Need You Now

54

C onnie and I drove nonstop to Boston and reached Lemuel Shattuck Hospital around nine o’clock. It was after the prison unit’s regular visitation hours, but this wasn’t a regular visit. Even so, the corrections officer at the ground-floor entrance told us that only one visitor at a time was allowed in the room.

“You go,” said Connie. “He asked for you.”

I completed the visitation paperwork, and my sister returned to the main lobby, where the Celtics game was playing on a flat-screen TV so small that Kevin Garnett looked like a Lilliputian, albeit one who could dunk. Searches were mandatory for all visitors, but in my case it was made all the more necessary by the fact that the metal detector showed no cell phone on my person, which the guard found utterly unbelievable for anyone whose work address was on Wall Street. He rode with me in the express elevator to the eighth floor, where another officer was posted at the locked entrance to the prison unit. Dr. Alice Kern met me in the waiting area, on the visitors’ side of the security doors, and introduced herself.

“How is he?” I asked.

“We had to give him something for his pain, which, of course, makes him drowsy. He’s asleep.”

“But he asked me to come because he had something to tell me.”

“Honestly, you got here much faster than I expected. You’ll have your time with him. He’ll come around in an hour or so.”

“So, his passing is not… imminent?”

“It’s not a matter of hours, no. But it could be any day. You can stay here as long as you like.” She glanced at the corrections officer, adding, “It’s been approved.”

I signed my name on the register, and the guard inside the glass booth buzzed Dr. Kern and me into the unit. I followed her down the brightly lit hallway, my heart pounding. Once the secured entrance was behind us, the prison unit looked much like any other hospital, with the exception of the corrections officers posted at each end of the corridor. There were probably a few more security cameras than in a regular hospital, but this was definitely not San Quentin. We passed several more rooms and finally stopped outside an open doorway.

“When is the last time you saw your father?” she asked.

“When I was fifteen years old.”

She arched an eyebrow. “In that case, I guess what I was about to say goes double: you should be prepared for a change in your father’s appearance.”

I had thought I was prepared, but hearing her say it made me realize that I wasn’t. “You’re right, I should be.”

“Do you want me to go in with you, or do you prefer to be alone?”

I had not yet thought about it, but the answer came quickly. “Alone.”

“That’s fine. If you need anything, you can push the red call button by the bed.”

“How much longer will you be here?” I asked.

“Don’t worry, I’ll be around.”

I thanked her, which she acknowledged with a supportive nod. Then she retreated down the long corridor, and I turned to face the dark opening to my father’s room, where he lay deep in drug-induced sleep. After one tentative step forward, I stopped, the prognosis replaying in my mind.

It could be any day.

I was suddenly wracked with guilt, my feet nailed to the floor. The last five days had been all about my father, and this was the third time since Monday that I’d tried to see him. That made for a grand total of three such attempts since my fifteenth birthday. Did that make me a lousy person? An angry young man, forever bitter that in finding his conscience, my father’s choice to turn against the mob had ended in the death of my mother? Or was I a good son who respected the courage of a father who had come to the painful realization that the only way to protect himself and his children was never to see them again? The answer was complicated, but I had no doubt that guilt was the reason I had jumped at Agent Henning’s offer to arrange for first-rate cancer treatment in exchange for six months of spying on Lilly in Singapore. I wondered if my father knew what I had done. I wondered if he would care.

I wondered, too, if guilt was the reason I felt the way I did about Lilly-that I was so desperate for something good to come out of a bad situation.

“Sir, you can’t hang out in the hallway,” the corrections officer said. I hadn’t even heard her come up behind me. “It’s not allowed. You either have to go into the room or go back to the waiting area.”

“Sorry,” I said, breathing out some of my anxiety. “I guess I’ll go in.”