Run (24 page)

She switched on a light inside the door and when they were both safely in she closed the door behind her and locked it again.
Just like
you’ve been taught,
Doyle thought. The lightbulb was weak and the apartment stayed dark. “My mother wouldn’t be thrilled about you coming over,” she said. “She’d get all worried about cleaning everything first.” She went to pull back the curtains and when she did r u n

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she kept her gaze out the window for a minute, looking at a narrow walkway and then another covered over window like her own. “We don’t have that many people over.”

But the apartment, albeit small and dark, was perfectly clean.

There was a long floral sofa and an easy chair on one side of the room, a table and two chairs beside the kitchenette. There was a round-faced clock on the wall with a pendulum that swung behind a small pane of glass. The place was stuffy and had the vague smell of something that had burned. Doyle wondered if that came from another apartment.

“I don’t think I’ve ever been in one of these apartments before,” Doyle said.

“You can sit down if you want to,” she said. “The couch is really comfortable.”

Doyle sat down obediently and the couch pulled him back. It would have been impossible to sit there for any length of time without falling into a coma-like sleep. “Very nice.”

“People give my mom lots of stuff. The clock and the couch, both of the lamps. It all came from the people she works for.”

“Where does she work?” Doyle wondered how they had come this far without him knowing what Kenya’s mother did for a living.

“She takes care of old people. It’s called assisted living.” Kenya said the words carefully because it was what she considered to be a grown-up phrase. “She used to work in a nursing home but the assisted living place is a lot nicer. Sometimes when the people die their families give you furniture. It’s still hard work though. A couple of the old people are really mean but my mother says they can’t help it.

They’re frustrated.”

“I suppose old people are like everybody else,” Doyle said. He had a sudden, uncomfortable vision of himself as an old person, the furniture of his little apartment winding up in the little apartment a n n p a t c h e t t ❆ 188

of the women who cared for him. “I can call them if you’d like, let them know that your mother’s been in an accident.” Kenya nodded. “That’s a really good idea. I’ve been worried about them firing her for not coming to work.” Doyle looked around the little room. There was a door on the other side, surely a single bedroom, a bathroom. “Where do you stay when your mother’s at work?”

“I’m at school, or I’m at after-school.” Kenya swept her hand over the kitchen counter and pulled some loose mail, bills, and fliers , into a neat stack. “On Tuesday nights I go to the Girl Scouts.

She tries not to work at night but if that’s the schedule then I stay at home. I used to go with her to work but if anybody fi nds out she gets in a lot of trouble. I used to stay in a room that was empty but then the old people told on her. They all liked me fi ne and they still told.”

“You stay here by yourself?”

Kenya slipped out of her coat and laid it over the back of the chair. She took off her mother’s hat. “It’s no big deal. I put both of the locks on the door and I leave the television on. Someday she’ll get a job where she’ll only have to work while I’m in school. That’s going to be perfect.”

Doyle was glad he’d left the boys at home. He did not want to see them here. He did not want to picture them sitting on the too soft sofa, their too long legs pressing the edges of the coffee table. He used to find Bernadette sitting in their room sometimes after they had gone to sleep. She did it even more once she was sick, when she still had it in her to climb all those stairs. She would be sitting in the dark and he would come and sit on the arm of the chair beside her and for awhile they would listen to the boys breathe. “They could have gone to someone else,” she’d always say to him. That was the part of it she never could get over: that these sons who were so un-r u n

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questionably hers could just as easily have gone to another home, a different fate. But what they never said was that they had already belonged to someone else, and they could have just as easily stayed where they were.

“What do you want me to bring over?” Kenya said.

Doyle felt himself flush with emotion and he was ashamed.

“Whatever you’d bring over to stay at a friend’s house.”

“I don’t go overnight,” she said. “My mom doesn’t like me to go.”

He tried to find a handkerchief in his pocket. “Do you have a Kleenex? All the cold is making my nose run.” Kenya went through the door of the other room and came back with a handful of toilet paper. Doyle thanked her. She stood in front of him while he blotted his eyes. There seemed to be something she didn’t know how to say. There was an old white man crying in her living room. What was she going to say about that? “Don’t worry about me,” Doyle told her. “I’m fi ne.”

She twisted back and forth on one foot, just the slightest movement of nervousness. “I don’t know how to pack exactly,” she said.

He blew his nose and stuffed the paper in his pocket. The child stood in front of him nibbling her lower lip and he smiled at her.

“Kenya, I have no doubt that you could land a plane if the situation called for it. Packing for someone as smart as you wouldn’t require any thought at all. Besides, if you get it wrong we can turn around and come right back.”

With those few words, so true and therefore easily given, she all but fell down next to him on the couch in a swoon of happiness. He took her hand and patted it with authority. “Bring a nightgown, the warmest one you’ve got. Underwear, socks, an outfit for tomorrow, something to run in. Bring your schoolbooks.”

“Tomorrow’s Saturday.”

a n n p a t c h e t t ❆ 190

“Bring them anyway. The boys are going to want to see what you’re studying. You know that Tip’s going to want to help you with your homework so if you don’t have any just invent something. It will make him feel good.”

She got up then and went into the other room on her mission. He could hear the sound of drawers opening and closing. He wanted to take her back to the house and play her some Schubert. Not the lieder. The lieder would be too overwhelming for a child. One of the quintets would be exactly right for her. He wondered if she had ever listened to Schubert before. She had only just now gone and he wanted her to come back to him. He found he could not bear to be in this room without her. “Let me know if you need any help,” he said.

“What do I put it all in?” she called to him, and he was able to catch himself before he said the wrong thing.

“Put it in a pillowcase,” he said. “Then we’re going home.”

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c h a p t e r 8
❆

❆

A
FTER
ALL
THE
PILLS
IT
WAS
HARD
TO
FOLLOW

T H E
S T O RY
B U T
I T
W E N T
S O M E T H I N G
L I K E
T H I S :
two men came into her room, two different men, and they took the sheet she laid on at either end of the bed and they said, “On the count of three,” and they lifted her. Sweet Mother of God. She never knew that pain could form a light, a bright and blinding pool of heat. It poured through her. It broke open in her hip and fl ooded through her gut—her fi ngertips and teeth and hair, the rounded pads of her feet—everything that she was belonged to the pain. The pain jarred loose the very deepest part of her heart, a place so secret that she never went there herself. The stone was rolled away from the mouth of the tomb and in that moment she forgot herself and called out the name of her friend, the one whose name she never called, the one she tried her best not to think of.

“That’s right,” the man at her feet said, working to make his voice sound soothing and being no good at it. He had already forgotten her name. He forgot it the second he crossed her off his list.

“We’re going to Tennessee.”

a n n p a t c h e t t ❆ 192

The hallway was paved in cobblestones and they banged forth over them with inhuman violence while rattling through every conversation two men could have about basketball. Full-court and half-court pickup. NBA or college ball. Eastern versus Western Division.

It was impossible that a hospital could be so enormous. She didn’t know where they were going but it would have taken less time just to wheel her back to Cathedral. It occurred to her they might be steering around aimlessly just to have more time to talk. Every corner they turned put a knife in her side and soon, she knew, that knife would cut her in half. “Celtics? Man, tell me you’re making this up. You could not be interested in the Celtics.” The man at her feet scolded back. “Loyalty,” he said. “Loyalty.

Do you even know the word?” They chattered on like women, a basketball of happy banter thrown back and forth from head to feet. They weren’t even interesting to each other. It wasn’t worth the effort it took to make sense of the words and after awhile Tennessee stopped trying. She let the voices float above her like an unbroken string of lights. The entire room was going down now, abruptly stopping, starting again. People came in and stood very close beside her, not speaking to her but laughing with the basketball men. Then somewhere a door slid open and just like that the fi rst group left and new people came on. Everyone agreed that there hadn’t been a snow like this since ’78.

“Thomas, did you get caught here?”

“All night, Mister,” Thomas replied. “All day and then all night.”

“That’s too much,” the Mister said. “You tell them I said they need to let you out of here soon.”

Thomas acknowledged that this was his last delivery. “I drop her off and I am gone.”

It went on this way until they reached some ground fl oor in r u n

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hell. “Last stop,” the man above her head said in a jolly voice. They pushed her out and bumped into another hallway, this one con-gested with people like herself laid out on rolling slabs. That was when the two men left her. No goodbye. No good luck. She could only tell they were going because their voices receded, dribbled off towards the edge of her vision and then disappeared. Later on a woman came and stood beside her table.

“Ms. Moser,” the woman’s voice said. “Did you have some ice?”

“My stomach hurts,” Tennessee said, surprised that she was able to find the words, but it
did
hurt, and the pain was both deep and wide.

“It’s your hip.” The woman said it with such simple authority that Tennessee wondered if she had a way of knowing. Her hip hurt, yes, she knew that, but the stomach was something else altogether.

“Stomach,” she said again.

The woman snapped the chart shut, making a breeze that fanned Tennessee’s forehead in a lovely way. “Did you have some ice?” Drop the curtain. After that there was nothing, maybe some sleep. It was very hard to say what was real sleep and what was a lapse in memory or a smooth slope of medication that strapped her into a luge and sent her straight over the icy edge of a cliff. She knew how to go with it. She did not try to grab hold of anything to slow herself down. When she woke up she was in a regular room again and the blinds were pulled high. She blinked her eyes a couple of times against the honeyed light.

“You can flat sleep,” a woman’s voice said. It wasn’t the one who was asking her about the ice. It was somebody else.

Tennessee ran her tongue around the inside of her mouth in order to loosen up the words. Her teeth felt small and unfamiliar.

“How long have I been out?”

The woman got up from the chair where she had been sitting a n n p a t c h e t t ❆ 194

and came and stood beside the bed. She was dark skinned and terribly pretty with her hair in a mop of short, tight braids. She was wearing a pumpkin orange shirt dress that buttoned up the front and a pair of scuff slippers.

It was the dress that was familiar first. Even when she could only see it as a field of color she remembered. Tennessee had loved that dress. The color put out a heat all its own. She would have asked to borrow it but she was at least three sizes bigger, six inches taller.

“I’ve been waiting for you to wake up all day,” the woman said.

It came to her one piece at a time, the dress, the voice. Her vision was blurry from all the sleep but Tennessee in her bed blinked and blinked again. She had no choice but to admit to what she saw.

Ne plus ultra.
It was a phrase a teacher had used in school. She hadn’t thought of it in years but then she’d had no reason to. There by her bedside stood Tennessee Alice Moser, beloved, dearest and best. Tennessee Alice Moser, who at the greenest age of twenty-five had died of urosepsis in the emergency room of Boston Medical Center before anyone had ordered the tests to figure out what was wrong with her. Her truest friend, Tennessee Alice Moser, the big-hearted, small-boned girl for whom she had named herself, was now almost ten years dead, but standing in this hospital room anyone would have to say she was as fresh as a blade of new spring grass. How perfect she was! The clock had stopped and left her twenty-five and twenty-five was young. Not one bit of her stooped forward. Her eyes were fire bright. Her shoulders were straight and back. She even smiled like a girl. “My God,” Tennessee said. “How sweet you are!”

Tennessee Alice Moser touched the back of Tennessee’s cheek with her hand. “You too, girl of mine.”

“Am I dreaming or dead?” Not that it mattered to her either way. It was fine if it meant getting to see her friend. She was always r u n

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sorry she hadn’t had those kind of dreams people say they have, the ones where the person you love the most comes back and sits by your bed and holds your hand after they’re gone. She had not had a single vision of Tennessee Alice Moser since she had gone into the little cubical of the emergency room to say goodbye to the body that was there. In that last moment their roles were reversed from what they were now: Tennessee Alice Moser lay in her bed, eyes closed, chin tipped back, and Tennessee sat alongside, holding her cooling hand. Since that night she’d had only a few small photographs kept safe in a
Field Guide to North American Fishes
to rely on, and to tell the truth she hadn’t looked at those in years. They broke her heart.