Envy the Night

12

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It was long past visiting hours, but they let her in anyhow. Nora was well known by now at the Northwoods Nursing Center. The woman who staffed the front desk gave her a disapproving look but didn’t ask questions or attempt to stop her, just offered a single curt nod, and then Nora turned the corner and walked to her father’s room.

“Dad?” She spoke as she opened the door and stepped inside, and Bud Stafford twisted his head to see her, a smile crossing his face. It was this moment that broke her heart—that immediate smile. He was always so damn glad to see her. Other patients in the center weren’t able to recognize their loved ones. With Bud it was just the opposite; he couldn’t follow conversation well, couldn’t process simple details, but he absolutely recognized his daughter. Somehow, on a night like this, that made it harder.

“How you doing?” She leaned over and kissed his forehead. He struggled with the covers, made it clear he was trying to sit up, and she helped him get upright before sitting in the chair beside the bed.

Nora had heard the phrase wasting away a million times in her life, never stopped to give it any real thought until her father’s stroke. That was exactly what was happening, though. He just . . . faded. The strength had gone first, then the size, leaving a frail man where a powerful one had existed.

“Hello.” The single-word greeting came a full minute after she’d come into the room. It took his brain that long to catch up to the events, then search for the proper reaction to them. When you kept the conversation slow and simple, he could develop a bit of a rhythm, and the sense of truly communicating with him was better. Get too much going on at once, though, or going too fast, and he became helplessly lost, often resorting to repeating the same word or phrase over and over. It reminded Nora of the ancient computer she’d used in college. You’d ask the thing to run new software and get nothing but that silly hourglass symbol, a promise that it was processing, but you knew it would never yield results.

“Hello,” she said. She thought it was important to always go back and match his place in the conversation, make him feel less overwhelmed by it. “What was dinner?”

“Yes.” He smiled at her again.

She waited for a few seconds and saw there would be no response tonight. Sometimes he followed the questions, the simple ones at least. More often he did not. The stroke had affected his cognitive and motor skills. On the right day, he could move around just fine, albeit a little slowly. The problem was, you never knew when the right day would be, or the wrong day. His balance could be fine for a while and then completely disappear. He’d be crossing a room under his own power and then suddenly look as if he were on the deck of a pitching ship. This was the reason a return home was impossible, at least right now. He needed twenty-four-hour care, and they couldn’t afford that.

“Good day?” she said, emphasizing the question. The more you did that, the more likely he was to understand that he was expected to provide an answer.

“Good day. We had the birds.”

That meant they’d taken him outside, to a patio surrounded with bird feeders. That was a highlight of his existence now.

“Do you have cars?” he said. This joined the smile as the two constants of every visit. Sometimes he’d be unusually adept at following a conversation; other days he struggled with the simplest exchanges. The one question he always managed was: Do you have cars? He didn’t remember that he’d owned a body shop, or at least he was incapable of expressing that he did. When she tried to explain anything about work to him, he tended to get hopelessly confused. But he asked that question about the cars because somewhere in his fog-shrouded brain he knew it was important, critical, that without cars there would be serious problems.

“I have cars,” she said. “We have cars.”

He nodded, his face grave. Hearing that answer always reassured him. She looked down at him and felt his love even through the veil of confusion. It was a sensation she could remember so well from those visits when she was a girl, one of unusual staying power. There were few things that caught your breath more than looking at another person and feeling the intensity of his love for you. Seeing it in all of its layers, the depth of the adoration, of the pride, of the fear. Always the fear. You looked at the ones you loved and in that moment you were terrified for them, for all of the things that could go wrong in the world, the car accidents and the illnesses and the random violence that could reach out from the darkness without a note of warning and claim the ones you cared about most. It wasn’t until the stroke, until the first time she saw the shell that had been left behind where her father belonged, that Nora truly understood just how unbreakable was that link between love and fear. They belonged together.

There was a notepad on the table beside her, filled with scrawled attempts at his name. That meant it had been a therapist day. Three times a week, an occupational therapist named Jennifer came to work with him. She’d made remarkable progress, too—he tied his shoes slowly but competently now, and a few months ago, when he was still in acute care at the hospital, Nora would never have believed that would be possible. The fine motor skills were more difficult. Anything requiring dexterity was a challenge.

“You want to try your name for me, Dad?” She passed him the notepad and the pen, which he took carefully, his face set in a frown of concentration. The expression remained as he carefully laid pen to paper. The first three letters of his first name—Ronald—came easily enough. Then he hung up on the A. She watched him hesitate, write the letter, hesitate, write it again. And again. R . . . o . . . n . . . a . . . a . . . a . . . a

She stopped him after the fourth repetition. “You’re stuck, Dad. You already wrote that one. Try the L.”

He stopped writing to listen to her, head cocked slightly, then went back to the paper and wrote the A again. Perseveration, that’s what the therapist called it. When the patient would get stuck on a word or an action. It was a frequent problem with her father. For months, he’d been unable to switch from brushing his teeth to combing his hair. Something about the action with the toothbrush dominated his brain; he’d take the comb in his hand and stare at it in bewilderment, mime the motion he’d used with the toothbrush, never get the comb anywhere near his hair. He was over that now, at least with the comb. Jennifer had solved that problem by changing the order of his bathroom procedures, putting the toothbrush last.

“Let me help.” Nora leaned across the bed and took her father’s rough hand in her own, guided him through his name. It was a regular part of her visits, but for some reason on this night it cut through her with a sort of fresh agony she hadn’t felt since the early days with him in the hospital. He was her father, a strong man who was supposed to care for her. Today, a day on which she’d been attacked, when she needed his support the most, she was helping him write his own name.

The realization brought a stinging to her eyes and a thickness to her throat, and for a moment she just sat there, leaning on the bed and holding his hand and fighting tears.

“Done?” he said.

That brought her out of it. She sniffed and got a laugh out and shook her head.

“No, Dad. Not done. Let’s try again.”

They went back to the writing, with her guiding his hand and naming each letter as they wrote it.

Driving home in the dark, hours after she’d expected to be there, her thoughts turned to Frank Temple. Excuse me, Frank Temple the Third. There were stories behind Mr. Temple, she was sure. He was a little too calm in the situation they’d encountered today, a little too . . . familiar. If he were older, she’d suspect he was a cop, or maybe a soldier. Had the right haircut for a soldier. But he couldn’t be any older than she was, and if forced to guess she’d actually say he was a few years younger. So where did that odd poise come from?

He’d been attractive at first, charming and funny in a low-key way, but then there was that strange outburst at the cabin. He’d practically shouted at her when she went for the door, made it seem as if he couldn’t get rid of her fast enough. What was he so worried about? Afraid she’d throw him onto the bed, force herself on him in some show of gratitude? Please. Nora had tired of the regular routine of turning down dates from her customers—some of them offered sweetly if a little awkwardly, others in lecherous fashion—and maybe, maybe, she’d flirted with Frank just a bit earlier in the day. By the time they’d reached that cabin on the Willow, though, all she wanted to do was get his gear out of her truck, visit her father, and get home and into bed.

Home. That was how she thought of it now, although it was still a decidedly foreign and amusingly masculine place. At first she’d hesitated to make any changes, feeling like an intruder in her father’s house, wanting him to return from the hospital and find everything as he’d left it.

As the weeks turned to months, though, she’d become more of a realist. When he came home, he’d still need her there for at least a while, so it was fair that she begin to think of it as her home, too. The hideous old curtains went first; then she repainted the kitchen and deposited the bizarre “jackalope” creature—a rabbit head with deer antlers, some friend’s idea of high humor—into the basement. A day later, she felt guilty about the damn thing and brought it back up, hung it on the wall where it had been. Gradually the place began to take on a quality that was more comfortable. She was working on a mural in the back bedroom, a tropical scene she hoped he’d appreciate. If he didn’t, she’d hand him a roller and a can of that flat white paint that covered the entire house and let him do his worst.

Much as she loved him, he would not have been a good day-to-day father. Nora realized that now, but she’d believed otherwise as a child. In those days, struggling to adjust to a stepfather whose attempts at warmth seemed all too false, she’d been able to build Bud Stafford into a fantasy figure. It wasn’t difficult; in their rare times together Bud was attentive and thoughtful and funny, a strong man layered in self-confidence.

Nora began to see her mother as weak, money-hungry, someone who’d sacrificed passion for comfort. Only a fraction of that was true—the trade of passion for comfort. At this point in her life, Nora was certain her mother’s only passionate relationship had been with Bud. She was equally certain, though, that they could never have lasted together. Bud had taken Kate’s natural adjustment struggles to Tomahawk as a sign of weakness, deriding her instead of aiding her, using her privileged upbringing as a constant tool for teasing, because behind the teasing he could hide his insecurities. A family was certainly part of Bud Stafford’s vision for himself, but it was a family built on his own terms, and Kate hadn’t agreed to those. Had they loved each other? To this day, despite all the exchanged jabs, Nora believed that they had. Maybe still did. But they couldn’t live together.

The problem was that after the divorce Bud had decided he couldn’t live with anyone. It was a fine way to be when you were young and strong and always in control. The years caught up with you, though, devoured the youth and the strength and in the end even the control. Bud had no say over his existence now, and that, perhaps more than anything, held Nora in Tomahawk. Did she want to spend her life here, running a body shop and conducting empty visits at a nursing home? No. Nor did she want to fail, either, to lock the doors and shutter the windows and leave her father with a kiss on the cheek and a town full of people who admired him but couldn’t care for him.

So what did she want? How would it end? It was a question she’d been determined to ignore at first, firmly believing he’d return to the shop healthy and ready to work. Each passing month added weight to the reality, though, and she knew now that he’d never be back. Meanwhile the calls from Minneapolis and Madison had crested and faded, family and friends who’d been anxious to know when she’d return now giving up hope or losing interest. Back home life was plowing ahead, passing her by, and here she was in Tomahawk, lost in a routine of body shop business and nursing home visits.

She couldn’t let the business go under, though. Couldn’t close those doors and hang the for sale sign and let two generations of sweat and blisters and bruises disappear as if it had never meant a thing.

The one thing she still hadn’t gotten used to about her daily routine was the dark ride home. Still couldn’t relax driving anywhere out here at night. When the sun went down, the familiar ceased to be familiar, all landmarks hidden by shadows, everything beyond the reach of the headlights an unknown. They illuminated nothing but trees and pavement. She’d flick on the brights and then be dismayed when she saw how little it helped. You could see maybe an extra ten feet ahead, three to the sides, but for what? Nothing out there but more trees and more pavement, and the brights only made the surrounding shadows grow longer and seem darker. Many times when she left 51 she’d make it all the way home without passing another car, and that was a seven-mile stretch. Back in Minneapolis, you couldn’t go seven feet without passing another car. The first few weeks up here she’d actually come close to panic attacks during the drive home, everything looking so damn similar that she could have been on the wrong road, headed in the wrong direction, completely unaware.

Empty and alone and dark. That was what she’d thought of the place at first, and though she’d grown fond of many things about it as time passed, the night drive was not one of them. That was a time that hammered the old mantra—empty and alone and dark—back into her brain, left her longing for bright lights and loud music and the voices of strangers.

There was a light on at the house when she pulled in, and usually that was enough of a reassurance, but today the uneasiness followed her out of the truck and stayed with her until she was inside. Nothing shocking about that—it hadn’t been the most carefree of days. Well, it was done now, would be nothing but a memory by morning, fast on its way to becoming a story she would actually enjoy telling at parties, soaking up the way people’s eyes widened and their jaws hung slack when she described the gunshots echoing outside of her father’s shop.

Yes, soon that’s all it would be. A memory and a story.

She’d eaten no dinner, but the effort of preparing food seemed too much and her appetite too little, so instead she settled for pouring a glass of red wine and moving into the living room. Say this much for Dad’s furniture, she thought, it looks like something you’d want to hide even at a garage sale, but it’s comfortable.

She sank into one of his overstuffed couches and kicked her shoes off, unbuttoned the denim work shirt and slipped out of it, down to the sleeveless white shirt she wore underneath. Feet up on the coffee table and wine in hand, she exhaled slowly and lifted her glass to the jackalope.

“Rough day. How about you?”

It took one glass of wine and thirty minutes of bad TV before she gave up and decided to call it a night. She was exhausted, and tomorrow wouldn’t be a typical Saturday—she needed to get up early and track Jerry down, coerce him into getting the Lexus back into one piece. Once that was settled, she could turn it over to the police and, hopefully, have the whole miserable mess done.

Halfway to the bedroom, she remembered that the police might have used the shop number instead of the house if they’d learned anything or had any more questions. It was probably too late for that, but she was curious, and it was worth checking. She dialed the shop number and waited until she got to voice mail, then punched the pound key and entered the password. One message waiting, the robotic voice informed her. The police, surely.

It wasn’t the police.

Hello, I’m calling for Nora Stafford. This is Frank Temple. Listen . . . if you want that Mitsubishi back, I know where it is. But we’re going to need to talk some things over first. I think I might . . . there’s a chance I might know a little bit about that guy. Vaughn. I’m not sure of anything yet, but I’ve got some things that I should probably explain to you before anybody tries to deal with this guy. I’d like to talk to you, and then, you know, probably to the police. We’ll see.

He left his cell phone number, which she already had, and hung up. Nora stood in the dark living room with the phone to her ear for a minute, then punched the button that replayed the message. Listening to it again, she felt a twist of fear begin to counteract the sleepiness created by fatigue and wine.

Frank Temple knew where her car was? And, apparently, something about the man who’d taken it? Where, in the time since she’d dropped him off, had he stumbled across that sort of information, alone in his cabin on the lake?

I’d like to talk to you, and then, you know, probably to the police. We’ll see.

We’ll see?