This was how Jacob planned on explaining it all to Oliver, as he walked quickly through the halls of Anchorage House to Oliver’s office, where he had been abruptly summoned over the PA system, midway through his shift in Dr. Feingold’s group. He knew he was in deep shit even before he saw that the door to Oliver’s office was, unusually, closed.
“Dr. Boujedra?” he said, knocking quickly on his way in. “You wanted me to come—”
Inside the office, Jacob saw Oliver’s elbows on his desk, his hands gripping the sides of his balding head. A police officer stood a few feet behind the door, fiddling with the dispatch radio on his belt. Jacob froze. Surely not because of him?
“Thanks for coming in. Unfortunately, my father just had a stroke behind the wheel of a car. He’s been killed. This officer needs me to go and identify his body.”
Jacob didn’t understand. “What? All the way to India?”
The police officer looked confused.
“Jake — you know—” Oliver paused to collect himself. “My father has been in a senior citizens’ community in Mount Kisco for a few months. Before that he lived in New Jersey.”
Jacob had known this. It was just the way Oliver spoke about his father — always reminiscing, always in the past tense, made it seem like Dr. Boujedra, Sr., still lived far away. But yes, now that he thought about it, he remembered that the man had been widowed six years ago and had then retired to the United States.
He began remembering snippets of conversations with Oliver — anecdotes of how Dr. B. Sr. had been behaving erratically. The diagnosis was Alzheimer’s, and Oliver had gone down to Jersey to bring him up to the Glendale Retirement Center.
Jacob thought of something. “Where’d he get a car?”
Oliver looked embarrassed.
The officer spoke up. “He pocketed a set of keys belonging to the assistant director of the facility. Nice little blue Porsche. Cayenne model?”
“Yes,” Oliver said bitterly. “Which he totaled. Drove it into a water hazard at the Sunningdale Country Club.”
Jacob tried to cover his snort of amusement with a fake sneeze.
Oliver didn’t seem overly convinced. He sighed. “I suppose I should be happy he didn’t kill anybody. Anybody else.”
All Jacob wanted to do was throw his arms around Oliver, but he kept pretending that he was just a dutiful employee. “How can I help?”
Dr. Boujedra cleared his throat. “Officer Himmel is giving me a ride to the morgue. I was hoping you could drop my truck off by my flat later this evening on your way home from work. If it isn’t too far out of your way. I don’t think I’m in any condition to drive, and I’d — I’d leave it here but the Glendale people have asked me to come by in the morning to pick up his things.”
Jacob could barely hear himself saying, “Sure, sure. Of course.”
Oliver was standing, arms folded against himself, his face turned away. Coldly, he sorted papers into his bag to take home. Then he handed Jacob the keys to the truck and walked off with Officer Himmel.
Jacob went into the bathroom to stick his face under the tap, slurping coppery water until his mouth was numb and his stomach was full and sick. He fumbled his way into the stall. It was like being hung over — or still drunk from a week ago. Fuzzy sheet over his eyes, cotton in his mouth and ears. He’d never had a panic attack before. He’d always figured it would be like being out of breath, but he was breathing fine, even though his nostrils stung as if he’d been huffing Sriracha. He ground the heels of his palms against his eyeballs, which felt as if they’d been turned to marbles inside their sockets. When he felt like he could walk again, he went straight to Oliver’s parking spot and jumped into the truck.
At first he intended to just head back to Oliver’s early — maybe lie down for a while and flip through one of the pretentious little green leather-bound Poetry Classics volumes that he kept way up on the top shelf in his study, so no one could see they’d come through some Time-Life subscription service back in the 1980s. But as Jacob went out the back way and got onto the Hutchinson River Parkway, he began to dread the idea of lying there alone in the flat. Waiting for the sound of keys in the door and knowing it would be Oliver, all sad and depressed, or maybe still aloof and despondent as he’d been in the office.
Steadily, Jacob accelerated. The trees along the parkway were brilliant green and moving lightly in the breeze. He rolled the window down a little and set the radio dial to seek. He’d never even met the elder Dr. B. Probably Oliver had known this was coming. He was probably more annoyed about having to pay for the Porsche.
Jacob wondered what he’d do if his own father died. Probably drink heavily. Certainly be extra rude to people like Oliver. And he didn’t even like his father — Oliver and his dad had been quite close. Well, no, not that close. The real problem was that Jacob was dating a man in his late fifties who was still basically in the closet. The old man had gone to his grave believing that his son was straight. Still asking when he and his ex-wife would finally get back together. Now Jacob wondered if, somewhere deep down, Oliver wasn’t relieved: both his parents had died without knowing their son slept with men.
Jacob remembered coming out to his own parents at age fifteen to Royal Shakespeare Company — level hysterics. His father had sworn solemn oaths, and his mother had literally beat her breast. Oliver had never lived through such a scene. True, post-fallout had been better — he got a rare apology from his father and had gotten to watch him reading, in extreme discomfort, self-help books with titles like Love Is Alclass="underline" Accepting Your Gay Son. That had been pretty priceless; there had been illustrations. Plus, he’d got to check out men at the mall with his mother after school.
Jacob hardly called his parents now and only visited on his birthday. He wondered how it would feel to be an orphan.
The radio came onto a classic rock station, and Jacob punched the button to hold it there on the tail end of “Paradise City.” He cranked it as high as it would go, rolling both the windows down so that the wind roared back and forth across the bench seat. “‘Oh won’t you please oh take me hooooooome…’” He recalled nights in dark Ithaca basements, lost in the strobing of jury-rigged lights, voices all around him shouting this anthem from before their time.
Jacob sped up, sailing around each bend, tacking between lanes around sad little Hondas and Kias and Scions. His heart thundered, and cool air pummeled his face with tiny fists. The music crescendoed and crashed into silence, and Jacob felt as if his whole body might burst. Just then a little prerecorded promo came on: Two for. Two for. Two for Tuesday. Jacob remembered loving this as a kid, when they’d play a second song by the same artist, right after the first. And softly, the rising return of Axl’s moan, knock knock knocking on heaven’s door and Jacob pounded his fists against the steering wheel, lost in a joy greater than he’d felt in over a year, ecstatic — filled up like this by not just one song but a second, just when it ought to be over.