Mercies in Disguise Read online

  Buddy was silent for a few minutes, then looked at Tim and warned: “Be careful what you wish for.”

  Was Buddy telling him that he could never get in, or that he would not like being a doctor? Tim, embarrassed by the way he had blurted out his new calling, let the matter drop.

  Though he kept it to himself, Tim felt this lightning bolt of a revelation must have been divine intervention.

  He quietly began preparing for his new profession, going back to college to take the courses, like organic chemistry and comparative anatomy, he’d skipped as an undergraduate. He enrolled in the same local college, Francis Marion University, that had given him his undergraduate degree, all the while working as a chiropractor. He made up for the time he was away from the office while in class by working on weekends.

  Four years later, he was ready to take the grueling entrance exam for medical school and apply. The same doctor, who tried to dissuade him from becoming a chiropractor, Pickens Moyd, now wrote letters and made phone calls on Tim’s behalf. To Tim’s astonishment, he was accepted at the Medical University of South Carolina. He paid for medical school by working as a chiropractor during his three-month summer break and on school holidays. Nine years after his epiphany, in the summer of 1996, he had his MD.

  Now Tim and Buddy were both doctors. The two brothers would regularly visit each other—Tim was doing his residency training in Charleston, while Buddy remained in Hartsville—and mull over the mystery of their father’s illness, looking for clues, for hypotheses.

  All that speculation changed for Tim as soon as he heard that old woman’s seemingly offhand comment at his father’s viewing in 1998. He knew with a grim certainty that he had to tell Buddy despite the anxiety that instilled in him. Buddy intimidated him. It seemed Buddy still met many of his opinions and theories with skepticism; Tim frequently felt a charge of defensiveness in discussions with his brother. Most crucially, if he told Buddy his fears that their father’s disease might be inherited, he would be confronting him with a theory that held a serious family threat within it. He already felt raw from thinking about the consequences if he was right; he didn’t look forward to being grilled by Buddy.

  The Baxleys were not a demonstrative family, seldom hugging or even touching each other. They had been taught to keep their emotions private, so Tim knew Buddy was unlikely to embrace him in his sorrow and tell him he understood why he was so distraught. No, Buddy might very well just walk away, turning his back on him and his wild imaginings. He had to say something, though. The question was when.

  Tim and his family returned to his parents’ familiar house after the viewing, weary from the long hours at the funeral home. As soon as they arrived, Tim excused himself, so exhausted he barely made it to the cramped room downstairs where Merle had set up a small bed. It used to be the game room when Tim and his brothers were growing up, where the brothers battled each other in furious games of Ping-Pong. Now it held little more than a couple of narrow beds. But it was still full of mementos preserved by Merle. On shelves lining a yellow cinder-block wall were just about every schoolbook, novel, and nonfiction book her boys had ever owned. Once, Tim’s daughter, poking through the shelves, had even found a love note Tim had written but apparently not sent to the prettiest girl in his fourth-grade class; it was carefully penned in his best handwriting on lined paper from his three-ring binder and signed “Love, Tim.” And somewhere, tucked away on one of the shelves, was that old World War II compass that symbolized, Tim now suspected, something far more daunting than anyone would have expected.

  Next door, in Tim’s old bedroom, his wife Janet—tall, kind, chestnut-haired—and their daughters, ten-year-old Parker, Janet’s child from a previous marriage, and eleven-month-old Lee, were sleeping. This room was decorated with little more than a painting of a Clemson tiger—all the Baxley boys except Tim had gone to Clemson—and a few pictures from the boys’ old yearbooks. All was quiet. Tim envied his slumbering family. His body was exhausted; dead weight, as heavy as if it had been packed with sand. But his mind was alert. It had seized upon the old woman’s offhand remark—on its face, so inconsequential—and refused to let go, sending him into a tailspin of visions of the terrifying fates awaiting other members of the Baxley family. He and his brothers tucked into wheelchairs and stationed around Merle’s table for Sunday dinner, faces frozen into grotesque masks over steaming plates of food they couldn’t even lift their forks to eat. Merle placing flowers on the graves of her husband and sons, tombstones perversely arranged in birth order.

  Tim thrashed in his tiny bed, grappling with his thoughts, intermittently reminding himself that he didn’t know anything yet. After all, how far could he go with such an offhand remark? So his grandfather had also been a little ungainly—being clumsy doesn’t mean anything.

  He watched the hours go by. Midnight, 1:00 a.m., 2:00 a.m., 3:00 a.m. He got up and took an Ambien. Four a.m. How would he ever make it through the next day?

  He rolled over, a brick of certainty shifting in his stomach. At some point he slept, a heavy dreamless sleep, only to wake again at dawn, dreading his talk with Buddy yet also holding out a slim hope that his brother would convince him his fears were groundless.

  Tim dragged himself to the breakfast table. Merle and Janet had made a big pile of pancakes, his daughter Parker’s favorite. Mike arrived, driving the short distance from his own house to his childhood home. “He told us at the end that he was just tired,” Mike said, struggling with his emotions. “Sometimes death is not the worst thing.” Merle agreed. Bill was in a better place now, she said, his suffering was over.

  After breakfast the others drifted in, Buddy and his family and Billy with his son and daughter, each of them dressed conservatively in dark colors, somber and sedate, ready for the funeral.

  Tim finished his pancakes—the Baxleys always were good eaters, he thought wryly—grabbed his mug of coffee and eased up from his chair. He crossed the kitchen and stepped into the sunroom, the enclosed porch with those windows his father had had such trouble with at Home Depot. Impossible to escape the memories. Restless, Tim drifted back into the dining area and wandered into the hallway leading back to the first-floor bedrooms. It was lined with family photos, so many there was almost no wall left visible. Tim scanned from frame to frame: his parents’ wedding fifty years ago; Merle holding Billy, her first baby; the boys going fishing with their dad; Bill and Merle ringed by their entire family at Christmas.

  And then there was the photo from Tim’s wedding in 1994. Such a bittersweet memory of how things used to be. In it, Merle and Bill and the four Baxley sons with their families stand facing the camera in three lines, the tallest in the back. Ten-year-old Amanda, Buddy’s youngest, is in the center of the first row, hands clasped in front of her, shining bangs grazing her eyebrows. Buddy’s glasses glint. Bill looks dignified with a white handkerchief peeking out of the breast pocket of his suit. Merle, in a flowered dress pinned with a white corsage, is standing in front of him. It was the last time they were together before Bill’s illness accelerated, the last time he could participate in a wedding, the last time of innocence before torment rained down on the family.

  Everyone was healthy now, but for how long? If he was right—if the disease was inherited—then they were already running out of time. Tim shook the thought from his mind and looked over at the kitchen where his mother was cleaning up after the meal. She’d been buoyed by the crowd at the viewing the night before; now her years of rigid self-discipline were allowing her to get through this day, at least this part of it.

  The long black limousines from the funeral home arrived. It was time to go.

  The service was held at the First Baptist Church, a stately redbrick building with four white pillars in front and a stark white steeple against a cloudless blue sky. Bill and Merle had been married in the little chapel behind the church. It was the church where Tim and each of his brothers had been baptized; where they had spent so many Sunday mornings; where their father was a deacon and where he taught a Sunday school class.

  Inside, sun streamed through giant stained-glass windows. The mourners continued to file in, filling every pew and packing into the back. The family was among the last to arrive, opening the heavy white doors and seeing the waiting crowd, feeling all eyes on them as they slowly walked down the aisle to the first pew. Bill’s casket, closed now, was positioned in front of the pulpit. Bill’s only siblings, Faye, who lived in Huntsville, Alabama, and Burt, who lived in Los Angeles, walked in with them. No one had seen Burt or Faye for years. They lived far away and the Baxleys were generally not ones for staying in close touch with relatives beyond the immediate family. So Bill and his siblings had drifted apart. But when Mike, with his genteel ways, always the brother to deliver bad news, had called to say Bill had died, they came.

  The minister, Charles Roberts, was an old friend of Bill’s, a slender man with a broad ruddy face, a goatee, and bifocals perched on his nose. Despite their thirty-year difference in age, the two would play golf and go to the men’s club at church together. Charles recalled his dear friend Bill, told a few stories, described his great character, and then closed on a wistful note: “We will meet again on that beautiful shore.”

  After the final prayer, the minister looked at the casket and said, “I love you, Mr. Bill.”

  The family, faces tracked with tears, made their way slowly down the aisle as the organ played a final hymn. Tim escorted Merle, her exhaustion and sorrow weighing her down once again. He slipped his arm in hers, her fragile hand gripping his bent arm as if it were a crutch. They made their way behind the church for the graveside ceremony, a private moment for the family alone. As they slowly walked past the chapel to the little cemetery, Merle looked up at Tim and, with an expression
of utter sadness, remarked, “We are right back where we started.”

  It took Tim a few minutes to understand what she meant—that this was where her life with Bill had started, fifty years before. Their life together was ending where it had begun. Tim stopped with his mother under the shade of some oak trees, hoping for some respite from the intense heat of the day, watching the casket make its slow, measured descent into the freshly dug grave. Bill and Merle had purchased the family plot years ago—there were places reserved for Tim and his brothers too. The fact that his body would one day occupy this ground had always struck him as a detail from someone else’s life. But now the reality of his uncertain fate gripped him. His mother crumpled at his side in sorrow; he couldn’t imagine putting her through this again. He needed to find answers.

  Afterward, the family and a crowd of about sixty friends gathered at Merle’s house. In a blanket effort at consolation, everyone had brought food. There was fried chicken. There was basket upon basket of biscuits as well as cakes, potato salad, macaroni and cheese. Merle set it all out in the kitchen, spread it over every surface she had. Her little house—a 1960s-style brick ranch with a living room and dining area separated from the kitchen by a single counter—was once again full, people hurrying back and forth to fill plates and pour cold sweet tea. There would never be alcohol in her home—she had seen firsthand how alcoholism can ravage families and lead to early and tragic deaths. In reaction, she had never touched a drop. She did not even use vanilla extract when she baked because it contained alcohol.

  Faye and Burt sat in the sunroom on the other side of the kitchen. Mike saw them there and remembered, as Tim had earlier, the day his father could not figure out how to get the windows into his station wagon.

  It had been such a painful time, Mike recalled, those years of watching his father struggle, watching his mother veer between exasperation and pity. It had not been easy to live with Bill after he got sick. Even when he was still able to lurch around the house, still able to shower and dress himself, everything took so long. Merle struggled to remain patient even as she felt such shame to be tired of life with her struggling husband. By the time Bill died, Merle had begun to wonder if she’d have to send him to a nursing home, something she had sworn she would never do. But here, now, as her house filled with people, Merle responded with her usual grace; her sons noticed the way she was strengthened by this outpouring of love and support.

  Meanwhile, Tim had been trying to choose the right moment to speak with Buddy, practicing how he would articulate his concern to his big brother. With so many people in the house, with the din of everyone’s conversations, Tim realized the time had come: nobody would notice if the brothers disappeared for a few minutes.

  He sidled up to Buddy. “Can we talk privately for a minute?” Buddy nodded and the two brothers padded down the narrow hall, past the gallery of oblivious family members and toward the master bedroom, a preferred spot for secret conferences.

  Tim’s throat was dry as he turned to face Buddy. How to phrase it so as not to sound paranoid? But Buddy seemed ready to listen, leaning against their parents’ gleaming dark cherry wood bureau. Tim inhaled deeply and charged ahead. He moved systematically through the chain of events, explaining how he knew it might sound crazy but he just had this feeling about what it meant; how the elderly woman’s story had sent goose bumps prickling up and down his limbs and his stomach had dropped under the weight of his intuition. “Maybe it isn’t much,” he concluded, “but we can’t afford to overlook any detail.”

  Buddy was silent for a few moments. He looked directly at Tim, locking eyes. “You’re not wrong,” he agreed. “We’re in no position to discount a clue, however small.” Everything they tried—and they felt as if they had truly tried everything—had ended at a brick wall. They needed a new direction. And if Tim was right—if their father’s mystery disease was a thing that could be transferred from father to son and if it could kill you at fifty like it killed their grandfather—well, fifty wasn’t far off.

  A wave of relief washed over Tim. He was no longer in it alone. “What about getting that spinal fluid tested?” he asked hurriedly—referring to the fluid they’d drawn from their father and stored in Buddy’s freezer. Tim had considered that option when he’d tossed and turned with this news on his own the night before. When they’d first stored the fluid he had no idea what to look for in it, but Tim now knew there was a protein, called 14-3-3, that was nonspecific but if it was present in their father’s fluid, Tim explained, it would mean Bill had had a neurodegenerative disease. His symptoms certainly were those of such a disease.

  Buddy looked down. “I guess I never told you,” he confessed. “We had a power failure a few weeks ago and everything in the freezer thawed. I had to throw out the spinal fluid.”

  “You’ve got to be kidding me,” Tim replied. At this point he had come to expect disappointments, but this was incredible. Still, what could he say? The fluid was ruined. Anger was not going to solve the problem. It was one more difficulty in what seemed to be a series of unyielding challenges.

  The brothers stood staring at each other in the sunny bedroom, the mystery threatening to overcome them, until they were struck with this idea: the question they needed to answer did not require a medical test. What they really needed to know was whether it was possible to inherit their father’s illness. Framing the question this way offered a path forward. They needed a family tree of disease. They needed to find every relative they could, tracking down cousins, aunts and uncles, great-aunts and great-uncles, going back through the generations to find out if anyone else had had a disease like the one that killed their father and, perhaps, their grandfather.

  But neither brother wanted to take on the project. It would take so much time to find and call long-lost relatives. Both of them had demanding jobs and families. And those calls would not be easy to make, considering the underlying message.

  “Mike can do it,” Tim decided. Mike was not married. He was the politician in the family—he had just finished twelve years as a state congressman and he knew everyone in the area. He could put anyone at ease.

  They’d take Mike aside the next Sunday, when they all went to Merle’s for dinner after church, the brothers decided. For the time being they would keep their other brother, Billy, out of it. They felt a slight distance from Billy growing up, despite all the games and pranks they’d played together. Billy tended to keep to himself when his brothers played wild games of basketball in the driveway and begged off their hunting and fishing trips.

  Now he lived across the state, working as a dentist in Abbeville. He was going through a divorce and having a difficult time. No, Buddy and Tim decided, asking him was out of the question.

  The two brothers emerged from Merle’s bedroom, discreetly closing the door behind them. They rejoined the family, keeping mum about what had transpired.

  4

  An Uncertain Inheritance

  At Merle’s house the next Sunday, once Merle had served dessert and the meal had ended, Buddy looked at Tim meaningfully. The brothers took Mike aside, bringing him into the master bedroom where Tim and Buddy had convened the week before. Tim explained what the woman had said to him about their grandfather, feeling a bit calmer with Buddy at his side. He spoke of his terrible premonition that it meant this was not the last they’d seen of this illness.

  Mike looked at his brothers, trying not to let his astonishment show. He had not intended to keep it a secret, but actually, he already knew about his grandfather’s stumbling.

  One afternoon, when Mike and Bill had been playing golf, Bill began talking about his father and his work. Then, ever so casually, Bill remarked that men who worked at the mill with him were shaken by what they saw. “They remembered him stumbling from side to side in the textile mill. When you stumble in a mill, a machine can snatch you in. There are a lot of folks around here who are missing fingers and limbs that they gave to the textile mill.”

  Yet, it had never occurred to Mike to link his grandfather’s problem to his father’s disease. The main thing that struck Mike was that even though Bill had not seen his father’s stumbling and lurching for himself—he’d been away fighting in World War II throughout his father’s entire illness—he had heard that people in the factory had been afraid for his father.