“Who?”
“It’s a horse. A very fast horse.”
Kenya nodded, taking long, deep breaths. “People say that to me. Not that horse. Some other one.”
“See you, Kenya,” the fast girl called as she left the track. Kenya waved.
“We should probably go pretty soon,” Kenya said.
“You can come back and run anytime,” the dark haired girl said. “If I’m not here you tell them that Ariel said it was okay. I’ll leave a note at the desk. What’s your last name?”
“Moser.”
“You don’t need to come in with your brother. Anytime you want to run, you come here.”
There was something about this easy dismissal of his necessity that bothered Tip but he didn’t say anything.
Kenya spent a long time at the water fountain and then she walked another lap, stopping from time to time to stretch. “I’m sorry I took so long,” she said to Tip when she finally got back in her coat. “I had more running in me than I thought.” She hoisted up his backpack but he stopped her.
“Let me take that,” he said.
“Don’t be crazy.”
“Really.” He took it from her hand and pulled the straps across his shoulders. “I don’t even know why I brought this. You shouldn’t have to carry it.”
Kenya shook her head. “I don’t mind it, and anyway, you still don’t feel good.”
“I’m better now.” Just watching her had made him stronger. He was perfectly capable of taking care of himself.
“Ariel can call the cab company.”
But Tip explained that the hospital was close. They could pick up the bus on the other side of the bridge. “We’ll be there in half the time on the bus.”
Kenya would have rather waited at the track. It was enough for her just to be in the building, standing on the right side of the glass, but she didn’t want to argue with Tip about transportation anymore. In a way he reminded her a lot of their mother: once she made up her mind about how they were going to do something then that was the way it was going to be.
But when they were outside again she wished she had stood firm against him. She had sweated through her track suit and her coat offered no defense against the weather. The instant they turned into the wind she felt a paper-thin wash of ice form over her stomach and chest. They had forty dollars to spend! Tip was struggling, she could see that, and they weren’t twenty steps from the door. “Let’s go back,” she said. “We’ll call security. They’ll give us a ride.”
“It’s right across the bridge.”
“I’m cold.”
“Anyone who can run like that has the fortitude to hang on for another block.”
Yes. That’s what her mother would have said. If you have the energy to run five miles, then I expect you have the energy to finish your homework. If you really are the fastest girl in the state, then let’s see how fast you can pick up your dishes. “It’s freezing,” she said. She did not whine but she wanted to tell him just in case the wind didn’t get through the fancy down coat he was wearing. She could have been to the bus in ten seconds flat but instead they took steps that could be measured in inches. Tip was even slower now than he had been. She had to bite the inside of her cheek to keep from saying it. She could see the pain on his face, the sag in his shoulders as the crutches ground into his armpits. His foot was dragging behind him in the snow, but they kept pressing ahead, crutch, crutch. They weren’t anywhere close to the bridge and the bus was on the other side of that. She said the word Stop very quietly but let the wind come inside her mouth and sweep the sound away. Stop. Stop. Stop.
And then, just like that, his left crutch turned against the ice and shot out as if it had been kicked away, and just as fast the right one went as well, but he pitched to the left, the whole balance of his body thrown into chaos by the backpack. His left arm splayed out to follow the trajectory of the crutch and Tip slammed into the ground without a moment to release his hands, to curl his hands up around his head the way anyone would do if they were falling. Kenya heard the sound of his head hitting, distinct from the heavy sound his body made, the sickening thud of shoulder and hip and boot and books, the rush of air being forced from his lungs. He was a big man. It was easy to forget that about a person until you saw him fall.
“Shit,” Kenya said, and dropped to her knees.
They were still in the parking lot outside the track and when Kenya looked around she saw no one. Goddamn backpack. She pulled the crutches free from his hands and then tried to get him turned in such a way that she could pull the pack off of him and get him straight on his back, but he was heavy. His left arm was at a bad angle, both above his head and behind it. It also appeared to be longer. Her head darted up and she scanned every direction. At least he hadn’t broken his neck, it wasn’t that kind of fall. She moved his head and saw a smear of blood in the snow.
“Tip!”
“What?” he said, his eyes stayed closed, the left side of the face pressed into the snow as if it were a pillow and she was the one throwing open the curtains. Wake up, wake up! It’s time.
“Can you move your arm and help me get this off you?”
Tip took a big inhale. “One minute.”
She kept on tugging until finally she turned his shoulder the wrong way and he made a terrible face. His closed eyes pressed tightly down and he pulled back his upper lip to show his teeth the way a dog would show its teeth. “Don’t.”
She couldn’t get anywhere without help. She struggled out of her coat, which seemed to be frozen to her torso, and lifted up his head. “Lay on this.”
He panted a couple of times and then seemed able to compose himself. “You’ll get another badge.”
Kenya looked around again and then she filled her powerful lungs to their very edges with air cold enough to stop a life and she screamed, “Help me!”
“Shhh,” Tip said. “I’m going to get up.”
She got up and tugged at his legs so they didn’t look so twisted. It was wrong to leave him and impossible to stay. “Two minutes. You stay here two minutes and don’t move. I’m going to get help.”
“Smart,” he said, but did not open his eyes.
Two minutes, set your watch by it, because she was up and gone, a shot bullet hot from the fired gun. Back to Ariel who had dismissed her, to the arms of Ariel who now adored her, she flew, ripped the door open so that it banged the wall, letting the air fill the room with its arctic storm. “He fell!” she screamed at the mass of curls bent over a calculus book, not a human head but a sheepdog poised over the desk, reading calculus.
Ariel could have been asleep. She shot up, startled. “What?”
“In the parking lot. He fell. Get somebody!” And then she was gone. There was nothing left to say. One leap, out the door, one leap, down the stairs, and now she was crying, crying for her mother to come and save her from this, from having to be in charge of grown people. Mother save me, beat out her heart for one leap, one leap, over and over until she was beside him again. She skidded to the ground, taking his right glove into her mittened hands. “I’m right here,” she said. “Everything’s fine.”
“Fine,” Tip repeated, “except that I’m an idiot.” Then he squeezed her hand, and she cried even more because of it.
She had scarcely touched the surface of her own despair when she heard voices behind her calling her name, “Kenya! Kenya!” It was the step-lunge boy, the nice boy who had asked her about her times and events. His arms were full of towels and he was running towards them in the snow, and Ariel was behind him and she was running, too.
“Help,” Kenya said again. She could not stop herself. It seemed to be the only word she knew.
Tip stirred in the snow just as they were coming up beside him. He wanted to take the weight off his arm but he couldn’t figure how to do it. He thought about the myriad ways he had always been so lucky until now, and then he opened his eyes and saw her there. There was no one he could think of at that moment th
at he would rather have bending over him, no one more competent, no one who knew him better. “Didn’t this already happen?” he asked Kenya.
Chapter 10
TEDDY WOKE UP IN HIS OWN BED ON THE FOURTH FLOOR BUT IT TOOK HIM A MINUTE TO FIGURE THAT OUT. He had been running. He couldn’t remember if he was running from something or to something but his heart was beating like a jackrabbit’s and the covers from the bed were lying across the floor in sweaty twists. Teddy lay still in the bright light of his room, legs sprawled, and let the heat rise off of him. It was as if his body were working hard to warm the frozen air. He listened to his heart thumping inside his ears and that sound took every other thought away. He couldn’t quite grab hold of where he had been and who else was there. While he had been running the dream had run faster, and before he could get his hands around it the whole thing slipped past him and was gone. He flipped over on his stomach and faced Tip’s bed where Kenya had slept the night before. It was more expertly made than he had ever seen it, made the way he imagined a marine would leave his bunk, all the corners tucked in tight and the top spread smooth. Teddy closed his eyes against the sight of such order. He was sorry he had gone back to sleep. It never worked for him. The sleep he went back to was never the one he left. Now he was anxious, feeling like there was something important he had forgotten. If he had simply stayed awake, the only thing he would have to contend with would be exhaustion and that, comparatively speaking, was nothing at all. He got up, leaving his own bed unmade, and went to the dresser to tap the halo of his mother’s statue three times, saying three fast Hail Marys to himself as he did every morning. Doyle had taken him to see a psychiatrist once when he was ten because he was certain that Teddy had an obsessive-compulsive disorder, but the psychiatrist had been unable to find any more taps than those three, and three, he said, was nothing to be worried about. “Catholicism is an obsessive-compulsive faith,” the doctor said to Doyle without asking Teddy to step out into the waiting room. “It’s all ritual.” Teddy hadn’t been able to touch the statue when he got up the first time this morning since he’d been sleeping on the couch, but now that he’d done it he felt more settled in his skin.
Teddy showered and went downstairs where he found his father and Sullivan sitting in the kitchen reading the paper, his father with the business section, his brother with a special supplement on travel. They turned their pale eyes towards him and blinked. There was such a similarity in their faces as they aged, the long straight noses, the way their eyes sat back in their sockets. It was as if they were two snapshots of one man spread thirty years apart. Teddy never thought about the ways his father and brother were alike because even when Sullivan was around they were so rarely sitting near each other. “I didn’t think you’d be up,” he said to Sullivan.
Sullivan was fading. The honey-colored tan he’d brought home the night before seemed to be sliding into his socks, leaving behind a mass of darkened freckles on parchment backing. “I tried to sleep,” he said, his voice exhausted. “It didn’t stick.”
“No,” Teddy said, opening up the refrigerator and peering inside as if the answer to whatever was haunting him were lodged behind a carton of orange juice. “It didn’t.”
“I called the hospital.” Doyle folded up his section neatly and placed it back in the stack of paper. “She’s still in surgery. She should be coming out soon.”
Teddy straightened up and closed the door without making any selection. Of course the dream had something to do with her, Tennessee and the hospital, all of them there, but what was confusing was that the part that felt like a dream now was the part he knew was real: he had left the house with Sullivan before it was light and they had gone to the hospital. He believed that the woman in the bed had been his mother, or was his mother, he didn’t quite know how to phrase it in his mind.
“By the way, the nurse asked me for her insurance cards,” Sullivan said.
“She doesn’t have any. They asked me last night, but they weren’t in her wallet.”
“Kenya said she had them,” Teddy said.
Doyle took off his glasses and wiped them clean with a napkin. “She probably did at one time, maybe with another job, but there’s nothing there now.”
“Then we have to get her insurance,” Teddy said.
Sullivan shuffled through to find the crossword puzzle. “Too late.”
“It’s not our problem, Teddy,” his father said.
“Then whose problem is it?”
Sullivan decided to get a piece of the action. “The uninsured poor are such a compelling political issue until you actually meet one of them.”
“It’s between Mrs. Moser and the driver of the car.”
“Perfectly done,” Sullivan said.
The bickering worked on Teddy’s nerves, and they weren’t in good condition to begin with. It was his intention to introduce something positive into the conversation. “I’m going to bring Uncle Sullivan over to see her today.”
“John Sullivan?” Doyle said. “You can’t be serious. You’re not going to drag that old man out in the snow. You’ll kill him.”
“He wants to meet her,” Teddy said, because his uncle did want to meet her, even if the truth was more complicated than that.
“Did you stop to think about the fact that she might not want to meet him?” Doyle said. “She will have just come out of surgery, and anyway, we don’t even know who she is yet. I don’t think we need to bring in the entire extended family.”
Of course he wasn’t Teddy’s extended family. Uncle Sullivan was the center of his family, the core, the magnet which kept the compass pointing north. “He might be able to help her.” As soon as Teddy said it he wished he hadn’t. Doyle had read about the goings-on at Regina Cleri in the paper and considered it to be nothing but an embarrassment. He didn’t have a moment’s patience with rumors of miraculous healing.
“It certainly takes care of the insurance question,” Sullivan said, and then stopped to yawn, giving his eyes a good rub once he had finished. “He’ll just go up to her bed and tell her to walk. She’ll probably still have to pay for the room though.”
Doyle called forth his expression of deepest disappointment. “Oh, Teddy,” he said. “Tell me you don’t believe he’s actually doing that.”
Teddy picked up a rag and wiped the toast crumbs into the sink, keeping his back to his audience. “It’s nothing like that,” he said to the drainboard. “A lot of people find him very comforting. Priests visiting sick people isn’t exactly a new idea.”
“Can’t you at least use a priest who’s in better health than the patient?”
“He wants to see Sullivan and Tip,” Teddy said, trying another approach. “He wants to see you. At least if he comes to the hospital—”
“I’m not going to the hospital,” Sullivan said impassively, swiveling the handle of his coffee cup back and forth with his thumb.
“What?”
“I’ve already been once today.”
“But we were all going to go together. Can’t we do one single thing as a family?” It had never occurred to him that Sullivan wouldn’t come. He had promised his uncle that. Sullivan was, in some shabby fashion, the payoff.
“She isn’t my mother.”
He meant, of course, by simple mathematical extension, that his mother wasn’t Teddy’s mother either. Which meant that Bernadette, for whom he had lit a thousand candles, was the mother to whom his enormous love and devotion had no claim. A quaking rage rose up in Teddy’s chest and he wanted to reach out and pull Sullivan’s head off his shoulders. His anger was startling, murderous, like Death itself had glided into the room. It wouldn’t take anything. Sullivan was smaller and weaker by half. His open arms draped across the back of the chair like an empty shirt. There was nothing to him. He could be eaten. But as soon as the thought had evolved in Teddy’s brain he was sorry for it, and as soon as he was sorry the phone rang. Doyle stood to answer it, that ancient yellow phone that hung from the kitchen wall with
its endlessly long cord curling into itself. All he said was hello, and after hello he was only listening. He didn’t nod his head or cut his eyes back to look at his sons. He just stood there, all of the life pulled out of him, and listened to Teddy’s punishment. Tennessee Moser was dead. That’s what God had given him for his thoughts. That’s how quickly retribution came.
“I want you to hold yourself together,” Doyle said finally. His voice was calm and ever so slightly stern. “We’ll be there as quick as we can. Can you do that? Can you stop crying?—All right, that’s right.—Yes. You wait for us there.” When he hung up the phone he dropped his chin for a moment and looked at his shoes.
Sullivan and Teddy waited and watched him but nothing came. “She’s dead,” Teddy said finally to save his father from having to say the words.
Doyle lifted up his face again, shocked by the breadth of his son’s imagination. “Oh, no, God, nothing like that. It’s Tip. He fell on the ice outside the track. That was Kenya calling from the hospital. She said something happened to his shoulder.”
“An ankle and a shoulder,” Sullivan said. “That’s brilliant.”
Doyle ignored him. “Get yourself together. We need to get over there.”
Sullivan had only made it through the first syllable of his explanation when Doyle raised his hand and stopped him cold. “I wouldn’t care if you were sixty,” he said. “You’ve got two minutes.”
It was more than two minutes, of course. Doyle’s car was still buried in Cambridge and so they were again reduced to looking out the window for the taxi that had been called. Teddy walked around the room with his hands stuffed in his pockets, staring at the floor like he was trying to find change, while Sullivan lay across one of the living room sofas in his coat, his feet hanging over the arm, one hand covering his eyes. He was thirty-three years old. He did not understand how such a short time in this house could have returned him to adolescence. He could package the place as hell’s interpretation of the Fountain of Youth and make a fortune: just walk in the door and you’re fifteen all over again. He tried to imagine how interesting this story would have been had he not been a part of it. He could have just as easily come home three months from now—three years!—and everyone would have gathered around to tell him the tale: Tip had been hit by a car, the missing birth mother had been found, there was a child and she was lovely but oh, the mother and the child had gone away again. He didn’t think the entire story could possibly take more than ten minutes start to finish, and yet to live it, to actually be a part of its playing out, was an excruciating investment of time. Sullivan had used up his lifetime allotment for family drama by the time he reached twenty-four: other children had been adopted, his mother was dead, he’d killed poor Natalie and, in doing so, ended his father’s career. The continent of Africa hardly knew such upheaval. By anyone’s standards his previous involvement with the family story should have been enough. From now on he swore his visits home would be divided by decades and spent in hotels. This business of coming back to take your little part in the play you would never again be the star of was simply more than anyone should have to bear.