The Last Embrace

  “Stay with Mom,” Charlie ordered Jack, following his father and the policeman out the door. He did not object as I came with him. Mrs. Connally’s wail followed us out the door.

  Seconds later, I found myself wedged between Mr. Connally and Charlie in the backseat of a musty police car. We lurched forward. A loud buzz in my ears nearly drowned out the police officer’s words. “Accident...unconscious.” I understood then that Liam had crashed his dirt bike. Bile rose in my throat. I knew he had been drinking. Why hadn’t I stopped him from riding off? Charlie’s hand found mine, gripped it until my fingers numbed. The policeman kept talking to fill the space and I made out that he was the father of one of our classmates and had recognized Liam, which was how he had gotten to us so quickly.

  “How bad is it?” Mr. Connally croaked.

  “I don’t know. They’re still treating him at the scene.” That meant he was alive. I exhaled slightly. He would come through this. He had to. The police car turned onto Front Street, which ran parallel along the Delaware River, and then slowed by the wide expanse of water. Lights gleamed high on the Ben Franklin Bridge to the north, but on the far banks the warehouses and factories of New Jersey were shrouded in darkness.

  We ran from the car. The twisted wreckage of Liam’s dirt bike lay by the edge of the choppy river. Stale, brackish air filled my lungs. Several feet away stood an ambulance, its rear doors open as a stretcher was loaded in. Charlie raced to it and I struggled to keep up. Liam thrashed wildly as the medics tried to treat him, his soaked hair plastered to his forehead. There was a deep gash on his head.

  “Liam, are you okay? ” Charlie demanded.

  Liam’s eyes darted wildly from side to side. He did not seem to know we were there. “Robbie? Robbie?” Then he grasped Charlie’s arm. “Save him, man.” He groaned, then fell back, semiconscious.

  I froze, the ground seeming to slide from beneath me. Charlie spun away then, scanning the river. He ran toward the water and jumped in.

  “Charlie!” his father cried.

  “What the hell?” the policeman exclaimed behind me.

  But I understood: the policeman had only mentioned Liam. He hadn’t known about Robbie, who had gone looking for Liam—and undoubtedly found him. “His little brother.” I recovered, turning to the policeman desperately. “He must’ve been on the bike, too!”

  “Christ,” the policeman swore. He ran back to the car and picked up his radio. “Get the search-and-rescue boat out here, stat.”

  I swung back to the water, lunging forward. “Charlie!” I searched the choppy surface. I made out his head for a second, before he dove back under, searching, heedless of the rough, icy water. I started forward, then stopped again, powerless to help.

  “Go with Liam to the hospital,” Mr. Connally said hoarsely. “We need you there.”

  “Please, I want to stay,” I started to protest. I could not possibly leave until I knew Charlie and Robbie were safe. But hands pulled me toward the ambulance. I climbed in and sat down beside the stretcher. Liam’s face was calm now, eyes closed. He looked like the boy I had met two summers ago. Pity and anger washed over me. Beside me the medic was working to start an intravenous line in Liam’s arm. I shrunk back against the cold wall of the ambulance, trying to stay out of the way.

  The ambulance sped through the streets, sirens blaring. A few minutes later, we reached Pennsylvania Hospital and the doors opened to garish light. After they had lifted the stretcher and wheeled Liam in, I stood helplessly in the entrance bay to the emergency room. “Dear God,” I began, trying to summon the prayers I had not uttered since the day my parents went missing. The words stuck in my throat.

  With a futile attempt to compose myself, I went to face what was waiting inside. Mrs. Connally and Jack had been brought straight to the hospital. They stood inside the doors locked in the same embracing position in which I had left them at the house, as though they had been magically transported there. Should I tell them about Robbie? But their faces, frozen in horror, told me they already knew. My aunt and uncle were there, too, hovering in the background, now part of this strange tableau as they waited for me. Aunt Bess stepped forward and draped my coat around my shoulders, then led me to a chair.

  Minutes passed like hours. A doctor appeared. “Liam’s going to be fine,” he said, unaware how little those ordinarily joyous words could do to quell their terror. “Just a concussion and a cut to the head. He’s a very lucky fellow.”

  The outside doors to the hospital opened then. Charlie limped in gray-faced, wearing a soaking wet blanket someone had placed around his shoulder. I ran toward him. “Charlie—” But he continued past, not seeing. His arms were half-extended before him, still etched in the shape of the object he had been carrying, the body that was now gone.

  Years later, witnesses would still tell the story of how the oldest Connally boy had jumped into those dark, stormy waters, diving repeatedly to find his youngest brother. He had at last pulled Robbie to the surface but, unable to reach the shore, he had remained afloat treading water and cradling his brother for twenty minutes. When the rescuers finally reached them, Charlie would not release his brother and so they were pulled gently to land together, Charlie whispering softly to the lifeless body he held.

  Washington, DC

  November 1943

  I blinked and my vision cleared, the memories of love and pain pulling me back to the present like the tide. I was still standing on the corner of 15th and H Streets, letting the crowds swirl around me as they had on the dock the day I arrived in America, and so many times in the halls of Southern. The rain was heavier now, flattening my bangs against my eyes. Usually, I loved the way it lifted the smells from the pavement, as if giving new life to the city. But now the stench of dirt and ash caused my stomach to turn.

  I started walking quickly, past two policemen on wide motorcycles, desperate to get as far away as I could from the site of our encounter. Not that it would help; Charlie was here. All of the time and distance I had put between myself and the ache of what had happened evaporated like mist when I saw him standing before me. I hurried past Woodward and Lothrop, the early Christmas decorations in its windows, more austere than they might have been in peacetime, a kind of forced merriment. Workers passed one another, eyes straight ahead, not seeing. For all of the excitement of the holiday in the bustling city, Washington had a bland, antiseptic feel, so unlike Philadelphia’s messy patchwork of ethnic neighborhoods. No one, it seemed, was actually from here, or expected to stay very long.

  At the corner stop, I boarded the streetcar. I gazed up through the smudged window at the dome of the Capitol, its lights blackened now in case of an air raid attack. But an eerie glow seemed to cast faint gray around it, silhouetting it against the twilight sky. As we wove through the rain-slicked streets, Charlie appeared once more in my mind. I had thought of him constantly these many months, wondering if he was still off in training somewhere or had already been deployed. And I worried about him, in a way that I had no right to, really, now that he was no longer mine. But I had never expected to see him here, even though Washington had been his place first when he’d been accepted to Georgetown (and might still have been if he had not enlisted). Yet here he was in front of me and he wanted to see me again. What could he possibly want?

  A single tear rolled down my cheek, hot and unfamiliar. I brushed it away before any of the other passengers could see. I had not cried the night Robbie died, nor any of the days after. I had functioned mechanically, taking on the jobs that everyone else was unable or unwilling to manage, such as getting Robbie’s clothing for the funeral home. I had stood in the empty foyer of the deserted Connally house, flooded with images, my grief threatening to burst forth from its tight wrappings. I had remained dry-eyed, but I almost broke down as I looked at Robbie’s secret hiding spot beneath the stairs. It was almost as if, if I walked slowly toward it, Robbie w
ould be there waiting for me in our hideaway. Our last chess game lay unfinished on the other side of the door.

  I had walked upstairs and ran my hand over the duvet, lumpy with stuffed animals Robbie had not quite outgrown, toys strewn across the floor. I laid out his navy suit, threadbare and worn at the knees and elbows from being worn by at least two brothers before him, then looked around his room for the white sneakers he insisted on wearing all the time. But those were gone now, one missing when Charlie carried him from the water, the other God-only-knew-where, most likely at the bottom of the river. Choking back a sob, I had grabbed the clothes and run from the bedroom.

  The funeral had taken place two days later on a gray morning, with a coating of snow that had come too early in the season, covering the sidewalks and cars for a few hours. At the church, I’d hung at the back, overwhelmed by the dark chapel and the sea of people. Among the other kids from school and families from the Pennsport neighborhood, there were faces strangely resembling the Connallys, out-of-town relatives I hadn’t known existed from New York and other places. My aunt and uncle sat on either side of me. I had not been sure they would come, but they had been waiting for me in the living room that morning, dressed in black.

  The doors at the back of the church swung open. Aunt Bess cried softly into her hand at the sight of the small casket, borne by men I did not recognize.

  The Connallys followed. Charlie and Jack each held their parents’ arms to keep them upright. I thought I caught Charlie’s eye, but he looked away. We had not spoken since that night at the hospital, but I was sure he would find me after the funeral. When we were seated, a priest began to chant the Mass. I craned my neck to see the front row. The Connallys had sat reflexively in their usual order, leaving spaces for Robbie and also for Liam, alone in the hospital with his guilt and grief. I looked to the back, half expecting to see Robbie bound in and interrupt the service noisily. He could not be in that tiny box.

  As the priest went on, my thoughts turned improbably to the Connallys’ next-door neighbors who had also lost a son. The blue star in the Dennison window was gone, a gold one hung crookedly in its place. There would be no stars for a boy like Robbie who had died in an ordinary, if tragic, way. The Connallys had tried to do all the right things to keep their family safe. They had worried about the war being fought thousands of miles away, all the while never guessing that danger and death might be lurking right around the corner on a street they had walked or ridden down hundreds of times.

  And now Robbie was dead. I clasped at the shell bracelet he had given me at the beach last summer. Icy water seemed to swirl up around me now, as if I was there with him. He must have been so afraid. Had he called for his mother or one of the boys? Or perhaps he had blacked out and not known anything at all. He could not have possibly survived more than a few minutes.

  There were more prayers in Latin and English and then it was over and we all rose as the casket was carried from the church. Someone should have spoken about the wonderful twelve-year-old who loved blocks and chess and his dog, Beau. But the family was in no shape to do it and they had not asked me. In other times the Irish would have had a wake where everyone came back after to drink and reminisce. Here there was only pain, and this quiet funeral where words failed.

  By the time I reached the door of the church, the Connallys had already gotten into the long, black car that would take them to the cemetery close to the shore for a private burial. No one had asked me to go. I watched Charlie through the window of the limousine, remembering the hospital after the medics had taken Robbie from his arms and raced away in a last futile attempt to save him, even though we knew it was too late. Charlie had stood, soaked and shivering, apart from the rest of us. I had rushed to his side. “Charlie...” I waited for him to tell me it would be all right, to take charge as he always did. But he remained silent, arms still limply outstretched, wings broken. Nothing, not that night on the dock at Trieste or any since, had terrified me more.

  Anger rose in me as I watched him seated in the limousine, remembering. He was supposed to be able to make things okay, but he had failed, even when I had tried to warn him about Liam. But I had failed, too, and so had Jack, who always tried to fix everything, and their parents—and now Robbie was dead. We were all a little bit to blame, except for that sweet, innocent boy lying in the cedar box.

  I stepped forward toward the limousine to go to Charlie. But Aunt Bess was holding my arm and guiding me away. “Give them time.” I was too numb to argue, so I stood watching as the car door closed.

  The window opened and Charlie looked up at me with hollow eyes I hardly knew. For a second, my heart lifted, hopeful despite it all. I took a step forward. “Wait for me,” he mouthed. And then he was gone.

  The next morning I rose early, the awfulness of what had happened knocking into me anew. Outside the air was icy, hinting at more snow to come. As I crossed through the neighborhoods, chin tucked against the wind, I tried to figure out exactly what to say, the words that could make things if not right then just a bit better. I reached Second Street and steeled myself as I neared the Connally house. Then I stopped. Though it was after eight o’clock, the front curtains were still drawn. They must have been exhausted after the drive back from the cemetery. For a minute, I considered going home and coming back later. But maybe I could make them breakfast. I walked up the steps to let myself in as I often did and tried to open the door, but it was locked. I reached under the flowerpot for the spare key. The door did not budge. The second lock, the one they’d never used, was bolted. I peered through a crack in the curtains. The house was dark and still, as it had been that first night Charlie brought me here to surprise me for my birthday.

  “They’ve gone,” an unfamiliar voice said from behind, causing me to jump. I turned and recognized Mrs. Dennison, whose eyes were still hollow from her own loss.

  “Gone?” My mind raced. Perhaps they’d taken a room by the cemetery, or even stayed at the beach house.

  “The boys packed a lot of bags and left first thing this morning. Asked me to tell the milkman they won’t be coming back.” A hard lump formed in my throat. There had to be some mistake. Charlie would not have just left. “They’ve gone,” Mrs. Dennison repeated flatly, before turning and walking back into her own house.

  I had returned home and, with Aunt Bess’s help, called the hospital and learned that Liam had been discharged the previous night. Neither he nor Jack returned to school after that and the guidance counselor would tell me nothing. Rumors swirled about where they had gone. I went by the house every day after school, hoping that I would see Beau in the front window, Mrs. Connally at the door waiting for me. But the house remained dark and a few weeks later, I gave up. There was simply nowhere else to look.

  “They couldn’t have just disappeared,” I burst out one night at dinner in frustration.

  My aunt and uncle exchanged knowing looks and Uncle Meyer patted my hand. “I think,” he said gently, “they just don’t want to be found.”

  The rest of the school year was a blur, the halls and streets filled unbearably with ghosts. As I sat in class, it played over and over again in my head: the moments before the police had come, so filled with joy and anticipation, and then everything that happened after. Even images I had not actually seen, like Robbie laid out motionless on the gurney after they had pulled him from Charlie’s arms, his face crooked and faintly blue, had gone through my mind so many times it had grown fuzzy, a record warped from being played too many times on a phonograph. What if Robbie had never gone after his brother? Liam would have come home, late and maybe drunk to be sure. Charlie and I would have shared our news, seeing the surprise and (hopefully) happiness on their faces. But that moment would now never be.

  And in the darkness, the nightmares always returned. Most nights, I sat bolt upright, trying to clear the nonexistent water from my lungs, gasping for breath. Sometimes there was a
moment in the haze of awakening I could forget. Then the reality would wash over me like ice. Robbie wasn’t back home, playing in the yard with Beau. He was in that box I’d seen at the church, now buried underground.

  I went to graduation because Aunt Bess insisted on it. She and Uncle Meyer sat somberly, clapping as hard as they could when my name was called. They’d brought me a too-large bouquet of carnations and planned a fancy dinner at Stouffer’s, trying to fill the empty space left by the Connallys. There would be no great whooping crowd as there would have been if the Connallys had been there to cheer on me and the twins. Were Jack and Liam graduating somewhere else? A few weeks earlier when we had gotten our yearbooks, I’d opened to the page where their photos should have been, half-expecting to see Jack’s gentle smile beside Liam’s taunting grin, or at least a blank space where their images might have been. But the spots had been filled in by the pictures of other classmates, as though they had never existed.

  “I should start packing,” Aunt Bess said, the day after graduation.

  I looked at her blankly. “For what?” The days ahead stretched before me like a blank canvas. I would have to do something: take some classes (though I had not formally applied to college, there were night classes in which I could still enroll) and find a job, hopefully somewhere other than the plants.

  “The shore,” she replied. “We can get into the house tomorrow. I thought it would do you some good to get away.”

  I had noticed the warm weather, of course, but I had not actually considered that we would return to the shore after all that had happened. Something lifted at the corners of my heart. “Perhaps the Connallys will be coming?” I scarcely dared to hope that our other world still existed.

  Aunt Bess shook her head. “I’m sorry, honey. I asked the landlord. The house next door is closed up and she doesn’t think anyone will be there this year.”

  I ran upstairs and threw myself across the bed, sobbing. The city without them was bad enough, but how could I face the shore without the Connallys?