The Shortest Way Home

by Juliette Fay

“What score? And how do you settle anything by proposing to another guy in public?”

  “Well . . .” Cormac shifted in his seat, considering how to respond. “Ricky was kind of . . . hard on him sometimes. I think Dougie just wanted to play a little joke to get him back.”

  Chrissy let out a derisive snort. “Psycho,” she muttered, and shook her head.

  She didn’t know, Sean wanted to tell Cormac. She had no idea Cavicchio was such an ass. But she knows now, so give her a break.

  Barb called them in for dinner. Sean and Chrissy sat shoulder to shoulder at the kitchen table, across from their hosts. When she moved her head, he could smell her shampoo. She was left-handed—a trait he’d never noticed before—and their arms brushed against each other constantly as they lifted forks to their mouths, a sensation that felt just short of foreplay.

  Chrissy led the conversations through dinner, with questions about Cormac’s Confectionary and how the baked-goods business was doing in a down economy; Sean’s next post, and whether he’d go to Haiti and what celebrities he might see there; Barb’s photography, what kind of camera she had, and what kind of camera she’d like to have someday.

  It wasn’t until the end of dinner that Sean realized how subdued Barb was. He’d expected her bubbly personality to mesh so happily with Chrissy’s. But tonight Barb was quiet. There were circles under her eyes—not the bluish, one-bad-night kind, but the brownish, chronic kind. It had only been about a month since he’d last seen her. He had a momentary urge to take her pulse.

  “How about kids?” Chrissy said. “I know you haven’t even been married a year yet, but at your age I’m sure you’ve considered it ­already.”

  Barb flinched. Cormac’s arm moved a fraction of an inch toward his wife, and Sean could tell that he’d just taken her hand under the table. “We’ll see what the good Lord brings,” he said with a tight smile.

  “Oh.” Chrissy licked a dab of mashed potato from her lip. “I didn’t realize you guys were religious. Which is great—I’m all for prayer and everything. But conception doesn’t always go smoothly late in life. I’ve had so many friends who’ve needed a bit of, you know, help. So don’t drag your feet if you think you might—”

  “Chrissy!” Calling her name was the only thing Sean could think of to make her stop talking. Barb’s chin had dropped lower and lower until it was practically on her chest, and Cormac looked as if he’d just taken an uppercut to the face. Chrissy had unwittingly hit a nerve, and Sean told himself it could happen to anyone. But how had she missed their reactions?

  “Hmm?” she said.

  “We haven’t told them about George.”

  She blinked at him, surprised by the subject change.

  “George?” said Cormac, exhaling a long breath. “What’s the deal with him?”

  “Her,” corrected Chrissy. “She’s female.”

  Sean and Chrissy described George’s training—“Kevin’s training,” Chrissy insisted—tag-teaming each other with details about the English Monarchy Scenario and the designation of Kevin as prime minister. “He’s probably the most ambivalent chief of state ever elected,” Sean quipped, and Barb actually laughed.

  “So how’d you learn so much about dog training?” Cormac asked, apparently happy to keep the conversation away from any further land mines.

  “First of all,” said Chrissy, “I consider it people training. Dogs have excellent instincts. It’s people that mess them up. And ­secondly . . .” A shy little smile played around her mouth. “I don’t know . . . I’ve just always felt so connected to animals, ever since I was a kid. They’re so easy to deal with compared to people. And they can read me really easily. I think it’s because I’m an old soul. Animals can see what’s deep inside us, and they feel comfortable with me.”

  Cormac nodded and smiled. Barb let out a little cough into her hand.

  After dessert, Barb told them she had an early class. “I’m so sorry,” she said, “I hope you won’t mind if I sneak upstairs. But don’t let me spoil the party—you guys stay.”

  “Stay,” echoed Cormac. But Sean could tell he was tired. He wondered how their appointment had gone.

  “Yeah,” Sean said, “and you’re getting up to go to work at—what? Five A.M.?”

  Cormac grinned and shrugged. “Hey,” he said. “I almost forgot. I told my father about your lawn mower. He’ll be over tomorrow morning.”

  “You sure you can spare him?” Sean had borrowed a neighbor’s mower a couple of times to keep the lawn from turning into a meadow.

  “Trust me,” said Cormac with a smirk. “I’m sure.”

  They said their good-byes, and Cormac gave Sean an extra little slap on the back.

  * * *

  It had started to rain, and as Sean drove Chrissy across Belham and into Weston, the wind picked up and water buffeted the old car from all sides. It gave Sean a weirdly claustrophobic feeling, as if he were trapped somewhere unpleasant instead of with the object of all his adolescent yearnings.

  “That was so much fun,” she was saying. “What a nice couple. Isn’t it the best feeling—when you find another couple you both like to be with?”

  Sean, of course, had absolutely no idea. Never having been part of a couple himself, he’d never considered the benefits of finding some other likable pair to hang out with. It was foreign and vaguely disconcerting to hear her suddenly referring to them as some sort of matched set—like those little Dutch salt and pepper shakers, slight differences in the intricate blue design the only indication that they didn’t contain exactly the same spice.

  “Um . . .” he said, pulling into her driveway. He put the car in park but didn’t turn the motor off.

  She studied him, and he could see uncertainty grow in her gaze like blood leaking into a perfectly clean bandage. Chrissy ­uncertain—that, too, was completely foreign.

  “Is something wrong?” she asked.

  “No,” he insisted, shaking his head innocently, his lie mirrored by her disbelief. But for once that evening, she stayed quiet, and her unexpected lack of commentary created a sort of vacuum in the confines of the car that ultimately sucked the truth out of him. “I should tell you . . . in case we see them again. . . . You should probably know they’re having fertility problems. It’s kind of a sore subject.”

  Chrissy’s hand went up to her mouth, brows furrowed with regret. Her hand came down and gripped his forearm. “I feel terrible.”

  “You had no way of knowing.” Sean patted her hand. They murmured about this for a few minutes—Chrissy’s regret, Sean reassuring her, what good parents Cormac and Barb would be. As they did, their physical contact increased, and Sean could feel his distaste for her earlier behavior leaching out of him. She leaned slightly toward him, which accentuated her cleavage. Her cleavage was breathtaking, for the love of God! She was looking into his eyes and then he saw her gaze drop for the briefest second to his mouth, and all the bells in his head starting clanging dive, dive, and he was kissing her.

  Her lips were as warm and lush as he’d always imagined they’d be—he’d imagined it so many times in his adolescence, it was slightly startling to feel his old thoughts morphing into real life like some sort of science fiction movie. He slid his hand up her bare arm, in part to reassure himself that she was real and not just a set of fantasized lips. She made the slightest little breathy sound in the back of her throat, and he almost laughed, thinking there should be a caption over his head that read Kissing Chrissy Stillman.

  After a few minutes, he pulled back to look at her. Her aggressively red lipstick was smeary, making her appear slightly clownish. But her eyes looked satisfied, and that was good enough for him. He’d kissed her—finally, finally!—and she’d enjoyed it. They said good night and talked vaguely about getting together soon, and as he watched her glide up the paving stone driveway to her house
, he couldn’t help but giggle like an idiot.

  CHAPTER 21

  Charlie McGrath’s hands seemed to be made for tools. Despite the fact that he’d quit his job at the town dump to work in his son’s bakery more than a year ago, his hands were still callused. Sean wondered idly if he’d been born that way. George had growled at the older man when he’d arrived, but Kevin gave her the Chtch! sound, and the dog slunk back to the shade of the red maple to maintain her surveillance of the situation.

  “See, ya got all this crap in the carburetor here,” Mr. McGrath told Kevin when the dismembered mower lay in pieces by the shed.

  Kevin blinked and nodded. Living with women, Sean suspected he wasn’t used to hearing adults use coarse language as easily as if they were ordering lunch.

  “Goddamned thing’s full of gunk.” Mr. McGrath shook his head and eyed Sean.

  “Don’t look at me, I just got here.” Sean laughed.

  Mr. McGrath chuckled. “Yeah, well, wherever you’re off to next, make sure you get home to maintain your gear occasionally, would ya?”

  Sean made a mental note to try to convince Aunt Vivvy to go back to her lawn service.

  He and Kevin watched Mr. McGrath clean the crap out of the goddamned carburetor and reassemble the machine. The older man had a gravelly voice and a range of expletives that belied his tenderness. Sean remembered how kind Mr. McGrath had been to him as his father made less and less of an effort to get home. “Door’s always open,” he would growl at Sean, “even for a young scalawag like you.”

  In fact, Mr. McGrath often reminded him of his father. They were both blue-collar guys, stocky, and Irish, though the difference in their heights had to be close to a foot. Mr. McGrath didn’t speak with a brogue, but he had a strong Boston accent, the brogue’s descendant. Both men valued their toughness. It wouldn’t do to be caught getting sentimental. And yet Sean knew them both to shed a private tear over the troubles of others.

  Martin Doran had lost the privacy of his tears, though. Gritting his teeth in a vain effort to control himself, he would weep in church after his wife died, head bowed, shoulders shaking. Sean remembered how embarrassed he’d felt.

  “Well, don’t just stand there,” Mr. McGrath told Kevin. “Hand me that wrench.” Kevin jumped up to retrieve the tool resting in the grass where the older man had tossed it. “There’s a good boy.” He grabbed the wrench with one hand and tousled Kevin’s hair with the other. Kevin appeared slightly confused by these contradictory gestures, but it didn’t keep him from hovering over Mr. McGrath’s battle-scarred hands as they performed mechanical CPR on the mower.

  “And what are you doing with yourself when you’re not lollygagging around, letting others do your work for you?” Mr. McGrath demanded of Kevin.

  “Uh . . .” Kevin squinted uncertainly at Sean for a moment. “Well, I’m going to Boy Scout camp in a week.”

  “Boy Scout camp!” Mr. McGrath exclaimed, and it was hard to know if it was with disgust or approval until he went on to say, “I was a Boy Scout!”

  “You were? Are you an Eagle?”

  “Nah, I only made it to Star, and then I started gettin’ interested in girls.” He landed a beefy hand on Kevin’s shoulder. “Take my advice, don’t let some goddamned silly thing get in your path. I’m seventy-four years old, and to this day I regret not making Eagle.”

  * * *

  After Mr. McGrath left, Kevin was to mow the lawn. But he went into the shed first and came out wearing a set of old headphones, big clonking things the size of cinnamon buns, with the curling cord dangling down his back.

  “Where’d you get those?” asked Sean.

  “My dad.”

  It still startled Sean sometimes to hear Kevin refer to Hugh this way. The happy-go-lucky rascal Sean had known, and the man who had brought Kevin into the world and cared for him, were almost two different people in his mind.

  Kevin must have noticed Sean’s discomposure. “They’re not ­supposed to be for mowing,” he said quickly. “They went to a tape player he had. And when everything got too”—Kevin grimaced and wiggled his hands around—“he’d put them on me and play this really quiet music.”

  “Oh.” Sean nodded, as if the headphones had been the question all along. “Where’s the tape player?”

  “It broke and Auntie Vivvy threw it away. She said I wore it out. But I grabbed the headphones before she went to the dump—they still keep the sound out even if they’re not attached to anything.” He reached down and pulled the cord on the mower and the engine let out its introductory roar before settling into an aggravated growl. Kevin flinched at the noise. Then he let go of the brake and started across the lawn.

  A wave of sadness washed over Sean as he watched the boy, who was not much bigger than the mower he was attempting to control. It surprised him, the intensity of the sorrow seeming to far outweigh the visual. He generally only felt like this when he lost a patient he’d grown particularly fond of.

  Viv’s getting that lawn service if I have to pay for it myself, he thought, and went into the house to confront her.

  She was in the den, papers scattered across the burled maple desk like the detritus of a parade. She looked up when Sean came in, her eyes ablaze with fury. “I can’t do it,” she said tightly. “I can’t remember what I’ve done, what’s been paid . . . any of it.”

  His anger toward her, the image of the broken tape recorder and the boy with the beastlike mower, receded from the foreground of his mind. “Any of it?”

  She remained silent, which was as good as shouting the answer.

  “I’ll go through it with you,” he offered. “Some of it might look familiar if we go slowly.”

  Her arm came out and with a sudden jerk she swatted the bills away from her, several of them cascading to the floor. He’d never seen her do anything so childish.

  Loss of impulse control, he thought. Sudden outbursts. Instinctively he put a hand on her shoulder, as he’d done so many times with melting-down patients. It said, You are not alone and You are not allowed to go ballistic in one efficient gesture.

  He half expected her to shrug away his touch with a sharp, imperious comment. That was the Vivian Preston he knew. Instead she put her hands to her face and wept. The only thing that had ever worried Sean more was seeing his father do the same thing.

  Holy shit, he thought. We are screwed.

  CHAPTER 22

  He brought her into the kitchen, leaving the papers littered across the den, and made her a cup of tea. He thought about putting a splash of whiskey in it to calm her, but he knew she would taste it and get even angrier. Sean was hard-pressed to know how to manage her—she’d never been one to tolerate managing. But then she’d never needed it before.

  Her hand trembled slightly as she brought the teacup toward her mouth. “Stop examining me,” she murmured, and took a sip.

  He turned his gaze down to his own mug. “I really wish you’d see a doctor.”

  “If wishes were horses, beggars would ride.”

  He let out a laugh despite himself. She had a comeback for everything, and yet she couldn’t do her damned bills. “Okay, I’m going to make suggestions and you’re going to shoot them down, but I can’t not make them.”

  “Ever the responsible medical professional.”

  He let out an exasperated sigh. “Have you always been this ­difficult?”

  It was obviously a rhetorical question, but it stopped her for a moment, and she seemed to consider it. Finally she said, “No, I don’t believe so. I don’t like this . . . confusion. Some people seem to live their whole lives in a state of befuddlement. But it makes me irritable.” She glanced at him briefly. “More so than usual.”

  Of course it did, especially since she’d had so little to hang on to in life other than her intelligence and grit. Sean dug a little deeper for p
atience. “It could be caused by an imbalance of some kind, in which case it’s reversible.”

  “That’s what Simon hoped.”

  “Dr. Krantz? Did he run any blood work?”

  “He did. He died two weeks later. Lovely man.”

  “Did he find anything?”

  “Not a thing. It’s likely Alzheimer’s or some similarly ruinous cousin thereof. Certainly not Huntington’s. There’s no known case of onset at my age. But whatever it is, there’s no cure.”

  “Auntie, there are new drugs now that can slow the process.”

  “Sometimes they can, sometimes they can’t.”

  “For the love of God, won’t you at least try?”

  She put her teacup down and steadied her gaze at him for the first time that afternoon. There was a gentleness to it that bordered on sympathetic. Sean had no idea of what to expect.

  “Did you have a plan?” she asked simply. “If the symptoms came?”

  “A plan . . . you mean . . .” he stammered.

  “Suicide. Were you planning to kill yourself? Or does your faith preclude that option?”

  Catholic doctrine was pretty clear. Suicides are said to share no reunion with their loved ones in the afterlife, no communion with Jesus or the saints. They drift alone for eternity. But Sean could never buy the idea that a loving God would actually cut loose the most desperate of his children. He suddenly felt so weary. “Tierra del Fuego,” he said. “I was going to do it there.”

  “Ah,” she nodded approvingly. “Parts unknown. Very fitting.”

  “You?” he asked.

  “When I was at risk for Huntington’s, I always thought I would have a nibble at some garden chemicals under the red maple.”

  “Also fitting.”

  “Yes, but then all of you children came here to live, and I couldn’t very well let you find me foaming at the mouth in the backyard. I never did devise a satisfactory alternative. But as the years passed, it became less and less likely I’d need one.”