“Hey, what do you remember about this?” John asked Rose casually, having brought a copy of the Gazette article with him for a lunch of chicken salad in the old house. It was the front-page verdict story, the headline declaring “Physician, Hospital Cleared in Malpractice Suit.” John was curious what his mother would remember from the event, now thirty-five years ago. He observed that distant memories, sometimes arcane ones, had a way of fixing themselves forever to the minds of Alzheimer’s patients. While essential data and elemental knowledge from a half hour ago failed to find a home no matter how many times it was repeated.
John detected the unease as his mother was unexpectedly pulled backward in time. She stared at the photo on the front page, her husband visible but not quite there.
“That was your father,” she said, her finger touching his image. The details of the case began filtering back to her. “He was in trouble. Somebody sued him.”
“I know,” John said. “I read the story. It was that Farragut family.”
The name triggered something complicated in Rose. She diverted her attention to the photo in the paper from Larry to the hugging, crying parents in the foreground.
“The Farraguts!” she recalled with a kind of wonder. “Do you know, back when I did my volunteer work for the hospital, we were dealing with them all the time? Those parents, they were just awful. And the children…” She stopped herself.
She studied the article as if to read it, but John could tell by the way her eyes fixed in middle distance that it was coming back to her through her own muddied recollection of events.
“We knew that little girl,” she whispered.
“Vicky.”
“Vicky,” she said wistfully. “There were a lot of them. And then, after the trial, it just got worse. The parents got worse. One of them was always in jail or would disappear, for weeks at a time. But the babies kept coming. We were always taking up collections for them: food, clothes, toys—whatever we could get our hands on.”
A fact returned to her. It still hurt. “After what happened, after the trial, someone decided I shouldn’t go out to their house anymore to drop the things off. It was upsetting the parents,” she said, an uncommon tone of derision in her voice.
“So I organized the drives, made the rounds of garage sales to get what we needed,” she said, shaking her head with sad bemusement. “I kept buying back all the things we had already given them. The parents were turning around and selling some of it off to pay for God knows what.”
“That was really nice of you to keep helping,” John smiled. “Considering.”
“Those children didn’t deserve to do without just because their parents were so terrible.”
He returned to the newspaper article. “So, what happened?” he asked tonelessly, without revealing his suspicions. “The Farraguts said Dad was responsible for their daughter dying?”
Despite the decades, a defense instinctively went up. It was a spouse’s undiminished insistence on the truth of the matter.
“The jury found him innocent. You read the article,” she said sharply.
“I know, but … If you really look at it…” John said, cutting himself off the moment the words left his mouth. The medical records, the court documents—Rose would have never seen what John had discovered, and they would have meant nothing to her if she had. Rose’s man was innocent, and that was that. Retrying the case now to get Rose to let go of her undiminished loyalty would be cruel.
But maybe there was still something John could learn here, to shape this new perspective of his father he was discovering.
“Do you think he might have felt responsible, in some way?” John asked delicately. “I mean, I know the jury said he didn’t do anything wrong. But…”
“Your father felt terrible any time he lost a patient,” she said sternly. “Nobody else saw that, only me. And even then, he tried to not let it show. But I knew. Nights he’d come home for dinner, and then he’d lock himself up in his den. I knew.”
She looked again at the smudgy copy of the old newspaper article.
“What kind of parent leaves their child to suffer for days? You don’t treat a dog that way.”
* * *
The law office of Henry Getch sat in a strip mall between a Domino’s Pizza and an empty storefront that had once been the larger law office of Henry Getch. He was pushing sixty now, rickety-thin and his hair swept back and dyed black.
When John first called and asked if he could come in to talk about his work for the Farraguts thirty-five years earlier, Getch said he would have to charge John his hourly rate for the conversation. But as Getch became incensed at remembering the case, it appeared that having a chance to rail against it after so many years was reward enough.
“Your father killed that little girl,” he said bluntly the moment John settled into the folding chair opposite Getch’s desk. “Plain and simple. He killed her.”
John flinched, instinctively rising to his father’s defense despite his suspicions.
“You remember all this, all the details?” John said skeptically. “After over thirty years?”
“That was one of the first cases I ever tried. You know how many lawyers had to turn that family down before they got to me?
“You want me to tell you that Randy Farragut and that wife of his were saints, just some down-on-their-luck losers who couldn’t catch a break?” Getch asked. “They weren’t. They were assholes. They were shitty parents. But they brought that girl into the hospital alive and she died because your father didn’t do his job.”
The lawyer seemed to take satisfaction from watching John recoil. “Sorry now you gave me a call?”
John wasn’t sure.
“He fucked up,” the lawyer continued matter-of-factly. “It happens, even to doctors. Especially to doctors. That’s why they have malpractice insurance. It wasn’t his cash on the line. He should have just settled.
“But this wasn’t about the money. It was ego. And reputation. His, and the hospital’s. The town was already pushing back on the new hospital. The financing wasn’t coming together. This wasn’t the time for losing a court case. And there was no way your father was going to admit to doing anything wrong. So that fucking Bob Schurmer went and gutted the family, and your father let him. Everybody walked away, hands clean.”
An uneasy realization rattled John as he absorbed Getch’s venom: If John told Mike about Larry, and Mike did insist on suing the hospital and Walt, John was sitting across from a lawyer who had waited decades for another shot at them. Even a strip mall shyster like Henry Getch would be almost guaranteed the payoff of a lifetime, given the flagrancy of the acts and the shitstorm of attention that would surround the case.
“I hadn’t lived here that long, I had no idea how the whole town spit on that family,” Getch continued, surprising John with a sincere tone of regret. “I should have known. I should have never let that jury decide things. That was on me. If they could have found a decent lawyer, they should have sued me.”
“Do you know what happened to them?”
“I had a trail of unpaid bills sent to them for years,” he recalled hazily. “I think the last one bounced back from an address in Iowa. Meth World magazine named them Parents of the Year in 1997,” he chuckled.
“Just between you and me,” the lawyer belched moistly as he squirmed in his chair. “Your father probably did that little girl a favor.”
* * *
Eastlawn Cemetery sat between the town and the interstate, along a busy stretch of road that had grown thick with mini-marts, big box stores, and fast-food restaurants in the thirty-five years since Vicky Farragut was buried there.
Vicky’s headstone was small, surely the cheapest her parents could find. It read simply: VICTORIA DENISE FARRAGUT, 1971–1980. LOVING DAUGHTER. Here is where grieving Farraguts had stood, maybe cleaned up in secondhand clothing that John’s mother and her volunteer friends had given them.
John winced at finding himself wondering how genuine the parents’ sadness could have been when they seemed to care so little when these kids were alive. He remembered the picture that ran on the front page of the paper when they lost their lawsuit. If one chose to believe the parents were crying and holding each other over a lost payday rather than a dead child, they had a harder heart than John Husted.
John didn’t know why he came to the cemetery. The bad TV movie version of this would have him bring a teddy bear or a single rose to lay on Vicky’s grave, but he rejected the mawkishness of it with a queasy cringe. Coming here seemed like gesture enough.
As John stood at the grave and listened to the flow of the interstate a cornfield away, another maudlin movie scene coalesced in his imagination: Could Larry Husted have stood here once? All alone, for just a moment? To convey some silent sentiment to a little girl that he shouldn’t have let die?
John decided he probably did not, and he left it at that.