Halfway Home (28 page)

I swiveled around and crashed through the evergreen hedge, back to the keening of the wind. The panic had rooted in me now. As I skidded down the slope of the ridge, tearing the spongy fabric of the lawn, I kept telling myself he was doing this deliberately—hide-and-seek. In a minute he'd swagger out and wonder what all the fuss was about. But if I was so sure, then why was I so scared?

I staggered against the corner of the pergola, gripping the stucco column like an anchorage. I stared dully through the parlor windows, alien and orphaned by the storm. The scruffy plush of the parlor furniture, the crackling fire and the nice relations—all of it seemed like another life, a daydream I had wakened from at last. The world was chaos after all. And then there was no wall anymore between me and the unthinkable:
He's dead.

I pitched along the side of the house, moaning now, reason flung to the winds. I looked down and saw my right foot was bare, streaked with mud. Somewhere I'd stepped out of one of my shoes, without even knowing. A wave of black laughter convulsed me, because I couldn't feel the slightest difference between one foot and the other. Please—let him be all right. If he was dead, then what was I praying for? And to whom? I was all contradictions, tilting against the newel post by the kitchen door, the runoff from the roof above like a waterfall on my head. Some rescue mission.

By then I must have been on adrenaline overload, or shellshocked from the rain and cold. I should have gone in. I was flirting with hypothermia when I lurched across the back lawn, making toward the garage. My head was fogged with grief already. I had the clearest picture that I would find my nephew in there, hanging from a roofbeam. When I reached the gravel drive I finally felt which foot was bare, from the stinging of the crushed stones. It was better that I should find him. Maybe I could even cut him down before his parents had to see him.

The big sliding door was stuck and rusty, because nobody kept a car in there. I tugged at the handle, bracing my foot on the frame, creaking it open a bare few inches. Then I wedged my shoulder into the breach and shoved, widening the gap bit by bit till I could slip inside. The light was silvery gray through the dusty windows. Panting with dread I looked up into the gloomy eaves, tracing the crisscross of the beams. Nothing there of course, no seven-year-old at the end of a rope.

So why was I shuddering? Why this high-pitched moan?

Because this was what I always swore to do in my bitterest hours: hang myself from a rafter of the barn on West Hill Road. Then let my father try to answer what he had done to his son. It was my trump card fox years and years, ready for when I couldn't take it anymore. I kept the rope coiled in the loft like a sleeping snake. And couldn't say even now how close I came, though the bleating cry of loss erupting from me here made it seem as if I'd done it. In fact, I'd found a way to be a dead child without going all the way.

Then I was crying with something like relief. The garage was cold as a meat locker, but the panic had receded some, so the chattering of my teeth was purely physical. No one had died here. The memory of West Hill Road flipped over, and I saw very clearly my child self, swinging my feet at the edge of the loft as I read through a stack of library books. Secretly, so my father wouldn't hit me. It was a wonder I didn't go blind from so many hours in such dim light. And the rope always coiled beside me, like a spy with a cyanide pellet. I don't know why I never thought to run away. In my day Catholics didn't.

So I couldn't have said which seven-year-old was missing anymore, me or Daniel. But I did begin to see how deep things went between parent and child. How the terror of something being wrong—an injury, a kidnapping—dredged up all the most ancient fears. You became a lost kid yourself.

Wiping the rain and tears from my eyes, I turned my head, and dimly through the dusty window saw the prodigal's return. I couldn't be sure at first, because the other figure beside him carried a wide red umbrella, huddled over them both. I darted to the window and smeared a wet hand across the grimy pane. They'd just reached the kitchen door. Daniel, without a doubt. I didn't recognize the blond young man who collapsed the umbrella and followed him in.

When I burst outside the rain in my face had turned from winter to spring. The stones in the drive didn't even graze my foot. I skidded across the lawn as if I were riding a skateboard. For once the nightmare had turned out to be nothing but hide-and-seek, and I was a boy homing in to touch base. It never occurred to me to be angry at Daniel. All the horror had lifted, and I was back to being happy, the memory of Gray in my bed returning with a rush.

I flung the kitchen door wide and strode in with drunken glee. I must've looked a sight, shoeless and muddy and drenched. Daniel and the blond young man—platinum as Mona—sat on either side of the zinc table, dry and chatting amiably. The young man blanched at my Ahab demeanor, but Daniel as usual took it all in stride. "Uncle Tom," he said excitedly, "look what Ricky gave me."

The table was strewn with compact disks, but still I was a beat behind. The young man, rail-thin and looking slightly cornered, stood up and offered his hand. "I'm Ricky Gun," he declared, the voice right off the East London docks. My own hand must have been cold as a bog, but he shook it firmly. Straight, I remember thinking. "Your Daniel found a hole in the hedge and came to visit me," he said, not unamused.

I wouldn't have recognized him from Adam, not being a devotee of MTV. He didn't
look
as if he pulled in thirty million a year. Utterly ordinary and without sequins. Yet even as Daniel chattered breathlessly, unrolling a poster of Gun and his band and holding it up to show me, I experienced a moment of coldblooded perspective. To wit: this scrawny man was the apex of the glass pyramid of entertainment, while I was and ever had been at the very bottom, despite being the drag Messiah. And I wanted to kill for envy, not because of his zillions or even his shining good health, but because he was my nephew's hero.

"Daniel," I declared, waving my arms to make him stop the presentation of his loot, "your parents are looking all over for you. They thought you got lost." Neatly excusing myself from the general panic.

Daniel didn't appear to take it in, shuffling and clicking his CD's together. Ricky Gun was already edging by me, stooping to pick up his red umbrella. How could the boy not understand he needed to prepare a chastened face? "I'm at the Forum in May," said the rock star, and I realized he was talking to me. I turned to his smiling face, all his East London teeth neatly capped and bonded. "I'll drop off some tickets," he announced cheerfully.

None of us will be here,
I thought, but I let them make their nice good-byes. Daniel stood at the kitchen door and waved his new friend away. And just then I heard the yelling, blowing in through the parlor doors like a bad wind.

We hardly had a second to get ready. I hissed at my nephew to warn him, but he was still mooning after Ricky. The shouting filled the house, too shrill for me to make out the words. I took a step toward the kitchen table, thinking to hide the evidence of a merry outing, when the two of them burst through the swing door from the dining room.

My brother in front, blown by the storm, stared wildly, his face chalk-white and stark as a lone survivor. His wife behind him seemed to ride him like a harpy, her own features twisted beyond recognition. They stopped in their tracks at the sight of me, beasts at bay. I shrank back guiltily. They looked as if they were chewing it over whether to grind me up in little pieces before they resumed their rampage.

Then my brother's eyes flicked to the left, catching sight of his son. I couldn't see Daniel react, but expect he just stood there very still. A piercing groan tore from Brian's heart as he scrambled by me and fell to his knees, seizing the boy to his soaking shirt.

My eyes were fixed on my sister-in-law, who looked beyond demented now, or anyway beyond help. Her mouth was a rictus of fury as she screamed: "Where have you been?" The same as what she screeched the day we went to the Chevron, Daniel and I, but this time there was no reply that would ever be the right answer.

I responded evenly: "He went to visit the neighbor." Playing down both the glamour and the adventure.

She didn't hear. She gripped the top of her head as if it would explode. A sound like gnashing teeth, and then she threw herself into one of the kitchen chairs, sending the CD's flying as she sprawled her elbows and buried her face in her hands. She wasn't exactly crying. The muffled noise she made was a kind of surrender, as if to say she couldn't take it anymore.

I turned to the others, Brian still gripping his son in a frantic wet embrace. Daniel looked at me over his father's shoulder, his own face composed and patient, what the Irish call long-suffering. Something close to irony passed between us then, though we were both far too well behaved to give it full expression. Yet it proved to me again what outsiders we were, the two of us, how far removed from the ruckus and upheaval that his parents lived on, just as mine had. He was a keeper of secrets like me, innocuous and seemingly impassive, biding his time till he could be free.

Suddenly Brian released him, giving him a push toward Susan. The boy shied slightly, and Brian coaxed him, murmuring some variant of the Sixth Commandment. Dutifully Daniel moved past me to his mother's side. He reached a hand and touched her shoulder. "Mom, it's okay," he said softly. "Nothing happened." And for once she didn't snarl and tear into him, but let the tears come instead.

My brother rose to his feet and pulled off his sodden sweat shirt, wrestling it over his head. The sudden nakedness of his torso, witnessed only by me, was oddly thrilling—the warrior stripping his armor. A great pool of water spread around his feet, which a Catholic boy would never track through the house. He turned with the heap of cotton in one hand, unsure where to set it down till I reached out, and he passed it to me like a football. I moved behind the kitchen door, still open to the storm, and pulled the lid of the washing machine and dumped it in.

By which time Brian had kicked off his seeping mocassins and was shucking his wet jeans. He danced on one foot, then the other, to tug them free. Again he handed them off to me, his body all glistening wet. Where his Jockey shorts clung against him, his dick was vividly outlined, better hung than
David.
I couldn't quite put it together, the massive presence of my brother's flagrant nakedness and the queer tableau of mother and son beyond.

Then Brian hooked his thumbs in the waistband of his briefs and yanked them down. No excess of modesty there. I was the only one who blushed, as he kicked off the shorts and caught them up in his hand, his thing swinging between his legs, the burning bush of red hair—all of it charged as ever for me. Madonna and child weren't even watching. Totally unselfconscious, casual as a locker room, Brian lobbed the Jockeys to me, since I had designated myself to the wash detail. I stared at him more or less dumbstruck.

He was already turning away when he happened to glance through the open door, where the rain drummed steady on the kitchen stoop. And I saw the most amazing change. Suddenly it was Brian doing the blanching. His mouth went into a funny grimace, and he actually brought up a hand to cup his genitals. His face was as red as his hair. I was behind the kitchen door, so I saw nothing but him, spinning around and ducking out of sight through the swing door, a stripper who'd just spotted a cop.

Daniel still stood with his back turned, half hugging the bent form of his mother. Then a knock on the door an inch from my ear. "May we come in?" asked a musical voice.

Daniel turned and Susan looked up, and the last thing I saw before the others walked in was a gleam of relief in Susan's eyes, wanton with hope. Then I was seeing a three-quarter view of Kathleen Twomey—in the modified habit of a teaching nun, royal blue with a shoulder veil, very Vatican II. Mona behind her, in a black trench coat out of
Shanghai Express,
saw me first and gave me a shit-eating grin.

Then Kathleen smiled beatifically and laid a hand on my arm.

"Tom, it's good to see you," she said. "Please introduce us to your family."

Her eyes were brimful of the jest of her Halloween getup, but only they betrayed her. Otherwise she was a fount of serenity, playing it absolutely straight. I couldn't pretend to keep up with it all anymore. I went on automatic, treating it like a play, relieved for the moment not to be the star. "Susan," I said, smiling across at my sister-in-law, who stood up from the table and hastily straightened her lilac jumpsuit, like a shanty Irish housewife. "I'd like you to meet Sister Kathleen."

"Sister," whispered my brother's wife, almost curtseying as they shook hands. "This is our boy. Daniel." A protective arm around the kid's shoulder, not a clue that a minute ago the walls shook with shrieking and ranting.

"Welcome to California, Daniel," Kathleen declared with hearty good cheer. "I'm sorry it's not sunny, so you can play outside. You'll have to believe us, it's
always
sunny here. Right, Tom?" Her voice boomed with laughter at the folly of the storm.

"Oh, he gets out," I murmured dryly, raising a brow at my nephew, but more than anything wanting to rattle Susan's First Confirmation rosiness. It reminded me of my mother simpering at Father Donegan. Mona leaned forward and introduced herself, like the donor in a medieval triptych, but Susan hardly noticed. Her face was swooningly open only to Sister. She wanted all A's in parochial school.

"I understand you've had a lot of trouble," offered Kathleen, and the compassion wasn't the least trumped up. The room was charged with an extraordinary air of release, that the trials of my brother's family were already revealed, no shame anymore. "Maybe we could pray together," Kathleen suggested, and there was something almost seductive there.

Susan nodded gratefully. Clearly this would be one on one, not a circle of us on our knees. Mona and I drew back, impeccably discreet. Kathleen leaned down to Daniel, lifting his chin with a finger. "We'll be back in a bit, and then I'd like to hear how you're doing in school. Tom says you're quite a reader."