He still took a painkiller every day, and when his doctor said that one pill likely did very little for him at this point, he understood that as permission to take two. Sometimes two in the morning and another two in the afternoon. Nothing seemed to happen except that he felt quiet in his center, at peace. He took an antidepressant, which didn’t work nearly as well as two painkillers, and which felt a little embarrassing but which his doctor said was standard.
Sometimes, still, when he was standing at the kitchen sink looking out the window, he would hear the buzz and slap of a grass edger and expect to see Brian Stanhope’s head moving along the other side of the rocks. Then he’d remember and feel astonished all over again. He tried to recall what he used to think of Anne Stanhope. He’d mostly wanted to stay out of her way. Otherwise he hadn’t thought much about her. She was an odd bird, that was all. A person they’d have to encounter for a little while but could one day, when the kids were gone, ignore. He’d been kind to her. He’d been kinder than anyone else would have been. And still. Sometimes he let his imagination wander and he placed Kate on their front porch instead of himself. What if she’d killed his child?
He knew she’d been moved to a different hospital. It was generous of him to have agreed to the plea deal that removed her from prison, and sometimes he felt that generosity warranted more acknowledgment. If he were a different person, a vengeful person, he would have insisted on prison, and he knew what happened to crazy people in prison. He was worried when their lawyer called that he was going to tell them she’d been released to a halfway house or some nonsense, but it sounded as if the new hospital was not as nice as the first, and Francis was pleased. He tried to examine his pleasure—what did it mean about him? As Lena had asked many times, what did it matter, really, where she was, as long as she wasn’t near them?—but at the end of these examinations, he always concluded he was within his rights to wish ill upon her. He would have been captain by then. He would have been captain or better, and if things had gone as they should have when he walked into his house at the end of a day, his wife would look at him in a way she hadn’t looked at him in four years now. Once a cop always a cop, the guys said when they visited. But the more they said it the less it rang true.
* * *
It occurred to Lena as she began to gather the bottles of soda, the cases of beer, the chips, the dips, the pounds of ground beef for burgers, box after box of macaroni for salad, the gas for the grill—that this was how she’d once pictured living in Gillam. She’d seen herself hosting parties, throwing open their doors, and inviting in anyone who wanted to come. She’d pictured music playing, bottles uncorking. She’d pictured sitting outside with friends and neighbors while the kids raced around the house. She’d selected a dining table with double leaves instead of the usual single because she imagined she’d need seating for twelve, one day, even if that meant the table would extend right out of the dining room and into the living room. But when she brought the dining table leaves down from the attic, she noticed they were a slightly different color now than the table. The dowels were still covered in manufacturer’s plastic. She’d called for Francis to take one end of each—they were too heavy to move on her own—and as he shuffled backward he staggered for a moment. “Pick up your feet!” she cried, and then insisted on switching sides.
* * *
Graduation was on a Saturday. Kate had won the science prize and had to cross the stage to accept a certificate and shake the principal’s hand. Natalie had graduated from Syracuse the previous week, and Sara was halfway through SUNY Binghamton. With Francis’s pension and Lena’s job and a few loans, there would be enough to cover Kate’s first year of tuition. Lena had assumed she would go to a state school like Sara, but Francis was the one who noticed the brochures and envelopes from NYU coming in. “You want to go here?” he asked her one night after taking in the mail. She was eating a bowl of cereal before bed; Lena had already gone upstairs. He thought of the Ninth Precinct, and of Brian Stanhope, of all people—a field mouse of a thought that shot through his brain and disappeared. Kate shrugged and it broke his heart a little to see she’d become a girl who wouldn’t say what she wanted.
“If you had your pick of any school, which would it be?” He was determined to make her say it.
“Well, we can’t do private, right?”
“This is a dream scenario, Kate, which is it?”
Finally, she’d nodded to the envelope in his hands.
“You can get in?” he asked.
“I think so.”
“So apply, and then we’ll see.”
* * *
The party started at three and most of the guests arrived at exactly the same time. Some rang the doorbell before walking around the side of the house. Others just followed the sound of the stereo and trudged through the side yard bearing flowers, wine, platters of cookies and pies. He couldn’t remember how people used to greet him before he was hurt, but now they seemed to make a special point of it, and he wondered if talking with him made them feel virtuous, like they’d done a good deed. He could tell that most people had trouble looking at his mismatched pupils—their own perfectly synchronized eyes would dart back and forth between his as they decided which one to settle on. Most people had presents for Kate, and when Francis saw that he felt guilty—he hadn’t pictured people going out to buy presents on top of everything else they’d done for them. But Kate accepted everything gladly, and when he looked at her across the patio, he was reminded of what she’d been like as a little girl, running a private inventory of her gifts as they came in. Her friends greeted her with hugs, and the boys in the class hung around the girls in a loose circle, long armed and mostly shy.
He fired up the grill at four and began lining the grate with burgers, hot dogs, foil-wrapped corn on the cob. He had a beer. Two beers. Four beers. He refilled the coolers. A few men kept him company, while the women mostly clustered around the appetizer table. At one point Lena led a group of women upstairs to look at their bedroom closet and get advice on what could be done. She was delighted to be hosting, and when her voice carried over to him, it sounded giddy and girlish. She’d made pitchers of margaritas and when they went in the first hour, she brought out all the bottles that had gone into them and a pile of limes and mixed up more. They ate, ate more, drank more, and still, people kept arriving, Francis kept grilling. There were other graduation parties that day, and some of their guests hopped from one to the next to the next until it felt like all of Gillam was one big party.
A woman came up and asked Francis if she could get a burger without cheese, and while she waited, she asked him how he was doing, if he still got those sharp pains around his orbital wall. He turned to her quickly and she smiled, put her hand on his arm. “You don’t remember me. I’d just started at Broxton around the time you were moved there. I wasn’t on your floor but I came in to see you because our girls were in school together.”
“I do remember. Yes, of course.”
She laughed. “You don’t. But you’re very polite. You were getting a lot of visitors then. I remember a stream of cops in and out. Some of the young nurses used to put on lipstick in case any of them were single. They were sad when you were discharged.”
“Ah. That would have been pertinent information at the time, I’m sure.”
Francis took another look at her. She was petite, with long, auburn hair and a pretty dress with flowers printed on it.
“You have a daughter in the high school? You look so young,” he said, and blushed. He hadn’t meant to sound like he was flirting. But she did look young.
“I did until yesterday. Casey. Do you know Casey? She’s . . .” She turned and tried to find her. “Well, she’s here somewhere.”
He put the burger on her plate, and she put her hand on his arm once more and squeezed. He felt a charge on his skin where she touched him. “Good to see you looking so healthy,” she said, and then she slipped off into a crowd of women talking by the shed.
> * * *
It was nearly dusk when he finally turned off the grill, and after dusk when he finally sat down. There were still more people arriving, and now, in the near dark, they snuck up on the crowd in the backyard like a jolt of new life. A local cop named Dowd was just telling him about a case when Kate came up behind Francis’s chair and whispered that someone was puking by the rhododendron. They’d told the girls to be careful, to watch their friends, but it was inevitable, he supposed. They should have been more strategic about where they put the coolers, but they figured it would be okay. Lena had pointed out that when they were eighteen it was legal to drink, the law was arbitrary, and at their age Francis had been on his way to America, for God’s sake. Plus most of the teenagers at the party had a parent there, too.
He excused himself and as he crossed the yard, he looked around for Lena, who must have gone inside. Someone had found a pack of cards and as he passed the kitchen window, he saw a group of men sitting around his table as Oscar Maldonado dealt. Some of the wood chairs from inside had somehow gotten outside, and the chaise lounge from outside was now in the middle of the kitchen. Kate had an urgent expression on her face, and walked quickly ahead of him. When he turned the corner he expected a crowd of people, but it was the dark side of the house, the side that didn’t lead to the driveway, and once he arrived at the bush where Kate stopped walking, it felt like the party was far away.
“How much did she have?” he asked Kate.
“I don’t know. I just saw her going around this side of the house so I followed her.”
He had to squint into the shadows to spot the figure on all fours, her hair hanging around her face. “Okay, I’ll take care of it,” he said, feeling mostly sober all of a sudden. “And, Kate? That’s it for all of you. Unless a kid is with his or her own parent, not a single person under the age of twenty-five leaves this house without me getting a look at them. Got it?”
“Got it,” Kate said, but then gave him a look before she jogged away.
He went down on one knee and gathered the person’s hair in his fist. She retched for several seconds, the volume and drama of which didn’t match what little came out.
“Okay, okay,” he said, and patted her on the back. “Let’s get you cleaned up.” He took firm hold of her upper arms and helped pull her to standing. “Oh!” he said when he saw who it was.
“I’m so embarrassed,” she said as she swayed back and forth. She was barefoot, and one strap of her dress had fallen down around her elbow. She leaned for a moment against his chest and closed her eyes. When he felt the steady rhythm of her breathing, he knew that she’d fallen asleep. Her hair smelled like tea. Her frame was smaller than Lena’s. He pushed her away, gently.
“Sorry, you said your name is? I forgot to ask before.”
But she slid her hands up his arms, clutched his shoulders, and he couldn’t understand what she said.
“Oh, poor thing! That’s Joan Kavanagh,” Lena said when she came looking for Francis and saw whom he was leading around the side of the house. The card game was still going strong around the kitchen table, but Lena squeezed by the men to bring out a glass of water and two aspirin, which Francis dropped into Joan’s mouth one at a time. Lena was in bad shape herself, and after asking twice if he could handle it, she went upstairs to lie on their bed with all her clothes on, including her sandals. Joan’s daughter had already left, thank God. She’d walked to another party with a group of half a dozen other kids.
“Is she all right?” Kate asked, and Francis realized that she’d hung back and let all her friends go on without her. Sara was upstairs. Who knew where Natalie had gone off to, but she was an adult now, a college graduate.
“She drank too much,” Kate said.
It was so obvious that Joan Kavanagh had drank too much that Kate’s statement, framed with cautious certainty, betrayed her innocence. He could see that up until that hour she thought drinking too much was just for kids.
“She might have eaten something bad. Who knows?”
Kate looked at the woman for a long time, as if deciding.
“She can sleep here, can’t she? You won’t make her go home?”
“No, I won’t make her go home, but she might like to wake up in her own house.” But then he thought of the next problem. “Do you know where the Kavanaghs live?”
Kate shook her head. “One of those blocks by the playground, I think?” She glanced down at her friend’s mother as if to make sure she wasn’t listening. “I think it’s just her and Casey who live there. I’m not sure. I think the dad doesn’t live there anymore.”
Francis contemplated the sleeping stranger, curled up now with a beach towel over her shoulders for warmth. She was snoring softly with her mouth open. “I’ll sort it out, Katie. Okay? You go on up to bed.” How long had they been out there? One by one, without his noticing, every guest had left. The kitchen was dark except for the light above the stove. Francis went in and pulled the throw blankets from the couch and armchair. He turned off the TV, which was blaring music videos. When he came back outside, he pushed two armchairs together until they faced each other, and used one to sit in and the other to put up his feet. He draped one blanket over Joan and wrapped the other around himself.
He was drunk, he realized as he stared at a group of moths darting and swooping under the porch light. He was drunk and he was exhausted. He tried to remember meeting Joan at Broxton, but it was too tiring to recall, and he decided he’d do the work of remembering tomorrow.
* * *
When he woke into the blue chill of morning, she was looking at him over the edge of her blanket. In the space between their chairs were a few stained napkins, a sea of crushed potato chips. “I’m mortified,” she whispered. It was not quite dawn, and his neck felt stiff and frozen. The inside of his mouth felt like fur. She stood and neatly draped the blanket he’d given her over the back of the chair where she’d slept. “I’m leaving,” she whispered. “I’m walking home. You should go inside.”
She took a moment to look around for her shoes, and when she found them she just hooked them on her first two fingers. As she passed by he reached out and grabbed her free hand, held tight. Twisting around in his chair, he moved his hands to her hips, then up to the narrowing at her waist, and for a second, for only half a second, perhaps, he felt her move closer to him, her muscles tensing under his palms. The morning felt thin and breakable and if he asked her a question, he knew it would lead to another. And that one to another. And so on.
“I’m going,” she said, and then she was gone.
eleven
GEORGE WENT DOWN TO Skillman to play basketball while Peter packed. He’d planned on helping, but that morning when they were standing at the couch shoulder to shoulder, folding Peter’s few clothes into piles, they realized it wasn’t a job for two. In early August, George took him to a Sears on Long Island where he bought Peter a set of bath towels and new, extra-long, blue and red plaid sheets for his dorm room bed. George asked what else he needed, and Peter knew some kids were getting small refrigerators, thirteen-inch televisions, but he said nothing, all his meals were included, what else could there be? On the way home they stopped at their usual diner and George cleared his throat and said that since his dad wasn’t there it was up to him to tell Peter a few things before he headed into the world on his own, and Peter felt his stomach drop, sure George was going to say something about sex that Peter already knew but didn’t want to know that George knew, too. Once, Peter had a bad head cold and left practice. He arrived home two hours early and believed, at first, that George wasn’t home. Then he heard sounds coming from the bedroom, small movements, a quick, hushed conversation. He froze, his keys still in his hand, and then he left again. He walked down Queens Boulevard towards Manhattan’s skyline. When he got as far as the movie theater, he turned around. When he returned home a second time, there was no one in the apartment and George’s bedroom door stood wide open.
Instead, George said
that he knew there was a lot of drinking that went on in college, and that might be okay for the other kids but not for Peter. “I mean, a little, sure, a few beers here and there, but you’ve probably got the gene, Peter. Some people have it and some people don’t. If you’re like the Stanhopes, then you have it.”
George had been making references to the gene for a few years now but Peter didn’t know if he meant a real gene, as in a distinct sequence of nucleotides that formed part of a chromosome, or if it was just a notion invented by people who needed to understand themselves.
“Did my dad have a problem? In that way, I mean?”
George gaped at him. “Oh, Peter. Buddy. Yes.”
“I never noticed.”
“Well,” George said. “You were a kid.”
“I don’t think so. I would have noticed. And I didn’t.”
“Okay.”
Peter removed his napkin from his lap and refolded it along the seams. He went to the bathroom, washed his hands without looking at his reflection in the mirror, and when he got back to his seat, he made himself eat two-thirds of the burger so that George wouldn’t ask why he wasn’t hungry.
Instead of packing his suitcase with his running T-shirts and thermals, Peter put his books in there because they were the heaviest and the suitcase had wheels, and George said that was the sort of thinking that got him the big bucks. He stuffed his clothes into his old track duffel. Since he’d worn a uniform through high school, he only had one pair of jeans, a few sweaters, two pairs of khaki shorts. He went through his running clothes, and anything with yellowed armpits he stuffed in a giant Hefty bag and then carried down to the trashcan on the curb. Already, the space he’d taken up for four years was emptying of his presence, and he could begin to see how the place would close up around any memory of him, like the walling up of a door.
Ask Again, Yes Page 17