As the hours passed in the tall house on Union Park, only Sullivan stayed awake. The clock in his chest that was still set to African time had left him in a relentless state of wakefulness. After spending half the night thinking that exhaustion would surely win, and looking hopefully in his dopp kit for the sleeping pills he had run out of months ago, he finally gave up. He blinked into the darkness of his childhood room, made out the shape of his oak dresser and the narrow door of his closet, and realized that coming home had been a mistake. He’d only gotten half the equation right: he absolutely had to leave Africa, but he hadn’t spent enough time thinking about which plane to get on and where that plane should land. This was not a late Christmas visit. He had forgotten that he had ever volunteered for Christmas at all. This was another reshuffling of life, a complete reinvention that called for some time and a little peace, neither of which had ever been afforded to him in his father’s house. Sullivan kicked off his covers, closed his eyes, and for a brief moment tried again. But sleep was a mirage, a wavy blue line in the desert that you never actually got to. He pulled himself out of bed and went to the window. The snow had stopped, and even though it was dark outside the world below the house was oddly bright. No one had driven down the street yet. All the disruption, the shoveling and tire tracks and footprints and dog shit that would be there in a few hours to ruin the landscape hadn’t happened yet, so Sullivan decided to go out.
Because his exit from the African continent had been hurried, there wasn’t much luggage involved, just his computer and some papers, a handful of books, a few sentimental pieces of clothing that worked well in Uganda but offered up no defense against a Massachusetts winter. Sullivan looked in his closet and in the dresser drawers and found sweaters and jeans and boots that had been left behind more than a dozen years before. He felt at once irritated because the clothing implied his eventual return and relieved because he needed something to wear. He found the mossy green sweater he had loved in high school and buried his face in the wool to see if he could find any residual traces of pot smoke. It smelled like cedar. He got dressed in the darkness and stepped out into the hall. Through the door that was left half open he could see the girl asleep in Tip’s bed, her head and arm dropped over the mattress’s edge, the fingertips of one dark hand curling just above the floor. It was so damn cold up there. They had always referred to the fourth floor of the house as the meat locker, and not without cause. He went back and took the comforter off his bed, spreading it over the girl who did not so much as change her breathing beneath this new weight that settled on top of her. Sullivan thought of all the strays he saw in Africa, the endless streams of parentless children who cycled through the various AIDS clinics he supplied, freshly minted orphans who had given up looking for extended family and were now trying to find a place to spend the night. They bore no resemblance to this Kenya who appeared to be utterly at peace in her sleeping. She did not twist herself in a ball or stuff herself beneath a cabinet. She did not sleep with open eyes the way the most unnerving children had learned to do. He had forgotten how American children slept. They stretched out long and wide, dreaming of sugarplums while they waited for handouts from tooth fairies. Even he had to admit that a clean bed on the top floor of the Doyle home on Union Park wouldn’t be such a bad shore for someone to wash up on, no matter how cold it was, as long as that someone hadn’t grown up there.
Sullivan went down the stairs in the dark. He thought he was moving quietly but when he passed the living room Tip raised a hand and waved. “Leaving so soon?” he whispered.
“Can’t settle down. I’m in the wrong time zone again. I’m going to go look at the snow.”
“Well, in case you don’t come back, it was good to see you.” Tip had not seen Sullivan in over two years.
“You should learn to be sweeter,” Sullivan said, drawing on an old joke. “More like your brother.”
They both turned and looked at Teddy, who was still sound asleep. Sullivan thought of the girl in the bed upstairs, her cheek pressed against the pillow in such a similar way.
“Do me a favor,” Tip said. “Bring me a glass of water.”
“Sure.”
“I don’t want to get up. This thing is killing me.”
Sullivan came back from the kitchen with the glass. He watched Tip sit up enough to pull a bottle from his pants pocket and tap out a pill the size of a small bullet into the palm of his hand.
“I’ll trade you,” Sullivan said. “One for the glass of water.”
“Are you in some sort of pain?”
“Enough.”
“You don’t even know what it is.”
Sullivan shrugged. “I’ll assume they aren’t passing out Bufferin.”
Tip looked at his brother, held him still for a minute with his eyes, then they made that most basic exchange: narcotics for water.
“At least you’re making me work for it, that’s good.” Sullivan put the pill in his pocket and then patted his hip. “This is for later, when it’s time to go to sleep.”
Tip looked up at the clock on the mantel. There was barely enough light in the room to tell the time. “It’s five in the morning. You better take it soon.”
“How’s the ankle?”
“Hurts.” Tip swallowed his Percocet.
“It’s a hell of a story,” Sullivan said. “Your own mother coming out of nowhere to snatch you from death.”
Tip smiled. “Why does everyone insist I was dying?”
“It was an SUV. Anything’s possible.”
“Somehow you showing up here feels like the bigger coincidence. What happened to the humanitarian efforts in Africa?”
“Let’s just say everything comes to an end.”
“Is there a reason you’re having this conversation now?” Teddy said, his eyes still closed. He pulled the comforter over his shoulders and then brought his hand back inside.
“Just to annoy you,” Sullivan said kindly. Teddy, no matter how tall he’d gotten, would always be the baby, the baby Sullivan liked to take out of his crib when he was sleeping, driving his mother crazy when he wasn’t in the place she had put him down. Sullivan took him to the street to show the other kids. These were Irish kids like Sullivan himself, kids who under any other circumstances would have said nasty things about who is your mother fucking to get a baby like that? Instead they stayed quiet and watched while Sullivan bounced Teddy in the air above his head. They knew he was baiting them, they knew that Sullivan was just waiting for the chance to prop this baby up against a light pole and kill one of them for saying what was on their minds. Every now and then he got lucky. Somebody’s visiting cousin or a stranger who’d wandered foolishly in from another neighborhood would give him an invitation. Then he just handed the baby off to any kid who was standing around to watch that crazy Irish boy, the son of Bernard Doyle, unleash himself like a hurricane upon another child. Teddy was easy even then, round and smiling. He’d go to anybody.
“Go back to sleep,” Tip whispered.
“Did you take a pill?” Teddy said, still refusing to open his eyes.
“We did.” Tip gave the bottle a shake. “Do you want one?”
“You’re a riot,” Teddy said.
Sullivan pulled on his hat and fastened the toggles on the coat he’d worn at sixteen, feeling pleased to see how easily it fit over the heavy sweater. No one got fat in Africa. “Both of you go to sleep. I’ll be back in a little while.”
Teddy sat up then. There was a heavy scar running down the side of his cheek made by a crease in the pillow. “You’re going out?”
“Here I go,” said Sullivan.
Then Teddy was up, pulling on his boots. The comforter slid off the couch and puddled onto the floor with a smooth shush. “Give me two minutes. I’m almost ready. We can go to the hospital and see how she’s doing.”
“I was thinking more about a walk around the block.”
“Teddy, seriously,” Tip said. “Wait until someone’s called the hospital. W
ait until Da and Kenya are up. It’s too early.”
“Not if they’re taking her into surgery this morning.” He jumped off the couch and was gone down the hall.
Sullivan watched him go. The sudden, miraculous ability to wake up astounded him. “This’ll teach me to go out the back door.”
“I did appreciate the glass of water though.” Tip believed that he was just starting to feel the warm ease of the Percocet seeping into his bloodstream. The pain in his ankle was becoming softer. He was starting to think it had never really bothered him at all.
“I don’t suppose you’re coming with us?”
“Not unless you’re planning on carrying me.”
“You’d have to bend your knees up.” Sullivan looked at his wounded brother all booted up and wondered if he could carry him still. “I hate you for being taller than I am, you know that.” If Teddy was a cupcake among babies then that left Tip to be the difficult one, stiff and intractable—a wailer, terrified of both the day and the night. You could always find him looking out the door, out the window, in the closet, under the bed. Nobody knew if he was looking to see if there wasn’t somebody else coming to take him away or if he was trying to find the person who’d left him behind. Sullivan wondered if he would remember any of that now. Probably not. Tip wasn’t easy like Teddy. He was suspicious, didn’t want to be touched. And who could blame him? This kid had a memory. He was fourteen months old when he showed up on their doorstep like a basket of fruit. For two months and a year he had been somewhere else, had been used to someone else. Then he came to live with strangers who called him by another name. “What’s his real name?” Sullivan asked his mother.
“Tip?” she said. “Thomas.”
Sullivan shook his head. “I mean before that. What was his name where he used to live?”
She was bathing Teddy in the kitchen sink. Her hair was in one long braid over her shoulder and the baby kept reaching for it. She said she didn’t know.
“You have to know. It has to be written down somewhere.”
“Maybe his name was Tip,” she said.
But Sullivan knew this wasn’t the case. He had called out the name when Tip was sleeping and he never opened his eyes.
Sullivan invented a game for Tip that he called The Cape. “Where’s my cape!” Sullivan would roar and then get down on his knees and here would come Tip if Tip was in the right kind of mood. He would latch himself around Sullivan’s neck and hang down his back, his head turned to the side and pointing down. Sullivan would hold on to his feet and they would careen through the living room, screaming. For awhile, a year or two, that worked for both of them, but it didn’t make them any closer really. Tip was the kind of kid who could hang from your neck and still maintain a critical distance.
When Teddy rushed back into the room he was wide awake, pulling on his coat and moving through the front door. “I’ll call you if anything happens,” he said to Tip. There was a great rush of cold air that blew through the entry hall and into the living room. The temperature would start dropping now that the snow had made its final contribution. Sullivan leaned over and picked Teddy’s comforter off the floor and threw it on top of Tip, though he wondered if he wouldn’t be better off taking it along for himself.
“We won’t be long,” Sullivan said.
Tip smiled at him. “You will be if you’re going with Teddy.”
The snow was soft and deep and dry and it came very nearly to Sullivan’s knees. January nights were epically long in Massachusetts. The sun was still two hours from coming up. It could as easily have been midnight as five a.m. as the brothers shuffled ahead in the dark. “You don’t really want to go to the hospital,” Sullivan said.
“Of course I do.”
“And what are you going to say to her? ‘I know you’re going into surgery, but why’d you give me away?’ It might not be the best moment.”
Teddy stopped. The words stopped him. He stood so close to Sullivan that Sullivan had to lift his chin to meet Teddy’s eyes. “I want to see how she is. She was hit by a car. I want to tell her that we’re taking care of her daughter. She did something pretty heroic, you know. Maybe you can’t see that, not having been there.”
“So you have nothing to ask, just things to tell. You have no curiosity.”
Teddy pulled up the collar of his parka and leaned in. “Things come up by themselves over time.”
“Well, I’m thinking of myself then,” Sullivan said. “If my mother had given me away and then turned up again twenty years later at the scene of an accident, I think I’d have some questions.”
“Your mother is my mother,” Teddy said. “And if our mother had shown up at a Jesse Jackson lecture and pushed Tip out of the way of a car, well, then yes, I’d have some pretty serious questions myself about where she’d been.”
“A Jesse Jackson lecture?” Sullivan shook his head. “Jesus, the old man just never lets up, does he?”
Sullivan and Teddy let it drop after that and walked the blocks towards the Back Bay Station in silence. It had always been about politics. If anything, it had been less about politics when Doyle had been mayor, when the wild aspirations he had to shoot the moon were only for himself. But after that was gone, and yes, Sullivan understood that this was in part his responsibility, Doyle simply turned the full weight of his expectations onto the boys. It had been made abundantly clear that Sullivan had proven himself unfit years before he was in the car accident, and every action of his adult life did nothing but provide more irrefutable evidence that he was not the son to provide his father’s wish fulfillment. He was glad for it, glad to be off the hook no matter what disasters of conduct had been required, but why couldn’t Doyle see that Tip and Teddy were no more likely candidates than he? Tip was never going to pull his head out of the aquarium long enough to vote, much less run, and Teddy, Teddy had all the political acumen of a koala. Still, Doyle continued to persist with their political education, their sentimental education. Once he admitted that Teddy and Tip were hopeless causes he would have to face the fact that there was no one else coming up behind them, no one else who was willing to be crushed by the heavy mantle of his expectations.
“What are you going to do?” Sullivan asked his brother.
“I’m just going to talk to her.” Teddy pulled off a mitten and fished around in his pocket for a Kleenex.
“No,” Sullivan said, thinking of the conversation in his head. “I mean with your life, assuming that you don’t have any plans to be the next Jesse Jackson.”
It was so absurd a thought that it caused Teddy to laugh. Then he shook his head. “I don’t know.”
“You do too know.”
“I’m twenty.”
“And I’m Jack Kennedy.”
They walked along for awhile, their feet shushing in the snow. They were alone in the city with the moon sitting high above their left shoulders. “I think, sometimes,” Teddy said, and then he stopped. “Sometimes I talk to Uncle Sullivan—”
“About the love and fellowship of our Lord, Jesus Christ.”
“Forget it.”
“Just say it. You can talk to me.”
“There’s nothing to talk about.”
Sullivan clapped his hands and let out a howl to wake the street. “I knew it. Dear God, you’re going to sign on with the child molesters!”
“Sullivan, stop it.”
He laughed. “I think it’s fine. You might as well make one father in the family happy.”
“I didn’t say I was going to be a priest.”
The older brother bowed. “So you’re not. I apologize. I am completely wrong.”
Teddy took the bait. He always took the bait. That’s why there was so little pleasure in baiting him in the first place. “I want to help people. Is there anything so wrong with that? Isn’t that what Da taught us to do? Isn’t that why you were in Africa?”
“Not exactly.”
Teddy stopped walking and then Sullivan stopped walking too. They face
d each other in the snow until Sullivan started to shiver. “Keep moving,” he said.
“‘Your honor,’” Teddy said, “‘years ago I recognized my kinship with all living beings, and I made up my mind that I was not one bit better than the meanest on earth.’”
“Eugene V. Debs,” Sullivan said, and raised one gloved hand towards the starry night. “‘I said then and I say now, that while there is a lower class, I am in it, while there is a criminal element, I am of it, and while there is a soul in prison, I am blah, blah, blah.’”
Teddy nodded his head, grateful for once to be understood. “That’s what I mean.”
“No,” Sullivan said. “That’s what Debs means. He was on his way to prison. You want to be a priest. If you can’t explain the connection between those two things, I’d be happy to do it for you.”
Teddy trudged forward in the snow, showing Sullivan his back. He was too good a Catholic to tell his brother to go fuck himself. “I said I don’t want to talk about it.”
“You like girls, Teddy. Remember that? And they don’t let the girls come with you. You have to check them at the door. You’re going to give up Ramona for a bunch of guys who can’t get laid?”
Teddy reached up and pulled his hat down farther over his ears.
“Wasn’t her name Ramona?”
“We broke up last year.”
Sullivan could imagine it. To the best of his memory, that Ramona wasn’t the sort to wait around on a guy who was trying to decide between his girl and his savior. “But it’s not as if you’ve been spending your Saturday nights doing projects for the altar society. You’re still seeing girls.”
“It doesn’t matter who I’m seeing.” Teddy’s voice was tight. “I’m not a priest.”
“Yet,” Sullivan said. He could only imagine all the pleasure there was in the girls who tried to dissuade Teddy from his calling, just like the girls who tried to distract Tip from his fish. It was one of the few things Sullivan and his brothers had in common: whether it was serious or remorselessly casual, there was never a shortage of female companionship. It was the payoff for all they had suffered. All girls were suckers for motherless boys.