All the Good Parts (26 page)

CHAPTER 30

So I was going to gather my bricks. The first one I’d throw through Paul’s glass house—who was he to tell me to stay away from a friend? A few hours later, I drove over to Jerry’s, parking my car bumper to fender with Paul’s Mercedes.
Fuck him,
I thought, feeling pretty proud of myself. He was going to have to deal with me. I wasn’t leaving until I’d gotten my job back. Maybe even with a raise.

I looked good, professional. I had taken a quick shower when I got offline, and after the last of the prospective renters filed out with promises of deposits and quality references, Maura and I sat in my bathroom while I did my makeup and fixed hers. She’d applied with a heavy hand, the black lines around her eyes accentuating not her pretty eyes, but her vulnerability. “You look like a puppy dog,” I said. “Makeup should add to the confidence you already have.”

“What if I don’t have any?” she complained. “What then?”

I smiled at her. “It’s there. But this might help you fake it until you figure out where it is.”

I fixed her up and then offered my face for practice. Hesitant, she used a lighter touch on me than she did herself, and the result was better than I could have done. She wasn’t trying to cover up anything on me. I complimented her work, and she flashed me a quick, lip-glossed grin. “I’d fix your face every day if you let me live with you instead of going to Ireland.”

“Not a chance, cupcake.”

“Well, then give me a ride to the park?”

I gave her a hard look. “No way. You shouldn’t be hanging out at that park.”

“You don’t have the right to tell me what to do,” she erupted. “If I was living with you, then I’d have to listen, but since you’re too selfish to do that for me—”

“Maura,” I said sharply. “I think, given the circumstances last time I took you to the park, that I do have every right to tell you no.”

“I thought you said I should be confident,” she whined, deflating a little. “I was stating my perspective.”

“There’s a definite difference between being confident and being obnoxious. You are being
überobnoxious
.”

“I learned from the best,” she said, and huffed up to her room.

I shook off my argument with Maura and checked my face in the shining surface framing Jerry’s screen door, straightening my scarf, and adjusting my long sweater over my leggings, tugging it gracelessly over my ass. Then I mentally slid my conversational filter into place, took a deep breath, and knocked.

Paul answered.

“You are going to give me five minutes of your time.” I smiled brightly, happy with myself for not giving him much of an out.

“Just come in,” he said, and disappeared back into the darkened house.

I followed him into the kitchen. It smelled of burned coffee and something sour, like an old dishcloth. The medicinal smell was less pronounced, hovering like the ghost of Lim past.

“Where’s Jerry?”

“I’m going to turn the light on, okay? It’s going to be bright.”

I didn’t ask why he’d been moving through the house in the semidarkness because I was too bothered by why he didn’t answer the question. The overhead fluorescent assaulted my senses, and it took me a moment to recover. “Is Jerry out?” I asked, my stomach sinking at the offness of everything.

Paul switched on the coffeemaker. “I’ve got a few minutes and then I have to go.”

“You’re going out like that?” Paul wore a white T-shirt with pit stains peeking out from under his arms in yellow half-moons. Sweatpants hung loose from his hips, the waistband stretched and frayed. He leaned against the kitchen counter and fidgeted with the hem of his shirt. “Have a seat.”

“Thank you, I’ll stand.”

“Sit down, Leona. You’re making me nervous.”

“Well, that’s a first.”

“Please.” The plea in his voice shook something deep inside me. I sat.

“What’s going on? Is he all right?”

“No.” Paul pushed away from the counter and sank into the chair opposite me. “He’s not. He—I came over yesterday and found him on the floor in the bedroom.”

“Oh, God!” Instinctively, I reached for Paul’s hand. He was trembling; I felt it under his skin like a tiny earthquake. Difficult as it was, I swallowed the rest of my questions and waited for him to continue.

“He’d taken a handful of his painkillers, some antidepressants, and washed it all down with a bottle of vodka.” Paul’s voice sounded choked, like his throat was closing up and he was trying to talk into the small opening left. He wouldn’t look at me, gazing instead at our joined hands, though I doubted he was seeing anything but the image of his father on the floor, OD’ing. “He’s in the hospital,” Paul continued. “Intensive care.”

“He’s alive,” I said, letting out the breath I’d been holding.

“He didn’t want to be. This wasn’t an attempt, it was a mission for him.” Paul sat back and crossed his arms over his chest again, hugging himself. “He had seizures when the EMTs got here, and they couldn’t control them at the hospital, so he’s heavily sedated and intubated. I don’t know when he’ll wake. I came home to get some things, but then I’m going back to the hospital.”

“I’m going with you.”

Paul didn’t disagree—he didn’t say anything at all. The coffee gurgled, and he poured us two cups, frowning into his before taking a small sip. “It’s not good.”

I wasn’t sure if he was talking about the coffee. “Doesn’t matter,” I said. “As long as it’s strong.” I watched as Paul shrugged and tossed his coffee down the sink. “Does Jerry need anything? I can put together a bag for him.”

“I don’t . . . I really don’t know. All this time I thought I knew what I was doing, and I don’t even know how to pack an overnight bag for my father.”

“You’re just in shock,” I said, trying to soothe him. “Let me take care of it.”

He nodded, and I quickly made my way to Jerry’s bedroom. I ignored the stains on the carpet, and the indentations of countless pairs of shoes. It took a lot of people to save a man from dying in his own house. After tossing some clothes and toiletries into a gym bag I found in his closet, I wrapped the photo of Anna in a sweatshirt and placed it on top.

Paul met me in the front hallway. He’d changed into jeans and a striped dress shirt that still held the dry cleaning tag. I tugged it off. “I’m driving you,” I said, stuffing it in my pocket. “No arguing.”

“I wasn’t going to do that,” he mumbled. He ushered me outside and locked up behind us. “What good has it gotten me?”

In the intensive care unit, hope is not a thing with feathers, lifting the mood with its weightless optimism, but something winding down slowly, with every beep and whir of the machines keeping its patients alive, with the low hum of televisions no one is paying the slightest bit of attention to, with the calm, imperturbable faces of nurses accustomed to managing bad news.

“Is she family?” one such nurse said, not unkindly, tilting her head toward me.

I held my breath.

Paul gave a terse nod. She offered me a quick smile and passed over a clip-on ID tag.

“How is he?” Paul asked.

“No change,” she said. “But you haven’t been gone long. Don’t get disheartened.”

The rooms all faced the administrative center, glass-walled terrariums displaying variations on pain and suffering. Paul put his hand on the small of my back, and I realized I’d stopped moving. We entered Jerry’s room, and I forced myself to breathe. His prosthesis sat in the only chair in the room, propped up, the healthy skin tone and fake muscles mocking the man lying on the bed, pale and slack, the flimsy plastic tubes running into his nose and mouth the only things tethering him to this world.

“I hate this place,” Paul whispered.

“Yeah. He would, too, if he was up.” I took Jerry’s cold hand in mine, rubbing some warmth onto his knuckles with my thumb. His eyes were only partly closed, revealing his baby blues, so remote in their sightlessness.

Rattled, I gave his hand a squeeze and placed it at his side.

“I don’t really know what to do,” Paul said, staring at his father. “Helplessness is an unfamiliar emotion for me.”

“I’m very familiar with it,” I said, making him smile wanly. “Usually, I’d say, when in doubt, do nothing, but I’m trying to be more proactive lately. Maybe you should just go with whatever feels right?”

Paul thought for a moment. “I want more than anything to shake him until he wakes up.”

“On second thought, maybe doing nothing is the right course of action.”

“I’m not going to actually do it,” Paul said, his tone withering. “But I am going to sit here and think about doing it, and I’m going to practice all the things I’ll say if he does wake up.”

“
When
he wakes up. And you should talk to him.”

He sighed. “I don’t believe he can hear me.”

“But they say—”

“I know what the nurses think,” he said, waving his large hand dismissively at the administration desk. “And I know what I know. He can’t hear me. Even if he could, he can’t talk back to me, and all that will do is drive him crazy.”

That I could agree with.

So we sat there, the TV flashing but mute, the sounds of Jerry’s forced breathing our only sound track. Paul seemed content to sit in silence, and surprisingly, I was fine with it, too. We both needed time to process what was right in front of us. We both needed time to just be.

After a while a nurse came in and started pressing buttons and adjusting the tubes. “Why don’t you two take a break?” she said, politely trying to get us out of the room. “Cafeteria’s on the sixth floor.”

“This is your chance to leave,” Paul said as we walked to the elevator. “It’s been . . . really nice of you to stay, given the circumstances.”

“Circumstances have nothing to do with it. I love your dad. I know you have your reasons for not trusting my veracity, but I do.”

Paul rubbed at his face. Exhaustion was settling in for the long haul, setting up camp in the bags under his eyes, staking a claim in the deep ridges of his forehead, the reddened whites of his eyes. He punched the UP button. “Ironically, hospital food contains some of the worst additives and preservatives. It’s likely to be full of GMOs and contaminated with pesticides. The milk isn’t rBGH-free, and the fries will be cooked in rancid oil. They’re basically serving poison.” He paused. “Want to give it a try anyway?”

“He’s alive,” I said with more relief than I’d let myself feel in the ICU. “We’re in this cafeteria line ordering dinner and feeling only sort of awkward with each other because he’s alive.”

Paul nodded tightly as he picked up a carton of milk, frowned at the expiration date, and put it back. “Sometimes the line between bad and tragic is so uncomfortably thin.”

Paul paid the bored teenager at the register, barely acknowledging the money I’d tried to thrust at him. We chose a seat by the window, naturally drawn to the diminishing light of an early winter’s evening. It softened the fluorescent harshness of the cafeteria, blurring the edges with a peaceful pinkish gold.

“I’m sure you already picked up on it, but I was jealous of you.” Paul let that hang in the air as he took a big bite of his grayish burger. He made a face, but then took another, inhaling nearly the entire thing, leaving only a piece of crescent-moon-shaped bun.

“You were?” I said through a mouthful. I wasn’t taking ladylike nibbles. The burger looked horrid but tasted like heaven. I could feel the grease at the corner of my mouth.

“Your relationship with my dad . . . bothered me. I didn’t like it, so I fired you. I’m not proud of myself. I don’t usually act like a spoiled child. It occurred to me recently that I put you in economic hardship, and I want you to know I’m sorry.” He ran a napkin over his mouth and took in the room, unable to meet my gaze. “I hope I’m not embarrassing you.”

“I am embarrassed, but not because of that.” The bite I’d just taken lodged in my throat, and I swallowed hard. “It’s my fault he’s here. There were signs, Paul, obvious ones I should have done something about and didn’t.”

“Like what?” He was looking at me expectantly, as if what I was going to say might change something fundamental about Jerry’s situation.

“Classic signs someone is suicidal. Sleeping all the time. Fixing up the house.”