Between his lack of sleep and the emotional battering he brought upon himself on so many fronts—the unrelenting servicing of Larry, the truth he kept from his mother and brother, the escalating dysfunction at home, the ghosts of his father’s past—John’s mind was wobbly and getting worse as he arrived for another night of caring for his father. When he opened the door to Larry’s room and saw a figure sitting in the shadows of his father’s bedside, John’s brain hazily grasped that someone else had stepped into his secret world. Or maybe he was asleep on the couch at home and a dream was commencing.
The air took on a queasy charge as John drew nearer to his father’s bed. The closing of the door behind him clicked thunderously in the tomb-like room; the man at the bed didn’t flinch. This is a dream, John comforted himself. Just hover above it and see what freaky places it takes you.
When the bland, smug face of Dean Durning looked up to greet him, John jolted abrasively into reality.
“He looks better than the last time I saw him!” the hospital administrator said with sleepy exasperation, pointing at Larry.
John impulsively pulled at Durning’s chair to get him away from his father. “Get the fuck outta here,” John seethed.
Durning jumped up but made no moves to leave.
“I don’t think so,” he said with simpering courage. “This is my hospital. This is continuing because I allowed it. But…” He pointed again at Larry. “Why is he still here?”
“I told you,” John said, coldcocked by this unexpected demand to defend the situation. “Until I am ready to—”
“No!” Durning shot back. “It’s been almost two months. I don’t care anymore how hard it is for you to tell your family. They have to be told. Or they have to not be told, but you have to end this. That’s it!
“And if you won’t take care of this,” Durning said darkly. “I will.”
“Don’t threaten me,” John said.
“You’re threatening me every day you’re in here!” Durning shot back. “If this is exposed in a way we can’t control, we’re both going to be fucked. But your problem will be over. I’ll take the fall for this!”
John struggled for a return volley as Durning exploited all the angles. “That nurse of yours would be on a bus back to El Salvador by the end of the week if this is discovered. I know what she has done for your father. Would he want that to happen to her?”
Because of their alternating shifts, Gloria had become a shadowy angel for John. He left her cash on the nightstand beside Larry’s bed, she left language-hobbled notes for him when they were running low on the nutrition drip or lotion. Larry was always diapered perfectly when John arrived for the night shift, his skin oiled silkily and without a trace of infection.
Everything John was able to do for his father was what Gloria had scripted for him. If keeping Larry Husted ticking was some kind of mad miracle, Gloria made it possible. When this was over, she needed to slip away without consequence.
Dean Durning was just reinforcing what John already knew was true: This could not continue. Tell the family, don’t tell the family—something had to be decided.
Bringing this to a conclusion would be right for everyone involved, including John, who was finding his mind going to some very strange places lately. As he spent more and more time with Larry, John feared some lines were about to be crossed.
Specifically: John wanted to put a pointy party hat on his brain-dead father. John would wear one, too. This made sense to him.
John relearned his father’s birthday; it was coming up next month, on the sixth. Larry would turn seventy-eight. Larry had been denied thirty birthday parties, and John was certain no one, not once, thought to blow out a candle for him.
So on one of those long, late-night vigils at Larry’s side, when John’s brain rambled off on loopy tangents, he decided he wanted to put a pointy party hat on his father because the old man was due a celebration. He wanted to put a pointy party hat on his father just to bring some color and some lightness into this room.
Mostly, he wanted to put a pointy party hat on his father because it’d be really wrong but weirdly funny, and John wanted to believe that if Larry knew his son did it, he’d think it funny, too.
Walt Bolger told John a wealth of stories about his father; John was stunned and gratified to learn that Larry was a really funny guy. Walt thought Rose never really understood many of the things her husband found amusing, which is probably why John never heard about them. John had come to learn that wives just don’t always know what’s funny.
But his own sense of humor meant a lot to John. To know that he got it from his father was a gift he now knew to cherish.
So John sat there very late one night, staring at Larry and anticipating his birthday, and he thought, Yes, I will put a pointy party hat on my father. I think this is something I will do.
But then he thought, What if that is the precise moment Dad decides to wake up?
John really, truly knew that this wouldn’t happen. But, he reasoned, if you had asked him six months ago if any of this could have happened, he wouldn’t have thought that possible either. You never really know.
So just suppose: Larry Husted goes off to work in 1985 and wakes up three decades later in a strange little room, hooked up to tubes and staring at a guy who looks just like him when he was thirty years younger, with a pointy party hat on his head. Who could explain such a thing?
John would say to his father, “Yes, it is pretty odd, but I hoped you’d find it funny in a Weekend at Bernie’s kind of way.” But Larry wouldn’t have a clue what Weekend at Bernie’s was, so John would have to explain all that.
Then, what if that was the moment Larry finally died? Really died. Miraculously back to life after all this time, finally—for just a moment—there with his son to exchange a few words of compassion and wisdom, and they spent it talking about Weekend at Bernie’s? Wearing pointy party hats? Like that wouldn’t fuck a guy up for the rest of his life.
John found himself thinking about all this the other night. A lot.
So, yes, maybe it was time to let this end.
* * *
“A couple more weeks,” he said weakly to Durning in his father’s room.
“But—” Durning protested.
“Please,” John said. “I understand. But … please.”
Durning screwed up his spine. “I have a first year resident who is on thin ice. Talented kid, but screwing up too many times on procedure. If it comes to it, he’ll do whatever I tell him to save his career.
“I will bring him here. He will withdraw your father’s feeding tube and he will humanely tend to him until it is done. Then you, with or without your family, will be afforded as much dignity as possible to see that the dispensation of the body is discreetly managed.”
John simmered at the cold efficiency of the threat.
“Two weeks,” Durning said tersely, then left.
John drew closer to Larry, once again hoping to gain some unspoken guidance from him. But it was on John alone to act. His heart told him all along that he could not not tell his mother about Larry, but that he could not tell her and hope to still keep it from Mike.
So since Mike was going to know eventually, he was going to know first. For all that had gone dead inside his brother, John was prepared to gamble that Mike would know not to hurt their mother as she struggled to accept the truth.
For all he had been through, for all the damage he had done to himself and others, there had to be something decent left inside Mike Husted.