,’ I’m going home.” Nora’s voice quavered. Hearing Casper’s name said out loud had rattled her.

Fiona hammered the point. “I’m not a drug addict. You haven’t blown hundreds of thousands of dollars on cocaine.”

“I’ve taken it, and so have you, Fiona.” The sibling rivalry had slipped from Lucy versus Fiona to Willy versus Fiona.

“I’ve never taken cocaine in my life.”

“Liar.” Lucy, not wanting to feel left out, threw herself in on Willy’s side.

Tears were streaming down their mother’s face. Lucy handed her a napkin. “Congratulations, Fiona, you succeeded in making Mom cry.”

“Zach is making Mom cry, not me.”

Nora slowly shook her head no. “You like to think you did the best you could for your children. But you know that’s never true.”

“So does that mean you want Zach or not?”

Their mother said nothing. Pushing back her chair, she got up and hurried to the door. Fumbling with the lock, she cursed herself—“Damnation!”—then, slamming it behind her, walked out onto the lawn.

No one said anything until Michael’s cell phone rang—he excused himself to talk business in the library. Willy shot his sisters a reproachful look as he collected his mother’s purse and sweater and ran outside after her. The girls watched the wind swirl dead leaves up around their mother. One caught and crumbled in her white hair as their brother tried to button the sweater around her shoulders.

Fiona and Lucy couldn’t hear what was being said outside. All they knew was that their mother was shaking her head no to something. As Willy guided her toward the car, she looked older and smaller and frailer than she had when she first sat down at the head of the table an hour ago.

Fiona spoke first. “What do you think’s going to happen to Mom when Dad dies?”

Lucy answered solemnly, “You can’t kill the undead.” Their laughter reminded them that they were once and still friends. “Mom’s tougher than Dad, if that’s what you mean.”

“What I guess I mean is, what’s going to happen to us?” Fiona stared out the window.

“You mean after Dad dies or when we’re old?”

“We are old. I’m worried about where I’m going right now. Christ, I’m forty-eight, and I pick a fight so I can have Dad’s party at my apartment simply because I think you want it at your house?”

“I don’t want to give him a party either.”

“You’re kidding?”

“Whatever we do end up doing won’t be right with him. But if we don’t do anything, we’ll wake up depressed and tell ourselves we would have felt better if we had tried.”

“You know what’s the worst part of having our father for a father? You can’t even take antidepressants without thinking about him.”

“You, too?” Lucy slapped the table. The sisters howled with laughter, and then, after a quiet moment, began to weep.

Z woke up the next day hurting. The hill he had climbed to avoid seeing his family left his calves feeling flayed. Before opening his eyes he stretched out and absorbed the ache. His body felt the same way the last time he had made a run in search of character. Unable to find it at fourteen, it seemed unrealistic to think he’d have it in him to grab hold of at thirty-eight. But then again, no one had ever accused Zach of being realistic.

The bed of his pool house prison felt cozy. He opened his eyes and saw that he had bothered to put the sheets on the night before. It was the first time he’d done that since he arrived. A good sign? Or an indication that his subconscious had no intention of leaving the isolation ward Lucy had provided? Remembering his mantra of beginning each day with a positive thought, he cleared his mind by staring at the ceiling and waited for one to come.
I
miss my parents.

He was not at all sure that that was a positive thought. Z got up and tried to open the pool house door and found that he had locked himself in. The key Leila had given him was on the floor next to the bed. Where did he think he was going? Why did he not think he should go there? Z thought he felt no longing for the drug. Trouble was, he couldn’t be sure he wasn’t conning himself. He was expert at that.

Zach picked up the key and turned it in the lock. The hollow place he still felt inside him was not about a lack of dopamine, or a chemical imbalance in his bloodstream; at least, that was not the source of his denial.

He pushed the door open and cautiously inspected the day that faced him. The last leaves of fall were being blown from the trees. The woods looked threadbare. A November wind pushed the clouds across the blue, seamless sky at a pace that made him feel like his life was suddenly on fast-forward.

Z turned and looked at himself in the mirror. It was not a pretty sight. Opening a drawer, he took out the Swiss Army knife he had found on yesterday’s run. He had offered it to Leila. She had refused. “Mom doesn’t let us play with things that can hurt us.”

Unfolding its four-inch stainless steel blade, he tested its edge with the ball of his thumb, then reconsidered and unfolded the scissors on the other end, and began to cut his hair. After that he showered, and nicked himself twice shaving.

Throwing the jogging suit he usually wore into the laundry hamper, Z pulled on the cashmere sweater Lucy had given him but he had not bothered to take out of the box. Then he opened the footlocker and pulled on the rumpled jacket and jeans he’d arrived in. His clothes smelled like the bar of a nightclub after last call: alcohol and chemical sweat. His jeans were two sizes too large for him. He found a rolled-up twenty in his pocket, both ends caked with snot and a hefty white residue of blow. If he had found it a month ago, he would have licked it clean. Z washed the bill with a bar of soap in the sink and pocketed his net worth. After he laced up his sneakers, he checked himself out in the mirror one last time. “You’re not perfect, but at least you’re human.”

It was only after he was out the door and had walked past the piney curtain that smelled of Christmas and was halfway across the lawn, ankle-deep with a red and orange rustle of leaves, that it occurred to him that he had left the key in the lock. He guessed it was safe. It occurred to him to wonder, had he been locking the werewolf in, or the werewolves out?

Lucy’s house was deserted, save for an illegal alien from Guatemala who cooked and didn’t speak English. He guessed his sister was taking the kids to school. Lucy paid for the cook’s daughter to go to St. Luke’s with her children. It was coed now. Lucy did her part to change things. It was his turn now.

He had wanted to borrow Lucy’s bicycle. When he discovered it had a flat tire, he climbed on Leila’s. Knees hitting the handle bars, he pedaled the girl’s bike out into what had once been his world.

Z told himself he had not yet made up his mind where he was going that morning, that he was on a bike because he needed exercise and his muscles were too sore to tackle a run. But his body knew his intention, even if he did not. His arms turned the handlebars left and right and left again. Pedaling with a sense of urgency, he was jockey and beast in one, riding himself to a place he was not sure he wanted to go—home.

He would have liked to have pedaled all the way to Greenwood, to walk through the house on Harrison Street, the place where he’d first been introduced to his family’s ghosts. But Lucy’s house was twenty miles as the crow flies from the banks of the Raritan. Besides, the dead don’t stop haunting you just because you move on.

Turning into his parents’ driveway, he told himself he was there in search of reconciliation. But the werewolf in Z knew that he had come to conduct a séance.

His parents’ last three Volvos were parked side by side in the drive. They could bear to part with less and less as time went by. Z propped the bike against the trunk of a hickory tree, and took in the changes he’d missed during the years he’d been high. Two of the twelve pear trees he had planted with his father twenty years ago had died. One was twice as large as the rest, its branches reaching just short of the second story of the barn. His parents had finally gotten around to adding the balcony they had always wanted off their bedroom/office. A new retaining wall now tidied up the front walk, and his father had finally fulfilled his promise to the groundhogs and built a chain-link rectangle over his vegetable garden—a long trench was cut down the center so he didn’t have to bend to pick the tomatoes and squash he no longer shared with the groundhogs. Z shook his head in marvel and disdain at the idea of his father reaping his harvest in a cage.

Z had hoped, as a child hopes, for things to be as they are in a storybook, for his parents to look up from their work, catch sight of him, run to the door, and greet the prodigal son of the drug age with open arms. It didn’t happen that way.

He knocked on the door and waited. Gray squawked and flew to the rail of the balcony above and called out the names of dogs that had been dead for nearly thirty years. “Thistle, Spot.”

Z knocked again. Still no answer. He told himself he would come back. He started to leave. But knowing that if he walked out on this, he would have run out on more than himself, he turned and tried the door. It was unlocked.

Stepping inside, he called out, “Mom . . . Dad.” His voice was as tentative as it had been when he had come home from seventh grade with an F in math, or with that note from the headmaster recommending he see the school psychologist.

“Father . . . Mother.” It deepened and became more formal, as he considered the possibility that something was wrong. He was in the kitchen now. He tripped over a dog dish with the word “Fred” written on it. He guessed Alfie, the Bambi killer, had passed on. The hook where they kept the dog leash was empty. Maybe Fred was taking his parents for a walk.

Relaxing, Z stepped into the living room. The slipcovers were new, but the furniture was the same. Willy’s track trophies still lined the mantel, and there, in their midst, was the cup he had won for “What Goes Up Must Come Down.” It wasn’t so bogus after all. There was much to explain, and more to be ashamed of.

Dazed by the rush of memory, he went through the fortress of his youth like a sleepwalking thief. Opening doors and closets and cupboards, he was not sure what he was looking for or expecting to find. His bedroom had been turned into a guest room, his bed replaced by a foldout couch. From the scraps of cloth on the Hepplewhite table in front of the window that overlooked the valley, he surmised his mother had taken up quilting.