Repentance by Andrew Lam

Author:Andrew Lam [Lam, Andrew]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Tiny Fox Press
Published: 2019-02-13T00:00:00+00:00

Seventeen

LOS ANGELES 1998

* * *

Daniel had been in medical school for only four weeks when he attended his first anatomy class. The students entered a large, well-lit room with thirty cadavers lying naked and supine on stainless steel tables. The room reeked of formaldehyde, forcing Daniel to take short, abbreviated breaths through his mouth. Each cadaver lay under the eyes of four students who were prepared—or maybe not quite—to dissect it.

Daniel’s group named their cadaver “Harry” because he had a massive amount of pubic hair. It seemed insensitive, but paradoxically, naming their cadaver was one way of de-humanizing it. Naturally, it was important to respect that these were real people, people who had generously donated their bodies for the education of the Harvard medical students; but, it was also necessary to find ways to distance oneself, or one would never be able to make the first cut. Daniel found that this was especially true when he dissected the hands. To him, the hands were the most human part of the cadaver. The part that gave him goosebumps.

His father’s hand was like that. Gray and sallow. When they brought Daniel and Keiko to view Ray’s body, Daniel felt the need to touch it, and he did. This was the hand that changed my diapers, picked me up when I fell off my bicycle, and shook my hand when I went off to college, he thought. Now it felt cold, rigid, and so absent of life it might not have ever been a living hand that had once helped others to live.

Now Daniel stood in the rain beside Ray’s grave, listening to his mother’s pastor deliver a sermon on the twenty-third Psalm. Daniel kept one arm around Keiko, who stood beside him, as he held a black umbrella over both their heads. Roiling storm clouds in the distance threatened heavier rain, but Daniel found it fitting, as if the weather matched the occasion, and his mood.

There were only ten other attendees. Ray Tokunaga did not have any friends. There were a half dozen ladies from Keiko’s church who had come to support her. Beth stood across the flag-draped casket, still looking stunned, though three days had passed since Ray’s death. They’d both agreed the twins should stay in school and not travel to the funeral. Daniel was particularly glad the kids weren’t present. He didn’t want them to see this. His horrible, dysfunctional family. It was too late to shield Beth from knowing the garish truth, but he could at least protect the kids. They shouldn’t be burdened with any of this, he thought. This was the family he was ashamed of, and he couldn’t escape the truth that he was the one most responsible for failing it.

His father, dead after a life of hard work and sacrifice, estranged from his son and grandchildren because Daniel couldn’t be the bigger man.

His mother, looking stoic but undoubtedly hurting, after forty years of heartache that Daniel could have easily alleviated with something as simple as an occasional visit or even just a phone call.

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