The Shortest Way Home

by Juliette Fay

  Chrissy Stillman.

  She handed him a five and gave a tiny flick of her wrist to indicate that the change could go in the tip jar, College Tuition/Harley Fund scrawled on it. She moved to the Pick Up counter.

  “Chrissy?” he said quietly, unsure if he really wanted her to hear him.

  She looked up, tilted her head slightly to one side.

  “Sean,” he murmured. “Sean Doran.”

  “Oh, my God, Sean!” she called out, her long legs quickly striding back to the Order counter. “Wow! How are you? Where’ve you been? It’s been like—what?—over twenty years!”

  “Yeah, I know, long time. I’ve been doing overseas work.”

  “And now you’re . . .” She wiggled her tan fingers toward the ­register.

  “Oh, no,” he said quickly. “No, I’m not . . . I’m just here for a few weeks. Cormac needed a little help so I’m just . . . helping.”

  “That is terrific. Well, hey! We have to get together! I want to hear all about what you’ve been doing overseas.”

  Sean’s head started to spin just a little. “Sure, that’d be great.”

  “What’s your cell?” She whipped a phone out of her small white purse and began tapping at the screen. “Sean Doran,” she muttered. “Okay, shoot!”

  “Uh, actually, I don’t . . . lots of places I’ve worked don’t exactly have cell service. I’ll give you my home number.” He blanked on it for a second, recovered, and recited the number.

  “Shoot, shoot, shoot,” she said. “I’m late for yoga. But I will definitely call you! I can’t believe it—Sean Doran!” She sailed back to Pick Up for her latte. Suddenly her face lost its exuberance. “This is supposed to be iced,” she told Tree. The girl reached for the cup, cutting her eyes toward Sean to indicate the source of the mistake. “Oh, never mind,” said Chrissy, grabbing the cup. She shone a good-sport smile at Sean. “I’ll just crank up the AC!”

  * * *

  Later, he took a good bit of razzing from Cormac about it, as he knew he would. He didn’t expect Tree to chime in, though. “Shoulda seen it, Cormac,” she smirked. “He was like . . .” She wiggled her body like a happy puppy. “Then he was like . . .” She strutted a few steps, nodding her head smugly. “And then he screwed up the next three orders.” Apparently Tree’s language processing skills had kicked in.

  He walked home that afternoon, back throbbing slightly, but with a silly grin he couldn’t seem to get rid of. Chrissy Stillman. The unattainable Holy Grail of his teen years. She had his number. She was going to call.

  Sean hadn’t been home ten minutes when Kevin banged through the back door with a look of undiluted terror on his face. The dog jumped up and began barking homicidally, and Aunt Vivvy dropped her plate of saltine crackers. Sean turned so quickly to see what the commotion was that his back twanged into spasm and he had to hang on to the counter to keep from falling.

  “I . . .” Kevin panted, “. . . there was . . .”

  “For goodness sake, Hugh,” Aunt Vivvy chastised, as the dog continued to bark. “Stop this foolishness! Are you in your right mind? Come here and let me look at you.”

  Kevin’s terror turned to confusion, as his eyes flicked from his irate aunt to her irate dog.

  With sirens of pain wailing up and down his spine, Sean could barely process the scene. “Jesus! Stop your damned barking!” he yelled at the dog, who downgraded her outbursts to an aggravated growl. “Get me a chair,” he said, and Kevin slid a kitchen chair over to Sean, who lowered himself gingerly onto it. “What is going on here?” he demanded.

  “I was in the woods . . .” Kevin said tremulously. He glanced to Aunt Vivvy, who stood looking slightly dazed, the crackers and sandwich plate strewn across the floor at her feet.

  “Auntie Vivvy,” murmured Sean. “Sit down. We’ll pick that up in a minute.” The older woman moved obediently to a chair. He turned his gaze back to Kevin and tried to focus on the boy, despite the blistering pain in his back.

  “I . . . I was up by the big log. I made a . . . a fort up there a couple of weeks ago. But when I went in, there was . . . stuff in it. Not my stuff. And then some kids came . . . older.” His chin started to tremble. “They chased me.” He blinked furiously but a tear spilled down his cheek anyway. He quickly wiped it against the shoulder of his T-shirt.

  “Ah, Kevin,” Sean sighed. “Maybe you shouldn’t spend so much time up there alone.”

  “What’m I supposed to do, then?”

  Sean didn’t know. He could barely form coherent thoughts. Kevin trudged out of the room—Sean could hear him clomp up the stairs and close a door. “Auntie,” he said after a moment. “We need to do something about the dog. She can’t go into attack mode every time one of us walks into the room.”

  Aunt Vivian leveled a clear-eyed gaze at him. “George is protective,” she said. “It is a laudable trait, one that is grievously lacking in the world, and it is not a feature that can be surgically removed like some sort of mole or polyp.” She rose and left the room, the dog trotting behind at her slippered heels.

  Sean sat there with his back muscles pulsating as if to a crazed rumba. He wished he’d asked someone to get him some ibuprofen before they’d stormed out. And what was that about Aunt Vivvy demanding to see if Kevin was “in his right mind”? Sean pondered this for a moment. Had she actually called him Hugh?

  His brain was too busy sounding an alarm about his back to puzzle it out at the moment. He needed to be flat, so he slid off the chair and onto the floor, vowing to carry ibuprofen tablets in his pocket from now on. The spilled saltines lay inches away from his face and looked like delicate little rafts in the churning waters of the pitted linoleum.

  * * *

  Sean was able to accomplish two things the next morning. The first was to confirm that there were no summer camps that fit into the union of subsets that included Kevin’s willingness to attend, the camp’s having space for him, and being located within a twenty-mile radius of Belham. Kevin flatly refused to go to overnight camp. “What if I don’t like it? What am I supposed to do—leave like a homesick baby?”

  Comments from Sean like “It’ll be an adventure!” and “You’ll make some great new friends!” and “This one has horses, a driving range, skeet shooting, and a gourmet selection of desserts after every meal!” held no sway.

  “Besides,” Kevin muttered about that last one, “it costs six thousand dollars for two weeks.”

  He was willing to consider some nature-oriented day camps, but they had no openings. There were a couple of sports camps with available spots, but Kevin wasn’t interested. Then Sean found one that looked perfect.

  “I went there last summer,” said Kevin. “They never empty the trash cans. By the end of the week, there’s stinky milk cartons and baloney sandwiches falling out and bees swarming all over. And the counselors are mean.”

  They’d spent three hours on Deirdre’s laptop and making phone calls—all for nothing. Kevin took a book on Denali National Park, his stainless steel water bottle, and a Clif Bar out to the backyard. Sean popped another quartet of ibuprofen tablets and called Tree of Life Spa. Miraculously, Rebecca had an opening at four o’clock.

  He arrived at ten to four with the long-odds hope that she had finished early with the previous client and he’d get a few extra minutes. Cleopatra the receptionist disabused him of that fantasy in record time. In fact she claimed Rebecca wasn’t available at all. “You wanted Missy last time,” she said. “Now you can have her.”

  “Why’s Rebecca suddenly unavailable?” Sean said, barely able to keep the edge out of his tone. “I just called a couple of hours ago.”

  “Yeah, um . . .” Cleopatra shook her head as if searching for an excuse. “Miscommunication? Missy will be ready for you in a few minutes.”

  “When is Rebecca available?”
<
br />   “She’s pretty booked up.”

  “Okay, tell you what,” he said, irritation rising like high tide under a full moon. “Why don’t you just give me Rebecca’s first available ­appointment—whenever that is. Today, tomorrow, next week. I’ll take it.”

  Cleopatra gave a long-suffering sigh, got up, and went down the hallway toward the massage rooms. Sean sat in the little waiting area, which consisted of two vinyl chairs and a tall dieffenbachia plant. He touched the leaves. Fake. No surprise.

  He snorted in annoyance. He did not want the wailing, pajama-clad Missy to attempt—and fail, he was certain!—to corral his pain into manageable chunks. He wanted Rebecca. And there was a little part of his brain telling him he sounded like a child refusing to drink out of the blue cup because he’d irrationally determined the red cup to be somehow superior. But it had been a hell of a twenty-four hours, and he wanted what he wanted. It was so unlike him, he realized. He wasn’t used to caring the least bit whether he got the blue, the red, or any cup at all. It was exhausting, having preferences like this.

  An older woman came in and sat down. “Getting a massage?” she asked congenially.

  Maybe, he thought. It’s either that or throw a head-banging hissy fit.

  He smiled back politely. “Yes,” he said. “You?”

  She nodded. “My first one.”

  “Who’s it with?” he asked.

  “Oh, whoever they give me, I suppose. I’ve never been here before. My daughter gave me a gift certificate for my birthday and . . .” She kept talking, but Sean stopped listening.

  “Whoever they give me”? he thought. I’ll tell you who they’re giving you—Wailing Pajama Girl, that’s who.

  Cleopatra returned and gave him a momentary glare. “Rebecca is now available in room three,” she said, with a tone that implied, Happy now, you big baby?

  “I’m so grateful.” He smiled at her, knowing she’d take it to be sarcastic whether he meant it that way or not. Which he most certainly did.

  CHAPTER 11

  When he walked into room three, a woman stood there with her arms folded across her chest. Her face was calm, framed in layers of wavy dark hair that fell to her shoulders, but also somewhat surprised-looking. Actually one half seemed calm, the other surprised. Her misaligned right eye was slightly bigger than the other, and the cheekbone on the right was also more pronounced than its mate on the opposite side. The asymmetry made it hard to judge her expression.

  “Hi, Sean,” she said quietly. “How’ve you been?”

  “Becky? Jesus, Becky Feingold!” He went forward to give her a hug, which she received warmly, if a little awkwardly, too. “You’re Rebecca now!”

  “Yeah.” She gave a little smiling shrug. “It’s more adult than Becky.”

  “Wow,” he said stupidly, still trying to assemble the previously unconnected pieces of this puzzle. Rebecca the All-Powerful Pain Tamer was really little Becky Feingold, his pal from high school. They’d hung out quite a bit back then, though it was pretty much an established fact that she’d had a widely known secret crush on him since junior high. She’d never made a bid for his affection, though, and after a while he’d forgotten about it, the crush becoming just another tree in the social forest, and not a terribly tall one at that. She was a nice girl, a good listener, and had a sense of humor that was all the more hilarious for its selective use. The congenital facial deformity had created a barrier between her and many of her classmates. She and Sean both felt an outsiderness that had served to strengthen their friendship.

  “Okay,” she said, taking a little breath. “You’re probably wondering why I didn’t say anything before, and the whole deal with today’s appointment and everything.” She crossed her arms again. “I was just . . . caught off guard the last time, when you turned over and it was . . . you. And you were in a deep state, a really healing place—I could feel everything loosening up and starting to hum at the right frequency again. I didn’t want to disturb that. You really needed it.”

  “Yeah, no kidding,” he said. “It was amazing. I felt like a new man.” He chuckled. “Well, new—I suppose that’s a relative term once you’re past forty, right? But better than I’ve felt in months. Way better.”

  A look flitted across her face—pride, satisfaction, gratitude—he couldn’t tell which. Maybe a mixture of all three. But then her smile faded. “Sean,” she said. “There’s another reason I didn’t say anything, and I didn’t want to treat you again.”

  What? he thought. What’s wrong?

  She seemed to be forcing herself to look at him. “Back in high school you told me . . . you said you’d be dead by now. Were you lying? Was it some sort of weird joke you were playing? Because if it was . . .” Her mouth went tight, and she looked away. “Well, that’s just unbelievably sick, and I can’t expose myself to that kind of toxic—”

  “No!” he said quickly. “God no, I would never joke about . . . Jesus, no. I just . . . I thought I had it. I was sure of it. Growing up ­everyone always told me I was just like my mother. I looked like her, sounded like her. My father used to say ‘The image of Lila.’ He used to mutter that at me all the time.”

  Sean stared at Becky, remembering now the times they’d hung out in her basement, and she’d fiddle around on her guitar and he’d just . . . talk. Or at the end of a party, the two of them often the only ones not making out with some random classmate, her driving him home in her beat-to-hell Plymouth Horizon. They’d idle in his driveway for an hour or two before he went in to face the music of curfew breakage and Aunt Vivvy’s wrath. He vaguely remembered talking about Huntington’s. What a shock it must have been for her to see him after all those years—naked, no less—when she assumed he’d gone to his grave.

  “Swear to God, Beck,” he said. “It was no joke.”

  Her expression softened. “So you don’t have it?”

  “Well,” he said, “I don’t have symptoms. It could still surface, I suppose, but it’s unlikely. Most people start showing signs by their early forties. My mother was thirty-three.”

  “But there’s a test now.”

  “Yeah.” He scratched his arm, looked around the room. Why was it always so hard to explain to people? “I didn’t take it. I don’t want to know.”

  “But you thought you already knew.”

  “Trust me, I’ve had this conversation before,” he said. “It just doesn’t make a whole lot of sense to people who haven’t faced knowing for sure if they’re in for a long, slow death.”

  “Okay,” she said, not as if she understood, but with a willingness to be all right with not understanding.

  “Becky Feingold.” He shook his head in wonder.

  “Yep,” she said with the faintest hint of resignation. “It’s me.”

  * * *

  He did get his massage after all. It was a little strange at first to be lying naked with nothing but a thin sheet over his butt while little Becky Feingold worked her magical fingers into the angry hard places across his shoulders and down his spine. But it wasn’t long before high-school-Becky seemed to recede into the background. With his eyes closed and his body practically levitating in relief, he could listen to her melodic voice—a trait he’d never noticed in their teen years—and believe in this new person, Rebecca the Pain Tamer.

  “How’s your family?” she asked.

  With his face in the doughnut, he noticed she wore clogs now. Blue ones. He told her about Deirdre working at Carey’s Diner, never having left home. “Oh, and she’s an actress now.”

  He heard a little chuckle. “She was only about seven or eight the last time I saw her, but she seemed pretty dramatic, even then. Didn’t she keep getting into trouble for wearing your aunt’s clothes as dress-ups?”

  “I forgot about that! You have a good memory.”

  She dug a little harde
r into a spot just above his hip bone. “What about your brother—the one who sank that guy’s boat in Lake Pequot.” The feel of her thumb pressing into a knob of molten pain made him jerk reflexively. “Sorry,” she murmured, backing off.

  “Yeah, Hugh.” Sean had occasionally told people about his brother’s death before, of course. But he’d never had to tell anyone who’d actually known Hugh. “He died six years ago.”

  Her hands stopped moving. “Oh God, Sean,” she whispered. “I’m so sorry. I know how much you loved him.”

  His throat tightened, and at first he didn’t know why. Hugh had been gone a long time, and Sean hadn’t gotten emotional about it in years. How much I loved him. He’d almost forgotten.

  After a moment she asked, “Was it Huntington’s?”

  Sean cleared his throat, willed himself to relax. “No,” he said. “Pneumonia.”

  “Terrible,” she murmured. Her hands began to move slowly, carefully across his hips. “You don’t often hear about young people dying of pneumonia these days.”

  “Well, Hugh had a way of burning the candle at both ends. Apparently by the time he got around to having it checked, it was so bad they couldn’t save him.” Sean felt the familiar swell of anger when he told this detail. Couldn’t Hugh have exercised a little caution for once in his life?

  “He had a son,” Sean added quickly, to move the conversation away from death and lost chances. “Kevin. He’s eleven.”

  “Does he live nearby?”

  “Actually he lives with Deirdre and my aunt—and at the moment, me. His mother was . . . well, what’s a nice word for it? A free spirit, I guess. She left when Kevin was two. The state tried to find her when Hugh died, but they never did, so they gave guardianship to my aunt.”