Run (28 page)

Tip sighed and put the twenties in his wallet. He knew what Doyle had in mind giving her the money. He wanted her to feel grown up. He wanted her to feel that he had chosen her for a job.

He had given her too much in hopes that she would pocket the change and have a little something for herself, something he didn’t know how to give to her directly, but he had underestimated her.

Maybe there was a way Tip and Kenya had had similar childhoods after all. She too had been attending lectures on social responsibility, sitting through the same crushing liturgies on the moral imperatives of honesty and humility. By growing up in the wake of his family she had inadvertently grown up with Doyle’s curriculum as well. If Tip or Teddy found a quarter on the ground when they were boys they’d be half crazed with worry over who had dropped it and how they could possibly give it back. Doyle was always there trying to explain that it was fine to keep the change that was out on the sidewalk and that it was in no way related to taking money from a cash register or a purse. Finding a quarter wasn’t stealing, it was lucky, and even while they understood that rationally they were still left emotional wrecks by the thought that it could have been dropped by some very poor child straight out of Dickens. That was Doyle’s fault. He had made them that way after all, high strung little a n n p a t c h e t t ❆ 220

do-gooders who had to live every moment of their lives as an enact-ment of the Nicene Creed. Maybe he’d done it to Kenya, too, without even knowing it. Doyle would just have to take the money back as a consequence of his parenting.

By the time they were halfway through Harvard Yard, Tip was seriously questioning the wisdom of his own decision to leave the house at all. His leg had progressed far beyond aching. The pain in his sciatic nerve was sharp and somewhat electrical in nature.

It now extended from his foot up the back of his leg. He had, despite all better knowledge, dug the crutches into his brachial plexus and slowly crushed it, sending a radiation up his neck and into the back of his head that was like a persistent hammer slamming in a reluctant nail. He had to admit that from the standpoint of physiology it was interesting to feel his central nervous system unite. His wrists, for example, which he had been so careful to keep straight, had extended somewhere around the Science Center, and now the median, ulnar, and radial nerves were so sore from holding himself up that his entire arms trembled and burned in the warm sleeves of his brother’s parka. His breath was labored and short. His sinuses were scorched from the freezing wind that pushed at him until he felt concerned for his own stability. Blind kittens were more robust in their nature. Once this was behind him he would not assume that pacing around the lab and lifting glass jars full of fish over his head sufficed for physical exercise. As for now he was thinking fondly of the living room sofa.

I can take her running ,
Teddy had offered.

Need I remind you that you were hit by a car last night?
Doyle had said.

A fat yellow plow just as wide as the sidewalk snaked a lazy curve through the center of the yard while students who preferred not to walk through the snow filled the dry path behind r u n

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it. Everywhere they looked the trees were black and wet and leafless.

“This is the most beautiful place in the world,” Kenya said in a tone best saved for walking up the nave of Chartres and not passing between two freshman dorms.

“It’s nice.” Tip looked up and saw a handmade sign taped inside somebody’s bedroom window,
Obama 2012
. The truth was Tip always felt better the minute he stepped into Harvard Square. He was a Cambridge resident by nature. Boston was a city that never understood him and therefore Boston was a city he never thought twice about leaving.

“Do you ever just look around and think, I can’t believe I get to go to school here?”

Tip was concerned about the lack of feeling in his fi ngers. Cold?

Nerve damage? It was impossible to tell. “I guess I always thought I’d go to Harvard.” He was working to make his voice sound steady, conversational, to give no indication of what he was coming to see as his imminent collapse. “I’ve been interested in the science department here since I was your age.”

Kenya pulled her mother’s hat farther down on her head until the wind was cut from her eyes. It was hard for her to walk so slow but she did it. “It’s not like they let you in this place just because you’re interested.”

The Museum of Comparative Zoology must have moved. It had never been this far before. By the time they got to the side door Tip didn’t have the fine motor skills to put the key in the lock. After a few pathetic stabs of tapping the metal key against the metal door he dropped the ring.

“I’ve got it.” Kenya plucked the keys from the deep burrow of snow. She shook them off and made a pleasant jingling sound.

“Which one?”

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Once they got into the lab, he fell into a chair and let his crutches slide with a great deal of clatter onto the floor. The place was empty.

The snow had kept everyone away. Tip’s chin dropped forward and he crossed his arms in front of his chest to try and stretch out the ache that was in his back. He had never been so grateful for a chair, for a room, for the warmth.

Kenya dragged another chair in front of him and lifted up his foot very gently. She did not mind that the sole of the boot was en-crusted in watery gray ice. She did not put the well-being of the chair before the well-being of the foot as Tip would have done. She picked a coat off the coat tree without any question of who it might belong to and covered his leg, then took down another and spread it across his chest. Tip didn’t know who had left their coats behind, but they were always there, even in the middle of the summer. She pressed her small, neat fingers into the side of his wrist and stared at the clock over the door. When she did the math she pressed them in again to check herself. “It’s bad,” she said.

“It’s all right,” he said, but his head was splitting.

Kenya walked away from him and a minute later she came back with a coffee cup full of water. “Drink this,” she said. “Do you have any medicine?”

Tip took a sip of the water and she held the cup. It was tepid.

When he tried to reach in his pocket he couldn’t get his arm to bend back far enough and she brushed his hand away and took the bottle out herself. “Childproof caps,” she said, snapping the bottle open.

“I don’t know who they think they’re fooling.”

“They’re fooling the people who can’t read the instructions on the cap,” Tip said, but even he could hear the slur in his voice. He took the pill from her hand and swallowed it with the water she gave him.

“Oh,” she said.

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He closed his eyes and took another breath. He would be fi ne.

If he had to stay here another six to eight weeks until his ankle had healed completely he would manage. He knew how to sleep with his head on his coat. He knew which restaurants delivered.

“Keep drinking,” she said. “Little sips.” When the cup was empty she took it from him. She pulled off his gloves and rubbed each of his hands between the flats of her own small palms. He almost made a sound it hurt so much when she straightened out his fingers. Then she unwound her scarf and put his hands on either side of her neck.

It was like settling his hands on a radiator. He jerked them away and opened his eyes. “What are you doing? You’re going to freeze to death.”

But then, with admirable stoicism, she grasped his hands more firmly and clamped them around her throat, pressing them in with her hands so that for all appearances she seemed to be forcing him to strangle her. “Just be quiet for a minute,” she said sternly. It was like holding a bird, a hot little bird cupped inside his frozen hands.

She stood close beside him, her forehead practically against his chest. He felt every breath, every steady thump of her heart as it echoed through her carotid arteries. “Who in the world taught you to do this?”

“Girl Scouts,” she said, not lifting her head.

“They give a badge for treating someone who’s walking with crutches?”

“First aid. You have hypothermia.” She was speaking directly into his sweater.

“I don’t have hypothermia.”

“You think.”

He looked at her, at the crown of her head bowed there beneath his chin, at the straight lines that ran between her braids. At some a n n p a t c h e t t ❆ 224

point she had taken off her hat. At some point her mother had put this child on the floor between her knees and parted her hair with such mathematical consideration that he could read her intentions in the child’s scalp. This was a girl who was cared for, who would not be sent out of the house with her hair gathered into unequal sec-tions. He could see all: hands, comb, soft hair, and for the fi rst time he thought of the woman and the girl in this picture as people who had a tenuous connection to him. When as a child he had thought of the mother who gave him away at all it was as someone who was reckless and halfhearted, someone incapable of fi nishing anything she had begun. He pictured her apartment as a place that was full of half-read books, half-eaten sandwiches, a jigsaw puzzle of a clip-per ship strewn across a table with only a dozen or so pieces fi t together. By the time he was six he had named her lazy and selfi sh and closed the door on her there. He realized that this childish answer to the question of why he had been given away had somehow gotten stuck in the back of his mind without revision, and now it seemed the equivalent of being a scientist who still held with the theory that thunder was the result of God moving furniture around.

After the death of his own mother he didn’t have time to reconsider the mother who had given him away. He could only think of the one who had been taken from him forcefully, only think of the cancer that had started in her tonsils and then swept through her body in an irreversible tide. It occurred to him now for the first time with this girl in his hands how the two mothers were linked by their absence, and a wave of loneliness of the sort he did not allow himself came over him. He wanted both of them back, both the one who was living and the one who was dead. He gave Kenya’s neck the smallest squeeze and then he let go. “Let’s stop this now before your neck freezes through and your head snaps off.” She stood and looped her scarf back into position, then she r u n

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stretched her arms up towards the fluorescent lights, making herself as straight and slender as a ruler. “My neck will be warm again in just a minute,” she said, thinking that she was no longer holding up her end of the bargain as a heat source. “You can put your hands on my stomach while we wait. That’s the second warm place.”

Tip rubbed his hands together and pulled on his fi ngers until he felt the smallest indication that they were flexible and alive. “No, thank you.”

“I won’t mind.”

“You’re a model scout.”

“You’re feeling better, aren’t you?”

He said that he was.

“Maybe you could write a note to my troop leader. We get extra points for practical application.” She bent back her shoulders and dropped the backpack to the floor, then she took off her coat. Her track suit was the pink of a dime store budgie with white stripes running up her legs and down her arms. “It’s warm in here.”

“It feels good.”

“That’s because you have hypothermia.” Kenya picked up a jar from the desk beside her and looked inside, agitating it gently left to right so that the long-dead fish rose up to swim.

Her touch was so light that he didn’t feel the need to stop her.

She didn’t shake them the way a child would, she simply reanimated them. “Do you want to help me finish up my work?”

“Sure.” She looked around at the long tables covered in papers and fishes. If they did everything that needed doing around here she’d never get a chance to run.

“I need to refile some of these and I can’t carry them with my crutches, so I was thinking that you could carry the jars and I’ll tell you where to put them back.”

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“Just tell me where they go and I’ll do it myself,” she said. “I think you should keep sitting down.”

“Is that what the handbook says?”

“Don’t joke,” she said. “You could have died.”

“Well, I didn’t, and now I need to get a little work done.” Kenya made an assessment of the situation. She looked down the hallway in front of them and looked at the chairs. They were by no means shoddy in their construction. The fish department at Harvard clearly wasn’t skimping on chairs. She had rolled around plenty of old people in the place where her mother worked and she knew a thing or two about how helpful a good set of wheels could be. “Okay,” she said, giving her hands a single, authoritative clap, “this is what we’re going to do: you hold the jars and I’ll push you. I think you can even keep your leg up if you work to steer the second one yourself.”

“I’m too heavy for that.”

His lack of imagination made her impatient. “The chairs roll.

I didn’t say I was going to carry you.” Kenya got behind him and gave a demonstrative push. There was the practical application of the theory.

So Tip told her where the basket was and which jars should go in the basket and she brought them to him, stopping every time to hold the glass up to the overhead light and rock the occupants back into motion. “
Lepomis macrochirus,
immature bluegills,” Tip told her when she asked. “
Couesius plumbeus,
lake chub.” He didn’t need to read the labels in order to know the occupants of all the jars on the desk. He didn’t have to hold them or, for that matter, even get a very good look.

“Do you know every fish in this place?” she asked.

Tip shook his head, amused at the thought. “There are over a million fi sh here.”

At that she held up her hand. “Wait,” she said, and ran into the r u n

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other room, into the endless rows of shelves and jars and fi shes. She gave a small scream when she saw the full force of them there, the occupants of what appeared to be an entire ocean divided into jars and stacked into soldierly rows. It was a noise of pure delight. A scant half hour ago, Tip had considered telling Kenya she shouldn’t be so impressed by things: the house, the street, the school, but his heart leapt that she did so love the sight of the museum’s collection.