Run (35 page)

Sullivan looked to Kenya, who nodded her head at him. “Okay,” she said.

“I’ll go out, too,” Tip said. “Just for a minute.” Doyle was backing out of the room at the moment Father Sullivan leaned forward and for the first time got a closer look at the woman in the bed. “Wait a minute,” he said. Doyle thought he was speaking to him and so he stopped, his hands on the back of Tip’s chair. Kenya turned to face Father Sullivan and he looked at both of their faces together. “I know you,” he said. “I know you both.

Teddy, don’t you remember?” He looked at his nephew and then back to the woman in the bed. It wasn’t his imagination. He was sure of it. “This is Tennessee Moser. She worked at Regina Cleri years ago. We were close then, we were friends.” r u n

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“The priests’ home,” Kenya said, nodding, because now she could place him as well. “You lived there.”

“Tennessee,” the priest said.

Tennessee knew that voice and for that voice she opened her eyes. They had brought him out to her? In this weather? “Father,” she said. “My God, you shouldn’t have come.”

“How do you know her?” Teddy said. “I never saw her there.” He panicked at the thought. He couldn’t have missed her at Regina Cleri! He felt that he could not endure such a failure, that he missed his own mother in the place that he went to day after day.

But Father Sullivan wasn’t looking at Teddy now. He was so pleased to have found his friends again, to have found everyone in so unlikely a place. “You came to see me a couple of times,” he said to Kenya. “But you were so much smaller then! You’ve gotten so tall I didn’t recognize you.”

“I didn’t see her,” Teddy said.

Doyle and Tip pushed in closer now and Sullivan was close behind them, all of them watching. Father Sullivan did not think of what it meant for Tennessee to have worked in the place that he lived, nor did he think of what it meant for Teddy to have missed her. For the moment he was only glad to see this woman he had been so fond of. She came not long after he had moved to Regina Cleri, and she had always taken good care of him. He had thought he was so sick in those days, too sick to stay in the rectory anymore, but in retrospect he had still been in the bloom of health. Sometimes in the afternoons she would sit with him for awhile before she went home, talk about politics and things they had read in the paper. She liked to go to college lectures that were open to the public, and sometimes, she had admitted, ones that weren’t open to the public, but it was easy to stay towards the back and no one ever asked her to leave. He remembered she brought him books from a n n p a t c h e t t ❆ 276

the library. How bright she was! Many times he had told her she should find a way to quit and go back to school, but when she left the job abruptly without coming back to tell him goodbye he felt unreasonably dismayed. With Tennessee there to visit, Regina Cleri had been bearable to him, and without her he felt like what he was: a useless old man who had been shelved away to die. “I missed you so much after you left,” he said.

“You too,” she said honestly, though it took so much effort to say the words.

Father Sullivan did not speak of her to Teddy, come to think of it. His longing and disappointment once she had gone had made him feel too childish. Hadn’t he even been worth a phone call, a note? It had bothered him for months, the unfinished quality of her departure, until finally he had disciplined himself not to think of her anymore. Now all this time later there was an answer, or at least a part of one. She was here. He pictured her coming into his room with his coffee in the morning. “Are you still in that bed?” she’d always say to him.

“Tennessee,” he said, and rested his hand against the calf of her leg where it lay beneath two sheets and a pale green blanket.

His vision turned gray and then white, a fuzzy blurring of everything that was before him, as if the room had all been snapped away in a sudden wall of bitter wind. The awful cold of it rose up his arm and spread through his body, a cold that was worse than anything he had ever felt or imagined, colder than he had been the winter he was nine years old and broke through the ice on the Charles. He remembered now that black water pouring into his ears and down his throat, flooding his nose and eyes, the blind choking panic that came before his older brother pulled him out by reaching his hockey stick over the jagged edge of ice and into the water. Colder even than he r u n

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was on that walk home, shaking beneath his brother’s arm. He tried to open his ribs, to fill his lungs, but all the air inside him was frozen. His chest was frozen. There was nothing to breathe. It was as awful as any death is awful, like his own death would be awful, and then he wondered if that was what he was feeling, his own death now, surrounded by the people he loved. Tennessee had come back somehow to see him out of his life. He didn’t understand why this would be the case but then what experience did he have with his own death?

“Uncle Sullivan,” Teddy said, and put his hands beneath his arms to pull him up. He could hear Doyle’s voice from down the hall, the voice of never-ending authority, calling for a doctor. Teddy was there and Sullivan was there and Tip and this lovely child and they all seemed to be rushing towards him at once, everyone speaking to him, speaking over him, and then Teddy picked up both of his hands in his hands and raised them over his head and in that instant he let go of Tennessee’s leg and the air seeped in. He took a shallow, broken breath. The hard block of ice that was pressed against his heart receded an inch and then two inches and then he felt the sudden release of a weight removed.

“Can you hear me?” Teddy said.

Father Sullivan nodded his head, though his own head seemed like too much weight to hold anymore. He wanted to let go of it.

He was ready, truly, to give his life away. Everything was rushing.

His eyes were closed but he was moving through the door. “Help her,” he said, but he couldn’t even hear the words himself. He was drowned out by the voice of a woman who was scattering the rest of them behind her, scolding as she drove them from the room. “You never should have been in here in the first place,” she said. “She’s just come back from recovery.” And Father Sullivan heard this bit a n n p a t c h e t t ❆ 278

of news and he held on to it. The voice, or his memory of it, followed him all the way down the hall.
You never should have been in
here in the fi rst place
.

What came to his mind as he struggled to right the oxygen defi -

cit in his lungs were those first two women who had come to see him in Regina Cleri, Nena and Helen, the ones he had supposedly healed, and he thought for the first time that he may indeed have helped them, because now he knew what it was to touch someone who was outside of help, to feel with what remained of your own life that which could not be saved. The doctor, in a horrible error of judgment, came to him and not to her, and the next thing he knew he was falling over the edge of the world, through the wondrous swirling sheets of snow and down deeper and deeper into sleep.

When Father Sullivan woke up again he was in a bed himself, a bed that was unfamiliar. There was a plastic tube lying flat across his body blowing oxygen into his nose, another tube dripping something into his arm, and Teddy was there sitting beside him. What he saw when he opened his eyes was Teddy’s relief, Teddy smiling hugely. “I thought I had killed you for sure,” he said.

Father Sullivan looked at him and knew from the simple expression of happiness on his face that whatever was coming had not yet arrived. “Where’s your mother?” he said.

Teddy hesitated for a minute but then he let it go. “She’s in her room.”

“Go back to her.” He tried to keep his voice calm.

Teddy shook his head. “I’ll see her later. I’m going to keep an eye on you for now. The doctor said you had an episode of ven-tricular tachycardia. He said that it could have happened anytime, but I know it was my fault, this has all just been too much. I was r u n

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crazy to have brought you out like this.” Teddy hadn’t called Sister Claire yet, even though he knew that too much time had gone by and she would be anxious now, imagining some terrible scenario that in fact would bear a remarkable resemblance to what had actually happened.

“Go find her doctor,” Father Sullivan said.

“You want the doctor?” Teddy was already on his feet.

“Her
doctor.” Every word spoken was a flight of stairs to run.

He gave himself a minute to concentrate on the air. The oxygen burned his nostrils, and still he wanted more than what he was getting. “Go.”

Teddy eased back into his chair, picked up his uncle’s hand. “She broke her hip, do you remember that? She was hit by a car last night.

But everything’s okay now. She came through the surgery fi ne.”

“I know what happened.” He waited, pulled in breath. “You brought me here to see her.”

Teddy shook his head. “I didn’t listen to you. You asked me not to do this and I just thought . . . I don’t know what I thought. I wasn’t thinking. She’s going to be fine. It’s just going to take some time.” Father Sullivan tried to imagine what Tennessee would want at the end of her life. He didn’t know her well at all, and he didn’t know anyone well enough to answer a question like that. He only knew that she had been good company, that the time passed more slowly on the days she didn’t come in. He could picture her in his room as if she was walking towards him now, healthy and young.

How she seemed to tower over him when he sat in his chair. “How are you feeling today, Father?” she would say to him. “Has your nephew been by to see you yet?”

“Get up now,” Father Sullivan said to Teddy.

Teddy did stand up and he pulled another blanket over his uncle’s legs. “Are you cold?”

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“Why?” Father Sullivan felt a sob well up in his chest. He had wasted so much of his strength in life, run it out on nothing. If only he had the legs to carry him back to her. Maybe there was something that could be done. He couldn’t save her but maybe he could fi nd someone, a surgeon who could cut out whatever it was that was inside her. “Go.” He closed his eyes and pulled in every bit of air he could manage.

“Look at you,” Teddy said. “You’ve got to rest.”

“Then go.”

Teddy was stung but he refused to show it. His uncle was old and ill and confused. His oxygen saturation was low. He was not responsible for anything he said. “I’ll stay with you. I’ll keep everyone else out so that you can get some rest.”

Father Sullivan reached up for his nephew’s hand. He wished he had the strength to squeeze it tight, to hurt him just enough to make himself heard. Teddy whom he loved above all others. Teddy who was his comfort and delight. It would be the last time he would ever see him as a child, the last time before all of the guilt and regret came to sit with him for the rest of his life. “Listen to me, Teddy, I’m telling you.” His voice came out in nothing but a whisper. It was a strain to hear it at all over the hiss of the oxygen. “Go as fast as you can now. Run.”

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c h a p t e r 1 1
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D
OYLE
HAD
INSISTED
ON
ARRIVING
EARLY.

They each had a ticket but the seating was open and he wanted to be sure they could all find seats together.

The ceremony was held in the symphony hall downtown, and while the entire auditorium offered good acoustics, acoustics were not what Doyle was there for. He wanted an unobstructed view of Tip crossing the stage and collecting his medical degree from Johns Hopkins.

“We should have packed a meal,” Sullivan said, crossing in front of the knees of parents who were even more neurotic than his own and so had arrived earlier.

“I’ve got some Life Savers in my purse,” Kenya said and patted the white leather bag at her hip.

“Always prepared,” Sullivan said.

Teddy dropped into the seat beside his father and opened his program. He rested his fi nger beneath his brother’s name. “Look at that, Thomas O’Neill Doyle—Warfield T. Longcope Prize in Clinical Medicine. Now that’s something.”

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“He should have gotten the convocation address,” Doyle said and looked at the two names above Tip’s. “He almost got it.”

“He didn’t want it,” Kenya said. “You know Tip doesn’t make speeches.”

“They should have given it to Teddy,” Sullivan said. “The fi rst non–medical school graduate to give the convocation address.” Teddy rose to the call without hesitation. “‘Duty—honor—

country,’” he said in the voice of an old white man who’d been bat-tered by war. “‘Those three hallowed words reverently dictate what you ought to be, what you can be, what you will be. They are your rallying points; to build courage when courage seems to fail; to regain faith when there seems to be little cause for faith; to create hope when hope becomes forlorn.’”

“Old patients never die,” Sullivan said, “they just fade away.”

“You’re going to need to start quoting yourself,” Kenya said to Teddy. “Forget about all these dead people. Kids are going to want to hear Teddy Doyle speeches, wearing their Teddy Doyle T-shirts.” Teddy smiled but shook his head. “Nothing like that.”

“You should listen to your sister,” Doyle said. It was what he said about most things these days. It made no sense to him how Teddy could have turned himself towards politics and still be shy, and yet it seemed to be his very shyness that people found themselves attracted to. He won both his junior and senior class pres-idencies without regarding a word of Doyle’s advice. He led the Student Coalition Against the War. He spent two summers working for the Massachusetts senator for whom he was named without letting Doyle put in so much as a phone call, and in fact it was that same senator and not Doyle who was so devoted to Teddy that he used all of his considerable sway to get him a spot in Georgetown law school in the fall. Contrary to all logic, the softer Teddy spoke, the more the room quieted down to listen.