Life is a short dream, the ancient Romans had said, and so once a year she would stay through late afternoon, and kiss him on the cheek, and wish him godspeed on his.
While she went back out and tried to make sense of her own.
In the ninth year of his stay Adrienne left as she always did — a little sad, a little relieved, a little fearful over the thought of how her life might change, or mightn't, in the year to come before her next visit. Annual rituals were harsh that way, always forcing your head around to face the future. She took the elevator down to ground level, sharing it with several others to whom she paid no mind. Its doors slid open and all of them went about their lives.
Adrienne was halfway to the door when she realized that one of them seemed to be trailing her. Surely not, though. It must be coincidence.
"It's good of you to come every year, way you do," the man said as they stepped through the doors of the hospital and began to descend terraced steps toward the parking lots. "It's a fine thing you don't forget him."
She stopped on the concrete walkway and turned. The speaker was an elderly man, once tall but now mostly withered, with a stern face gone slack, his hair white and cropped in an old man's crew cut. He wore his old blue suit with a touchingly natty pride, and smelled of too much sweet cologne, and she had never seen him before in her life.
"Do I know you?"
"I'm…" He looked down, seemed almost embarrassed. "I'm Clayton's father. Randolph Palmer."
He seemed reluctant to shake hands, no point to such a formal gesture, for which she was glad. She might not even have been able to move her arm, when it came right down to it.
Clay's father. He must have been, what, in his early seventies now? About that. He looked it, possibly more. She found a scar on him that she'd not noticed at first, a thick ridge nesting low in the wattles on his neck. He caught her staring, mentioned getting a Purple Heart for that one, and didn't appear interested in pursuing it further.
"I been trying to catch you, this makes the fourth year," he said. "The boy doesn't have any visitors but for you and me. They told me about you a few years back, and I said to myself, 'Well, I've just got to meet her, if only the once.' It's a fine thing you remember Clay."
Adrienne got herself moving again, down the stairs and across the lot. He followed along as escort, mindful of the traffic because he seemed to realize how distracted she was.
It was like the appearance of an apparition, a visit from the ghost of Jacob Marley or Hamlet's father. Never had she pictured him, not consciously, even during the heaviest of her sessions with Clay. But deep in her heart she supposed she had painted the portrait of an ogre, a cruel and gigantic man who devoured his only son until he was nothing but scraps and bones, then berated him because there was nothing left to take. Randolph Palmer could never have lived up to such a fearsome image, now less than ever, and she wished he had never shown her his face at all, for now she was tempted to feel sorry for him.
"Did you travel all this way just for this?" she asked.
"Wasn't anything. I don't live but a few miles from here. It's not a bad drive at all, come summer."
"I thought you lived in Minneapolis."
Randolph Palmer shrugged, scuffing along in well-worn shoes, newly polished. "I moved here seven years back, to be close to him now even if I wasn't for the years before he … well, hell, before he got this way. I suppose I could've moved him someplace back to home, you know, but … just seemed right I should leave him be and I should be the one haul up stakes."
"What about his mother?"
"Oh, she died about the same time. Her liver got too big on her." He shook his head. "You can't have that."
There's a lot you can't have, she thought, but people do it anyway, to themselves and to each other. So often they never learned in time. Or never learned at all, going to their graves with befuddled faces.
She led them to her rental car and stood at the door, digging in her purse for her keys as Randolph Palmer stretched, turned on run-down heels, and tipped his face to the lowering sun while gazing back toward the hospital.
"The boy always was a handful, or most of the time," and then his head lowered, sinking into the scarred wattles. He rubbed his chin with his fist, huffed with a gruff little laugh. "One time, he was four years old, must've been, he had this favorite toy. A stuffed lamb is what it was, dirty white thing, half the fuzz worn gone. He dragged it everywhere. Stupid damn toy for a boy, is what I thought. I burned the thing. Burned it and held his hand over the flame so he wouldn't want to touch one again." He shut his eyes, and for a moment she thought he might cry until he cleared his throat and put himself out of danger. "I shouldn't have done that."
Keys in hand, she tried to stand tall, taller than she felt while unlocking the car door and hoping to ignore the remorse in the man's voice. It was too late for remorse in this case. For once she wanted to be unreservedly bitter and childish and cruel. Let her have this one bitter thing in her life, and she would keep trying to make the rest, if not sweet, at least palatable.
"I have a flight at Logan to catch," she said, but froze when she saw Randolph Palmer looking at her as she had always imagined Catholics would look at the Virgin Mary while praying to her.
"I wanted to ask you something," he said. "They came and told me even before he got like this that he had things wrong with him, things he was born with inside that didn't come from his mother or me, neither one. I know you knew him then, before. These people here, they didn't, none of them. I want you to tell me if you can … would he have ended up the way he was no matter what? I know sometimes I probably didn't raise him the way I should've, but … that wouldn't've made any difference, would it?"
She tossed her purse in through the door, cocked an elbow onto the roof as she leaned there and met Randolph Palmer's eyes. He was a needy old man, come to seek absolution in what was most likely his final chance. How many years had he wrung his knotty hands and wondered if only he had done things differently? She should have been kinder than she felt, but if the temptation was there, so too was the thought of that small hand over a burning toy lamb, and it burned so much brighter.
"We'll never know, will we?" she said. "I still live with that."
"What about me?" He was close to pleading. She could see behind his eyes to all the fears that pooled there, how little time he had left to make his peace with a ruined son and how little progress he had made.
"You made your bed," she told him. "Now die in it."
She left him standing on the lot, alone and small at the end of a lengthening shadow at the close of a dismal day, and for another year she drove away hoping that Clay was where he wanted to be, at last, if only in his mind. And she thought, too, of all those babies born with the identical defect. Six hundred and eighty-three, the last she had heard, but that had been nine years ago. They would be in grade school now, and for them she prayed for patient teachers and persistent friends and, most of all, parents who had not confused love with something else, something tyrannical.
She thought of the last thing she had said to Randolph Palmer, then echoed his sentiments exactly.
I shouldn't have done that.
But she did not turn around.
The damage was already done.
There are few pains as sore as once having seen, guessed, felt how an extraordinary human being strayed from his path and degenerated.
— Friedrich Nietzsche
Beyond Good and Evil