Read Lucky Man for Free Online Page B

mother and the rest of my family and friends. However long it took, it wouldn't be nearly enough time.
    I let myself into the apartment. I could smell dinner cooking in the kitchen and hear Sam giggling with Iwalani, our friend and Sam's nanny. I couldn't go in there and face him right at that moment. Tracy entered from the kitchen and I met her in the foyer and silently motioned her toward our bedroom. It is seldom that my face is set in so serious an expression, and she sensed immediately that the news was not good. As she followed behind me, I could feel her curiosity escalating toward panic.
    There's an odd little hallway, shaped like a 7, leading to the master bedroom in our old West Side apartment. The bottom of the 7 opened onto the bedroom where I told Tracy. We cried, we held each other. I remember thinking the scene was a very strange, sad, upside-down version of the pamphlet I'd left in the cab—funny if it wasn't so . . . happening to us.
    Having no real idea about what this monster was, vaguely understanding that it would be years before we would feel its teeth and claws, we exchanged assurances. Tracy, stunned and frightened, was at the same time so present, and loving . . . in sickness and in health , I remember her whispering, arms around me, her wet cheek against mine. Typically, my first instinct was: There's an angle here, there's got to be a way out of this, just keep moving . To Tracy: It'll be okay . . . To myself: What will be okay?
    Only a few of us will admit it, but actors will sometimes read a script like this: bullshit . . . bullshit . . . my part . . . blah, blah, blah . . . my part . . . bullshit . . . I loved it /I hated it really depends on the bullshit to my part ratio. Days, maybe weeks into it, I transitioned into high bullshit mode: not my script, hate it, not doing it . I went through the motions, sought second opinions; the opinions were unanimous. I had Parkinson's disease. Resolving never to see the neurologist again unless a hurricane blew him through my living room window, I had my internist prescribe P.D. meds. I'd carry these around with me, loose and broken in the pockets of my trousers, like Halloween smarties. Therapeutic value, treatment, even comfort—none of these was the reason I took these pills. There was only one reason: to hide. No one, outside of family and the very closest of friends and associates, could know. And that is how matters stood for seven years.

Chapter Two
The Escape Artist
    Chilliwack Army Base, British Columbia—1963
    The boy was gone . . . vanished. I had slipped away while my mother was occupied with that thankless task familiar to any career military wife: unpacking the family's possessions and setting up yet another new household.
    My mom, Phyllis, and dad, Sgt. William Fox, Royal Canadian Army Signal Corps, had become experts at relocation. Between their wedding day in 1950 and that afternoon Mom spent uncrating the effects of thirteen years of family life, Dad had been stationed at six different army bases.
    My father's job involved encryption and decoding—his skill at these arcane arts is the reason the army required him at postings all across Canada. (We could never visit him at his office, which was always sealed off.) There had been a previous stint in Chilliwack from 1955 to 1958. The family was returning there from the province of Alberta, where Dad had spent the intervening years at bases in both Calgary and Edmonton. (I was born in Edmonton in June of 1961.) This was life in the military, and if it was inconvenient, or even traumatic for a serviceman's family— well, tough . Dad knew the reply he'd get from the brass should he ever complain, and with a rueful half smile he'd often remind us, “If the army wanted me to have a family, they would have issued me one.”
    Dad had actually put in for this latest transfer, though, and it was no hardship saying good-bye to the flat, featureless landscape and insultingly