Run

  Doyle pulled back the curtain and, after carefully assessing the empty nature of the street, stared at his watch as if it might have something new to tell him since the last time he’d looked. “I’m going to call the hospital back. Someone needs to tell Kenya why we’re so late.”

  “Ask her if they’ve found out what’s wrong with Tip yet,” Teddy said.

  “Leave her alone,” Sullivan said, but he hadn’t taken his hand off his eyes. He didn’t know that Doyle had left the room.

  After a minute Teddy stopped pacing and came and wedged himself onto the couch where Sullivan lay, working his hip against Sullivan’s hip until Sullivan was forced to push himself back into the pillows and make some more room. “I don’t think Tip could really be hurt that badly, do you?”

  “Do I think he’s going to die of a shoulder injury? No.”

  Teddy tapped his feet on the floor and stared towards the kitchen where Doyle had disappeared to use the phone. It appeared as if he might at any moment spring straight up from the couch and hang inverted from the light fixture in the living room. Sullivan could all but feel the nervousness pouring out of Teddy and into him at the point where their two bodies intersected at the hip. “‘So first of all,’” Teddy said in a voice gone jittery and low, a voice that did not call Roosevelt’s to mind at all, “‘let me assert my firm belief that the only thing we have to fear is fear itself—nameless, unreasoning, unjustified terror which paralyzes needed efforts to convert retreat into advance.’”

  Sullivan uncovered his eyes and looked up at his youngest brother. “Which means you want to do what, exactly?”

  Teddy put his right index finger into his mouth, bit down. “I was just thinking, if I slipped out right now I could go get Uncle Sullivan and meet you and Da back at the hospital. That way Tip is there and you’re there. We could all be together. It would be a nice surprise.”

  “Except that it’s not a nice surprise since you already mentioned it to Da.”

  “So not a surprise.”

  “And by slipping out you mean leaving before he walks back into the room so that he couldn’t stop you, and so I’d have to tell him where you’d gone.”

  Teddy looked at his fingers. “Something like that.”

  “I have one for you,” Sullivan said. “I know one you’ll like.” He cleared his throat and then stretched back his neck as if to achieve a more sonorous tone. “‘There comes a time when people get tired. We are here this evening to say to those who have mistreated us for so long that we are tired—tired of being segregated and humiliated; tired of being kicked about by the brutal feet of oppression. There comes a time my friends when people get tired of being plunged across the abyss of humiliation, when they experience the bleakness of nagging despair. There comes a time when people get tired of being pushed out of the glimmering sunlight of last July and left standing amid the piercing chill of an Alpine November.’”

  “Sullivan, listen.”

  But Sullivan only returned his hand to his eyes. He had no need to listen, only to speak. “‘We had no alternative but to protest. For many years, we have shown amazing patience. We have sometimes given our white brothers the feeling that we liked the way we were being treated. But we come here tonight to be saved from that patience that makes us patient with anything less than freedom and justice.’” Sullivan smiled, looking up at Teddy again. “It’s King, of course. Pretty good that I remembered that much. Except that the white brother part doesn’t work exactly. It should be our black brothers. ‘We have sometimes given our black brothers the feeling that we like the way we were being treated.’”

  Teddy reached down and took his brother’s hand, kissed the knuckles gently, quickly. “I owe you.”

  “Yes, yes you do,” Sullivan said, but it didn’t matter, since Teddy was already gone.

  Teddy passed the taxi as he was running around the corner onto Tremont Street, and the sight of it only made him run faster. He had barely gotten away in time. The sound of the front door closing behind him and the blast of the cabbie’s horn breaking up the crisp winter air came only a minute apart. Had Sullivan been able to remember the next paragraph his entire enterprise would have been sunk.

  “It’s like herding cats,” Doyle said when he and Sullivan were settled into the backseat of the car.

  Sullivan nodded. “It’s true. You never had much luck in getting all of us together at one time.”

  “Well, I never had much luck getting you anywhere.” Doyle looked for Teddy out the window but all he saw were sexless, shapeless bundles of humanity toddling down the street, trying not to fall on the ice. “You could have made him wait.”

  “You could have kept Tip from going out this morning. That would have saved us all a trip.”

  There was nothing and no one who made Doyle think of Bernadette more than their oldest son. Sullivan was not like his mother. He did not possess a shred of her character, but he looked like her, and not just in the color of his hair. It was the way he held himself, the way he sat so easily in his own body, ankles, wrists, hands, all of that was hers. Bernadette would have been proud of the job Doyle had done with Teddy and Tip, but she never would have accepted his relationship with Sullivan. Whenever they were together he could hear her, pressing him to show more kindness, pressing for sympathy. Even the wreck Sullivan had made of his life would not have dissuaded his mother from her love. At thirty-three he was still the baby she had held in her arms. That was one of the many things Doyle had found so admirable about his wife: her ability to look at their children and see them at every age. She managed to hang on to every bit of love she had ever felt for them, while Doyle could only see the person they were at that exact moment in time. He didn’t have to wonder if Bernadette might have changed if she had lived, if time would have worn her down to a lesser state of unconditional love. He knew it would never have happened. He tried to turn himself towards Sullivan now, to find the charity of spirit that Bernadette surely must have willed to him. “We should have been allies,” he said finally, frustrated with himself for his inability to come up with anything better, and grateful not to have said anything worse. “At least for the boys.”

  Sullivan cracked the window and let a dose of frigid wind brush his hair back from his forehead. “But we’re not.”

  True, Doyle thought, but certainly some alliance is born of simply keeping up appearances. “Is there anything we can agree on? I have to tell you, with this woman showing up and the accident, it would be a comfort to me.”

  Sullivan sighed and rubbed at his eyes with his fingers. He was tired beyond measure, tired of not sleeping and tired of his family. “I’m sure there are thousands of things. Global warming. You and I are both against global warming.”

  “Jesus,” Doyle said. “Roll up the fucking window.”

  Sullivan raised his head, tried again. “We both want the boys to do well, but the boys are going to do well, each in their own freakish way. It isn’t what we’d wish for them but they’ll find their happiness in the world.”

  “Forget it.”

  There was something in the flatness of his father’s tone that seemed to jar Sullivan awake. For the first time since he’d left the hospital and Tennessee Moser in her bed waiting for surgery he decided to make a tentative engagement to the world. He considered the question and the deep canyon that sat between him and his father in the backseat of the cab. “The girl,” he said finally.

  Doyle was turned away from him now, his eyes tracing the shimmering surface of the frozen Charles. He said nothing.

  “We are allies for the girl,” Sullivan said. “Or we will be. We can agree on that.”

  Doyle weighed out this offer, the pink-suited girl. “What about the mother?”

  Sullivan turned to him and, in doing so, inadvertently touched his knee to his father’s knee. “There you go. I offer the girl, you want the girl and her mother. Forget about the mother. Neither one of us knows anything about her. All I’m saying is that you and I can
agree to get behind Kenya, to be helpful to her.”

  Doyle could see her sitting in their living room, straight and still, listening to the music with her eyes closed. She made it through the first two movements of The Trout quintet and then he worried he was boring her. “That’s enough,” he said. “I just wanted you to get an idea.” But she shook her head. She stopped him. And what she said then was that she could hear the stream in the music. “She likes Schubert.”

  Sullivan nodded. “I believe that. She can play the piano a little, too. She played for Tip.”

  This was better than anything he’d hoped for. She had wonderful hands. He had noticed them spread out flat on the kitchen table this morning, her fingers slender and long. It was with this image in his mind that he made his greatest admission to the son to whom he made a point of admitting nothing. “I want to see if I can get her into Cathedral Grammar.”

  Sullivan didn’t like Cathedral Grammar, but that’s because he didn’t like the whole Cathedral system. He had been at Cathedral High School when his mother died. The nuns made every kid in the school send him a card, even the kids he had never heard of before. Sorry about your mom, they said, one after the other. After awhile he stopped opening them. There was something luxurious about throwing away unopened mail. It seemed to him a very grown-up thing to do as he dropped entire stacks of cards into the trash. When he thought about his school what he saw were those envelopes sealed up tight, nestled in among the eggshells and coffee grounds. That probably wasn’t reason enough to keep Kenya from going there. “That’s good. She’d do well there.”

  A small peace washed over his father’s face and Doyle smiled. Sullivan was genuinely horrified to see how little effort it took to make the old man happy. All he needed was the promise of a good deed, some task that he could concentrate on for the future. What would become of him once Teddy had left the house? What would become of him when there was no one left to meddle with? Sullivan wondered if Doyle would be waiting at the front steps of the school to pick Kenya up in the afternoon, if he would wait for her there all day.

  “Here we are,” Doyle said, and he pulled out his wallet and paid the fare. He had one foot down in the snow when he turned back into the cab and pushed several folded bills towards his son who took them without a word and put them into the pocket of his coat.

  There were several people in the waiting room but only one eleven-year-old girl in a bright pink track suit. She was sitting in the corner, away from the others, elbows on knees, her face in her hands. Doyle called her name.

  She stood up quickly but when she turned to them she stopped, her eyes filling up with tears. They walked towards her and for one awful moment thought that they had misunderstood the gravity of the situation and were now about to receive the worst news possible from a child. “He wouldn’t take a cab,” she said.

  Doyle took off his gray felt hat and held it by the brim. “It doesn’t matter,” he said, hoping that she would reassure him that the cab was the worst of it, but she said nothing. “Is he all right?”

  Kenya shook her head. “He hurt his shoulder.” She crossed her right hand over to her own left shoulder, leaving it there for comfort. She was crying in earnest now. “When they came and picked him up off the ground it was awful. He cried.”

  Sullivan went to her and put his hands around her waist. He said one word, “Up,” and then he lifted her so that her arms went around his neck, her long legs wrapped around his waist. In the moment that immediately preceded this very small leap and catch he was struck by the extent to which what he had said to Doyle in the cab had been the truth: they did agree on this girl, the one who now exhaled in long, damp sobs into the collar of his shirt. In many ways, Sullivan had been very good at his job in Africa. He had always known how to pick children up, how to comfort them without embarrassment, and in return the children found a solace in his skin, his hair. He made them hold their own weight by letting them cling to him. He didn’t mind it. Kenya was too big to be carried, she was years past it, but Sullivan had always picked up the bigger children, boys or girls, anyone he could physically lift off the ground. In Africa, nobody weighed anything at all. It made him feel like a strongman, gathering up so many skinny arms and legs in his hands like bunches of sticks. He whispered into her ear, “You didn’t push him, did you? You didn’t kick his crutch?”

  She shook her head into the side of his neck.

  “Then there’s nothing to cry about.” He rubbed a circle on the small of her back.

  Doyle came and stood beside them. “I’ll go in and see Tip and then I’ll come back and tell you that everything’s fine.”

  Kenya nodded again but she couldn’t raise her head. She had been put in charge, after all. She was the one with the money for cars.

  Sullivan looked at his father, mouthed the word “tired,” and Doyle nodded. “We’ll be right here,” Sullivan said. “We’ll wait for Teddy.”

  “Will he be here soon?” Kenya asked, because now she was worried about everyone who wasn’t in front of her.

  “Oh no,” Sullivan said. “He’ll be late.”

  Doyle did not need to ask anyone any questions this time. He knew the landscape. He knew that the door marked AUTHORIZED PERSONNEL ONLY was the one he was meant to walk through. What surprised him was that absolutely nothing had changed from the night before. The people even looked the same. The emergency room was like a casino in that way. It existed in a state of perpetual fluorescence that was meant to represent neither day nor night. It was a jar of alcohol solution in which time had been suspended.

  “Ah, yes,” said Dr. Ball, bowing his head slightly to Doyle in a sympathetic acknowledgment of bad luck. “Your son has come back to us.”

  Doyle started, as if he had seen a ghost. “Have you been here all night?”

  Dr. Ball shook his head. “No, no. I slept very well at home, thank you. It appears that I never leave, but then some would say the same of you. Your son, he asked for me. I have sewn up a cut above his ear. He said he did not care to see a plastic surgeon. It will be beneath his hair.”

  Doyle thanked him and looked down the row of curtains, wondering where Tip was now.

  The doctor sighed. “I fear the shoulder is another story. It was dislocated in the fall. It’s a very painful business, the shoulder coming out of the socket and then needing to be replaced. He’s had a poor run of luck, your son, but this is not an uncommon circumstance. Crutches can be very deceitful at first.”

  Doyle agreed, wishing to be out of his topcoat and scarf. There was a thin line of perspiration forming above his eyebrows. He found that he could hardly stand to be in this hallway again. The nurses, the lights, the empty gurneys lined against the wall, every bit of it struck him as unbearable. “If I could see him now.”

  “Certainly, yes.” Dr. Ball led him forward to the third bay. “We have taken some X-rays. I want to see about the rotator cuff. It is probably fine but there is no point in him having to come back again. I’ve wrapped the shoulder to keep it stable. The bandages are not so much a medical necessity as they are a reminder for him not to use it.”

  Doyle thanked the doctor for all of his attention and then he turned away. He did not want to see Dr. Ball again. He stepped inside the room and pulled the curtain behind him. Tip was stretched out, eyes closed, his shirt off. The white bandaging was extremely neat, binding the top of his left arm to his body as if it were a bad wing. The left side of his head was shaved in a four inch square above his ear that framed the six spiky black knots that were sewn into his skin, a perfect piece of modern art. His cheek was swollen and dark, and still, with all of that, the thing Doyle noticed first was how beautiful he was, how young and healthy and whole. His ribs expanded evenly with every breath and then made their gentle descent. Doyle put his hand on his son’s forehead the way he had when Tip was a boy, a little wild boy who could not be comforted. “How are you feeling?”

  Tip opened his eyes and tried to focus. “Like a fucking idiot,
” he said.

  “You fell.”

  “She stood there and told me we had to take a cab.”

  “Always listen to the girl.”

  “I don’t think of myself as a careless person, but twice in less than twenty-four hours makes you wonder.” He reached over and touched his shoulder very gently with the tips of his fingers.

  “You were tired today. I never should have let you go out.”

  Tip smiled slightly. “I wasn’t asking permission.”

  “No one does. Not anymore.”

  “Where’s Kenya?”

  “She’s in the waiting room. She’s pretty worried about you.”

  “Is Teddy with her?”

  “Sullivan.”

  Tip raised his eyebrows.

  “Teddy went to get your uncle. He thinks this would be the perfect moment for a family reunion. Anyway, Sullivan’s doing fine. He likes the girl.”

  “You have to see her run, Da,” Tip said. “She’s like a rocket. She’s a hundred times better than either of us ever were. She looks like she could go to the Olympics tomorrow and wipe up the floor with everyone there. And she’s a hell of a Girl Scout, too. She knew just what to do when I fell.” Tip didn’t mention that she had in fact saved him twice, the first time being when he nearly collapsed on the way to the lab. In retrospect, it seemed a clear indication that the day should have been over when he could no longer get a key in the door. He also declined to mention her affinity for the fishes. It was a sign of maturity that he could recognize a peaceful moment and decide to let it stand.