Checked

  Late that night something wakes me up. I’m suddenly 100 percent awake. Then I hear it: my dad crying. It’s not loud, that’s not what woke me up. And it doesn’t sound like it’s coming from his bedroom. I silently push myself up and walk carefully through the house. But he’s not inside. He’s on the front porch, on the top of the three steps. He doesn’t see or hear me, but I see and hear him clearly. His face is in his hands, elbows on his knees, and he’s crying hard. I can’t decide if I should say something. I stand there in the throes of a terrible indecision. Finally I say, “Dad?”

  His head jolts up and turns quickly toward me. His face is wet in the moonlight. “Sorry, Con, did I wake you up?” he asks.

  “No, no problem, Dad. Um. Are you okay?”

  “Yeah, yeah, I’m fine. Go on back to bed.”

  I hesitate. “But Dad . . .” I don’t know what I want to say, but I know I want to say something, so I don’t leave.

  “I know,” he says. “You want to know why I’m crying. I know.” He wipes his face on his pajama top. He scoots over and pats the stoop next to him. I sit down. “Congratulations again. I’m proud of you, Conor. So proud.”

  “Thanks, Dad. That means a lot to me.” And it does, too. It means everything to me. He looks really sad, though.

  “But are you okay, Dad? Are you?”

  “Yeah, yeah, I’m fine.”

  “But, Dad . . .” Then I just say, “I heard you crying the other day.”

  “You did?” He looks displeased, but not necessarily with me. Maybe with himself.

  “Is it still the divorce?”

  “It’s different things. I got called to a bad accident today. Drunk driver.” He shakes his head. “It made me think of your mother. . . . How proud she would have been of you today. And that got me thinking, just wishing I could have been driving the day your mother died. The reason she was alone was because I had a game out of town. I always felt like if I’d been driving, she wouldn’t have died.” My mom was killed by a drunk driver, in the middle of the afternoon.

  “It’s not your fault!”

  “It just feels sometimes like it is. Even today.” But then he half smiles through his sadness. “Seeing you play so hard in the tryout, you reminded me of me when I was your age. I never saw you play so hard. I’m glad you’ve had your hockey to distract you from . . . whatever. Real glad. I’m glad you have a passion, because I promise you having a life you’re passionate about is the only thing that’s worth a can of beans in this world.” He wraps an arm around my shoulders and stares at the house across the street. It’s a small house, like ours. It’s painted a weird orange-yellow shade, but you can’t tell in the night. Then he lifts his eyes to the sky. “There’s going to be a blue moon this summer.”

  “What’s a blue moon?”

  “It’s the second full moon in the same month.” He nods, but kind of to himself, like he’s forgotten I’m there. There’s a long silence between us. He looks toward the door. “Where’s Sinbad?”

  “You know how he is. He likes his sleep.” I’m pretty sure when I get back, he’s going to be stretched across the whole bed.

  “I need to get to sleep too. Come on.”

  He goes back into the house without making sure I’m following, and a few seconds later I hear his door close. I keep looking at the house across the street. I imagine dramas playing out in that house, kind of like they are here. And in every other house on the block. Even just the drama of daily life. Our little neighborhood, safe now from the fire, but full of the kind of drama Mr. Falco would be interested in, family drama. I think about the stuff I brought when we evacuated. I think I made good decisions. My hockey trophies represent a lot of battles. My computer. But mostly what I think about is what I didn’t take, and I don’t know why I didn’t take it. The pictures in my bottom drawer, mostly of my mom, with the frame sitting on top of them. I don’t know, man, I just feel like I can’t look at those pictures. There’s one that was taken in a photo booth, me and my mom when I was two years old. I wonder what the world would be like if she’d never died and Dad and I weren’t here living the bachelor life. I wonder what would have happened if those pictures all got burned up. I don’t know why, but there’s a part of me that wishes they had been.

  Three coyotes lope down the street, eyes glowing. There’s a noise at the door, then deep growling. “Sinbad!” I say. He paws at the screen, ripping it.

  “Aw, man! No! Bad boy!” Ordinarily, I would be the one to pay for that screen, but I’m not going to have any money for it. My heart just feels so low. I slip inside. “Come on, bad boy,” I say softly so I won’t wake Dad. He runs ahead of me, and when I get to the bed, he’s lying on my pillow, acting like he’s asleep. I think about how he’s starting chemo next week, so instead of pushing him away, I lie down without a pillow. He paws me like he wants me to pet him. “I’m mad at you for taking my pillow, plus you broke the screen. I’m not going to pet you.” But I’m already reaching for the top of his head as the words come out. He’s acting exactly the same as he always does. He doesn’t realize how hard the next few months might be. He doesn’t even seem to realize he’s got a hunk of white plastic around his neck.

  The motion detector turns on outside. Who has a motion detector in Canyon Country, with all the animals? But Jenny wanted lights all over. And I haven’t asked Dad to take it down ’cause, I don’t know, maybe it’ll remind him of her, or maybe he likes having little reminders of her around. I just don’t know.

  CHAPTER 13

  * * *

  MONDAY THERE’S NOT much to do. Practice usually doesn’t start until August. I’m so busy all the time that usually what I love about summer is having nothing to do for hours, just walking Sinbad and working out. But today feels kind of empty. Ordinarily I’d be playing in-house hockey this summer. Other guys like to take a few weeks off, but I’m not like that. I get super antsy when I haven’t been skating. In-house leagues are four teams all based out of the same rink. A lot of in-house programs don’t have very good players, ’cause there are no tryouts—the teams take anyone who wants to join. But there’s one in-house program with a lot of travel players. Travel teams hold tryouts and go to different rinks to play as well as fly out of town for tournaments. Unfortunately, the in-house program I was planning to enroll in costs eight hundred dollars. Several guys I know are going to play there this summer, so I was looking forward to it. But it’s okay.

  After I eat a late breakfast, I sit out front with Sinbad, just so he can watch the neighborhood. Mr. Reynolds from down the street walks by. He’s old, like in his eighties, but he takes a slow, slow walk twice a day.

  “Hi, Mr. Reynolds!” I call out.

  “Yes!” he answers. “Yes!” He walks a few steps and stops, then turns to look at me as if he’s forgotten to say something, which he has. “Conor MacRae!” he shouts out. He immediately turns around again and heads off. He does that to everybody. He knows the name of everybody on the block, and when he sees them, he says their name instead of “hi.” His hair is snow white, but he has a good amount of it, and he wears wide glasses, like, wider than his face.

  After watching the world go by for an hour, we go inside and I do five sets of five pull-ups, thirty-three push-ups, and five hundred squats, which just about kills my legs. Then I clean the bathroom. I play video skateboarding and watch YouTube for five hours. Watching YouTube is one of my favorite things, but I’m just killing time until it’s tomorrow, when we take Sinbad to the oncologist.

  When Dad gets home, we go to a park and work out while Sinbad waits. Afterward Dad asks if I want to see a movie, but I don’t, so we just sit in the park on our phones until it’s almost dark. Sinbad lies close to me the whole time. At some point I start thinking of Mr. Reynolds, and then I think about old people, and then I think of my grandparents. I say, “Dad?”

  “Yeah?”

  “So after Grandma and Grandpa did all that stupid traveling, they just didn’t want to know me anymore?” I
don’t know why I called it “stupid.” I got nothing against people who travel.

  “Conor, you need to understand—they were unbelievably close to your mother. She was the same way toward you, just unbelievably close.” He pauses. “After she died, they came over to our apartment, and they didn’t leave for a week. I let them sleep on the bed, and I slept on the living room couch by myself. They slept with you in the middle. I don’t think they even went out during the day.”

  “You never told me that!”

  “Your grandmother especially. She just held you in her arms for hours. I had to make her set you down so you could walk around once in a while. Finally they went home because they couldn’t remember if they’d left their heater on. They were afraid their house would burn down.”

  “Then did they come back?”

  “Yeah, they would stay for days at a time. They only lived ten minutes away, but they didn’t want to go home. I think they just felt like your mom was still around a little bit, in that apartment.”

  I think about my bottom desk drawer, and the pictures of my mom and me. There are some with us and her parents and her grandparents. There’s even a picture of me with my mom’s great-grandmother. I guess at one time, and maybe even today, the longest-lived people in America were Asian American women in an area of New Jersey. That’s where she lived.

  “Remember that picture of my great-great-grandmother holding me? How old did she live to be?” I ask.

  “I don’t know. She was a hundred and one the last time I saw her.”

  “Was she nice?”

  “To tell the truth, she mostly sat around watching TV and not talking to anyone. She did garden for two hours a day, I heard. There was one time we all went for a walk together. She got around the whole block. It was pretty amazing. But she never said a word.”

  The park is totally empty, but I don’t feel like leaving yet. It feels nice to sit out here in the lukewarm night. Sinbad seems relaxed. So does Dad.

  “When did Grandpa and Grandma stop coming over so much?”

  “That first year, they were over all the time. Then when I started dating Jenny, they stopped coming over so much.” He rubs his chin. “I know it really hurt them, and I thought about stopping with Jenny. But you seemed to like her, and she seemed to like you. So I thought it was a good idea. I liked her a lot too. She made me happy.”

  “Did you feel guilty?”

  “Yeah, I felt real guilty. I thought about all of it a lot.”

  “Did you try to talk to them?”

  “After I started dating Jenny, I went to their house to ask if they still wanted to take care of you when I was on road trips, and they said no. I went there another time to ask them how often they wanted me to bring you over, and they said once a week at first. Then they said they would call me when they wanted to see you, but they hardly ever called. I went to their house to talk a few more times, but they never said much, and sometimes we’d sit there for ten or fifteen minutes without saying a word. Your aunt already lived in Los Angeles, so when the next season ended, I decided to quit hockey and move to LA to get a new start. At that point, I hardly ever saw your grandparents anymore. But I went over there to tell them I was moving to Los Angeles.”

  “What did they say?”

  “They cried. They were so close to your mom, I can’t even express how close they were.” He rubs his face again. “And to be honest, Jenny didn’t really like them. She was polite to them, but she wasn’t feeling it. So I’m sure they intuited that.”

  “What’s intuited?”

  “They just felt it without anyone really saying anything.”

  “Like Sinbad just knows things?”

  “Yeah, kind of.”

  “Wow, that all sucks.”

  “Yeah, it did. I mean, I was happy, you seemed happy, Jenny was happy. But they were sad.”

  “They came out to LA that one time.”

  “That was the only time.”

  I nod. It’s gotten dark, the lights shining over the empty park. Southern California was in a drought for years, but the grass is pretty green now. But the lighting makes it all look unreal, or like a photograph. I look around; we seem to be the only ones left. It feels good to be here. I think about what my dad’s just told me, and I guess I still kind of resent my grandparents for basically abandoning me. I understand they were hurt, but didn’t Dad have the right to move on?

  “We better get going. I want Sinbad to get a good rest tonight. I don’t know if they’ll start the chemo right away, but if they do, I want him ready.”

  That makes me hop up, which makes Sinbad jump up. We walk quietly across the park, Sinbad acting clingy like he does once in a while. I believe he knows what’s coming. Even in the parking lot where we see a group of teenagers, he doesn’t even seem interested in them. He just wants to cling.

  “I had a Dobe once!” a guy calls out.

  “They’re great!” I say.

  On the ride home, I think about how weird it is that time only moves forward. That means you don’t really have a choice about a lot of stuff. Like if you wanted to stay a kid, you wouldn’t be able to do that. And if you wanted to sit in a park with your dog and your dad for seven days, you really couldn’t do that, either. You’ve got to move forward with your life. You’ve got to face stuff. I’m in the backseat with Sinbad, and he’s still clingy. He knows.

  CHAPTER 14

  * * *

  WE SIT AT the oncologist’s. Everything in the office looks new and in good shape, the opposite of Dr. Andris’s place. There’s a chalkboard that says WELCOME TO OUR PATIENTS! Underneath are names of all the animals being treated today. It even says WELCOME TO SINBAD! WE LOOK FORWARD TO MEETING YOU! I flip through a scrapbook on an end table and see all the success stories—animals that went into remission for months and even a couple of years. Sinbad’s going to set the record for that. Maybe five years! There are also handwritten notes from pet owners thanking the doctors.

  I feel like spiderwebs are on my face. I’ve never felt this before and have to keep rubbing my hand across my skin to wipe away the feeling. Sinbad stands with his tail up, staring down a golden retriever. He’s not dog-aggressive, but he’s not dog-friendly, either.

  A man leans out a door. “Sinbad!”

  Sinbad looks at him with interest, then turns to me. We follow the man into an office, where he weighs Sinbad and takes his temperature. I’m surprised to see he weighs ninety, two pounds less than he weighed just last week.

  Dr. Pierre comes in right away. She’s a small black woman who looks like she weighs about as much as Sinbad.

  “Hi, I’m Dr. Pierre.” She shakes our hands, reads over the chart, then continues, “So a malignant lump on his left popliteal. How long ago did you notice the lump?”

  “About a week ago.”

  “Good, I’m glad you got him in quickly. Do you think you could lift him onto the exam table?” She says that to Dad, but I do it with a little struggle. “Strong!” she says.

  “I play ice hockey and work out.”

  “Oh, you do? Good for you. Uh, LA Kings, right?”

  “Grizzlies . . .” There’s an awkward pause. “Oh, you mean . . . yeah, the Kings play in LA.”

  “I thought so. Is Sinbad your dog?”

  “Yeah, he sleeps on the bed with me.”

  “Aw, okay, well, we’re going to take good care of him.” She feels the back of his leg. “Right,” she mumbles. “Wow, he’s completely healed. You can go ahead and stop using the cone.”

  Dr. Pierre smiles slightly at me. “He’s a good dog, isn’t he?” I nod, and she continues. “So. There are some tests called staging tests that we do before we begin treatment to get an idea of the extent of the cancer. Different doctors will sometimes not do all of them. There are a set of the usual ones, which are chest X-rays, abdominal ultrasound, a full blood panel, a bone marrow aspirate, and a urinalysis. Many doctors like to do the bone aspirate, but it’s expensive and invasive, and I try to avo
id that. In the case of a Doberman, I also recommend an echocardiogram to make sure the dog won’t go into heart failure during chemo.” Heart failure? Wait, what? I can’t ask. I need to concentrate. Focus as Dr. Pierre is still talking. “I’m going to tell you the sort of simplified version of things here, and then I’ll also give you some papers for you to read.”

  I’m leaning forward as I listen. Then, glancing at Dad, I ask, “So that’s all included in the seven thousand dollars?”

  “Yes, it is.”

  I look at my dad questioningly, and he says, “Great, then do we get started now?”

  “We do,” she says. “We do. After the staging test results, I’ll be giving him vincristine and doxorubicin intravenously. Then you’ll give him prednisone and cyclophosphamide at home. We start out weekly, then move to every other week.” Then she gives me a really sympathetic look. “Do you mind? I actually think things go more quickly without the owner. Do you think you could sit in the waiting room?”

  She asks it kindly, but I know what the only answer she’ll accept is. “That’s fine,” I say.

  Dad and I return to the waiting room. I put on my earphones and chew gum as hard as I can. Then I close my eyes and listen to music, zoning out so big-time that I’m really surprised when someone in scrubs brings Sinbad out. We have a couple of hours to wait for results, so we find a cheap restaurant with outside tables and eat while Sinbad stands at attention, watching anyone who walks by. Sinbad loves to eat out, so even though I’m worried, it makes me feel good to watch him.

  Then we return, and Dr. Pierre explains that the chemo will be given to Sinbad intravenously, and it’ll probably take thirty minutes. I can’t be there because the dog needs to lie still. Also, it’s dangerous for me—the staff will be wearing impermeable gowns, N95 respirators, and special chemotherapy gloves.