“How long have you known?” Teddy finally asked, because of the million questions flying through his head at once this was the only one he could shape into words.
“About you?” Kenya shrugged. “I don’t know. A long time.”
But what was a long time when you’re eleven—two months? three years? Teddy couldn’t bring himself to ask her and so he said nothing. Tip wrapped and unwrapped the shoelace of his empty sneaker around his finger while Doyle kept watch for the cab. It came sooner than any of them expected, the first piece of good luck all day. Together they set through the electric door that sprang open to return them to the weather. Teddy helped his brother into the backseat and Doyle rolled the chair through the door of the hospital and said good night again to the nurse. Kenya sat by one window with her mother’s purse in her lap, looking out, and Tip sat by the other window with Teddy in the middle. Doyle got into the front seat.
“We’ll come back tomorrow,” Kenya said, looking at the sprawling building over her shoulder when they finally drove away.
“First thing,” Teddy said.
“What if she wakes up in the middle of the night? How’s she going to know where I am?”
“The nurse will tell her you’re with us,” Teddy said, though they had forgotten to tell the nurse anything.
“We’ll have to call someone at your school and tell them you won’t be coming in,” Doyle said. In the morning he would return her to the place he had taken her from. He would let her sleep and then it was right back to the waiting room. Now that they were in it that was the only thing to do.
“I don’t think they’ll have school tomorrow,” Kenya said. The taxi was only going about ten miles an hour. It pushed through the snow like a sleigh.
“No,” the taxi driver said. “No school tomorrow.”
“Good.” Kenya put her head against the frosted window and watched the snow.
Doyle kept his eyes straight ahead until they ached from trying to focus on so much whiteness. He had felt a leap of viciousness inside his chest, the very viciousness that had made him a good prosecutor when he was a young man, when the girl first made her claim. He managed to catch himself before he laughed at her. He was able to remember the circumstances of this night and that she was only a child. He did not blame the child, but that didn’t mean they weren’t sitting in the middle of some elaborate ruse. Even if he was no longer the mayor, theirs had been a public life. An old white mayor with two black sons, they were almost impossible to miss. People had delusions. Women had called the office all the time when the boys were young and proclaimed their maternity. Everybody sees themselves at the center of the story. Still, the defense could find holes in his argument big enough to drive a herd of cattle through. The woman had put herself in front of the car to save Tip, that was true, but who knows what she was thinking at that moment? The girl, Kenya, was more troubling as she seemed to be the very body of evidence: long legs, long neck, the warm color of her skin. He had noticed her hands, her tapering fingers, the elegant beds of her fingernails. Those hands could be compared. Hands? Doyle felt himself more closely related to Clarence Darrow than the high-tech legal investigations that ruled TV. It was only a matter of DNA these days. The mother was or she wasn’t, and as far as Doyle was concerned, even if she was, she wasn’t. His boys had a mother, and their mother was in the Old Calvary Cemetery in Roslindale.
What Doyle wondered at even more than this sudden reappearance was his own lack of vigilance. Why had he never thought of a mother returning? Why was it that once the adoptions were finalized he never wondered about her again, never speculated about her to Bernadette? Even the claims of crazy women never drove him to consider the possibility of a mother waiting out there somewhere. How had he let himself be so emptied of any past, as if the boys had been pulled from out of the air? And why was it the boys had never asked about her either, never said, as children in similar circumstances surely must, what about our real mother? Maybe because it was natural to wonder about the one who was missing, the one who left you, and for their family that would always be Bernadette. It was enough to hold one absent mother in your mind, to love completely and completely believe in the love of this woman you never see. No one could be expected to hold up two empty places. The weight of it would surely crush the life out of a child.
“It’s late for a little girl to be up,” the cabdriver said, looking back at Kenya in his rearview mirror. He was Jamaican. It was not a country that afforded any practice in driving through snow.
“I get to stay up late if there’s no school,” she said, though not late like this. Even on a Saturday night she was asleep by eleven, and if her mother was working a late shift she called Kenya and told her it was lights-out and Kenya would do what she was told. She would go to sleep but still keep one ear cocked. What she would have given to hear her mother’s keys right now, the jingle that preceded the deep click of the lock. Heaven would be home, to walk into their own apartment together right now. She would barely get out of her shoes. She would sleep in her coat and her dress if her mother would let her. She would collapse into their shared bed, melt into familiar sheets. Home, bed, sleep, mother—who knew more beautiful words than these? “Anyway, I’m not even tired.”
“That would make one of us, girl,” the cabdriver said.
Just saying the word tired made her eyelids flutter down. How glad she would have been to sleep in this cab. But then she remembered her vigilance. That was the word her mother taught her. Don’t stop looking around. Don’t stop watching. Every moment you’ve got to know where you are, what’s coming up behind you, who’s staring you down. That’s what her mother would tell her now. Kenya yawned once and then shook it off, made herself sit up straighter.
When they pulled up to the house all the lights were on, the only house lit bright on the dark street, and none of them gave it a thought. Doyle handed the driver twenty over the meter in simple gratitude for bringing them back. The street was a snow globe, a Christmas card. Doyle took a last deep breath of the cab’s sour warmth before opening the door and stepping back into the cold. He went to get the crutches out of the trunk. Someone on the street was playing Schubert’s C-sharp minor quartet. He could barely hear it but he knew, and for a second Doyle smiled. Then he stopped smiling. To reach the front door of the house they would have to climb fourteen steps, and while they had once been distinct they now blurred into a single slope of snow, a perfect bunny run. Back in the taxi Teddy put his hand on the girl’s shoulder.
“We’re here,” he said.
Kenya blinked, looked at Teddy and then looked down the street, suddenly, utterly awake, though she would swear that she hadn’t been sleeping. “We’re here,” she said.
There was nothing Kenya did not know about Union Park Street. She knew the bus that came up Columbus Ave. through Roxbury, past Malcolm X to where the split makes it Tremont. She and her mother rode that bus to Union Park when she was a little girl. She knew the straight shot down to Cathedral. She knew when the neighbors moved away and who kept up their tiny patches of lawn. She made note of the padlock on the iron spiked fence that surrounded the little park in the center of the street, the faded “No Dogs Allowed” sign on the gate that might as well have read “No People Allowed.” She watched as the snow was whisked away in the winter and how the street sweeper came and scrubbed down the street in the summer with water sprays and giant round brushes. Where she lived, what fell on the street stayed on the street, if it was precipitation or a Coke can.
Doyle and Teddy got Tip out of the car and stood on either side of him. Tip dug in his crutches and tried to hold his foot up but his bare toes touched down behind him and dipped into snow. “Who thought it was a good idea to put the door so far away from the street?” he said. While they looked at the stairs and tried to figure out the logistics of transport, Kenya shot up ahead. She bounded and leapt. Never had she climbed these stairs or been allowed to sit down on them to catch her breath on a hot day, though
people everywhere sat on steps that did not belong to them, people sat on these steps that did not belong to them, a fact that she pointed out to her mother often and to no avail. She wasn’t even allowed to walk on the same side of the street as this house. She turned her eyes away from it every time but there was not one thing she didn’t know about the window casements, the knocker or doorknob, the woman’s face carved out of stone above the front door or the two urns on either side that were filled first with violets then hydrangeas then zinnias then chrysanthemums just this summer alone. If anyone had asked her yesterday how it might have felt to be right there at the top of the stairs like she owned the place, she would have said petrifying, paralyzing, and she would have been wrong. It was electric. It was King of the World, first place in the 500 meter. She could have roared, “Look at me here!” her hot breath making a geyser of white steam. But she remembered herself. She looked down at the Doyles there on the sidewalk looking up at her and saw that they were stranded, waiting helpless for her lead, and so she started dragging her foot back and forth like a broom.
“I have a snow shovel,” Doyle said.
“I’ve got big feet,” Kenya said. Back and forth she traveled down each step until there was a wide swath cut from the center.
“You’re going to get snow in your shoes,” Teddy said, but he admired her resourcefulness, the meticulous nature of her work.
“I already have snow in my shoes.”
“Sacajawea.” Tip put his crutches on the first stair while Teddy and Doyle stood close by to catch him in case he fell over backwards. Once, when Teddy was thirteen he had a cyst in the back of his knee that had to be removed and that cyst put him on crutches for six weeks. It was during that time that maybe twice, when the crutches were very new and still seemed glamorous, Tip took them for a spin around the kitchen. That was the full extent of his crutch experience. When they got to the landing at the top, Kenya said to none of them in particular, “I get to go inside.”
“We weren’t going to make you sleep on the stoop,” Tip said.
Doyle was still searching his pockets for his keys when the door swung open wide and Schubert poured out behind the sound of Sullivan calling their names.
“Doesn’t anyone leave a note?” he said. He was wearing Doyle’s red plaid bathrobe and a pair of bedroom slippers cut from an old oriental carpet that none of them had seen before. He put down his drink on the front table to put his arms around Teddy. Teddy, for embracing, was always the logical choice.
“Who knew you were coming home?” Doyle said.
“You knew it,” Sullivan said. “I told you I was coming home.”
They hobbled into the front hall, wet and covered in snow. Doyle took off his hat and scarf and handed them to his oldest son, then he went to help Tip out of his jacket. Sullivan tonight? Think of all the nights they waited up, waiting and wanting Sullivan to come and then tonight there he was. They should have slept at the hospital.
“When did you get a boot?” Sullivan asked. He had put a fire in the fireplace but the flue wasn’t open far enough. Everything in the living room was dim and slightly blurred with smoke. Teddy coughed.
“Tonight. That’s where we’ve been. You said you were coming home for Christmas.” Tip had had all the mysterious reappearance of family he could stomach for one day. Surprise! It’s your mother! Surprise! Your brother shows up too! He felt like hobbling down the street after the Jamaican and hiring the taxi to take him back to the lab. Sullivan patted Tip on the back, a little too heartily given the circumstances of Tip’s balance.
“It’s practically Christmas.”
“On my calendar it was three weeks ago,” Doyle said. “Could you turn the stereo down?” One child understood Schubert, only one of them, and he managed to make Schubert a point of irritation.
“And now you’ve adopted another child,” Sullivan said to his father. “I think that’s marvelous.”
Doyle looked at him, a look that Teddy or Tip would have understood instantly, but Sullivan simply turned away to shut off the stereo.
“This is Kenya,” Teddy said, his voice sounding abrupt in the new silence.
“Kenya, Kenya,” he said. “What a beautiful name. I’ve been to Kenya. I was living not too far from there in Kampala.”
“You’ve been to Kenya yourself?” It was her own name, she heard it every day, and still it was thrilling to attach it to the place.
“This is Sullivan, by the way.” Teddy was always glad to see Sullivan. He loved his brother, and besides, Sullivan had the brilliant ability to turn all of the focus and anxiety in any room onto himself.
“Do you have a last name?”
“Moser,” she said and shook the hand that he held out to her. Kenya had only seen Sullivan a few times in her life. He had dark red hair and dark blue eyes and his skin was tan with a red undertone like a deeply polished wood, though she remembered it as being very pale before. They stared at each other without embarrassment, Kenya and Sullivan, while they held each other’s hand.
Sullivan spoke to his father but he kept his eyes on the girl. “If you were going to adopt another child it seems remarkable that you found one who looks so much like the two you’ve already got.”
“We didn’t adopt her,” Doyle said.
“You think I look like them?” Kenya was awfully flattered. It was something she liked to think sometimes but when she asked her mother all her mother would say was you look like yourself.
“Not him, of course,” he pointed to his father. “But those other two.”
“Sullivan.” Doyle lowered his tone.
“A first cousin at least.”
Tip crutched his way into the living room and fell into the sofa, pulling his leg up to the coffee table as he stretched against the cushions and closed his eyes.
“What happened to you, anyway?” Sullivan asked, following behind him. “Did one of the fish bite you?”
“He was hit by a car,” Kenya said.
Sullivan raised his eyebrows, and it served to make him look halfway impressed. “If you were hit by a car then I’d say you came through pretty nicely.”
“It was her mother who was hit by a car,” Tip said in a flat tone, though he looked like he was already asleep. Her mother. Let’s be abundantly clear on this point: her mother.
Sullivan, who wasn’t as tall as either of his brothers, crouched down to his knees in front of the girl. He pushed his hair, which had gotten too long, back from his eyes. “Your mother was hit?”
“She broke her hip,” she said, “her wrist, a rib, and she cut her forehead here.” She ran her finger along her hairline in the place that her mother was cut. “But she’s going to be fine. The doctor said she was going to be fine. She pushed Tip out of the way. He didn’t see the car.”
Doyle clapped his hands. “All right, enough stories. It’s very late and there will be time for all of this tomorrow.” He stood behind Kenya and lightly touched her shoulder. He saw then that her coat pulled across her shoulders and was short in the sleeves, last year’s coat. “We should let our guest get some sleep now.”
But Sullivan did not stand up. “Your mother must be very brave. I would never step in front of a car for someone else.”
Kenya started to say something but every single word she knew was inadequate for the necessary response. Her mouth simply opened and then closed, empty. Sullivan looked at Kenya and then he picked up her hand and held it again. “Do I know you?” he said.
She blinked. Teddy turned around to face them and for a moment Tip opened his eyes. “I don’t think so,” she said carefully. Where had Sullivan gone to all those years he stayed away? That was the thing Kenya and her mother couldn’t figure out. One day he was there and then they never saw him anymore.
“Sullivan, let her go to bed now,” Tip said. “You can grill her for details tomorrow.”
“Your mother won’t appreciate our keeping you awake all night, school or no school.” Doyle gestured one hand towards
the staircase.
At that moment Kenya remembered where she was. There was so much happening and it was all going by her so quickly. “I haven’t seen anything yet,” she said to Doyle. Here was the living room, two identical sofas with carved legs facing each other, bright throw pillows, big and soft, one that was needlepointed with a picture of fish, a real piano in the corner, a big one, photographs in silver frames. The draperies, whose lining she had seen so many times before, were striped on this side—red and blue and green on a heavy cream cloth. They were held back by tasseled ropes. She had to remember every last piece of it, the carpet, the candy dish, the basket of magazines on the floor. She had to go back and tell her mother.
Tip yawned hugely from the sofa. “She might be hungry, you know. We could offer to feed her.”
“I’m not,” Kenya said, and then immediately regretted it because it would have meant seeing the kitchen.
“Let her sleep in our room,” Teddy said. “Tip’s never going to make it up all those stairs.”
“I’m going to sleep right here,” Tip said, and he meant it. He pulled off his red jacket and tossed it onto the farthest cushion. Then he swung his boot off the table and onto his jacket, stretching out long. Tip had a history of sleeping on couches, of studying too late and falling asleep wherever he was. Teddy went off to get him some blankets. Tip wanted them all out of the room. He wanted everything out of his head: fish and snow, car and politics, mother and sister. The ache in his ankle was like an angry conversation coming from another room, something persistent, irritating, abstracted, something you should get up and take care of but for whatever reason you don’t.