‘My dad has help,’ I said hoarsely. ‘There’s a woman there, Cora, who is sort of…I don’t know. His assistant, I guess. I mean, she cleans the house, she makes sure he’s taking things…I don’t know what else. But she’s always there. She lives there. I arranged it. I mean, I’m there, too…and I’m going to be taking him to his actual appointments. I guess people wake up disoriented, so…’
I began to pick apart my paper napkin. ‘It’s not as if he’s really…ill. He just gets sad. His brain is resistant to drugs, we think. Apparently they do the…procedure all the time. They say he won’t feel anything.’
I trailed off. My voice was shaking too much.
‘I know that.’ Dr Hughes folded her hands. ‘It’s none of my business. I shouldn’t have brought it up.’ She drained her coffee, put her napkin on the table, laid down a few crumpled bills, and stood. I followed. ‘You know what you can handle. I trust you. Just turn in the essay and the statement and I’ll put in the paperwork.’
‘Okay,’ I said. ‘Good.’
‘I’m sorry, again,’ she added.
‘It’s all right,’ I answered, a beat too late. ‘I’m sorry.’ Although I wasn’t sure what I was sorry for-showing emotion, maybe.
On that snowy day a few months ago when Dr Hughes and I first made the connection-‘You’re that Richard Davis’s daughter?’ she’d asked-her face had registered a small, unrehearsed moment of horror. It was the look. The look that told me that Leon had told her all he knew and had witnessed-which included a few of my father’s public breakdowns.
I allowed the look to cross her face without challenging it. I pretended not to see it at all, deciding to give her a chance to have a new, more tempered response. ‘My father’s not doing so well right now,’ I’d said, my eyes on the table, giving her space to properly react. ‘He has clinical depression. He’s been on disability for a while, but I think he’s going to have to resign from the practice altogether.’
And she got to say, ‘Yes, Leon mentioned it. I’m so sorry. It’s got to be hard.’
Perhaps that was why Dr Hughes didn’t intimidate me: I loved the fearless way she taught, but I know she was just as impressionable and sensitive as anyone. When I left the diner, that first time, I thought about how I let her reaction pass by without commenting. It was the easiest thing to do, of course-if I had called her out on it and asked her to explain, then I would have had to explain, which might have meant admitting everything that scared me.
And then, seconds later, I felt somehow responsible-perhaps there could have been a way for me to have warned Dr Hughes, told her who my father was in advance so she could have her moment of horror in private. But warned her how, exactly? I felt so uncomfortable with myself and the situation, I stopped in the middle of the sidewalk, closed my eyes, clenched up my fists, and breathed. When I opened my eyes, I was so amazed that the submarine-round windows of the St Vincent’s medical facility were still there. And the Two Boots Pizza take-away across the street. The entire city was in its right place. I sort of thought it couldn’t be.
12
Later, when I unlocked the front door to the apartment, all of the dogs-Fiona, Wesley, Skip, and Gracie, the Smitty dog-greeted me. ‘Where’s Dad?’ I asked them, their eyes wet and bright. They ran excitedly into the living room, comprehending. My father was in his usual spot on the couch, propped up on his knees and looking over the back of it at something out the window. Seven glasses of water, all at varying levels, were on the coffee table, along with a bunch of newspapers and the TV remote.
‘Hi,’ I announced.
He jumped and turned around. ‘Summer.’
He was wearing the t-shirt and gym shorts I had given him the Christmas of my freshman year, during one of his active spells when he said he was going to start lifting weights at the Y. And even though I saw him every day, I still wasn’t used to the beard, or that his hair was so much longer, or that he wore oversized, square glasses instead of contacts. He had gained thirty pounds from the latest drug he was on. When he took other types of medications, he drooled. Or he twitched, an arm or a thigh, the side of his hip or an eyelid. When he turned his hand a certain way, I saw the mark from the snow globe in the pit of his palm. There were new scars, too, as distinct as tattoos: cross-hatchings on his elbow from the time he broke a plate, the half-moon on his wrist from the hunting knife, the puffy, wrinkled crater near his collarbone from the lit cigarette.
‘They towed another car,’ my father announced, his eyes bright and wide. The dangerous look. ‘The blue Volvo, the bastards.’
‘Ah.’ I dropped the apartment keys in the bowl on the credenza.
‘It was this morning. Three trucks. And the police came this time. It must have been stolen. They surrounded the car.’