The room was carefully preserved, in jarring contrast to the deterioration of the abandoned building. A single lamp burned softly, casting the bed in the corner in a cloak of shadows.
Photographs of the Husted family were throughout the room: Rose as a young doctor’s wife, a preadolescent Mike and John smiling with abandon at Disneyworld. Larry Husted and Walt Bolger in seventies era golf clothes, tipping beers on the veranda of a golf course clubhouse. But mixed in with the distant past were a handful of more recent images, candid photos of Rose and John caught smiling at unremarkable gatherings held years after they lost Larry. A class picture of Katie, taken when she was in sixth grade, was on a shelf viewable from the bed.
The door closed behind John as he eased in. The nurturing tableau before him and the inconceivability of what waited for him in the shadows threatened to send his mind careening into shutdown. Some instinctive self-preservation mechanism kicked in as he knew to take his time acclimating himself. To hold onto for just a few moments more the reality he had believed for thirty years.
He glimpsed a sturdy bookcase filled with medical texts, along with the Ian Fleming and John le Carré novels his father had loved. A Donald Duck figurine stood at the end of a shelf. A framed photo clipped from the Holt City Times was propped up among the books. It was Mike at twenty-one, onstage and preening in his full heavy metal finest. Gravel Rash was beginning to draw big crowds down in Chicago, with rumors around town about a pending record contract. The article in the local paper back then had called Mike the next Axl Rose.
Gazing farther along the shelf, John stopped short when he saw it: chips of concrete, set in Lucite. He solemnly took the smooth cube into his hand. That day at the new hospital, with the sledgehammer and the applause and his father hailed as a hero, was a moment around which John fixed all his memories. John long ago assumed the Lucite block had simply been misplaced.
John felt its cool surface as he grimly looked back to the door that would return him to the old man who had the answers.
John’s steps were deliberate as he committed to crossing the room. He felt time spinning backward, to a point where two lives diverged, he thought forever. One became a man, formed a life, fell short sometimes but carried on. The other, he had been told, had not.
The faint, sterile tapping of the medical machinery grated against the solemnity of the moment. Vital signs silently triggered spikes on the screen of a digital monitor.
As the form in the bed took shape in the dim light, John met the scent. It was antiseptic, the chilly moist bite of alcohol fused with something warm and human: The muted sour milk smell of a body long dormant. A whiff of breath. The traces of body waste discreetly collected.
Larry Husted had a smell. A living smell.
John arrived at the bedside and looked down.
His father was a gauzy husk of a man, the trauma of his decades-long internment reducing his body to a cruel hollowing out of the human form. He was in a fetal position, facing his son. His eyes were closed; a faint scar ran across his left cheek.
His chest rose and contracted almost imperceptibly.
A tinfoil sting pricked the base of John’s skull as he recognized the face despite the effects of age and distress. He gripped the railing at the bedside and felt the reconnection.
His mental processing was blunt and simple:
“Here is Lawrence Charles Husted,” John silently explained to himself. “Larry. Dad. Here is my dad.
“I have a dad.”
His knees began to weaken as he reached to brush his hand along his father’s forearm. The warmth of Larry’s body proved to him that his existence was real, and John’s steadiness collapsed. Gravity brought him to a chair at the bedside, his fingers never once breaking the connection now that his touch found his father’s living skin.
John gently traced the line of a vein in his father’s reed-like arm. Their blood flowed here. The son’s tears came in jagged surges that wracked his body.
* * *
When the door to Larry’s room rattled open an hour later, the sound echoing down the abandoned corridor, Walt Bolger stood slowly with his shoulders back, ready to honor his obligation. But the ravaging of John’s emotions and the inconceivability of the truth left him too numb to assail the old man with questions or furious disbelief.
Something vastly intricate was at play here. The same man who had engaged in the most macabre deceit imaginable, who had kept John from his father for three decades, had just allowed John to stand again in the presence of that father.
Something mad and tragic had been allowed to live on in this long-dead building, but Walt was now owning up to it when he didn’t have to. Time may come for rage, John realized as he met Walt’s mournful look, but it would have been profane unleashing it in the reverent quiet outside his father’s room.
Instead, John collapsed into the embrace of the old doctor.
“It got away from me,” Walt whispered as he wept. “I never wanted to do this to your family, to Larry. He’d be so disappointed in me.”
John pulled back from the embrace and grasped the haunted old man at the shoulders:
“What happened?”