Recovering Charles (9 page)

“Thank you,” he mumbled.

Others came and kindly offered support.

“We’re here for you,” a woman said.

“He just wiped us off the map,” the man repeated.

“It’s OK, bud. We’re in this together,” said another.

“Thanks, guys. Thank you.”

I made eye contact with the man. I tried to smile through the pain in my chest and gut.

I returned to the parking lot.

I slept in the car.

~ ~

I dreamt of the day Mom first realized she couldn’t live without the pills.

Dad sat her down and told her how much he loved her. How much he believed in her. How long he’d stand by her. It amounted to a one-man intervention, and it was even less successful than Dad had hoped.

Mom said no.

Then she ushered him out the door on some needless errand and, after taking another of her naps, called me into the living room.

“Sit down by me, my sweet boy.”

“Everything OK, Mom?”

“Yes, yes. All is well. Just sit with me for a minute or two. Your dad’s still out and about.”

Mom’s voice wasn’t what it used to be. Once it sparkled and fizzed, like bubbles from my favorite soda. It used to make Dad and me smile just to hear it, even if we were two rooms apart from her. The exact words didn’t matter.

Now it sounded like wet bread.

“Luke, I’m not doing well. You know this.”

“You need something, Mom? Another blanket?”

“No, dear. I mean . . . I mean I’m not doing well at all. I’m not who I used to be.” She stroked my hand. “Am I?”

“I know, Mom. You’re sick. You’re still grieving about Grandma. I know.”

“Is that what your father told you?”

“I guess.”

“He’s right. I am sad. But I’m also tired and angry.”

“At me?”

“Of course not at you, sweetheart.”

I wondered how many of her words were being generated by the pills. We sat quietly for a few minutes. I suspected she was editing her thoughts before they became words I wouldn’t understand anyway.

“I need you to do me a favor, sweetheart.”

“Sure, Mom.”

“Live.”

“I
am
living.”

“Not like this. Live your life, son. Take your dad and be what you two want to be, what you were
meant
to be. Stop sitting around here bringing me blankets and V8s and cards from the school. Go live your life. You’re still a child, Luke.
A child.
”

She was right. And this wasn’t the first or last time I felt trapped in a conversation ten years too early.

“Your dad is a good man, Luke. But he’s stubborn. Talk to him. Go. Be happy. Let me be me. You go be
you.
”

I began to cry. “But we love you, Mom. We want you to get better.”

“I am getting better, don’t you see it?”

No.

“But it’s taking time. And I hate seeing you wait around for me, hoping I’ll jump up and get back to my life like it used to be before. I don’t want you to forget me, Luke. I just want you to get on with your life. Get back to the promise of your future.”

I put my head on her chest and she ran her fingers through my hair.

“You’re such a talented boy. Such a talented, talented boy.”

We sat quietly again for a moment.

“Mom, can I ask you something?”

She was asleep.

Later that night, while I sat in my room strumming my guitar, I heard Mom arguing with Dad in the living room. It ended in a familiar way.

“We’re never leaving you,” he said.

“Charles—”

“I said we’re never leaving you. Never.”

Chapter
14

My neck was kinked and killing me.

          My cell phone was ringing in the passenger’s seat and my eyes were adjusting to the light. The screen flashed Jordan’s name and cell phone number. I let it go to voice mail.

I opened the door of the rental car, stepped into the Mississippi air, and stretched my arms high above my head. I hadn’t slept in my car since a friend talked me into “camping out” early in a parking lot for the privilege of paying a hundred and twenty dollars to walk eighteen ridiculous holes and lose eleven balls on one of the toughest and most prestigious golf courses in the country, Bethpage Black in New York.

I would’ve given anything to be back at that parking lot instead of at this one in Hattiesburg, Mississippi.

I opened the back door of the car and retrieved my toiletry bag from my duffel. My neck and back argued about which hurt worse.

There were new faces at the registration counter when I walked back into the lobby. The lounge was buzzing with people eating granola bars and drinking fresh juice. In the background, Glenn Beck was on the radio riffing about the recovery and Mayor Nagin. Another movie was playing, one I’d never seen before, and a few of the guests from the night before were gathered again, debating FEMA, Cheney, and whether the levees were blown on purpose.

“You hear about this fella from the Coast Guard?” A man in jam shorts took the floor. “He’s in charge now. What’s his name?”

“Admiral Allen,” someone answered.

“Yeah, that guy is for real, ya’ll. Read that thing in the paper over there. This cleanup is back on track, ya’ll. The Coast Guard is on the
scene.
”

“Amen, brother!” A woman playfully mocked and raised her hands to the sky. “That’s my man right there!”

“That’s right, girl. Now let’s roll. Kids!” He yelled to two children playing tag in the hallway leading from the lobby. “Load up, we’re rolling.”

I watched the man say good-bye and thank you to the two employees at the counter. Even from where I stood across the lobby it seemed he had love in his eyes. He gave them each a man-hug—shaking one hand, hugging behind the back with the other.

“Godspeed, friends,” he said and walked away. His wife had already loaded the children in their Trooper. As promised, he gunned it and rolled out in style.

I took a granola bar and a cup of cranberry juice. Only one table had an open seat. A man sat alone nursing a cup of coffee and picking at a dry muffin.

“May I?”

He nodded.

“Busy place, eh?”

“Sure is.” He added another cream to his coffee and stirred.

I don’t know that I felt like I needed to make small talk, since he clearly wasn’t interested, but I did anyway. Maybe it was the two days, a thousand miles alone, and sleeping in the car.

“You coming or going?” I asked him.

“Going home.”

“Been here helping out?”

He added yet another cream to his coffee. “Was. Drove down to New Orleans. I’m with FEMA. Though more like a contractor, really.” He stirred his coffee. “Now I’m going home.”

“What’s it like down there?”

“You headed down?”

“I am. Today’s day three of my drive from New York.”

“Good luck to you.”

“That bad?”

“It’s everything you’ve seen on the news, and some of what you’ve heard.”

“I’m Luke, by the way, Luke Millward.”

“Bobby.” He shook my hand.

“Nice meeting you, Bobby.” I unwrapped my granola bar. “So it’s bad. Snakes, alligators, all that?”

“Nah, some snakes I imagine, but a lot of that stuff isn’t true; it’s just rumor. Rumor is the only thing that spreads faster than water or fire. But it’s just as dangerous.”

Wise man,
I thought.

“So what did you see?”

“Ah, now, you don’t want to know
half
of what I’ve seen.”

“Actually, I do. I’m a photographer. I’d love to know where to go, where to stay away from.”

“What’s real and what’s not?”

“Bingo.” The word seemed out of place as soon as I spoke it.

“It’s as bad as it looks on TV. The chaos is dying down because so many people have left the city by now. And because a lot of the holdouts are dying too. It’s so hard to get to them in time.”

“I can imagine.”

Bobby got up and refilled his coffee at the buffet.

“No, Luke. You can’t.” He picked right up when he returned to his chair.

“Two days ago I was on a boat, clearing out a neighborhood. Marking doors. We came upon a house on the east side, water
lapping at the top step. There were six or seven kids on the porch. Cutest little kids. So young. So polite. Sweet kids, every one. Youngest was just a baby, barely walking; oldest I imagine was probably twelve.”

He added a creamer to his fresh coffee.

“There were three of us. We came up alongside the porch and two of us hopped off with life jackets to rescue the kids. Planned to take them in two trips, split up the two oldest kids so they could help. My partner and I got onto the porch and told the kids we were there to help. That everything was all right now.”

Another creamer.

“I asked where their parents were. One of the little ones, maybe five years old, said Mom was inside and needed help. Right then the oldest grabbed my arm and led me in the house. The smell . . . man, the smell took me right back to ’Nam. The youngster led me through the family room and around a corner toward a bedroom.”

Please be alive,
I thought.

“Their mother was on her back in bed. Kid told me she’d been relying on oxygen for a couple years.”

Please be alive.

“She was dead.” Bobby added a third creamer to his coffee.

I closed my eyes and pictured what it must have been like the night the storm rolled in. Wind threatening to push the house over. Fear in the children’s voices as the water rose. Mother reassuring them. “We’re going to be fine, children. Everything’s gonna be all right. Calm, calm, children, let’s pray to God again.”

I imagined their thirst as the post-Katrina heat wave baked the roof of the house. I imagined the lies the older siblings had to tell. “Momma will be up soon,” they must have said.

“You’re a good man,” I told Bobby.

“Am I? Because here I am going home. Quitting. I can’t see that again. I just can’t.” His eyes were so distant I wondered if he’d even remember meeting me.

“You came, Bobby. That makes you one of the good ones. One of the
great
ones.”

I gave my own story—the reason for the trip, the apprehension, the estrangement from my father, my growing fear that not only was my father dead, but that he’d died in a similarly brutal way.

I stood up, shook Bobby’s hand with both of mine, and thanked him for his service in the recovery effort.

“You know what,” he said. “Follow me out for a minute.”

I trailed him to the parking lot.

Bobby pulled a FEMA construction pass from his dashboard and handed it to me. “Put this on your dash. Trust me,” he said, “this’ll get you wherever you need to go.”

Then he wished me luck recovering my father and resumed his lonely drive home.

~ ~

The beginning of the end of the career of noted architect Charles Millward started with an ice sculpture and ended with a shouting match with one of the firm’s partners. The firm, the partner said, could only look past so many disappearances, missed deadlines, and embarrassing meetings.

They’d already offered to get him into an exclusive Dallas-area rehab center and foot the bill. His greatest defender in the firm, Kaiser, a recovering alcoholic himself, begged Dad to let him sponsor him in Alcoholics Anonymous.

“I’m fine,” Dad said. He repeated that so often I think he actually believed it.

I never did. Not when one drink became two, then three, then four. Not when Dad joked to a room full of colleagues paying a courtesy call after Mom’s funeral about taking his own life. And certainly not when we were both left alone in the deadly quiet to cope with the twenty-four-hour loneliness we felt when the house finally cleared of mourners and meatloaf. It’s an atmosphere unlike any other, and only those who’ve lost a loved one from underneath their own roof know it.

My camera never left my side during those early weeks of adjusting to life without my zombie mother constantly readjusting her pillow. I took pictures of the house, Mom’s things, bouquets that filled every room, the cemetery.

Dad found his solace and companionship in a bottle.

His guilt and loneliness were things I couldn’t understand. Dad told me he loved me and would always be there for me. But according to him, it was time for me to become a man and stop being embarrassed by him. On my eighteenth birthday, he wrote in my card that even though his dreams hadn’t all come true, mine still could, and he didn’t want to stand in the way.