Ask Again, Yes (13 page)

That night, while Peter was doing homework, Brian stood in front of the TV and said that he had something pretty exciting to tell them. When Peter looked up he noticed once again that his father had grown thinner. Every pair of pants he owned was too big for him, and cinching his belt tighter only made them look worse. He was jittery, quick to smile, but his grin had a manic quality that made Peter nervous. Now, watching his father clear his throat as if he were addressing a large audience, Peter saw a spark of joy in his father’s eyes for the first time since the night his mother shot Mr. Gleeson.

As they knew, Brian began, he’d always wanted to live down south—George and Peter glanced at each other—and after making some calls and talking to some people, he had a good lead on a condo in South Carolina. He also knew a person who could connect him with a security guard position down there. The guy was retired NYPD himself and it was all but guaranteed. He’d collect his pension, and living was cheaper down there. Peter was welcome to come with him if he wanted to.

Peter could see that his uncle was just as surprised as he was. Peter was fifteen years old. He’d been reading about the capture of Fort Ticonderoga because his teacher had hinted there might be a pop quiz the next day. He’d just started his sophomore year at Dutch Kills Preparatory High School for Boys, which still felt like a placeholder. Mrs. Quirk, his science teacher from St. Bart’s, had met him in the city and brought him to meet a bunch of people he understood were evaluating him, somehow. It was summer. He assumed teachers went into hiding in the summer, and yet here was Mrs. Quirk, stepping down from the commuter bus and onto a sidewalk grate in the heat of late July. “Come along, Peter,” she said, and he did. The adults spoke in private. All he could focus on
was how odd it was to see Mrs. Quirk making her way across a city street with the same helmet hair and thick stockings she wore in Gillam, and his first thought was that he couldn’t wait to tell Kate. Then, as always when he thought of Kate, he felt a clenching in his belly as if he were bracing for a punch. His father was so busy that summer—lawyers and doctors every day—so it was George who took him where he needed to go, George who got the phone numbers and addresses and the deadlines from Mrs. Quirk. It was George who told Peter he had Mrs. Quirk to thank when he got into Dutch Kills. “What’s that?” Peter had asked. And when they told him it was a specialized high school, sort of like a private school except there was no tuition, that it was one of the best schools in the city, public or private, he still couldn’t quite understand what they meant. Staying in Queens for a while was one thing. Going to school there was another. When he pictured high school, he still pictured the fieldstone façade of Gillam High.

That was over a year ago. He’d made a few friends at school since then, none who knew about his mother or what had happened in Gillam. None of whom he’d ever met up with on a weekend or after school. They went places together, each other’s apartments or to hang out in the park. They referred to things that Peter understood had happened after school, after practice. A few of his cross-country teammates had witnessed a dog walker get tangled up in several leashes and dragged along the bridle path in Central Park. They talked about it for weeks, Rohan imitating the way the man had hopped and stumbled, Drew and Matt howling and yipping like dogs. “You would have laughed, Peter,” they said to him, so he knew they weren’t excluding him, he knew they liked him, and that was enough. It felt like too much to enter their homes and see their bedrooms and eat snacks with their brothers and sisters like they all seemed to do with each other. He could tell that they assumed he did other things on the weekends, that he went back to “the country,” perhaps, where they knew he was from. Once, in his first few weeks there, back when they still peppered him with questions that he mostly
deflected, he told them that he had a girlfriend back home whom he tried to see on the weekends. He said sometimes he took the bus out to see her and other times she came to see him. They asked what she looked like not because they were curious, he knew, but because they were deciding whether to believe him. He told them the truth: dark blond hair that fell to the middle of her back, hazel eyes, average height.

“Big tits?” a boy named Kevin asked, and they all laughed as they stretched their hamstrings. Peter grinned along with them but he felt something cold pass through him, and for a terrifying moment he thought he might cry.

Now, in the fall of his sophomore year at Dutch Kills, he was the second best runner on the cross-country team, and when Barry Dillon graduated, he’d be the best. Coach wanted to move him from the mile to the 1,200 meter for winter track, and down to the half for spring. Barry Dillon hadn’t been running his times at fifteen, Coach told him over the summer, and added that if he worked his ass off, he could end up being the best middle-distance runner in the city. Peter had been thinking maybe if he just sent Kate the meet schedule, she’d understand what he wanted to ask. If he sent it by mail with a different return address, they might just leave it out for her to open and never even bother to wonder about it. Then she could figure a way to come to the city and they’d finally get to see each other. Despite what his friends at school believed, he hadn’t seen Kate since the night he’d used the Gleesons’ phone to call 911.

What Peter understood was that his father was going either way, that he’d retired from the police department, that he’d signed a lease for a place in either North Carolina or South; Peter kept getting them mixed up. If there was any debating whether or not he should go, that debate had already happened, privately, inside Brian’s head. He was inviting Peter, but he was also inviting him to stay behind. Peter’s impression
was that he’d made the offer as a mere courtesy, a nod to the fact that their lives had intersected up to this point. If it was an inconvenience to George for Peter to stay, then, in his father’s view, that was for Peter and George to work out.

“How will you see Mom?” Peter asked.

“How will I see Mom?” Brian repeated in a tone that implied the answer was obvious. He ran his hand through his hair, seemed to search for something in the hidden thicket of his own thoughts. “Average temps down there run about twelve degrees warmer than here. The community I found has a pool for residents. Also a fitness room.”

“Also a fitness room,” George repeated. He turned to Peter. “You’re welcome here as long as you want, kiddo.” George spent many of his workdays straddling a four-inch steel beam, several hundred feet above the sidewalk; over time he’d developed a sixth sense for danger that came from always looking around for hazards. “I’ll run you up to Westchester whenever you want.”

“I’ll stay then,” Peter said. “At least for a while. See how it goes.” He watched his father closely.

“Okay!” Brian said. “It’s a plan.”

Thirty minutes later, George walked the two blocks up to the boulevard and joined Peter on the stoop of the noodle shop. “I’m glad you’re staying, kiddo. We’ll have a good time, me and you.” Then he put a heavy hand on Peter’s head. “You good?”

“Me? Yeah. I’m fine.”

“I don’t know from golfing, but I know it’s not for me, down there. Not for you neither. And you’re in this good school. You know there’s kids dying to get into that school? And look at you kicking ass there with your running and everything.”

“Thanks for the heart-to-heart, George. Nice.”

George belted a laugh that turned heads on the city-bound platform. “Now you’re a wise guy. They don’t have wise guys down south, I don’t think.”

Brian left a few weeks later, on the morning of the biggest cross-country meet of the season. Peter hated the feeling he got whenever he came home to find his father packing, organizing. One day there was a brand-new duffel bag. Another day a pile of golf shirts in bright colors spilling out the top of a plastic Marshalls bag. It didn’t annoy him, exactly; he just preferred to drink a Coke on the front stoop of George’s building and watch people hurry home from work, walk their dogs. One afternoon while his father was on the phone, he went down to the street and watched a woman parallel park her station wagon in just three moves, with maybe two inches to spare on either side. He wanted to applaud. A kid he recognized from school walked by, but that kid wasn’t a runner, wasn’t in any of his classes, so Peter just gave him a quick “Hey” and looked away.

When the morning arrived, Brian threw two bags in the back of his car and slammed the door. “I gave George some money,” he said to Peter, who had walked down to the street with him. “So don’t worry about that part.” Peter hadn’t worried about that part. He worried only about having enough time to digest a bagel before the starting gun went off. Now it occurred to him that George had bought those bagels. He’d have to chip in from time to time. He had no idea how much money an ironworker made.

“Be safe,” Peter said. He’d heard George say the same thing earlier that morning before he went out. Peter felt in a big rush all of a sudden. He couldn’t miss the team van. He needed to stretch. He needed to go to the bathroom. The morning was cool and smelled like apples. He was wasting it standing on the sidewalk.

“Be good,” Brian said. “I’ll see you soon, okay, Pete?”

“Yeah. I know. That’s what you said.”

Peter remained on the sidewalk as his father shimmied the car out of the tight parking spot, headed toward Woodside Avenue, and turned right. Before the light had even turned red again, a car pulled up and took the vacant spot.

Two hours later, after a nerve-filled journey to Van Cortlandt Park with the rest of his team, Peter dropped out of the race after only a mile. He’d gotten off to a strong start, had been in the lead as usual, but as the pack headed into the woods, he fell back. He couldn’t find his wind. His quads felt heavy. The JV kids started passing him. He slowed to a stop, stepped to the side of the path to let the others get by. “Cramp?” Coach wanted to know as he jogged up. It wasn’t like him. Back in the van after the meet was over, heading back to Queens, Coach asked him to sit up front. “You okay?” he asked. “What happened?”

Peter shrugged. “Not feeling too good I guess.”

“Want me to call your dad?”

“No, I’ll tell him later. I’ll tell him when he picks me up.” Peter felt pressure on his chest, felt short of breath. He stretched but it didn’t seem to help. He rolled down the window and closed his eyes as the rushing air washed over him. “Close that!” one of his teammates called from the backseat, so Peter did. A little while later, the van returned to its spot by the gym doors, and Peter was standing beside the cemetery with his track bag, waiting for the bus.

He saw his mother on Sundays. Not every Sunday, but most. His father used to drive him, but after a few months Peter started taking the train instead. He liked going alone. He usually took the 7 to Grand Central, and then transferred to Metro-North for the seventy-minute ride up the Hudson. He wore his Walkman so that no one would start a conversation with him as he stared out the window, watching the towns of Westchester slide by, one after the other so quickly that they bled together, and then less so as the landscape opened and became farmland, stone walls tracing shapes in the distance. Houses gave way to horse paddocks, paved driveways gave way to loose gravel and packed dirt. None of the towns the train went through reminded him of Gillam, but he found
himself comparing them to Gillam anyway. Occasionally he spotted a cow. When he got off the train, it was a near two-mile walk to the hospital along a two-lane road. Once, when it was raining, he took a cab from the train and when the driver, a woman, asked him who he was visiting at the hospital, he told her the truth. When she pulled up out front, she said she was very sorry but she still had to charge him the five bucks because she’d already called it in to her dispatcher and things weren’t so great for her either.

There had been a period of months when he hadn’t been able to see his mother at all. His father saw her a few times when she was being held in the hospital in the Bronx, but both the lawyers and the doctors thought Peter shouldn’t see her yet, not until things were settled. Seeing Peter, his father said, would upset what little balance she had, and they didn’t want to risk that. They framed it as their decision, all the men involved in her fate, and Peter worried about what she’d think about him not coming to see her. One night, not long after the trial was settled and she was transferred to the state hospital in Westchester, when his father finally got back to Queens, he put his hand on top of Peter’s head and told him she’d come around soon.

Then he said, “I mean—”

“You mean it’s her who doesn’t want to see me?”

“She doesn’t know what she wants, Peter. Honestly. I only meant . . . I don’t know what I meant.”

Peter mulled this over. It was as if he’d been looking out at the world from one window, and now he walked across the room to look at the same world from a different window. “If I show up there, she’ll see me. I know she will.”

“Okay, bud,” his father said. “Next time. Let’s give it a try.”

And Peter was right. She didn’t turn away when she saw him waiting there in the family room next to his dad. She was wearing a loose dress with bright flowers printed on the fabric, a black cardigan, slippers. She looked tired. She’d put on a lot of weight. She smelled like soup.

“That’s the medicine,” his father told him later. “Puffs her right up. Changes her coloring, even. That’s one reason she hates it. It’s hard-core stuff. They have to take her blood every other day to make sure it doesn’t poison her.” She didn’t ask Peter any questions about himself, so he just began talking. He told her about his new school. He told her about Sunnyside. She stared blankly past him for a few minutes and then she held up a finger and shushed him. His father looked at his watch, used his smiling voice to say they’d better hit the road, there’d probably be traffic. He smiled harder to smooth their way out the door. “Go to that workshop Dr. Evans was talking about last week,” he said to his wife. “You’ll enjoy it! Anne, isn’t it great Peter came? He wanted to see you so bad.”