The Bolger house was silent. With Larry’s move into the old hospital explained to John, Walt’s story had reached its end. At some point in the telling, when John stood to stretch his legs and allow his mind a moment to pause, he found himself back in the room in Walt’s house where his father had spent the first twenty years of his not-quite death.
John still had dense and unsettled memories from his childhood of the emptiness that his father left behind when he died, the spaces in the family home that Larry would never fill again. As a boy, it felt to John like Larry was never around because of his commitment to his job. But when his father was gone for good, the hole he left proved that he had been a commanding presence in the house all along.
John felt the same lingering sense of his father in the Bolgers’ spare room that he did in those first few weeks following his father’s death, when John would stare with still-ravaged emotions into his parents’ bedroom, or his father’s den, or the kitchen where the family came together for meals:
Dad was here, and now he’s not.
Walt stood in the doorway and watched John struggling to process it all. After living alone with it for so long, Walt had told the tale and he was at peace with how it all added up. Having sworn an oath to stand between his friend and a death that his church would call murder, he had met every challenge and endured every sacrifice while awaiting Larry’s natural demise.
Walt drew closer to John as he prepared to let Larry go.
“I want you to tell me what you felt yesterday, in that first moment with your dad,” Walt said softly, breaking John’s reverie. “What you felt in your heart, that split second before your head caught up and demanded answers.”
John relived it again. Walt watched as the emotions began to surge.
“There you were,” Walt continued in a near-whisper. “And there he was. And you two were together. Again.”
John was set upon by torrents of emotion yet again. Walt moved to John and held him as he cried.
“That moment, John,” Walt whispered. “That was the life I had to protect. Was I supposed to throw him away? Because he was too sick to be who he used to be?”
Walt accepted the raw, cathartic rush of John’s crying as the response he had longed for. They held each other and leaned into the flood of emotion together.
Walt finally broke the embrace. Tissues were at the ready, and tears and flowing noses were mopped up for the work left to be done.
“My job is finished now, John,” the old doctor said with a fatherly sturdiness. “That moment I brought you to is yours now. And unfortunately, everything that made it possible.”