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Back 3 a.m.
Chapters (67)
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  67. 3:46 a.m.

I don’t need to see him to know he’s biting his tongue. I try to imagine what he saw when he walked through the door, his only son sitting in a chair at the table, naked as the day he was born.

Unable to squelch it any longer, he erupts in violent laughter. “Do I even want to ask, Son?”

In the fifteen minutes since I called him, I’d made some headway and I’m able to lift my head slightly. I can see him wiping tears from his eyes out of my periphery.

Murdock and Lassie tumble off the couch loudly, no doubt waking my downstairs neighbors from a pleasant slumber.

“Be quiet, you two,” my dad yells.

To their credit, they stop.

I feel my dad’s hand on my shoulder. He is still chuckling, but he also knows what an ordeal it was the last time this happened to me. I easily could have done irrevocable harm to my spine and there could be nerve damage in my arms, hands, legs, and feet.

Murdock appears next to my father and begins licking my face with his foot-long tongue.

“Hey, you big lug.”

Lassie is standing on his back, riding him.

Meow.

“Yes, like a horse,” I agree.

“Move it,” my dad says, pushing the beast out of the way. “Now let’s get you to the couch.”

I’d given this some thought and decided the best bet was for my dad to slide my chair to the couch, then roll me over the back.

It isn’t easy, but by 3:27 a.m., I am on the sofa. My dad pulled some boxers on for me, which wasn’t the highpoint of my life, but he didn’t bat an eye.

What a champ.

“You want a couple of those pills?”

It’s all I want, but I also want my wits about me for the next ten minutes.

“Not yet,” I groan, the vibration of the words causing an aftershock in my neck. I change my mind. “Pills. Now.”

He brings me some water and I wash down the two pills.

“Can you feed Lassie and grab me a shake out of the fridge?”

He does both.

He sits down on the couch next to me and holds the shake while I drink.

“So, you gonna tell me what happened?”

“Grab the laptop.”

He does.

The screensaver, a picture of Ingrid, is on-screen, and I say, “Refresh it.”

He is apprehensive.

“It’s not porn, dad. I just happened to be naked.”

“I don’t judge.”

I spend the next minute telling him about Men in Black, how I think the woman who walked out on us thirty years ago sent it to me, and how I’m pretty sure she sent me a hidden message through a review written for the movie.

“I don’t see the review,” he says.