Page 37 of The Book Doctor

Liam is good at making a point. “I don’t think we should take him home right away. Let’s make his parents sweat it out.”

“I have a better idea. Let’s take him to the police station and tell the cops we found a lost kid.”

“Ah,” Liam says. “Irony.”

I shrug.

He peers out the passenger door and then looks at me, his face impassive. “First, we have to get him in the car.”

“Hey kid,” I say. “You want to go get ice cream?”

Chapter Twenty-Three

The boy babbles in the back seat, and I don’t know why, but it physically hurts. I haven’t been around children much since my own were little. That’s sort of the thing about having kids—once you no longer do, unless your vocation has to do with teaching, there aren’t a lot of opportunities to be around them, even if you wanted to. Especially as a man.

I think about my children a lot. Where would they be now, what would they be like? I think about how they would essentially be different people, all grown up, not very much at all like the kids I knew.

With Jenny it was different. She was older when she died, and I got a bit of a glimpse into what adulthood with her would have been like.

Jennifer was Eve’s daughter through and through. She not only inherited her mother’s looks, she inherited her mental illness too. The boys’ deaths were unexpected, like curve balls, to use a familiar expression. But Jenny’s was different. It was slower to evolve. Most people that kill themselves don’t succeed on the first try, and Jenny was no exception.

We spent nearly $100,000 on facilities and treatments, trying to make her better. Like Eve, she would improve for a while. But never for long. Her manic periods were always extreme. Maybe this had to do with the fact that she was a female adolescent. I don’t know. But Jenny’s rough patches were never pretty. Jenny wasn’t a particularly happy child before the boys died, but she was never happy afterward.

I resented her, of course. I resented her for not being mine, for not appreciating the life I was trying to give her. I resented the fact that she was alive and miserable, when her brothers did not get the chance to be either of those things.

So when she told me she was going to take her own life that final time, when she said that she’d find a way to get the pills, or the knife or the rope, I didn’t try to stop her. I didn’t put her in her seventh consecutive facility. I didn’t listen to Eve, who said we should.

I knew Jenny was right. It’s impossible to keep every item that a person might use to kill themselves out of reach forever. I just hadn’t thought it would happen like it did.

There’s a small town in between where we live and the city. Hamilton has three restaurants, several fast food joints, a small grocery store, a bank, a pharmacy, and of course, a bar. Normally, I use the pharmacy in the city on account that some of Eve’s medications require compounding—and also the privacy it allows. Everyone knows everyone out here, and people talk. There’s not much else to do.

I wasn’t looking forward to the long drive on account of work, about two and a half hours round-trip, give or take traffic, nor did I want to leave Eve alone for that long. So I’m not entirely upset to have found the boy. Even though we need the medication, postponing the trip into the city is not the worst thing that could have happened.

The boy speaks gibberish, pointing out the window as we pass the old hardware store. It closed up a few months ago after old man Stott died. His kids had moved on to bigger and better things, to live their lives elsewhere, and without anyone to run it, it dried up.

The bank has changed hands several times, but it keeps going, as banks have a way of doing.

Next to the bank is the drugstore. It’s an old-school pharmacy, the kind with a soda fountain that serves root beer floats, banana splits, milkshakes, and ice cream of all kinds. By the early 1920s, almost every drugstore had a soda fountain. Due to prohibition, which began in 1919, bars were closing and people needed a place to socialize. This place was born of that time.

“It’s rather charming, don’t you think?” Liam says, glancing at the boy in the rearview mirror as he pulls into a parking spot up front. “Almost makes me think maybe I could live out here in the boonies.”

We used to bring the kids here when they were little. Sometimes in the evenings, Eve would make me promise, after a long day, that I’d drive them into town to get root beer floats. She’d bribe them with it to keep them out of her hair. I don’t think I appreciated her enough back then, what she did, raising them, tending to their needs and mine too.

I suppose it’s tough to see things as they are when we’re in the thick of it. All I know is that my career was demanding, it was all-consuming and in hindsight I can see that there wasn’t enough of me left over for her, or for them.

Inside the shop we grab ice cream. “Lovely family,” Mrs. Thompson remarks as the boy spins round and round on the barstool. She’s feeble, and her memory is half gone, but she shows up to work every day, and I suppose that’s what keeps her going.

Nevertheless, it strikes me that under different circumstances, she could be right. I could be doing this very thing with my son and grandson. A long time ago, I did research for a novel about parallel universes, and while I don’t know if they exist, I’d like to think there are other versions of Eve and I out there somewhere, happy with our children. Children who are alive. Children who are having children of their own. In some ways it’s easy to imagine. In others it feels very far away. The part of me who existed as a father then is not in the same place as the person I am now. His growth was stunted when life as he knew it was cut off.

I send Liam next door to the dime store to buy the kid a new pair of shoes. The boy devours the ice cream, so I buy him a chees

eburger and fries. He eats all of it and half of mine too.

Later, when we take him home, his old man is passed out on the porch drunk. He stirs at the sound of Liam’s tires crunching on the gravel road.

“Let me deal with this,” Liam says, as I reach for the door handle.

Through the windshield I watch as Liam walks the kid up to the porch, even though I warn him not to. I have a feeling this is a very bad idea. Next thing I know, the hood of Liam’s car is riddled with bullet holes.