“Hazel, I’m serious. I have upsetting facts to relay.”
“Just get on with it.” Whatever Byron was about to tell her was to his advantage—Byron didn’t say things that weren’t—so Hazel was skeptical. It wasn’t above Byron to lie about her father to try to get his hooks in deeper. She also couldn’t discount outright the chance that Byron had gotten to her dad. Perhaps the bathtub thing with Di had pushed him over the edge. It wouldn’t be difficult for Byron to convince her father that Hazel having free will wasn’t in her own best interest and she needed to be returned to him. Her dad probably half-believed that anyway. Now that her father had a sudden interest in purchasing artificial women, he could likely be bought off.
“As you know, the helmet does physical diagnostics. You need to start physical therapy on your shoulder. I also want to add that your nutrient intake since you left the compound has been abysmal. I’ll have a drone drop some Vitapax into your father’s backyard. Please eat them.”
“Why don’t you mail them?”
“I don’t use government services, Hazel. The government uses my services.”
“Liver doesn’t use government services either. You two have so much in common.”
“Incorrect. I did check into him, for your protection. Disability, Medicaid. He has outstanding warrants in a few states for failure to pay the fines on unlicensed firearms. I hope you two weren’t planning on taking any romantic getaways out of the area.” It pleased Hazel that Byron wasn’t able to keep the hostility out of his voice.
“No need,” she said. “We can have sex just fine right where we are.”
“Hazel.” Byron cleared his throat. “I’d actually recommend wearing the helmet whenever you’re thinking of coupling with a new paramour. I understand it if you feel the need to have affairs as part of some grievance against me that you’re getting out of your system. Very well. But the helmet also gives readings of others within a five-hundred-foot radius. It’s not a bad idea to scan ahead of time for STDs. Of course, those in the incubation period might not show up, so you’ll always want to use protection.”
“Is Liver clean?”
“I certainly wouldn’t use that term. He doesn’t have any operative venereal infections, no. But it is not pretty under the hood. Your new boyfriend wouldn’t qualify as an organ donor.”
“Okay. So what did my father’s scan show?” Hazel could feel her emotions putting their boxing gloves up, bracing. Whatever Byron was about to say was probably a lie, or a half-truth—a warping of the complete picture.
“It’s widespread cancer, Hazel. He doesn’t have long.”
Hazel scoffed because she had to. Her father dying of cancer when her mother had died of cancer? What were the odds? “He just went to the doctor yesterday. Maybe they did something, gave him something that set off a faulty reading. He’d have all kinds of symptoms if that were true,” she added. “He’d know, or the doctors would pick up some abnormality in his tests. He’s always getting tests.”
Hazel thought about this statement. Why had he gone to the doctor, anyway?
“I’m sure he is,” Byron said. His tone was gentler now, unchallenging. He wasn’t afraid of losing, which meant there was no chance that he could. The humid air suddenly seemed wavy, nauseatingly so, like what she was breathing in was also sloshing around inside her.
“You mean he knows? I think he’d tell me if he was dying.” Hazel realized this wasn’t true even as she said it though. The worse her father felt, the more he downplayed any pain. He’d always been this way. The morning prior to a stress test his doctor had ordered when Hazel was in high school, her father had mowed the lawn and subsequently had a micro heart attack followed by a same-day surgery; for a week the mower sat in the middle of the yard at the end of an unfinished strip until one of her father’s OCD neighbors had come over and finished it because he couldn’t stand looking at it anymore. He and her mother had fought about this for weeks. Why the fuck were you mowing the lawn with chest pains! she’d screamed. That would’ve been death by idiocy, Herbert! Death is not some pansy baby. You cannot pee down the neck of Death’s shirt and expect it to look the other way. If you are flagrantly too dumb to live, it will come to collect. But her father hadn’t been fazed. Well, if you weren’t yelling at me about almost dying you’d be yelling at me about how bad the lawn looks!
“Oh, Hazel,” Byron said. “He definitely knows. The helmet’s not designed for medical scanning to be its primary function, so I don’t have results with the specificity of, say, a HealthSweep imager. And I’m not a doctor. But I’ve talked to several today on your father’s behalf, and they all concur: based on the information we do have, he’s already undergone a variety of chemotherapy and radiation treatments. It looks like he stopped everything except pain management medication a few months ago. Were it legal to do so, I may have also double-checked electronic hospital records to confirm this. I wouldn’t be breaking this news to you unless I could speak with certainty.”
“So he never told me about having cancer or having cancer treatments, and then he made the decision to die and neglected to share that with me as well?” Hazel had to say it out loud to acknowledge that it was real. Bring the words into the world and examine them.
Why hadn’t she asked him about the hundreds of pills beneath the sink? Why hadn’t the urgency of sex doll number one and sex doll number two triggered more of a warning signal to her? Why hadn’t she thought it stranger that he was willing to spend the rest of his life without a car? Hazel supposed she’d stopped trying to understand her father’s logic so long ago that it had become a habit. She didn’t question what he wanted anymore, and this made her not question why he wanted it either.
“I understand this information has the potential to feel very hurtful to you,” Byron said, the bright horizon of a coming sales pitch already beginning to put a lilt in his words. “And while I believe it’s your right to know this, if all it was going to do was cause you pain, I wouldn’t meddle. But your father probably made his decision based on the care and treatment options that were presented as being available to him, which, given his financial situation, are minimal. We’ll have to do more tests of course, but I can give him access to cutting-edge treatments not available to the general public. There’s definitely hope.”
So there it was, Hazel thought, his angle. He was using her father’s health to blackmail her.