Michael Chabon

I sat forward, all the pain flown away, and reached out to grab him by the nubby sleeve of his sweater, as Cleveland would have done.

“Ever since what, Lenny? They killed my mother instead of him?” For an instant this seemed to explain everything, and then, abruptly, ceased.

Lenny backed toward the door, sad and alert, suntanned and old.

“I’m going to get your Aunt Elaine,” he said, word by slow word, as though I were waving a crazy gun around. “All right? You wait here. I’m going out now.”

“What happened to my mother, Lenny?” What happened to my father? What happened to me?

He went out. The pain in my head receded before the mounting uproar in my stomach. I pressed the call button, remembering despite everything to wonder if Annette was my nurse, but it was an older woman who swept in, looking crisp and happy, cap perched upon her head like a stuffed dove.

“I’m going to be sick,” I said, and was, though there was very little inside me. I lay back on the crackling sheets.

“I won’t be able to see anyone today,” I said, accepting a glass of sweet water. “I don’t feel very well at all.”

My valiant nurse (whom I now, belatedly, thank—a kiss upon each of your lined cheeks, Eleanor Colletti, R.N.) fought off intense outbursts of paternal concern and gladioli until the first set of visiting hours was over, although each time I heard his high, soft, contrite voice in the hallway I was terribly tempted to relent, since my inclination, as I have said before, was always to accept apologies, which feed on nostalgia. Throughout the afternoon a thunderstorm came tumbling and spilling against my window, as I heard my father plead and hector and sigh; I watched the door to my room remain firmly shut and ached for that return of everything to its previous condition which is the apology’s false promise. But I knew that if he stayed long enough, it would be I who ended up apologizing, which was something—and this is exactly how I put it to myself—that Cleveland would never do. At seven o’clock Nurse Colletti, her jaw grimly set, came in to say my father had gone, and with him the bouquet. She blew upward at a stray gray lock.

It was, in fact, this continual demand of myself to think as my dead friend had thought that finally led me out of bed and to the tiny closet of my room, where I found my clothes, my battle dress. I dressed slowly, among the faint rattle and ring of hangers, feeling weak and sad in my sad uniform, found my wristwatch, my wallet, my keys, crept out of my room and into the elevator. I informally checked myself out of the hospital, which was not too difficult to do at seven-thirty, and caught a bus back to Squirrel Hill.

Riding on a city bus along the route that you have taken from your job, from the movies, from a hundred Chinese meals, with the same late sun going down over the same peeling buildings and the same hot smell of water in the after shower air, can be, in the wake of a catastrophe, either a surrealistic nightmare of the ordinary or a plunge into the warm waters of beautiful routine. I watched, among the forty hot, plain people, a mother brush her daughter’s hair into ponytails wrapped kindly and tight with pink elastic bolos, and by the time I pulled the bell cord for the Terrace stop, I knew that everything would be all right, and that soon, very soon, I was going to be able to cry.

There was no mail in my mailbox; I came in the door and found Arthur sitting on my sofa, looking at a magazine, his large plaid suitcase on the floor in front of him. He looked ashen and sleepless. A cigarette trembled in his thin fingers. I went to him, we embraced, we wept, wet each other’s shoulders and throats, wiped our streaming noses a hundred times.

“I have a problem,” he said at last, sniffling. I felt his shoulders tense suddenly. “And it’s your fault, in a way.”

“What?” I said.

“Some of your father’s associates came to see me today. At my mother’s.” Through the paleness and shadow of his face there was a hint of his usual wry expression. He could still see the joke. “You never told me you were such a, well, such a scion,” he said.

“What do you mean? What did they want?”

He gestured toward the great valise.

“They wanted me to know I was lucky they didn’t tear off my pretty fag face, for one thing. They requested that I leave town.”

“How did they—what are you doing?”

“I’m leaving town. I’m going to New York. I’m just staying long enough to say good-bye to you and clean out my bank account. Can I spend the night here?” He attempted a smile. “Is it safe?”

“You don’t have to leave town.”

“Oh, no? Is there something you can do about it?”

I thought a moment.

“No,” I said, “there isn’t.”

I gave myself a moment to feel alarm at my father’s discovery, but none came. “How did they— Oh. The letter.”

“I believe that’s it,” he said.

“It was on him when he—when they found him? Why?”

“What was it?”

“A letter from Phlox. A very distraught one.”

“Maybe he kept it around for laughs.”