The Night Listener : A Novel

came hurtling back to me some forty years later as Josie drove us into Charleston from the airport. These sprawling suburbs looked so numbingly alike now, but down there beyond the freeway, along the marshes of the Ashley, I thought I’d seen that color again—the eerie blue of a low gas flame—and I’d uttered the words “Boo Daddy” almost without thinking.
    Josie corrected me. “That’s a Blockbuster Video, sweetie.”
    “C’mon.”
    “Yep. Think so.”
    “Well, fuck. You’re no fun at all.”
    She laughed. “You were awful to me back then.”
    “Was I?”
    “You and your Boo Daddy.”
    What a telling name, I thought, as if hearing it for the first time.
    Down here the devil was just another difficult patriarch.
    I hadn’t been home—or rather to Charleston—for almost four years, when I came here, minus Jess, for Pap’s eightieth birthday. Josie and Darlie had planned the event down to the last detail, renting a cottage on Sullivan’s Island and hiring a troupe of decrepit bagpipers to serenade the old man. It was better than most of our reunions, but I’d eaten a bad oyster that night and ended up puking my guts out during a stirring rendition of “Loch Lomond.” Since then, for reasons far beyond bad oysters, I’d resolved to stay on my own turf and let the family come to me.
    “Is this weird for you?” my sister asked.
    I shrugged. “Not in the scheme of things, no.”
    “I’ve told a few people you’re coming. I hope you don’t mind.” I smiled gamely.
    “And Billy and Susan are flying in tomorrow.”
    “That’s good.”
    “Would you like to freshen up first? We’ve done some new things with the house. I’m dying for you to see it.” Josie and her husband, Walker, had moved into our childhood home on Meeting Street in the early nineties when Pap and Darlie bought a two-bedroom condo in what had once been the Fort Sumter Hotel. Josie had given the house a thorough but sensitive remodeling, fussing over it in a way that seemed almost parental now that her kids were grown and gone.
    “I think I should see him first,” I said, “then freshen up. Smoke some crack, maybe. Shoot some heroin.”
    She turned to me and giggled. She was still so pretty. She had our mother’s English coloring and kind hazel eyes, our mother’s instinct to be strong when the menfolk might not be up to it. “He’s handling it fine,” she said. “And he looks okay, except for a droopy place on his face.”
    “Can he talk?”
    “Oh, yeah. Now, listening is another matter.” I smiled.
    “His personality hasn’t changed. When he heard his nurse was named Clinton, he asked her if she was kin to that horny prick in Washington.”
    “Oh, God.”
    “And yesterday he told me his doctor is one helluva fine Jew.”
    “Right.”
    “He does it to get attention, as much as anything. What were you doing in Milwaukee, anyway?”
    It was unsettling to be thrust back into that icy hallucination when it was almost seventy outside and a warm, spongy-soft breeze was rolling off the river. “I was visiting a sick boy,” I said.
    “Oh…how is he?”
    “He died before I got there.”
    “Did you know him well?”
    “Fairly.”
    “From where?”
    “He was sort of a fan.”
    “A listener, you mean?”
    “Yeah.”
    “God,” she said. “You’re catching some shit right now.” I wondered how much Jess had told her about the breakup, but I was too afraid to ask. He and Josie had always spoken freely, and he may well have told her what it was about me that had sent him packing.
    “It’s amazing,” I said, peering out the window, “how many malls there are now.”
    “The whole damn place is a mall. It’s just a theme park for Yankees. She-Crab Soup World.”
    Josie might be mostly our mother, but every now and then I could hear the old man loud and clear.
    As we pulled into Roper Hospital I took another queasy somersault into the past. This was the very building where my mother had died twenty years earlier. I knew every detail of the place, even that ragged palmetto in the parking lot where my stepmother was standing, seemingly in an effort to intercept us. Josie took this as an ominous sign.
    “Oh, fuck,” she said. “Something’s happened.” But when we got closer, it was clear that Darlie was just on a cigarette break.
    “I didn’t know she smoked,” I said.
    “Neither does Pap. So don’t blab.”
    I snorted. “How could he not know something like that?”
    “How could he not