“It sure looked like more than that.”
“I wish.”
Jeff looked at him for a few seconds, but it seemed a lot longer. “Huh,” he finally said. “Hope you’re keeping it in a safe place.”
“I think so.”
“Good. I mean, that’s a lot of money, and you wouldn’t want anything to happen to it. People hear about that kind of money around, they do all sorts of extreme stuff.”
“I know,” Rick said uncomfortably. It didn’t sound like any kind of a veiled threat, but he couldn’t be entirely sure.
“You think your dad saved all that, or what?”
“I wish I could ask him about it.”
“Does he… I mean, I know he can’t talk or anything, but does he get what you say to him?”
“Well, that’s the thing. I can’t be sure, but I’m pretty sure he does understand.”
“How do you know?”
Rick hesitated. “He grabbed my hand. When I said something about the money. Like he was warning me, maybe.”
“Warning you?” Jeff sounded amused.
“Could be I was just imagining it, I don’t know. Maybe it was nothing. I just get this eerie sense that he’s not a vegetable. That there’s someone home inside that head.”
“You ever watch Breaking Bad?”
“Sure.” He and Holly had spent several steamy summer weekends binge-watching that TV show about a high school chemistry teacher who becomes a meth cook, addicted, a couple of zombies sprawled on the bed, the air-conditioning on high.
“Remember the old guy with the bell? The-”
“Sure. You mean, could I do something with that kind of letter board they used on the stroked-out old guy? It’s an idea, sure. But I’m not sure it would work. Years ago we tried that on him, but no luck.”
“Can’t hurt to try again.”
“I can’t get him to blink once for yes and twice for no, or whatever. He blinks, but I’m not sure what he’s responding to. I need to get him seen by a good neurologist.”
“You know what; I just did a remodeling job on this great old town house in Louisburg Square, belongs to the chief of neurology at Mass General. I could ask him.”
“You stay in touch with him?”
Jeff nodded. “He’s a great guy. He was happy with the work. It was pretty damned fine, if I say so myself. We did an awesome winding staircase on the main level.”
“You think you could get in touch?”
“Happy to. He was telling me about all this crazy-ass new shit they’ve been doing at MGH with, like, magnets on the brain or something. Really wild.”
“Like electroshock therapy?”
“Isn’t that where they hook your brain up to a car battery or whatever whatever? Nah, I mean, it’s literally like they put some kind of really strong magnet on your head.” He tapped the side of his skull. “It makes depressed people undepressed, he said, and they’re starting to use it on people with brain damage or stroke. It made me think about your dad.”
“Put me in touch with him,” Rick said. “I’ll try anything.”
27
Jeff put in a call to his former client, the chief of neurology at Mass General, Dr. Mortimer Epstein. Dr. Epstein had in turn called Rick and spent a good ten minutes on the phone asking about Lenny’s condition. A generous act by a busy man. Rick could hear traces of an old Brooklyn accent in Dr. Epstein’s speech, probably traces he’d tried to expunge, mostly successfully.
A few minutes into the conversation, Rick said, “So Jeff mentioned something about magnet therapy?”
“It’s called transcranial magnetic stimulation,” Dr. Epstein said. “TMS. It’s been quite successful in treating depression, and it’s shown some promising results in treating stroke victims as well.”
“So it’s a brand-new procedure?”
“There’s nothing new about it. TMS has been around for thirty years. The great thing is, there’s no downside. They basically place a magnetic coil on the patient’s head and run an electrical current through it, pulsing it on and off for half an hour. If it works, great. If it doesn’t-well, no harm, no foul.”
“How long does it take to work?”
“It can take weeks and it can take days.”
“Sounds a little sci-fi.”
“That’s what they said about anesthesia a hundred and fifty years ago. Anyway, look, TMS has become quite popular. There’s a long waiting list of patients desperate to try it.”
“How long a waiting list? I mean, are we talking months?”
Dr. Epstein let out a low chuckle. His Brooklyn accent came on strong. “Well, look, I’ll try to pull some strings, get you moved to the head of the line. But how long has it been since your dad’s stroke? I mean, not for nothing, but it’s been like twenty years, right? What’s the rush all of a sudden?”
Rick didn’t know how to answer. What’s the rush all of a sudden? The answer was simple and almost too ugly to admit.
A few weeks ago he didn’t care that his father couldn’t speak. The Lenny he’d grown up with was gone, replaced by a gaunt, spectral Lenny who bore no relation to his actual father.
So for the last twenty years he’d parked this replacement Lenny in a nursing home, just waiting for him to die a quiet and anticlimactic death.
Until it turned out that there was a lot of money at stake.
The next morning Rick showed up at the nursing home in an uberX car, a perfectly neat Mitsubishi. He’d brought a new set of clothes: a pair of khakis, a belt, and a blue button-down shirt. One of the attendants, a short, stocky Brazilian named Paulo, got Len out of his pajamas and into the new street clothes, which was a complicated operation. Also, the belt was too big; his father had lost a lot of weight over the years, largely muscle mass. Rick wheeled him out of the nursing home and into the wheelchair-accessible cab, with a lot of help from the taxi driver.
This was his father’s first time outside the walls of the nursing home in eighteen years, and Lenny stared out the window, wide-eyed. By shortly before noon, they’d passed through the gates of the Charlestown Navy Yard, the two-hundred-year-old shipyard now part residential, part commercial, part historical preserve. It was the site where the British landed just before the Battle of Bunker Hill. Now, Marine barracks and paint shops and forge shops had been turned into condos; warehouses and rope walks and officers’ clubs had been converted into outlying research facilities for Mass General Hospital. The cab pulled up to a brand-new-looking hospital building, the Sculley Pavilion, named for a rich benefactor, Thomas Sculley, the real estate magnate. Just seeing it gave Rick that unfinished-homework pang. The piece he’d been pretending to write.
When they got out, Rick could smell the tang of salt air and hear the cry of seagulls. They were just a few blocks from the Atlantic.
Getting his father out of the cab and into his wheelchair was an ordeal. Lenny’s head lolled to his left, a thread of drool escaping the left corner of his mouth. His eyes came open as the chair scraped against the ground.
“You doing okay, Dad?”
Rick hadn’t pushed a wheelchair for nearly twenty years. Gradually he got the hang of it as he searched for the wheelchair-accessible entrance. Even the simple process of wheeling his father up into the Sculley Pavilion and finding an elevator and getting him up to the second floor required reserves of patience Rick no longer had, if he ever did.
The elevator to the second floor required a building card-key-the research facility was security-protected-but people, he found, went out of their way to help. A woman in scrubs swiped the elevator keypad for him before taking the stairs herself. People passing by smiled at him as he wheeled his father out of the elevator and down the corridor. He was the good son taking care of his aged father. Everyone liked that.