The Fixer (14 page)

H
e was never going to evade the watchers, as he’d come to think of them, entirely. That wasn’t realistic. If he was careful, he could keep them from knowing where he spent nights. Theoretically he could change his rental car every couple of days, to make sure his vehicle wasn’t tracked.

But he wasn’t going to stop visiting his father, even though there had to be someone watching the nursing home, watching the comings and goings, waiting for him to show up at some point at the one place he was almost certain to go. So he’d have to take further precautions.

First he made a stop at Brooks Brothers on Newbury Street to pick up something for his father. He was there when the store opened, double-parked, and found a fluorescent orange parking ticket on the windshield of the Zipcar Toyota Prius when he got back. He didn’t care.

Then he stopped at a costume shop on Mass Ave near the Berklee College of Music. It wasn’t remotely Halloween time, but somehow this shop stayed open for business.

By a few minutes after eleven he parked a few blocks from the Alfred Becker Nursing and Rehabilitation Center. He approached the tan-brick building with a heightened awareness and a low-level sense of anxiety. He wore a Red Sox baseball jacket and a black wig and a pair of aviator sunglasses. Anyone who wasn’t looking too closely wouldn’t recognize him.

Inside, he stopped at the men’s room off the lobby and removed the wig and sunglasses. The woman behind the glassed-in counter seemed to take no notice of him. He wasn’t sure what she was doing there.

“Twice in one week!” Brenda the health care aide said with a gummy smile when she saw him. “Dad’s gonna be thrilled.”

“Got something for him,” Rick said. He stuck out the navy blue Brooks Brothers gift box.

“He loves chocolate,” Brenda said.

“It’s clothing. Don’t get his hopes up.”

She fell in beside him, joining him on the long walk down the corridor to Lenny’s room. Rick was a little surprised. He didn’t need an escort; he’d been coming here since long before Brenda started working here. He wanted to ask his father some questions, or rather, to give it another try, and he preferred not to have company.

He studied the wall-to-wall carpet underfoot, tan and beige and brown in a tight checkered pattern. The carpet was only a few years old. The Alfred Becker home took in a hell of a lot of money from its patients—its patients’ families, actually—and could afford to keep the place up. Though it was really little more than a long-term parking facility for old people. They gave Lenny hardly any medical care, because his health was basically stable. In his case, six figures a year went to pay for the nursing home’s staff and its terrible institutional food, which its inmates mostly didn’t mind, probably, because after all they had no choice, and what was the use of complaining? The old people probably started off complaining vociferously when they first entered. But after a few months, they settled down and resigned themselves to their fate.

Lenny Hoffman wasn’t much of a complainer, but Rick suspected that he, too, might be grousing if he were able to speak.

“There he is,” Rick said heartily. Lenny was slumped in his big vinyl-cushioned chair next to his bed. There was a line of drool on his shabby old pajama top.

The TV was on—TV doctors in scrubs standing around a glossy set. “One cough—one sneeze—one million germs released into the air!” a gravelly voice-over said. The Chyron on the screen read,
Disease Cloud!

His father lifted his head slowly, as if it were too heavy for his neck. Once again Rick was momentarily flustered by the outraged look on Lenny’s face.

“Leonard!” Brenda called as if he were deaf, not just mute. “Look who’s here again!”

His father moved his head warily in Rick’s direction and then turned back to the TV.

“Next on
The Doctors,
” the TV announcer said, “hybrid tummy tucks!”

“Thanks, Brenda,” Rick said, dismissing her, or at least trying to. “Lenny, I’ve got something for you.” He handed his father the Brooks Brothers box. Lenny took it in his left hand, the one that worked. It slipped from his grasp into his lap.

“Let me help you open it,” Brenda said. She took the box from Lenny and pulled it open. Meanwhile, Rick found the TV remote and clicked Mute.

“Oh, aren’t these handsome!” she said, taking out the navy blue pajamas with white piping around the lapels, sort of nautical-looking. “That’s exactly what he needs. We’ll have to put them on after lunch.”

“Hey, Lenny, how’s it going?” Rick turned to Brenda, who showed no signs of preparing to leave. “I think we’ll be fine now,” he said pleasantly. “Time for a little father-son bonding.” He sat at the end of his father’s bed.

“Of course, of course, I completely understand,” Brenda said, and with a curt nod she left the room.

Rick looked at his dad and found it hard to breathe. The air in the room was thick and oppressive. He smelled rubbing alcohol and cleaning solvent and nursing home food and something vaguely fecal. Something was pressing down on his chest. He could see a black hair sprouting out of a pore on his father’s nose.

Lenny Hoffman, it turned out, harbored a secret ambition. He wasn’t blithely satisfied with his sketchy job, his embarrassing clientele. He wanted more. He wanted something else. Maybe it was like his obsession with having Rick attend the Linwood Academy, that aspiration, that ache for something more in life.

There was nothing wrong with Rindge and Latin, the local public school. The mayor of New York City had gone there! So had Ben Affleck and Matt Damon! And the Linwood Academy was a mediocre prep school, for kids who couldn’t get into Milton or Roxbury Latin or Belmont Hill or Buckingham Browne & Nichols. Sure enough, Rick hadn’t gotten in to any of the good schools. He didn’t interview well. He had no interest in switching to a prep school, but his father insisted. This was right after Rick’s mother had died. Maybe Lenny wanted a school to take the place of a mother, give his kids the attention he couldn’t. Or maybe there was something else going on, something even sadder. Like, if he couldn’t be respectable, at least his kids could go to fancy schools.

“Dad,” he said now. “The day you had your stroke you were scheduled to have lunch with someone. Someone whose name began with
P
. Do you remember who it was?”

His father looked at him, or at least seemed to be looking at him. Rick moved closer down the bed. His father’s eyes remained fixed on his.

“Blink once for yes and twice for no. Do you remember?”

No response. Rick waited. A few seconds later Lenny blinked, but it seemed to signify nothing.

“Let me give you some names. See if you recall. Was it Phil Aronowitz?”

No response.

“How about Nancy Perry?”

No response. No blinks at all. What, if anything, did that signify?

“Was it Alex Pappas?”

Something seemed to come over Lenny’s face. He looked agitated—even more agitated—and pained.

“The money—was it meant for Pappas? Blink—”

His father’s left hand suddenly reached out and clutched Rick’s wrist. Rick’s heart seized.

“My God,” Rick said softly. “You understand.”

I
n the late afternoon, after moving to a new B&B, in Boston, Rick went back to the house.

He took measures—parked three blocks away and didn’t get out of the car until he felt sure no one had taken notice of him—and carried a cooler of Bud for Jeff and the crew.

But everyone had gone home except Marlon and Jeff. Marlon was still working, framing, screwing in two-by-fours. The racket made it hard to hear what Jeff was saying. Jeff and Rick popped open cans of Bud and sat on the plaster-dusty hardwood floor next to a Sawzall and a discarded can of Red Bull.

“The city inspectors came by,” Jeff said, popping open a beer.

“What for?”

“Make sure everything’s going according to code.”

“I assume we passed.” Rick opened a beer and took a few cold sips.

Jeff shrugged. “They know me by now. You do enough work in the city, they get to trust you.”

Marlon shouted, “Mind if I pack it in for the day? I’m finished up here.”

“Go ahead,” Jeff shouted back.

A moment of silence passed. Jeff scratched his chin. The goatee was probably new and he hadn’t gotten used to it yet. He looked at Rick, tilted his head. “Ask you something?”

“Sure.”

“How much money was there, inside the wall?”

Rick hesitated, but only for a minute. The question wasn’t whether Jeff knew; it was how much he knew. He shook his head vaguely. “I didn’t count it. Forty, fifty thousand, maybe? Maybe not that much. But, I mean, it was a lot.” Because any found money was a lot, to him and to Jeff. Jeff, who worked hard for it. And Rick, who used to.

“It sure looked like more than that.”

“I wish.”

Jeff looked at him for a few seconds, but it seemed a lot longer. “Huh,” he finally said. “Hope you’re keeping it in a safe place.”

“I think so.”

“Good. I mean, that’s a lot of money, and you wouldn’t want anything to happen to it. People hear about that kind of money around, they do all sorts of extreme stuff.”

“I know,” Rick said uncomfortably. It didn’t sound like any kind of a veiled threat, but he couldn’t be entirely sure.

“You think your dad saved all that, or what?”

“I wish I could ask him about it.”

“Does he . . . I mean, I know he can’t talk or anything, but does he get what you say to him?”

“Well, that’s the thing. I can’t be sure, but I’m pretty sure he does understand.”

“How do you know?”

Rick hesitated. “He grabbed my hand. When I said something about the money. Like he was warning me, maybe.”

“Warning you?” Jeff sounded amused.

“Could be I was just imagining it, I don’t know. Maybe it was nothing. I just get this eerie sense that he’s not a vegetable. That there’s someone home inside that head.”

“You ever watch
Breaking Bad
?”

“Sure.” He and Holly had spent several steamy summer weekends binge-watching that TV show about a high school chemistry teacher who becomes a meth cook, addicted, a couple of zombies sprawled on the bed, the air-conditioning on high.

“Remember the old guy with the bell? The—”

“Sure. You mean, could I do something with that kind of letter board they used on the stroked-out old guy? It’s an idea, sure. But I’m not sure it would work. Years ago we tried that on him, but no luck.”

“Can’t hurt to try again.”

“I can’t get him to blink once for yes and twice for no, or whatever. He blinks, but I’m not sure what he’s responding to. I need to get him seen by a good neurologist.”

“You know what; I just did a remodeling job on this great old town house in Louisburg Square, belongs to the chief of neurology at Mass General. I could ask him.”

“You stay in touch with him?”

Jeff nodded. “He’s a great guy. He was happy with the work. It was pretty damned fine, if I say so myself. We did an awesome winding staircase on the main level.”

“You think you could get in touch?”

“Happy to. He was telling me about all this crazy-ass new shit they’ve been doing at MGH with, like, magnets on the brain or something. Really wild.”

“Like electroshock therapy?”

“Isn’t that where they hook your brain up to a car battery or whatever whatever? Nah, I mean, it’s literally like they put some kind of really strong magnet on your head.” He tapped the side of his skull. “It makes depressed people undepressed, he said, and they’re starting to use it on people with brain damage or stroke. It made me think about your dad.”

“Put me in touch with him,” Rick said. “I’ll try anything.”

J
eff put in a call to his former client, the chief of neurology at Mass General, Dr. Mortimer Epstein. Dr. Epstein had in turn called Rick and spent a good ten minutes on the phone asking about Lenny’s condition. A generous act by a busy man. Rick could hear traces of an old Brooklyn accent in Dr. Epstein’s speech, probably traces he’d tried to expunge, mostly successfully.

A few minutes into the conversation, Rick said, “So Jeff mentioned something about magnet therapy?”

“It’s called transcranial magnetic stimulation,” Dr. Epstein said. “TMS. It’s been quite successful in treating depression, and it’s shown some promising results in treating stroke victims as well.”

“So it’s a brand-new procedure?”

“There’s nothing new about it. TMS has been around for thirty years. The great thing is, there’s no downside. They basically place a magnetic coil on the patient’s head and run an electrical current through it, pulsing it on and off for half an hour. If it works, great. If it doesn’t—well, no harm, no foul.”

“How long does it take to work?”

“It can take weeks and it can take days.”

“Sounds a little sci-fi.”

“That’s what they said about anesthesia a hundred and fifty years ago. Anyway, look, TMS has become quite popular. There’s a long waiting list of patients desperate to try it.”

“How long a waiting list? I mean, are we talking months?”

Dr. Epstein let out a low chuckle. His Brooklyn accent came on strong. “Well, look, I’ll try to pull some strings, get you moved to the head of the line. But how long has it been since your dad’s stroke? I mean, not for nothing, but it’s been like twenty years, right? What’s the rush all of a sudden?”

Rick didn’t know how to answer.
What’s the rush all of a sudden?
The answer was simple and almost too ugly to admit.

A few weeks ago he didn’t care that his father couldn’t speak. The Lenny he’d grown up with was gone, replaced by a gaunt, spectral Lenny who bore no relation to his actual father.

So for the last twenty years he’d parked this replacement Lenny in a nursing home, just waiting for him to die a quiet and anticlimactic death.

Until it turned out that there was a lot of money at stake.

*   *   *

The next morning Rick showed up at the nursing home in an uberX car, a perfectly neat Mitsubishi. He’d brought a new set of clothes: a pair of khakis, a belt, and a blue button-down shirt. One of the attendants, a short, stocky Brazilian named Paulo, got Len out of his pajamas and into the new street clothes, which was a complicated operation. Also, the belt was too big; his father had lost a lot of weight over the years, largely muscle mass. Rick wheeled him out of the nursing home and into the wheelchair-accessible cab, with a lot of help from the taxi driver.

This was his father’s first time outside the walls of the nursing home in eighteen years, and Lenny stared out the window, wide-eyed. By shortly before noon, they’d passed through the gates of the Charlestown Navy Yard, the two-hundred-year-old shipyard now part residential, part commercial, part historical preserve. It was the site where the British landed just before the Battle of Bunker Hill. Now, Marine barracks and paint shops and forge shops had been turned into condos; warehouses and rope walks and officers’ clubs had been converted into outlying research facilities for Mass General Hospital. The cab pulled up to a brand-new-looking hospital building, the Sculley Pavilion, named for a rich benefactor, Thomas Sculley, the real estate magnate. Just seeing it gave Rick that unfinished-homework pang. The piece he’d been pretending to write.

When they got out, Rick could smell the tang of salt air and hear the cry of seagulls. They were just a few blocks from the Atlantic.

Getting his father out of the cab and into his wheelchair was an ordeal. Lenny’s head lolled to his left, a thread of drool escaping the left corner of his mouth. His eyes came open as the chair scraped against the ground.

“You doing okay, Dad?”

Rick hadn’t pushed a wheelchair for nearly twenty years. Gradually he got the hang of it as he searched for the wheelchair-accessible entrance. Even the simple process of wheeling his father up into the Sculley Pavilion and finding an elevator and getting him up to the second floor required reserves of patience Rick no longer had, if he ever did.

The elevator to the second floor required a building card-key—the research facility was security-protected—but people, he found, went out of their way to help. A woman in scrubs swiped the elevator keypad for him before taking the stairs herself. People passing by smiled at him as he wheeled his father out of the elevator and down the corridor. He was the good son taking care of his aged father. Everyone liked that.

“Well, Lenny, the guy we’re about to meet is apparently some hot shit at Mass General. He’s an expert in something called transcranial magnetic stimulation.”

His father’s eyes stared straight ahead.

“I know,” Rick replied to his father’s silence. “That’s what I thought, too. But I figure it’s worth a shot.”

The director of the Laboratory for Neuromodulation was Dr. Raúl Girona, an associate professor of neurology at Harvard Medical School who had dark brown hair cut in high bangs and had a few days’ growth of beard that looked deliberate. He wore tortoiseshell glasses that looked Euro-stylish instead of nerdy, a navy suit and a bright green tie and a red Pebble smart watch. He couldn’t have been out of his thirties.

Meanwhile, in the next room, Lenny was being put through a battery of tests, all exams he’d no doubt been given years before, the greatest hits of stroke rehabilitation. He submitted to the tests docilely, as he did everything now, since he no longer had the ability to object.

“I should warn you,” Dr. Girona said as they shook hands. “Your father’s case is a difficult one.”

“Because of how long it’s been?”

Dr. Girona shrugged and sank back into his chair behind a small bare desk. “That concerns me less than the fact that your father does not speak at all. Most stroke victims are able to speak to
some
extent. They can make sounds, sometimes words or phrases. But your father’s chart indicates that he is unable to phonate at all, correct?” He was from Spain, according to his bio on the Mass General website, from Catalonia, but his English, though strongly accented, was remarkably fluent.

Rick nodded. “I’m not expecting miracles. I’m not expecting him to sit up one day and start talking about the Red Sox starting lineup with me. I just want to know what’s possible.”

“Well, your father has been categorized as a global aphasic. That means he can neither express himself nor comprehend when he’s spoken to. But I take it you think that diagnosis is incorrect.”

“I think there’s a good chance, yeah. Seems like he understands when I talk to him. He just doesn’t have a way of communicating what he wants to say.”

“What makes you think he understands?”

“He sometimes blinks rapidly, like he’s trying to tell me something. And when I asked him about something recently—something upsetting, I think—he grabbed my wrist.”

“With his right hand?”

“His left.”

“Ah, yes. His right side is immobilized. Well, perhaps so. More to the point, the question is, how
much
does he understand? And how can you know?”

“If he could write a note, maybe. Or type on a keyboard.”

Dr. Girona nodded. “I’m sure your father’s doctors and occupational therapists have tried all of the standard methods. The picture and symbol communication boards and so on. But the problem is, some aphasics don’t
understand
speech at all. At most, they recognize familiar names.”

“Can TMS help with that?”

“Perhaps. You know how a stroke affects the brain, yes?”

“Basically.”

Dr. Girona went on as if Rick hadn’t replied. “A stroke happens when something cuts off the flow of blood to your brain. The neurons in a certain area of the brain are starved of oxygen and they die. Now, the part of the brain where your father had a stroke was the left side, yes? And we know the left side of the brain not only controls the right side of the body but it’s also where the dominant language center is—the left inferior frontal gyrus, where speech is produced.”

“Okay.” Rick nodded.

“Now, when one side of the brain is damaged in a stroke, the other side takes over. As if to compensate. But we want to make the left side start to work again, right? To grow back, you might say. And the way we do that is to use magnetic pulses to rewire the brain itself. We run an electrical current through a wire in a coil to generate a magnetic field. Depending on what kind of magnetic field we generate, we can either activate the brain cells or inhibit them. Make them either more reactive or less. Are you following me so far?”

“I think so,” Rick said. “So you want to inhibit the right side to make the left side start doing work.”

“Exactly! We place the coil over the posterior inferior frontal gyrus. To inhibit the right side of his brain. Which we hope will make the left side, the language side, start to work again. And gradually the brain begins to rewire itself.”

“Will it hurt him?”

Dr. Girona shook his head. “At most, it may feel like a series of pinpricks.”

“How long will it take to see some results?”

“A few weeks, most probably. But you need to have realistic expectations.”

“What should I expect?”

“Expect nothing, and you won’t be disappointed.”

“I see. Well, anything would be an improvement.”

“One more thing. And perhaps I should have started with this. This is a costly procedure, and it’s not covered by any insurance.”

“How costly are we talking?”

“You’ll have to talk to our finance people.”

“Ballpark.”

“For a full course of treatment we’re talking probably over a hundred thousand dollars.”

Rick nodded, shrugged. “That won’t be a problem.”