Exley (14 page)

“So I don't think so,” L. said. “I think you're confused. I think you're thinking of Iraq.
That's
where the war is. I think they make
blankets
or something in Afghanistan.”

Anyway, I was talking about J., not L. J. was nice. She wasn't like K. or Mother. But she was nice.

We walked through the sliding glass doors together. The same woman was sitting at her desk, staring at her computer. She looked up when she heard the doors close. She saw me first and squinted. “Your . . . ,” she started to say to me, but then she noticed J. and said, “Hello, J.”

“Hi, Mrs. C.,” J. said.

“Hi,” I said. “How's my dad doing?”

“Oh, he's still kicking!” Mrs. C. said, but she was back looking at her computer screen.

The swinging doors were in front of us. I pointed at them and said to J., “My dad's room is through there.”

“Well, my father is on the
second
floor,” J. said, and started walking toward the elevator. The way she emphasized the word “second” made me think the patients on the second floor were different from the patients on the first, and that made me wonder: How bad off was my dad? Was he better or worse than the other patients?

“Hey,” I said. “Can I come with you?”

“Why?”

“I don't know,” I said. I tried to come up with a reason. “I just don't think I've ever met your dad before,” I finally said.

“I'm pretty sure you haven't,” J. said. She pushed the Up button and waited. The elevator doors opened. She walked in the elevator and then turned to face me. She was touching her scar again, but she was also smiling. “I guess that'd be OK,” she finally said. The doors started closing. She put her hand in between them; they stopped, then reopened, and I got in.

The elevator door opened and we got out and walked down the hall. It was full of patients. They were getting their exercise. The patients with two legs were walking on their own or with their arms hooked through the arms of nurses, or wives, or husbands, or physical therapists. I saw a lady on crutches; she had one leg. That leg was on the floor, obviously, or at least its foot was. The other leg was almost completely gone: the leg of her pajamas was folded up to the middle of her thigh and pinned there. When she swung on the crutches, the pinned pajama leg flared to the side. Her pajamas were pink with flowers; there were towels folded at the top of each crutch, over the rubber part that went under the armpit. The towels were pink, too. There was a man next to her. He was using a walker, although he had two legs. I wondered what was wrong with him, until I noticed there was a tube running out of his stomach, into a clear sack attached to his walker. The tube was very wide and the sack was very big and both were filled with something that was the color of mud. It looked too brown and murky to be blood, but I didn't know what else it could be. The man was doubled over a little, and every time he moved the walker, the tube swung and the man made a hissing sound behind his teeth. The man and the woman were standing really close to each other, even though the sack was on the woman's side of the walker. My first thought was that she must have been really in love with him to be standing that close to the sack. But maybe they were only standing so close to each other because the hall was so crowded.

Because it
was
crowded. Full of people who seemed normal enough except for one or two things that made them much different. It was like walking through a mall in a foreign country. I was happy to have a guide. I followed J. as she snaked in and out of the crowd. The hallway was in a U shape. She walked down one side of the hallway, around the curve of the U, then stopped at the second door. I stopped a few steps behind her,
because now that we were here, I wasn't sure she'd really want me to come in. But she turned and waved at me to come on. So I did.

This is what I saw. I saw J.'s father lying belly-down on the table. The table was on wheels and was next to J.'s father's bed, which was also on wheels. J.'s father was more or less as old as my dad. He was unshaven. When my dad didn't shave, he looked tough; J.'s father just looked dirty, even in the eyes, which were pale, pale blue and watery. Maybe because of the pain. Because J.'s father wasn't alone. There was another guy, a nurse or a therapist, leaning over J.'s father, rotating his stumps. I don't know how else to say it. He took J.'s father's left stump in both his hands, rotated it clockwise a few times, then counterclockwise a few times. Then he put the left stump on the table, lifted the right one, and did the same. The stumps were wrapped in Ace bandages. I had two thoughts. First was,
Thank God my dad isn't as bad off as J.'s dad
. And second:
I wonder what his stumps look like under the bandages
. I was staring at the bandages when J.'s father looked in my direction and caught me.

“I'm sorry,” I said. That startled the therapist. He dropped J.'s father's right stump and looked at me. His eyes were a much darker blue, much more alert, much less watery. He had a crew cut, and his arms had muscles you could see even when he was just standing there and not doing anything physical. He looked more like a soldier than J.'s father did.

“Hey, J.,” the therapist said, like they were buddies. But J. didn't say anything back, which told me they weren't. She walked over and kissed her dad on the top of the head and said, “Hi, Daddy.” J.'s father turned his head to the right and smiled up at J., then looked at me and smiled, but the smile was different. Once, at school, I'd heard a kid griping about losing his baseball glove. In the middle of the gripe, another smaller kid walked by, a baseball glove tucked under his arm. The bigger kid smiled at the smaller kid like J.'s father smiled at me. The therapist was watching all this, but he clearly didn't know what to make of it or me. “Hey,” he said to me.

“Hey,” I said back. The therapist seemed to want more from me than just that, though, so I also said, “I'm Miller Le Ray. J. and I are in advanced reading together. My dad is on the first floor.”

“Gotcha,” the therapist said.

“Knock, knock,” J.'s father said to me. His voice was rough and dry. I wondered when the last time he'd talked to someone was. I wondered if someone would even
want
to talk to him. His face was angry and tense.

“Daddy,” J. said.

“Excuse me?” I said. I mean, I knew what to say next, except I couldn't imagine that's what J.'s father wanted me to say next. But he did.

“As in the joke,” he said. “Knock, knock.”

“Daddy,
” J. said. This was clearly something her dad did — told knock-knock jokes to strangers — and I wasn't sure if J. was mad or just pretending to be mad. She rolled her eyes at him, then at me, and so I knew she was just pretending.

“Who's there?” I said.

“9/11.”

“9/11 who?”

An expression washed over J.'s father's face — not outrage, but sadness and disappointment. Just like that, he became a totally different guy, in the face. He probably would have been a great actor if he hadn't been missing both his legs. “You said you'd never forget,” he whispered. Then he laughed. It was the kind of joke the teller had to laugh at, because he couldn't be sure anyone else would. J. didn't laugh; maybe she'd already heard the joke. She did smile in kind of an “Oh, Daddy” way. I
might
have laughed if I knew J.'s father better and had been expecting the joke or something like it. But I didn't, so I didn't. The therapist sure didn't seem to think it was funny, though. He put his hands on J.'s father's stumps. His face looked determined. His biceps went to attention and stayed there, quivering. “Ready?” he said.

“Hell, no,” J.'s father said. But the therapist went back to rotating his stumps anyway.

I LEFT J
.'s father's room then and went out into the hall. J. followed me.

“Well,” she said, smiling, “that's my dad.”

“I liked his joke.”

“Yeah,” J. said, rolling her eyes again, pretending to be sheepish. “He thinks he's a card.”

“The therapist didn't think he was a card.”

“The
therapist
is a” — and I could see J. struggling to come up with a word bad enough to describe the therapist that wasn't so bad that she couldn't say it. I'd never heard J. say a bad word in the two months I'd known her — “dick wad,” she finally said. I laughed because I could tell that she had never used the words before and had probably only read them scrawled in the bathroom or on the bus. She pronounced “wad” like it rhymed with “sad.” I suddenly liked her a lot. I looked at her closely; I guess I'd never done that before. She was pretty. She wasn't pretty like K. or Mother. But she was very pretty, even with the scar. I wondered, for the first time, where she'd gotten it. It looked like what happened when you fall asleep on the couch and the cushion leaves a mark on your cheek. Except that mark goes away, and hers obviously hadn't.

“So,” she said, “can we go see your dad now?”

“What?” I said. “No.” I must have said “No” louder than I'd meant to, because J. took a step back. “I mean, you can't.”

“Why not?” J. said. When she was with her dad, I'd kept waiting for her to touch her scar. She hadn't, but she was touching it now. I felt bad that I was making her feel worse than her dad, who didn't have any legs. But I didn't want her to see my dad, not before I saw him myself. If I could be sure he would be doing better than the day before, if he was talking and stuff like that, then it would be different. But there was something in Mrs. C.'s “Oh, he's still kicking!” that worried me. Suppose my dad was the same as when I'd left him the day before? Suppose he was worse? Suppose he was worse than J.'s father, who had no legs but who could at least tell jokes? Suppose he was just lying there? It wasn't that I was ashamed of my dad; I was ashamed of myself, for not finding Exley yet, for not being able to help my dad yet. I made up my mind then that I didn't want anyone to see my dad until I found Exley, which meant that the next person to see my dad besides me would have to be Exley. But I couldn't tell J. all that, and so I said, “He's not allowed visitors except for family.”

“Is he OK?”

“Oh, he's OK,” I said. “He's getting better. I'm sure you can come see him soon. Maybe in a week.”

“My dad might not be here in a week,” J. said. For a second I thought J. was saying that her dad might be dead in a week. But then I realized she
meant they might let him leave the VA hospital and go home. Her face was shining now, and she'd stopped touching her zipper scar. I could tell she had stopped thinking about me and my dad and was thinking about hers again. “I'll see you at school tomorrow,” she said, and then went back into her dad's room.

AFTER THAT,
I went to see my dad. The first floor was much quieter than the second, and I realized that's what the first floor was for: for patients who didn't make much noise. I walked into my dad's room. The lights were dim. The Dixie cups were gone, which worried me a lot. My dad was still sleeping, and not kicking at all. Unlike J.'s father, he'd been shaved again. I wondered if they shaved everyone who couldn't tell them he didn't want to be shaved. I sat down next to my dad, put the back of my hand on his forehead. He'd always done that when I was sick and he wanted to see how hot I was. His forehead wasn't slick anymore, but it was still cool. I wondered if he liked my hand there, whether it felt good, or whether it bugged him. Then I wondered if he felt anything at all, and if he didn't, why did I even bother putting my hand on his forehead? So I took my hand away. But once you stop wondering about someone, it's hard to stop yourself. And so I wondered how well I really knew my dad anymore.
Do you miss having a beard
, I wondered,
or are you the kind of guy now who likes to shave, or at least likes to be shaved? What about the guy who punched Harold: would you be proud of me for not kicking him in the face, or would you be disappointed? Are you more like the Exley who wouldn't hit kids, or like the Exley who hit a black guy and a white guy for walking together, the Exley who fantasized about hitting women, the Exley Mother hates so much? Or is it possible to be one and not the other? And what about K.: if I told you I'd been to her home and eaten her cookies, what would you say? Why did you leave us, Dad? Why did you join the army and go to Iraq? Why, after writing me that one letter, didn't you write me again? What kind of dad are you? Are you the kind of dad who just lies there in your bed and doesn't say anything to me, or are you the kind of dad who tells me knock-knock jokes? If you don't wake up, would you mind, or even know, if I'd spent more time with J.'s father and less with you?

And then I felt terrible. I put my hand on my dad's forehead again and
told him I was sorry. I told him I was sorry for wishing he'd be more like J.'s dad, and I told him I was sorry for not finding Exley yet, too. Whenever I apologized to my dad before he went to Iraq, he always said, “You've got nothing to be sorry about, bud. You're just a kid.” This was always why I apologized in the first place: so that he'd tell me I didn't have to. This was why I said I was sorry in the hospital, too: so that he'd wake up and tell me I didn't have to be.
Please
, I told my dad in my head,
please wake up and tell me I don't have to be sorry
. But he didn't, and I was.

Finally, I opened up the copy of
A Fan's Notes
I'd brought with me and began reading it out loud. My dad didn't wake up, but I kept reading it anyway. I read it OK. I didn't sound like Exley, but I didn't sound bad. Then I came to the part after Exley thinks he's having a heart attack, but before Freddy takes him to the hospital, where he finds out he's not. “You son of a bitch!” Exley said to himself. “I want to live!” I choked up a little when I read that. Because I realized that's what I wanted. I didn't want my dad to tell knock-knock jokes. I just wanted my dad to say what Exley had said and mean it. I wanted him to say,
You son of a bitch! I want to live!
But he wasn't saying that; he was still sleeping. So I said it for him, and to him. “You son of a bitch!” I said. “I want you to live!” I kept saying it, over and over, louder and louder, until I hoped he got the message. Someone else on the floor might have gotten the message, too: I could hear shushing sounds coming from the hallway. So I lowered my voice and read the rest of chapter 1. When I was done, I left the book on the table. Then I kissed my dad good night, told him I loved him, and went home.