It’s only been my thirtieth birthday for an hour when I get the call. I think that maybe it’s an over-excited friend who can’t wait until morning to wish me a good day, until I realize that, one, I don’t recognize the number, and two, I don’t really have friends.
Instead, it’s an administrator from a hospital I’m not familiar with. Not until she tells me the town. Then I’m picturing the construction site I got arrested for drinking in, and the water tower I nearly fell from, and the school where I smoked weed on the roof, and the broken bedroom window flecked with my blood.
“He put me as his emergency contact?” I ask, hoping she doesn’t notice how badly I butcher my words, and she tells me that, yes, I’m the only name on her list. I set down my glass and tell her to take me off it, that I don’t know him, never did, but thank you so much for calling and have a good night.
Before I hang up, she says, “Just for your own curiosity, would you like to know what happened to your father?”
Sixteen hours later I’m punching the roof of my car as I take the ticket and watch the automatic arm rise up like a guillotine in reverse. Then I’m spiraling up the parking garage by car and back down on foot, the air so cold I can’t feel my nose, walking through the hissing doors of a hospital I still don’t know the name of, though I think it has something to do with mercy.
The man at the front desk can’t find the room number. I’m tempted to take it as a sign to turn around and head home, but then he finds it and gives me a sticker with my name and a number to put on my chest. The hospital halls smell like bleach, presumably because most people prefer it to the smell of piss, but that’s debatable for me. At least piss doesn’t bring back memories of scrubbing a bathroom floor on bare, shaking knees.
I take a wobbling elevator to the fourth floor and walk past a dozen rooms until I find the sign that matches the number over my heart. For six minutes I stand outside the door, telling myself it’s not too late, I can be watching cartoons on my couch by dinnertime, but then my legs betray me and before I can stop them I’m standing by Lawrence’s bedside, watching him sleep.
Maybe it’s the sickly green hospital gown, or the flickering fluorescent lights, but he looks like he’s aged thirty years in the last ten. His eyes have that sunken-in look of a man on the emergency room diet-and-detox plan, and his skin has the pale, clammy tone to match, like a figure in one of those wax museums that make kids cry and teenagers laugh.
Mostly, though, he looks small, the same way as when you’re visiting your old elementary school and wonder who shrunk all the urinals.
When his eyes eventually blink open and focus on me, those dark gray stones, I don’t feel relief or remorse for the time lost, or any of those things I assume other people would feel in that moment. More than anything, I can’t believe I’m missing my cartoons for this.
“What the hell are you doing here?” he asks. And I have to admit, it’s a pretty good question.
Lawrence spends two weeks at the hospital followed by three months in a rehab facility—exactly ninety days that his insurance will pay—and then a white van with a yellow mechanical ramp drives him home. The driver has me sign his pad and then deposits Lawrence, wheelchair and all, in front of the garage like he’s parking an old car with bad teeth and a beer gut.
Growing up we had the greenest lawn on the block, and maybe the whole town. Even through the Fall and halfway into Winter, the grass out front looked like it belonged on one of those fancy golf courses Lawrence was always talking about joining. His wife dreaded dinnertime and his son prayed for one of the factory machines to swallow him whole, but goddamn if Lawrence didn’t have that lawn just the way he wanted it.
Now, though, it looks like shit. Regardless of it being winter, the length of the dead weeds tells me he hasn’t touched it in years. It’s comforting to know that the neighborhood sees him for exactly who he is now. It’s just a shame it’s too late to do anything about it.
The van pulls away and Lawrence waits for it to turn off the block before he even glances at me. “I told them not to call you,” he says, where most people would just say thanks.
“Yeah, well, it doesn’t work like that. The rehab wouldn’t let you go home by yourself, and the aide doesn’t start until-”
“I don’t need that,” he cuts me off.
“Sure. I give it a month before they find you with a broken neck.”
“I’m not paying some stranger to wipe my ass and tuck me into bed. It’s my house,” he adds.
“And you’re taking such good care of it,” I say, nodding to the sagging porch. He sniffs, digging through the duffel bag in his lap for keys.
“You can get in your car and go back to wherever you’ve been hiding,” he says, pressing the button that opens the garage door. “I’ve been doing fine without you worrying about me.”
“You think I’m worried?” I have to stop myself from laughing because, seriously, it’s just about the funniest thing I’ve heard all year. I lean into his good ear to make sure he can hear me over the noise of the garage door raising up.
“I want to be perfectly clear about something: I’m only here because of one person, and they sure as shit aren’t sitting in that chair. Now, like I was saying, the aide doesn’t start until Monday, which means you’re my burden for the next three days. If you want to kick them out at that point, go right ahead, but until then, I’m sitting on one side of the house, and you’re sitting on the other, and we don’t have to say a goddamn word to each other. In fact, I’d prefer it.” I show him three fingers. “That many days, and you’re someone else’s problem. Then you can wheel yourself into the ocean for all I care.”
The garage door goes quiet. He stares up at me, the monster he’s made, and says, “That’s how you talk to your father?”
“No,” I reply, “that’s how I talk to you.”
I grab the handlebars and roll him inside, shutting the doors behind us. He complains that he can wheel himself in and yet he doesn’t bother to try, not until he throws all his stuff on the kitchen table, awkwardly grabs a bottle of beer from the fridge, and heads to the living room.
The house is cleaner than expected, not as nice as Mom used to keep it but decent enough. The wallpaper is yellowed from cigarette smoke, though, and the air is damp with the kind of mildew that settles into a place when the windows haven’t been opened in years. The only thing still intact is the sitting room couch, suffocated in plastic the way Mom left it.
At the front of the house, at the bottom of the stairs that lead to the second floor, a dark stain the size of my hand has absolutely ruined the carpeting. About halfway up, two of the guardrails holding up the railing are snapped in half where some part of Lawrence struck them on the way down. As I look up at them, trying not to step on the carpet stain, I have to wonder which was louder: the guardrails breaking, or Lawrence’s legs.
“You need anything?”
Lawrence, his wheelchair parked in front of the living room couch, looks up from the TV as if I’m a hypnotist who just snapped his fingers. For a moment he almost looks pitiable. Then his usual scowl comes crashing back, that condescending glare I grew up under, and just like that the moment passes.
“Dinner,” he grunts, returning to the cars driving around in circles, and in my head I keep repeating, three days, three days, three days.
The food in the fridge is coated in a rainbow of mold, from white to green to purple and back again, the stink of which hits my nose in one, unwelcome wave. Which, yeah, is what happens when you leave a fridge untended for two weeks and three months. That means I’ll have to hit the supermarket so Lawrence doesn’t starve under my watch, but considering how late it is in the day, and the fact that I already have a beer in my hand, it’ll have to wait for tomorrow. At least Lawrence still has the decency to fill every fridge in the house with cheap beer.
I order a pizza and drink my beer on the porch to get the stench of rotten food out of my nostrils, the cold wind blowing right through me, teeth chattering against the bottle. The night is quiet. Eventually the kid shows up with the pizza and I toss a few slices onto a plate and drop it in Lawrence’s lap.
Grabbing a few slices for myself, and another beer, I step over the dark stain and head upstairs to check out my old room. I either forgot that I have to pass Mom’s bathroom to get there or some part of me wanted to get a look at it, because I find myself standing in the hallway, beer and pizza in hand, peeking through the open door like I’m fifteen again and afraid of what I’ll see, my heart curled up in my throat.
Before I can get a glimpse of the bathtub, I shut the door and continue to my old room. It’s exactly how I left it all those years ago, band posters on the wall, bed unmade, a closet full of clothes, baseball trophy on the nightstand, and it’s like stepping into a time machine, except as a side effect it induces a panic attack. For a while I sit on my old bed and work on my breathing until I can eat and drink. By the time I remember that I left my backpack with my clothes in the car, the sun has gone down, and I don’t feel like going out to get it.
What I will go for, though, is another beer, so I head back down, past Mom’s bathroom, down Lawrence’s stairs, over his dark stain and into the kitchen. I keep quiet to avoid getting pulled into an argument, so it’s somewhat of a relief when I hear Lawrence is still in the living room, in front of the TV, talking to someone on the phone. It’s hard for me to imagine anyone who still talks to Lawrence at this point, but to their credit they seem to be giving him a hard time, at least based on his defensive answers, shooting them back like he’s afraid of them.
I grab two beers to make sure I don’t have to come back down, then a third to be safe. On a whim I toss all the rotten food I can find in a garbage bag, tie it up and toss it out out on the porch. Call me crazy, but it makes me sleep better knowing I’m not lying under the same roof as a laboratory’s worth of deadly mold. I say that, but really I’m doing it for the sake of the beer.
As I grab the beers and turn to head in for the night, I notice something strange. Lawrence’s duffel bag and discharge papers are still on the table where he left them, along with his phone. It’s strange, considering I thought he’d just been talking on it. By the time I stick my head in the living room to check on him, though, Lawrence is already nodding off in his wheelchair.
Not my problem. He can piss his pants, his chair, and the floor for all I care. He’s made it clear that he doesn’t need anyone’s help—least of all mine.
I wake up in the middle of the night with my bladder kicking me in the stomach. For a second I’m a kid again, alone in my room, bare chest as cold as a corpse, but then it all comes back at once, the years, the loss, the fall, the empty beers next to the trophy on the nightstand, and I pull myself up and stumble out of that dead childhood to take a piss.
Mom’s bathroom is out of the question, so I shuffle past its closed door to the guest bathroom at the end of the hall, the one where I once spit a tooth into the sink, and unleash a torrent into a toilet that hasn’t been touched in years.
“Still has a house phone,” I mumble. It’s the only thing that makes sense. I don’t remember seeing a land line, but that doesn’t mean there isn’t one. These old people can’t part with the past, and I suppose that, yeah, a land line is still important for emergencies. Imagine if his little accident had happened on a bad network day, no reception and him bleeding out with two broken stumps folded under him. It’s almost enough to make a guy smile.
As I’m finishing, a noise out in the hallway perks up my ears and stops me from flushing. A soft dragging, like someone drawing their fingers across the bathroom door. I stay perfectly still, back bent, hand on the flusher, listening to a sound that doesn’t fit, doesn’t make sense, and I have to ask myself if this is a dream, if I’m still back in a bed I just pissed. I decide that, no, I’m not asleep, and yes, I’m really hearing what I’m hearing.
There’s no way it’s Lawrence. He would have to have gotten out of his chair and dragged himself up the flight of stairs like a sack of dirty laundry. If he even had the strength to do something so ridiculous, he still wouldn’t do it, for the simple fact that I’m up here and he wouldn’t want me to think he was coming to check on me.
That means whoever is out in the hallway doesn’t belong in this house.
Without flushing, without making a sound, I slowly reach for the door handle, getting ready to catch whoever it is out there. The dragging noise, the light scratch of fingertips on paint, is further down the hallway now, outside of Mom’s bathroom if I had to guess, and the idea of a stranger so much as touching that door chokes me with rage.
I twist the doorknob and wrench the door open in one motion, rushing out to catch the intruder by surprise, but somehow there’s no one in the hallway. I rush down to check that all the doors are still closed, except for mine which I left open, ducking in to make sure no one’s hiding in there. The night is quiet, the hallway empty, though there’s a smell on the air like someone struck a match. It’s a faint odor but an unmistakable one, and the thought of an intruder with fire on the mind sends me running down the stairs.
After checking the rest of the house and finding nothing, no strangers, no dragging fingers, not even an out-of-place smell, I step into the living room to check on Lawrence as an afterthought, a way to finish a checklist.
Apparently after I turned in for the night, he managed to change into an undershirt and sweatpants and haul himself onto the couch by himself. I can’t even imagine how long that took him, how much he exerted himself, probably slick with sweat by the time he was done, huffing and panting, but then maybe he should have thought of that before he decided to be a mean bastard his entire life and then go and get himself paralyzed.
Standing there over him, smothering any attempt at feeling sorry for him with memories of who he is, I hear whispering. It’s soft, and deep, and it takes me a few seconds to realize it’s coming from Lawrence. He’s talking in his sleep. His lips barely move, though his expression looks pained. I can only make out a few words of it, what sounds like, “There’s nothing left.”
As I pass back through the kitchen, I consider grabbing a beer to help me fall asleep, what with my heart and brain slam-dancing, but I decide it’s not worth it. What if I wake up having to piss again and the cycle starts over? Forget it. I’ll fall asleep the old-fashioned way.
Back upstairs I find a normal hallway, with even the struck-match odor faded to nothing but a memory that feels like a dream, the kind your mind makes up when you’re half-asleep and half whatever else, and I drag my feet back to my old bedroom looking forward to being taken back in by sleep.
Halfway there, I stop walking. I played enough Spot the Difference as a kid, that game where you compare two pictures and try to figure out what’s changed, to know there’s one thing that isn’t how I left it.
My mother’s old bathroom. I know I closed the door earlier, even checked that it was still shut, but now here I am, not blinking, and there it is, wide open. And that bathtub, something about it, something in it, even—I swear it’s staring at me.
I almost sleep straight through the morning, though I feel like I didn’t sleep at all. Then I look out the window to find it’s been snowing, which is just great considering I have to hit a few stores to make sure there’s food in the house until Monday. So I throw on one of Lawrence’s old coats, trudge through the backyard, and dig out a shovel from the half-rotted shed to attack the snow with.
The snow is wet and heavy. With each shovelful, last night’s fear turns into something darker. Something like me: Lawrence’s fault.
Once the driveway is at least clear enough to pull my car out, I leave the shovel on the porch and stomp with wet shoes back inside, spine stiff and cold hair matted to my forehead, and discover Lawrence has changed his clothes and wheeled himself into the kitchen to look through the empty cabinets.
“I’m going to the supermarket,” I say, before he can ask. “Any brand of slop you prefer?”
Instead of answering, he pops open a can of instant coffee. The way my head is pounding I could snort lines of it, but I’d rather suffer than ask him for a cup.
“By the way,” I add, “do you still have a home phone?”
He looks over at me for the first time. “What kind of a stupid question is that?”
“Stupid because you do, or stupid because you don’t?”
He grunts. “Why would I waste my money on something I don’t use?”
“Stupid because you don’t,” I conclude.
He goes back to preparing his coffee, straining to reach the counter. “Did you clean off my car?” he asks, and I try not to smile as I reply.
“Why would I waste my time on something you don’t use?”
The roads, I soon find, are a mess. Some cars skid and slide on unplowed blacktop, others go at a crawl to avoid doing the same. The more I sit with Lawrence’s conversation, the one he had without a phone, the less I like it. I don’t like much that’s happened in the house in the past day, and not in the ways I’d expected. Well, not just in the ways I’d expected.
At the supermarket I fill a cart with canned beans and corn, boxes of instant macaroni, and every microwave dinner meatloaf they have, plus a few pizzas for myself. Passing through an aisle of calculators and alarm clocks, I spot a display of cheap home surveillance cameras and toss two into the cart.
Back at the house, I find more wet footprints than I remember making.
“When are you leaving?” Lawrence asks me over his plate full of microwaved meatloaf. I tell him Monday, and not a second later. “Good,” he replies. “You’re drinking me out of a house.”
I only have two beers with my frozen pizza, then turn in early and make sure the app on my phone is connected to the camera. It shows me the living room from up on the shelf where I put it, the scene tinted the greenish black-and-white of infrared. As he’s done for the past day and the twenty years leading up to it, Lawrence watches TV from the couch, his eyes like two, black voids thanks to the night vision.
For a while I watch him laying there, switching occasionally to the camera in the upstairs hallway, but it doesn’t make for the most exciting viewing, and pretty soon my eyelids feel syrupy and my legs grow heavier and heavier until it seems I’m about to fall right through the bed and then the floor, leaving behind a hole in the shape of my silhouette like in the cartoons that rotted my brain.
I know I’m dreaming because Mom wasn’t around by the time I got to college, and yet here she is in my dorm room, standing over me as I lay on the floor, and before that turning my head to make sure I don’t aspirate on what comes back up. Even through the bile in my nostrils, she smells like dirt and lilies. Then something is wrong with my chest, my solar plexus shaking like a honeybee hive that senses an intruder. Before Mom can warn me, I touch my hand to it and feel the hard mass there, like a mushroom of cancer growing up from my chest, and then it shakes again beneath my fingers and I realize that, no, it’s my phone, and no, Mom is dead.
My eyes open and a second later my hands start to work again, grabbing my phone from where it fell on my chest. The notification shows motion detected in the upstairs hallway, but when I press on it, it only shows me the stillness of an empty place, like a photograph if not for the video noise. With a press I switch to the other camera downstairs.
Lawrence is on the couch, slightly shifted from the last time I saw him but otherwise asleep. There’s a bit of pixel shifting on his face, so I zoom in to get a look at it, realizing quickly that it’s because his expression is changing rapidly, as if in pain, and his lips are moving. It takes a moment to realize he’s talking in his sleep. I press the speaker icon that lets me hear what’s going on.
“No. Please. No, you can’t.”
Even if it’s just in his sleep, this is the first time I’ve ever heard Lawrence’s voice like this. Scared. He almost sounds like a completely different person, certainly not anyone the ten-year-old me would have recognized.
“No!” Lawrence shouts in his sleep. “Leave him alone!”
A shape to the right of my bed catches me off-guard, a dark mass in my peripheral vision. I glance up to see it and a small gasp escapes me.
It’s Lawrence, but not Lawrence. He’s standing on two legs, for one, but also his face is different, distorted. The word that comes to mind is polluted just before he falls on me, wrapping his cold hands around my throat, and begins to choke me.
Even as my hands claw helplessly at his, legs kicking, I look up at him with a distant sense of horror, this impossible man, this Not-Lawrence, trying to understand. His twisted face smiles down at me, but not just a smile, an angry grin, as if he loathes me but at the same time enjoys squeezing the life from me. And meanwhile the dark room around us, my childhood bedroom, the place where I used to hide from the world but perhaps this man the most, grows darker, dimmer, less colorful, and my legs kick softer, my hands relaxing.
Just before the lights go out, some voice at the back of my head tells me that I’m dying, that this is the end of my story if I don’t do something right now, and I can swear it’s not my own voice but a woman’s voice, a familiar one. Either way the voice is right, and the thought of dying at this man’s hands is enough to anger me into action.
With the little strength I have left in my body, I concentrate on moving my right arm up and out, to look for something I can use. My hand knocks over empty beer cans on the night stand, sending them clanging and crashing to the floor, the sound of it sounding miles away. Then my hand hits something harder, something cold and solid, and I will my fingers to close around it before I even know what it is, and still don’t know as I push everything I have into my arm and swing it up at Not-Lawrence to smash it over his head.
What happens instead is, it passes right through him like a fireplace poker through a burnt-out log, and he turns to screaming hot ash over me, disappearing into the air. The grip around my throat disappears with him, and all that’s left is me, in bed, gripping my old baseball trophy.
I sit up, gasping and coughing and swallowing down great gulps of sweet air until my vision is steady and I’m able to get to my feet. A moment later I’m stumbling down the stairs and running to the living room to shout at Lawrence, who himself is already sat up like he’s waiting for me.
“What the hell’s going on?” I yell. “Who was that?”
“I told you not to come here,” he replies quietly, frowning up at me as if to leave it at that.
“That’s not an answer, Lawrence. Something just tried to kill me up there, and it looked just like you.” Thinking about its twisted grin, the way it felt so familiar, like a long look at something I’d only glanced at my whole life, I add, “How long has it been here?”
And Lawrence, he doesn’t so much answer me as he does close his eyes, squeeze his face up tight, and let out a pained scream that’s so loud I cover my ears. When I uncover them, I hear an awful sound like wet branches breaking underfoot. Still screaming, but muffled and choked by pain, Lawrence grips the couch cushions as his legs twist and rearrange, manipulated into a new shape by unseen hands.
Then he stands up, a broken puppet on mutilated legs, and his face is no longer his; an angry smile back from the ash.
Maybe if I had the vantage point of the camera on the shelf I could have seen it coming, but since I don’t, I’m caught unaware as he reaches back to the couch, pulls a half-empty bottle from between the cushions, and cracks me upside the head with it. Jagged glass and warm beer explode my senses and then I’m tumbling through the air, not knowing which way is up, eyes rolling into the back of my head.
By the time I regain some sense of myself I feel carpet rubbing against my back, followed by the thump-thump, thump-thump of stairs bouncing against my head. I reach out for passing guardrails to stop myself but my hand passes right through where two of them are missing, and then a moment later they’re all gone and so are the stairs.
When I realize which room I’m being dragged into, I find enough fight in myself to claw at the door frame and kick against Lawrence’s powerful grip. It’s like I’m a kid again and he’s so much bigger and stronger than me, a towering presence I couldn’t stand up to even if I dared.
My fingers pulled free from the door frame, he lifts me up to look me in the face, his grin like hot dumpster stench, and says, “This is where you belong,” in a voice that belongs to Lawrence and Not-Lawrence all at once, two voices sliced into strips and laid side-by-side, and then hurls me into the bathtub.
I crumple inside the tub a ragdoll of bruises. My eyes sting from wetness and only now do I realize my head is bleeding, the blood seeping into the corners of my eyes, and I try to wipe it away thinking of Mom, thinking of the bathtub, thinking of the stain that just wouldn’t come out no matter how much I scrubbed, no matter how much Lawrence yelled at me to try harder, to do something right.
The squeak of a faucet becomes the gurgle of water flowing and then it’s not just my head and my eyes that are wet as the bathtub fills and Not-Lawrence holds me down like it’s nothing to him at all.
It makes me so angry, that face. I don’t know why I’ve ever expected anything but this from a man with a face like that. I don’t know how I expected to ever make him proud or at least leave me alone. A face like that, a smile like that, is capable of only total destruction of everyone around it. It takes a day like today to figure that out.
With my back underwater, I draw up my leg, pull my foot as far back as it goes, and kick Not-Lawrence in that face as hard as I can. Even as it connects, knocking that smile right off his face, I feel the urge to do it again. A feeling like this can become an addiction. But I know better than to let the surprise go to waste, seeing as it might be my only chance to get out of this tub alive, so instead I shoot up out of the water, grab him by his bony shoulders, and pull him in with me.
Wrestling myself on top of him, I hold him face-down in the rising water and put all of my weight on his back. The tub is too small for him to maneuver his arms or find any purchase, and though he bucks and thrashes like a feral animal, I manage to stay on top, wrapping my hands around his neck for good measure, squeezing it tight, and I think, Is this how you would do it? And I shout, Are you proud of me now?
Right then, just as a big bubble escapes his mouth and his splashing and thrashing begins to calm, I glance over at the sink across the bathroom. Above it is Lawrence’s smile looking back at me, so angry and yet so alive, that monstrous grin that terrifies me. And it takes a moment, I mean a good second or two, to realize who I’m looking at.
When I do, I let go. I can’t get out of the bathtub quick enough, nearly slipping and breaking my neck stepping back onto wet tile. As I do, Lawrence pushes himself out of the half-filled water and turns over messily, his legs no longer the puppet’s things they just were but broken, useless things. He stares at me, and me at him, both of us gasping at air that burns our throats and lungs. Eventually, finally, he’s the first to speak.
“This’ll be yours soon enough, you know,” he says, and it’s the most honest thing I’ve ever heard him say, so much so that I barely recognize him, this man who didn’t so much raise me as he did make everything else seem easy to deal with in comparison.
In return, I offer him my hand and say, “You keep it, Dad. I think it suits you better.”
When I leave on Monday, I leave with no bags at all.
This Will Be Yours