She wanted to go back down there but now it would be different. She couldn’t just park and check up on him in secret. She’d have to go to the door, and doing that would be inviting herself, and maybe they didn’t want to see her now that the crisis had passed a little. It was hard to know what to do. Kate had asked for her help that time but she hadn’t really done anything, not really. Maybe Kate regretted asking.
Peter called again in May, just to check in, as he put it. He told her about the kids he was teaching, and about Frankie and Molly. Kate had written a very long paper and had gotten her master’s degree.
“Everything is going okay otherwise?” she asked, not wanting to push. “You feel good?”
“Yes,” he said. “And you?”
“Yes. Doing very well.”
Before hanging up he asked when they’d see her again, but she didn’t know if he was asking because he felt like he had to or if he really wanted to see her.
She knew he’d never tell her if things weren’t going well, not over the phone. And he hung up thinking the very same thing.
And then, the week after Thanksgiving 2017, a Tuesday mid-morning, she stood at the window of her apartment and decided that she would send the children a card that year, each their own, so she wouldn’t have to choose whose name to write first. City workers were outside on cherry pickers, hanging wreaths on the tops of lampposts. She’d write in their cards that she’d like them to pick a date to visit, but how would she put it so that it would feel welcoming but also let them know that her place was too small and they’d have to stay in a hotel? And in the very same second that she wondered whether it was safe to send cash through the mail, the super of her building knocked on her door and, when she answered, handed over a thick yellow envelope that was too big for the mailman to cram in her mailbox.
“What is it?” Anne asked.
The return address was a place in Georgia that Anne had never heard of, and above the address it read: “Attorneys at Law.”
“Gotta open it to find out,” the super said.
Georgia, Anne considered. Brian had once asked Anne if she knew there were little islands off the coast of Georgia. The Golden Isles, she remembered. He wanted to go there after the baby was born because they hadn’t had time for a honeymoon. But then they lost the baby.
She placed the envelope on the counter and looked at it while the water in the teakettle began to thrum. He was either divorcing her, finally, or he was dead.
“Well,” she said aloud to her empty apartment once she was ready.
* * *
After reading the documents through, she picked up her keys from the counter and drove over to the nursing home, the papers on the passenger seat. Once, before they got married, they’d agreed to meet up on the corner of Eighteenth Street and Fifth Avenue. She got there first and watched the throngs of people pass by. She didn’t know what direction he’d be coming from and then she saw him, so far away he was only a human shape bobbing along with so many others—their coats and scarves flapping, their bags weighing them down—but there was something about the way his particular shape moved that she knew it was him, long before she could make out his face. That one is mine, she thought that day.
And when she remembered that, she was surprised. She had loved him. Maybe intermittently. Maybe not very well. But she had. She tried to remember what it felt like to put her key in a door and know there might be someone on the other side.
When she got to work she told the charge nurse that she knew it was her day off but she had a family emergency, so she was going into the private meeting room to make a call and she didn’t know how long she’d be. If the phone call turned up on the bill as quite expensive, Anne would gladly pay for it. Someone just had to let her know how much it had cost. She’d read the documents through at home, but there were questions the documents didn’t answer. How had he died, for example? She did the math—he would have been only sixty-five. There were sixty-five-year-olds who regularly visited their ninety-year-old mothers at the nursing home. Maybe that was skewing her sense of who was old and who was young. He’d died a whole month ago. She was listed as wife and beneficiary.
She dialed the number on the cover letter and asked for a Mr. Ford Diviny. The receptionist put her right through.
* * *
One problem was—and Anne caught from his tone that this was just one of many problems Brian had caused—what Brian had was a simple will. He should have had a complex will with disclaimers, codicils. He’d been living with a woman for going on ten years, but he’d left her not even one dime.
“He wasn’t cruel,” Mr. Diviny said. “It was just the sort of thing he didn’t think about.” He needed personal care these last few years, and that woman had provided it. He was a diabetic, and every single day she’d checked his feet and legs for discoloration, for cracks and wounds. She got him special socks. She rubbed cornstarch between his toes. Still, Brian’s left foot had to be amputated in 2013. Did Anne know that? And he wasn’t careful, even after the amputation. With his sugars and such. Anne thought that was a nice way of putting it.
“You seem to have known him well,” Anne said. “Were you his attorney for a long time?”
“I wasn’t his attorney at all,” Mr. Diviny said. “I was his friend. We went to Louisville a few times. For the derby. Met him at a place down here called the Trade Winds. You been here?”
“No,” Anne said.
Mr. Diviny went on. “I didn’t know about you or about your son until he insisted I draw up that will for him, and by then I’d known him near twenty years. I know Suzie a little, so I felt bad about that. I had a feeling she didn’t know a thing about you all and I was right.”
It was looking like his other foot would have to be amputated when he died. Brian owned a home and Suzie lived in it, but Brian’s was the only name on the deed and he left the house to Anne, and to his son, to be split fifty-fifty. He’d also left a sum of money and some personal items to Mr. George Stanhope, his brother. He left personal items to Mr. Francis Gleeson, too.
Anne dropped her head to her hands. “How much could he have had? I don’t think he was even forty years old when he retired.”
“Well, he worked down here until his legs got bad. And he had his pension. He had a lot by some standards. In any case, what’s there is there. He didn’t have debt, which kind of surprised me, considering how he was.”
“How’d you find me?”
“I ran his social security number when he died. His old marriage license came up. Then it took a good three weeks to track you down.”
“Poor Suzie,” he sighed. “She’s a good girl, really. What a shock.”
“Have you informed the other beneficiaries?” Anne asked. “Are we all getting packages like this?”
“Should be. The notices and copies of the will all went out on the same day. Oh, and Mrs. Stanhope? The other thing is he wanted to be buried up north.”
“Up north where?”
“Up there. New York. Near you all.”
“Near who all? Me?”
“You, yes. And his son. His deceased mother and father. He spoke of his mother, in particular.” But they couldn’t hold him, Mr. Diviny explained. Who knew how long it would take to track down the family? So they had a little Catholic wake down there with an open casket and all, and then he was cremated.
Anne looked out the window to the parking lot but couldn’t make sense of any of it. None of it. An ice cream truck went speeding by on Route 7, its music off. His mother who had never even acknowledged their wedding, or the fact that that first baby died. Anne had gone to her wake and funeral but had refused to kneel by the body.
“I haven’t seen hide nor hair of this man in twenty-five years.”
“Well,” Mr. Diviny sighed. “As the poet said, every savage loves his native shore. I hear an accent in your voice. You don’t feel the same?”
“No. Not really. Suzie can have the ashes. Is that her name? Suzie?”
“Nope. Doesn’t want them. She’s furious. Can’t blame her. Besides, those weren’t Brian’s wishes.”
“She can have the house then, as long as she keeps the ashes. I don’t care.”
Mr. Diviny was silent for a long time. “I understand you and Brian parted ways under difficult circumstances.”
So he had told his friend a few things, Anne thought. Suddenly, a light on the phone she was using started flashing. She didn’t know what it meant.
“I’m going to advise you to think about that, Mrs. Stanhope. And besides, half that house is your son’s.”
A young nurse came to the door of the office just then. She held her pinkie and thumb up to the side of her head and kept miming something until Anne told Mr. Diviny to please hold.
“What?” Anne asked.
“You have a call. Peter. He says he’s your son? Should I put him through to this line?”
“Yes!” Anne said. “What do I do?” She rushed Mr. Diviny off the phone and was nervous all of a sudden that he’d change his mind, get sick of waiting.
But the young nurse came around the desk, pressed the flashing button, and nodded at her. And there he was.
* * *
In Gillam, a cup of tea in front of him, Francis read everything through for a fifth, sixth, seventh time before calling Kate. Lena read it through just once. Francis had seen her gaze run down the list of beneficiaries as if she might find her name there, too, since his was there, and when she didn’t find it, she announced she was going for a walk. As he stood at the counter and listened to Kate’s end of the line ring, he caught sight of himself in the stainless steel of the microwave door and saw a person who was haggard, a piece of driftwood left in rough waters for far too long. His hair was sticking straight up and he was wearing his eye patch again, the last prosthetic having deteriorated more quickly than the ones before. Less than three years old and a fine, dark ridge had appeared along the iris, and his eyelid blistered from closing over it a thousand times a day. He didn’t want to order another. Every new prosthetic eye was a marker of time—how much his face had aged since the last.
“I knew it was you,” Kate said when she answered. “Can you believe this? We were rushing around all morning and almost didn’t open the mail. What in the world did he leave to you?” Kate wanted to know. She was breathless, as if she’d run in from the yard when she heard the phone ringing.
“Don’t know. It’s going to arrive in the next few days. Under separate cover, the letter says.”
“What could it be?”
Whatever it was, Francis decided he didn’t want it. If it had any value, he’d give it to Peter. If it didn’t, he’d just throw it away.
“How’s Peter?”
“Fine,” Kate said, lowering her voice. “Seems okay. Surprised, I guess. He never expected to see him again but he didn’t expect him to die either.”
That was exactly the way Francis had felt about his own father, hearing about his death from so far away.
* * *
He didn’t want whatever it was Brian had left for him, but still, he found himself glancing at the clock more than usual, waiting for the mailman. Wednesday and Thursday went by. On Friday a package came but it was subscription vitamins Lena ordered.
Finally, on Saturday, a small cardboard envelope arrived from Georgia. Francis was expecting a box. Maybe a large box. An envelope meant it was more likely a check. Or the deed to something he owned. Or the key to a lockbox somewhere he figured Francis would be able to find. He probably didn’t even know his own son had been a captain in the NYPD.
And then he thought, Oh Christ, what if it’s a letter?
Lena wasn’t home, so Francis called Kate.
“Did it come? What is it?”
“It came but your mother isn’t here.”
“So open it now. I’ll stay on the phone. Or, you know what? We could go there, open it together. Oh wait, hang on.” She turned from the phone and he heard the low register of Peter’s voice in the background. Then Kate’s, muffled because she was covering the mouthpiece with her hand.
“Dad? Can you wait an hour? We’ll come there. Then Mom will be home, too. Tell her not to worry about cooking. We can get a pizza or something for the kids.”
* * *
Peter wasn’t there entirely willingly, Francis could see as soon as he walked through the door. He looked healthy lately, younger than he had a year before. But on that day he had some of the same expression he’d worn when he and Kate came to tell them that they’d gotten married, a wild, skittery fear around his eyes.
“What could it be?” Francis asked, holding up the envelope, and Peter recoiled from it a little as if he didn’t want to know. Kate had already told Francis the value of the house in Georgia, the stocks, Brian’s meager life insurance, purchased, presumably, before diabetes set in. But there’d been no personal note to Peter, and privately, Kate said to Francis, she knew Peter was disappointed. He didn’t imagine he’d get an apology or anything, but maybe some sort of acknowledgment that things had not been ideal. An acknowledgment that Peter had done well with his life, despite everything. But how would Brian even know that? Kate wondered aloud. He didn’t know a thing about Peter as an adult. There was a woman down there who lived with him, took care of him, Kate told Francis, and Brian left her nothing. Not only that, but he’d never said a word about being married, having a son.
Francis made a sound of disgust. It was always the same. People didn’t change.
“So between them,” Kate continued, “Peter and Anne decided to cut her in for a third.”
That surprised him. Shocked him, even, and he didn’t know he could be shocked. “That’s very decent,” he said. He wondered if he’d have been as decent, if he were in their shoes.
“Okay!” Lena said, putting a plate of cookies on the table. “Let’s not drag it out any longer.”
So they pulled up close to the table, all leaning forward to see. Francis pulled the tab of the envelope across the top and flipped it over, tapped it on the table until the contents slid out: three photographs, and one prayer card, Saint Michael the Archangel. All four of them held perfectly still as they looked and tried to understand. The first photo was a snapshot of a pretty blond woman with a long, slim neck. The next was a photo of two sunburned young men sitting in the bleachers at the old Shea Stadium. And the third photo was of Peter, around kindergarten age. All of the photos were yellowed and stained.
“Are you sure these were meant for you?” Lena asked after a long moment of silence. “Is that lawyer sure?”
“What happened to them?” Kate asked, picking up the one of Peter. “Water damage?”
“Sweat stains,” Francis said. “I’ve seen these before.” The day came back to him. The heat. The smell of the Bronx burning. The sound of the alarms ringing and clanging and buzzing every minute of the day. They were crazy years, and looking back sometimes he wondered why he’d gone at the job so hard. He often thought of himself giving chase, pursuing subjects down alleys, into dark lobbies, up stairwells. Why hadn’t he just pretended, like some others did? Why hadn’t he quit and then said simply that the suspect had gotten away? Everyone would have believed him. Only later, years and years later, did he look back at some of the situations he’d been in and see he was lucky to be alive.
He picked up the photo of Anne, and turned to Peter. “He showed me this one in 1973. July. We were on patrol. He kept it in the lining of his hat.” He touched the prayer card, and the photo of Brian and George. “These, too.”
“This one he must have added later,” he said, picking up the photo of Peter. Francis remembered Peter at that age: a weird kid, always sitting on the rocks out back with soldier figurines, whispering to himself as he made them battle each other. A weird kid, maybe, but his father had loved him, had tucked him into the lining of his hat so that he could look at him when his patrol car was idling, or when a day was hard, or maybe when he felt afraid.
“Why did he send them to you?” Peter asked. “And not to me?” He was staring hard at the photo of himself.
“I don’t know,” Francis said.
Maybe he sent them to Francis because he believed Francis alone would know what the photos meant to him, and he would tell Peter. The young cops today probably kept all their photos on their phones, kept the linings of their hats empty.
Or maybe Brian was saying he was sorry to Francis, for whatever part he played. Maybe he was saying he should have done something more, seeing how they’d been partners, once, for six sweltering weeks in the summer of 1973.
Or maybe he was saying, simply, that he remembered. That he’d not forgotten, even from the distance of so many years and so many miles, that he’d had a different life, once.
Or maybe he wasn’t saying anything at all, but simply wanted to mail the photos to someone who wouldn’t be upset by them because he didn’t want to throw them away, not after their having protected him through all his tours. This slim-necked woman was the woman he’d married. And this boy was the boy he’d made with her. And maybe he had to get their images out of the house in case Suzie came in to rub cornstarch between his toes.
There was no accompanying note, and anything that had once been written on the back of the photos had long ago been smudged away.
“What’ll happen with the ashes?” Lena asked.
“They’re being shipped to my mother,” Peter said. “She’s going to bring them down here and we’re going to have them buried with his mother. George suggested that.”
“It’s pretty easy,” Kate added. “They just open up a little spot in the same plot.”
Better than sitting on someone’s shelf, Francis thought.
Slowly, everyone began to move from their places. Lena got up first and took a few pork chops out of the fridge. She took down the bread crumbs from the high cabinet, brought out the eggs. After a minute, as Kate continued to look from one photo to the next to the next and then back to the first again, Peter got up to help Lena. Without being asked he grabbed a few apples out of the bowl. He sliced them and dropped them into a pan with butter to soften for a quick sauce. He ducked his head to glance out the window at the kids, who were out playing on the rocks.
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