The Sculptor

The Sculptor’s father did not know about his son’s work in the carriage house-did not know much of anything anymore. He spent most of his time in his bedroom-on the second floor, directly above the kitchen-looking out the window at the bird feeders his son had installed many years ago in one of the large oak trees. Sometimes The Sculptor would play music for his father on the old record player-mostly crackly 33-1/3s of classical music, the kind of stuff his father had been fond of before the accident. The Sculptor also installed a CD player inside the shell of an old Philco, jury-rigging it to play recordings of vintage radio shows from the 1930s and ’40s. This seemed to please his father greatly, who in turn would sit smiling at the radio for hours.

Mostly, however, The Sculptor’s father just sat motionless in his wheelchair by the window. He still could turn his head, still had use of his right hand, but he rarely spoke except now and then to ask for someone named “Albert.” For the first few years after the accident, The Sculptor had no idea who Albert was. But after digging into his family’s history, The Sculptor discovered that his father had an older brother named Albert who had committed suicide when his father was just a boy.

As Cathy Hildebrant and Agent Markham turned onto Route 95 on their way to Watch Hill, miles away, The Sculptor was removing an intravenous line from his father’s wrist. He usually fed his father by hand-a mixture of oatmeal and other ingredients that he had researched for optimum nutrition-but found over the years that after a night of barbiturates, this method was more effective to stabilize his father’s system. He had been out for nearly sixteen hours-had been intravenously fed a steady dose of mild sedatives while his son had been away-and now all his father needed was just a little extra TLC to bring him back around.

“That’s it,” said The Sculptor, wiping off the spittle from his father’s chin. He threw the rag into a white bin marked LINENS and with one arm lifted his father from his bed to his wheelchair. He turned the steamer beside the bed on to low, for sometimes his father’s nostrils dried out and his nose bled. Indeed, almost everything The Sculptor needed to care for his father was at hand in his father’s bedroom: boxes upon boxes of medical supplies; an adjoining bathroom that had been outfitted with a sit-down shower; a small refrigerator in the corner for his father’s medicines; and three intravenous units-each holding different bags of different liquids for different purposes. And were it not for the red wallpaper, the richly stained woodwork, and the four-poster bed, his father’s bedroom would have looked no different than a hospital ward.

“Time to watch the birdies,” The Sculptor said, parking his father before the large bay window. The Sculptor dropped a record on the turntable-Domenico Scarlatti’s Sonata in D Minor-and as the first strains of Baroque guitar washed over the room, The Sculptor headed down the servants’ stairs to the kitchen. There he rinsed his hands and fixed himself a protein drink, gulping it down with a handful of vitamins and supplements. He was hungry, ravenous from his work the night before, but resisted the temptation to eat more and stepped out onto the back porch. Yes, he must stick to his diet, must be in tip-top condition for all the hard work ahead of him.

Even back when he was known as Christian, The Sculptor always kept himself in good shape. Six-foot-five since the age of seventeen, before the accident he had lettered in both football and lacrosse for Phillips Exeter Academy. Since the accident, however, he had focused only on building up his body-what he saw from the beginning as a necessary component of caring for his father. The accident had been his mother’s fault. Christian would never know the exact details-had been away at boarding school when it all happened. But from what he could gather, there had been an incident at the country club. His father’s lawyer told Christian a week after the funeral-the same week he turned eighteen and became legal custodian of his family’s fortune-that his mother had been cheating on his father with a young tennis pro not much older than Christian himself. There had been a scene, a fist fight at the country club-Christian’s father laying out the tennis pro and dragging his wife out by the hair. They had just turned onto Route 95 when the semi broadsided them. His mother died instantly, but his father survived-paralyzed from the waist down, his left arm useless, his brain a vegetable soup.