Leaving Blythe River: A Novel (33 page)

Ethan stared at his father’s face, thinking Noah looked better. His color was better. His skin had lost that papery gray look. But the wildly tangled hair and rough beard made him look like a man you’d see sleeping in a doorway in Manhattan, which Ethan found disorienting. And disconcerting.

He had a sheet pulled up to his armpits, so Ethan did not have to see his legs.

“I’ll just leave you alone with him,” the doctor said. “I’d keep it to a few minutes this first time.” He hesitated. Turned away. Turned back. “And another matter that feels a little sensitive,” the doctor said. “Maybe this is a bad time to say it to you, and maybe any time would be. But someone will have to bring it up. Your father was brought in with no wallet and no identification of any kind. We’ll need his insurance card.”

“Right,” Ethan said.

He had no idea where his father’s wallet was hidden, but he pushed the problem aside again because he didn’t feel ready or able to deal with it.

“Take a few minutes,” the doctor said.

Then he slipped out of the room.

Ethan walked around the foot of his father’s hospital bed and sat in a white plastic chair. He stared at his dad’s face. It looked placid. As though the man didn’t have a care in the world.

Morphine will do that for you,
Ethan figured. He found himself almost wishing he had some, too.

As he sat staring, he thought about what Jone had said. The true thing that might help him let go of his hatred. Over time. How his father pretended to be better than everybody else because he was afraid he wasn’t as good.

It didn’t help.

“Not enough time,” he said out loud. Then, without realizing the words were about to rise up through his gut and burst out, Ethan said, “I still don’t forgive you, you son of a bitch.” His voice sounded solid and sure.

The words vibrated in the air for a few beats.

Then his father’s lips moved.

“I can hear you,” Noah said. Or barely said. His voice was a hoarse whisper, barely strong enough to come out into the world and be heard.

“Good,” Ethan said.

A few minutes later, just before letting himself out of the room, Ethan said, “Dad. I need to know where you hid your wallet. I have to give the hospital your insurance card.”

Nothing. Apparently Noah had slipped down into the deep land of morphine again.

“That figures,” Ethan said out loud. “There when I don’t need you to be. Not there when I do. Just what I’ve learned to expect.”

“Hey, Mom,” Ethan said.

He held the phone pressed between his ear and shoulder. He was tossing his father’s closet, looking for the wallet.

“Thank God you called,” she said. “I mean, it was great news. And at least they called. Until they called . . . you don’t know how close I was to getting on a plane and coming out there. But another half a day . . . But then they called.”

“But what about Grandma?”

A silence, which told Ethan as much as the sentence that followed.

“Your grandma passed away.”

“When? Just while we were gone?”

“Yeah,” she said. “Yesterday.”

“Oh. That’s too bad. Are you okay?”

“Yes and no. Are you?”

“Um. I think I’ll process it later.”

“Got it.”

“What about Grampa?”

“I found a care facility for him.”

“That’s good.”

A long silence. Painfully long.

“I’m glad I got to see her again,” Ethan said.

“Me, too, sweetie. And I’m thrilled that you’re back and safe. And that you found your dad. But not hearing it from you . . . hearing from a stranger that you were both okay. It was almost . . . well, it was almost hard to believe.”

“I know,” he said. “I’m still having a little bit of trouble with it myself. But look. Mom.
I’m
fine, except I’m exhausted and saddle sore and every muscle in my body hurts. But I don’t know if I’d say Dad is fine.”

“Your friend told me a little about his situation. He said Noah’s been conscious and he’s been upgraded to stable.”

“It’s his legs.”

“I know, honey. But they’ll heal.”

Ethan pulled his head out of the closet and eased onto the hardwood floor. Braced his sore back up against the wall.

“He might lose the left one,” he said.

A long, reverberating silence. Or at least it seemed to reverberate.

“Oh,” she said.

“I know,” Ethan added. “If it was anybody else . . .”

“Right. But your father is so athletic.”

“And so vain.”

“This is going to be hard on him.”

“I know,” Ethan said.

“Well, you know what, Ethan? I just really think that’s not your problem. He’s a grown man, and he always knew the risks of this extreme sports addiction of his. He’s just going to have to buck up and deal with it.”

Another strained silence. She broke it.

“So how on earth did you—”

“Long story,” Ethan said. “Very long. And I promise I’ll tell it to you. Maybe when I see you in person again. I promise I’ll tell you every single detail. It was quite the adventure. But right now I have a problem. You know how you made him hide his wallet every time he went out? So I couldn’t use his credit card to fly home?”

“Oh,” she said. “We didn’t know you knew that.”

“Well, I did. But I don’t know where his hiding place is. Which means I don’t have his insurance card. And neither does the hospital. Did he tell you where he was hiding it?”

“No. I’m sorry. He didn’t.”

“Oh,” Ethan said. It was impossible to mask his disappointment, even over the course of that one tiny word.

“Don’t take it on. Let me deal with it. I’ll call his insurance company and get them to communicate directly with the hospital.”

“That would be good,” he said.

“So . . . you looking forward to coming home?”

“Yes and no. Don’t take that the wrong way. I’m definitely looking forward to seeing you again. But this place . . . I don’t hate it like I used to. No fair saying ‘I told you so.’”

“I wouldn’t stoop so low. I know you’re exhausted and busy, Ethan, and if you need to go I understand.”

“Thanks. I’m thinking nap.”

She didn’t say anything for several beats, and Ethan couldn’t imagine why. A nap hadn’t seemed like a controversial plan.

“I know one place you should look,” she said. “Have you looked in his truck at all?”

“No. Just the house.”

“Go out to the truck. Put your hand under the driver’s seat and then lift up the back of the carpet mat and see if there’s anything under there.”

“That’s pretty specific. What made you think of that?”

Enough of a pause that Ethan knew she’d rather not say. But she said it all the same.

“Right before we moved into the city I had our car detailed so we could sell it. The detailer found an envelope there. Underneath the edge of the mat under the front seat.”

“I hate to even ask what was in it.”

Ethan imagined scraps of paper with women’s names and phone numbers.

“A key,” she said.

“To what?”

“I never found out.”

“What did he say about it?”

“That it must have been there when we bought the car.”

“You didn’t buy that car used. Did you?”

“No,” she said.

Ethan decided he didn’t want to push the matter further. Especially not at his poor mother’s expense. Jennifer hadn’t been Noah’s first secret. That was not much of a surprise.

“You want to hold on while I look?” he asked.

“Sure.”

Ethan set the phone down and eased painfully to his feet. He walked to the door and stepped out into the front yard, Rufus wagging and dancing behind. He looked around once for bears—never hurts to be smart, especially since the trash cans lived on the side of the house near his dad’s broken-down truck.

He eased his way around the house and reached for the driver’s side door handle, wondering what he would do if it was locked. He didn’t know where his father had been keeping the keys, either.

It wasn’t locked.

He leaned in and ran his hand under the front of the seat—and felt it immediately. It was opened out and lying flat, one half of it hidden under the carpet mat, which extended just far enough under the seat to hide the bulge.

He pulled it out and looked inside. His father’s smug face smiled at him from the New York State driver’s license.

“So that
is
your hiding place, you son of a bitch,” he told the picture. “And that
was
your key. To what? I guess we’ll never know now.”

He slammed the door and called Rufus to come back inside with him.

Halfway to the door he said, out loud and to no one, “Never mind. I don’t even want to know.”

He closed them both safely back into the house and carried the wallet into his father’s bedroom. Picked up the phone again.

“Thanks for the tip,” he said. “I’ve got it. I need to call the hospital now. Oh. Wait. Mom?”

“Yes?”

“Will you hold off on the . . . I don’t know. Funeral? Or memorial? For Grandma? I don’t want to miss it. Or do you have to do a funeral right away?”

“It’ll be a memorial. And it’ll hold just fine.”

“Thanks.”

They said quick good-byes and ended the call, and Ethan noticed a feeling as he did so. A good feeling. Not that everything was good—far from it. But he was handling things. It felt very . . . adult.

For the first time in a long time, Ethan felt as though his own life was in fairly good order, and more or less under his control.

Chapter Sixteen: Out of Control

Two days after his father was found

For the second day in a row, a knock propelled Ethan out of sleep. Out of a dream. He couldn’t grasp the dream, or recall any images from it, but he could still hear the echo of helicopter blades in his head.

And he was pretty sure he had seen his grandmother in there somewhere.

“Just a minute!” he called.

He stumbled into his clothes and walked stiffly to the door, rubbing his eyes and wondering if it was possible to feel even more sore on the second day after a big adventure.

He threw the door wide, wincing into the light.

On his doorstep stood Marcus.

“Oh,” he said. “Marcus. Hey.”

“Wanted to come say good-bye,” Marcus said.

“Which one of us is going somewhere?”

It was a sleepy question, but a reasonable one. Because Marcus might have assumed that Ethan was flying home to New York.

“Me,” he said. “I’m going back to L.A. This mountain man thing just isn’t working out. One of those things that looks better on paper, you know?”

“I do,” Ethan said.

But he didn’t. At least, not from any personal experience. For him it had looked terrible on paper and panned out better than expected.

“Anyway. I wanted to say how happy I am that you guys found your dad. Could’ve knocked me over with a feather, but I’m really happy for you. And also I wanted to tell you . . . you’re a very good peacemaker.”

“I so am not!”

“No, you are. You just don’t know it yet. I was in town last night having a beer at the tavern. Well, okay, three beers. And guess who was there having a couple of steak dinners?”

“No idea,” Ethan said. Probably because he was still too half asleep to realize he knew a limited number of people in the area.

“Oh, come on,” Marcus said.

“No, really. I just woke up.”

“Sam and Jone.”

“Really,”
Ethan said. It was not a question. More of an exclamation.

“When I said you’d have to be the peacemaker I meant I was hoping you could keep them from killing each other. I wasn’t setting my sights quite this high. I didn’t think anybody could get them together.”

“I don’t know that it was me so much.”

“They sure weren’t headed that direction on their own. Come on. What happened?”

Ethan sighed and tried to remember. It seemed so long ago. So much longer than a small handful of days—days that could be counted on one hand, with a finger or two left over.

“Let’s see.
So much
happened. Sam was being an ass, and he sort of knew it, but I guess he didn’t know how to stop. And he knew he was blowing it with her, and the more he knew he was blowing it with her, the assier he got. I might have given him some advice on how to turn it around again. But if it worked, it’s the only time in my life I ever made peace. It never worked at my house.”

“Everybody has to have a first time.”

Marcus held out one hand and brought the outside edge of it—slowly and ceremoniously—down onto one of Ethan’s shoulders, then the other.

“I dub thee . . . Peacemaker-in-Training. Go forth and practice. Have a good life, kid.”

Then he walked back to the road, and he was gone.

Jone appeared on his doorstep fifteen minutes later.

“Where’s Sam?” Ethan asked.

“One of his horses is colicky.”

“What’s colicky?”

“Colic. It’s a digestive thing horses get.”

“Oh. One of the ones who was out with us?”

“No. No connection with the trip. One of the yearlings. I told him to stay home and wait for the vet. Doesn’t take two of us to drive you to the hospital.”

“Well, I appreciate it,” Ethan said. “And I’m ready.”

They walked together to her big Land Rover SUV, a vehicle Ethan hadn’t seen before.

“Did you know Marcus is moving back to L.A.?” he asked her.

“Yeah. He said good-bye when he saw us at the tavern last night. I’m guessing he told you about that.”

“He mentioned it.”

“Don’t go making it out to be a bigger thing than it is,” she said. Her old, stern Jone voice was back, and she pointed at Ethan’s nose with a formidable index finger. “It was a steak dinner. Just steaks. Nothing more.”

“Just steaks? No salad? No baked potatoes?”

She cuffed him lightly on the back of the head, and Ethan stifled a smile.

“You know what I mean, wiseass. Just don’t get carried away with where this is going.”

“I didn’t say a word,” Ethan said. Then his smile faded, and he remembered what he’d been pushing away. “My grandmother died,” he said.

“Oh. I’m sorry. How’re you doing with that?”

“Hasn’t really hit me yet,” he said.

“Thank goodness you’re here,” the doctor said. He had hurried down the hall in answer to a page. The nurse had paged him the moment she saw Ethan approaching. “We need you to have a talk with your father. He’s wide awake now, and being very unwise.”

Hardly surprising,
Ethan thought.
And probably nothing I can fix.

But all Ethan said was “About . . .”

“We told him this morning that we will need to amputate that left leg. The infection is spreading, including upward toward his hip. If we wait even another day or two, we might not be able to leave him any stump at all. And a stump is very useful to a person using a prosthetic limb. If we wait much longer than that he will lose his life. But he refuses. He refused to consent to the surgery. He says he’d rather die than lose his leg. It’s quite heartbreaking for all of us, and for you, too, I’m sure. So much effort to save his life. I can’t believe he would then turn around and throw it all away again. People live good lives after an amputation. Active lives. It takes courage at first, but people do it all the time. But I couldn’t make him listen to reason.”

“I don’t know if I can make any difference,” Ethan said. “But I’ll talk to him.”

As he walked down the hall to his father’s room he remembered Marcus knighting him earlier that morning. Dubbing him Peacemaker.

He hoped his new official title would be of use to him now.

Noah was wide awake, as advertised. And scowling. He looked at Ethan as though a look could form a brick wall, keeping everything undesirable outside.

Apparently Ethan was undesirable.

“I see,” Noah said.

But it was impossible for Ethan to know what his father saw.

“What do you see?”

“They’re breaking out the big guns. Into the ring comes Ethan Underwood, standing five foot two and weighing in at a whopping one hundred twelve pounds. To do the dirty work the doctors can’t manage on their own.” Then he winced deeply. “They need to up my painkillers, Ethan. You need to tell them that. I’m still in agony here. I need more morphine. Or whatever the hell this is in the nice little drip tube.”

“So,” Ethan said, taking a seat by his father’s bed, “you’re back to your old self again.”

Ethan had been nursing a hope that his father had been humbled by the near-fatal experience.

“I’m serious, Ethan. Go get the nurse and tell her.”

“You have a call button for the nurse,” he said. “But please. Not yet. Not until we’ve talked. Once she ups that dosage, you’ll wink out on me. I need you awake while we have this talk.”

“I’m in pain here.”

“Then we’d better get this done,” Ethan said.

His father narrowed his eyes and looked right into Ethan’s face. “You’ve changed,” he said. “You seem different.”

“Thank you.”

“It wasn’t a compliment. I don’t like the new you.”

“Well, it’s a good thing I did it for me, then. Not for you. So the doctor tells me you’d rather voluntarily die than lose one leg. Do you have any idea what a slap in the face that is for me?”

“You? This has nothing to do with you.”

“The hell it doesn’t. Do you really not have any idea what I went through to find you out there and get you back to civilization? Do you know how scary it was? And how sore I am? And not because we have such a loving relationship and get along so great. But I did it because I wanted you to have your life at least. And then, after all that, you say you don’t want it. Unless it can be just the way you want it to be. You’re acting like a child.”

Ethan paused, almost as if to take a breath. But really he was making a space to allow some reaction.

“What the . . . ,” Ethan’s father began. Then he paused as if editing out a stronger obscenity. “. . . hell are you talking about, Ethan? I have no idea what you’re talking about.”

“You don’t know? You don’t know how you got here?”

“Medevac helicopter. A rescue team brought me in.”

“Because we called them.”

“Who’s we?”

“Our neighbors, Jone and Sam. We went out into the wilderness on Sam’s horses and pack mules. The rangers and search and rescue looked for you for two days and then called off the search, because the more they found out what a swell guy you are, the more they figured you just took off and left me. You would have stayed out there to die, but we put together our own search team. And we found you. And Sam rode home and called it in.”

A long pause. Noah’s eyes pressed closed.

“I think you’re delusional,” he said. “I think you’re on too many drugs, and I’m on not enough.”

Ethan sighed. He stood up, leaned over his father’s bed, and pressed the call button for a nurse. Then he sat back down.

A moment later the door popped open and a middle-aged nurse with a pleasant face stuck her head in.

“Problem?”

“I’m sorry in advance,” Ethan said, “because this is not a medical emergency. But please tell my dad who found him in the wilderness. It’ll help with this important talk we’re trying to have.”

The nurse looked at Noah, who looked back, but a little sheepishly. As if he already knew it was true, and didn’t want to hear it confirmed.

“You don’t know yet?” she asked. “I was sure they told you. Your son found you. Everybody else had given up. He joined up with the man who does the pack trips and another neighbor, and they just kept looking until they found you.”

“Thank you,” Ethan said to her.

The door swung closed again.

Noah squeezed his eyes shut.

“Oh,” he said, quietly, as if to himself, but he drew the word out long. “That explains something. I thought I had this really vivid dream that you were sitting with me on that ledge talking about what a terrible father I’d always been.”