Run (10 page)

The thing that was most likely to walk off with Teddy’s concentration was the memory of his mother, the splendid redhead in the photographs, his own perpetual flame that he stoked with every r u n

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available scrap of information. He
did
remember her. He was positive of that. He remembered her kneeling in front of him, buttoning his winter coat. He remembered sitting on the floor of the kitchen while she chopped carrots and talked to one of his aunts. He remembered lying beside her in a bed, his back to her chest, her long, pale arm draped over him so that he was looking at his pillow and her hand. He could still feel the even rhythm of her breathing. He had put his hand on top of her hand, stretched out his fi ngers and tried to cover hers and in her sleep she wrapped that hand beneath him and pulled him close to her.

There were many, many times that Teddy tried to mine his father for information because surely Doyle had enough stored away to keep his memory burning forever, but Doyle would always just tap the open math book with his finger. “Right here.” It was in fact a misunderstanding between them. Teddy wanted to talk about Bernadette. Doyle wanted to keep Teddy from spending his life in the seventh grade. He tried to ask Tip but all Tip would ever say was, “I don’t remember.” He said it curtly, like Teddy was nagging and he didn’t want to be bothered. That must have been the case since it was impossible that Tip, who was a year older and certainly smarter, would actually remember less. Sullivan would have told him about their mother but Sullivan was never around and when he was around he tended to stay in his room with the door locked. Other people in the family, aunts, uncles, various older cousins, would cry when he asked them what they remembered.

They would pull the boy to their chest and weep in his hair until Doyle had to tell him not to ask anymore.

That was how he came to be so close to his great-uncle, Father Sullivan. It turned out the priest had stories stacked up like dinner napkins. Father Sullivan said that they belonged to Teddy, hundreds of stories waiting to be unfolded. They all started simply, beautifully, a n n p a t c h e t t ❆ 76

“When your mother was nine she got a yellow dress for her birthday. I was at the party. Everything she asked for that year was yellow.

She wanted a canary and a lemon cake . . .” Somewhere along the line Teddy’s love for his mother had become his love for Father Sullivan, and his love for Father Sullivan became his love for God. The three of them were bound into an inextricable knot: the living and the dead and the life everlasting.

Each one led him to the other, and any member of the trinity he loved simply increased his love for all three.

The question wasn’t did he ever think of his mother. The question was did he ever think of anything else.

Doyle called for a taxi to take them home. When he asked how long it was going to be, the dispatcher told him to go look out the window. Everyone who was out in the city tonight was stranded. Now it was clear that he should have made the call an hour ago. None of them even considered going back for Doyle’s car, which by now was surely buried. Driving home was the smallest of the plans that had been laid aside. With everything that had happened, the only thing that stayed consistent was the falling snow. The streets had been swept into a single luminous valley. It was Teddy who announced that Kenya would spend the night with them, and neither Tip nor Doyle countered with the subject of kidnapping, though Doyle wondered if the child herself would bring charges against them later. Tip had signed all of his release papers and now he sat in the wheelchair and quietly ground his teeth. His left shoe, a puffy white Puma sneaker, rested uselessly on his lap beneath the two crutches that balanced across the wheelchair’s arms. The wheelchair would only go as far as the front door. The crutches had been written out as a prescription and filled from a storeroom at the hospital. The boot, r u n

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a complicated blue fi berglass construction trimmed out with Velcro straps, had been purchased and charged to the insurance company.

It was Tip’s to keep. They sat in the waiting room and looked out the window. The sets of headlights that slid slowly past the hospital were few and far between and the Doyles pinned their hopes to every one of them. Kenya yawned and then yawned again until her eyes were damp with exhaustion. She did the finger work for
Für
Elise
against her knees. It helped to keep her awake.

“How long have you known?” Teddy finally asked, because of the million questions flying through his head at once this was the only one he could shape into words.

“About you?” Kenya shrugged. “I don’t know. A long time.” But what was a long time when you’re eleven—two months? three years? Teddy couldn’t bring himself to ask her and so he said nothing. Tip wrapped and unwrapped the shoelace of his empty sneaker around his finger while Doyle kept watch for the cab. It came sooner than any of them expected, the first piece of good luck all day. Together they set through the electric door that sprang open to return them to the weather. Teddy helped his brother into the backseat and Doyle rolled the chair through the door of the hospital and said good night again to the nurse. Kenya sat by one window with her mother’s purse in her lap, looking out, and Tip sat by the other window with Teddy in the middle. Doyle got into the front seat.

“We’ll come back tomorrow,” Kenya said, looking at the sprawl-ing building over her shoulder when they finally drove away.

“First thing,” Teddy said.

“What if she wakes up in the middle of the night? How’s she going to know where I am?”

“The nurse will tell her you’re with us,” Teddy said, though they had forgotten to tell the nurse anything.

“We’ll have to call someone at your school and tell them you a n n p a t c h e t t ❆ 78

won’t be coming in,” Doyle said. In the morning he would return her to the place he had taken her from. He would let her sleep and then it was right back to the waiting room. Now that they were in it that was the only thing to do.

“I don’t think they’ll have school tomorrow,” Kenya said. The taxi was only going about ten miles an hour. It pushed through the snow like a sleigh.

“No,” the taxi driver said. “No school tomorrow.”

“Good.” Kenya put her head against the frosted window and watched the snow.

Doyle kept his eyes straight ahead until they ached from trying to focus on so much whiteness. He had felt a leap of viciousness inside his chest, the very viciousness that had made him a good pros-ecutor when he was a young man, when the girl first made her claim.

He managed to catch himself before he laughed at her. He was able to remember the circumstances of this night and that she was only a child. He did not blame the child, but that didn’t mean they weren’t sitting in the middle of some elaborate ruse. Even if he was no longer the mayor, theirs had been a public life. An old white mayor with two black sons, they were almost impossible to miss. People had delusions. Women had called the office all the time when the boys were young and proclaimed their maternity. Everybody sees themselves at the center of the story. Still, the defense could fi nd holes in his argument big enough to drive a herd of cattle through.

The woman had put herself in front of the car to save Tip, that was true, but who knows what she was thinking at that moment? The girl, Kenya, was more troubling as she seemed to be the very body of evidence: long legs, long neck, the warm color of her skin. He had noticed her hands, her tapering fingers, the elegant beds of her fingernails. Those hands could be compared. Hands? Doyle felt himself more closely related to Clarence Darrow than the high-tech r u n

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legal investigations that ruled TV. It was only a matter of DNA these days. The mother was or she wasn’t, and as far as Doyle was concerned, even if she was, she wasn’t. His boys had a mother, and their mother was in the Old Calvary Cemetery in Roslindale.

What Doyle wondered at even more than this sudden reappearance was his own lack of vigilance. Why had he never thought of a mother returning? Why was it that once the adoptions were fi nal-ized he never wondered about her again, never speculated about her to Bernadette? Even the claims of crazy women never drove him to consider the possibility of a mother waiting out there somewhere.

How had he let himself be so emptied of any past, as if the boys had been pulled from out of the air? And why was it the boys had never asked about her either, never said, as children in similar circumstances surely must, what about our real mother? Maybe because it was natural to wonder about the one who was missing, the one who left you, and for their family that would always be Bernadette. It was enough to hold one absent mother in your mind, to love completely and completely believe in the love of this woman you never see. No one could be expected to hold up two empty places. The weight of it would surely crush the life out of a child.

“It’s late for a little girl to be up,” the cabdriver said, looking back at Kenya in his rearview mirror. He was Jamaican. It was not a country that afforded any practice in driving through snow.

“I get to stay up late if there’s no school,” she said, though not late like this. Even on a Saturday night she was asleep by eleven, and if her mother was working a late shift she called Kenya and told her it was lights-out and Kenya would do what she was told. She would go to sleep but still keep one ear cocked. What she would have given to hear her mother’s keys right now, the jingle that preceded the deep click of the lock. Heaven would be home, to walk into their own apartment together right now. She would barely get out of a n n p a t c h e t t ❆ 80

her shoes. She would sleep in her coat and her dress if her mother would let her. She would collapse into their shared bed, melt into familiar sheets. Home, bed, sleep, mother—who knew more beautiful words than these? “Anyway, I’m not even tired.”

“That would make one of us, girl,” the cabdriver said.

Just saying the word
tired
made her eyelids flutter down. How glad she would have been to sleep in this cab. But then she remembered her vigilance. That was the word her mother taught her. Don’t stop looking around. Don’t stop watching. Every moment you’ve got to know where you are, what’s coming up behind you, who’s staring you down. That’s what her mother would tell her now. Kenya yawned once and then shook it off, made herself sit up straighter.

When they pulled up to the house all the lights were on, the only house lit bright on the dark street, and none of them gave it a thought. Doyle handed the driver twenty over the meter in simple gratitude for bringing them back. The street was a snow globe, a Christmas card. Doyle took a last deep breath of the cab’s sour warmth before opening the door and stepping back into the cold.

He went to get the crutches out of the trunk. Someone on the street was playing Schubert’s C-sharp minor quartet. He could barely hear it but he knew, and for a second Doyle smiled. Then he stopped smiling. To reach the front door of the house they would have to climb fourteen steps, and while they had once been distinct they now blurred into a single slope of snow, a perfect bunny run. Back in the taxi Teddy put his hand on the girl’s shoulder.

“We’re here,” he said.

Kenya blinked, looked at Teddy and then looked down the street, suddenly, utterly awake, though she would swear that she hadn’t been sleeping. “We’re here,” she said.

There was nothing Kenya did not know about Union Park Street. She knew the bus that came up Columbus Ave. through Rox-r u n

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bury, past Malcolm X to where the split makes it Tremont. She and her mother rode that bus to Union Park when she was a little girl.

She knew the straight shot down to Cathedral. She knew when the neighbors moved away and who kept up their tiny patches of lawn.

She made note of the padlock on the iron spiked fence that surrounded the little park in the center of the street, the faded “No Dogs Allowed” sign on the gate that might as well have read “No People Allowed.” She watched as the snow was whisked away in the winter and how the street sweeper came and scrubbed down the street in the summer with water sprays and giant round brushes.

Where she lived, what fell on the street stayed on the street, if it was precipitation or a Coke can.

Doyle and Teddy got Tip out of the car and stood on either side of him. Tip dug in his crutches and tried to hold his foot up but his bare toes touched down behind him and dipped into snow. “Who thought it was a good idea to put the door so far away from the street?” he said. While they looked at the stairs and tried to fi gure out the logistics of transport, Kenya shot up ahead. She bounded and leapt. Never had she climbed these stairs or been allowed to sit down on them to catch her breath on a hot day, though people everywhere sat on steps that did not belong to them, people sat on
these
steps that did not belong to them, a fact that she pointed out to her mother often and to no avail. She wasn’t even allowed to walk on the same side of the street as this house. She turned her eyes away from it every time but there was not one thing she didn’t know about the window casements, the knocker or doorknob, the woman’s face carved out of stone above the front door or the two urns on either side that were fi lled first with violets then hydrangeas then zinnias then chrysanthemums just this summer alone. If anyone had asked her yesterday how it might have felt to be right there at the top of the stairs like she owned the place, she would have said pet-a n n p a t c h e t t ❆ 82

rifying, paralyzing, and she would have been wrong. It was electric.

It was King of the World, first place in the 500 meter. She could have roared, “Look at me here!” her hot breath making a geyser of white steam. But she remembered herself. She looked down at the Doyles there on the sidewalk looking up at her and saw that they were stranded, waiting helpless for her lead, and so she started dragging her foot back and forth like a broom.

“I have a snow shovel,” Doyle said.