Out of the Dark

32 See Every Angle

Tonight’s Class 3 threat was that Naomi’s father was refusing to eat prunes.

Hank Templeton, legend of the Service and protector of presidents, was backed up from an array of meds and so far out of his right mind that he refused to cooperate with two nurses and the rounding physician. He shook his head back and forth like a child confronted with broccoli, grizzled lips clamped shut before the proffered prune.

Naomi had been called into her father’s room, which smelled of urine and the too-strong detergent necessary for bedsheets in a facility like this. “Dad, you have to—”

Hank knocked the prune out of her hand with his bone-lumpy knuckles. “No, goddamn it. Where’s Jason?”

“He’s not here, Dad. It’s just me.”

“Where’s Robbie? Where are my sons? I need someone who can get something done around here.” His pronounced eyebrows bunched, his face set with familiar New England obstinacy.

A nurse unknown to Naomi leaned her father forward and started to untie his gown to change him. Naomi looked away. For her modesty or his? Clearly he didn’t care. Fenway nuzzled into her side, wet nose in her palm.

Naomi took a step back, gathered her bangs in a fist, squeezed hard enough to feel the hair pull at the roots. She kept her eyes on the floor. “Okay, Dad. Look, I brought Fenway. Do you want to see…”

Her voice went dry, and she lost the back half of the sentence.

Amanaki suddenly was at her side. “I got it from here, honey. Why don’t you take a moment?”

Not trusting her voice, Naomi nodded and relinquished the leash.

In the hall she called Jason and got voice mail. But she reached Robbie. In the background she could hear the sound of a family dinner in full swing.

“Hi, Nay-Nay,” he said.

“Robbie.” She pressed a knuckle to her lips. There was no crying in the Templeton family. “I’m with Dad. I could really use your help.”

“Jesus, Naomi.” The full name now. “I’m sending, what? Four grand a month? I have two kids in private school and—”

“Not money. Just someone else here. I’m dealing with … I have a thing at work and trying to manage that and Dad is a lot. Plus, you should see him. You should just see him.”

“Dad doesn’t recognize anyone. He doesn’t know who the hell we are anymore.”

“I don’t need you to tell me that.”

“Maybe you do, okay? Because the way you frame it, to try and guilt me into dropping everything for Dad, it’s bullshit. If you thought about it, you’d realize — you don’t want me there for him. You want me there for you.”

She felt it then, a blowtorch flame of anger cutting through the grief. “No, Robbie. It’s so that when you’re lying in a bed like … like a remnant of who you were, you can look back and not be embarrassed by how you acted when he needed you.”

“That’s the thing. He doesn’t need me. Never did. He never needed any of us.”

“Be a man,” she said. “Not a child.”

She hung up and walked down the corridor, her head hot and thrumming. She sat on the plastic-cushioned chair, a shade of aqua not found outside waiting rooms, and tilted her face into her hands.

When had men gotten so small?

Her father, for all his flaws, had been forthright and loyal, shouldering responsibility and adhering to his own strict code. He’d always shown up, even when it was hard. Especially when it was hard.

It was difficult to square who he’d been with the boy-men her brothers were — let alone the dude-bros on the open market. Guys who were overmanicured and body-sprayed, who talked about little beyond microbrews and college basketball, who thought texting ’SUP? at booty-call hours constituted witty repartee. She replied the same every time: SERIOUSLY?

Her last date had been months ago, procured through one of the less-gropey dating apps. “Wellesley,” he’d said over pork-belly sliders. “Isn’t that, like, a girls’ college with no men?”

“No,” she’d said. “It’s, like, a women’s college with no boys.”

She recalled the furrowing of his brow, more confusion than offense.

“Oh,” he’d said.

Like her, they’d been raised on YouTube and swipe-right screens. On every billboard and music video, there was the unattainable fantasy, curated personalities, skin smooth and shiny, glammed up and spray-tanned, and she knew it was all fake, a media creation or whatever, but it was still effective, still teasing some high-school not-belonging part of her. That was even more infuriating: to know it was a lie but to want to believe in it anyway.

To dive into that not-world and live there instead of inside a life of death and decay, of assassins probing for weaknesses and early-onset diseases that ravaged body and mind.

She wondered how it would have been to live back when there were real men like her father was, or like he used to be, real men who took care of themselves and took care of others and, yes — took care of the women in their lives, too.

What would it be like to have that comfort? To live in a real house with someone else instead of in a walk-up with a hand-me-down bed and an IKEA bookcase with lots of little-used consonants, named after a meatball.

A gravelly voice cut through her thoughts. “Visiting your mother or your father?”

She lifted her head. An ancient gentleman, back domed like a turtle shell, had perched on the chair beside her. An oxygen tube fed his nose.

“My dad.”

“I’m sorry,” he said.

“Thank you. Me, too.” She took a breath. “He’s not … He can’t tell what’s going on anymore. Which I guess is ironic. He used to see every angle, everything coming down the pipeline. But he never could see what was right in front of him.”

Only in hindsight did she register her words as self-pitying.

The man gave a sage nod. “It’s funny how it goes.”

They weathered a momentary silence that was neither comfortable nor awkward. He fingered the oxygen tube, caught her watching his pruned fingers.

“When you’re a kid,” he said, “time lasts forever. You’re immortal. When your grandparents die, it’s not real. Not yet. Then your parents go, and … well, it’s like there’s no more insurance. You’re next in line. You’re that guy!” He laughed. “The last one standing. The one everyone wants to make sure to see at Christmas, because you never know. You never know. I can see them grieving me even while I’m still here. And there’s a comfort in that. A love. So maybe that’s what you’re giving your father by being here. Even if he doesn’t know it in his brain, he knows it in his cells.”

Her throat was dry, and her eyes burned. She folded her hands, staring down at the ridgeline of her knuckles.

The man said, “What?”

She cleared her throat. “The mourning, it sucks, yeah, but no one tells you…”

He kept his gaze steady on her.

She forced out the words. “No one tells you how hard it is not to get resentful.”

“Accept it,” he said. “If you accept life, you accept all its rich, awful complexities. Because if you think about it, what’s the alternative?”

She thought of pork-belly sliders and dude-bros thumbing their phones over dinner and the sweet bullshit promise of demo-targeted advertising.

She took the man’s hand, skin draped over bone. “Thank you.”

In her pocket her Boeing Black phone dinged with a text. Then another. A third and fourth on its heels.

And then it started ringing.

Alarm asserted itself in her chest as she stood and fished the phone from her pocket. “Sir, will you please tell Amanaki to keep the dog for me?”

She didn’t make out his reply.

She was already reading the screen, running for the door.