Molly waited just beyond his open door, breathing deeply and flexing her fingers, for a full minute before stepping into the doorway and knocking.
It was her father, sitting up in the motor-driven bed, reading a magazine with his glasses on. But he wore a hospital gown, the thickness of a paper towel, tied together loosely at the back, a garment of shocking immodesty; his hair, grayer than she remembered, bore the unkempt, angular shape of someone who had not been out of bed for a long time, days, even; and because of this, the familiar, untroubled, oh-there-you-are smile her father offered as he dropped the magazine and struggled to swing his legs off the edge of the bed was not only unreassuring — its very familiarity was profoundly frightening.
He remained seated as they hugged; she tried not to look at the pale alarming expanse of thigh he showed as he slid forward on the bed. In a scratchy but cheerful voice Roger suggested that they take a walk. “To the dayroom, anyway,” he said. “That’s as far as they’ll let me go.” He held out his arm, and it hung there for a few seconds until Molly understood that she was now to hold on to it, to support him as he struggled to stand and then walk without losing his balance. It wasn’t pride, exactly, that made him pretend this infirmity was something the two of them took for granted, as if she had helped him out of bed a thousand times before — more a fear of seeing her hurt or disappointed, a fear so extreme he would carry this pretense of infallibility to the most ridiculous and tragic length, which length, Molly realized, they had now arrived at.
The dayroom was a long drab rectangle, about one-third of it, at that hour, flooded uncomfortably by sunlight through the blindless windows. In one corner, eight feet or so above the floor on a kind of triangular shelf, sat the TV; a dozen black chrome-and-plastic chairs were ranged in front of it. At the moment no one paid attention to it, though the sound was turned up; the four or five patients in the dayroom sat or stood isolated from one another, not talking unless to themselves, having come here, Molly imagined, mostly out of an atavistic craving for some sense of space. She took her father to a padded easy chair at the end of the room furthest from the laughter of the television.
Roger seemed awfully thin, though this may only have been an impression produced by the clinging paper nightshirt. “So,” he said to her. “How was your flight?”
Molly wished desperately there was some third person there to tell her what not to do — a doctor, ideally, though she would have settled for her mother or her brother, which is to say that she would have been happy even with advice that was clearly wrong. For now, she let herself be lulled into her father’s construction that everything was fine, that the setting of their talk had no bearing on the talk itself. It masked the symptoms of their fear.
“Fine. Very smooth. Mom wired me money for the ticket.”
“Did you see a movie?”
Molly swallowed. “Yes. It was … it was called Sleepless in Seattle.”
“Never heard of it. What was it about?”
“I really don’t remember,” Molly said. “Dad, can I—”
“Not Sleeper? The Woody Allen movie? Because I remember that one. Lord, that was a funny movie! Gene Wilder with the sheep.” He shook his head, remembering, and with unfathomable abruptness his head fell forward and he began crying.
Molly looked all around the dayroom, afraid she was going to need help; but no one, not the other patients nor the one attendant in the room, so much as glanced in their direction as her father struggled noisily to catch his breath. She turned back and took his hand, took both his hands, even as she felt him trying to pull them away from her.
“It’s all right,” she said. “It’s okay. Everything’s okay.” The words meant nothing. She said them because they tended to produce a certain tone of voice, which she hoped was worth something, as if she were speaking to a horse.
Roger kept trying, with astonishing feebleness, to pull one hand away, until finally Molly understood that he only wanted to wipe his nose. She had no idea why she had been restraining him. When he finally looked up at her again, sniffling and smiling, she could see in his confident expression that he had no idea what he looked like. His gaze shifted past her, around the eggshell-colored walls of the dayroom.
“Would you look at all these lunatics?” he said.
When Molly had him back in bed she returned to the nurses’ station and asked again for Dr Kotlovitz. He was a fat doctor, genial and perspiring, and did not react at all to Molly’s angry tone of voice when she asked why her father was on the mental ward.
“Standard practice with all attempted suicides,” he said. “On top of which it worries me a bit that he still won’t talk about what happened.”
“He’s a very proud man.”
“Well, I don’t just mean he’s being reticent, or doesn’t like having his privacy violated. I mean he insists it never did happen at all. Didn’t you ask him about it?”
Molly shook her head.
“He insists, and I think he really believes, that this was an accidental overdose. He took something like fifty Seconal. Obviously no accident. If he hadn’t vomited in the ambulance, I think we might have lost him.”
“Seconal?”
“It had been prescribed to your mother. Whether she was hoarding it or whether she’d stopped taking it and he was refilling the prescription himself, I don’t know. He won’t talk about any of it with me, or even admit it happened. You should ask him yourself. I don’t know what your relationship with him is like — maybe he’d talk to you.”
“He’s asleep now,” Molly said nervously.
“Next time, then?”
Kay was sitting in the car in the hospital parking lot with the radio on. Molly knocked on her window.
“Is he feeling better?” she asked distractedly. Her attention was directed to the radio program, a call-in show, hosted by an angry, intemperate psychiatrist.
“He looks okay,” Molly said. “Listen, why don’t you slide over. I’ll drive.” They returned home without speaking; the car was a bubble within which swirled the voice of the woman psychiatrist, berating her invisible patients, broadcasting her contempt for their problems, intimately and nationwide.
Kay did not accompany her on any more trips to the hospital in Albany, though Molly went every day; in fact, Kay, though she dressed up smartly at some point each morning, never left the house at all that Molly could see. Her mother betrayed no awareness that everything was not as it should have been, or as it always had been. But for once Molly wasn’t eager to pull at the mask of normality settled upon the visage of life in the house, because she no longer wanted to see what was behind it. So when Kay put on her makeup, laid a towel over the pillow on her tightly made bed, and lay down and napped for five or six hours, Molly just got in the car and drove to town to pick up some food, because someone had to do it.
The IGA was one of the few stores still unshuttered. It was only a matter of time before Molly saw someone she knew; three of them, in fact, her former girlfriends from Ulster High School. One of them was Annika. They passed her on the sidewalk as she loaded bags of food into the trunk of her mother’s car. It was plain from the looks on their faces that they had had no warning Molly was back in town. They looked right at her, as if she couldn’t see them too, as if her misfortunes had made her into some sort of figure on a TV screen whom you could stare at unobserved; they had all been something resembling good friends little more than a year before. Molly didn’t have the time or the mental energy to make sense of it. She had another stop to make — at the drugstore, a sensitive errand, at which she was relieved to go unrecognized — before returning to Bull’s Head. Being away from the house, leaving her mother there alone, filled her with a vague dread now, a dread which grew geometrically as she got closer to home.