The Shortest Way Home

by Juliette Fay

  At the other end of the hallway, George lay in front of Aunt Vivvy’s bedroom door. Her head rose and she eyed Sean. She didn’t growl, but her steady gaze warned, Try me.

  Sean tried to go back to sleep, but found himself listening to Kevin’s solitary movements: opening dresser drawers in his room, stepping lightly down the stairs, pushing on the squeaky kitchen door. He wasn’t loud, but the absence of any other sounds made it easy to track him.

  Deirdre was a late riser, and Sean knew she’d barely get up in time for her lunch shift at Carey’s Diner. But where was Aunt Vivvy? When Sean was in school, she’d have a four-minute egg and two pieces of rye toast ready for him when he came down to the kitchen. He didn’t particularly like slimy-soft eggs or rye bread, but that’s what she made and that’s what he ate. Was Kevin fending for himself down there?

  Eventually the front door closed with a hushed thunk and the house went quiet. Cars hummed along a distant roadway. A woodpecker tapped at a tree in the woods behind the house.

  What am I doing here? The phrase seemed to have taken up residence in Sean’s brain where his prayers used to live. He got up, showered, tossed on some clothes, and exited the house, certain only of his need to leave. The air was warm and dewy, reminding him of Bukavu. But that was the only thing. The well-maintained houses with their freshly mulched flower beds and wicker porch furniture were nothing like any place he’d lived in the past twenty years.

  His back ached and he tried to ignore it as he’d often been able to do in Bukavu. But without the activity of the hospital, it was harder to distract himself, and the pain remained in his consciousness like a clinging child he carried piggyback.

  As he walked through the town of his adolescence, Sean’s mind turned to Cormac McGrath, his best friend from high school. Over the years, Cormac had shown an uncanny knack for finding Sean no matter where he was, often sending goodies from his bakery. The stuff was usually crushed, moldy, or ransacked by the time it arrived, but wrecked or not, Cormac’s packages always brought an unexpected reminder of the kindness in the world.

  A couple of months ago he’d written to say that he’d gotten married. It had surprised and, for a brief self-centered moment, depressed Sean. When they’d gotten together during Sean’s infrequent visits home, Cormac had always seemed as happy in his bachelorhood as Sean was. Now it was one less thing they had in common.

  Cormac had sent a wedding picture—him in a tux, his new wife in a poufy dress. She had blondish hair and lots of makeup that had smeared around her happy, teary face. Sean wasn’t used to seeing women with so much paint, other than the occasional celebrity who’d visit the clinic or hospital as an “ambassador” or, as they invariably said, “to experience it for myself.” With a photographer to capture it for the magazines and an iPhone so they could tweet about it.

  Most of the women Sean knew and sometimes got together with were aid workers or volunteers. They didn’t wear makeup, their hair was either very short or in a ponytail, and they were slightly unkempt like everyone else around them. That had become the norm for Sean.

  Looking at the picture, he’d chuckled, wondering if Cormac’s wife had consented to the wide distribution of this particular picture, with her face all smeary like that. Cormac, though—he looked like the day they’d beaten their tennis rival, Weston, after seventeen straight years of losses. Someone had taken a picture of Sean and Cormac that day, gripping the trophy in their sweaty hands. Cormac had had that very same look, like it just didn’t get any better than this.

  Sean had kept that picture in a box with a few other things from his childhood. Chrissy Stillman’s pink angora glove, which she’d left in the bleachers when they happened to sit next to each other at a football game—she’d allowed him to put an arm around her because she was cold, and everyone thought he had scored. A really bad fishing lure Hugh had made him. A note from his mother. Sean, I’m taking Deirdre for her one-year checkup. Auntie Vivvy is watching Hugh. Would you please mow the lawn? Love, M. It was the last coherent thing she’d written him.

  Sean had hidden all of this in a box in Aunt Vivvy’s basement, behind the camping gear. Probably no one had gone camping since Hugh died. Sean wondered if Aunt Vivian had tossed it all out. She was like that. She hated clutter.

  As he walked, Sean remembered that Cormac’s letter had been filled with little updates: his irascible father was now working for him at the bakery, making a godawful mess of things and driving Cormac crazy. However, there had been a marked uptick in sales since his father’s many, similarly irascible friends now considered the Confectionary their mother ship. His cousin Janie, whose husband had been killed in an accident the previous year, had found someone new, a guy they all liked. Cormac hoped she wouldn’t screw it up.

  Sean had had a secret crush on Janie when he was a junior, and she’d come to Belham High as a freshman with a newly grown set of boobs. Those boobs had caught him off guard—one minute she’d been flat as a manhole cover, the next she was all curvy and soft. She wasn’t a knockout, like Chrissy Stillman. And she had a sharp tongue—he knew that if she’d seen him looking at her rack, she would’ve verbally sliced him down to a quivering mass of remorse.

  Cormac had caught him checking her out once. “You know I’d have to kill you, right?” And that had been the end of the crush.

  Sean hadn’t laid eyes on Cormac in six years, and he wondered what his own life would have looked like if he had stayed in Belham, too, and maybe gotten a job at a local hospital. He could imagine himself going for beers at The Palace with Cormac after a tennis match or two on Saturday afternoons. But staying in Belham had never been a consideration. From the time he was fifteen Sean had known he would head out and do as much good as he could in the time that was left, while he waited for his mother’s diagnosis to become his own.

  Thinking about his old friend, Sean adjusted his course—which had been random and no course at all—toward Cormac’s Confectionary. Soon he was in Belham Center passing shop windows, one displaying a dozen brightly colored handbags, another brimmed with paint cans, brushes, and rollers. He couldn’t get used to how clean and smooth the sidewalks were. It felt as foreign to him as the places he’d lived were to Belham locals.

  The Confectionary had a full glass front, ringed on the inside by a high counter. Customers sat on stools and gazed out across the town green, read the Belham Town Crier, or chatted amiably, like a silent movie behind the glass. Sean tugged on the heavy door and let himself in. The dry coolness of the air conditioning sent goose bumps up his freckled arms.

  He spotted Cormac right away. At six foot five, with the shoulders of a gladiator and a mass of unruly hair, the guy was hard to miss. The overwhelming effect of Cormac’s stature was muted, however, by the baker’s apron hanging over a faded cranberry-colored T-shirt. CORMAC’S CONFECTIONARY was printed above a graphic of a muffin at the breast. Underneath it said, BELIEVE IN THE POWER OF BAKED GOODS.

  Cormac was behind the long display case, attending to a customer. “I’m a big fan of the ginger mousse cake, myself,” he was telling a woman in madras shorts and a pink polo shirt. “But it’s a personal decision.” He bit the inside of his cheek as he waited for the woman to choose, and Sean watched with amusement as Cormac’s natural congeniality began to wane. His hand tapped the top of the glass, and he glanced at the other customers in line, as if to remind the woman that she was not the only person in a dire state of cakelessness.

  His gaze passed over Sean without a hint of familiarity. It was a strange sensation, as if Sean were invisible, as if he could take a stack of twenties from the cash register without anyone having a clue. He had a momentary urge to say, “Hey, Cormac, it’s me!” and an opposing urge to turn around and walk out. What am I doing here? That chant had murmured at the back of his mind since he’d landed at Logan a mere twenty-four hours ago. Had it only been that long?

  He didn’t
wave and he didn’t leave. He waited. It was a familiar activity—you waited for everything in developing countries, sometimes hours, sometimes months. It was the only thing that had felt normal to him since he’d arrived. Eventually it was his turn, and as Cormac was depositing the bills from the previous transaction into the register, Sean started in with, “Yeah, I need a cake, but I can’t decide between the chocolate-glazed, the chocolate-filled, and the chocolate-infused. Can you give me a full description and your opinion of each?”

  Cormac glanced up with a look of forced patience. “Well, let’s see,” he began. “Wait, we don’t have . . .” He stared at Sean for a moment, then his face bloomed with recognition. “Spin!” he said, a nickname from their tennis team days. “When’d you sneak into town?” He came around the counter and shook Sean’s hand, pulling him into a back-slapping hug.

  “Yesterday,” said Sean, relieved to be received with such warmth.

  “How’s reentry? Little weird? You been gone a long time.”

  “Yeah, pretty strange. My aunt got a dog.”

  “Get out,” Cormac scoffed in disbelief. “Miss Vivian Preston hates animals.”

  “So I thought. But hey, you leave for six years, anything can happen. Even something as totally unlikely as Herman Munster here tying the square knot.” Sean grinned. “Where is she? I’m dying to meet the poor thing.”

  Cormac laughed. “She mostly helps out on weekends. She goes to photography school during the week. But listen, what are you doing for dinner? We’d love to have you over.”

  “No plans whatsoever, that’d be great. Hey, where’s your dad?”

  Cormac went back around the display case and called, “Pop!” And then, “Let Helen finish, there’s someone here to see you.” And finally, “The mascarpone isn’t going anywhere, Pop . . .” Cormac turned to Sean and muttered, “Current obsession: cannolis.”

  It wasn’t hard to see how Cormac had come by his size. Charlie McGrath was a large man. But he’d trimmed down since Sean had seen him last, and his shoulders now stooped a bit.

  “Hey, Mr. McGrath,” said Sean.

  The older man squinted at him as he took the proffered hand to shake.

  “Pop, it’s Sean,” Cormac said quickly. “Sean Doran, my old friend from high school.”

  “From the tennis team?”

  “Yeah, Pop. Sean. You remember.”

  “Of course, I remember,” Mr. McGrath said irritably. “He just looks . . . older.”

  Cormac chuckled, but his discomfort showed. “Well, we’re not eighteen anymore.”

  “No, you certainly aren’t,” Mr. McGrath shot back with a grin. “You’re on the back nine now, pal-o-mine.”

  “Yeah, and you’re up at the clubhouse, tossing back brewskies and cleaning your clubs.”

  Mr. McGrath gave Cormac a playful slap to the back of his head and turned to Sean. “How’ve you been, son? You eating well over in Sri Lanka?”

  “Actually, it’s been Africa for the past few years. How about you? I hear your new boss is a real slave driver.”

  They chuckled over this and traded pleasantries for a while. After a few minutes, Mr. McGrath started to worry about his cannoli filling getting dry, and another burst of customers lined up at the counter. Cormac confirmed their plans for dinner, and Sean went on his way.

  As he walked back to Aunt Vivvy’s, Sean considered the day ahead. No plans whatsoever, he’d told Cormac, and nothing could be truer. It was a stark contrast to the constant activity at the hospital, and weirdly disconcerting. But the reliable impatience he’d always felt to get to the next place, the next incubator of suffering, was gone. If anything, he just felt weary. Suddenly Tierra del Fuego seemed very far away. Maybe the thing to do would be to stay in Belham for a couple of weeks and recharge. Summer in New England was beautiful, he seemed to remember. He would read books, mow the lawn, take naps. It would improve his back pain, too—more than staying in run-down hostels and riding third-world public buses, at any rate.

  It wasn’t much of a plan, but it was something, which was better than the nothingness he’d been feeling for so many months. And it was an answer to that nagging question of what he was doing here. He was resting up for the next adventure.

  CHAPTER 5

  That evening, Sean drove Aunt Vivvy’s Chevy Caprice to the address Cormac had written on a blank cake order form. It was not the same Caprice his friends had nicknamed Old Ironsides for its likeness in size and turning radius to the Revolutionary warship docked in Boston Harbor. That car had eventually been sent to its final resting place by Hugh, who had proven its destructibility with a series of newsworthy crashes.

  Aunt Vivvy had gone right out and bought another Chevy Caprice. Around that time, Sean had made a brief stopover for Hugh’s high school graduation. One night he’d accepted Hugh’s invitation to get high behind the shed. It had been about the only way Sean could manage to get his party-boy brother to spend time with him, and they had gotten into a gasping fit of hilarity over Aunt Vivvy’s buying another Caprice.

  “I mean why does she have to have a Caprice, for chrissake?” Hugh had chortled between tokes as they sat facing the woods with their backs against the shed. “She’s like the least capricious person on the planet.”

  “Maybe she’s secretly capricious, and we just don’t know it,” Sean had giggled.

  “Yeah, like she has this whole secret capricious life! Vivian Preston, woman of whimsy!” They had howled at the very thought.

  “She could be a spy,” said Sean, eyes watering with laughter. “But like a double agent because she’s so freaking capricious she keeps switching sides!”

  “No, wait!” Hugh could barely breathe he was laughing so hard. “A stripper!”

  The comment made no sense, but the sheer absurdity of it made them fall into each other, pounding on each other’s arms, convulsing with hilarity till their ribs ached.

  Good times with Hugh.

  Driving through the twilit town in this second Caprice, Sean felt his chest tighten. A little over a decade after the car’s purchase, Hugh had died at the age of thirty-two. A bunch of his friends came to the funeral well on their way to the level of inebriation they felt was a fitting tribute to a man who’d shared their wildest, happiest times—at least from what they could remember. And there had been Aunt Vivian and Deirdre and five-year-old Kevin, pulling at the neck of his button-down shirt as he stared uncertainly at the casket. And Sean, who’d never returned after that. Until now.

  * * *

  Cormac and his new bride lived in possibly the smallest house in Belham. As Sean pulled into the driveway, he wondered if it might have started out as a small outbuilding to the much larger house next door. A stable maybe, or a small barn for housing chickens. Sean remembered Cormac’s mention of it in a letter several years back, that it was perfect for a guy who lived by himself and spent all his waking hours at work.

  It appeared to have been painted recently, the tan clapboards perfectly chipless and the confetti-pink color of the trim not yet faded to a more respectable muted rose. Has to be the wife. Sean chuckled to himself as he walked up the flagstones to the front step.

  He had gone to the grocery store that afternoon to pick up a bottle of wine, but was quickly overwhelmed by all the choices. One was billed as “an ample yet balanced offering, rich with buttery, woody notes that cozy up just as nicely to mahi-mahi as to mixed grill.” It tasted like buttered wood? He wondered if he’d be able to master American culture and dialect as readily as he’d picked up so many others across the globe. Then his back started to throb and he gave up, snatching a pineapple from the produce section as he walked gingerly to the checkout. He now held the pineapple crooked in his arm like a football.

  Cormac opened the door grinning warmly and stood there for a second as if he didn’t know what to say. Sean had the sens
e of ­fast-forwarding through time, from tennis team and high school graduation through occasional get-togethers over burgers and beers, to this moment now when Cormac’s bachelorhood, like so many other things they’d had in common, had faded to memory. This was Cormac’s new life, this pink-trimmed former chicken coop, and he seemed completely nonplussed as to how to explain it to his old friend.

  “Pineapple?” said Sean, holding it out like an offering.

  Cormac’s smile was tinged with relief. “Love some,” he said, and took it from Sean with one hand, ushering him in with the other.

  The small front room had a woodstove—Sean assumed it was from before the wife had taken up residence—and a sofa and love seat with matching floral slipcovers—clearly from afterward. Cormac proceeded toward the back of the house, ducking his head under the low doorframe, and Sean followed. They came into a kitchen with painted cabinets and hammered wrought-iron pulls.

  “Barb’ll be down in a minute.” Cormac reached into the fridge and presented two bottles of Schlitz beer.

  “You’re still drinking this swill?” said Sean.

  “Course not—I went out and bought it in your honor!” Cormac popped the tops and handed one to Sean. They clinked them and took long gulps.

  “Yeah, still pretty bad,” said Sean.

  “Nice how some things don’t change.”

  They were starting to go through the names of their old friends—who’d moved away or married young or hit it big—when Barb came down. She was pretty, Sean thought. Tall and narrow, the kind of girl who was likely string-beany and overlooked in high school but had eventually softened and grown into herself by her thirties. She had long straight light-brown hair, nudged toward blondness by highlights, and a silver heart necklace and matching earrings studded with little pink gemstones. Watching them swing as she approached, Sean wondered how old she was. There was a sort of teenage quality about her.