Debbie's Lie

The first thing I felt when I understood I'd been wrong about the only thing in the world that mattered was the urge to buy a gun.

Not to cry. Not to pray. Not to call my mother. A gun.

Go to Haskell's on Ridley Road, where the guitars hang on the wall behind the rifles. Put the cash on the counter. Feel in my hand the weight of a thing that doesn't lie. Walk out and shoot the first person I saw. The guy at the gas station. The woman dragging her trash cans. The kid standing on his pedals, cap on sideways. Anyone. I needed something to fall out there so everything wouldn't collapse in here.

The cough, at first, didn't mean a thing.

In the county men cough. Like they spit in the gravel. My father coughed until he turned red. His father the same. He breathed like he was paying rent on every breath. And the rent kept going up. We called it winter. Dust. Tobacco. Age that came earlier for the poor. We scraped our chests clear. Rinsed our mouths with coffee. Went to work.

Except mine didn't pass.

At first it was dry. A snag low in the chest. Then it went hollow. At night the cough had the silence. All the silence. I'd wake up with my ribs on fire. I tried to smother it in the pillow so I wouldn't wake Buddy.

I'd hear his bare feet on the linoleum. He'd appear in the doorway, face swollen with sleep.

— You okay, Dad?

I'd nod. He'd look at me one second too long. The time it takes a kid to understand an adult is lying. Then he pretends he didn't get it. He'd accept the sentence the way you accept a blanket that's too short and walk off with it. The feet stick out. You sleep anyway.

The blood, I saw it one February morning.

Buddy was sleeping. I sat up, pulled the pillow toward me. A round stain, dark, no wider than a dime. Blood on your hand means you did something. Blood on your pillow means something inside you decided to leave without permission. That your own body has become a place things escape from.

The waiting room smelled of disinfectant and reheated coffee.

The doctor looked at his results. Then at me. Then the sheet. He said a word. I asked him to repeat it. He did. I asked again. He broke the syllables apart.

— Cys-tic fi-bro-sis.

— Is it cancer?

— No.

— Then what is it?

— It's genetic.

Mutation. Protein. Transmission. Since birth. Maybe your mother. Maybe your father. Maybe both. All I could see was my mother standing at the sink, hands in the soapy water. My father in his work jacket. His cough in the yard.

— You're saying I was born with this?

— Yes.

— And nobody saw it?

— Not in time. Especially in certain backgrounds, he said.

Certain backgrounds is the polite way of saying where we come from. We'd taken the signs for something else. The cough for winter. The shortness of breath for age. The fatigue for work. Every baseball field left early. Every night breathing through the mouth. It had waited in my cells. Forty years is a long time. It's nothing for a disease.

I walked out with prescriptions folded in my pocket and brochures folded in three.

The treatments started. Pills in the morning. Others at night. Inhaler. Nebulizer. Buddy watched me open my pill bottles. He liked things to stay in their place. The bottles on the table were an intruder. He looked at them for three days. On the fourth day he lined them up by size.

The next appointment fell on a Tuesday. I'd gotten up to leave. My hand was already on the handle.

— And Buddy? Can he have it too?

The doctor sat back down. He spoke slowly.

— Cystic fibrosis is often associated with male infertility.

I didn't move.

— What does that have to do with my question?

— What it has to do with it is that certain things would need to be verified. Your ability to conceive.

— Often, I said. You said often.

— In the vast majority of cases.

He wrote a prescription. Tore the sheet off. Folded it in half before handing it to me. Our fingers didn't touch.

The paper stayed five days on the dashboard of the pickup. Folded in half. Set against the windshield like a ticket for an offense. The first day I told myself it was ridiculous. The second day the same. The third day I stopped telling myself anything at all.

In the evening I'd watch Buddy eat. His jaw. His forehead. His ears. My mother had always said: he has your eyes. Now I was searching for my face in his the way you search for a lost object in a house you know by heart. Sometimes I'd find an angle, a fold of the mouth. Then it would come undone.

Buddy looked up.

— Why are you looking at me like that?

— I'm not looking at you.

He lowered his head. He picked up the peas one by one and lined them up along the edge of the plate. He didn't push it.

The fourth evening I watched him sleep from his bedroom door. The blue nightlight trembled on the wall. His mouth was open. One arm out from under the blanket. His hand hung in the empty air, still small despite the years. I looked at that hand. Then at mine. I thought of all the times I'd held it to cross a parking lot, climb steps, wait at the dentist's, walk into the church the day of his mother's funeral. He was sleeping. I closed the door.

The fifth day I took the paper and drove to Warren Street. The woman handed me a cup without looking up. The small room. The lock. The fluorescent light buzzing. The small room smelled of disinfectant and loneliness. It's the same smell.

The doctor called me on Thursday.

— Azoospermia.

— Speak English, doc.

— You cannot have children.

— Since when?

— Since always.

— Check again.

— It's been checked.

I hung up. In the next room Buddy was doing a puzzle. Click. Click. Click.

He was seventeen. He slept at the end of the hall. He called me Dad.

Debbie came back to me. Not like a dead woman. Like a fever night. Buddy was burning in his bed. Debbie was there. The cloth. The forehead. The cold water. She looked up at me once. The look of a woman who knows the house is cracked and keeps putting flowers on the table. I understood that look seventeen years later. There was a night. We were lying down. She said Merle. Then nothing. I said what. She said nothing never mind sleep. The silence after my name wasn't silence. And I slept.

Buddy was born. A year later the pediatrician said autism.

Five years later Debbie died. Aneurysm. A Tuesday morning. The kitchen. After that it was me and the boy. Twelve years, the two of us in that house. Twelve years being his father.

For five years she had watched me be the father of a boy who wasn't mine. The lie had lived with us. At the table. In the bed. In the silence after sex. Debbie, me, and the lie. Three in the house. Two paying the rent. One living free. When Debbie died it's the one that stayed. Debbie's lie wound up orphaned and I'm the one who raised it. Debbie's lie was seventeen years old. It had Buddy's hair. It ate at my table.

In the next room the puzzle continued. Click. Click.

— Dad? You okay?

I didn't answer right away.

— Yeah, I said.

There's an image that comes back. Buddy at four standing in the yard with my boots on his feet. He walked lifting his knees because the boots were too big. He said I'm going to the depot, Dad. Debbie was laughing on the porch. He was playing at being me. That's what sons do. Except Buddy was walking in the wrong father's boots. And Debbie watched it from the porch and she knew.

From there the thoughts changed shape.

There were nights I watched him sleep thinking about Route 9 past Harlan. The places where you can stop and no one asks questions. I'd see myself putting him in the pickup, driving without speaking, telling him to wait there a minute, that Dad was coming back, and driving off. Other nights it was his room. The bed. The pillow. My hand.

One night I was standing in front of his door when Buddy opened his eyes.

— You okay, Dad?

I went in. I sat on the bed. I pulled him against me. Hard. He rested his head against my chest, and my chest was coughing, and my whole body was shaking, and he stayed there, warm, still thin. He smelled of toothpaste and old cotton and something else that children lose as they grow.

— Dad, you're cold.

I said no.

The keys. The pickup. Route 9 past Harlan. The dark. The trees lined up on either side like a congregation older than all of us. I drove to the end of the road and cut the engine. I screamed until the cough bent me in half. Hands on my knees I spat into the gravel.

The trees said nothing. The sky neither.

When I got home Buddy was sleeping. The pill bottles were lined up by size. Next to them, a scrap of paper. Three words in crooked capitals: MILK FOR MORNING. Buddy had thought about tomorrow. I couldn't think past the night.

One evening we were eating mac and cheese in front of the TV.

— Are you going to die?

I set down my fork.

— No, I said.

— Then why do you cough all the time?

— Because my lungs are tired.

— Like Grandpa?

— Yeah.

He picked up his glass of milk and pushed it toward me.

— If you drink this your lungs will be less tired.

I drank. He waited to see me swallow. Only then did he pick up his fork again. Serious as an old pharmacist. He'd just saved his father. As far as he was concerned, it was done.

Chuck E. Cheese hired him in April.

Greeter. He said hello to the people coming in. A purple apron, a badge with his name. I'd drop him off in the morning. Always the same spot in the parking lot. He'd get out, check his badge, his apron. He'd look at me for a second through the windshield and raise his hand once, palm open, fingers spread. One gesture. Not two. The same every morning.

On the way back he'd talk. The boy with the Superman cake. The little girl who cried because the tokens were green and not blue. He'd set the details down between us one by one, in order, as if he were emptying his pockets of little pieces of people he'd kept all day to give to me.

One Tuesday I watched him from the parking lot. A small boy held out his hand at chest height. Buddy hesitated half a second, then slapped it. The kid burst out laughing. Buddy too. I stayed there, hands on the wheel, the cough in my chest, watching my son exist in the world without me. That's a thing a father should want. I couldn't make myself want it.

He was my son all the same.

One evening in the pickup Buddy said: someone talks to me. A girl. Tasha. He said her name with care. Like a kid pulling a dead bird from his pocket and showing it to his father hoping the father will say it's beautiful.

After that he looked at his phone more. He'd smile while reading. Sang sometimes in the bathroom. Off-key. But he sang. Once I caught him fixing his hair in the microwave door.

Three weeks later he stopped singing. He stopped talking. He ate less. His puzzles stayed unfinished.

The day I understood I came home and the house had changed its sound.

The apron was folded on the table. Edges aligned. The badge set on top. The bedroom smelled of laundry detergent, cheap deodorant, the kind he took from my closet because he liked to smell like me. On the shelf the DVDs were arranged by cover color. Not by genre. Not by title. By color. That's how Buddy organized the world. By what he saw. Not by what others said.

I found the phone under the pillow. The code was 1-2-3-4.

Tasha. The first messages were sweet. You're different. I understand you. Buddy had answered slowly. Thank you. Me too. I like when you write to me. Then: I love you. Then the photo requests. Then the money. Then the threats. The word police. The word shame. The word everyone will see. The word mental retard.

That evening I said:

— Is someone hurting you?

He looked at me.

— It's none of your business, he said.

I reached for the phone. He snatched it back and pressed it against his chest with both arms. He held it the way you hold a wounded animal. He went to his room. The door slammed. It was the first door slammed in that house. In seventeen years.

I stayed in the kitchen watching the milk turn in his cereal bowl.

He quit Chuck E. Cheese on a Thursday.

— I don't want to go anymore.

— Why?

— I don't want to.

The house got smaller. Buddy lived in his room. Me in the kitchen. He didn't smile anymore. He didn't even line up the pill bottles.

The phone rang on a Tuesday morning. The Harlan County sheriff's office. Words about Buddy. Rails. A train. A conductor who couldn't do a thing.

I drove to the tracks. The gravel between the ties was dark in places. I crouched down. I touched the gravel. It was cold. Buddy was gone.

I told myself I could step onto the rails and wait for the next train. Not out of courage. Courage supposes a choice. There was no choice. There was a man standing on gravel and a train that would come. Then I thought about Tasha. Then I got back in the pickup.

The days lost their edges. There was only the pickup and the road and the empty passenger seat. It was the empty seat that marked the time. Not the clock.

I'd go at night to the Chuck E. Cheese parking lot. Engine off. I'd watch the door where Buddy used to stand. His smile would come back to me. His voice in the dark: Dad, you okay?

The next day I bought milk even though there was some left. I put it in the fridge next to the other carton. One evening I set the table for two. Then I saw what I'd done. I removed the second setting. The next day I set the table for two again. This time I didn't correct it.

The neighbor's cat started coming around. It would lie on the porch, right where Buddy used to sit on hot days. The cat would look at me with that animal patience that creatures have when they're waiting for something that won't come. I gave it tuna one evening. It ate. It came back the next day. There were two of us now waiting on the porch for the boy to come home.

The blue nightlight stayed plugged in. In the evening it would come on in the empty room and the light would slide under the door. It was the last thing of Buddy's that still moved. A light that didn't know he was gone.

One Monday morning I saw her come out of Chuck E. Cheese with a box in her arms. Hair tied back. A jacket too thin for the season. Tasha.

I got out of the pickup. I had nothing in my pocket but a screwdriver wrapped in a rag. From a distance it was enough.

— Get in the car.

She looked at me. Then she got in.

Route 9. Past Harlan. The woods. I took the shovel from the truck bed.

— Get out.

We walked to the pines. I set the shovel down in front of her feet.

— Dig.

She dug badly. Her arms were shaking. She cried without making a sound.

She stopped.

— Please.

— He stood at a door and he said hello to people. My son. That was his job. Say hello, welcome. Smile when life had left him nothing.

— That's what you touched. Not a number. Not a profile. That.

— Who else?

She ended up talking. Other names. Two boys. Screenshots going around. The money. People always tell a version where they can still stand themselves. I didn't want revenge or justice. Just that someone, for once, carry the exact weight of what they'd done.

I handed back the phone.

— Go.

She didn't move.

— Go before I understand why I brought you here.

She backed away without turning around at first, then she started running between the trees. Her silhouette shrank. The branches closed behind her.

I sat at the edge of the hole. Night was falling fast. The pines made that sound of almost nothing they make when there's wind and no man is speaking. I thought about Buddy. Not what they'd scraped off the rails. The living one.

The cough took me. The big one. The one that comes from the bottom. I spat into the dirt next to the hole. My blood darkened the surface before disappearing.

It's not okay, Buddy.

I said it out loud. To the trees. To the hole. To the dark. To the boy who stood at the door of Chuck E. Cheese and said hello welcome with a smile.

It's not okay.

No one answered.