“Speaking of which”—Teddy stood up and stretched—“I should go and check on her. I’ll come back in a little bit.”
When he opened the curtain the same doctor was there leaning over a chart at the nurses’ station. Teddy stood and waited until the doctor noticed his stillness and looked up. He pointed to the cubicle across the hall and down from Tip’s. “Good that you are here. It is time to take the child out now. She should not stay back there for too long. Mother needs her rest.”
Tennessee Moser was in a room with a door rather than a curtain, making her seem like someone who was in for a longer stay right from the start. Teddy tapped lightly on the frame. “Hello?” he said.
Kenya came and pulled the door open just a bit, peered out. She looked like a girl who was playing house. “She’s sleeping.” Then she pointed at the doctor. “He’s the one who should keep his voice down if he wants her to rest.” There was nothing especially loud about Dr. Ball’s voice, but every sound came through. Call bells chimed while a scratchy voice called indecipherably for Dr. X or Y over a loudspeaker, but Kenya’s mother slept deeply, unaware and undisturbed.
“We need to go back to the waiting room now,” Teddy said.
“Don’t you want to see her? You could come in and say hello.”
“I’ll say hello when she’s awake.”
Kenya looked over her shoulder and then back at Teddy. “Say hello just for a second. I think she’d like it.”
Teddy walked into the tiny room and saw that the woman was sleeping. She looked so different in the bright fluorescent overhead lights than she had in the snow. Teddy wasn’t even sure he would have recognized her. She was older than he had thought at first. She looked tired, average, not at all heroic, or at least she didn’t look like the sort of woman who would be pushing people away from cars, not that he knew what such a woman would look like. She was tall and she wore her hair straightened and pulled back. She had a white bandage on the right side of her forehead and it covered up half of her right eye. On her right arm there was a cloth splint held in place by Velcro fasteners and her other arm had an IV tube running into it that connected her to a plastic sack that hung above her bed. Her heart monitor beeped with comforting regularity. She was so still, so profoundly asleep, that Teddy had to watch to make sure her chest was moving slightly.
“They’re going to take her to a room in just a little while. That’s what they told me,” Kenya said.
“That would be good.”
“A nurse came in and asked me a lot of questions. There were all sorts of forms to fill out but I told her your dad had the cards.”
“He’ll take care of it.”
“They wanted to know what she’s allergic to. The nurse said that was really important but I don’t know. I don’t think she’s allergic to anything. There are things she doesn’t like. She doesn’t like olives but I don’t think she’s allergic to them.” Kenya turned her eyebrows down in a way that made her look particularly concerned.
“They probably won’t be giving her any olives tonight,” Teddy said.
Kenya gave him a quick look that made it clear she wasn’t a fool and then she let it go. “Did you know they put fifteen stitches in her forehead? I don’t think it’s going to make any difference though. It’s so far up it’s almost in her hair.”
Teddy didn’t follow her line of reasoning but he didn’t think it mattered. “It won’t make any difference.”
Kenya stroked her mother’s foot beneath the white sheet. “She’s so pretty.”
Teddy thought of the picture of his own mother that he carried in his wallet, how he would take it out to show people when he was younger and how he would ask them, “Don’t you think she’s pretty?”
“She is,” Teddy said.
Kenya leaned over and kissed her mother on the cheek. “You keep on resting and we’ll be back to see you in the morning. Don’t worry about anything.” She walked over to the door and stood next to Teddy. She touched her fingers lightly to the sleeve of his sweater. “At least tell her goodbye,” she said.
So Teddy told her goodbye.
In his mind, Teddy made a list of all the people he could call if he were in some kind of trouble late at night. He thought of the people he could call now, tonight, no matter how late it was, and then he thought of the people he would have called when he was eleven. If it was serious trouble he would always call Tip first, and then his father a very close second. He could call his older brother Sullivan, if Sullivan was in the country. Even though his father wouldn’t agree, Teddy knew that Sullivan would always come through to the best of his ability. His uncle Sullivan was certainly long past the point of being able to come and get him if that was what the situation required, but he would be the person Teddy would most want to talk to if there was ever real trouble. Even now he longed to excuse himself from the girl for a moment and find a pay phone so that he could tell his uncle what had happened tonight. Uncle Father Sullivan often had a difficult time sleeping, so chances were he would be awake anyway, staring out at the same snow that Teddy was staring at now. He would know exactly what to do about the girl, where they should take her for the night, and he would tell Teddy what he should say to comfort her. Father Sullivan didn’t have a phone in his room anymore since that story about him had run in the Herald, and the office at Regina Cleri had been overrun with calls. Still, Teddy knew that for him the nuns would take the phone up to his uncle’s room.
Even in the very unlikely event that Teddy couldn’t find the members of what he considered to be his immediate family, he could always call any member of his mother’s family, four uncles and two aunts, their husbands and wives, their children, his cousins, who were scattered all across the country now. He could call his father’s brother in Chicago or any of his uncle’s daughters, who were Teddy’s favorite cousins. He could call his friends, or Tip’s friends for that matter, and they would come to him and take him home with them for as long as he needed to stay.
So how was it possible that Teddy could conjure up an entire phone book of people waiting to accept his collect calls and Kenya could think of no one? Every time Teddy asked her, all she said was no. He decided that she must have people, plenty of people, but for whatever reason she was holding out as a way of giving them no alternatives. She wanted to stay where she was, a short hallway away from the steady beeping of her mother’s heart monitor. As they stood together by a large window, Teddy could think of no way at all to push her towards confession.
“Aren’t you sleepy?” he asked.
She shook her head. “I should be but I’m not.”
They stood and watched the snow coming down in the light and when the silence between them felt awkward Teddy started up, “‘Yes, the newspaper was right: snow was falling general all over Ireland,’” he said. “‘It was falling on every part of the dark central plain, on the trees, on the treeless hills, falling softly upon the Bog of Allen and, further westward, softly falling into the dark mutinous Shannon waves.’”
“What are you talking about?” Kenya said. She didn’t look at him like he was crazy. She just wanted to know.
Teddy shook his head. “It’s a story I like. The snow made me think of it.”
“You do that a lot, don’t you?”
“What?”
“I don’t know, repeat things. You did it tonight before the lecture.”
“You saw me at the lecture?”
“Everybody did. You were talking just like you were Jesse Jackson.”
He had been, he remembered now, although it seemed like that was years ago. It had never occurred to him that they were at the lecture too. Were Kenya and her mother sitting close by? “Why did you want to go hear Jesse Jackson?”
Kenya shrugged. “It was my mother. I didn’t want to go. My mother likes politics. We go to those sorts of things.”
Of course it made sense. Everyone there was coming out of the lecture. Why else would they have been on Eliot Street in the snow late
at night, so far away from Roxbury? “We must have come out at the same time then. I didn’t see you.”
Kenya looked at her fingernails and then stuffed her hands in her pockets. She was still wearing her coat. She was still carrying her mother’s purse, though she’d left the boots by her hospital bed. “Maybe we did. I don’t know. Tell me the rest of that story now, the one about Ireland.”
And Teddy was going to tell her, all about the snow falling on Michael Furey’s grave, but Doyle came through the door pushing Tip in a wheelchair. Tip’s foot was straight out ahead of him in a pale blue boot, a pair of crutches rested across his lap. Tip and Doyle looked tired in a deep and permanent way.
“They’re letting me go,” Tip said.
“And I’m going to talk to someone about where Kenya should stay tonight,” Doyle said. “We’ll get you set up, don’t worry about that.”
“I’m going to stay with my mother.”
“They won’t let you.” Teddy put his hand on her shoulder. “You know that.”
“You’re going to have to go to a family member or a guardian,” Doyle said. “We’d take you home with us but they don’t let children walk out with just anybody at this hospital.”
But they all knew that wasn’t true. There were very few people left in the waiting room now, and where they were standing, so near to the door, there was no one else at all. No one would see them or stop them. No one would care who she left with except for the Doyles themselves. Kenya sat down in a chair beside an artificial rubber tree. She was thinking things over. Maybe she was trying to come up with the name of someone she could call. Maybe she hadn’t given up hope of staying there with her mother. When she finally spoke it was to answer the question that no one had asked her. “It’s the one thing I’m never supposed to tell,” she said.
“Then we won’t tell either,” Teddy said. It was late. It was impossibly late, and if they were only now going to get involved with child services it could be hours still before they were home and asleep.
“Just take me with you,” Kenya said.
“We can’t.” Doyle kept his eyes steady on hers. “You have to understand, that would be against the law.”
Kenya sighed. She looked at Teddy and at Tip, but in the end it was Tip she decided to put the question to. It was all so complicated and Tip was the smartest one so he had the best chance at understanding. Look at your face, she wanted to say to him. Look at your eyes. But that wasn’t the right way to say it. Tip in his red jacket sat in his wheelchair, his bare toes poking out of his blue boot. Doyle stood on one side of him and Teddy on the other, all three of them looking right at her, seeing her and no one else. They were all respectful of who she was, the daughter of the woman who had been hit by the car. They were waiting to hear whatever she had to say. No one was rushing her but the words tired and late hung over all of them like a blinking sign. She wanted more than anything to pull on her hair but she willed herself to keep her hands in her lap. She wanted them to see her as serious.
“Don’t you ever wonder about your mother?” she said.
Chapter 4
TIP WAS SMARTER AND TEDDY WAS SWEETER. THEY HAD HEARD IT SINCE A TIME BEFORE MEMORY. Sweet and Smart or Smart and Sweet. Either way it should have been a name of a magazine for teenaged girls or a brand of hard candy or a sauce for crispy duck. The teachers in their elementary school said it when the boys were a grade apart. They said it after Tip skipped the fourth grade and went ahead to fifth. They dressed up his English compositions in tin foil stars and red letter A’s and pinned them to the cork board in the language arts center. They were slow to erase the math problems he had worked out in chalk. But they never longed to scoop Tip up in their arms. They didn’t save his class picture or the cards that he made because, unlike his brother, Tip never made any teacher a card. “Tip is one of the smartest little boys this school has ever seen,” the teachers would confide when Doyle came in for conferences. “But Teddy is just so sweet.” Teddy did not get to skip the fourth grade. In fact, it was suggested that he repeat it. The principal was careful to avoid the word “failed.” She made it sound like they enjoyed having Teddy in fourth grade so much that they were hoping he could stay and do it again. Doyle refused. It was bad enough that his sons, who should have been one year apart, were now two years apart. He would not see them go to three.
Besides, just because Tip was smart didn’t mean that Teddy was stupid. Teddy wasn’t stupid, he just wandered. Even as a little boy Tip could be pinned into place by an idea. Set him on the floor with a picture book and he would stay until the book was finished. Set him on the floor with a can of Lincoln Logs and he would stay until he’d built himself a woody Taj Mahal. Teddy, on the other hand, was more like a cloud. The slightest breath of wind could send him to the hall closet to hunt up a tennis racquet he hadn’t seen in years, or out to the mailbox on the corner to see if the time for the pickup had changed even though he had nothing to mail. It wasn’t that he refused to do his homework or even that he couldn’t manage it, it was just that other things caught his attention, and anything that had Teddy’s attention had all of him. Doyle got his youngest son through fourth grade the same way he would get him through fifth and sixth and all the grades to come: he sat there. He put his body in the room, at the table, beside the book. He brought Teddy to his office after school and had him sit beside him at the desk so they could work together. When Teddy’s mind wandered from the project at hand, Doyle knew it before he did. He could smell the distraction as if it was something burning and he tapped the page with his finger. “Right here,” Doyle would say. If Doyle had a meeting, a dinner out, he would pay Tip a dollar to take his place. He did not ask the baby-sitter to do it. She had a susceptibility to Teddy’s charms that made her unsuitable for discipline.
The thing that was most likely to walk off with Teddy’s concentration was the memory of his mother, the splendid redhead in the photographs, his own perpetual flame that he stoked with every available scrap of information. He did remember her. He was positive of that. He remembered her kneeling in front of him, buttoning his winter coat. He remembered sitting on the floor of the kitchen while she chopped carrots and talked to one of his aunts. He remembered lying beside her in a bed, his back to her chest, her long, pale arm draped over him so that he was looking at his pillow and her hand. He could still feel the even rhythm of her breathing. He had put his hand on top of her hand, stretched out his fingers and tried to cover hers and in her sleep she wrapped that hand beneath him and pulled him close to her.
There were many, many times that Teddy tried to mine his father for information because surely Doyle had enough stored away to keep his memory burning forever, but Doyle would always just tap the open math book with his finger. “Right here.”
It was in fact a misunderstanding between them. Teddy wanted to talk about Bernadette. Doyle wanted to keep Teddy from spending his life in the seventh grade. He tried to ask Tip but all Tip would ever say was, “I don’t remember.” He said it curtly, like Teddy was nagging and he didn’t want to be bothered. That must have been the case since it was impossible that Tip, who was a year older and certainly smarter, would actually remember less. Sullivan would have told him about their mother but Sullivan was never around and when he was around he tended to stay in his room with the door locked. Other people in the family, aunts, uncles, various older cousins, would cry when he asked them what they remembered. They would pull the boy to their chest and weep in his hair until Doyle had to tell him not to ask anymore.
That was how he came to be so close to his great-uncle, Father Sullivan. It turned out the priest had stories stacked up like dinner napkins. Father Sullivan said that they belonged to Teddy, hundreds of stories waiting to be unfolded. They all started simply, beautifully, “When your mother was nine she got a yellow dress for her birthday. I was at the party. Everything she asked for that year was yellow. She wanted a canary and a lemon cake…”
Somewhere along the line Teddy??
?s love for his mother had become his love for Father Sullivan, and his love for Father Sullivan became his love for God. The three of them were bound into an inextricable knot: the living and the dead and the life everlasting. Each one led him to the other, and any member of the trinity he loved simply increased his love for all three.
The question wasn’t did he ever think of his mother. The question was did he ever think of anything else.
Doyle called for a taxi to take them home. When he asked how long it was going to be, the dispatcher told him to go look out the window. Everyone who was out in the city tonight was stranded. Now it was clear that he should have made the call an hour ago. None of them even considered going back for Doyle’s car, which by now was surely buried. Driving home was the smallest of the plans that had been laid aside. With everything that had happened, the only thing that stayed consistent was the falling snow. The streets had been swept into a single luminous valley. It was Teddy who announced that Kenya would spend the night with them, and neither Tip nor Doyle countered with the subject of kidnapping, though Doyle wondered if the child herself would bring charges against them later. Tip had signed all of his release papers and now he sat in the wheelchair and quietly ground his teeth. His left shoe, a puffy white Puma sneaker, rested uselessly on his lap beneath the two crutches that balanced across the wheelchair’s arms. The wheelchair would only go as far as the front door. The crutches had been written out as a prescription and filled from a storeroom at the hospital. The boot, a complicated blue fiberglass construction trimmed out with Velcro straps, had been purchased and charged to the insurance company. It was Tip’s to keep. They sat in the waiting room and looked out the window. The sets of headlights that slid slowly past the hospital were few and far between and the Doyles pinned their hopes to every one of them. Kenya yawned and then yawned again until her eyes were damp with exhaustion. She did the finger work for Für Elise against her knees. It helped to keep her awake.