The daily digest of Twin Cities culture | Secrets of the City

The neat, large farmhouse was different from what he remembered. Even though he had been back for a few months already, it still took him by surprise some mornings: the wide plank, light wood floors, butcher block countertops in the kitchen, cool tones on the walls, books everywhere, fresh coffee brewed by the time he stumbled in from his bedroom. It was a bright house. Clean everywhere, new towels hanging in the bathrooms, even his sheets coming up crisp and changed every few days, his laundry hung in the closet, folded into the dresser.

Hooper hoped that his daughter, Hannah, had not been the one cleaning his room. He liked the sense of order, but he wished he could ask if his wife—his ex-wife, he remembered—Mary Elle, or her lover, Jeannie, were the ones changing the sheets, tidying the bathroom. He did not want his daughter to see the bloody tissues in the trashcan, to have to touch the linens that soaked up the sour smell of his body. Though maybe if Hannah did clean up after him, then things would change, maybe then she would begin to notice him. Sometimes Hooper thought he must already be dead, so insubstantial was his existence to Hannah. He thought that his presence was only a physical obstacle, only something that Hannah had to walk around. He should not have expected anything else, he thought, after going through a decade and a dozen cities since leaving this Midwestern college enclave behind, and along with it, his marriage, his family: Mary Elle and Hannah; he had no real claim on them. He knew he was not much of a father, not while he was gone—a few cards, a few letters from jail—and not now, fading away, dying, ghoulish and sick, just an inconvenience to his daughter.

He supposed that the only reason Mary Elle took him in was because he had been gone long enough so that her anger and resentment had burned away, so that all she carried with her were good memories, the thoughts of why she had loved him in the first place. And Mary Elle had Jeannie now, which was part of it. Jeannie occupied whatever void Hooper had left behind. Or maybe he was flattering himself; maybe he had not left a hole at all; maybe his empty space filled over without a ripple; maybe by the time he left it was a relief for Mary Elle to have him gone; maybe the reason that she took him back in was because she was thankful that he had left in the first place.

Hooper did not know what he had been expecting, but it had not been this: it had not been this farmhouse, so familiar and yet so new, had not been his ex-wife with a woman for a lover, had not been his daughter as something unrecognizable, as a teenager, a creature he could not possibly understand and who could not understand him. Coming home—he thought of it as home again, even after such a long time gone and such a short time back—was a surprise to Hooper; his limited correspondence had all been one-way. He had somehow pictured Mary Elle and Hannah as existing in a stasis, as remaining unchanged.

Things had changed, of course, and Hooper did not only have to contend with Mary Elle and Hannah. Mary Elle had been kind, gracious, forgiving of a man whom she had little reason to forgive, but on that first night, when Mary Elle had brought him back from the airport, Jeannie had been clear about Hooper’s failings, pointing and hissing at him, her body uncomfortably close to his on the red, overstuffed couch. She kept her words quiet and clipped, conscious of the girl sleeping upstairs, but that did not blunt them. He thought it was somehow worse for him because he did not know Jeannie, and while he sat there nodding like an idiot, she scolded him like a child, acting as if she knew him, as if she had soaked in his history simply by her own history with Mary Elle. Still, sharp and jealous, Jeannie had not said no, could easily have said no, and as she badgered him, there were times when he even thought she felt sorry for him.

“I don’t understand why you’re giving him another chance,” Jeannie said, “why you’re taking him in after all this time.”

Mary Elle did not answer, but they all knew why she was taking him in: because, at the most basic level, she was a generous and forgiving woman, because she had loved him once, because he had left before he had destroyed her, because he was dying, because he had asked, because as much as Jeannie had helped to raise Hannah, there was still something of Hooper in the girl. All simple things that did not need to be said.

They had sat quietly for a while, Hooper disoriented from the travel and from the pain, but when he saw Jeannie staring at the burn scars that snaked out of his T-shirt and down his arm, he knew that both of the women believed him when he said he was done with meth. He had said it to Mary Elle before, on the same night that he slipped away for the better part of ten years. This time he was done, though, the cancer beating out the addiction.

He had not been eating much. His doctor had told him that in a few more days the nausea would wear off and he would be ready to eat again. “Try to pack on as much weight as you can,” Dr. Yokimbe had said, “you’ll need it for the next round.” But now, even though it was almost noon, he was not hungry.

The kitchen was quiet when he slowly walked out of his room. He picked up the note next to the small basket of muffins on the counter, reading the hastily scribbled words, “try to eat something, these are fresh,” and with a different colored pen but the same writing, “call if you need anything.” He recognized the writing as Jeannie’s.

He heard the bite of tire on gravel and looked out the kitchen window. The women were back earlier than he had expected.

Hooper pushed the muffins to the back of the counter. The scrawled note, the looping letters in blue ink, “try to eat something, these are fresh,” made him smile again.

He stared at the coffee pot for a moment and then took down a mug from the cupboard. The rough, coiled, clay mug was obviously handmade, though rather poorly, like something a child would make at school, and when Hooper turned it over he was surprised to see Mary Elle’s name rather than Hannah’s. Three months and still there were surprises. He did not know that Mary Elle had tried pottery. He smiled and thought of the first time he saw her and Jeannie kiss; there were bigger things than an interest in pottery that he had not known about Mary Elle.

“Did you eat anything?” Jeannie said, by way of a greeting as she came through the door.

“No,” he said. “Thought I’d try some coffee.” He poured the coffee into the mug, and though the steaming smell made him gag, he kept the bile down until the milk hit the black liquid, pooling out like an oil slick. He vomited into the sink, knocking the mug onto the floor with his elbow.

“Here.” Jeannie held his arm, pushing a tissue into his hands. He wiped his eyes, nose, and mouth, and watched Jeannie clean the coffee from the floor with a dishtowel. The rim of the coffee cup had chipped, and the handle had separated and broken into two pieces, but when Jeannie picked up the mug, Hooper stopped her before she could throw it out.

“I’ll glue it,” he said, taking the pieces from her. “It’ll give me something to do. You won’t be able to tell about the handle,” he said, “though I can’t do much about the chip in the rim.”

Hannah laughed. “Don’t bother.”

His daughter’s voice surprised him. He had not heard her come in, Mary Elle behind her.

Hannah was fifteen and pretty, though not in the corn-fed, American way that her schoolmates were pretty. She had something of him in her, something of Hooper’s father, really, his broad nose, long eyes. She had hacked her ponytail off the week he came, but if anything, it made her more striking: the jagged, close-cropped hair, her height. At six feet, she was as tall as he was, taller really, since Hooper had sunken into himself. He had lost fifteen pounds after the surgery to remove the tumor in his brain, and now, after his first round of treatment, he was down an even sixty pounds. He had not weighed one hundred and forty pounds since he was Hannah’s age.

“Mom’s meth mug,” she said, leaning her hip into the counter. “We can give it a much deserved rest. Bury it in the garden.”

Jeannie let out a snort, a little laugh, and then turned a small scowl toward the girl, “Hannah.”

“Right, right, I forgot. No meth jokes. Come on, J.,” she said, “I mean, look at it.”

Hooper held the cup up in his hand. “A real funeral then. A eulogy for the mug.”

And Mary Elle’s quiet voice, “we’ll have the real thing soon enough.”

“Jesus, Mom. Really classy. We were just goofing around.”

Hooper winced, and Hannah shook her head, walking through the kitchen, her shoes stomping on the stairs.

“Sorry. It just sort of popped out,” Mary Elle said. “I’m still working on the coping through humor thing.”

Hooper nodded, then put the broken mug on the counter. He summoned up a smile. “Don’t bury me in the garden.”

“Wouldn’t think of it,” Jeannie said. “A pauper’s grave for you. Or better yet, we can chuck you on the compost heap.”

“Wow,” Hooper said, “at least wait until I’m dead.”

“That’s what I’m talking about,” Mary Elle said. “How do you joke about it?”

Hooper put the broken handle next to the mug.

“What else is there to do?” Jeannie said.

“You should get outside for a little bit,” Mary Elle said, turning back to Hooper. “It’s nice out. Warm. The fresh air will do you some good.”

“A little too late for that,” he said, but he went out the door anyway and sat on the wicker couch on the porch, hot even out of the sun.

The sound of a tractor carried from one of the adjacent fields. Their neighbor, Tony, Hooper thought. It was a good deal for both sides. They only charged him a token amount, enough to cover land taxes, and in return, Tony gave them as much of his organic produce as they wanted. During the winters, he did small projects around the house for Jeannie and Mary Elle. Two winters ago, Tony had even gutted the kitchen and put in the new cabinets, floor, and appliances, though Mary Elle had done all the painting.

The wind kicked lightly and a thin haze of dust lifted from the garden beside the house. It was a large garden, though all it held was sunflowers. The garden had been Jeannie’s birthday gift to Mary Elle, the sort of thing that Hooper liked to think he would have done if he had stayed straight, if he had stayed around. Hundreds and hundreds of sunflowers, and by the luck of sun and rain, they had actually bloomed the week of Mary Elle’s birthday. Now, though, they were dark and burnt, the ground cracked from the incredible heat. Hooper thought of his rotted flesh and bare bones mixed in with vegetable scraps and grass clippings, spread over the soil and then dried into dust by the sun, blowing over the fields. A morbid thought, but it made Hooper smile, the idea of Jeannie tossing him on the compost heap. He would not put it past her; that would be her idea of a joke.

Hooper had forgotten the Iowa summers. His shirt felt tight around his wrist, and he unbuttoned the cuff. He had come from the West Coast as a graduate student, already older than most of his classmates, and when he left Iowa, he returned to the West Coast and had not come back. Ten years of winter rains and summers by the ocean had left him forgetful of the punishment meted out by the weather. Now, when he saw Tony, it was all either of them talked about. Tony did not ask many questions, did not talk much to Hooper in fact, limiting himself to the rain, the lack of rain, wind and sun and cloud. Hooper supposed that Mary Elle or Jeannie had spelled it out for Tony, but then sometimes he was not sure what the women had told Tony, or for that matter, what they had told anybody.

Hannah knew, of course. She was old enough when he left that she remembered him, or if not exactly him, remembered an idea of him, the destruction he had left in his wake. She remembered enough to be cold and quiet when he was the only one around, to move around the periphery of his existence. She did not call him Dad, did not call him anything, as far as he knew.

When he called, there was silence at first on the telephone, as if Hannah might have so many fathers that she had trouble placing Hooper. That was fair enough, he thought; he had not recognized her voice either, had not heard it since she was five, since he had left, and when she passed the phone off to Mary Elle, he felt relief. And of course, Mary Elle offered to help. He did not have anywhere else to go, he said, though they both knew that was not strictly true. What he really did not have was anywhere else he could call home, anywhere else he needed to go back to before he died.

He did not have any money or insurance, but he and Mary Elle were still technically married. She was close with the head of oncology, and it only took a week to get him in for surgery. With the brain tumor gone, the black specks at the edge of Hooper’s vision vanished also, and he gained back some balance, some of his equilibrium, but once he had rested up from the surgery, the treatments began.

Dr. Yokimbe had warned him that the treatments would be rough. “We can’t cure you,” he said. Dr. Yokimbe looked straight at Hooper when he said this, and Hooper nodded. He had not had any false hopes, at least not about living, not about anything other than Hannah.

“This cancer metastasizes quickly, it is already too far into your lungs for surgery. You are riddled with this.” The doctor picked up a pen from his desk and clicked it open, then closed, open, and then closed again before putting it back down on the desk. “Six months, a year, maybe two. The treatments will be very rough on you. Very unpleasant. But between rounds, you will be able to enjoy many things. It will buy you some time.”

“That’s it?” Hooper asked.

“That is it,” Dr. Yokimbe nodded. “That is the best you can hope for.”

“What if I don’t have the surgery, don’t have the treatments?”

Dr. Yokimbe grimaced. “Without the surgery, it will be quick. Very quick.” He looked out the window of his office and pushed his tongue into the side of his mouth. “Weeks, a month or two.” He turned back to face Hooper. “If you remove the brain tumor but do not have the treatments, I cannot say, but it will still be quick. A few months at best. Though of course, you will not have the unpleasantness of the treatments. The question you should ask yourself is, how much more remains to be done?”

Hooper stared out over the fields to the two-lane blacktop road. A lone car crept down the gentle rise and past the long, gravel drive, headed to town. He fingered the burn mark on the back of his hand. With a long-sleeved shirt on, only the tail of the scar showed, the shape of South America. He had an entire atlas on his back and chest. The night that Hannah saw the scars was the only night when she had stopped, had really seen him, had touched him since he had come home.
He had not been able to sleep, so he pulled on a pair of jeans that were already sliding off his hipbones. He had to hold them up with one hand while he walked into the kitchen. Hannah came down the stairs just as he walked into the kitchen, and saw him standing there without a shirt on.

She did not say anything to him at first. She just stared at the knotted scars on his torso.

“That’s why they call it cooking meth,” he said, trying to make her laugh.

“Does it still hurt?”

“Sometimes.” He touched his chest. “Mostly it just feels tight.”

“How did you do it?”

“I picked up the pitcher and the bottom just sort of collapsed out. It hit the burner, and then,” he waved his hand over his body, “this. I was on fire. I don’t really remember it. I was high. I guess that goes without saying.” He touched his wrist, running his finger around the mottled band. “My watch. It melted into the skin. The doctors had to peel it out.”
“Was that painful?” she said, and then almost immediately she laughed. “Stupid question, I guess.”

“It hurt,” he said.

“Why didn’t you come back before?”

Hooper tried to smile. “You know I went to jail?”

Hannah nodded.

“After the fire, there wasn’t much left in my apartment for the police. When they released me from the burn unit I ended up doing about a year.” He looked at her. “You would have been eleven.”

“Why now?”

“Now or never,” he said. “I’m sorry.”

Hannah stepped forward, her hand reaching out. “Can I?”

Hooper nodded, and Hannah slowly touched the scar on his chest.

“It’s smooth.”

They were both quiet for a moment, and then Hannah had turned and walked back up the stairs.

On the porch, the low drone of Mary Elle’s and Jeannie’s voices carried through the screen door, and Hooper closed his eyes and fell asleep briefly until the sound of the telephone woke him. The telephone rang several times before stopping. There were no other sounds from the house, and Hooper realized that neither of the two cars was in the drive.

He rose stiffly and then walked to his small bedroom at the back of the house, stopping in the kitchen to take a muffin. Before he came, the guest bedroom on the ground floor had doubled as Mary Elle’s office, but though somebody slipped in to clean the bed and bath, the room had been given over completely to him. He kept the marijuana in a sock in the dresser. Not the most original hiding place, he thought, but enough to satisfy Jeannie’s request that he keep it hidden from Hannah, though from the sweet, pungent smell of marijuana that sometimes followed in Hannah’s wake, Hooper did not think the drugs would shock her very much.

He picked up his book and lay down on the bed, smoking about a quarter of the joint before pinching it out between his fingertips. He took a few tentative bites of the muffin, and eventually he fell asleep again.

Hooper woke up panicked and sweating, the room dark except for the feeble lamp on his nightstand. The reek of ammonia was enough for him to realize that he had pissed the bed. He peeled off the sheets and blankets, piled the bedding in a basket and stepped into the shower, turning the water as hot as he could stand. He dried himself and pulled on a pair of pajamas that Mary Elle had bought for him. The thin cotton stuck slightly to his damp back.

He carried the basket to the basement door, leaving the dirty sheets and clothes for later. The house was still quiet, so Hooper pulled himself up the creaky stairs, hoping that he could find clean bedding. He had not actually been upstairs in the farmhouse since his return. There had been no reason. By the time he reached the top, he was out of breath and suddenly chilled and shivering.

From Mary Elle and Jeannie’s bathroom, Hooper took a long, silk robe and wrapped it around himself. They had a stack of thick towels on a shelf beside the bathtub, but no sheets. He ran his hand down the neatly folded stack. He felt alien, out of place in their bathroom. He had shared it with Mary Elle once, had kept cologne and his razor and shaving cream in the cabinet over the sink. There had been thick, brown towels hanging on the wall. Now, the bathroom, the house, his life, was strictly under the purview of women. He left their bedroom and walked down the hall past the closed door of Hannah’s bedroom to the other bathroom. He was out of breath, but he wanted to get clean sheets, wanted to do at least that much for himself.

Hooper stepped on the duck-shaped bathmat and opened the small linen closet in Hannah’s bathroom. He pulled out a few thin blankets off the top shelf, a set of dark green sheets. He was about to turn and leave when he saw another door in the bathroom, this one cracked slightly open, and through the door, Hannah’s bedroom.

He put the linens on the sink and timidly poked his head into the bedroom. Hannah sat cross-legged on the bed, reading a book, scribbling occasionally onto a yellow pad of paper, and he watched her for a few minutes before knocking lightly on the door.

“Hey,” he said, “homework?”

She looked up and nodded, and then looked again at him. “Is that Mom’s bathrobe?”

“I was cold.”

She considered this, and then held up the book so he could see the cover. “English. It drives Jeannie batshit that I don’t let her help me with my papers. Having a professor in the house can be a pain in the ass.”

“Two professors, really.”

She rolled her eyes. “Yeah, well, between Mom teaching medicine and Jeannie, I have to get straight A’s. I’m supposed to be a star in both the sciences and the arts. The only class I’m allowed to do poorly in is gym.” She smiled and pointed to the softball trophies that lined the hutch on the small, blond desk.

Hooper laughed. “It could be worse.”

“Yeah, I could have had you for a dad.”

They were both quiet. Hannah shifted a little on the blue, checked blanket, and Hooper looked around her bedroom. The room was spectacularly neat, not what Hooper would have expected from a teenage girl. A lighter shade of blue, similar to the blanket, covered the walls, and near the window, an uncomfortable-looking star-shaped chair rested by the dresser. On the other wall, the desk with her trophies, a short stack of books, a pair of framed photographs, a silver chair. A few posters hung on the walls, bands that Hooper did not recognize.

“That’s not what I meant,” Hannah said. “It just sort of came out wrong.”

“It’s OK. I wouldn’t have been much good. I wasn’t much good.”

“I know why you left. I know why you couldn’t come back.”

He nodded at her.
“It’s not like it was a secret or anything,” she said. “I mean, we didn’t sit around talking about it, but you know, I knew you were pretty fucked up.”

“It wasn’t your mom.”

“Yeah.”

“I still can’t believe she’s with Jeannie.” Hooper touched the door hinge with his finger. There was a smear of paint on the brass.

“She always says she loved you, but she knew she shouldn’t have married you,” Hannah said.

“Things just got away from me,” he said. “Your mother got away from me.”

“She loves Jeannie.”

“I’m sorry.”

“Don’t be,” she said, and he could hear a sharpness in her voice, and then a turn almost towards defiance. “I love her too.”

“Not about Jeannie. I’m not sorry about that. I meant about me,” he said quickly, feeling as if something had once again gotten away from him. “Things could have been different. I should have come back sooner. I wish I could have. I just,” he faded off, touching the scar on his hand again. “I couldn’t until now. And now it’s too late, I guess.”

“No,” Hannah said, shaking her head. “It worked out pretty well. Things were good.”

“Until I showed up?”

She shrugged.

“I tried,” he said.

“Yeah.”

He stepped into the room, looking at the desk. “Do you mind?”

She shook her head, and Hooper walked closer to the desk, looking at the first photograph, a picture from the previous summer of Jeannie, Mary Elle, Hannah, and in the middle, Mickey Mouse. He picked up the other picture, his stomach knotting. He knew this picture. Hannah cradled loosely in his arms, her hair falling backwards, laughing and looking up at him, a cigarette dangling from his lips, a smile, neither one of them aware of the photographer, of Mary Elle in a different time, a different place, locking away this memory.

Carefully, he put the photograph back.

Hannah stared at him. “I remember that, you know.”

“You were five.”

“I don’t remember much else. You were here and then you were gone.”
Neither of them said anything, but it hung in the air between them. He was here but he would be gone again soon, and after a few minutes he left the room and took his sheets and blankets downstairs.

He laboriously made his bed and then smoked the rest of the joint, idly flipping through a magazine. But later, lying in bed, he thought of the picture, and he knew that when it came to it, after the second round of treatments, after they would have to rent a hospital bed, after he would not be able to get to the bathroom himself, he would still be thinking of the picture. And above him, hearing Hannah’s soft footsteps, he thought of the open laughter, how loose she was in his arms, trusting him to hold her, believing that he would never let her fall.

Alexi Zentner’s short story, “Touch,” was recently selected for the O. Henry Prize Stories 2008 (Anchor Books, May 2008), and his fiction has appeared in Tin House and The Southwest Review. He lives with his wife and two daughters in Ithaca, NY, where he is a student in Cornell University’s MFA program.