Justin Cronin - The Summer Guest

Bill didn’t die either, though by all rights he should have. My father was right: Bill didn’t have much time left. Apart from the hypothermia, the fall in the riverbed that had started it all had ruptured the middle meningeal artery-the cavity behind his right eye was slowly filling with blood-and at some point on his trip through the dam, either in the tube or when he and my father popped out into the rocky riverbed below, he suffered a compound fracture of the left tibia, a dislocated shoulder, a ruptured spleen, and a hammer blow to the face that knocked out all his front teeth. Pete and my father managed to pull him out of the river, just about the time that Mike and Carl, who had taken the wrong trail and emerged on the county road two miles from my father’s truck, flagged down the passing logger who put in the radio call that sent Darryl Tanner and the EMTs streaming pell-mell out of town. A helicopter airlifted Bill straight from the site to Farmington General, where he spent the night in the first of three surgeries, and in the morning he was wheeled into the same intensive care ward where, just a few yards away-adding one more symmetry to the day’s events-Harry Wainwright lay dying. My parents took a room at a motel across the highway from the hospital, my mother keeping watch at Harry’s bedside, my father shuttling back and forth between the two men, and when Harry died two days later, my father stayed on another week, until Bill was out of danger.

For a few months, my father’s trip through the dam made him famous. A story in the Portland Press Herald went out on the wires the next morning, and the first call from the networks came by breakfast the following day. The caller introduced herself as a producer from the Today show-was I the daughter of the man everyone was calling the Hero of the Dam? I said I guessed I was, told her how to reach my father at the hospital, and stood with him the next morning in the parking lot as he held the little earpiece against the side of his head and awkwardly answered the questions I couldn’t hear. After that, CBS and ABC both jumped on the bandwagon; once Bill was out of the hospital, both he and my father were flown down to New York to do their morning shows, and by the end of the week they had posed for pictures in magazines from People to Sports Illustrated and inked deals for both a segment on 48 Hours and a television movie-of-the-week, with Richard Dean Anderson attached to star. The movie was never made, of course, much to my father’s relief; he was embarrassed by the whole thing and maintained every step of the way that he’d really done nothing. But well into the following summer and even for a time after that, the buzz in town was all about locations and shooting schedules and whether or not they’d be casting locals as extras, and to this day, rumors of Richard Dean Anderson sightings-like Big Foot, the Loch Ness Monster, and little green men from Mars-will occasionally make the rounds and set the whole thing going again.

Was my father a hero? Absolutely. But in my book, it wasn’t his trip through the dam that made him so, no matter how the media played it. What he did was brave, and completely crazy, and if you didn’t know the man, it might surprise you plenty. But he’d done far braver things in his life-all his life-not the least of which was warming another man’s child against his skin while outside the snow poured down, and loving that child so fiercely she became his own. Your daddy. I’ve never thought differently, not for a second, and in a world darkened by secrets, where one true light is still enough to guide you home, that’s mine.

Once the hubbub died down and my parents returned to Big Pine, I thought things would return to normal, and for a while they did. My father bought Frank DeMizio’s Chris-Craft, just as he’d planned, and in the spring my parents moved into a new two-story house down the road from their condo. They rented out their old place to Bill, who had quit his job in Worcester and was waiting for his divorce to come through; when Bill decided to stay on permanently, my father took him on as a partner. A year later, he got a call from Frank DeMizio, the naked gangster himself, fresh from eighteen months in the federal pen for tax evasion, and the three of them-a lawyer and two federal ex-cons-decided to go into business together, fixing up and selling vintage wooden powerboats, with Hal bankrolling them as a silent partner. Frank, just as my father had always assured me, really was a nice guy underneath all the rough stuff; he also turned out to be something of a genius at restoration. So, while Frank oversaw the shop on Big Pine, Bill and my father scoured the country, the two of them gone for weeks at a time hunting down forgotten classics moldering in barns and boatyards, from tiny lake runabouts to big oceangoing fifty-footers they shipped south on the back of a semi.

I was in medical school by then-Dartmouth Hitchcock, after all-sleeping four hours a night or less, and my father would sometimes telephone me at odd hours, telling me about a boat he and Bill had found in someplace weird, a garage in Goose Bay or a cornfield in Kalamazoo. You should see this thing, Kats, he always said, his voice crackly with distance, and always some odd sound in the background, the airy whoosh of traffic on an interstate, or music coming from a roadhouse jukebox. Christ, Kats, it’s like finding the Mona Lisa at a garage sale, we couldn’t whip out the checkbook fast enough. Sitting in the kitchen of my tiny third-floor apartment with a pot of black coffee warming on the stove and Netter’s Atlas of Human Anatomy propped on the table in front of me, or lying in my dark bedroom with the phone pressed to my ear, I would listen to his voice and the sounds around it, trying to send my mind down the miles of wire to where he was. You studying hard? he always asked. You don’t mind me calling so late, do you, Kats? Not at all, I said, you know I don’t, and smiled, thinking how strange it was, and nice too, that in the end it was my father, not I, who had flown the nest. We’d talk awhile about the boat he’d found, and about school, and what my mother was up to and when I’d next be coming down to Florida; when the time came to end our call, he’d clear his throat and say, Well. Better go. I miss you, Kats. I know you do, Daddy, I always said, and told him I missed him, too, and after a moment of silence the two of us would hang up the phone together, never saying the word good-bye.

In the summer of ’99, a month after I’d started my residency in internal medicine at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston, my father flew with Bill to Salt Lake City to look at a boat he had seen advertised in WoodenBoat magazine, and at the last minute they decided to add a side trip to Lake Tahoe. They could have flown but decided to drive instead, eight hours across the dry mountains and sagebrush bowls of northern Nevada on Interstate 80. They were thirty miles east of the town of Elko when my father, in the passenger seat, asked Bill to stop the car.

Here, you mean? Bill asked. What for?

Just stop, please.

Bill pulled to the side of the road, and without another word, my father got out. What Bill told me later was that he thought my father simply wanted to take a leak and was too polite to say so. He stepped away from the car, mounted the metal guardrail, and made his way down the sandy embankment. Except for the highway, there was nothing around for miles; it was noon, not a cloud in the sky, and probably over a hundred degrees. To the north, a line of mountains shifted in the wavy haze. Perplexed, Bill got out of the car and watched my father from the guardrail. About a hundred feet from the road, my father stopped in his tracks, put his hands on his hips, and tipped his face to the empty, sun-bleached sky. Bill said he seemed almost frozen, like a statue. My father stayed that way ten seconds: ten tiny seconds to leave his life. Kats, he thought, and two thousand miles away, I heard; I hear him still, in the smallest things, in the shifting wind and jostling leaves, and the sound snow makes when it falls. Kats, something is happening. Kats, you’re my one, remember that. Then he collapsed, probably already dead, onto the desert floor.