It began like this:
“Did you ever hear Dad talk like Donald Duck?”
John waited a couple days, until Mike’s drug bust slid into a predictable state of legal limbo. With his fate forestalled by red tape and systematic indifference, it didn’t take long for Mike to resume the grumpy pose John could now see through.
Mike reflexively shot back the baffled and barbed glare he leveled on his little brother whenever he spoke nonsense.
“What?”
They sat across a table at Rocky’s, John mysteriously having invited Mike out for dinner. Mike ordered the prime rib sandwich and a series of beers; John looked sweaty and settled for a glass of water.
“I mean,” John meandered unsteadily, “what do you really remember about him?”
“He was always in my shit,” Mike recalled bitterly. “Twenty-four seven.”
“That was at the end,” John said quickly. “But you two didn’t start going at it until you started getting high and pushing the bands, when you were thirteen or fourteen. All those years before that, when you got along, he was like … Dad. Right?”
Mike shrugged. John pressed on.
“Little League. Cub Scouts. Christmas morning. Before you started hating each other, you were a kid and he was your dad and, you know, things were okay.”
“When he had time for us,” Mike sniffed.
“Yeah,” John agreed. “But, I’m just saying. Even with how it ended, he did all right by you for a long time. Longer than he didn’t. Right?”
“You are so gay,” Mike chuckled derisively.
Mike finished off the last of his sandwich, and instantly two huge sundaes were lowered onto the table. The brothers looked up.
“Do they have free sundaes in jail?” Sheila the waitress sternly inquired of Mike. She had been hovering throughout lunch, this being her first chance to nag Mike in years.
“No, ma’am,” he said compliantly, without attitude.
“Are free sundaes important to you?”
“Yes, ma’am,” Mike said.
“Any chance you can keep your skinny butt out of jail so that you and me can keep this good thing going?”
“I’m trying, ma’am.”
“Try harder,” she glowered good-naturedly before turning to John. “Why aren’t you eating?”
“I’m not—”
“You take care of yourselves,” the waitress decreed sagely to the pair of them, “you take care of each other, and you take care of your mom. I waited on your father long enough to know that’s what he would’ve expected from the two of you.”
“Got it,” John smiled, grateful beyond measure for the bridge she provided to their past. She tallied up their bill and slapped it on the table.
“Tip generously,” she said, then whispered: “He’s watching.” She pointed heavenward and winked.
John and Mike smiled as they watched her retreat to the kitchen. Mike shook his head with wry fondness as he dug into the sundae. John still had no appetite as he stared past his brother to the hospital.
The sun had fully set. It was time to cross the street.
* * *
Mike followed skeptically, sufficiently bonded with his brother from the nostalgia that enveloped them in the restaurant. But as John briskly led him around the back of the old hospital into the dense shadows, he began to get rattled.
“Dude,” Mike laughed uneasily as his younger brother produced a key to the door behind the dumpster. “What the fuck are you doing?”
“I told you, you gotta check this out,” John said in the rare position of being the bad influence on his older brother. “It’s a trip.”
He made sure to observe the illicit look of anticipation on Mike’s face as the door creaked open. As intrigued as he was, Mike feared detection as he looked to confirm that no one was watching them.
“Man, I’ve got a sentence hanging over my head. I can’t afford to get caught—”
“C’mon,” John said cockily, holding the door open and gesturing him in. “Don’t be so gay.”
* * *
“Jesus, I remember all this,” Mike whispered as their flashlights did their best to reignite his memories of the old patient wing. He looked to the dull, dusty tiles beneath his feet. “The floors were like ice after they got waxed. I’d take my shoes off, get a running start, and I could slide almost all the way down to that corner in my socks.”
He smiled as he pointed.
“I’d run around, not giving a fuck that people were sick and dying inside these rooms. Dad finally took me into one of them; I must’ve been around six. This old lady was like a hundred, and she was crying. Crying, like a baby—just bawling—because she hurt so much.
“He told me to stop being such an obnoxious pain in the ass around people he was trying to help.”
They explored every inch of the old building: the empty gift shop, the pharmacy, the chapel. Some of it was new to John and he enjoyed poking around the spooky new corners with his big brother.
They stood uneasily once they realized they stumbled upon the old morgue; its cold, steel tables with drains and rotted hoses still on display. John hung back as Mike took it all in, his morbid curiosity undercut with something deeper as he studied one of the tables. His eyes followed the path from the operating surface to the trough to the drain that flushed everything away.
Maybe he was thinking of the dead girl he slept with in Rhode Island before his world caved in. Maybe he was thinking of their father.
* * *
John was imagining how best to tell Mike practically from the moment Walt Bolger told him. The slow buildup and the gradual reveal that the old man used with John had no doubt felt necessary, and it did its job in John’s case. But accepting the full story, from Larry’s stroke to room 116 and the decades in-between, required more cognitive dexterity than John knew his simple-minded brother could process. John would fill in the details after Mike’s mind was blown by what he was brought to, but first he had to get him there.
“You need to get ready to get your head around something totally fucked up,” John said forebodingly once they reached the room. Profanity from his straitlaced brother always struck Mike as amusing, but he stopped smiling when he saw John shaking.
Mike looked to the closed door, and then back to John. Something big loomed.
John let it come bluntly, to get it done.
“Dad’s not dead. He’s been alive, all this time,” John said. “You’re going to see him now.” And he opened the door.
John stepped in. Mike did not. The words John just said, the macabre pristineness of the room inside, the form in the shadowy bed that was visible from the hallway—it all froze Mike in place as his mind began to churn.
John agonized as Mike’s uncomprehending eyes met his. “Come on, Mike,” he said gently, taking his brother at the elbow. “You need to do this.”
John got him into the room, but Mike would go no farther. His chest began to heave from a shortness of breath as his eyes locked upon the man in the bed. John had earlier positioned Larry facing into the room, but with the dim light, the toll that time and disease took on Larry and the madness of the moment, Mike found it easy to push back the truth.
He looked to John, certain instead that his brother had lost his mind.
“What the fuck are you doing in here?” Mike whispered sharply, finally taking in the carefully staged comfort of the room.
“That’s Dad, Mike,” John whispered, gently but firmly. “It’s him.”
Mike wasn’t having it. “What the fuck are you doing in here?”
“Look at him. Just look at him.”
The plaintive urging of his little brother compelled Mike to take one step closer. The view was clearer now. Mike was old enough to remember his grandfather—Larry’s dad—before the old man died at sixty-seven, eaten away by cancer. The resemblance was there on the man in the bed. That family face was there.
Mike’s legs failed him and he sank to his knees. His head filled with helium and white noise as wracking sobs overtook him.
If there were words for the moment, they came out only as choked, baffled gasps. John knelt beside his brother and held him as Mike quivered at the unexpected and relentless flood of emotion.
“I know,” John whispered, rubbing Mike’s shoulder beneath his long, dirty hair. “I know.”
* * *
Mike finally made it to Larry’s bedside, and John left the two of them alone. John stayed outside the room for as long as Mike needed, and then they sat in the hall as John walked him through the journey that brought them here.
As Mike sat beside his brother and John laid out the plot that Walt Bolger carried out, John saw the fury and disbelief pass across Mike’s face. But it was tempered by a humbled calm that John had gambled would be there. It might not last, but the same momentousness that slammed John into accepting this as an opportunity to reclaim their father seemed to have struck Mike the same way.
Mike’s eyes remained locked on the door to his father’s room. “You end up hating somebody—really hating them,” he said softly. “But the whole time, maybe you’re thinking, ‘On the other side of all this shit, maybe we could be cool with each other someday.’ You know? When we were older, we’d work it all out.
“But then out of nowhere he up and dies, and we never…”
He gave into another bout of tears. John allowed him a moment, but then he resolved to get to the responsibility left to them.
“What are we going to do about Mom?” John asked.
Mike felt the shock as the full weight of what they needed to do hit him.
“Fuck!” Mike groaned hopelessly as he replayed what he just endured. “She can’t … If we …
“Fuck!!!”
The answer wasn’t going to come to them just then. They stood and sighed heavily in tandem. John turned to lead them out, but Mike wasn’t ready to go. He stared at his father’s door.
“Go on back in,” John said, sitting back down. “I’ll wait.”
“You come, too,” Mike said softly as he opened the door and gestured John in. “We’ll hang out. The three of us.”