Run (11 page)

“I’ve got big feet,” Kenya said. Back and forth she traveled down each step until there was a wide swath cut from the center.

“You’re going to get snow in your shoes,” Teddy said, but he admired her resourcefulness, the meticulous nature of her work.

“I already have snow in my shoes.”

“Sacajawea.” Tip put his crutches on the first stair while Teddy and Doyle stood close by to catch him in case he fell over backwards. Once, when Teddy was thirteen he had a cyst in the back of his knee that had to be removed and that cyst put him on crutches for six weeks. It was during that time that maybe twice, when the crutches were very new and still seemed glamorous, Tip took them for a spin around the kitchen. That was the full extent of his crutch experience. When they got to the landing at the top, Kenya said to none of them in particular, “I get to go inside.”

“We weren’t going to make you sleep on the stoop,” Tip said.

Doyle was still searching his pockets for his keys when the door swung open wide and Schubert poured out behind the sound of Sullivan calling their names.

“Doesn’t anyone leave a note?” he said. He was wearing Doyle’s red plaid bathrobe and a pair of bedroom slippers cut from an old oriental carpet that none of them had seen before. He put down his drink on the front table to put his arms around Teddy. Teddy, for embracing, was always the logical choice.

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“Who knew you were coming home?” Doyle said.

“You knew it,” Sullivan said. “I told you I was coming home.” They hobbled into the front hall, wet and covered in snow. Doyle took off his hat and scarf and handed them to his oldest son, then he went to help Tip out of his jacket. Sullivan tonight? Think of all the nights they waited up, waiting and wanting Sullivan to come and then tonight there he was. They should have slept at the hospital.

“When did you get a boot?” Sullivan asked. He had put a fi re in the fireplace but the flue wasn’t open far enough. Everything in the living room was dim and slightly blurred with smoke. Teddy coughed.

“Tonight. That’s where we’ve been. You said you were coming home for Christmas.” Tip had had all the mysterious reappearance of family he could stomach for one day.
Surprise!
It’s your mother!

Surprise!
Your brother shows up too! He felt like hobbling down the street after the Jamaican and hiring the taxi to take him back to the lab. Sullivan patted Tip on the back, a little too heartily given the circumstances of Tip’s balance.

“It’s practically Christmas.”

“On my calendar it was three weeks ago,” Doyle said. “Could you turn the stereo down?” One child understood Schubert, only one of them, and he managed to make Schubert a point of irritation .

“And now you’ve adopted another child,” Sullivan said to his father. “I think that’s marvelous.”

Doyle looked at him, a look that Teddy or Tip would have understood instantly, but Sullivan simply turned away to shut off the stereo.

“This is Kenya,” Teddy said, his voice sounding abrupt in the new silence.

“Kenya, Kenya,” he said. “What a beautiful name. I’ve been to Kenya. I was living not too far from there in Kampala.” a n n p a t c h e t t ❆ 84

“You’ve been to Kenya yourself?” It was her own name, she heard it every day, and still it was thrilling to attach it to the place.

“This is Sullivan, by the way.” Teddy was always glad to see Sullivan. He loved his brother, and besides, Sullivan had the brilliant ability to turn all of the focus and anxiety in any room onto himself.

“Do you have a last name?”

“Moser,” she said and shook the hand that he held out to her.

Kenya had only seen Sullivan a few times in her life. He had dark red hair and dark blue eyes and his skin was tan with a red un-dertone like a deeply polished wood, though she remembered it as being very pale before. They stared at each other without embarrassment, Kenya and Sullivan, while they held each other’s hand.

Sullivan spoke to his father but he kept his eyes on the girl. “If you were going to adopt another child it seems remarkable that you found one who looks so much like the two you’ve already got.”

“We didn’t adopt her,” Doyle said.

“You think I look like them?” Kenya was awfully fl attered. It was something she liked to think sometimes but when she asked her mother all her mother would say was you look like yourself.

“Not him, of course,” he pointed to his father. “But those other two.”

“Sullivan.” Doyle lowered his tone.

“A first cousin at least.”

Tip crutched his way into the living room and fell into the sofa, pulling his leg up to the coffee table as he stretched against the cush-ions and closed his eyes.

“What happened to you, anyway?” Sullivan asked, following behind him. “Did one of the fish bite you?”

“He was hit by a car,” Kenya said.

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halfway impressed. “If you were hit by a car then I’d say you came through pretty nicely.”

“It was her mother who was hit by a car,” Tip said in a fl at tone, though he looked like he was already asleep. Her mother. Let’s be abundantly clear on this point:
her
mother.

Sullivan, who wasn’t as tall as either of his brothers, crouched down to his knees in front of the girl. He pushed his hair, which had gotten too long, back from his eyes. “Your mother was hit?”

“She broke her hip,” she said, “her wrist, a rib, and she cut her forehead here.” She ran her finger along her hairline in the place that her mother was cut. “But she’s going to be fine. The doctor said she was going to be fine. She pushed Tip out of the way. He didn’t see the car.”

Doyle clapped his hands. “All right, enough stories. It’s very late and there will be time for all of this tomorrow.” He stood behind Kenya and lightly touched her shoulder. He saw then that her coat pulled across her shoulders and was short in the sleeves, last year’s coat. “We should let our guest get some sleep now.” But Sullivan did not stand up. “Your mother must be very brave.

I would never step in front of a car for someone else.” Kenya started to say something but every single word she knew was inadequate for the necessary response. Her mouth simply opened and then closed, empty. Sullivan looked at Kenya and then he picked up her hand and held it again. “Do I know you?” he said.

She blinked. Teddy turned around to face them and for a moment Tip opened his eyes. “I don’t think so,” she said carefully.

Where had Sullivan gone to all those years he stayed away? That was the thing Kenya and her mother couldn’t figure out. One day he was there and then they never saw him anymore.

“Sullivan, let her go to bed now,” Tip said. “You can grill her for details tomorrow.”

a n n p a t c h e t t ❆ 86

“Your mother won’t appreciate our keeping you awake all night, school or no school.” Doyle gestured one hand towards the staircase .

At that moment Kenya remembered where she was. There was so much happening and it was all going by her so quickly. “I haven’t seen anything yet,” she said to Doyle. Here was the living room, two identical sofas with carved legs facing each other, bright throw pillows, big and soft, one that was needlepointed with a picture of fi sh, a real piano in the corner, a big one, photographs in silver frames.

The draperies, whose lining she had seen so many times before, were striped on this side—red and blue and green on a heavy cream cloth. They were held back by tasseled ropes. She had to remember every last piece of it, the carpet, the candy dish, the basket of magazines on the floor. She had to go back and tell her mother.

Tip yawned hugely from the sofa. “She might be hungry, you know. We could offer to feed her.”

“I’m not,” Kenya said, and then immediately regretted it because it would have meant seeing the kitchen.

“Let her sleep in our room,” Teddy said. “Tip’s never going to make it up all those stairs.”

“I’m going to sleep right here,” Tip said, and he meant it. He pulled off his red jacket and tossed it onto the farthest cushion.

Then he swung his boot off the table and onto his jacket, stretching out long. Tip had a history of sleeping on couches, of studying too late and falling asleep wherever he was. Teddy went off to get him some blankets. Tip wanted them all out of the room. He wanted everything out of his head: fish and snow, car and politics, mother and sister. The ache in his ankle was like an angry conversation coming from another room, something persistent, irritating, abstracted, something you should get up and take care of but for whatever reason you don’t.

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“Good night,” the girl’s voice said from someplace nearby. He raised up the fingers of his hand to her but kept his eyes closed.

Doyle found a toothbrush in its package and a tube of paste and laid them on top of a fresh towel and facecloth in the bathroom. He gave her an undershirt to sleep in because there was nothing in the house, not a single thing, that came anywhere close to being right for little girls. He took her up the long staircase with its steep angled turns and then worried that she might be afraid to sleep so far away from everyone else. Then he remembered that Sullivan would be across the hall and he wondered if that might frighten her more. He watched her narrow shoulders, her slender waist. He counted her six high ponytails and reminded himself again that whatever else was happening here tonight, this was a child whose mother had been hit by a car. She would have to be scared to death and he would make a point to remember that.

When they got to the room, Doyle, who had very few occasions to venture so high up in his own house anymore, was struck by how perfectly preserved it was. It was a museum of a past life, and now Teddy lived up there by himself. Hardly anything had changed since the boys were in grade school except the addition of the crimson felt pennant that said HARVARD. Teddy had put it up over Tip’s bed when Tip was accepted, and while Tip said it was idiotic and embarrassing, he never took it down. There was a map of the states and a huge map of the world that Doyle himself had put up on the walls with thumbtacks, a chart of the solar system, a guide to learning Morse code, pictures of Bobby Kennedy and Martin Luther King, Jr., the two pictures of Bernadette on the dresser in a double frame.

On one side she was a bride of twenty-four, her hair twisted up and crowned in netting, on the other side she was a mother of three, the day they brought Tip home. Bernadette holds Teddy and Doyle holds Tip and Sullivan stands between them, twelve years old. Be-a n n p a t c h e t t ❆ 88

side the pictures was the statue of the Virgin Mary, her arms open and ready to receive.

“This is where they slept?” Kenya said.

“Teddy still sleeps here. Tip sleeps at school.”

“Why doesn’t Teddy get to sleep at school?” Doyle glanced at Teddy’s unmade bed and pulled the covers up.

“Because he doesn’t go to classes when he sleeps at school.” Kenya slowly turned her head, not so much looking at the room as absorbing it. “I used to make up stories about this house.” How strange it was to think that a child he had never met could make up stories about the place he lived and that he would never have known it. “What kind of stories?” It was his legacy, this house.

Doyle had bought it when people said the neighborhood was too close to Roxbury, too close to Cathedral. He hung on to it when his neighbors chopped theirs up into condos and sold off their homes room by room.

“I said there was a dance club here, and a bowling alley, and a movie theater.”

“No movie theater.”

“I said that each of you had your own floor, you and then Sullivan, then Tip and then Teddy on the top, and that there was an elevator so you could go up and down and visit each other.”

“I’m certain the boys would have liked that.”

“Sometimes I said it was my house.” Kenya had tried to be on her best manners when she was downstairs. Don’t ever stare at things, her mother always told her. If you stare at something people will think you mean to take it. But now she could not help herself. She walked from chair to bed to desk in the room, staring and touching and every now and then closing her eyes to inhale. She pulled
Moby-Dick
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its proper place. She took down
Call of the Wild
and
The Voyage of
the Beagle.
She opened them up and smelled the pages.

The winter that Tip was eleven and Teddy was ten, Doyle read them
The Voyage of the Beagle
over twenty-eight nights. He billed it as their first completely grown-up book, so defined because it lacked any of the elements that had made the previous books he had read them so appropriate for little boys. There were no dogs, no beggar orphans
,
no Lilliputians, and no illustrations. Doyle had dragged an armchair up the stairs from his study a long time ago and left it permanently in the boys’ room so that he could be comfortable regardless of chapter length. There the chair sat, now awkwardly pushed into the corner and covered in clothes that the housekeeper would pick up on Thursday. In the evenings, thousands of evenings ago, he had pulled that chair in between the boys’ twin beds so that he faced them, Tip on his left hand, Teddy on his right, both of them pajama clad, both of them so wide awake with excitement for the story that it seemed impossible that in half an hour they would both be sound asleep. Doyle knew the adventure of it all wore them down to a thread in the end. He read the story of the young Charles Darwin in a strong and animated voice, and sometimes the boys would become so excited by the discovery of a toad or the painful wanting of water or the threat of various natives that they crawled out from under their covers so they could sit closer to him. If there was a terrible storm that pitched the
Beagle
violently in strange waters, Teddy would wind up coming over into the chair to sit on the side of Doyle’s lap and then finally, a page or two later, Tip would follow, even though he thought of himself as too old for such things. What they loved so passionately about the book was that it was real. Darwin was a real man, the
Beagle
was a real ship, and this was the real world he wrote of, even though it was difficult to believe that the a n n p a t c h e t t ❆ 90