The Chronoliths (10 page)

The years hadn’t been kind to the Maryland suburb where my father lived. The once semi-rural neighborhood had become a nest of strip malls, erotica retailers, and high-rise worker housing. The gated community still existed, but its gatehouse was untended and covered with Arabic graffiti. The house on Provender Lane, the house where I had grown up, was almost unrecognizable behind lumpy hedges of snow. One of the eavestroughs had worked loose from the roof, and the shingles behind it sagged alarmingly. It was not the house as I remembered it, but it seemed very much the kind of house my father would (or maybe ought to) inhabit—unkempt, inhospitable.

I parked, turned off the engine, sat in the car.

Of course it was stupid to have come here. It was one of those reckless impulses, all drama and no content. I had decided I ought to see my father before I left the country (implicitly,
before he died)
—but what did that mean exactly? What did I have to say to him, and what could he possibly say to me?

I was reaching for the ignition key when he came out onto the creaking wooden porch to pick up his evening paper. The porch light, in a blue dusk, turned his skin jaundiced yellow. He looked at the car, bent to pick up the paper, then looked again. Finally he walked out to the curb wearing his house slippers and a white strap undershirt. The unaccustomed exercise left him panting.

I rolled down the window.

He said, “I thought it was you.”

The sound of his voice set loose a regiment of unpleasant memories. I said nothing at all.

“So come on in,” he said. “Cold out here.”

I locked the car behind me and set the security protocols. Down the street, three blank-faced Asiatic youths watched me follow my dying father to the door.

Chuffy recovered from his injuries, though he never went near my mother again. It was my mother whose injuries were permanent and disabling. I was told, at some point during her decline, that she was the victim of a neurological disease called adult-onset schizophrenia; that it was a medical condition, a failure somewhere in the mysterious but natural processes of the brain. I didn’t believe it, because I knew by direct experience that the problem was both simpler and more frightening: A good mother and a bad mother had begun to cohabit the same body. And because I loved the good mother it became possible, even necessary, to hate the bad one.

Alas, they bled into each other. The good mother might kiss me goodbye in the morning, but when I came home (late, reluctantly) from school, the crazed usurper would have taken control. I had no close friends beyond the age of ten, because when you have friends you have to let them into your house; and the last time I had tried that, when I brought home a timid red-haired boy named Richard who had befriended me in geography class, she lectured him for twenty minutes on the danger posed by video monitors to his future fertility. The language she actually used was considerably more graphic. The next day Richard was aloof and unresponsive, as if I done something unspeakable. It wasn’t my fault, I wanted to tell him, and it wasn’t even my mother’s. We were the victims of a haunting.

Because she disbelieved in her own illness she saw this as my weakness, not hers, and I cannot count the number of times during my teenage years when she demanded that I stop looking at her “like that”—that is, with obvious, wincing dread. One of the ironies of paranoid schizophrenia is that it fulfills its own darkest expectations with almost mathematical rigor. She thought we were conspiring to drive her mad.

None of this brought my father and me closer together. The opposite. He resisted the diagnosis almost as fiercely as my mother did, but his form of denial was more direct. I think he always felt that he had married beneath him, that he had done a favor to my mother’s family in Nashua, New Hampshire, by taking this moody and reclusive daughter off their hands. Maybe he had imagined that marriage would improve her. It hadn’t. She had disappointed him, and perhaps vice-versa. But he continued to hold her to a high standard. He blamed her for every one of her irrational acts just as if she were capable of moral and ethical judgment—which she
was
, but only sporadically. Thus the good mother suffered for the sins of the bad mother. The bad mother might be bitter and obscene, but the good mother could be cowed and bullied. The good mother could be reduced to a state of craven apology, and he performed this alchemy on her on a regular basis. He shouted at her, occasionally struck her, regularly humiliated her, while I hid in my room trying to imagine a world in which the good mother and I could abandon both him and the invading pseudo-mom. We would live contentedly, I told myself, in the kind of loving home she had once at least attempted to create, while my father continued battling his irrational
faux
wife in some distant, isolated place—a jail cell, say; a madhouse.

Later, after I had turned sixteen and learned to drive, but before she was committed to the residential home in Connecticut where she spent her final years, my father took us all on a trip to New York City. I think he believed—and he must have been desperate to have grasped at such a fragile straw—that a vacation would be good for her, would “clear her head,” as he was fond of saying. So we packed up the car, had the oil changed and the gas tank filled, and set out like dour pilgrims. My mother insisted on having the back seat to herself. I sat up front, the navigator, occasionally turning back to beg her to stop picking at the skin of her lip, which had begun to bleed.

I have only two vivid memories of the weekend in New York City.

We visited the Statue of Liberty on Saturday, and in my mind’s eye I can practically count the burnished stairs we climbed on the way to the top. I remember the simultaneous sense of smallness and largeness when we arrived there, the smell of perspiration and hot copper on the windless July air. My mother shrank away from the view of Manhattan, keening quietly to herself, while I watched with rapt attention the seagulls diving toward the sea. I brought home from that journey a hollow brass model of Liberty as tall as my hand.

And I remember Sunday morning the same weekend, when my mother wandered out of the hotel room while my father was showering and I was down the hallway pumping quarters into a soft-drink machine. When I came back and found the room empty I panicked, but I couldn’t bring myself to interrupt my father’s bath, probably because he would have blamed me (or I imagined he would have) for misplacing her. Instead I walked the red-carpeted hallway up and down, past room-service trays and carts of snowy linen, and then rode the elevator to the lobby. I saw my mother’s dark hair disappearing through the rotunda, out the revolving doors. I did not call her name, because that would alarm strangers and provoke a public embarrassment, but I ran after her, almost tripping over the newspaper rack outside the gift shop. But by the time I pushed through the glass door onto the sidewalk she was invisible. The red-suited doorman was blowing his whistle, I didn’t know why, and then I saw my mother lying sprawled across the curb and moaning to herself, while the driver of the floral delivery van that had just broken her legs jumped out of his truck and stood trembling above her, his eyes wide as two full moons. And all I felt was brutally, icily cold.

My mother was committed to the long-term care facility after the New York trip—after her legs had mended, and after the doctors at Central Mercy had been forced to pump her full of Haldol until the casts came off. The living room where I sat with my father had changed remarkably little since that time. It was not that he had made an effort to keep the house as a shrine to her. He simply hadn’t changed anything. It hadn’t occurred to him.

“I was getting all kinds of phone calls about you,” he said. “Thought for a while you’d robbed a bank.”

The curtains were closed. It was the kind of house where not much light gets inside no matter what. Nor did the ancient floor lamp do much to dispel the gloom.

He sat in his tired green easy chair, breathing shallowly, waiting for me to speak.

“It was about a job,” I said. “They were doing a background check.”

“Some job, if you got the FBI making house calls.”

The undershirt exposed his skinny frame. He had been a big man once. Big and easily angered, not the kind of man you trifled with. Now his arms were skeletal, the flesh sagging. His barrel chest had shrunk back to the ribs, and his belt was at least five notches in, the loose end flapping against his high hip joints.

I told him, “I’m going out of the country for a while.”

“How long?”

“Tell you the truth, I don’t know.”

“Did the FBI tell you I was sick?”

“I heard.”

“Maybe I’m not as sick as they think. I don’t feel good, but—” He shrugged. “These doctors know fuck-all, but they charge like Moses. You want a cup of coffee?”

“I can get it. I guess the coffee maker’s still where it was.”

“You think I’m too fragile to make coffee?”

“I didn’t say that.”

“I can still make coffee, for Christ’s sake.”

“Don’t let me stop you.”

He went to the kitchen. I got up to follow but stopped at the doorway when I saw him sneaking a big dollop of Jack Daniel’s into his own cup. His hands shook.

I waited in the living room, looking at the bookshelves. Most of the books had been my mother’s. Her tastes had run to Nora Roberts,
The Bridges of Madison County
, and endless volumes of Tim LaHaye. My father contributed the ancient Tom Clancy novels and
Stranger Than Science
. I had owned a lot of books when I lived here—I was a straight-A student, probably because I dreaded leaving school and going home—but I had kept my mystery novels segregated on a shelf in my room, primly unwilling to let Conan Doyle or James Lee Burke mingle with the likes of V.C. Andrews and Catherine Coulter.

My father came back with two mugs of coffee. He handed me the one with CORIOLIS SHIPPING, the name of his last employer, still faintly legible on the side. He had managed the Coriolis distribution network for twenty-three years and still collected a pension check every month. The coffee was both bitter and weak. “I don’t have any regular milk or cream,” he said. “I know you like it white. I used powdered milk.”

“It’s fine,” I said.

He settled back into his chair. There was a remote control on the coffee table in front of him, presumably for his video panel. He looked at it wistfully but didn’t reach for it. He said, “That must be some job you applied for, because those FBI people asked some peculiar questions.”

“Like what?”

“Well, there was I guess the usual, where you went to school and what kind of grades you got and where did you work and all that. But they wanted lots of details. Did you go out for sports, what did you do in your spare time, did you talk about politics or history much. Did you have lots of friends or did you keep to yourself. Who was your family doctor, did you have any unusual childhood diseases, did you ever see a shrink. A lot about Elaine, too. They knew she’d been sick. In that area, I mainly told them to fuck off. But they knew a lot already, obviously.”

“They asked about Mom?”

“Didn’t I just say that?”

“What kind of questions?”

“Her, you know, symptoms. When did they come on and how did she behave. How you took it. Things that aren’t anybody’s business but family, frankly. Christ, Scotty, they wanted into
everything
. They wanted to look at your old stuff that was in the garage. They took samples of the tap water, if you can believe that.”

“You’re telling me they came to the house?”

“Uh-huh.”

“Did they take anything besides tap water?”

“Not as I noticed, but there was a bunch of ‘em and I couldn’t keep an eye on everybody. If you want to check your old stuff, the box is still there, back of the Buick.”

Curious and unsettled, I excused myself long enough to step into the unheated garage.

The box he was talking about contained unsorted detritus from my high-school years. Yearbooks, a couple of academic awards, old novels and DVDs, a few toys and keepsakes. Including, I noticed, the brass Statue of Liberty I had brought home from New York. The green felt base was frayed, the hollow brass body tarnished. I picked it up and tucked it into my jacket pocket. If there was anything missing from this assortment, I couldn’t place it. But the idea of anonymous FBI agents rummaging through boxes in the garage was chilling.

Beneath this, at the bottom of the box, was a layer of my schoolboy drawings. Art was never my best subject, but my mother had liked these well enough to preserve them. Flaking water-based paints on stiff brown paper the consistency of fallen leaves. Snow scenes, mostly. Bent pines, crude snowbound cabins—lonely things in a large landscape.

Back in the house my father was nodding in his chair. The coffee cup teetered on the padded arm. I moved it onto the table. He stirred when the telephone rang. An old handset-style telephone with a digital adapter where the cord joined the wall.

He picked it up, blinked, said, “Yeah,” a couple of times, then offered the receiver. “It’s for you.”

“For me?”

“You see anybody else here?”

The call was Sue Chopra, her voice thin over the old low-bandwidth line.

“You had us worried, Scotty,” she said.

“It’s mutual.”

“You’re wondering how we found you. You should be glad we did. You caused us a lot of anxiety, running away like that.”

“Sue, I didn’t run away. I’m spending the afternoon with my father.”

“I understand. It’s just that we could have used some warning up front, before you left town. Morris had you followed.”

“Morris can fuck himself. Are you telling me I have to ask permission to leave town?”

“It’s not a written rule, but it would have been nice. Scotty, I know how angry you must feel. I went through the same thing myself. I can’t justify it to you. But times change. Life is more dangerous than it used to be. When are you coming back?”

“Tonight.”

“Good. I think we need to talk.”

I told her I thought so, too.