Adam Haslett - You Are Not a Stranger Here

I’m sorry it’s not actual. You can imagine though how people might enjoy deciding how to walk through it. Patterns would form, families would have their habits.”

“I wanted a father.”

“Don’t say that, Graham.” He’s crying still and I can’t bear it.

“It’s true.”

I turn back to the desk and, kneeling there, scrawl a note.

The pen is nearly ruined and it’s hard to shape the letters.

The writing takes time.

Though some may accuse me of neglect, I have been consistent with the advice I always gave my children: never finish anything that bores you. Unfortunately, some of my children bored me. Graham never did. Please confirm this with him. He is the only one that meant anything to me.

“Graham,” I say, crossing the room some minutes later to show him the piece of paper, to show him the truth. He’s lying on the bed, and as I stand over him I see that he’s asleep. His tears have exhausted him. The skin about his closed eyes is puffy and red and from the corner of his mouth comes a rivulet of drool. I wipe it away with my thumb.

I cup his gentle face in my hands and kiss him on the forehead. From the other bed I take a blanket and cover him, pulling it up over his shoulders, tucking it beneath his chin.

His breath is calm now, even. I leave the note folded by his side. I pat down his hair and turn off the lamp. It’s time for me to go.

When I’m sure he’s comfortable and sleeping soundly, I take my glass and the wine out into the hall. I can feel the weight of every step, my body beginning to tire. I lean against the wall, waiting for the elevator to take me down. The doors open and I enter.

From here in the descending glass cage I can see globes of orange light stretching along the boulevards of Santa Monica toward the beach where the shaded palms sway. I’ve always found the profusion of lights in American cities a cause for optimism, a sign of undiminished credulity, something to bear us along. In the distance, the shimmering pier juts into the vast darkness of the ocean like a burning ship launched into the night.

AS HE PULLED up the drive, Frank saw the skeleton of a Chevy Nova, grass to the windows, rusting in the side yard like some battle-wasted tank. Toy guns and action figures, their plastic faded, lay scattered over the brown lawn. The house, a white fifties prefab, sagged to one side, the chimney tilting. To its left stood a dilapidated barn. From the green spray-painted letters on its door announcing No Girls Allowed it seemed clear the building had some time ago been delivered from the intention of its creator into the hands of children.

He cut the engine and watched the cloud of dirt his tires had kicked up drift into a stand of oak trees shading the side of the house. They were the only trees in sight, empty prairie stretching miles in every direction. He rested his hands and chin over the top of the steering wheel, his head weighed down with the sinus ache of his hangover.

One of the reasons he’d taken his job at a county clinic two thousand miles from his friends and family was that the National Health Service Corps had promised to repay his medical school loans in return for three years’ work in an underserved area. Last night he’d come back to his apartment to find a letter in the mail: Congress was cutting the program’s funding, leaving him the full burden of his debt and a paltry salary to pay it with. He’d spent a year at the job already, and now they were hanging him out to dry. For the first time in his life there was uncertainty in his future. From college to medical school to residency to this job, everything had been applied for and planned. Now he wasn’t even sure he could afford to stay. He’d got drunk on a bottle of scotch his friend from back East had sent him for his birthday. The last thing he had wanted to do today was drive two and half hours here to Ewing Falls to evaluate some woman who’d been refusing to visit the clinic for a year and demanding her medication by phone.

Nearly hundred-degree weather had settled over the state for the last week and today was no exception. With each step across the drive, more dirt rose powder dry into the air. By the time he mounted the porch steps, sweat dampened his collar.

A first knock produced no response. He waited a minute before tapping again. The shades in the front room were pulled to the middle of the windows and all he could see was the wood floor and the floral print back of a sofa. He turned to look across the yard and saw a girl standing in the driveway. She seemed to have appeared from nowhere. By the height of her, she looked eight or nine, but her rigid mouth and narrowed eyes suggested someone older.

“Hey, there.” As soon as he spoke, the girl started walking quickly away, toward the trees.

“Hey,” Frank called to her back, “are your folks home?”

“She ain’t a bigger talker,” a voice behind him said. Frank turned back toward the door to see a middle-aged man dressed in a sweatshirt and work pants. Spidery angiomas, those star-shaped discolorations of the vessels seen in liver patients, blotched the skin of his rounded face. Hepatitis C, Frank thought, or the end of a serious drinking habit. The man took a drag on his cigarette, holding the filter between thumb and forefinger, the exhaled smoke floating over the porch, tingling Frank’s nostrils.

“You’re the one they sent up from the clinic,” he said flatly. He leaned forward, squinting. “Bit young to be a doctor, aren’t you?”

Frank got this all the time: old ladies asking when the doctor would be in—a useful icebreaker, but he wasn’t in the mood today.

“I’m here to see Mrs. Buckholdt,” he said. “I assume she’s home.”

The man looked out across the fields, the horizon molten in air heated thick as the fumes of gasoline. The expression on his face changed from scrutiny to the more absent look of recollection, as though he had suddenly lost interest in their conversation.

“Yeah,” he said, almost to himself. “She’s in there.”

Then he crossed the porch, past Frank, and wandered out into the yard.

“MRS. BUCKHOLDT?” FRANK called out, blinded momentarily by the darkness of the front hall.

“Down in a minute,” she said, her voice coming from somewhere up beyond the stairwell.

Ahead in the kitchen, a cheetah chased a gazelle over the screen of a muted television. Frank could see the back of a boy’s head silhouetted against the screen’s lower half, the rest of him obscured by the counter. The house smelled of stale candy and the chemical salts of cheese-flavored snacks. A bookcase stood on one side of the living room and a picture he couldn’t make out in the poor light hung on the wall opposite. Two large Oriental carpets covered the floor. He put his briefcase down on a torn leather armchair and took out Mrs. Buckholdt’s chart, which he would have read by now if he hadn’t been in such poor shape this morning. After getting thoroughly drunk, he’d done the really smart thing of calling his ex-girlfriend, a woman in his program he’d dated toward the end of their residency. They had gone out for six months, which, at the age of thirty-two, was the longest Frank had ever been with a woman. If he hadn’t seen so many patients with romantic lives more desperate than his own, he might have considered himself abnormal.

Anne had flown out from Boston a few times when he first got out here; he’d convinced himself that one day he would ask her to marry him.

“Glad to hear you’re still out there saving the world,” she said, after he made a few comments he regretted now. She knew he’d come out here with the idea that he’d be given the freedom to practice the way he wanted to, which meant more time to talk with his patients. Wanting such a thing seemed almost renegade at this point in his profession, given the dominance of the biological psychiatry they’d been trained in, a regime Anne had never seriously questioned.