The Chronoliths

My mother was committed to the long-term care facility after the New York trip — after her legs had mended, and after the doctors at Central Mercy had been forced to pump her full of Haldol until the casts came off. The living room where I sat with my father had changed remarkably little since that time. It was not that he had made an effort to keep the house as a shrine to her. He simply hadn’t changed anything. It hadn’t occurred to him.

“I was getting all kinds of phone calls about you,” he said. “Thought for a while you’d robbed a bank.”

The curtains were closed. It was the kind of house where not much light gets inside no matter what. Nor did the ancient floor lamp do much to dispel the gloom.

He sat in his tired green easy chair, breathing shallowly, waiting for me to speak.

“It was about a job,” I said. “They were doing a background check.”

“Some job, if you got the FBI making house calls.”

The undershirt exposed his ski

I told him, “I’m going out of the country for a while.”

“How long?”

“Tell you the truth, I don’t know.”

“Did the FBI tell you I was sick?”

“I heard.”

“Maybe I’m not as sick as they think. I don’t feel good, but—” He shrugged. “These doctors know fuck-all, but they charge like Moses. You want a cup of coffee?”

“I can get it. I guess the coffee maker’s still where it was.”

“You think I’m too fragile to make coffee?”

“I didn’t say that.”

“I can still make coffee, for Christ’s sake.”

“Don’t let me stop you.”

He went to the kitchen. I got up to follow but stopped at the doorway when I saw him sneaking a big dollop of Jack Daniel’s into his own cup. His hands shook.

I waited in the living room, looking at the bookshelves. Most of the books had been my mother’s. Her tastes had run to Nora Roberts, The Bridges of Madison County, and endless volumes of Tim LaHaye. My father contributed the ancient Tom Clancy novels and Stranger Than Science. I had owned a lot of books when I lived here — I was a straight-A student, probably because I dreaded leaving school and going home — but I had kept my mystery novels segregated on a shelf in my room, primly unwilling to let Conan Doyle or James Lee Burke mingle with the likes of V.C. Andrews and Catherine Coulter.

My father came back with two mugs of coffee. He handed me the one with CORIOLIS SHIPPING, the name of his last employer, still faintly legible on the side. He had managed the Coriolis distribution network for twenty-three years and still collected a pension check every month. The coffee was both bitter and weak. “I don’t have any regular milk or cream,” he said. “I know you like it white. I used powdered milk.”

“It’s fine,” I said.

He settled back into his chair. There was a remote control on the coffee table in front of him, presumably for his video panel. He looked at it wistfully but didn’t reach for it. He said, “That must be some job you applied for, because those FBI people asked some peculiar questions.”

“Like what?”

“Well, there was I guess the usual, where you went to school and what kind of grades you got and where did you work and all that. But they wanted lots of details. Did you go out for sports, what did you do in your spare time, did you talk about politics or history much. Did you have lots of friends or did you keep to yourself. Who was your family doctor, did you have any unusual childhood diseases, did you ever see a shrink. A lot about Elaine, too. They knew she’d been sick. In that area, I mainly told them to fuck off. But they knew a lot already, obviously.”

“They asked about Mom?”

“Didn’t I just say that?”

“What kind of questions?”

“Her, you know, symptoms. When did they come on and how did she behave. How you took it. Things that aren’t anybody’s business but family, frankly. Christ, Scotty, they wanted into everything. They wanted to look at your old stuff that was in the garage. They took samples of the tap water, if you can believe that.”

“You’re telling me they came to the house?”

“Uh-huh.”

“Did they take anything besides tap water?”

“Not as I noticed, but there was a bunch of ‘em and I couldn’t keep an eye on everybody. If you want to check your old stuff, the box is still there, back of the Buick.”

Curious and unsettled, I excused myself long enough to step into the unheated garage.

The box he was talking about contained unsorted detritus from my high-school years. Yearbooks, a couple of academic awards, old novels and DVDs, a few toys and keepsakes. Including, I noticed, the brass Statue of Liberty I had brought home from New York. The green felt base was frayed, the hollow brass body tarnished. I picked it up and tucked it into my jacket pocket. If there was anything missing from this assortment, I couldn’t place it. But the idea of anonymous FBI agents rummaging through boxes in the garage was chilling.

Beneath this, at the bottom of the box, was a layer of my schoolboy drawings. Art was never my best subject, but my mother had liked these well enough to preserve them. Flaking water-based paints on stiff brown paper the consistency of fallen leaves. Snow scenes, mostly. Bent pines, crude snowbound cabins — lonely things in a large landscape.

Back in the house my father was nodding in his chair. The coffee cup teetered on the padded arm. I moved it onto the table. He stirred when the telephone rang. An old handset-style telephone with a digital adapter where the cord joined the wall.

He picked it up, blinked, said, “Yeah,” a couple of times, then offered the receiver. “It’s for you.”

“For me?”

“You see anybody else here?”

The call was Sue Chopra, her voice thin over the old low-bandwidth line.

“You had us worried, Scotty,” she said.

“It’s mutual.”

“You’re wondering how we found you. You should be glad we did. You caused us a lot of anxiety, ru

“Sue, I didn’t run away. I’m spending the afternoon with my father.”

“I understand. It’s just that we could have used some warning up front, before you left town. Morris had you followed.”

“Morris can fuck himself. Are you telling me I have to ask permission to leave town?”

“It’s not a written rule, but it would have been nice. Scotty, I know how angry you must feel. I went through the same thing myself. I can’t justify it to you. But times change. Life is more dangerous than it used to be. When are you coming back?”

“Tonight.”

“Good. I think we need to talk.”

I told her I thought so, too.

I sat with my father a few more minutes, then told him I had to leave. The faint daylight beyond the window had faded altogether. The house was drafty and smelled of dust and dry heat.

He stirred in his chair and said, “You came a long way just to drink coffee and mumble. Look, I know why you’re here. I’ll tell you, I’m not especially afraid of dying. Or even of talking about it. You wake up, you read the mail, you say to yourself, well, it won’t be today. But that’s not the same as not knowing.”

“I understand.”

“No you don’t. But I’m glad you came.”

It was an astonishing thing for him to say. I couldn’t muster a response.

He stood up. His pants rode low on his bony hips. “I didn’t always treat your mother the way I should have. But I was there, Scotty. Remember that. Even when she was at the hospital. Even when she was raving. I didn’t take you mere unless I knew she was having a good day. Some of the things she said would peel your skin. And then you were off at college.”