What You Don't Know(27)

“Did he take his pills?” he asks. Same questions, same phone call, every day. He’ll call again, in a few hours, to make sure Joe has eaten lunch, that he’s taken a nap in front of the TV. “Did you give him the paper? He needs to do the crossword.”

“I know,” the woman says flatly, and he can hear the impatience in her voice. She’ll quit soon, he thinks, and it won’t be long before he’ll be searching for someone else. Another name he won’t be able to remember. “He’s doing it now.”

“Does he have his slippers on? It’s cold in the house.”

“Yeah.”

“And he keeps scratching that spot on his arm. Could you put some cream on it?”

“I already did.”

“Okay.”

This must be like having a kid, he thinks. Calling the babysitter to make sure everything’s going all right, no one’s playing with matches or shit in their pants, worrying over everything. It’s been this way since his father fell off the ladder while pruning a tree in his backyard, and there hadn’t been any broken bones or damage, not even a scratch, but there’d still been a brain scan, just in case, and the doctor had thrown around lots of big words and charts and had shown them the X-rays on his laptop, and Hoskins and Joe had nodded and pretended to understand, although they had no clue what the fuck was going on. And afterward, when his father was at the front desk scheduling another appointment, Hoskins asked the doctor to explain it all again, in a way he could understand.

“There’s calcium depositing around your father’s brain,” the doctor said. He wasn’t looking at Hoskins, but down at his phone, scrolling through his endless text messages. He was already done with the conversation, moved on to other things, and Hoskins considered snatching the phone from his hand and throwing it through the window. “If we hadn’t done the CAT scan, we might not have found out until it was far too late.”

“Found out what?”

The doctor looked up from his phone, smacked his lips together wetly. God, Hoskins hated doctors, hated everything about them. The expense of them, and the time they took, but mostly he hated the way they made you feel like such an idiot, like you were too stupid to even be worth their attention.

“The calcium is affecting your father’s brain,” he said. Slowly, as if Hoskins might be the one with the dysfunctional upstairs. “He’s going to start forgetting things, even more than he already is. Suffering from dementia. His brain impulses will slow down, so he won’t be able to get around as well. It could happen a little bit at a time, over many years so you might not notice, but your father’s got a pretty advanced case. The calcium’s been building up for a long time.”

“Jesus. What are we supposed to do?”

The doctor shrugged.

“There’s no known treatment for his condition,” he said. “There’s nothing you can do.”

“So we’re waiting for him to die?” Hoskins asked, and the doctor had to have heard the anger in his voice, the fear, or maybe he didn’t notice it at all. Maybe the doctor had heard so much of it over the years that he’d become deaf to it.

“I suppose we are,” he said. “But you could say the same thing about everyone. We’re all waiting to die, aren’t we?”

*

His father was going to lose his mind, had possibly been losing his mind over his entire life, slowly, one piece at a time, and this was a curious thing, that a disease had hidden in the structure of his DNA and decided to finally make itself known; it’d been there all along and no one had ever noticed it, because everyone loses their keys and forgets to turn off the oven, maybe Joe did it more often than most people, but how was that supposed to be a reliable sign of what was coming? But Hoskins, he was losing his mind because he was a cop and he’d seen terrible things and it happened a lot, cops went apeshit all the time, but that felt like a half-assed excuse, because it was his job, wasn’t it? He’d signed up for the whole damn thing and he’d known exactly what he was walking into; he’d been trying to get into Homicide since the day he’d been sworn in and it’d driven him to the brink and still he missed it, he sometimes wanted back in so bad he could taste it.

Or, Hoskins thought, he was losing his mind for no reason at all.

He finds ways to keep it together. Just one way, really, although there might be more ways, methods he hasn’t yet discovered. Not drink, he’d tried that, most cops have found their way to the bottom of a bottle at one point or another, but it didn’t work for him. He was a lousy drunk. He didn’t smoke and he didn’t sleep with whores and he didn’t shoot up and he didn’t gamble. He didn’t take the prescription the department psychologist had prescribed for him either; they made his tongue fuzzy and his hands tingle in a way he didn’t like, and he didn’t care much to talk about his feelings, but he still went to the head doctor once a month, partly for show, because people thought you were trying to get better when you went to the doctor, although that wasn’t entirely true in his case.

“Avoidance behavior,” this woman had immediately said, not ten minutes after they’d first met. She’d been asking all sorts of questions, one after another, and marking his answers on her notepad, although she held it so he couldn’t see what she’d been scribbling. “You don’t care for conflict, so you avoid it.”