The next morning before she left, Chris asked Jenny if she would call the Rose Hill nursing home in Connecticut to check on Sam's condition. She agreed and he gave her the number and some instructions. A little after ten, Jenny drove off in the van. In her handbag she carried the photos of Wendy and Chris and sample signatures. Also, two ampules of Elixir.
On their eighteenth night, Chris drove to a call box outside a fire station in Rumford. The street was dark and deserted. A little after nine, Jenny's call came through. But after a few seconds he could tell something was wrong. Had the authorities cornered her? Did she and Ted fear they were getting in too deeply? Was it a money problem?
"Chris, I'm sorry. It's your father. He's dead."
"Oh no."
"I did just as you said: I identified myself as an assistant prosecutor from Massachusetts…"
"When did it happen?" Chris asked.
"Ten days ago. They said his remains were cremated, which was the home's policy when next of kin couldn't be located. I'm sorry, Chris."
He felt the grief well up in him, but he pushed it back. "Thank you, Jenny." He hung up and headed home, concentrating on driving under the speed limit.
He arrived at the cottage around eleven. Wendy and the baby were in bed. But he knew he would not be able to sleep. He knew he would have to confront the full force of his grief and guilt. So he sat on the couch and turned on the television.
One of the channels was playing The Wild One with a lean, young Marlon Brando swaggering about the screen in tight jeans and a hurt truculent look. Today he was a three-hundred-pound bald and wheezy mound of fat draped in black tunics to hide what time had done to him.
Chris watched the movie with the volume off. The only sound was that of the sleeting rain against the windows. With his glasses off, the picture was fuzzy. But that made no difference, because all he could see was Sam lying in his bed, a pathetic shriveled shadow of the man he had been, dying in an institution made up of hands and feet and mouths moving without sense.
Chris knew that Sam hadn't had long, that his organs would give out as he languished in a vegetative state. But what ate at Chris was that he had not had the chance to say goodbye. That life had turned so bizarre he could not even risk visiting his father one last time.
Blankly he stared at the TV and proceeded to drink a six-pack of beer, one can after the next-brain cells be damned-until his head was a throbbing mass and the geometry of the room took a non-Euclidian slant and the fuzz on the screen sharpened into shapes and forms that pulled him in.
Green. The black and white had turned a dazzling green. He was walking on a vast lawn between Sam and his mother Rose. They were at Campobello, Hyde Park, New York. He could see it with brilliant clarity-the great white house with the high windows. The massive white marble tombstone of FDR. Then he was rolling on the lawn and his seven-year-old legs were cool from the grass. He was wearing navy blue pants with black-and-white saddle shoes and a Brooklyn Dodgers baseball cap.
"Hey there, slugger!"
Then grass shifted and became a dirt diamond at Goodwin Park in Hartford, and Sam was at the pitcher's mound with a bucket of baseballs and Chris at the plate with his Louisville Slugger. Sam held up a clean white hardball. "What do you say we give this one a run for its money?" And Chris swung with all his might and cracked the ball up to the clouds.
The next moment Sam was climbing aboard the dive boat on a reef off Boroko on the southern coast of Papua New Guinea: his body still lean and bronze, joking about the giant grouper that had spooked him, handing Chris a triton shell. Chris held the shell up to his eye imagining he could see around the curves spiraling forever inward… until he was peering through a window of the nursing home where he spotted Sam in the bed…
Chris climbed through the shell window thinking how odd it was that Sam was sleeping in his navy blue jumper shorts with a white polo shirt and socks and saddle shoes. But Sam's face was not tanned and full, but thin and dry and spotted with age. His hair was a wispy cloud across a sad pink skull. He breathed in short raspy starts through a raw toothless mouth. So that he wouldn't injure himself, Sam's hands had been bound to the sides of the bed. Chris untied one and pushed up the sleeve of his johnny. The arm, strapped with an IV needle, was like a stick covered with old wax paper. Sam looked like a mummy of himself.
"Dad? It's me, Chris."
Sam stirred but he didn't open his eyes. He didn't know Chris's name. He didn't know his own name. Chris removed the syringe from his pocket and inserted it into the IV and pushed the plunger.
It didn't take long. Sam's eyes opened. He looked confused and frightened and Chris's heart slumped. "Dad, it's me, Chris."
Sam nodded and closed his eyes. When he opened them again he smiled. "Hey, slugger, where you been?"
As if by magic, his face had tightened and smoothed out, his lips plumped up and skinned over, and his eyes lit up. From under the sheets he produced a bright new baseball. "What do you say we give this thing a run for its money?"
You betcha!
And Chris woke up.
His shirt was damp with sweat. His head thrummed painfully and his mouth was sour with beer. The television was still on: Young-buck Brando was mounting his chromed stallion.
Chris clicked off the TV, then stumbled into the bathroom and threw up. When he returned to the living room, his eyes fell on a framed photograph of Sam and Rose and Chris in box seats at a Washington Senators game. Chris must have been thirteen.
Suddenly Chris felt grief press up from the pit of his soul like a geyser. He grasped the photo and slipped to his knees to let it come. And it did. He collapsed onto the photo and dissolved into deep wracking sobs-the kind that came with no inhibitions, that rose up in black fury. Chris wept for his father. For his mother. For Wendy and Adam and himself. For the loss of it all. He wept until his eyes stung and his chest was no more than an aching hollow cavity.
"What do you say we give this thing a run for the money?"
Chris's breath stopped short. For an instant he felt totally sober.
No need to act surprised. It's been there all the time, a few layers beneath the skin of things. Like some strange organism with a life of its own, every so often sending up signs of life. Little fetal kicks and rolls, getting stronger by the day. What finally took a jab at old Dexter Quinn.
Chris pulled himself up. His legs felt wobbly like a newborn colt's. But he felt a sudden sense of purpose. Dexter was desperate, he told himself. He had had a bad heart and knew he would die soon. That was a one-shot thing. But not me. Got flagons of the stuff-last a hundred lifetimes.
Chris started to giggle but burped up a bubble of acid.
You're twisting things, buddy boy, another voice cut in. Pulling out of the hat every rabbity reason for taking a leap off a cliff in the dark, hope against hope that you'll end up in the land of milk and honey. The problem is you're fucking drunk. That's right: Gassed, blotto, smashed and filled with guilt and grief up the yin-yang. You're like the guy who convinces himself he's got this special alcohol-resistant radar unit inside his skull that will lead him home in the rainstorm no matter what, but who slams into a tree only to spend the rest of his life in a coma, curled up like a shrimp.
But another voice whispered, "Hey, slugger, what do you say we give this thing a run for the money, Huh?"
Don't want to end up like Dad, now, do we? he asked himself.
Uh-uh, no way!
But what if you miscalculate?
Impossible! He had worked out the dosages long ago.