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They turned their pale eyes towards him and blinked. There was such a similarity in their faces as they aged, the long straight noses, the way their eyes sat back in their sockets. It was as if they were two snapshots of one man spread thirty years apart. Teddy never thought about the ways his father and brother were alike because even when Sullivan was around they were so rarely sitting near each other. “I didn’t think you’d be up,” he said to Sullivan.

Sullivan was fading. The honey-colored tan he’d brought home the night before seemed to be sliding into his socks, leaving behind a mass of darkened freckles on parchment backing. “I tried to sleep,” he said, his voice exhausted. “It didn’t stick.” r u n

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“No,” Teddy said, opening up the refrigerator and peering inside as if the answer to whatever was haunting him were lodged behind a carton of orange juice. “It didn’t.”

“I called the hospital.” Doyle folded up his section neatly and placed it back in the stack of paper. “She’s still in surgery. She should be coming out soon.”

Teddy straightened up and closed the door without making any selection. Of course the dream had something to do with her, Tennessee and the hospital, all of them there, but what was confusing was that the part that felt like a dream now was the part he knew was real: he had left the house with Sullivan before it was light and they had gone to the hospital. He believed that the woman in the bed had been his mother, or was his mother, he didn’t quite know how to phrase it in his mind.

“By the way, the nurse asked me for her insurance cards,” Sullivan said.

“She doesn’t have any. They asked me last night, but they weren’t in her wallet.”

“Kenya said she had them,” Teddy said.

Doyle took off his glasses and wiped them clean with a napkin.

“She probably did at one time, maybe with another job, but there’s nothing there now.”

“Then we have to get her insurance,” Teddy said.

Sullivan shuffled through to find the crossword puzzle. “Too late.”

“It’s not our problem, Teddy,” his father said.

“Then whose problem is it?”

Sullivan decided to get a piece of the action. “The uninsured poor are such a compelling political issue until you actually meet one of them.”

“It’s between Mrs. Moser and the driver of the car.” a n n p a t c h e t t ❆ 252

“Perfectly done,” Sullivan said.

The bickering worked on Teddy’s nerves, and they weren’t in good condition to begin with. It was his intention to introduce something positive into the conversation. “I’m going to bring Uncle Sullivan over to see her today.”

“John Sullivan?” Doyle said. “You can’t be serious. You’re not going to drag that old man out in the snow. You’ll kill him.”

“He wants to meet her,” Teddy said, because his uncle
did
want to meet her, even if the truth was more complicated than that.

“Did you stop to think about the fact that she might not want to meet him?” Doyle said. “She will have just come out of surgery, and anyway, we don’t even know who she is yet. I don’t think we need to bring in the entire extended family.”

Of course he wasn’t Teddy’s extended family. Uncle Sullivan was the center of his family, the core, the magnet which kept the com-pass pointing north. “He might be able to help her.” As soon as Teddy said it he wished he hadn’t. Doyle had read about the goings-on at Regina Cleri in the paper and considered it to be nothing but an embarrassment. He didn’t have a moment’s patience with rumors of miraculous healing.

“It certainly takes care of the insurance question,” Sullivan said, and then stopped to yawn, giving his eyes a good rub once he had finished. “He’ll just go up to her bed and tell her to walk. She’ll probably still have to pay for the room though.” Doyle called forth his expression of deepest disappointment.

“Oh, Teddy,” he said. “Tell me you don’t believe he’s actually doing that.”

Teddy picked up a rag and wiped the toast crumbs into the sink, keeping his back to his audience. “It’s nothing like that,” he said to the drainboard. “A lot of people find him very comforting. Priests visiting sick people isn’t exactly a new idea.” r u n

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“Can’t you at least use a priest who’s in better health than the patient?”

“He wants to see Sullivan and Tip,” Teddy said, trying another approach. “He wants to see you. At least if he comes to the hospital —”

“I’m not going to the hospital,” Sullivan said impassively, swivel-ing the handle of his coffee cup back and forth with his thumb.

“What?”

“I’ve already been once today.”

“But we were all going to go together. Can’t we do one single thing as a family?” It had never occurred to him that Sullivan wouldn’t come. He had promised his uncle that. Sullivan was, in some shabby fashion, the payoff.

“She isn’t
my
mother.”

He meant, of course, by simple mathematical extension, that his mother wasn’t Teddy’s mother either. Which meant that Bernadette, for whom he had lit a thousand candles, was the mother to whom his enormous love and devotion had no claim. A quaking rage rose up in Teddy’s chest and he wanted to reach out and pull Sullivan’s head off his shoulders. His anger was startling, murderous, like Death itself had glided into the room. It wouldn’t take anything. Sullivan was smaller and weaker by half. His open arms draped across the back of the chair like an empty shirt. There was nothing to him. He could be eaten. But as soon as the thought had evolved in Teddy’s brain he was sorry for it, and as soon as he was sorry the phone rang. Doyle stood to answer it, that ancient yellow phone that hung from the kitchen wall with its endlessly long cord curling into itself. All he said was hello, and after hello he was only listening. He didn’t nod his head or cut his eyes back to look at his sons. He just stood there, all of the life pulled out of him, and listened to Teddy’s punishment. Tennessee Moser was dead. That’s a n n p a t c h e t t ❆ 254

what God had given him for his thoughts. That’s how quickly retribution came.

“I want you to hold yourself together,” Doyle said fi nally. His voice was calm and ever so slightly stern. “We’ll be there as quick as we can. Can you do that? Can you stop crying?—All right, that’s right.—Yes. You wait for us there.” When he hung up the phone he dropped his chin for a moment and looked at his shoes.

Sullivan and Teddy waited and watched him but nothing came.

“She’s dead,” Teddy said finally to save his father from having to say the words.

Doyle lifted up his face again, shocked by the breadth of his son’s imagination. “Oh, no, God, nothing like that. It’s Tip. He fell on the ice outside the track. That was Kenya calling from the hospital. She said something happened to his shoulder.”

“An ankle and a shoulder,” Sullivan said. “That’s brilliant.” Doyle ignored him. “Get yourself together. We need to get over there.”

Sullivan had only made it through the first syllable of his explanation when Doyle raised his hand and stopped him cold. “I wouldn’t care if you were sixty,” he said. “You’ve got two minutes.” It was more than two minutes, of course. Doyle’s car was still buried in Cambridge and so they were again reduced to looking out the window for the taxi that had been called. Teddy walked around the room with his hands stuffed in his pockets, staring at the fl oor like he was trying to find change, while Sullivan lay across one of the living room sofas in his coat, his feet hanging over the arm, one hand covering his eyes. He was thirty-three years old. He did not understand how such a short time in this house could have returned him to adolescence. He could package the place as hell’s interpreta-tion of the Fountain of Youth and make a fortune: just walk in the r u n

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door and you’re fifteen all over again. He tried to imagine how interesting this story would have been had he not been a part of it.

He could have just as easily come home three months from now—

three years!—and everyone would have gathered around to tell him the tale: Tip had been hit by a car, the missing birth mother had been found, there was a child and she was lovely but oh, the mother and the child had gone away again. He didn’t think the entire story could possibly take more than ten minutes start to finish, and yet to live it, to actually be a part of its playing out, was an excruciat-ing investment of time. Sullivan had used up his lifetime allotment for family drama by the time he reached twenty-four: other children had been adopted, his mother was dead, he’d killed poor Natalie and, in doing so, ended his father’s career. The continent of Africa hardly knew such upheaval. By anyone’s standards his previous involvement with the family story should have been enough. From now on he swore his visits home would be divided by decades and spent in hotels. This business of coming back to take your little part in the play you would never again be the star of was simply more than anyone should have to bear.

Doyle pulled back the curtain and, after carefully assessing the empty nature of the street, stared at his watch as if it might have something new to tell him since the last time he’d looked. “I’m going to call the hospital back. Someone needs to tell Kenya why we’re so late.”

“Ask her if they’ve found out what’s wrong with Tip yet,” Teddy said.

“Leave her alone,” Sullivan said, but he hadn’t taken his hand off his eyes. He didn’t know that Doyle had left the room.

After a minute Teddy stopped pacing and came and wedged himself onto the couch where Sullivan lay, working his hip against a n n p a t c h e t t ❆ 256

Sullivan’s hip until Sullivan was forced to push himself back into the pillows and make some more room. “I don’t think Tip could really be hurt that badly, do you?”

“Do I think he’s going to die of a shoulder injury? No.” Teddy tapped his feet on the floor and stared towards the kitchen where Doyle had disappeared to use the phone. It appeared as if he might at any moment spring straight up from the couch and hang inverted from the light fixture in the living room. Sullivan could all but feel the nervousness pouring out of Teddy and into him at the point where their two bodies intersected at the hip. “‘So fi rst of all,’” Teddy said in a voice gone jittery and low, a voice that did not call Roosevelt’s to mind at all, “‘let me assert my fi rm belief that the only thing we have to fear is fear itself—nameless, unreasoning, un-justified terror which paralyzes needed efforts to convert retreat into advance.’”

Sullivan uncovered his eyes and looked up at his youngest brother. “Which means you want to do what, exactly?” Teddy put his right index finger into his mouth, bit down. “I was just thinking, if I slipped out right now I could go get Uncle Sullivan and meet you and Da back at the hospital. That way Tip is there and you’re there. We could all be together. It would be a nice surprise.”

“Except that it’s not a nice surprise since you already mentioned it to Da.”

“So not a surprise.”

“And by slipping out you mean leaving before he walks back into the room so that he couldn’t stop you, and so I’d have to tell him where you’d gone.”

Teddy looked at his fingers. “Something like that.”

“I have one for you,” Sullivan said. “I know one you’ll like.” He cleared his throat and then stretched back his neck as if to achieve a more sonorous tone. “‘There comes a time when people get tired.

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We are here this evening to say to those who have mistreated us for so long that we are tired—tired of being segregated and humiliated; tired of being kicked about by the brutal feet of oppression. There comes a time my friends when people get tired of being plunged across the abyss of humiliation, when they experience the bleakness of nagging despair. There comes a time when people get tired of being pushed out of the glimmering sunlight of last July and left standing amid the piercing chill of an Alpine November.’”

“Sullivan, listen.”

But Sullivan only returned his hand to his eyes. He had no need to listen, only to speak. “‘We had no alternative but to protest. For many years, we have shown amazing patience. We have sometimes given our white brothers the feeling that we liked the way we were being treated. But we come here tonight to be saved from that patience that makes us patient with anything less than freedom and justice.’” Sullivan smiled, looking up at Teddy again. “It’s King, of course. Pretty good that I remembered that much. Except that the white brother part doesn’t work exactly. It should be our black brothers. ‘We have sometimes given our black brothers the feeling that we like the way we were being treated.’” Teddy reached down and took his brother’s hand, kissed the knuckles gently, quickly. “I owe you.”

“Yes, yes you do,” Sullivan said, but it didn’t matter, since Teddy was already gone.

Teddy passed the taxi as he was running around the corner onto Tremont Street, and the sight of it only made him run faster. He had barely gotten away in time. The sound of the front door closing behind him and the blast of the cabbie’s horn breaking up the crisp winter air came only a minute apart. Had Sullivan been able to remember the next paragraph his entire enterprise would have been sunk.

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“It’s like herding cats,” Doyle said when he and Sullivan were settled into the backseat of the car.

Sullivan nodded. “It’s true. You never had much luck in getting all of us together at one time.”

“Well, I never had much luck getting you anywhere.” Doyle looked for Teddy out the window but all he saw were sexless, shape-less bundles of humanity toddling down the street, trying not to fall on the ice. “You could have made him wait.”

“You could have kept Tip from going out this morning. That would have saved us all a trip.”

There was nothing and no one who made Doyle think of Bernadette more than their oldest son. Sullivan was not like his mother.

He did not possess a shred of her character, but he looked like her, and not just in the color of his hair. It was the way he held himself, the way he sat so easily in his own body, ankles, wrists, hands, all of that was hers. Bernadette would have been proud of the job Doyle had done with Teddy and Tip, but she never would have accepted his relationship with Sullivan. Whenever they were together he could hear her, pressing him to show more kindness, pressing for sympathy. Even the wreck Sullivan had made of his life would not have dissuaded his mother from her love. At thirty-three he was still the baby she had held in her arms. That was one of the many things Doyle had found so admirable about his wife: her ability to look at their children and see them at every age. She managed to hang on to every bit of love she had ever felt for them, while Doyle could only see the person they were at that exact moment in time. He didn’t have to wonder if Bernadette might have changed if she had lived, if time would have worn her down to a lesser state of unconditional love. He knew it would never have happened. He tried to turn himself towards Sullivan now, to find the charity of spirit that Bernadette surely must have willed to him. “We should have been allies,” r u n