Safe Passage (4 page)

    
"They've bombed the headquarters in Beirut," she said. "Where Percival is."

    
Simon stopped snapping. He looked at Patrick. "Is he dead?"

    
"They didn't kill that many," Patrick said. "We don't know. They don't know anything."

    
Patrick had stopped holding his nose now and put his hands to his temples. The cat jumped to the floor. Patrick turned his face toward
Mag
, and she saw that his pupils were growing smaller, as if he'd looked at the sun. The turquoise irises grew larger and the pupils kept contracting. The headache had come, and now the blindness.

    
"Dad's eyes," she said to Simon.

    
Simon stood there for a moment and then opened the door to the little phone room-the room she'd had put in specially, off the family room, because with seven boys in the house, how else could anyone hear?

    
"What are you doing?" she asked.

    
"I'm calling Alfred."

    
Whenever there was a crisis, everyone called Alfred.

    
She had been foolish to think something terrible had happened to Alfred. Alfred handled
crises,
he did not get embroiled in them. Alfred would come over and make everyone feel calm. It was good Alfred was all right. She did not think she could stand for Percival to be dead.

    
Patrick was trying to look at her and then at Simon, but Simon was in the phone room, out of sight. Patrick's head bobbed awkwardly, in odd directions, like Stevie Wonder's. The pupils were shutting to pinpoints, little by little, like muscles pulling more than their accustomed weight.

    
"I never wanted children," she told him. "This is the punishment."

    
Patrick opened his eyes then, but the pupils were gone. The turquoise irises for which
Mag
had loved him had become two round blanks with no pupil in the middle, the perfect dead blue of cataracts. She had not wanted children and had not wanted Patrick, and this was the price.

 
CHAPTER 2

    
"
Mag
—this isn't the punishment. This isn't the anything," Patrick told her. "An explosion went off in a war zone. It happens. You have to take it one step at a time."

    
She could not look at him. He put his hands to his temples to fend off the headache and stared in her direction with pale saucers of unseeing eye. Her throat, her heart, her whole chest was clenched into a fist—and Patrick, blind, seemed to be carrying on as usual.

    
"It wasn't supposed to be a war zone," she said. "Just a peacekeeping force."

    
"Semantics." Patrick started to get up, turning toward the kitchen.
Mag
realized he was going after his medicine, which he wouldn't be able to identify in this state, and which he would resent not being able to see. His dozen visits to the greatest eye specialists in the world had yielded no miracle drugs, only Valium for nerves,
Darvon
for the headache, and a muscle relaxant that was supposed to control the opening and closing of the iris but did not.

    
"Here, sit down,"
Mag
said. "I'll get your stuff." The twenty-minute workout had resumed—parrots screeching, a steady drumbeat,
the
three models doing jumping jacks during which their bosoms remained absolutely motionless and flat.
Mag
turned the volume down.

    
"At least get a newscast," Patrick said. "It's torture knowing those ladies are there and not being able to see them." He might have been lusting for them without another thought in his mind.

    
Mag
changed the channel. A sermon. "No preachers," Patrick mumbled. He was proud of avoiding preachers — of having quit the Catholic Church after high school and later refusing to send the boys to any sort of Sunday school. But
Mag
believed his approach to life had been shaped by the religious upbringing his mother, Angela, had given him-a woman who was widowed when Patrick was nine and spent the rest of her life going to Mass every morning in the freezing Maine weather and refusing to eat meat on Friday even after it was allowed.

    
"It's too early for the news on Sunday morning,"
Mag
said. She found a weather forecast and walked into the kitchen.

    
Patrick made a show of listening as if he were absorbed, not at all concerned with what was happening in Beirut. She knew his stoic mode well. On their infrequent trips to Maine, his mother had served meager meals at such widely spaced intervals that the boys were irritable and light-headed by the time they sat down-but Patrick had starved silently along with Angela and expected his children to do the same, as if graceful endurance were more important than their hunger. And his calm facade now was apparently as important to him as Percival. Or rather, what was important was not to show emotion, no matter what. It was something like fasting before Communion, even if lack of food made you faint in church every week, as he'd told her one of the girls in his high school used to do.

    
She poured the pills into her palm and wet a washcloth for him to put over his eyes. "Here," she said, not kindly, shoving the medicine into his left hand and a glass of water into his right. He swallowed and then lay back, folding the washcloth over his eyes. He liked the cloth not for its dampness but because the material would prevent him from seeing anyway, and he could pretend he was normal. The weathercaster gave way to a newsman in a brown suit. Patrick didn't change position. Behind the reporter, invisible to Patrick, was a large photo of a sand-colored building surrounded by fences and barbed wire.

    
"The blast apparently collapsed the four-story Marine administration building, which had-in addition to sleeping quarters—a mess hall, library, gym, and other facilities for administering the sixteen-hundred-man force. More than sixty men are known to be dead at this hour, and efforts are under way to rescue others still trapped beneath the debris," the newsman reported.

    
"More than sixty dead,"
Mag
said. "They said forty-three a while ago. It could be a hundred. It could be all sixteen hundred."

    
"That's unlikely," Patrick mumbled from beneath the washcloth. "There's no sense in imagining it worse than it is."

    
Simon emerged from the phone room and stood completely motionless in the middle of the family room carpet, listening, his hands hanging at the end of too-long arms, face white as an egg. "Alfred's coming over," he said.
Mag
could not imagine that until five minutes ago this had been a child who was continually snapping his fingers. "What else do you want me to do?" he asked.

    
"Just deliver your papers," Patrick said. "There's nothing we can do right now but wait for some news. We have to assume everything is going to be all right." Patrick's voice was steady.
Mag
should have been grateful for his trying to reassure Simon, but she was too disturbed. She saw chunks of cement pillar, cinder blocks, shards of wire trapping sleeping men. Heard screams, and groans not unlike Patrick's when he dreamed of blindness.

    
"Percival could be under that building," Simon said, echoing her thoughts. He stood unnaturally still, as if he were rooted to the floor.

    
"Simon, don't imagine what might not even be there," Patrick told him.

    
"It's hard not to."

    
"I know."

    
"I can't do it," Simon said.

    
"Just make your mind blank."

    
"I don't mean that. I mean I can't deliver the papers."

    
"You don't have any choice."

    
"Patrick,"
Mag
began.

    
He held up the hand that wasn't holding the washcloth. "It's …what?
Five-thirty in the morning?
Where are you planning to get a substitute?"

    
Simon didn't move or speak.

    
"It's your responsibility," Patrick told him.

    
"You act like you don't even care," Simon said woodenly.

    
"It's not that I don't care. It's just that I don't see going into a panic unless we have to."

    
Mag
hated Patrick's calm. She saw Percival, who was always graceful, always fast, trapped beneath a building, unable to move, much less run. If he were crushed, Patrick would not think of it, though he had cared for Percival and trained him to run and loved him more than the others. But now Percival might be dead or dying and Patrick would not think of it. And if Patrick went blind, he would ignore that, too, claw his way along a beach somewhere, as if he had no needs, no grief,
no
pain. He expected the same of his sons: that they remain in control, do what was needed, never lose focus. To please him, Alfred had learned to practice piano in spite of a tin ear and Gideon had run track until he threw up—whatever was required—and even Simon pretended not to care about his ear because he was afraid of surgery. But it seemed too much to ask him to deliver his papers. Simon's face was white, drawn, as if at any moment he would issue a great roar that would engulf them all.
Mag
heard the cry in the recesses of her mind, not Simon's voice but
Percival's
—her son—beneath the rubble of a building in Lebanon, not calling for help with the calm face of a stoic, but screaming out of control. And because she knew Simon was close to that, too, and because in spite of everything she knew Patrick would make him deliver his papers, she said to him, "Come on, Simon, I'll help you."

    
Five minutes later they sat on the cement floor of the garage, stuffing the papers into transparent plastic bags. It was too wet outside just to rubber-band them. The overhead light was on, bright and
unshaded
. The only sound was the rain. She had delivered papers hundreds of times and never hated it like this. First she'd helped Alfred and then the others-ten years of it—whenever it rained or was too cold. She'd helped on Sundays and Wednesdays, when the food ads made the papers thick and the boys either had to make two trips on their bikes or get her to take them in the car. They argued that otherwise the complaints would start coming in, because deliveries were supposed to be completed by seven. In those days
Mag
only listened if she felt like it; they all understood that. There were eighty-nine dailies, ninety-four Sundays—fewer in Alfred's and
Izzy's
time, before their subdivision was complete. Mostly she didn't mind. She liked the neighborhood early in the morning, the webby green feel of it in summer, with rabbits running across the grass; and in winter getting hot from the exercise, especially if she knew she'd be sitting at a desk all day at work. But now it was the last week of daylight savings time, dead dark, and it felt colder than it really was because of the rain. The
Freestate
Sentinel
banner
head passed under her fingers forty-odd times as she slipped it into bags. There was no mention in the paper of Beirut, or of Percival, because the explosion had come too late to make the deadline. But tomorrow Lebanon would be front-page stuff, and Patrick would make sure Simon delivered it to the neighbors by seven A.M.—photos of buildings blown up, leveled, obliterated, and perhaps the graduation picture of that local boy, Percival Singer, who was or wasn't dead. And for the first time since the morning
Izzy
had broken his ankle,
Mag
felt that the job was obscene.

    
Simon began to load the back of the station wagon. He worked slowly, mechanically, his face still very white.

    
"
Applewood
first, all right?" he said. But she already knew:
Applewood
first, then Lynwood,
Canterwood
, Trevor Circle; they had their routine. They would park halfway down the block on each street, and she would deliver one section, he the other, each of them moving away from the car to do the houses on one side, back toward the car on the other.

    
The darkness and the cold rain were all-consuming. She carried fourteen papers on
Applewood
, her big canvas bag pulling at her shoulder, Sundays always so heavy. Her hood did not protect her. Soon her face was wet, and water seeped down under her collar, down her neck, ending in a cold puddle on her chest. She didn't care. In the dark she could not see where she was going. She knew these lawns, these landmarks, but in the blackness she tripped on an uneven driveway, on vines growing at a property line, on a branch lying on the grass. She didn't fall. She caught herself, righted herself, as if the larger force of her terror were holding her up. Simon, too, moved swiftly, unthinkingly, and when they got back into the car to drive to the next block, she saw that he had let the hood of his slicker fall free. His hair was soaked, hugging his head, showing the clear outline of the right outer ear that was there and the flat place on the left where it wasn't. Simon always wore hats, or sweatshirts with hoods, and never in the past two years had he let his hair get wet in public.