Crazy for Cornelia (17 page)

She did a little skip. She wouldn’t concentrate now on her regret at leaving her father with his wall-to-wall worry without
so much as a goodbye. She would get word to him soon. Perhaps once he knew she was all right, he would even feel relieved
that she was gone. He could stay in the cocoon of Cornelia’s photographs and his memories of his little girl.

Now she needed to focus on her mission.

She walked swiftly to the lounge, making sure no one was following her. Kevin Doyle, of the sky-blue corona, had joked about
her black outfit. She didn’t wear black to be stealthy like a ninja, but to simplify her life by reducing time-draining vanity.
Wearing all black in New York City attracted little attention.

The cozy Air Brasilia lounge was too crammed with noisy, happy-looking voyagers enjoying its bar. Cornelia found a quiet section
for business travelers. Like most such areas, this was a masterwork of soulless comfort. Uprooted prisoners of modern business
made phone calls, pecked away at laptop computers, and stared dispiritedly out the glass windows at the tarmac. She sat in
a leather chair so slick she nearly slid out of it. She relaxed, stretching her legs out.

A man who sat with his back to her, working on a laptop, turned around.

“Hi,” Tucker said.

The warm buzz tingling through her turned icy cold now. She started to fling herself up out of the chair.

Tucker touched her arm gently. “Sit, Corny. I’d just like to show you something.”

She hesitated, then settled back. How could he have known? Not even Chester knew. The thought of Dr. Powers calling Tucker
made her suddenly ill. Then she swallowed, angry at herself for thinking that he would ever betray her. Maybe the thought
was paranoid, but even paranoids can have excessively nosy would-be boyfriends who might want to interfere with their plans.

Tucker seemed calm enough, punching a key on his laptop and turning the screen around to her. The pixels crawled into a shape
she recognized.

She couldn’t believe what he was showing her.

“What I’d suggest,” Tucker said, “and only suggest, because you’re free to do what you want, is a way to use the two hours
before your flight leaves. I want to take you somewhere here in the airport. If you don’t like what I show you, I’ll bring
you right back.”

“How can I trust you?”

He smiled and held up two fingers, a parody of a hippie peace sign. “This is a meeting. Not an abduction.”

She fretted like Chester. As easy as it was to read Kevin Doyle, whose eyes she could jump in without fearing what she might
find, Tucker’s were slippery and unfathomable.

But if what he just showed her was real, it would change her life forever.

“Okay,” she agreed. “Show me.”

K
evin slowly climbed the staircase. He bent down to feel the stiff new imitation indoor-outdoor carpet, the Astroturf the landlord
had laid right after his mother tumbled down the cement stairs nearly one month earlier. Kevin looked up at the new sixty-watt
light bulb in the ceiling fixture. The landlord had paid the utilities this month, too.

Tonight a lawyer was coming by to talk to the family about the accident.

Trudging up past three hallways full of pungent smells in his parents’ walk-up building stabbed him with memories. He tried
to imagine the way his mother would have seen it as a newlywed full of energy and hope. It was only supposed to be their starter
place. Then life dropped by with three kids. No wonder she got lost in the Time Life art books.

When his mother grew up in Bloody Forehead, Ireland, art appreciation probably meant not throwing rocks at the church’s stained
glass windows. He imagined her discovering Giotto’s
Lost Saint Sebastian
. She had traveled to Dublin with her brother Eddie. Waiting for Eddie to arrange two tramp-steamer tickets to New York City,
she snuck into the National Museum in Dublin and stood there glued to the painting. Maybe she felt like the saint, looking
for meaning in another
place. But, whatever she felt, she wanted to share it with Kevin by taking him, not his sisters, to the Metropolitan Museum
when the
Lost Saint Sebastian
came to New York.

It was his tenth birthday. He remembered her hands, warm on his shoulders. She made a little gasp when Kevin pointed out the
simple lines and shadows that Giotto used to show them Sebastian’s character, just from looking through the Time Life art
books with her. He told her that he saw Giotto’s spark of the divine. From that moment, she treated him as special.

When Kevin got through high school, Uncle Eddie waited with his tight little tyrant’s grin for Kevin to ask for a doorman
job. No, his mother tapped her finger on Eddie’s chest. Kevin would not start a career with the City of New York, or be one
of Eddie’s doormen. Kevin could work night jobs if necessary, but he would not have to take a real job. Kevin would study
art.

This Thanksgiving, his secret plan had been to lead her by the hand to the Stinson Gallery. He would surprise her the same
way she had brought him to the Metropolitan Museum. He would show her the Saint Sebastian he made for her, in a real gallery.

That was going to be his gift to her.

Now she would never see his Sebastian, and he had wound up begging Eddie, whose idea of art was
Dogs Playing Poker
, for a steady job to pay his rent.

Kevin tramped up the last flight to the fourth landing. He put his key in the metal door, stepping back when his father opened
it for him.

He swallowed. His dad was only fifty-three, but he looked old now, face bleached, chin resting on his shirtfront like a sad,
tired bloodhound.

Dennis Doyle had always prided himself on his fastidiousness. Tonight, his neck seemed to have shrunk in his shirt, and a
gray stubble covered his raw chin. His eyes had always revealed a little glimmer of the clever boy from Limerick. Now they
burrowed in their red rims, lonely and disbelieving, the skin around them pebbly. His dad looked lost. Maybe Kevin should
stay at the apartment with him until he found the groove of his new life.

“Hey, Dad,” Kevin greeted him with a hug. His father tensed at his touch. They weren’t easy huggers, the Doyle men.

“Well, the artist,” Dennis said quietly. “Our lawyer, Jon Landau’s coming in a half-hour and the girls are here already. Watch
your step around the piles of tissues. The girls mean well, but they make me feel worse with Marne ready to smack somebody
and Helen all weepy. How’s the job?”

“Great,” Kevin said.

He kept his smile hitched up while his father took the two bags he carried. He glared at the thin plastic one containing a
roasted chicken from the Hamas Deli, dry from twirling on the spit, and a pound of greasy macaroni salad. But he smiled at
the brown paper bag twisted at the top, a fifth of Bushmills.

Kevin looked around the apartment expecting, as he always did, some small change to mark the fact that his mother no longer
lived there. The mail she sorted through on November 23 remained on the table by the door. Even the scent of her cosmetics
lingered in the apartment, probably on the sheets and towels his father would not send to the laundry.

The living room of the Doyles’ apartment, sixteen feet square, looked out on Third Avenue through wood-paneled windows half
covered with yellowed white drapes. A brown couch and two plaid chairs huddled close together before a gigantic TV set. The
day he turned fifteen, they carried home the thirty-two-inch Magnavox and rearranged all the seats to face the tube.

Wall-to-wall photographs of Kevin and his sisters from newborn babies through high school graduation, multilayered with more
photos that covered the tables and walls, created a silent documentary of the Doyle family’s Big Events.

In the traditional world of the Doyles, Kevin realized for the first time, the next Big Event for each of them would be the
disease or accident that killed them.

“Hey, Kevin.” His sister Marne hopped up and squeezed him.

Marne got his mother’s nice features and auburn hair. She also worked out every day with free weights. When Kevin lightly
gripped her forearm through her thin jacket sleeve, it was like he could be holding a length of hard rope.

He sniffed her hair. “You went back to work.”

“They gave me three weeks.” Marne, twenty-six and single, became a firefighter after two years at City College. Kevin cared
about both his sisters, but he looked up to Marne. Not many people chose storming into an inferno, lungs filling with smoke,
for the same salary you could earn as a bartender.

And Marne had always backed him up, like his mom. In school, she’d poke guys her age in the eye and make them yowl for picking
on her little brother.

“How’s your job, Kevin?”

“Great,” he said. Flicking a glance to make sure his father wasn’t looking, he silently snapped his right fist by his neck
and let his tongue roll out of his mouth, to look like he was hanging himself.

She giggled and mussed his hair.

Helen was twenty-eight, but looked middle-aged. When specialists told her she was unable to have kids—at least not without
fertility drugs that she worried might give her octuplets—her youth seemed to burn out like the pilot light in a stove. She
started to pull her hair back, wear sensible shoes, and take on the rhythms of a municipal-payroll lifer who lived for weekends
and vacations. To Kevin, she was serving out a sentence.

While Dennis Doyle took the bags into the kitchen, Kevin went to the sagging shelves over the couch and ran his finger over
the old set of
Encyclopaedia Britannica
volumes from A to Z. He pulled out the C volume and read a short section.

“What are you reading?” Helen frowned.

“Nothing,” Kevin told her, closing the book, looking around the apartment.

At his mother’s wake, this living room had throbbed like an Irish boombox. The rumbling bass sounds came from his mom’s people,
the Feeneys. They were descended from the Finnachs, the Irish word for fighters. Their faces wore the stamp of craggy western
Ireland. They never spoke at less than a bellow. His mom always seemed a mutant in her family, since she seldom yelled and
her face never furrowed into dark lines and shadows. His dad’s people, the more sociable Doyles, had softer faces with big
ears. They came from Limerick, where they sold green beer and plastic shillelaghs to Americans tourists who used
expressions like “Top of the mornin’ to you” that no real Irish kid had ever heard.

Kevin remembered his childhood as a constant bedlam. Everybody yelled just to make conversation. Kevin squeezed himself into
whatever quiet space he could find, sometimes out on the fire escape, even when it snowed.

Now he longed to roil in that old bedlam. His dad would live in this empty-feeling apartment for the rest of his life. He
would never re-marry.

His father was coming back from the kitchen. He carried a short whiskey on the rocks in each hand, handed one to his son.

“I was just thinking,” Kevin started. “Maybe I could move in here for a while.”

He didn’t say what he really thought, that his father had no life without his mom. But it was true. Dennis Doyle never wanted
anything more than to be with his wife. He wasn’t like other neighborhood men who snuck out to Riley’s Sports Bar and had
to be dragged home.

“You’ll be lonely, Kevin,” Dennis blew him off, sounding phony-brave. “I’m ready to get back to work. By the way, the building
residents made a donation to the Heart Association in your mother’s name. They didn’t get it right, but I suppose it’s the
thought that counts.”

Kevin sat in one of the faded plaid chairs across from his father. He put his drink on the coffee table, alongside a
TV Guide
for the Thanksgiving week when his mom died. He had always believed, when his parents’ mortality began to dawn on him, that
his dad would die first.

“To Mom,” Kevin said. They sipped the whiskey slowly, both drinking to dull the edge, but not get high or drunk.

Dennis got up as though he’d forgotten something. He came back with a copy of the previous day’s
Globe
, opened to the “Don’t Drop Deb!” headline. Dennis passed it to Kevin and lifted his eyebrow.

His sisters stared at him as though they’d already seen it.

“Yeah, that’s me,” he told them.

His father frowned. “I could tell by your ears. What are you getting
up to in that building? This kind of stuff won’t do you any good with the management, you know.”

“Her boyfriend called me in the lobby, asked me to help him with her. She has some problems.”

“I’ve read about her before, Corny the Deb,” Marne said. “That girl’s trouble, Kevin.”

Kevin shrugged, not ready to gossip.

“Do you talk to this girl?” Helen asked him, looking worried that the deb and her doorman brother would be friendly.

“She was asleep.” Kevin sighed. “She woke up and said, ‘Great corona.’ Then she passed out again.”

“Corona?” Marne asked him. “The beer?”

“Or an electrical arc. We use them making neon. Or maybe a crown. Or a burning star. I just looked up a bunch of definitions.”

“Are you interested in the girl or something, Kevin?” his father said. “They have rules against fraternization, don’t they?”

“Yeah, but I’m not interested.”

“Then why look up what she said?” Marne asked him.

Marne was looking for action, something to argue about. He supposed after chewing over his mother’s death for the past twenty-seven
days, they were all grateful for another topic.

“Hey, I like that deb for Kevin, Dad,” Marne said.

“I don’t know if the artist’s got time for girls,” Dennis said.

“I don’t see them making much time for me, Dad.”

“Becky Donnelly, she’ll make time,” Marne said. “She likes you.”

Kevin winced at the memory of Becky, a relative of some firefighter. Marne had set them up on Halloween.

“I like her, too,” he said to slide it by.

“No, I mean, she
likes
you,” Marne pestered. “And she’s an artist. She makes sculpture with Reynolds Wrap or something. She just needs a break.”