For the rest of the fall and that winter Tennessee made no effort to find Teddy and Tip. She didn’t take Kenya to lectures or political rallies. She did not save her money to buy symphony tickets on the rare nights they played Schubert. Something had shaken her on the train. It was time for her to think of the boys as grown now, time to focus her attention on the daughter she had. She did, however, work hard to get a copy of Inland Fishes of Massachusetts. She tried for weeks to find it in a regular bookstore, but she didn’t have any luck. She was starting to think that Tip must have bought the last copy for himself. Then, finally, on a Saturday it occurred to her to look for it at the Coop. There were three of them, but the book cost forty-five dollars. For an hour she stood in the aisle and read the first chapter while Kenya looked at a textbook on ornithology, beautiful photographs of birds with drawings of their feathers and bones. On the train home, Tennessee wrote down the things she could remember in her notebook while Kenya stared out the window at the sailboats cross-hatching the Charles. There was nothing she liked better than taking the Red Line over the river.
“What are you doing?” Kenya asked.
“Writing down what I read in the fish book.”
Kenya waited only for a second. She wanted to be patient, but there was such a short time before they lost the view. “Mama, look at the boats,” she said.
Tennessee put down her pen and glanced up. “Nice,” she said, and then went back to her work.
“Why do you care so much about fishes?” Why, when there were so many pretty boats.
“They’re interesting,” her mother said.
The next nurse didn’t ask her anything. She couldn’t see him very clearly for the bright hall light behind him. He could have been reading a chart or checking the pills that he had, maybe he wasn’t sure he was in the right room. Tennessee closed her eyes and fell back to sleep or didn’t, but when she looked again there were two of them there and one of them said, “See, she’s awake.”
“She’s awake,” Tennessee said quietly. Her tongue was heavy in her mouth and she had trouble making the words. The skin on her lips had cracked and bled and the blood had dried. This time there was something she wanted and she remembered to ask for it while they were there. “Water?”
“I’ll get you some,” one of them said.
“You can’t get her water.”
“Why not?”
“She’s probably having surgery in a couple of hours. She may not be allowed to have any water.” Then the voice turned to her. “Has anyone else given you water?”
Tennessee thought about all the comings and goings. Water would have been nice, a little ice even. She felt like she had a fever now. “I don’t remember.”
“I’ll go ask.”
“I’ll ask,” the other one said, and he was gone.
Now the second one, the one who was left in the room with her, walked towards the bed. “I think this is harder than he realizes,” was what he said.
Tennessee tried to fix her mind on all the nurses to think of which one had been shy. When the nurse was closer he sat down on his heels so that his face was just a foot away from hers and slightly lower. He wasn’t wearing scrubs. He was wearing jeans and a heavy green coat. The strip light above her bed that had been such a source of irritation made it possible for her to see. Even in the wake of medication and pain and a sharp blow to her left temple she knew him. She had not seen him in years but she knew him like he was one of her own. How was it that he was the one who had come to her? Had he heard about her accident and come to see if she was okay? But that didn’t make sense. Maybe she was still asleep. Maybe the sleeping and the waking and dreaming had finally become one thing. She looked at the light in his hair. It was still that same strange dark red color it had been when he was a child. Tennessee pressed her eyes closed tight.
“Are you in a lot of pain right now?” Sullivan said.
“Where have you been?”
“Excuse me?”
“All those years you haven’t been home.” She felt like she had no experience talking. Her mouth was hot and dry.
“I’ve been a lot of places. I’ve been in Uganda for awhile now.”
When he was a child, when she was a little bit more than a child herself, she had been afraid of Sullivan. Everything Sullivan could do to her boys could be done secretly, with no way for her to protect them. He could shove them up against the wall when passing in the hallways or smother them with pillows in their beds at night until they were too frightened to sleep. Did he pinch her boys when no one was looking? Whisper in their ears that his parents had reconsidered the adoption and now the orphanage was coming to take them away? Her children had stolen his sweet life as the baby, after all. He would never again be the only child, the only son. She watched him closer than his parents did. Sometimes she watched him closer than Teddy and Tip. But this boy dragged her boys around. They hung from his neck and propped on his hip. This boy seemed nothing but patient in the afternoons when she sat in the far corner of Blackstone Park and waited with a book that she pretended to read for hours at a time. Even when he thought no one was watching, he was good to them.
“No water,” Teddy said from the door, his voice so small and apologetic it was difficult to hear him over the hum of the light strip.
“What did I tell you?” Sullivan kept on looking at Tennessee.
“Who’s that?” she whispered.
“Teddy,” Sullivan said, and took her hand.
There was so much churning inside her chest she wondered if her heart could stab itself on that one broken rib. She had not meant for this to happen. She had not. For a moment she allowed herself to believe they didn’t know. They were only coming to see her as the woman who had acted to save their brother. But this was not the visit of grateful strangers. She thought of her own face now, cut and bandaged, ugly. To see her in bed like this. When Teddy walked up to stand beside her, Tennessee closed her eyes, even though everything in her said to open them.
“I wanted to check on you,” Teddy said in his church voice. “See if you were okay.”
She pulled up the corner of the sheet in her other hand, the hand that Sullivan was not holding, and she wiped her nose and eyes.
“The doctor said you’re going to have surgery this morning.”
She nodded.
Teddy started over, as if every sentence he spoke was his opening line. “I wanted to tell you that Tip is okay. His ankle is hurt but he’s fine. He would be here with us but he needs to stay off his leg for now.”
“It’s sprained?” she asked. Her voice sounded so strange to her.
Teddy started to tell her but Sullivan looked up at him and said, “It’s sprained.”
“Did you see my daughter?”
“She was still asleep when we left the house,” Teddy said. “We kept her up too late.”
And now Tennessee did open her eyes. She looked at Sullivan and then at Teddy, one of them on either side. Sullivan did not let go of her hand even though she couldn’t imagine why he held it. Teddy was so close to her. She could hear him breathing. She could see the way his eyelashes curled up. He had the face of someone who had never been hurt before, never been disappointed. She felt certain that he didn’t lie to anyone, and yet in her mind she could see Kenya sleeping on a sofa in a bright waiting room, her long legs tucked beneath her, her coat over her shoulders, fast asleep. The picture was perfect in her mind. “She’s here,” Tennessee said. She must be here. Why hadn’t she asked one of the nurses where her daughter was?
“We brought her home with us last night,” Teddy said. “We couldn’t leave her at the hospital. Da’s with her now, and Tip.”
The Ghost of Christmas Future came back into the room. She did not care who was having a conversation. She had her schedule to keep to, and anyway, there was nothing in the world she hadn’t seen. “Miss Moser, are you in any pain?”
Tennessee nodded her head, and the nodding served to increase the pain.
/> “We’re going to have to say goodbye to your guests now and start thinking about getting you ready for surgery.”
“Give us one more minute,” Sullivan said.
The nurse shook her head but at the same time she turned away. “One minute and then you go. Visiting hours don’t even start until nine.”
“Nobody asked us to leave,” Sullivan said. There was something sweet in his voice, as if he meant to charm her.
“Stick around much longer and somebody will ask you to leave,” the girl said, but with a lilt that matched his.
“She shouldn’t have gone off with you,” Tennessee said, hoping that by saying it enough she could change the outcome. “She was supposed to stay.”
“They wouldn’t let her stay.” Maybe this wasn’t exactly the truth but Teddy thought it was close enough. “She argued with everybody. She wanted to sleep here.”
“I can’t ask you to keep Kenya.”
Sullivan stood up and touched Tennessee’s forehead as if he was checking for fever. “Given the circumstances, you could ask us to do anything.”
“She’s a nice girl,” Teddy said. He did not know the woman in the bed. He knew his mother, Bernadette, who smiled at him from a thousand photographs. He was glad they were being sent away. His hands were starting to shake and he stuffed them in his pockets.
Tennessee’s head was aching. She wanted whatever medication the nurse was going to bring her. Before they left she would remember to ask them to turn out the lights. “She’s a nice girl,” Tennessee said as a way of saying goodbye to them, as a way of saying thank you and I’m sorry, as a way of saying, I wish I had never let you go, and I wish we had never met. “Just be sure you take her out and let her run.”
Chapter 6
FATHER SULLIVAN HAD LOST HIS TALENT FOR SLEEPING. IT WAS HIS PROBLEM LONG BEFORE ANYONE EVER SAID HE HAD THE ABILITY to take cancer from a thyroid with prayer, though certainly this persistent rumor didn’t help. It was the condition of his heart that kept him from sustainable rest. He still fell asleep, he fell asleep constantly, but the sleep was like a bean he managed to balance for a moment on his nose. He had no ability to hold it. There was a tide inside his chest now and whenever it crested and broke around his heart he tried to find a better position to lie in. Try sleeping in the ocean with the water rushing into your nose and mouth the second you cease to float. Late at night, Sister Claire pulled up the railing on the far side of the bed and lined it with pillows so that in those restless hours when she wasn’t nearby he could shuffle them around on his own. He stacked and unstacked and restacked, looking for the perfect angle at which to prop himself up, then finally got out of bed and sat in the chair by the window so that he could look out at the snow, the gorgeous sea of sugar-ice that he was no longer responsible for shoveling. His heart woke him up to remind him that in life there was never a limitless number of nights.
The floor was cold on his bare feet, but getting out of bed had been effort enough. He didn’t want to spend the little energy he had left walking over to the closet for his slippers. Let cold feet be the worst of it. Little Johnny Sullivan, the fastest Catholic boy the South End had ever seen, climber of trees and chain link fences, the ruler of ice hockey and hardball, now weighed out the benefits and perils of walking five feet across linoleum and wisely decided against it. When he was a pirate boy of ten and twelve the apostle Paul himself could not have convinced him that this was where it would all wind up one day, and if he had been convinced he no doubt would have thrown himself into the Charles to drown. So sure was Johnny Sullivan’s belief in God’s impassioned love for him that he had felt certain he alone would never age.
Not that the misconceptions he held dear to his heart as an adult were any more advanced than the ones he had had as a child. There was a time when Father Sullivan would have thought this confinement was God’s retribution for the enormous restlessness that had driven his life, or for the cigarettes he managed on the sly. He believed in a carefully ordered universe: action and reaction. But now he could no longer picture a God who kept track of such minutiae or would think to punish anyone for it. Over the course of his lifetime, God and Father Sullivan had changed together. When he was a young priest teaching American and European history to Catholic boys and coaching basketball in the winter and baseball in the spring, God was made of sterner stuff. Those were the days of confession and penance, Lenten offerings and Friday fish. As a teacher he ran the boys after school in large loops around the playing field and then out into the neighborhoods, over the broken sidewalks, past the dismal row houses with missing shingles. He kept pace beside sixteen-year-olds in the rain and the snow and the last scorching days of August. They ran in the name of athletics and in the silent understanding that what was in each of them needed to be exhausted, wound down like a clock. When Father Sullivan was a young man he kept up a crushing pace in every waking moment so that sleep was like falling down a mine shaft—straight to the bottom of something nameless and dreamless and dark. It wasn’t a specific desire within himself that he tried so hard to break. It was his thoughts of God, a God and a Church with which he might not be in peaceful accord.
Now, at the very moment when there should have been no distractions, when he should have had nothing but time to examine the very things that had kept him from a total communion with his faith, he had somehow become the star attraction in his own circus. His undoing had started out simply enough, as undoings so often will. Three months ago, a woman from his old parish had come to visit at Regina Cleri. Nena DeMatteo brought him some banana bread and a book of crossword puzzles and sat by his bed to talk. It was church gossip mostly, the battle over how to manage the capital campaign for the new addition. In the course of their conversation she told him other things as well. She talked about her children (disappointments every one) and how she had developed a painful bursitis in her hip. She had given up her tennis game and then could no longer manage the stairs in her home. Cortisone shots and anti-inflammatories had done nothing to help her and the doctor had run out of suggestions. Nena asked Father Sullivan to pray for her and he said of course he would. When she was leaving she stood for a moment beside the priest’s bed and he reached up and touched her hip, her left hip exactly where it had been hurting and the hurting stopped. The way she told it to the newspapers later on, it had startled her the way a sudden silencing of unendurable noise is startling. She shifted her weight from side to side, gently experimenting with the absence of pain, and then she thanked the priest and said goodbye. Nena passed the elevator in the hall. Sixty-eight years old and her legs carried her down the stairs and out to her car with the even clip of a girl. After a week spent without the slightest trace of discomfort she came back with her friend, Helen Cain, who had been diagnosed with thyroid cancer. They said nothing to him of Nena’s recovery. They brought another loaf of banana bread and a crossword-puzzle book by way of superstition.
“If you could touch her neck,” Nena said in what she hoped would be an offhanded manner, “and say a prayer for her health, it would mean a lot.”
Father Sullivan thought nothing of the request. He had been putting his hands on sick people since he was twenty-three years old. He believed in the comfort of human touch. He was sitting up in his chair by the window that day, and Helen Cain, who was barely forty with three small girls at home, leaned forward and he touched her neck and closed his eyes and prayed that she would have peace. That was all he asked for. That was all he had ever asked for. Later Helen would say that she felt something at that moment, a small shock in her throat, and three days later when she went to the doctor the cancer was gone.
“How should I know where it went?” Father Sullivan said to the bishop when the bishop came to Regina Cleri. “It’s not as if I hid it in my chair.”
Awash in their health and good fortune the two women had talked: to each other, to their families, to the press. Soon the hallway outside his room was clogged with the suffering and the sick. Women with colick
y babies crying in their arms, a man with leukemia in a wheelchair, his young wife standing behind him looking sicker and more exhausted than he did. There was a ten-year-old boy who had been blind from birth. Blind! What did they expect?
Sister Claire would let them in one at a time. Father Sullivan would explain over and over that there was nothing he could do, but of course the person would insist that he try. He was a priest after all. He could at least offer up a prayer. So Father Sullivan spent his days praying, trying and failing in a seamless continuum until finally Teddy would come and shoo everyone away. He had come by just this afternoon and driven them out, enduring all of their bitterness in stride. The sick were a ferocious lot. They’d walk right through you if they thought that health was on the other side. “He’s sick himself,” Father Sullivan heard Teddy say out in the hallway. “You have to understand. It’s not going to do anyone any good if he dies trying to make you well.”
That’s telling them, Father Sullivan thought.
When every last one of them was gone the boy came in and sat down beside his bed. “Give me your hands,” the priest said.
“I can’t. They’re freezing. It’s freezing outside.”
“If I can give sight to the blind I should be able to at least warm up your hands. Anyway, mine are cold, too.” And so they sat there, the two of them alone, holding each other’s frozen hands.
“You should try and get some sleep,” Teddy said.
“Not when you’ve just gotten here.”
“I’ll stay and study. If I sit right here no one will bother you. When they look in your door I’ll shake my head at them and they’ll go away.”