“How do you know that?”
Kenya shrugged. “My mom said you did. She said that’s what you were studying in school.” She waited but her conversation starter had started exactly nothing. The silence sat back down on top of them, causing them to stare and look away in perfectly timed intervals. “Did I say the wrong thing?”
Tip had a sort of pinched expression on his face and she was kicking herself. “It’s just that you know a lot more about me than I do about you.”
“I’ve known you longer.”
Tip closed the book in his lap and rested his hands flat on top. She could still see a picture of a pale blue fish beneath his thumb. “So if that’s the case, we should be talking about you and not me.”
Kenya waited. She knew he was trying to think of something important that he could ask her about. Tip was at an even greater disadvantage than she was, seeing as how he hadn’t been thinking about her for years. “What do you want to know?” She wanted to get the ball rolling.
“Something about you. Anything. What do you study in school?”
“Just the regular stuff. Math and science and social studies, English.”
“But what do you like?”
“Running,” Kenya said.
“I meant which subject.”
“PE is a subject, sort of. I always get A’s. I run in the all-city track meets.”
There was a way that Tip had of holding his head perfectly still and straight and giving equal weight to each of his words that made him seem very much like his father. Kenya wondered if he realized he was doing it. “Is that what you want to do when you grow up? You want to run?”
Kenya reached up and pulled sharply on one of her pigtails. It was what she did when she was uncomfortable. “I’ll run in the Olympics. You can do that a couple of times until you get too old and then I’ll be a coach.”
“Teddy and I used to run,” he said, though he sounded unsure. “But we both gave it up awhile ago.”
“Didn’t you like it?”
“We liked it fine but neither one of us took it seriously enough. There are only so many things you can keep up with. I guess running just got dropped.”
Maybe that was true and maybe that was a reason not to finish your geography homework, but how did a person give up running? No more that beautiful moment of lacing up your shoes before a race, no bouncing on your toes, the loss of your own speed, the power to cut past everyone using nothing but strength, to stretch your legs out long in front of you, kick up high behind you, to say in your head again and again, fleet, fleet, fleet. He had given that up for fins and gills and buckets of slimy water? “So what do you like?” she asked him. “Other than fish.”
Tip did not answer. Kenya waited so long that she wondered if it would be impolite to repeat the question. He let his eyes stray over the room until an interest presented itself to him. “I used to play the piano,” he said finally. He hadn’t really been listening to her though. He was not thinking of other things he liked now, he was thinking of the things he’d liked at another time in his life and then had given up: soccer, the Catholic Church, politics.
Kenya did not correct him in the excitement of the moment. “I can play a little!” She had had her eye on the piano in the corner, its polished wood and sweet, rounded curves. Though she could not devise a scenario in which anyone would ask her to play, she could imagine herself doing just that. She had only ever played on an upright before and it had always been true in her mind that real pianos had long, elegant bodies like this one. Real pianos lived in concert halls and the living rooms of the very rich, while uprights toughed it out in school gymnasiums and the small apartments of elderly piano teachers.
“Play something, then,” Tip said.
She was already on her feet, heading magnet to metal towards the Steinway before the invitation could be rescinded. “I really only know a couple of songs. I practice in the gym when there’s a teacher who’ll stay after school. Someday I’m going to take lessons again.”
“I stopped my lessons, too,” Tip said in solidarity. “I was older than you, though.”
Kenya nodded, so pleased to finally have this one thing that united them. “Last year I got to take for four months, but it cost too much. Our math teacher, Mr. Morris, he shows me something every now and then. He had lessons the whole time he was growing up. He said when he was my age that music was just another subject and everybody took it like math.” Even the sea of framed pictures that covered the piano top could not distract her now, graduations and weddings and baby portraits, she overlooked them all. Kenya lifted the lid and set it smoothly back without so much as a tap. She could have cried to see such perfect keys, every single one of them even, none sitting higher or lower than the others, none of them yellowed or split. The white gleamed white and the black gleamed black. She wanted to press her cheek against them, to absorb their coolness. She wanted to sound E-flat with her forehead. “It’s beautiful.”
“It was my mother’s.”
For a second Kenya started to say the wrong thing but she caught herself. “Your mother played piano?”
Tip nodded. “That’s one thing I remember about her.”
She slipped down quietly onto the bench. It would have been enough just to sit there, to never even play. If she had had a piano like that she felt sure she could have done something great with it.
“Are you going to play?” Tip asked.
Whenever she played the upright in the gym at school she always imagined herself in a beautiful auditorium, but now she knew for the rest of her life whenever she played a piano she would imagine herself right here. She set her fingers lightly on the keys, pulled in all of her breath, and played as much of Clair de lune as she had in her head. She could not believe how beautiful it sounded, how good she was on that piano. When she got to the end of what she knew she doubled back and played it again, hoping that Tip wouldn’t realize she was just repeating. She could not break away from the sway of the melody and force herself on to the other songs in her modest repertoire. She might have gone on all day if Teddy and Sullivan hadn’t come in then, their noses wet, their faces stiff from cold. She pulled up her hands and let the last notes rise slowly and wait and then release.
“Christ in His heaven, but it is cold out there.” Sullivan slammed the door and stomped the snow from his boots onto a mat in the entry hall.
“You’re missing the concert,” Tip said.
“We heard someone playing.” Teddy bent down to begin the business of unlacing. “We thought it might have been you.”
Tip laughed at the thought. “That was a ridiculously long walk you took, by the way. Shackleton came back sooner than that.”
Sullivan shook his hair out from underneath his hat and pulled off his coat. “You don’t know the half of it. So how is our little Van Cliburn this morning?”
“Can we go to see my mother now?” Kenya asked Teddy.
“We might want to wait a little while,” Teddy said.
Kenya shivered, either from the dull tone of his voice or the wind that followed them in through the door, she didn’t know. She left the piano bench with regret and went to them. “Is there something wrong?”
“Nothing wrong except what you know about already. She was just going into surgery when I left her this morning.” Then Sullivan quite unexpectedly leaned over and folded Kenya in a tight embrace, as if he had just that moment seen her and realized that he loved her. His hair was cold and soft against her face and he smelled of limes and soap. When she looked up at him, surprised, he kissed her cheek. “That is from your mother,” he said, planting one hand firmly down on each of her shoulders. “She told me to give you a hug and a kiss and there you go.”
All of the light that Kenya had stored up from the bedroom flooded through her now. It was better even than getting to play the piano. She had most certainly felt her mother. She could only imagine her mother had held on to Sullivan and Sullivan had somehow managed to carry her home in hi
s arms. “Thank you,” she said, though thank you didn’t begin to cover it.
He held up his hands. “I’m only the messenger.”
“What else did she say?”
“Not very much, other than the usual things about loving you and being worried about you.” Sullivan said this as if her mother passed messages along through him all the time. “Oh, and she was worried that you were causing us a great deal of trouble and eating all our food.”
“She didn’t say that,” Teddy said. Teddy did not take kindly to the teasing of children, but Kenya only laughed.
“Maybe she said it and she didn’t mean it,” Sullivan said. “She was pretty sleepy still. We got there too early.”
“You should have taken me with you.”
“I went in your room to wake you up,” he said, “but you were sound asleep. I gave you my blanket so you wouldn’t freeze to death up there.”
It was true, because now Kenya remembered that there had been an extra comforter in the morning when she woke up.
“I don’t think they would have let you in anyway,” Sullivan said. “They’re pretty strict about visitors on the surgical floor.”
Kenya studied him. “Then how did you get in?”
“I told lots of lies. Teddy is completely incapable of telling lies, you know. If you ever want to circumvent the system you may as well leave him at home. He’s useless.”
“Is any of this true?” Tip asked.
“We were at the hospital,” Teddy said, hanging up the coat that his brother had dropped on a chair in the entry hall.
Sullivan took Kenya’s hand and led her back to the sofa opposite Tip where they both sat down. “I spoke to the doctor before I left and he said he would call us when the surgery was over.”
“I want to go now,” Kenya said. “I want to wait for her.” And she did, in part because she loved her mother more than anyone in the world and wanted to be close to her, and in part because she was feeling very guilty all of a sudden for having such a good time.
“There’s simply no point. We’d only be sitting over there staring at the carpet and it’s not worth looking at. The very first minute you can see her we’ll know it. We’ll be there before she ever opens her eyes. In the meantime, there are plenty of things to think about.”
“Like what?” Kenya said.
“Breakfast, for one. I somehow doubt that this one offered you anything to eat.” He tilted his head towards Tip.
“I thought people would be bringing me breakfast this morning,” Tip said.
Kenya came to Tip’s defense. “I haven’t been up very long, really, and we started talking about the piano. We would have gotten around to breakfast.”
“And after you’ve been fed I think one of us should take you back to your house to get your things. Your mother’s going to be in the hospital for a few days at least and she thinks it’s best that you stay here with us. Do you have your keys?”
“I have my mother’s purse.”
“Then they’ll be in there,” Sullivan said, as if he had an intimate knowledge of that purse. “Now we have a plan: breakfast, packing, and then you’ll go for a run. Your mother said you were essentially worthless if you didn’t go running.”
Was it possible that she should think of Sullivan as another brother, perhaps even more of a brother than these other two who seemingly had no ability to speak to her, or was it the fact that he wasn’t her brother that made him so easy in his conversation? Certainly Teddy had talked to her plenty last night in the hospital when he thought she was nothing but some poor little stranger with no place to go. But even then Teddy hadn’t kissed her. It was Sullivan’s ease she found so mesmerizing, the way he told the truth about everything, even if it meant showing himself in a poor light. The very few times she had seen Sullivan around when she was younger, she had always thought of him as her brothers’ impediment. Worse than being black in a white family was the burden of being an imitation in the presence of something real. Kenya always thought that things must have been better for Teddy and Tip when Sullivan was gone because then there was no other child against whom they could be judged, there was no one there who by his very presence reduced them to outsiders. But the things that had been the clearest to her when she stood far away from the house on Union Park were now the very parts of the story she seemed to have wrong. Without Sullivan, this house would be unbearably serious. In fact it was hard for her to imagine how they managed for such long stretches when he was gone.
“Do you run?” she asked him.
“It depends on who’s chasing me.”
“I’ll take her out,” Tip said. He sat up straight and put his feet on the floor.
“You’re not going running,” Teddy said. “In the boot, in the snow? I can take her.”
“I didn’t say I was going to run. I’ll take her to the track over at school. She’s not going to run in the snow.”
“I can,” Kenya said, but they weren’t listening to her now.
Sullivan smiled benevolently. “And how will you get to the track?”
“The same way I’ll get anywhere. Did you think I was going to sit on the couch for six weeks and stare at my foot?” With that Tip was up decisively, taking his crutches off the floor and stepping forward. The throb in his ankle that came with lowering his foot was both a devastation and a surprise. The Percocet turned out to be nothing but a mask for a deeper truth. His ankle seemed to be breaking all over again. He leaned forward to pick up his blankets and Teddy did the same, folding everything up in neat piles. “I’ve got to go to the lab today anyway.”
“You’re going to work?” Sullivan said.
Tip laid his blankets back on the couch. “Imagine that.”
“‘I think that we have no hope at all if we yield in our belief in the value of science,’” Teddy said, clutching a pillow to his chest. “‘In the good that it can be to the world to know about reality, about nature…’”
“And they’re off,” Sullivan said.
“‘…to attain a gradually greater and greater control of nature, to learn, to teach, to understand. I think that if we lose our faith in this we stop being scientists, we sell out our heritage, we lose what we have most of value for this time of crisis.’”
“Oppenheimer,” Tip said, choosing to ignore his entire leg. “No one had the sense to say those things but Oppenheimer.”
Kenya leaned in towards Sullivan and dropped her voice. “Why does he do that?”
“It’s a game,” Sullivan said. “We were all supposed to memorize speeches when we were kids. Teddy just turned out to be so freakishly good at it he never stopped playing.”
“Do you know any speeches?” she asked.
Sullivan shook his head. “I make a point of forgetting everything.”
“I’ll start breakfast,” Teddy said. “What do you eat?”
“Anything,” Kenya said.
“Peanut butter toast and cereal?” Tip said. “That’s what I eat.”
It was as if Tip was extending his hand to her as best he could and so she nodded. “That’s good,” she said. The truth was that she liked peanut butter toast quite a lot.
“I’m going to take mine to go, if that’s all right.” Sullivan stood and stretched and yawned. “I suddenly feel like I might be able to go back to sleep now. You’ll wake me up when you hear anything from the hospital?”
“Sure we will,” Teddy said, but even he wasn’t able to make himself sound very convincing.
Then, instead of turning for the kitchen, Sullivan headed up the stairs, as if he had forgotten about the food as soon as he had mentioned it. “Good night, family,” he said. “I’m going to put every blanket in the house on my bed and go to sleep and dream of Africa.” He waved to them and blew a kiss to Kenya. With every turn in the stairwell he was more convinced by his own exhaustion. He could barely even make it up to the top floor. Certainly he would go to sleep. He took his heavy comforter back and fell into his bed and this time the b
ed felt right, a deep feathered nest. It was perhaps even a bit warmer in the room now. He would stay asleep for the entire day and dream of the hot sun coming down on the dark red earth, of the children in the Catholic orphanage who wore those bright white shirts, of the pale green house geckos that clung to the walls of his room.
But for the first time in nearly a dozen years, Sullivan dreamed of Natalie instead.
“You were at the hospital all this time?” Tip asked his brother. He was sitting at the table in the center of the bright kitchen while Teddy filled up the four-slice toaster.
“What can I do?” Kenya asked. What she wanted to do was open up the cupboards and look at all the plates.
“Make the coffee,” he said.
“I can’t make coffee.”
“Of course you can. I’ll talk you through it. First step, the filters are in the drawer and the coffee canister is the second one over.”
“We went to the hospital for a little while and then we both left. I wanted to tell Uncle Sullivan what had happened and Sullivan didn’t want to go.”
“No surprise on either count.”
Teddy closed up the plastic bag and returned the loaf to a smart wooden bread box whose front panel scrolled down like a garage door. “I ran into him again when I was coming home. He said he had stayed in the hospital because I’d forgotten to leave him a token. He’d left his wallet at home.”
“So how did he get on the T?”
“One of the nurses gave him the money.”
“No surprise there as well. Okay, now put the coffee filter in the basket and put in five scoops of coffee.”
Kenya closed the drawer with some hesitancy. Everything in it was interesting: a tin of mints, a handful of old corks, long wooden matches.
“I can make the coffee,” Teddy said.
“So can she. Everybody has to learn how to make coffee,” Tip said. “Heaping, not level. So Sullivan stayed with her all that time?”