The Shortest Way Home

by Juliette Fay

  Sean shrugged. He did not particularly care to talk about the “sweet side” of his traitorous friend at the moment.

  “And Janie’s just how I remember her,” Rebecca went on, “nice, but a little edgy.”

  “Yeah, what was that weird look you two gave me when I told you about Kevin almost drowning? It was like in stereo.”

  “Um . . . I don’t know if Janie was thinking the same thing . . .”

  “It certainly looked like it.”

  “Well, I don’t know. It wasn’t really what you were saying, but how you were saying it.”

  “How was I saying it?”

  “You just sounded very . . .” She hesitated. “Parental.”

  This was exactly not what he’d come here to talk about. It was what he’d come here to avoid. And here she was sitting in her ratty pajamas, hitting the sore spot.

  “This is about getting tested, isn’t it?” he said, knowing he was being irrational, but not able to stop himself, now that his building agitation had finally been unleashed.

  “What?” Her eyes were wide with concern. “I never said anything about—”

  “No, but the other night you implied it—that I’m like his parent now, so I should suddenly jump to do something I’ve always been completely against doing.”

  “Sean, that is not what I—”

  “You know what I think? I think all this concern for Kevin is really self-interest. You want me to get tested for you.”

  For a moment she looked as if he’d slapped her, and somewhere down deep he knew that in a sense he had, and the resulting guilt made him even angrier. But then her eyes lit in just the same way Aunt Vivvy’s did, and he realized he’d started a much bigger fight than he’d intended.

  “Do I want you to get tested?” she said, her voice low but furious. “Of course I do. I can’t put it out of my mind like you do. And how could I not want to know what I’m in for? Because whether we’re together or not, Sean, if you have Huntington’s, I’ll be devastated.”

  “I could get hit by a bus and the outcome’s the same.”

  “Yes,” she said, nodding hard. “That would devastate me, too. Because that’s what it means to live in the world, Sean—not on the edge of it.” She crossed her arms. “And what if I get hit by a bus? A change of scenery won’t help. The fact is, it never really helped. It just gave you a way to hide from yourself.”

  “Oh, my God, you’re lecturing me about hiding? You’ve been peeking out from behind your parents your whole life. You’re forty-three freaking years old and I practically needed a crowbar to get you to separate!”

  “Okay,” she said, standing up. “Time for you to go.”

  “You’re kicking me out. What—is my energy destabilizing you?”

  “Your energy is practically radioactive right now, and I want it—and you—out of here.”

  “Fine.” In three long strides he was at the door. “But this conversation is not over.”

  “You’re damn straight it’s not over.” She twisted the knob and held the door wide. “We’ll finish it when you can stop being such a jackass. And next time? Call first.”

  CHAPTER 55

  Sean went to school early on Tuesday morning to get his mind off the previous night and found Penny with a shopping bag full of clothes. “Running away from home?” he teased.

  The bag belonged to an eighth grader. “His father left, and he says his mom’s sad and doesn’t get out of bed much. He and his older sister are managing, but the washing machine broke, and he was starting to smell bad. The other kids were calling him ‘Stink Bomb.’ ”

  “So you’re doing his laundry here?” Sean was shocked. Nurses didn’t do laundry.

  “There’s a washer and dryer in the janitor’s closet. We’re working on getting a new machine donated to the family, but until then—”

  “Shouldn’t you call Social Services?”

  “I think guidance made a call. But DCF has much bigger fish to fry. The kids are holding it together and they don’t want to leave her, so it’s pretty low priority.”

  “Any word on Davis?”

  She sighed. “That could take weeks to get sorted out. We have to give the meds until the order changes, okay? So please don’t let him off the hook again, or it’s my neck on the block.”

  He took the bag from her and said, “Point me to the janitor’s closet.”

  “You don’t have to do that.”

  He patted her shoulder. “Least I can do for the patron saint of Belham Middle School.”

  The day brought its usual host of cuts, lumps, and fevers, and an impressive parade of weekend-related maladies: several third-degree sunburns with blisters popping and oozing, a handful of sports-­related wounds that required dressing changes, and nine cases of poison ivy. Sean’s fingernails turned pink from all the calamine. It was fairly monotonous, but Sean found he liked joking with the kids, keeping them calm as he pulled out a particularly deep splinter or tugged at a stuck wound dressing. He was starting to know the frequent flyers on sight.

  Amber came in, and it was so busy Sean didn’t even bother to question her. She went to her usual bed by the door. Later he realized she’d signed herself out and left without a word.

  Davis came in at lunchtime. “Please don’t make me take it,” he said.

  “Have to, pal. I got in trouble for letting you off last time.”

  “I’ll be good,” he pleaded. “I’ll stay in my seat the whole—or at least most of the time.”

  “If you take it, I’ll give you a special prize.”

  Davis rolled his eyes. “What, like a sticker? Been there, done that, torched the chart.”

  Sean handed him a CD. “A friend of mine made it. It’s for ­meditating—”

  “I told you I can’t—”

  “It’s guided meditation. You listen to words. She has a really nice voice.” He thought of Rebecca’s voice, the anger in it last night, and guilt pinched at him.

  “It’s a girl?” Davis looked at the CD. “Is she cute?”

  “She’s beautiful.”

  Davis gave him a sly-dog smile. “Way to go, Mr. D.”

  He was long gone by the time Sean realized he was still holding the pill.

  When Penny came back, Sean told her what happened. “I’m like the loser nurse,” he said. “Seriously, why did you hire me?”

  “To be honest,” she said, “you were the only one who applied.”

  * * *

  The day got worse from there. When he got home, he heard the dog barking upstairs and ran up to see if Aunt Vivvy was okay. When he opened her bedroom door, the dog lunged out and down the stairs. Aunt Vivvy was not in her room, or anywhere else in the house. Sean took George and searched the neighborhood, knocking on doors, but no one had seen her, so he went home and called the police. He heard Kevin crying in his room, but assumed it was just the usual. When Sean went out again to search the woods behind the house, George wouldn’t go. She barked at Kevin’s door until Kevin let her in, and Sean had to go on his own.

  As he trudged through the woods, the sick feeling in his gut rose up into his chest. Aunt Vivvy was stubborn and hard-hearted and . . . well, stubborn. But no one deserved an end like this. She would hate it more than anyone, he realized. It was so undignified.

  Jesus, Viv, where the hell are you? And he found himself praying for Hugh’s help.

  When he circled back to the house, Kevin was still up in his room, and Sean decided to look in on him. “Whoa!” he said. “How in the world did that happen?”

  Kevin’s eye was purple and swollen shut. “In gym,” he whimpered. “Last period.”

  Sean went down to the kitchen and wrapped some ice in a paper towel and went back up. “What happened?” he said, laying the ice pack against the eye.


  They had been playing dodgeball and Keri Franzenburg, “who’s about nine feet tall,” elbowed him in the face. “I hate dodgeball,” he cried. “It’s such a stupid game.”

  That special ed evaluation can’t come soon enough, thought Sean. “Why didn’t you come to me?”

  “Because some of the guys in the locker room were calling me baby, and why didn’t I just go cry to my uncle. And then they started saying that you must be stupid because you’re not a doctor, and you probably like to look at naked little girls, or something.”

  Sean’s eyebrows went up. “Wow,” he said. “Those kids are jerks. Who was it?”

  “I’m not telling you!”

  The doorbell rang and Sean went to answer it. Officer Dougie Shaw was standing there with Aunt Vivvy, who was clearly so angry she practically had steam coming out of her ears.

  “Thank God!” said Sean. “Where’ve you been?!”

  Officer Dougie walked her into the living room and they all sat down on the couch. “I was in the cemetery,” she said, biting at every word. “I wasn’t aware there had been an ordinance passed against visiting graves.”

  Dougie smiled. “She did not come along quietly . . . but we’ll spare her the jail time.”

  “I would like to lie down,” she spat out. “I have had a very trying ordeal.”

  Sean helped her upstairs and noticed a piece of paper gripped in her hand. George bounded out to greet her and then stood in the hallway whining, looking from Kevin’s room to Aunt Vivvy’s. “Go on,” Kevin called, and the dog ran in behind her before the door shut.

  Sean went back downstairs. “Jesus, Dougie,” he breathed.

  “You got your hands full,” he said. “Alzheimer’s? It can’t be Huntington’s this late in life, right?”

  “You know about that?”

  “Sure. Hugh told me.”

  “You were friends?”

  “Well . . .” Dougie chuckled. “Your brother was ‘known to the police,’ as they say. But once Kevin’s mother blew town, he pretty much stopped partying and buckled down. I used to come by and check up on him, and we’d get talking.”

  “What did he tell you?”

  “All kinds of stuff. He was real worried about Kevin and how everything bothered him. He did a lot of reading up on it. The pediatrician was no help—just kept telling him Kevin would grow out of it. Hugh always blamed the girl, you know, for all the drugs she did when she was pregnant. But then he was doing them, too, so he felt bad about that.”

  “The last time I saw you, you said something about him being such a good dad, and that’s why the pneumonia got him.”

  Dougie shook his head. “Terrible, really. Kevin had it first, and it was so bad Hugh was worried he’d lose him. He was so little. And even when he turned the corner, he didn’t want Hugh to leave the room. So Hugh stayed and just kept getting sicker. Your aunt hounded him to see a doctor, but you know, whatever she said, Hugh would do the opposite. That part of him never changed. Finally he collapsed and she called the ambulance. I was on duty that night, and it killed me to see him like that. Such a damned shame.”

  The two men stood silently in the foyer. After a few moments, Dougie said, “You might want to think about alarming the doors. If she wanders like that in the winter, it’ll be all over.”

  After Dougie left, Sean went up to Aunt Vivvy’s room. She was sitting on the side of the bed, clutching the paper to her chest. As soon as he sat down next to her, she turned on him. “You had to call the police? Have you no respect for me at all?”

  “Auntie, I . . . I love you. You took care of us when everything else fell apart. Now I have to take care of you.”

  “I wasn’t doing anything that required your intervention!”

  “Auntie. Look down.”

  She lowered her gaze to her lap, and then to her feet. “Oh, dear God,” she murmured. She was wearing nothing but her nightgown and slippers.

  “Why did you go to the cemetery?” he asked gently.

  “I had to find him,” she said, and handed Sean the crumpled paper. It was actually a letter, addressed in her fastidious handwriting to someone named George Gardner. Across the top a shaky hand had scrawled, DECEASED—RETURN TO SENDER.

  “Is he the George you named the dog after?”

  “Yes. When we were young, he asked me to marry him.”

  This was him, thought Sean. The man she loved. And now he’s dead.

  “But you turned him down,” he said.

  “My father was sick with Huntington’s—we didn’t know what it was back then. And my mother was frail, and rather . . . flighty. Lila was so young. I couldn’t leave them. I told myself I’d have other chances, once my parents had passed and Lila was grown. But I never found anyone I loved as much as him.” She sighed. “And then we learned that the Huntington’s was genetic, and I told myself I was glad I’d never had children . . . and then I had children anyway, didn’t I? I had all of you, and you were just as much at risk as if I’d borne you myself, so there I was with the same problem, after all.” Slowly she leaned toward him and rested her head against his shoulder, and he put his arm around her. “I’m so glad you don’t seem to have it, Sean. But I can’t stop worrying about Deirdre and Kevin.”

  He looked at the address on the envelope. If it was correct, George Gardner had lived in Ashburnham, Massachusetts, about an hour’s drive from Belham. “I’ll see if I can find out where he was buried, Auntie. And then I’ll take you to say good-bye.”

  * * *

  He got her settled for a nap and went to check on Kevin. The ice had reduced the swelling a bit, and they went downstairs. Kevin started his homework in the den and Sean set up his new low-speed laptop to search for George Gardner. He hadn’t checked his e-mail since Deirdre had left. When he opened it, there was an e-mail from Yasmin Chaudhry.

  Sean, I’m so glad you’ll be joining me here. You’re going to love it!

  CHAPTER 56

  The next day, during lunch period, Davis stopped in for his pill. Sean asked him about the CD. “It was okay,” said Davis. “I still don’t want to take the pill.”

  “You’ve slimed out of it so many times, Davis, you owe me this one.”

  “Okay, but can I keep the CD?”

  “Absolutely.”

  Just before the end of school, Amber came in, but this time she looked different—paler, blue eyes a little too shiny. “I don’t feel that good,” she said.

  Story of your life, Sean thought, and reminded himself to be patient. “What’s up?”

  “I’m, like, freezing.” Her chin clenched and her teeth began to chatter.

  Sean checked her temperature. “Wow, Amber,” he said, smiling. “A hundred and two point six. You win the prize—that’s the highest temp I’ve seen since I started here.”

  She looked at him blankly. “Can you call my mom?” She went to lie down in her usual spot. Sean pulled her emergency contact card and called her mother’s work, cell, and home numbers, but only got voice mail. He went back to check on Amber. She was curled up, arms wrapped around herself, but this time she wasn’t staring at the curtain. She was snoring.

  The next name on Amber’s card was her father’s. Sean called him and got through. “I’ll be right there,” he said.

  “Okay, thanks,” said Sean. But the guy had already hung up.

  About ten minutes later, a man walked into the office, short and stocky, looking like a fire hydrant dressed in a business suit. It was clear he worked out fairly obsessively—his short arms were so muscle-bound they stuck out from his body on both sides.

  “Where’s Amber?” was all he said.

  Sean handed him the sign-out clipboard and suddenly got a distinctly creepy feeling. The guy didn’t seem aggressive or angry in any way, but his energy was somehow menacing. />
  Menacing energy. He would have to tell Rebecca that one. But then he remembered their fight, and her calling him a jackass. In the light of day he had to agree with her. She’d been right about a lot of things. And he’d countered with that nasty crowbar comment. He wondered if she’d ever forgive him.

  “Where is she?” said the suit-wearing hydrant.

  Sean drew the curtain back and murmured, “Amber, your dad’s here.”

  The girl was upright by the time he’d finished the sentence.

  “Let’s go,” her father said.

  The look on her face was surprisingly familiar to Sean. It was the war-torn face. It was the I’ve-seen-more-hell-than-you’ll-ever-know face. But what Sean realized in that moment was that he’d never seen it with blue eyes before. All the war-torn faces he’d seen had had brown eyes. And yet it was the same. Blue-eyed terror was just the same as brown-eyed terror.

  “I’m not supposed to go with him,” she told Sean, never taking those eyes off her father.

  “Let’s go, Amber.”

  “I’m not supposed to,” she whispered to Sean. “The court said.”

  “Are you sure?” Sean asked her. “Because he’s listed on your emergency card.”

  “I’m sure.”

  “Look,” said the guy. “You called me, remember?”

  “Yeah . . . but I think maybe we should check with the main office first.”

  “I’m her father. I don’t need permission to take my sick kid home.” He took a step toward Amber, who crouched back to the far corner of the vinyl bed.

  Instinctively, Sean stepped into his path. And the guy smiled, a sneer really, as if the very idea of Sean were ridiculous. “I could kick your ass,” he said with sociopathic calmness.

  No doubt, thought Sean. But what could he do in the face of blue-eyed terror?

  “Well, kick it then, asshole,” he said. “Because that’s the only way you’re getting her.”