But Jackson never got to Tip. Tip was still in the MCZ, reviewing the notes he had taken that afternoon on the jaw structure of regional fishes. That’s what it meant to concentrate. Jackson’s voice was nothing but a metronome in the background, the steady ticking that regulated the artistry of science in his head. Politicians would always be talking. They had been talking forever. If Tip had chosen to listen to them every time they chose to tell him something he would have gone out of his mind by the seventh grade.
That was the way it was in any room where one person took the center stage; some of the people would listen with concentration while others couldn’t tell you a single thing that was said. It didn’t really matter who the speaker was, or if they were boring or passionate. You never got everyone’s attention, not if you were the Pope saying mass in St. Peter’s Square or Renée Fleming in recital at Carnegie Hall or Czeslaw Milosz reading his poetry in Polish for the very last time. The only way to make everyone listen was to start a fire in the middle of the room and then identify the location of all emergency exits. And even then, if you took the time to notice, there would always be someone running frantically in the opposite direction. Doyle knew this. Jesse Jackson knew this. But Teddy and Tip, at the ages of twenty and twenty-one respectively, each believed that he was the only person there who had drifted off to other things. Teddy was thinking about his great-uncle lying in bed and how he was no wider than a pillow, no higher, and just as pale. He believed that Father Sullivan had cured those two women even if the old priest swore on Teddy’s head that he had nothing to do with their sudden onset of miraculous health. The weather report had promised that the snow would be blinding by three and so Teddy decided if he waited he could get caught at the Regina Cleri home. He had been sure he would be forced to stay the night rather than be sent into the howling drifts alone. He waited and waited. The sick were dispersed and his uncle fell asleep, but the snow never came. Finally one of the nursing sisters said the weatherman had changed his story altogether and already his snowstorm was pushing up the coast to bury Maine.
Once Jackson finished his lecture and opened the floor to questions, Tip had a harder time blocking out his environment. It seemed to him that every hand in the place was raised except for the hands belonging to his family. It could be four o’clock in the morning before they got this circus wrapped up. Tip felt that he had reached the end of his evening’s allotment of obedience. “I need to go,” he whispered.
Doyle shook his head almost imperceptibly and Tip released a long, audible sigh. As children, both Teddy and Tip had been so good. They were practically legends of patience in certain circles, sitting quietly in their white shirts at dinner tables full of adults, occasionally offering up a single insightful and utterly charming question. But now they twisted in their seats and scratched their ankles. At the very point they should have been able to make a full connection with the material they were instead so often restless, itchy.
A nervous white girl stepped up to the microphone in the overcrowded aisle and asked whether Jackson would ever consider another run. “We need you,” she said. The crowd exploded in cheers and then the rhythmic repetition of the name, “Jes-SEE, Jes-SEE.”
Tip pushed one of his fingers, which was only now starting to warm up, under his sleeve and pulled the sleeve back to look at his watch. He leaned across his father and tapped Teddy on the thigh. Once he had his attention he held up his wrist.
“It won’t be that much longer,” Teddy said quietly. “He’ll shut it down.” He motioned towards Jackson, who was nodding his head slowly and then holding up his palms to signal to the audience that their point had been taken. Doyle, without so much as glancing in Tip’s direction, put his hand over his son’s wrist.
Tip started to review the material that would certainly be included in his advanced marine biology exam. How many times had jaw protrusion occurred in the evolution of fishes? Simple enough. Everyone knew it had in sharks, in some chondrostians, in the Ostariophysii, and in the higher teleosts. Maybe it would seem too obvious to favor the higher teleosts the way he did, but fascination didn’t always have its origins in obscurity. While Jackson answered questions about the inherent cruelty of the Republican domestic budget, Tip considered the fully movable maxilla and premaxilla and tried to draw conclusions about the teleosts’ homocercal tails. In this way he managed to pass the time. Teddy was right. At nine-fifteen Jackson called for one final question and at twenty minutes past the audience produced a thundering ovation and struggled into their coats.
“Didn’t I tell you that would be worth it?” Doyle said, his face as bright as Christmas morning. “He’s still got the fire in him. Even when you’ve heard it all before, you never have the feeling he’s just putting it through the paces.”
“He was putting it through the paces,” Tip said flatly.
Doyle shook his head. “He has a message. He’s still trying to get people to listen.”
Teddy picked up his own long scarf and looped it twice around his brother’s neck. When Tip started to object, Teddy pulled the scarf tight across his mouth. “He’s good all right,” Teddy said. “It’s the minister in him.”
“What the party needs to find is another Jackson,” Doyle said.
“What’s wrong with the Jackson it’s got?” Teddy followed his brother down the aisle and into the crowd of slow moving, winter-wrapped bodies.
Tip turned around and spoke over his shoulder as he walked. “He means we need a Jackson who’s white and centrist, which means we don’t need Jackson at all. We need Clinton, and we’ve already had Clinton.”
“Is that what I said?” Doyle asked.
“It’s what you meant.” It wasn’t what Doyle said or what he meant, but Tip felt entitled to a mean-spirited remark. It wasn’t just the fish that needed to be put away. Even Tip knew that was nothing. But there was still so much to read, and the weight of all the work there was to be done on his thesis balanced like a piano on his head. The swirl of people in the front hall of the building overwhelmed him. Everyone seemed so energized, so motivated by the event. Was he the only student there who had work to do?
“Try to straighten out your disposition on the way to the reception,” Doyle said.
“A reception?” Teddy said.
His brother held up both hands, his red woolen mittens making two sharp exclamations. “Not a chance.”
“It’s at Lawrence Simons’ house. Thirty minutes tops. He was good to invite us.”
“And we would be good to go, but we’re not going, or I’m not going with you.”
“Tip!” a boy called.
Tip turned around. “Hey,” he said and raised his hand. It was Jacob Goldberg, his lab partner from inorganic chemistry last year, the only other kid in the class who was interested in science and wasn’t just another insanely cutthroat premed. Before they had a chance to speak, the crowd pushed them apart and moved them forward. The crowd made the decision about which of the doors they would use to exit. They were all just a school of fish bumping around in a wave. The whole time they shuffled ahead, Tip and Doyle bickered lightly about Jackson. Teddy tried to keep his place between them, putting his hand on one coat sleeve and then the other. When they were finally pushed out of the warm foyer of the Kennedy School and into the great cold world of the night, it was snowing. Not the heavy, wet flakes that come down like silver dollars and melt a minute later, and not the very dry tiny snow that blows around and never really settles on anything. This was a hard, steady fall of a medium-sized flake that meant business. To tilt your head back and look straight up into a streetlight was to have some comprehension of infinity. They came and came and came. The huge crowd dispersed almost instantly, everyone looking for shelter while Tip and Teddy and Doyle continued to stand on the street corner, trying to agree on their destination, their heads and shoulders quickly glittering with snow.
“They said the storm missed us,” Teddy said, looking at the soft fall as if it had lied to him persona
lly. He should have waited longer with Uncle Sullivan. He should have been more patient.
“I told the Simonses we were coming. This isn’t going to take all night.” Doyle felt the cold deep inside his ears. He wanted to step back inside, preferably into the Simonses’ warm living room where he could have one drink and talk for a little while to friends, to his sons.
“Sometimes it takes all night.” Teddy was trying to be lighthearted but the intention got lost in all the weather. Cars slid past. Already there was the sound of tires crunching and spinning.
“You should go home now anyway,” Tip said. “You’re never going to be able to drive in this.” All he would have to do is walk back to the museum. The heater was always running on overtime there. Tip wore a T-shirt under his shirt and sweater all the time because the colder it was outside the more likely it was to get too hot down in the basement near the boiler.
Doyle took off his glasses and wiped them on the end of his scarf. “How many people do you think were in that room tonight who would be able to make the time to go and shake Jesse Jackson’s hand?”
“Let them go,” Tip said.
“We’ll be out in ten minutes,” Teddy said. “We won’t even take our coats off.”
For a minute Tip closed his eyes against the snow’s luster. He thought about the teleosts, about jaw structure, about what mattered in his life. “I’m not going to do this anymore.”
“Why is your schedule—”
“Not tonight, not anymore.” Then Tip opened his eyes and looked at his father. There, he had said it, and it wasn’t even that difficult. Other people from the lecture trudged around them, past them, muttering about the weather. No one stopped and stared. “You don’t care about the things I care about. I don’t care about the things you care about. I’m not dragging you over to look at bluegills.”
“I’m trying to teach you about something that matters,” Doyle said.
Tip nodded his snow-covered head, and the snow-covered branches of the snow-covered trees leaned over and bent down close to him. He was walking backwards, away from his father and brother. Snow like this took away all the familiar markings. It erased the environment, the place where Tip and Teddy and Doyle had all grown up. They were on Eliot Street, but it snowed so hard they could have been in a forest outside of Copenhagen. They could have been on a city street in St. Petersburg. They could have been anywhere in the world where snow fell in endless repetition, the three of them together having this very conversation. Tip was wishing his brother would walk away with him because he knew Teddy was tired of politics, too. This wasn’t what he wanted for himself any more than Tip wanted it. I’m going with Tip, he would say to their father, and they would walk together back across campus to the MCZ, maybe stop in one of those cappuccino places on the way to warm up from the snow. And even as Tip was wishing his brother would come with him, he was also wishing he could stay. He wished he were more like Teddy, able to just let things roll off of him, be pleasant, think of the good. If they were alone, Teddy would have brought up Sullivan. Remember all that Da has been through with Sullivan, he would say, and the thought of their brother would shame Tip into keeping quiet. Tip was right in between those two thoughts as he was backing away, as he was hit by someone he thought for a second had just slipped into him in the snow. But the hit was much harder than that, hard enough to push all of the air out of his lungs. His fall to the ground was soft with all the snow and still it stunned him. Immediately he heard the sound of another hit and then another. He was far from where he’d been standing, down on the ground and all he could see was the endless field of white gliding towards him. He felt a pain in his leg but the pain, like everything else, was very far away. There was a girl somewhere screaming and his father’s voice calling out to him, “Tip! Tip!” But when Tip opened his mouth he found he didn’t have the breath to answer. He closed his eyes and felt the snow melting on his tongue.
Chapter 3
THERE WERE THREE SEPARATE HITS. THEY WERE SO CLOSE TOGETHER THAT SOMEONE WHO WAS NOT directly involved might not have been able to see them distinctly, but for Kenya time slowed down and gave her the chance to think of each one as its own act of a play. In the first, her mother left her on the sidewalk and ran to the older boy, Tip. She blindsided him with the full force of her body, the momentum of the blow knocking him very nearly clear of the car. The second one was the car hitting her mother, and this hit was made up of many smaller hits: her hip against the high front fender—BANG—her chest against the hood—BANG—and then she rolled up until her head struck the windshield with a single clear crack, just at the moment when the car slid to a stop. The third act was the worst to see because it was the whole scene played back in reverse. Her mother’s head leaves the windshield, her body rolls backwards across the hood, and then she falls to the ground with a wet, heavy thump and lies there, facedown in the snow in front of the tires of a light-colored SUV. One of her mother’s arms was still in its coat sleeve but the rest of the coat was turned inside out and fanned the ground next to her, the slick green lining facing up. Kenya, who was capable of moving like lightning, of leaping, of vaulting, of being her mother’s little gazelle, was there beside her before the coat had settled out across the snow. Not only was Kenya fast, she had trained her young reflexes to snap like springs. Crack the starting gun and she was off the blocks. She ran. She was down on her hands and knees, calling, “Mama, Mama,” but it didn’t come out anything like the word. It was just a long, high sound that started with the letter M. She put her hand beneath her mother’s cheek to turn her head. She needed to see her face. When did her mother’s head get to be so heavy?
“Don’t move her,” a voice above her said. It was an adult voice but she did not regard it. One of the first rules of safety in scouting was not to move a person after an accident, but that knowledge came second to the fact that no one can breathe facedown in the snow. When she had turned her mother just enough, she brushed the snow out of her nose and eyes. There was blood beneath her head, a bright and shocking soak of red against the white, but the sight of her mother’s face, the weight of her head in her hands, calmed her and she was able to stop making that noise. She could hear a car door open and then there was a man’s voice that everyone quieted to hear. Over and over again he said, “I didn’t see her. I didn’t see her.” Doyle and Teddy ran to Tip, who was still on the ground. The other white man, the one who Did Not See Her, just stood there repeating the only sentence he knew. And then Teddy, whom she had always especially liked, left his brother and came and crouched down right beside her. He put his arm around her like she was someone he knew and for a second he held her tight so that her shoulder pushed against his ribs. Then he let go and took off his own coat in the snow and put it over her mother. He put his own hand beneath her mother’s head to keep it from being too cold.
“Will you get somebody to help?” Kenya said.
“Somebody will be here in just a minute.” Again he spread his arm like a wide wing over Kenya’s back and they crouched together, their knees touching very close. He was a big man, tall and big-shouldered, and though she was tall for her age she felt like a little girl beside him. Both of the boys were handsome and tall and even though she liked Tip and knew he was very smart, Teddy had always been her favorite of the two brothers. He had a softer face. Several times in her life he had smiled at her when their eyes met in a crowd, not because he knew her but because he was the sort of person who didn’t mind smiling at people he didn’t know. He was only wearing a blue pullover sweater now and he did not shiver even though it was freezing. Sitting like this beside him, touching him, would have been the most remarkable thing that had ever happened to her except that now she could not think of him at all. Her mother hadn’t opened her eyes and Kenya had to keep brushing the snow off her face. Teddy took off one of his mittens and pressed it tightly to the long cut across her forehead. Cars had stopped all around them and people stood in the snow and waited for something to happe
n. It seemed that there were almost as many people clustered on the sidewalk as had been to hear Jesse Jackson.
“I didn’t see her,” the man from the car told someone. “What was she doing in the middle of the street?”
“She’s your mother,” Teddy said.
The way he said it, not as a question but as a statement of fact, made Kenya wonder for a second if he knew this was her mother, but then she realized that wasn’t the way he had meant it. She told him yes, and even though she couldn’t put any volume behind the word, she saw her mother’s chest very clearly rise and fall at the sound of her voice.
“What’s her name?”
“Tennessee,” Kenya said, and she added, “like the state.” Because that was the way her mother always said it. If she didn’t introduce herself as “Tennessee-like-the-state” then someone was always bound to ask.
“That’s not one you hear every day,” Teddy said.
“No, sir,” Kenya said.
Doyle came over to them then, crouching down in the snow. He wasn’t wearing a coat either. He had spread it over the other brother, who for some crazy reason was only wearing a jacket. “Tip’s okay,” he said to Teddy. “I think he’s broken his ankle but he’s okay. The damn car went over his ankle.”
“She pushed him out of the way.” Kenya’s voice was soft. The headlights from the SUV cut her into a silhouette. “He was going to be hit by the car.”
Doyle nodded solemnly and Kenya could tell that he was thinking, yes, I saw it too. He looked down at her mother and very gently touched her forehead next to the place where Teddy was pressing down the mitten, and at that moment Tennessee blinked open her eyes. She looked at Kenya for a minute and the sides of her mouth bent up the smallest bit.