After everything that had happened, Andy had privately sworn that he would never run again, not even to catch a bus. But that had been years ago. Who would know? More important, why should he deny himself the pleasure of something he’d once loved? Running had once taken him to a place beyond thought, a place where there were no questions, no conversations, no debates about right or wrong, fate and destiny. Would it still work?
Andy unlaced his work boots and peeled off his socks. His feet had the unhealthy pallor of mushrooms that had sprouted during a rainstorm, and there was a basketball-induced blister on his left heel. His jeans would chafe if he went too far, and he hadn’t brought sunscreen. He rolled up his cuffs and walked down to the water, feeling the sand, cool and firm, underneath his feet. First he started walking, swinging his arms, getting a feel for the sand. Then he eased into a slow trot. It felt, for a few hundred yards, like he was relearning something basic, like he’d somehow managed to forget to breathe and had to figure it out again. His legs felt clumsy; his arms were as stiff as sticks shoved into a snowman’s side; his breath burned in his throat. He veered toward the water and stumbled as the sand shifted, almost bumping into a pair of optimistic surfers, chatting as they zipped up their wet suits. Then it started coming back to him, the rhythm and the flow. His stride smoothed out; his arms began swinging with a purpose; his heart and lungs took up their assignments. His skin tingled as he sped up. The sun shone down on his head and his shoulders, and sweat sprang up on his face and back, good, cleansing sweat, not the acrid excretions of a man who felt trapped. The air had a salty tang, the sky was suddenly full of birds, wheeling and squawking overhead. He didn’t feel trapped anymore. For the first time in a long time, as he jogged, then ran, then sprinted along the water, Andy Landis felt like he was right where he should be, doing the thing he was meant to be doing, like the constant chatter of criticism in his mind had finally stilled. For the first time in a long time, he felt free.
•••
That had been five years ago. He’d gotten merit raises, promotions; he’d become a section manager and had eventually started teaching those classes he’d once wondered about, instructing stressed-out dads and blissed-out newlyweds on how to paint a bedroom, how to install tile, repair drywall, stain a deck, build a grilling cart. When Mr. Kincaid had retired, the regional supervisor had offered Andy his job, and Andy, who’d never imagined his life after running at all and had certainly never imagined spending it in charge of a cavernous, concrete-floored megastore, had agreed.
He walked into the office that had once been Jack Kincaid’s, picked up the telephone that Paul had remembered to place on hold, and braced himself for the news he’d been expecting, and dreading, for the past six months, ever since Mr. Sills’s pulmonary disease had gotten worse.
“Hello?”
“Andrew Landis?” It was an unfamiliar man’s voice, hoarse and soft. “This is DeVaughn Sills. I’m Clement Sills’s son.”
“Hello,” said Andy, setting his free hand on the desk, surprised and yet not surprised to hear from the son whom his friend so rarely mentioned, a son he’d never met, even as Mr. Sills’s health had declined.
“My daddy passed last night.”
“Oh, no,” Andy said. He and Mr. Sills had talked it over—the death, and what would happen next—when he’d visited the previous weekend. Mr. Sills, whom Andy had never been able to call by his first name, had been in his bedroom. The room had been cleared of all the stacks, the books and magazines, the collections of teapots and ceramic roosters, the thick scrapbooks about Andy. There was only a hospital bed, and two white plastic chairs for visitors. “I’m ready to go,” Mr. Sills told him. “I lived a good long while.”
“You have so many friends,” Andy said. This was true. There’d been the boys whom Mr. Sills had met and befriended and helped over the years, many of whom had found their way into one of those white plastic chairs over the last weeks. They had left tokens, too: photographs of themselves with Mr. Sills, at basketball games and graduations, at weddings and christenings and First Communions and commencements. Pride of place had been saved for a framed photograph from Athens, of Mr. Sills, beaming, with his arm around Andy and the two of them wrapped in the American flag, with Andy in his laurel wreath and Mr. Sills wearing Andy’s gold medal.
“I’ve made my peace,” Mr. Sills wheezed. A tear slipped down his cheek. “I’m not afraid.” But his hand was trembling when Andy took it. “I will miss this world,” he said. His chest labored upward, paused, and sank down. “Andy,” he said, reaching for Andy’s hand. Andy leaned close. Mr. Sills’s eyes were closed, and his voice was faint, but each word was clear and deliberate. “You can stop running now.” Andy sat with him, waiting for more, but his friend’s eyes stayed closed, and he didn’t wake up again for the rest of the afternoon.
“Visitation’s Wednesday and Thursday, and the funeral’s Friday at noon, at Mother Bethel on Sixth and South,” DeVaughn Sills said.
Andy knew the church. Mr. Sills had brought him there for years on the day before Christmas, to hear the choir sing Handel’s Messiah. Once, he’d gone to Midnight Mass on Christmas Eve.
“I’ll be there,” Andy promised.
“Then I’ll see you,” said DeVaughn.
•••
On Friday morning, the church was packed with people, hushed and dim, with the sunshine filtered through stained glass, and it smelled like dusty carpet, old paper, and the lilies in the flower arrangement that decorated the handsome brass-trimmed casket that stood in the front of the room. It was closed, per Mr. Sills’s request. “Let ’em remember me living, not dead,” he’d told Andy, and Andy had been the one to bring the clothes his friend had chosen to the funeral parlor and tell the director there to skip the cosmetics.
He spotted DeVaughn right away, standing in the back of the church and looking so much like his father that Andy’s heart almost stopped. DeVaughn wore a black suit, a white shirt, and a dark-gray tie. His hands were free, but when he walked, Andy saw the shackles around his ankles, and then he spotted the corrections officer who stood by the door. He felt his eyes welling, and wondered if DeVaughn even had gotten a chance to say goodbye.
The first row was filled with boys and young men, some in suits and some in collared blue shirts and khakis. A few of them were crying. Lori had left him at the doorway and had gone to sit beside a tall man in a dark suit. Andy looked at him, then looked away.
After Mr. Sills’s favorite hymn, “What a Friend We Have in Jesus,” the preacher stepped up to the lectern. He bowed his head for a long moment, then began. “Our friend is gone,” he said.
“Yes, Lord,” said one of the ladies Andy recognized from Mr. Sills’s house, an older lady in a pink suit and matching hat.
“Whose lives did our friend Clement Sills not touch?”
“That’s right,” called another woman.
“Our friend was a humble man. A man who knew how to fix what was broken. He came into our homes with his box of tools and the young man he’d taken under his wing, and he fixed things. Fixed broken windows, leaky faucets, furnaces that didn’t want to heat and air conditioners that didn’t want to cool. But more than that, he fixed those young men. He saw what was broken in each of them, and he fixed it.”
“Praise Jesus!”
“He was kind.”
“Yes, God!”
“He was a father figure to the young men whose daddies couldn’t or wouldn’t be there for them. By example, our friend Clement showed each and every one of them what it was to be a man.” The preacher lowered his head again, as if lost in thought. Then he raised it and looked at the crowd.
“There’s a young man here who’s a lawyer. Another two go to Temple on scholarship. Up front, we got Terrance Parker, who’s a vice president at Comcast. You got a problem with your cable bill, go talk to him.” Laughter rippled through the audience. “In the ba
ck, I see a young friend of Clement’s who became an Olympic runner.” Andy froze, mortified, as he felt every eye turn toward him. He hung his head.
“All these men learned how to live their lives, how to make their way in the world, but more than that, even more than that, every single one of them learned how to love.”
The room exploded with shouts of praise, to God, to Jesus, with cries of “Tell it!” and “Preach!”
“They learned how to love,” called the preacher. He raised his hands and, immediately, the din dropped away. “And that, my brothers and sisters, is the true measure of a man. Not money.”
“No, sir!”
“Not success.”
“That’s right!”
“Not job titles. Not degrees. Not even gold medals.” The preacher’s voice dropped to a whisper. “The measure of a man is, does he know how to love. Clement Sills knew how to love. That’s what he did. That’s what he taught every single one of us who were lucky enough to know him.”
In the back of the room DeVaughn was crying. Andy saw the corrections officer hand him a handkerchief, as the pastor invited anyone who wanted to speak to come to the podium and send their friend on.
The young man who’d become a lawyer thanked Mr. Sills for showing him another path, “because I so easily could have walked down the wrong one.” The Comcast vice president talked about how he’d been so shy as a little boy he’d barely opened his mouth in the classroom, and that his teachers thought he was slow until Mr. Sills started bringing him around to antiques stores and restaurants, making him talk to the salesladies and the waitresses until he could speak up a little better.
“When things got noisy in my house, Mr. Sills let me come over and study, as long as I could find room for my books,” one of the Temple students said, to smiles and laughter, as the audience members recalled Mr. Sills’s hobbit warren of a house. A single mom remembered how when her young daughter had broken her leg, Mr. Sills had been there, morning and night, to carry the girl down the stairs, and then carry her back up for bedtime.
Then the preacher called Andy up to the podium, introducing him as “Andy Landis, the gold-medal-winning Olympic runner,” and asked if he wanted to speak.
Andy had gripped the edges of the lectern. He thought about how long it had been since people had looked at him with anything but disdain. Enough time had passed so that, at least in some places, sometimes, he could just be what he’d become—the manager of a home-goods store, a so-so basketball player, a son, a coworker, a friend. “I grew up without a father,” Andy began, “and I wasn’t the greatest kid. I got in fights at school. Threw a brick through someone’s windshield. I almost got sent to juvenile hall for that one,” he said as some of the boys up front nodded. “Mr. Sills saved me. He made me feel like I was worth something. Nothing I did, nothing I had . . .” His voice caught, but he made himself push through it. “Nothing I achieved would have been possible without him.”
Afterward, a few of the attendees came to introduce themselves. More than one told him how Mr. Sills had always talked about Andy, the way he’d run his paper route, how he’d been such a quiet boy, and how he’d flown Mr. Sills first class all the way to Athens, Greece, so he’d be there to watch Andy win his gold medal. “I think it was the highlight of his life,” said the young man who’d gone to law school, and Terrance Parker had nodded and said, “He told me that, too.”
Finally, Lori’s aisle-mate, a tall, stooped man with a bald head and glasses, came over. He stood shyly a few feet away from Andy, the way autograph-seekers once had when they were waiting for a signal or permission to approach him.
Andy knew who he was; knew in his bones, knew from the way the other man was looking at him, and the shape of his face, and his hands.
“Hello,” said Andy. He held out his hand to the man who he’d seen only in pictures and carefully his father shook it.
•••
In the car, on the way home, his mother was quiet. It wasn’t until they pulled into the driveway of the house she shared with her new husband, a retired police officer named Tony Lucrezi, that she said, “He wants to get to know you. He’s sorry for everything.”
“What’s everything?” Andy felt furious, and he welcomed the feeling that pushed aside the sorrow. It felt good, he thought, to be angry at someone other than himself. “Which part is he ashamed of? The drugs, or the being an accessory to murder, or the part about lying to me for my entire life?”
Lori looked into her lap. “I’m not saying that the way he handled it was right, but we did it for the best reasons.”
Andy just stared at her, not trying to disguise his skepticism or his disgust, and, instead of meeting his anger with her own, Lori continued to talk, her eyes on her lap as she stumbled through an explanation.
“Your father and DeVaughn were friends. They grew up together; they played sports together; they were high school basketball stars, the big men on campus.” She smiled a little, remembering.
“So how’d they get from there to jail?” Andy asked.
Lori shut her eyes. “Once high school was over, and I was pregnant, there were a lot of temptations in the neighborhood. A lot of ways to make easy, quick money. Your dad wanted a house for us. He thought if he could just do one big thing, just one time, we’d move to Haddonfield, near my parents, and he’d learn a trade. He was doing okay in the army. They were training him to be a mechanic. He figured he’d stay a few years, learn how to do it, and when he got out he’d get a job. But he came home on a furlough, and DeVaughn had this idea, this great idea about how they were going to each get ten thousand dollars . . .”
“By robbing a friend,” Andy supplied.
Lori shook her head. “It was stupid. They thought it was a Robin Hood thing, stealing from the rich, giving to the poor. Which was the three of us.” She looked at him, her eyes wide and beseeching, an unfamiliar pleading tone in her voice. “They never meant to hurt David. They weren’t like that. They just thought they’d roll up, stick the gun out the window, and he’d give them the money, and that would be the end of it.”
“You’re kidding.”
“Andy, they were teenagers. They weren’t criminal masterminds.”
Andy shook his head. He was trying to make sense of it, to put it all together, his father and DeVaughn Sills, who’d driven the car, who’d used the gun.
“Mr. Sills lied to me,” he said slowly. “He said he didn’t know my father that well. And he sure never told me that my dad was alive.”
“He didn’t know your father that well. He only knew him as DeVaughn’s friend. And he wanted to tell you. He thought that even having a father in jail was better than no father at all. He only kept quiet because Andy and I—your father and I—had asked him to. He was always looking out for us,” Lori said. “He felt responsible. He thought that if he’d been a better father to DeVaughn none of it would have happened. It was stupid,” said Lori, her voice catching. “It was stupid and awful, and it ruined so many lives, but, Andy, it’s over. It’s in the past. It was a long time ago, and you’ve got a chance to get to know your father now.” She touched his hand. Her voice was gentle. Maybe her new marriage had softened her. Maybe it was just time. “If you can find it in your heart. But he’ll understand if you can’t.”
“I’ll think about it,” Andy said . . . and he had, for months, considering each piece of the story, the new facts, trying to understand why they’d done what they’d done, and how their choices had shaped his own life. He had been so lonely as a kid. No friends, because his mother had wanted his strongest—his only—connection to be to her. When he was being charitable, he thought that she’d lied because she’d wanted to keep him safe, away from the influences and the kinds of people who had caused his father to make such bad choices. When he was angry, he thought that she’d kept him so close because other people in the neighborhood had to have known the trut
h . . . and that she hadn’t noticed, or hadn’t cared, about the way he was always on the outside; how he’d never really had friends.
A dozen times he sat behind the wheel of his car or climbed the steps to the El with a token in his hand. But he never turned the key, never boarded the train. He wished he could have done it all differently. Maybe he would never have agreed to the doping. Maybe he’d never have met Maisie. Maybe he could have had the life he’d imagined with Rachel, a quiet, happy Act Two, with his medal on the mantel of some cozy little home, kids playing in the yard, Lori visiting, and his father, too. Rachel would have known how to navigate the situation; she’d have made arrangements and made jokes and helped him figure out how to talk to a ghost that was now flesh and blood. But now he’d have to figure it out alone.
Rachel
2015
Jay had called me at the end of March, on a Thursday afternoon almost a year after I’d found out about Amy. On Thursdays, the girls had dance lessons. Delaney was enthusiastically attempting ballet—mostly because she loved the pink leotard and white tights, and she knew that if she made it to the recital, she’d get a pink tulle tutu—while Adele was the least energetic hip-hop dancer in the history of hip-hop. “I was wondering if I could come to the Seder.”
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