Run (14 page)

“Sullivan, stop it.”

He laughed. “I think it’s fine. You might as well make one father in the family happy.”

“I didn’t say I was going to be a priest.” The older brother bowed. “So you’re not. I apologize. I am completely wrong.”

Teddy took the bait. He always took the bait. That’s why there was so little pleasure in baiting him in the first place. “I want to help people. Is there anything so wrong with that? Isn’t that what Da taught us to do? Isn’t that why you were in Africa?”

“Not exactly.”

Teddy stopped walking and then Sullivan stopped walking too.

They faced each other in the snow until Sullivan started to shiver.

“Keep moving,” he said.

“‘Your honor,’” Teddy said, “‘years ago I recognized my kinship with all living beings, and I made up my mind that I was not one bit better than the meanest on earth.’”

“Eugene V. Debs,” Sullivan said, and raised one gloved hand towards the starry night. “‘I said then and I say now, that while there is a lower class, I am in it, while there is a criminal element, I am of it, and while there is a soul in prison, I am blah, blah, blah.’” Teddy nodded his head, grateful for once to be understood.

“That’s what I mean.”

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“No,” Sullivan said. “That’s what Debs means. He was on his way to prison. You want to be a priest. If you can’t explain the connection between those two things, I’d be happy to do it for you.” Teddy trudged forward in the snow, showing Sullivan his back.

He was too good a Catholic to tell his brother to go fuck himself. “I said I don’t want to talk about it.”

“You like girls, Teddy. Remember that? And they don’t let the girls come with you. You have to check them at the door. You’re going to give up Ramona for a bunch of guys who can’t get laid?” Teddy reached up and pulled his hat down farther over his ears.

“Wasn’t her name Ramona?”

“We broke up last year.”

Sullivan could imagine it. To the best of his memory, that Ramona wasn’t the sort to wait around on a guy who was trying to decide between his girl and his savior. “But it’s not as if you’ve been spending your Saturday nights doing projects for the altar society.

You’re still seeing girls.”

“It doesn’t matter who I’m seeing.” Teddy’s voice was tight. “I’m not a priest.”

“Yet,” Sullivan said. He could only imagine all the pleasure there was in the girls who tried to dissuade Teddy from his calling, just like the girls who tried to distract Tip from his fish. It was one of the few things Sullivan and his brothers had in common: whether it was serious or remorselessly casual, there was never a shortage of female companionship. It was the payoff for all they had suffered. All girls were suckers for motherless boys.

Sullivan wondered if his mother would be happy to think that the only sweet child she had was growing up to be a priest. He wondered if she would be horrified. He was genuinely sorry that he had no idea what she would think. He remembered his mother in the snow when he was still her only son, pulling him behind her on a bright r u n

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blue plastic disc. He remembered the snow in her hair and later how when they were back in the warm kitchen she would rub his hair dry with a towel. He remembered how she sang to him, “To know, know, know you, is to love, love, love you.” She was pregnant then.

He could see her belly pushing out against her sweater. One more thing that never came to pass.
If Bernadette had shown up,
Teddy had said, but that couldn’t happen, even though at some point Doyle was bound to throw that possibility out to him:
What would your mother
say if she knew what you’ve done?
But his mother wasn’t there, and as long as the universe continued to operate in the same way it always had there was no chance she was coming. If she had shown up even once, just to him, he believed that things wouldn’t have turned out like this at all, and if she had lived, there was a chance that even Sullivan might have gone so far as to make someone proud. He might have been a politician or a scientist, even a priest. He wouldn’t have made the same mistakes because he would not have been in those places at those moments. If his mother had lived, the chain of events would never have begun. There never would have been an accident.

He would not have been sent off in the world by himself. Surely he would still have made mistakes, but they would have been smaller ones. He shook the thought out of his head. It got him nowhere.

When they arrived at Back Bay, Sullivan dug his hands in his pockets, but all he found there was a Percocet. It was a very small thing but still something to look forward to later on. He looked at Teddy.

“I’ve got it,” Teddy said and pulled out his wallet. His face was soft again and he smiled at Sullivan. Teddy, unlike the other members of his family, never held a grudge about anything.

Like Sullivan, Kenya’s mother had been awake off and on for most of the night. Every time she fell asleep for a second there was a n n p a t c h e t t ❆ 110

someone there to wake her up. It seemed to be the responsibility of every person in the hospital to wake her up, and they took their job seriously. They shook her shoulder and called her name and shined a light in her eyes. “Miss Moser, how you feeling? Can you tell me how you feeling?”

But Tennessee couldn’t say how she was feeling. The only word that came to mind was suspended. She was hanging off a thousand tiny wires. She didn’t tell them that. It wasn’t worth the effort to make the words. She couldn’t take in a proper breath. How was she feeling? She looked at the woman standing over her bed. She was tall and bony with jet black skin and three gold chains around her elegant neck. African, you could hear it in the voice. That wasn’t a Boston voice. That wasn’t Roxbury. She closed her eyes and wondered where in Africa she was from, but when she started to ask, there was an Asian man holding her wrist. He wasn’t as tall as the African woman but he was even thinner, no bigger around than a six-year-old. Didn’t anyone eat in this hospital? Did they hire starv-ing refugees to come in and wake you up at night? “Miss Moser, can you open your eyes for me now?” It was an Irish girl, fat and sickly pale, who was checking the line going into her hand.

Tennessee thought of Ebenezer Scrooge and wondered if this last girl was her ghost of Christmas future. She had a vague memory of Christmas, Kenya sitting cross-legged on the floor with a present in her lap. She could see her tearing the paper but she couldn’t be sure if the Christmas she was seeing in her mind was the most recent or a year ago. She had a terrible feeling she had left Kenya someplace she wasn’t supposed to, that she had forgotten her, though how could that be possible? She would never forget her daughter. Had Christmas come and gone? It was winter. For all of her uncertainty, that was the one thing she was sure of, she had been so cold in the snow.

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there at a distance, and then touching her, and then she was alone.

She was awake in one room and then later on she was awake in another, or at least she thought it was another room. It seemed larger and not nearly as bright. She didn’t think there had been any window before. She had no memory of being moved, but that didn’t tell her anything either. She had no memory of coming to the hospital in the first place. The room was mostly dark except for a long, thin light that was mounted on the wall above her headboard, and that light fell directly into her eyes. She would have liked to turn it off so that she could better see out the window, but turning off a light seemed like the single most impossible task she had ever considered and so she left it alone. She could never seem to remember to ask anyone about the light when they were there.

What she thought about, what consumed her past the point of speaking, was the pain. There was a web of pain that extended from the top of her head down to her knees. First she tried to stay very still so as not to disturb it, but then it would get disturbed anyway and so she would experiment: she moved a hand, she fl exed her toes. She was at all times very careful to keep her pelvis straight and pointed up, as she knew it was her pelvis, or more precisely her stomach, that was the center of what was wrong.

“Miss Moser, I’m taking your blood pressure now. You’re going to feel a pressure.”

When there weren’t people talking directly to her, there were still people talking. Their voices came out of the ceiling. People called for doctors. People called Code Blue. Bells rang out a little symphony. Again and again they woke her up.

And then Tennessee woke up alone in a room and everything was different. As soon as she opened her eyes she remembered.

The great fog that was dripping down the little plastic tubing into her arm burned off in the bright light above her head and she a n n p a t c h e t t ❆ 112

remembered Jesse Jackson was speaking at the Kennedy School.

She had barely made it in time, rushing home from work to pick up Kenya. She made them both peanut butter sandwiches, standing in the kitchen with her coat on, and put the sandwiches together in the bottom of a paper sack with an apple.

“I don’t know why we can’t stay home,” Kenya had complained.

“It’s freezing cold and I’ve got homework.”

“You should have done your homework already,” Tennessee said. “You can do it on the train.”

“I can’t do it on the train because then my handwriting gets all sloppy and it’s points off.” Kenya bent over and put her hands on the floor then straightened out her legs. Bend and straight, bend and straight, until her torso rested flat against her thighs and the backs of her hands were pressed beside her shoes. “There was an extra-short recess today because it was so cold outside, so I went and ran circles in the gym until Miss LaPiana came and said I wasn’t allowed to be in there by myself and that I had to go back to the caf-eteria with everybody else.” She was like a dog that had spent the day penned up. Tennessee had to figure out a way to get her into a better school. Cathedral Grammar had offered her a scholarship of four thousand dollars last year, but that wasn’t any more helpful than offering four. She had to figure out a way to make them pay for all of it. She had to get someone from the school to come see Kenya run. Kenya could be their fleet-footed child star. She could run and earn her keep.

“I could run all the way to Cambridge if you’d let me,” Kenya said, turning a deft finger inside the peanut butter jar. “I could run beside the bus and then beside the train and you could watch. I’d stay right next to your window.”

“Quit horsing around and put your coat on. Wash your hands first. Did you get your hat?”

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Kenya said it was in her pocket, but once they were halfway to the stop and Tennessee told her to put it on, Kenya admitted to leaving it at home, saying that it made her head look lumpy. The child went out into the freezing cold night with no hat on and Tennessee scolded her while they stood on the corner and waited for the bus that would take them to the Park Street Station.

She saw the lights of the bus coming from a long way off. She saw the lights of the car.

Kenya had been on the sidewalk. She was sure of that. She could not say where her daughter was now, asleep in the waiting room probably, not too far from here, but she was positive that when the car came, Kenya was nowhere near the car.

She was less sure about Tip. She had been half surprised to see them at the lecture. More and more often now she saw Mr. Doyle alone. The boys were growing up. They were busy with school. Tennessee had not been able to find a seat and she watched the boys from high up in the auditorium where she stood behind the back row against the wall. There was nothing she did not know about the backs of their heads. She listened to Jesse Jackson, but her eyes stayed fixed to her sons’ heads. Why was Tip only wearing a jacket?

She wanted to ask Jackson a question but she never raised her hand when the Doyles were there, and anyway, Jackson only seemed to call on the dreamy-eyed students.
I do appreciate your inspiration
and leadership,
she wanted to say,
but I need some more specifi c advice. I need to know how to keep my child safe in public schools, safe
from guns and chipped lead paint and pushers and bullies who have
been bullied too much themselves. I need to know how I can walk
her straight to the door of her classroom in the morning and still get
to work on time and how she can learn enough to get to college when
there are thirty-five other children in the room and half of them did not
get breakfast. Can we talk, sir, about those things?
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were so inspiring, yet every time she left the building with no more information than she had come in with. Politicians never mentioned the details of life because of course the details that appealed to one person could repel another, so what you wound up with in the end were a long string of generalities, stirring platitudes that could not buy you supper. For years Tennessee had wondered how Mr. Doyle and the boys could stand it, so much talk that added up to nothing.

She thought that Mr. Doyle must have been obligated to go because he had been a politician himself.

Mr. Doyle had led her to politics, but when she actually started to understand it all she was with her neighbor, a girl who didn’t go to hear speeches. It was years ago, and Kenya was just a baby, and she was cooking dinner with her neighbor, who was also her best friend, in the apartment three floors up from hers. It was January and freezing cold and they were making soup the two of them with the baby held in place on the sofa with a nest of pillows. The two women were talking with the radio on, and then they heard Dr. King’s voice.

Her friend leaned over and raised the volume until that giant bari-tone covered them whole. “It’s his birthday today,” she said, and Tennessee said she knew that because there wasn’t any mail.

For another minute they tried to continue their chopping and then they simply stopped and stood, eyes closed. Tennessee had read the speech in school when she was a girl but it meant nothing to her then. They had even played it from a record album once in the school gymnasium and made the children listen, but she had managed not to listen by looking at a magazine instead. So, truly, when it came over the radio in her girlfriend’s kitchen the year she was twenty-nine it was nothing she had heard before.