Run

  “Good night,” the girl’s voice said from someplace nearby. He raised up the fingers of his hand to her but kept his eyes closed.

  Doyle found a toothbrush in its package and a tube of paste and laid them on top of a fresh towel and facecloth in the bathroom. He gave her an undershirt to sleep in because there was nothing in the house, not a single thing, that came anywhere close to being right for little girls. He took her up the long staircase with its steep angled turns and then worried that she might be afraid to sleep so far away from everyone else. Then he remembered that Sullivan would be across the hall and he wondered if that might frighten her more. He watched her narrow shoulders, her slender waist. He counted her six high ponytails and reminded himself again that whatever else was happening here tonight, this was a child whose mother had been hit by a car. She would have to be scared to death and he would make a point to remember that.

  When they got to the room, Doyle, who had very few occasions to venture so high up in his own house anymore, was struck by how perfectly preserved it was. It was a museum of a past life, and now Teddy lived up there by himself. Hardly anything had changed since the boys were in grade school except the addition of the crimson felt pennant that said HARVARD. Teddy had put it up over Tip’s bed when Tip was accepted, and while Tip said it was idiotic and embarrassing, he never took it down. There was a map of the states and a huge map of the world that Doyle himself had put up on the walls with thumbtacks, a chart of the solar system, a guide to learning Morse code, pictures of Bobby Kennedy and Martin Luther King, Jr., the two pictures of Bernadette on the dresser in a double frame. On one side she was a bride of twenty-four, her hair twisted up and crowned in netting, on the other side she was a mother of three, the day they brought Tip home. Bernadette holds Teddy and Doyle holds Tip and Sullivan stands between them, twelve years old. Beside the pictures was the statue of the Virgin Mary, her arms open and ready to receive.

  “This is where they slept?” Kenya said.

  “Teddy still sleeps here. Tip sleeps at school.”

  “Why doesn’t Teddy get to sleep at school?”

  Doyle glanced at Teddy’s unmade bed and pulled the covers up. “Because he doesn’t go to classes when he sleeps at school.”

  Kenya slowly turned her head, not so much looking at the room as absorbing it. “I used to make up stories about this house.”

  How strange it was to think that a child he had never met could make up stories about the place he lived and that he would never have known it. “What kind of stories?” It was his legacy, this house. Doyle had bought it when people said the neighborhood was too close to Roxbury, too close to Cathedral. He hung on to it when his neighbors chopped theirs up into condos and sold off their homes room by room.

  “I said there was a dance club here, and a bowling alley, and a movie theater.”

  “No movie theater.”

  “I said that each of you had your own floor, you and then Sullivan, then Tip and then Teddy on the top, and that there was an elevator so you could go up and down and visit each other.”

  “I’m certain the boys would have liked that.”

  “Sometimes I said it was my house.” Kenya had tried to be on her best manners when she was downstairs. Don’t ever stare at things, her mother always told her. If you stare at something people will think you mean to take it. But now she could not help herself. She walked from chair to bed to desk in the room, staring and touching and every now and then closing her eyes to inhale. She pulled Moby-Dick down from the bookcase, studied the cover carefully and then returned it to its proper place. She took down Call of the Wild and The Voyage of the Beagle. She opened them up and smelled the pages.

  The winter that Tip was eleven and Teddy was ten, Doyle read them The Voyage of the Beagle over twenty-eight nights. He billed it as their first completely grown-up book, so defined because it lacked any of the elements that had made the previous books he had read them so appropriate for little boys. There were no dogs, no beggar orphans, no Lilliputians, and no illustrations. Doyle had dragged an armchair up the stairs from his study a long time ago and left it permanently in the boys’ room so that he could be comfortable regardless of chapter length. There the chair sat, now awkwardly pushed into the corner and covered in clothes that the housekeeper would pick up on Thursday. In the evenings, thousands of evenings ago, he had pulled that chair in between the boys’ twin beds so that he faced them, Tip on his left hand, Teddy on his right, both of them pajama clad, both of them so wide awake with excitement for the story that it seemed impossible that in half an hour they would both be sound asleep. Doyle knew the adventure of it all wore them down to a thread in the end. He read the story of the young Charles Darwin in a strong and animated voice, and sometimes the boys would become so excited by the discovery of a toad or the painful wanting of water or the threat of various natives that they crawled out from under their covers so they could sit closer to him. If there was a terrible storm that pitched the Beagle violently in strange waters, Teddy would wind up coming over into the chair to sit on the side of Doyle’s lap and then finally, a page or two later, Tip would follow, even though he thought of himself as too old for such things. What they loved so passionately about the book was that it was real. Darwin was a real man, the Beagle was a real ship, and this was the real world he wrote of, even though it was difficult to believe that the world contained such things as phosphorescent seas and natives who ran naked through the jungles and slept in the rain and the mud.

  “‘All that at present can be said with certainty is that, as with the individual, so with the species, the hour of life has run its course, and is spent,’” Doyle read, and closed the book. “And so ends chapter nine.”

  The boys made small sounds of disappointment but they did not ask for more. Beg all you want, Doyle never read more than a chapter a night.

  “When I’m bigger, I’m going to go and explore Brazil,” Tip said.

  “I’m not sure what’s left to be explored,” Doyle said. He stood up and swung Tip over into his bed, dropping him from a height great enough to cause a good bounce.

  “I’ll find something.” Tip scrambled to pull his covers up against the New England chill that no furnace could chase from the fourth floor. “There are jungles there that no one has ever been to.”

  “Very possible.” Doyle leaned over and kissed his son good night. “Then you’ll come home and be president.”

  “After I’ve been a famous explorer,” Tip said.

  “Not me,” Teddy said. “I’m going to stay home with Da.”

  “Good man,” Doyle said, and kissed him, too. “You can be president first then, while Tip is in the Amazon hunting piranha. Now off with the light.”

  Tip leaned up and pulled the chain on the table lamp but the room was never very dark. The curtains stayed open at night to let the streetlight in and a plug-in night-light that read Brush Your Teeth glowed brightly from the baseboard. Neither boy liked the dark. They liked to lie in bed awake and look at the maps pinned to the wall, including the map of Darwin’s voyage on which they charted his progress.

  “Say a prayer for your mother, boys,” Doyle said at the door, and then he said the words with them. “Grant eternal rest unto her soul, O Lord, and may perpetual light shine upon her—”

  Kenya touched the lamp, the bedside table. She went to the wall and touched the frame of Kennedy’s picture. She put her hands flat against the windowsill and looked out. “I know which window this is,” she said excitedly.

  “You do?” Doyle stood beside the doorframe and watched her watch the world.

  “I never knew which room they slept in. I thought it was the next window under this one but I was just guessing.”

  They had asked for one child and then came home with two. So often they had said to each other how lucky they were. They hadn’t thought of it before but it was so much better, infinitely better having them both. Each brother would keep the other from feeling alien or isolated in thi
s white jungle. But if there had been another call, the agency saying there was one more sibling in the set and this one was a girl, a daughter for Bernadette, oh, he would have given anything if she could have had a daughter. Even if she had come at the very end, even for a week. Doyle sat down on the edge of the bed and closed his eyes.

  “This is your wife?”

  Doyle looked at the pictures of his wife. “That’s her.”

  “She’s so pretty.”

  “She was,” Doyle said.

  “And this is her, too?” Kenya touched her fingertip ever so lightly to the fingertip of the Virgin. “This is her after she died?”

  “Yes,” Doyle said. “That’s her, too.”

  Chapter 5

  IN TEDDY AND TIP’S ROOM, KENYA SLEPT OPEN MOUTHED AND DREAMLESS, ONE HAND FALLING OVER EITHER SIDE OF THE TWIN MATTRESS. She did not snoop in drawers or say her prayers, the two things she had planned on doing once she was safely alone. This sleep had caught her off guard, swept up like a wave and pulled her in. Wearing a T-shirt that seemed to be the size of a ship’s sail, she slept in Tip’s bed. Doyle told her to because the sheets were clean.

  Tip had made his bed where he said he would, in front of the smokey fireplace on the couch where he had first collapsed upon coming home. Teddy got an oven mitt and stuck his hand up the chimney to wrench the flue open wider, scorching his sweater slightly for his troubles, then he stretched out on the couch across from Tip in case his brother should wake and need something in the night. Besides, his room was occupied. Neither boy had taken off any of their clothes and the hems of their pants were still wet from snow. Their socks were damp and cold.

  “Awake?” Teddy said. They had been saying it to each other all their lives, sleeping in their opposite beds or, in this case, opposite couches. It meant, Are you there, are you listening to me, will you talk to me now?

  “I can’t imagine why, but I am,” Tip said.

  “So what do you think?”

  “About what?”

  Teddy pushed himself up on one elbow. “Come on, there’s nothing to talk about? The car, the girl, your ankle, your mother. Take your pick.”

  Tip kept his eyes closed. He would have liked to have been asleep. He was tired enough. But his brother, once he got on a scent, would be relentless with his questions. There was really nothing to do but give in to him. “The car: didn’t see it. The girl: I have no idea about the girl, I’m skipping that one. The ankle: hurts more than you might think. The mother, whomever’s mother she might be: absolutely no concern of mine.”

  “Even if she saved your life.”

  “No one said I was dying.”

  “Tip, seriously, our mother showing up like that out of nowhere, you can’t just write that off, not if she really is our mother.”

  Then Tip did open his eyes. He rolled over to face his brother whose face he could make out quite clearly in the light coming in from the street. Teddy serene, hopeful, open-minded. Every word of it was written out on his face. If Tip had had the energy he would have pulled himself off the couch to slap him, but since he didn’t have the energy he would have to try and explain. “There are two choices as to what you can think. You can think this is a sad person or a dangerous person who has been following us around for God only knows how long because of something she read in the paper twenty years ago. She watches us go to school, she watches us pick up bagels, she tails us through the bookstore. I don’t love this thought. In fact, I find it singularly disturbing. Next thought—this is our biological mother, the woman who didn’t take you home from the hospital and set me out on the curb at fourteen months, and now she’s following us around for whatever reason, jealousy, regret, who knows. What part of that am I supposed to embrace?”

  Teddy sat with this a long time. Tip’s logic was always going to be stronger than his own. Tip knew how to put words to things while Teddy knew how to follow what was in his heart. “But she pushed you away.”

  “I appreciate that. Maybe we can call it even now.”

  “You have to at least give her a chance.”

  “If she’s some crazy woman, then no, I don’t have to give her a chance. If she has a biological connection to us, then I already did. I gave her a chance for fourteen months.” Tip leaned into the void between the couches, the side of his face barely illuminated by the final licks of orange light from the fireplace. “You want to think she’s our mother? Then who is our father? Did you ask yourself that one? That’s where babies come from, Teddy, a mother and a father. Open the door to one and you’re going to have to start looking for the other.” He let his head fall back to the pillow. It was deep and sweet. “I’m not interested.”

  “Nobody’s talking about fathers here,” Teddy said, feeling a rush of loyalty to Doyle.

  There had been moments in his life when Tip had considered another father, more so than he ever considered a mother. Whenever he got angry at Doyle he would try to imagine that other man, the one who was coded in his genes, but it was never very satisfying. He could not picture him as a scientist, a brilliant herpetologist or entomologist who had given his son away. He could only see a boy no older than he was now, walking through the streets, his hands shoved deep into the pockets of his sweatshirt. “Go to sleep,” Tip said, and dismissed the image from his mind. “It will be every bit as confusing in the morning.”

  Teddy would have pressed the point but then they heard their father coming down the stairs and they fell into silence. There was nothing they meant to keep from him, but it was their habit from the days when they used to hear his footsteps coming back up the stairs to tell them it was late and time to stop talking. Doyle trained them this way, until the sound alone of his footsteps would quiet them.

  Doyle came into the living room with extra comforters in his arms and draped one over each of the boys. Looking at them there, he thought of when he used to carry them, both of them together, when they fell asleep in the car coming back from the beach, how he balanced one on each hip and felt their shins tapping together. They were always so slight, so long-legged and weightless. He did not know how they could have grown into such enormous men. He unlaced the one shoe Tip was wearing and rested it on the floor. By the time he was finished, both boys had fallen for their own trick. Both of them were asleep.

  Doyle knew for certain he would be awake all night. He had planned to worry about Tip’s ankle and the little girl sleeping in Tip’s bed. He had also meant to analyze the best way to extricate his family from the girl’s mother, while at the same time being fearful that she had come to take from him the very thing he could not bear to lose. He told the story quietly to Sullivan in the kitchen after covering up the boys, about Tennessee and Kenya and how they had always known where Tip and Teddy had been. “To hear this girl you’d think that she and her mother have been standing on a street corner every night of their lives making sure the boys got across.”

  Sullivan took it all in, nodding slowly while Doyle talked, and when Doyle was finished Sullivan yawned. “I guess that’s why she looked familiar.” He poured himself a glass of grapefruit juice from the refrigerator. “I must have seen them lurking around.”

  Doyle watched while his son drained his glass in one long gulp. “That’s all?”

  Sullivan’s blue eyes were bloodshot and damp and he pressed them down with his fingers. “No, I’m sure there are other things to say—‘how shocking,’ or ‘what a surprise.’” He scratched hard at his head with both hands. “It’s just the jet lag. I’m standing here but I’m sound asleep.”

  Doyle tried to focus his attention on his first son for a moment but it was an effort. Bernadette was always telling him to think about Sullivan. “You can’t make everything about the little boys,” she would say. But right from the beginning Doyle saw the little boys as a fresh start, a chance to do a better job. It was remarkable in retrospect, seeing as how Sullivan was at that point still more than a decade away from complete ruin. Once Bernadette was gone and Sullivan did his
best to destroy everything that wasn’t already lost, it was all Doyle could do not to write him off completely. But he hadn’t done that. He had stood by Sullivan, even if Sullivan would never acknowledge it. He had been an imperfect father to an imperfect son and as far as he was concerned they were even. Now that Sullivan was back, Doyle would do his best to walk the line between extending himself and playing the fool. He tried to make his voice sound kind. “You know, we expected you home three weeks ago, and I can’t remember the last time you picked up your phone when I called. Are there problems in Africa?” Sullivan’s failure to materialize at Christmas had barely been commented on in their house. Sullivan not showing up when promised was the rule rather than the exception.

  “I would say that the entire continent is nothing but one mammoth problem. Thus is the nature of Africa.” He yawned again, this time like a lion, his head went back, his mouth opened wide. When it was finished he shuddered. “I’m going to sleep.”

  Doyle said good night and let him go, feeling certain that whatever had gone wrong this time, it was serious. You could tell by the crispness of his manner. Even when Sullivan was a teenager he had a certain formality when things were very bad, as if he was preparing to serve as the counsel for his own defense. Doyle wondered if he needed to spend some time worrying about Sullivan on top of everything else, even though he had sworn that off as a pastime years ago.

  Once he was in his room with the door closed, Doyle realized he wasn’t going to get to anyone on his list. He took off his shoes and socks and draped his suit over a chair, but when he sat down on the bed to pull off his tie he knew he had reached the end of the evening. There would be no brushing of teeth, no getting up again. He barely had enough time to pull a blanket up over his shoulders before he had fallen into a sleep so peculiarly untroubled it would last until nine the next morning.