There was a private place where John and Robin could talk, but they hadn’t been there in a long time. Back when they first found themselves arguing a lot about their marriage, Katie was old enough to listen in and perhaps extract traumas that she would internalize and let fester. They had an aging mutt named Wobble and a small park nearby, so they resolved to take their unhappiness there. Even in the dead of winter, all of a sudden Mom and Dad were really into taking the dog for a walk, sometimes for hours.
But the fights kept coming and maybe they walked poor Wobble to death, because before long the dog was dead and the walks faded away. John proposed getting a new dog in order to maintain their cover, at which point Robin wondered with exasperation if maybe the problem was not how to keep the fights going but why they were happening in the first place.
John couldn’t fault her logic, but he had really come to like the walks. When they got through this bad patch, he hoped the family would go forward with a new dog. He’d walk it alone if Robin didn’t want to join him.
* * *
John’s mind had been agitating spastically when he returned home after leaving Walt and his father at the hospital. Katie was there, but Robin wasn’t. John knew he couldn’t unravel the way he needed to with his daughter in the house so until Robin got home, he had to act like nothing was wrong.
“Hey,” he said with forced cheer to Katie as she sulked over homework at the kitchen table. “Where’s Mom?”
“Work?” Katie muttered, her black-lipsticked mouth pinched by a chin propped up by a balled, black-fingernailed fist. Every day, the goth thing spread—the dark, mopey soul of a teenager, splashed across her body like an existential billboard. As much as John despaired at seeing his once-sunny child painted up like a sad, trendy corpse, he often wished he had had this fashion option when he was a sulky fifteen-year-old.
Kids these days, they could just buy their attitudes down at the mall. Their parents would pay for it.
“Dunno,” John said in response to his daughter as he paced edgily. “Too late for Mom to be at work.”
“Store?” Katie sighed.
“Hey,” John said, way too brightly. “Let’s list all the places she could be! My turn. Dentist!”
The front door jangled open; John whirled on Robin. “Hey, hi, there you are! Let’s walk the dog!” he announced tersely as he headed out of the house.
Robin stopped. They hadn’t had a dog for over two years.
* * *
“Jesus,” Robin whispered after John told her.
Larry Husted died years before they got together; she knew John’s father only through reverent family stories that she silently suspected were a bit too reverent—the guy was a small-town doctor, he wasn’t God. But her husband stood before her now, swinging wildly at an unimaginably raw trauma that had coldcocked him just hours earlier.
Her mind churned. “How?”
“I don’t know,” John said through his dazed struggle. “He said he’d only been in the old building for a couple years, but other than that he didn’t tell me.”
“He didn’t tell you?!” There was a scolding in her voice. “How could you let him—?”
“He said he’d explain everything, after … After…” he insisted defensively before trailing off. “Help me!”
Her responding to his raw plea came automatically. In this precise moment, the best of what they brought to each other seemed to seep back in tentative rivulets. It ran sludgier, but there it was.
She found the right tone.
“So what are you going to do?” she asked.
“Who the fuck knows? In the entire history of dead fathers, nobody’s ever had to deal with this!”
“Well, maybe there’s been somebody,” she instinctively countered. John had never learned to love the way Robin brought an arbitrary contrariness to their marriage, often when she seemed to know it would rev him up.
His terse glare told her this was one of those times.
She sat silently and watched him pace. Over the years they had racked up hours of silence in this park, the two of them running out of words without ever getting to the nub of what was dying in their marriage. Those quiet stretches grew to be agonizing, neither willing to articulate the hard things that needed to be said.
Now, as John continued to pace and chew his lower lip frenetically, Robin finally grabbed him gently at the wrist.
“Hey,” she soothed. “Sit.”
He parked himself beside her on a picnic table. John felt stillness for the first time since he had crossed into room 116. He appreciated her bringing him to it.
But she knew there was work to be done.
“You have to tell your mother,” Robin said.
“How?” he agonized, jumping up to pace again. “Does Hallmark have a card for this? ‘Congratulations, turns out your husband’s not dead!’”
“John…” she scolded. He shook his head regretfully; usually he knew when his humor went wrong.
“This could kill her,” he sighed.
“You don’t know that. When you were telling me, it sounded like as awful as this is, something has touched you in a way you need to share with her.”
He exhaled deeply, rifling through the barrage of emotions he had been wrestling with the past several hours.
“I don’t even think about him anymore,” John said sadly. “I haven’t for years. The whole time you’ve known me, I haven’t gone to the cemetery once. I couldn’t find his grave if you put a gun to my head.
“Whatever he used to be to me, he had just become a bunch of bones at the bottom of a hole. And, you know, that’s what it was. That’s what I knew.”
Robin recognized his harsh dispassion as a defense mechanism. She knew he needed to sort this out his way.
“But all this time later, to just stand beside him…” He sighed, then the tears came. Robin held him. The silence of the park was broken for several hard minutes by John’s sobs.
He finally pulled himself together and broke the hug with his wife.
“I have to tell her,” he said resolutely. But with dread.
“Yes, you do. But you shouldn’t have to do it alone. Tell Mike, make him help you with this. Make him do something decent for his family for once.”
Robin had no affection for Mike. She spent years watching John try to forge some sort of relationship with his older brother, despite Mike’s disinterest in anyone but himself.
Over the course of their entire marriage, she probably had no more than ten conversations with her brother-in-law that lasted over five minutes. Mike knew about eighties heavy metal, and dope, and how much better the world would be if everybody just smoked dope while listening to eighties heavy metal. Everything else—politics, culture, essential human connections—were of no use to Mike Husted.
But Robin saw right away that Mike might be the answer here.
“He won’t feel this the way you do,” she reasoned. “All you’ve ever told me was how he hated your father. He’ll be able to look at this dispassionately and maybe know what to do. He could surprise you.”
John scrunched his mouth skeptically. “You think?”
“Sure. He might have heard an Iron Maiden song that addresses this very thing.”
She winked; he smiled. An echo of something good returned to them.
“But you can’t tell either one of them until you know how the hell this happened,” she said, bucking him up for what he had to do next. “You need to sit this old doctor down—first thing tomorrow—and not let him up until this all makes sense. Do you want me to come with you?”
John studied her intensity with fondness.
“I think you’d scare him.”
“He needs scaring.”
“I’ll handle it,” he said, hugging her. “This is for me to take care of.”