Better You Go Home Read online

  Better You Go Home

  by

  Scott Driscoll

  * * *

  Coffeetown Press

  PO Box 70515

  Seattle, WA 98127

  For more information go to: www.coffeetownpress.com

  www.scott-driscoll.com

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, brands, media, and incidents are either the product of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously.

  Cover design by Sabrina Sun

  Better You Go Home

  Copyright © 2013 by Scott Driscoll

  ISBN: 978-1-60381-170-5 (Trade Paper)

  ISBN: 978-1-60381-171-2 (eBook)

  Library of Congress Control Number: 2013938460

  Produced in the United States of America

  * * * * *

  Acknowledgments

  The following were instrumental in helping this novel come to be and I extend to them my deepest thanks: Jennifer McCord, for her tireless editing in the developmental drafts; Catherine Treadgold for her time and wisdom with the final edits; Josef Kolář and Dana Wilkie, Czech transplants to Seattle who authenticated the details and language of my family’s former homeland; Kate Trueblood, my writer friend who read late drafts; David Downing, Jasen Emmons, Nicholas O’Connell, Layne Maheu, Garth Stein, and Cindy Willis, current and former writing group task masters; my sister, Sandra Driscoll, who fed me medical information; my father, Glenn Driscoll, who introduced me to Czech family connections; my patient wife, Daiga Galins, who kept the roof over our heads while encouraging me to get this done; my daughter, Megan Driscoll, who provided technical support; and my son, Dainis Driscoll, who (at age six) coined the term “baguette ponytail” and allowed me to use it.

  Additional thanks to Jack Remick and Mindy Halleck for helping with social media connections, to Roberta Trahan for aid with file management, and thanks to the friends who asked about the book and cheered me along.

  Chapter One

  Monday Afternoon at the Church: September 12, 1994

  The desultory flap flapping of the monk’s sandals in the cathedral’s cold, vaulted vastness reminds me of my father’s attitude when I told him I was coming to the Czech Republic to find my sister. It was not indifference, exactly. He chewed right through his toothpick and left his thick-cut bacon untouched on his plate. It wasn’t even so much him saying, “Those people are dead, it’s not your concern.” It was more the way he tossed my plan off as though it was of no consequence. The way the farmer who called the raptor center where I volunteer weekends said a random owl had flown into his glass porch and then, that out of the way, went right back out to his tractor to continue his row.

  “Tell me again why you wanted to meet me here?”

  “Sick people,” whispers Milada, “come here from every place in world to pray to Bambino for cure. He is famous.”

  “A cure?” Milada is a doctor, she knows better.

  Today was the day Milada was to drive me to my father’s village in eastern Bohemia to begin our search. Instead, I’m watching the monk in his brown robe drape an ermine shawl over the shoulders of a wax Christ child mounted above the altar. He ignores us, the newest supplicants, with divine disinterest. The stone walls are unadorned. Kostel Panny Marie vítězné is a spare German Lutheran-built structure in Prague’s Malá Strana district near the river. Not much here for tourists except this chapel.

  “Bambino was brought here from Rome by Carmelites.” She reads the Bambino’s provenance off a placard as though that will nail the lid on my incredulity. Something about touching his cheek and Countess Kolovrat’s sight and hearing came back and it was a miracle, and ever since then the lame and the sick have flocked like lemmings to our humble church in Prague to touch the Bambino.

  “FYI, he’s behind bullet-proof glass.”

  “Ano, but still you can pray. I have prayed to Bambino before I take medical school exams. I believe you have say? ‘Do not put all bets in one basket’?”

  “Eggs. Eggs …” I’ve never met my sister. I only actually learned of her existence this year. My father grew up in Písečná, a farm village near the mountains bordering Poland. He would have inherited a large estate had he not been unlucky enough to come of age in time to be conscripted into the Nazi army. Or, would have, had he stayed. He was sixteen when he fled to Iowa with his father and two younger sisters, along with a woman from the farm next door and three of her children. He left his mother behind on the farm with three of his sisters. But he also left someone else behind, and this is the rub. He left Rosalie, the young “maid,” pregnant. His daughter, my half-sister, was born four months after his arrival in Iowa and was sent away by her mother to live in an orphanage.

  “I am so exciting to see you.” Milada invites me to bend down. I’m a ridiculously tall man. She gives me a kiss on the cheek, then holds me at arm’s length for a better look. “You look good but I see swelling.”

  “I know,” I say, ruefully patting my belly. “Fifteen pounds of fluid.”

  Last winter, I was warned that renal failure is in my near future. Until then I’d led a pretty cosseted life—high marks in law school, a rapid rise to the position of city attorney in Kent Terrace, a suburban municipality south of Seattle. But, okay. That is what was. This is what is. Hating the thought of being idle, and hating even more the thought that there was a little girl who was my sister and whose existence my father had denied, I vowed to use my medical leave to find her. To find her, and, if a visa could be arranged, bring her back to Seattle. My sister, I’ve learned, worked most of her adult life as the director of the orphanage where she grew up. While my weekend warrior trips to the raptor center have nothing to do with abandoned children per se, rehabilitating wounded raptors ought to appeal to her rescuing nature.

  “You bring the letter with you?” I can’t avoid this indefinitely.

  “Všechno v pořádku. Everything is fine. I am certain.”

  “Did you read it?”

  “So many questions. Finally you are here.”

  “My internist is not happy about it and my father pretends not to care. But you look great.” I’d forgotten how dark complected she is, how Slavic looking. Her eyes have an extra fold at the corners that I teasingly call her Genghis Khan fold. Despite having raised three boys, she’s kept the compact figure of the Olympic skater she once was. Today, in Prague, she’s wearing the same black Italian leather jacket and thigh-cleaving slacks she wore when we first met in February. A reporter took a photo of her that day that was later printed in the Everett Herald along with her essay on why she loves the Pacific Northwest. At the time she was attending an English language school for professionals, paid for by her employer, the Czech Ministry of Health. I tucked a copy of that photo into my passport pouch. In the six months that have gone by since, I’ve studied it as though she were the Holy Grail.

  “What your father say about you come to Prague?”

  “When he realized I was serious? Let me see if I can get this right. He said … it would be best if I don’t get involved … quote unquote.”

  “I am wary sorry, Chico. But we will speak with his family. He had to know we look for your sister.”

  In these past few months so much has happened I hardly know if I’m coming or going. My amicable divorce was finalized in December. In January, my nephrologist dropped the warning that without transplant surgery I had at most a year before my kidneys gave out. Needing time to absorb everything, I flew back to Cedar Rapid
s to visit my father, only to find letters handwritten in Czech in his attic revealing the existence of a sister. With little more to go on than the name of a village, I sent a letter requesting information regarding a woman named Anežka who would be in her early fifties. Before the month was out, I had a call from Milada. She had grown up on the very farm that once belonged to my father’s family. What did she expect from me? Was she looking for a sponsor? That thought did cross my mind. Age is a subject she avoids. The chemical black dye she uses on her hair seems to confirm my surmise—based on her having let slip that she was eighteen in August 1968 when she escaped, briefly, over the border into Germany—that she is forty-four or forty-five, two or three years older than me. Her family, one boy still at home, lives in a concrete high-rise flat—I’ve seen photos, it looks cheerless—a flat that she loathes but is stuck with. Her husband took a usurious loan from the Russian mafia so he could restore the mountain chata where his ill father spent his final years. Living under the hammer of the Russian mafia was not how she had planned to enjoy her freedom. Fair enough, I’ll sponsor her if that’s really what she wants. I did make her promise that first, as soon as my medical leave started, she’d take me to my father’s village.

  Here I am.

  She couldn’t get out of her shift today.

  A letter arrived that probably means bad news.

  * * *

  “Guess I better have a look.”

  “Ted’ je dobrý čas.” Milada pulls out of her handbag a manila envelope marked “Urgent!” The return address puzzles me, until I realize it’s my ex-wife’s new condo.

  Inside is a business-sized envelope that has been cut open and resealed with tape. On the back, a hand-drawn smiley face is wearing a frown. Frown? A frown? Her note is written on a pad from Metro Bank—my ex manages loan officers—in large looping letters gauged to help me read without my magnifier.

  Before you read this letter, she says, don’t worry. Should I scream or laugh? I called the UW Medical Center and talked to Julie. Julie is the social worker who makes the arrangements once you’ve been accepted for transplant surgery. Please look at the date on the letter. I’m very, very sorry I didn’t get this to you sooner. You know how sometimes I get your mail and you get mine even though I put in for a change of address? Well. I didn’t know if I should open this. But I thought it could be important. I forwarded it to your ‘guide’ (smiley face) I don’t know the Czech word. Big hug, whether you want it or not. Your ex, ha ha. (I’m still Kasia.)

  “Could you read it for me?” I ask Milada. I’m a coward when it comes to facing bad news. Feed it to me gently?

  A class of twittering uniformed school children chooses this moment to wing into the famous Bambino’s chapel. They shush each other to avoid a swat on the ear from their chaperoning nun. They recite a prayer. The radiance of their voices cheers me up, until I notice Milada frowning and my heart stops again.

  “I cannot understand your English insurance speak.”

  “Maybe read it out loud?”

  The nun gives us a baleful look before guiding her twittering sparrows elsewhere. Milada waves the nun away with a rude hand gesture that reminds me of her impetuous side, not what you’d expect necessarily of an anesthesiologist who designed a portable machine for testing blood gasses and who has devoted much of her career—and suffered a lack of promotions from the Ministry of Health because of it—to coercing the government to pay for the installation of these machines in emergency vehicles.

  We are alone in the Bambino’s chapel. She reads. My blood tests, according to Dr. Stan Pomerantz, the signatory on the letter from Blue Cross, show a creatinine level averaging seven to seven point five. For someone my size, it would take a consistent reading over eight to trigger concern of imminent renal failure. Pomerantz concedes that the rapidity of my kidneys’ deterioration warrants further testing. Before they can complete their consideration for approval of dual kidney/pancreas transplant surgery, I need to come back in for another round of blood and urine tests and chest X-rays.

  Consideration for approval? The drop-dead date by which they want the test results is September 23rd. “That’s a week from Friday. Ten days.”

  “Tomorrow you must speak with my colleague. Dr. Saudek will say you what is possible at IKEM. On Wednesday he will go with me to conference in Brno so we must see him tomorrow.”

  “Delay delay delay, that’s their job, you know. They delay until you die and then you are no longer their liability.”

  “Kneel with me. Please, Chico.” She tucks the letter back into her handbag, but of course I notice her doing it. “We will say prayer to Bambino.”

  “What’s the point?”

  “You are being crazy like me.” She touches a finger to my lips. “Your family was Catholic. They would not say this is wrong. Now you must recite prayer exactly.”

  Typed copies of a standard prayer, translated into a dozen languages, are taped with yellowing sticky-tape along the marble banister’s handrail. The lame and sick who feel inspired to ask for miracles are instructed to kneel at the rail and recite the prayer. Milada locates the English language version.

  She won’t accept a no, so I kneel beside her. After breaking the sticky-tape seal, she slips the crinkled paper with the prayer out of its plastic sheathing. She reads it, intact with grammatical errors, and I repeat it verbatim:

  “Humbly understand, dear God, that I am aware that I asking for special consideration. Please know that I am willing to bear burden of my suffering if that is your will.”

  “Willingly suffer?” I repeat.

  “It’s a matter of faith,” she reminds me.

  “But if it pleasing to you, God, take away this suffering. Will you please humbly consider …” Here the prayer instructs the supplicant to fill in the blank with a personal request.

  “Now you must say request in your words.” Age and smoke have darkened the Bambino’s face and raised hand to ebony. He gazes down at me impassively. Obviously, he’s seen this a thousand times before.

  “First, thanks for not sending me a rejection. I am grateful for that.” Sorry, Bambino, I sound like the mumblers at city hall with too much time on their hands. “I gotta do this silently.”

  I do have a request. Remind Blue Cross that if they drop me they’ll lose the contract for a hundred and twenty thousand municipal employees in the State of Washington, not just my office. Just remind them of the facts. No threats. And make sure you leave no paper trail, but get me on the list. Okay, one more request? Help me find Anežka while I can still get around. I’ve got that room waiting for her in my townhouse. That map I hung on the wall is so detailed it shows every last village in the Czech Republic. We’ll spend our days at the raptor center. Evenings she’ll walk me around the map. I don’t know if a reconciliation with my father, our father, will be possible, but at least he should be called to the witness stand to answer a few questions.

  Milada strokes my arm. “Budeš potřebovat protekci.”

  “That sounded lovely. Say it again.”

  “Is not joke. Here if you have pull, things can be done.”

  I shake my head. “No. I really can’t do that.” Despite knowing I feel that it would be a grievous betrayal, Milada persists in believing I should ask Anežka to donate a kidney.

  “Tomorrow night you will eat dinner with my family. We will phone to your insurance. Maybe they will give extension and we will find Anežka.”

  “I get to spend tomorrow with you? You’re not on shift?”

  “Trvám na tom!. I cannot permit you stay alone. Perhaps you meet some hot young Eastern European tramp.” She slides her thumb over two fingers, the international sign for money. “For one day you are my prisoner, Chico!”

  She promises to call me at my rented room first thing in the morning. I watch her walk away from the Bambino’s chapel. Here, in Prague, she has that Eastern bloc way of hunching her shoulders and shoving her hands into pockets to make herself less noticeable. When I took
her out for a cold walk by the Skagit River this past winter I saw none of that hunching. While I waited on the bridge, braced for the cold, she disappeared into the tall, coniferous woods.

  The children’s sing-songy chanting of their Catechism reaches me from deep in the cathedral’s recesses. My father, František Lenoch, we call him Frank, was pretty devout in his younger years. He once admitted to me—he’d never have admitted this to Mom—that church helped him remember his mother, my grandmother, whom he never saw again once he’d fled to Iowa. She had a chapel built in their farmhouse so she could worship nightly. The Dostáls, her family, built the first and only church in the valley. He carries a lot of unspoken guilt surrounding his mother’s death, guilt that no amount of going to confession, evidently, could expiate. But, these are his issues, not mine. I don’t miss going to church. I do love the way the children’s voices reverberate within these stone walls. It’s nothing less than the clarion call of angels. Joy itself. I love it. I’m convinced that sound of unadulterated joy can only be cooked up in a pressure cooker like here. How would Anežka feel about that? Her entire life was spent in this pressure cooker. Would she have an ear fine-tuned for the subtle shades of suffering in her orphans’ expressions of joy? Or would she have grown tone-deaf to all that, as though it were nothing more than desultory noise?

  Chapter Two

  Tuesday Night in Prague: Sept. 13, 1994

  Milada’s flat is on the eighth floor of a twelve-story high rise in a gray sídliště of concrete block buildings. The street curb is dammed by defunct Škodas, the no-frills tin-can cars manufactured locally. The security mesh screening the outer door is rusted and dented. This is the depressing Khrushchev-era flat Milada is forced to continue calling home so that her husband could afford that Russian mafia loan. Okay, it’s not lost on me that I’m taking risks, possibly for no better reason than to salvage my own father’s dignity. Or my own. Still, Jiří goes too far. How is his pride any different than that of his father’s?