T. Parker - Laguna Heat

“You sound bitter, son. A door is closed and a window opens. When you find a young woman whose soul is your soul, take her as a wife and love her with all your heart.” Wade’s voice was the same mellifluous, optimistic one that he used for his televised sermons.

Shephard nodded. “I did that,” he said.

“Only a fool would close the window,” his father said quietly.

“You haven’t raised a fool.”

“No. I haven’t.” Wade sipped his coffee, and as his father lowered his face, Shephard saw a change of expression so subtle only a son might register it. For an instant, the face of Wade the Cop passed across the face of Wade the Reverend, like the shadow of a bird across water. Then it was gone and Wade looked up. “You know, I think that everything I’ve done in my life — from the time I married your mother and every day after she left us — I did in some way for her. Even before I met her. Somehow I was acting for her, anticipating her. And judged by some standards, I have done wonderful things. The power of the Lord has given me a large congregation that grew from almost nothing. Do you remember the first sermon in that makeshift chapel that still smelled like popcorn? With Little Theodore sitting there in a sweat?” He paused, as he did on television, for effect. “Then a huge chapel in which to worship. And the beginnings of a hospital in Yucatan, where we can carry the mercy of God to those who need it most. And I have been given some beautiful things, too. A lovely house in a beautiful city, good friends, health. But you know something? I would trade it all to have her back with me.”

Wade brought a napkin to his mouth, patted, set it down on the table in front of him. Shephard poured himself another glass of wine. His father smiled.

“I think, of all the joys on earth, that the love shared by a man and a woman is most sacred, Tommy. And human, too. When I loved Colleen I told myself that it was the best of what I would ever do. I was your age when I thought that. And now, it’s thirty years later and I feel the same thing. I would trade it all to have her back in this house with me. You’ll never hear that in a Sunday sermon, or maybe you will, but it’s true. The times we had, the laughter. Even the sorrow we shared...” Wade smiled again and it wasn’t the public version, but a private reminiscence, a reverie about something fine.

Shephard felt like a man listening to an advertisement for something he couldn’t buy. The image of Louise reclining on a Malibu sun deck flitted into his mind, followed by one of Jane Algernon standing in waders, aiming her lovely and hurtful smile across the yard at him.

“The hospital in Yucatan,” he said, “will it be big?”

“Two hundred beds, Tommy. And the donations keep rolling in. We’re about to break ground, and she’s going to be beautiful. I decided to call it the Sisters of Mercy Hospital. Come back to the den, I’ll show you the blueprints.”

Wade led him from the dining room into the living room, then down the familiar hallway to the den. The presence of his old house, the home of his boyhood, brought back to Shephard a horde of memories that fought for attention all at once: walking down this same hallway in his baseball cleats and getting a wild bawling out by Wade; the same hallway where Pudgy, Shephard’s beloved mutt, had scampered a million times and slammed into the wall, unable to negotiate the sharp turn to Shephard’s bedroom; that bedroom, first on the right, where he had retreated to play with Christmas presents, cried at the first heartbreak of romantic love in the fourth grade, slept long and feverishly through the chicken pox, constructed out of cardboard his first motorcycle, stared through the window when the rain fell so hard in 1960 that three houses in the Heights had slipped into the street, and sat benumbed before the small television set the day of John Kennedy’s funeral watching the motorcade labor through the streets — Hope Creeley had been right, the wind was foreign and merciless that day.

Even the smells seemed haunted: his father’s invariable Sunday morning menu of pancakes, bacon, and eggs; the dank and muted smell of sulfur brought up in the water system; the undercurrent of saltwater that was always stronger in summer; the smell of dried eucalyptus leaves, Wade’s favorite, which were always placed around the Shephard house in vases; even — and Shephard believed as they stepped into the den that he could smell it still — the high-pitched stink of his father’s bourbon.

As they went into the den, he realized that what was so strangely timeless about the old house was simply the obvious. Wade hadn’t changed it in thirty years. No new paint, no new carpets, no drapes, no new furniture. Why hadn’t he noticed it before, he asked himself. Because there was nothing to notice?

The Sisters of Mercy blueprint hung from the den wall by thumbtacks. Wade trained the beam from a track light — one new addition, Shephard noted — onto the smeared design and put on his glasses.

“Two stories and two hundred beds,” he said proudly. “One hundred private, the rest in groups of four, six, and eight. A full maternity ward and pediatrics section because the birth rate in Mexico is phenomenal. The hospital itself will be on Isla Arenillas, south of Cozumel. Ten years ago, the villages around were nothing but a few huts and a Pemex station. Now they’re towns. Five years from now they’ll be wonderful little cities full of tourists who are going to pay good money and bring good business to places you’ve never even heard of yet. The Yucatan is going to be the new Mexican Riviera, and the Sisters of Mercy will be there to help.” Wade turned to his son with a contented but oddly skewed grin. “I don’t really know where I got the idea to do this. I just woke up one morning and that’s what I wanted to do. I believe I was guided by the spirit in my decision. Strange, but I’d never even been to Mexico.”

“You’ve been guided a long way from home, pops.”

“A few years from now, I’ll be gone and I’ll have left four miracles behind me. A church and a hospital, a wife and a son. I’m proud of that. I think it’s an honor to add something before you go.”

Wade glanced at his watch and flicked off the track light.

They returned to the dining room, where Shephard helped his father clear the table.

Through the sliding glass door that led to the backyard, Shephard watched the sea heave steadily into Arch Bay. The surging blue was broken only by the bright dabs of color that were his father’s roses, a Wade passion for as long as he could remember. The rose bushes ran the entire length of the wide backyard. They had supplied Shephard with scores of gifts over the years. He remembered particularly a small bunch he had picked for Louise on the occasion of their first date, a mixed bouquet of reds and whites, which he augmented with bright yellow blossoms of sourgrass weed that grew unfettered in a far corner. She had been nearly ecstatic, and Shephard was moved by her reaction in a way that only a boy of sixteen can be. He thought back to that night as he set his wineglass in the sink. After going to bed he had mentally composed love poems to Louise, which he imagined turned into deep blue birds that flitted out of his room and winged through the night to her bedroom. And, too moved by emotion to sleep, he had left his room and gone into the backyard, where he faced in the direction of his beloved’s home and spread his arms to draw in the telepathic poem-birds that she was assuredly sending back to him. He had maintained this dramatic pose for a few long minutes, convinced that the world had never known a love so pure and powerful. Pudgy had sat idiotically in front of him, head cocked, waiting for something to happen.