He kept the shotgun barrel aimed at her midsection. He was wavering and grimacing, his mouth moving under the gray-and-black scruff as if he were carrying on a conversation inside.
He gaped at Zack, squinting and wincing as if trying to register recognition. The shotgun swayed from Sarah toward Zack, sending a shock to his midsection.
Before he could finish, his father let out a pained cry and slumped to his side, landed on one knee, wincing and gasping. The gun clunked to the wooded floor. Zack caught him by one arm as Sarah took the other. Slowly they moved him to the bed. He groaned as they removed the slicker and raised his feet onto the bed. Gently they laid him on the mattress, a thin, stained pad that was sour with body smells. Sarah grabbed an old sweater for a pillow, and Zack lowered him onto it.
“Jesus,” Zack muttered. The right side of his father’s pullover was dark with blood.
Zack didn’t know if the shock rose from the realization that his father had in fact been shot as presaged in the NDE or from the hideous wound the bullet had left.
He tried not to react to the rancid odor of decay as they removed a dressing made of a rag and duct tape. The bullet was probably still lodged inside of him, and where it had entered was a fetid puckered hole of draining pus, haloed by a raw, angry swell of discolored flesh.
Zack’s first thought was gangrene. His second thought was that it had spread to his father’s brain, rendering him delirious and incapable of recognition. He was shaking with fever and dehydration. Without antibiotics, he probably wouldn’t make it through the night. “We have to get him to a hospital.”
“No hospital.” The syllables scraped out of his father’s throat.
“But the infection’s spread,” Sarah said.
“Not dying in a hospital,” his father said in a wheezing voice. It was the first lucid statement he had made.
“Okay,” Zack said, relieved. From his jacket pocket he removed a vial of Percocet he had brought, left over from his release from the hospital. He slipped two tabs into his father’s mouth and raised the water bottle to his lips. “This will make you feel better.” His father swallowed the pills.
Meanwhile, Sarah removed Nick’s shoes and pulled the blanket over him. She added some wood to the stove to take the chill out of the air.
As they waited for the drug to take effect, Sarah shook her head to say that Nick’s condition looked bad.
Zack held his father’s hand while he closed his eyes, wincing occasionally against the pain and waiting for the medication to kick in.
As Zack studied his father, things came back to him. The way the blue vein on his forehead was visible, now pulsing with a labored heart. The small chip on a front tooth, the result of a fall from his bicycle when he was a boy. The slightly crooked third finger on his right hand, which he had broken in college during a fraternity prank. Little features he had forgotten. Yet the green eyes still blazed with a fire he could never have forgotten. They stared back at Zack every time he looked in a mirror.
He could also see how he had aged—the deeply scored crease lines around his eyes, the cleft between his brows. The liver spots on his forehead and the backs of his hands. Various cuts and scars on his arms. His chipped and blackened fingernails, the grime in his matted hair. The whitened scruff of a beard. He had lived in this wilderness, renouncing the “civilized” world like some latter-day Thoreau, subsisting on the land that he loved—this sanctuary of Magog.
But what squeezed Zack’s heart was the certainty that these were the last hours he would spend with the father he barely knew. So much to say, so much to ask, so few heartbeats left.
In a few minutes, the drug took effect. Nick opened his eyes and nodded that he felt better. He drank more water.
Sarah got up to give them some privacy. The interior was small, but she moved to the other side of the cabin, where she found some napkins and duct tape to make a clean bandage.
“I knew you’d find me.” He spoke in a feathery rasp. “Felt you coming.”
“Me, too. I saw them bury you alive on Sagamore. I saw you dig yourself out. I was with you.”
His father’s eyes filled up. “You have the gift, too.”
“The gift?”
“You see the unseen. You touch the spirit.”
“But how?”
His father began to speak but got caught in a coughing jag that turned into a fusillade of wheezing gasps. Sarah shot over, and they raised him up and held him until he could catch his breath. Sarah poured him a cup of water from a five-gallon jug rigged up in the far corner. Nick took small, pained gulps. When he was finished, they propped him up with pillows. For a few minutes he lay still with his eyes closed.
From a table against the opposite wall, Sarah returned with a thick cardboard box with a strip of silver duct tape across the top and ZACK printed in a bold hand.
Inside was a photo album containing black-and-white shots, the first of which showed Zack being handed his B.A. diploma at graduation. It had been taken not by the official school photographer, but through a telephoto lens in the crowd, probably from one sitting on that shelf beside the old Nikon F.
And there were others, all of Zack—playing pickup softball at the field on Columbus Avenue; high school graduation shots of his accepting a scholarship check from the principal; Zack pinning opponents in high school wrestling matches; Little League shots of him catching a pop-up. There were dozens of them—each an event from Zack’s young life and all shot from a distance. His father had been there, unseen.
“You made me proud,” his father whispered.
“Why didn’t you let me know?”
“I didn’t belong in your life.”
“That’s ridiculous. You were my father. I needed you. We needed you.”
“Not the man I should have been.” Tears squeezed out from the corners of his eyes. “Couldn’t handle things. Your brother’s dying … bringing you up, being married. Too weak. Too weak. I wasn’t worthy of being your father.”
“You were worthy.”
He shook his head. And in a failing whisper he muttered, “Couldn’t live in a world I didn’t understand.”
“So you joined the monastery.”
“For God to forgive me, help me understand … My penance.”
“For what?”
“Jake’s death, bad father, bad husband. All my weakness.”
“Why didn’t you at least answer my letters?”
“I did.” He pointed to a wooden cigar box on the shelf with books and shotgun shells. “I have them all. Something else.”
Sarah moved to the shelf and got the box for Zack. Her eyes were wet.
Inside were all of Zack’s letters sent from the time he’d learned where the monastery was. They were bound together with string. Also unsent letters addressed to him from his father. No stamps on the envelopes. Also a small, ledgerlike diary. When Zack removed that, his father whispered, “No. After.…”
Inside was also a thick manila envelope addressed to Adam Krueger at a Boston address. “Adam Krueger. I know that name. He’s an insurance guy.”
Nick shook his head. “Lawyer.”
“The guy who signs all the checks to Mom. We thought it was insurance money after they said you died.” They regularly received payments from two separate sources, which his mother had assumed were from two different life insurance policies. “Where’d the money come from?”
“Luria,” his father whispered. “Wanted to find Jake. They kept paying me.”
“And you paid Mom.”
He nodded. “Also, when I pass … where to put me. ’S’all in there.” He could barely talk and winced against
