Run (27 page)

“And he’s never seen me. I’ve spent the last twenty years making sure of that.”

“He saw you last night.”

Tennessee covered her face with her hands. She could feel the gentle tug of the IV needle in her vein. “I don’t know what I’m going to do about that.”

“Just be grateful. You’re going to need help and he’s the person who’s going to help you.”

“I wouldn’t take anything from him.”

“With Kenya,” she said, her voice at once so certain and so calm it seemed to take her by the hand and walk her forward. “He’s going to have to help you with Kenya.”

Tennessee would never say it, not even to her best friend in the world, but she did in fact have a fondness for Mr. Doyle that was a sort of affection. After all those years you get to know a person even if you’ve never spoken to him. She could tell that his moods were consistent for the most part and that he was fair. So many times she had seen him carry Teddy asleep to the car when he was young, or put a light hand on Tip’s back when they were walking. He never pandered to the boys, he wasn’t trying to make them into friends instead of sons, but he was proud of them, as proud as she was, and they had grown up in the light of his pride. She had seen him waiting for them, she had seen him frustrated, but she never heard him raise his voice or turn away when they were talking.

As a mayor there were things he could have done better, but as a father she had never faulted him. She did not fault him for a n n p a t c h e t t ❆ 212

trying to steer them towards politics. Tennessee understood that.

What Mr. Doyle couldn’t see was that the boys, while bright and dear and brave, knew nothing of sacrifice. They had never been asked to give anything up, not like Mr. Doyle had, not like she had.

Even the place where Bernadette had been, Mr. Doyle filled that up by giving them twice as much of himself. And while she’d wished that he would find someone else, some nice woman who would replace what they’d lost, she often wondered if he felt that his wife was in fact irreplaceable. She imagined that he did not love her any less for being dead. She knew how possible that was. “I guess Kenya could stay with them for awhile, until I was healed up.”

“At least you know he’ll look after her.” Tennessee Alice Moser smoothed the covers out over them with the flat of her hand. It seemed like she was going to say something else, something important, but as long as Tennessee waited it never came.

“The boys would be good to her. She’s always wanted to know them. She wants to have brothers.”

“And she’d have Sullivan, too.”

Sullivan, yes. He would be the easiest with her. He would be the one to buy her dresses. He would take her to Africa someday. “I had a dream that he came to see me.”

“He did come to see you.”

“Really?” Now Tennessee had to think about it all over again.

She was sure she had imagined everything.

“I think he has some problems,” Tennessee Alice Moser said.

“The truth is Tenny, we all have problems,” Tennessee said. “I have a new hip.”

“And I’m dead,” Tennessee Alice Moser said, and laid an arm across Tennessee’s chest and closed her eyes so that they could both get some sleep.

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c h a p t e r 9
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K
ENYA
AND
TIP
STOOD
ON
THE
CORNER
OF
UNION

P A R K
A N D
L O O K E D
D O W N
T H E
L O N G ,
S N O W Y

E X P A N S E
O F
T R E M O N T
for as far as they could see in one direction and then they turned to face the other. They found the world divided into three neat layers: blue sky, red brick buildings, white snow. The plows had come through in the very early morning and pushed everything from the middle of the street to either side, forming banks as high as Kenya’s shoulder. She had to crane around them to see, but there really was nothing
to
see. The snow that was left on the street was packed into a hard white permafrost as impen-etrable as the asphalt itself. When she scanned the few brave cars that skittered around with all the traction of ice cubes, none of them were taxicabs.

“What time is it now?” Kenya asked.

Tip didn’t look at his watch. “Eleven o’clock.” The cab was so late and they were so restless that they had decided to wait it out on the corner, but going to the corner did not produce the car. Tip was weighing it out: the wind, the cold, the crutches, the girl, the a n n p a t c h e t t ❆ 214

promise to his father that they would take a taxi, the likelihood of the taxi actually materializing in the next hour. Beneath her coat, Kenya was wearing a track suit brought from home. She was wearing Tip’s backpack on her back and she had to lean slightly forward to counterbalance the weight of the books.

“I can take that bag,” he said, looking down at her, though he wasn’t completely sure he could, given the compromised nature of his own balance. He needed the books in case he found the time to read for exams.

“I’ve got it,” she said, keeping her eyes fast on the road.

She appeared ready to spring at the first sign of available transportation, ready to sprint down the street and guide the cab back to Tip. Tip thought of her as a little peregrine falcon. Everything in her was designed to dart down, grab the rabbit. On the other side of the street the light turned green, instructing them to walk. That settled it. “We’re taking the T,” he said, and stepped into the street.

Kenya stayed on the curb. Tip was not following the plan. “I told your father I’d make you take a cab,” she called in a loud voice. “He gave me money.”

“Keep the money,” Tip said, working his crutches carefully against the hard pack in the street.

“At least call them again.”

“How many times can I call them?” Anyway, his cell phone was in his pocket and both of his hands were thoroughly occupied.

Kenya hesitated and then followed. If it would be wrong of her to take the T, it would be worse to let him go on alone. Besides, she didn’t want to go back to the house. Teddy and Sullivan were both asleep and Doyle would be too bent on entertaining her if it was just the two of them sitting in the living room together. She had already listened to the Schubert quintet (ironically, he had played her
The
Trout
, or at least Tip said it was ironic) and now she wanted to see r u n

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the fish museum, the special part that was only for scientists, where she and her mother and regular paying customers were not allowed to go. She wanted to run on Harvard’s track. She knew it was enormous and completely indoors because she had seen it once by peering in through the windows. More than anything, she wanted to get to the hospital so that she would be standing next to her mother’s bed the minute she opened her eyes. She wanted to kiss her hands and put her head lightly to her chest and listen to her heart, the things she did on the nights she couldn’t sleep. None of those things would happen on the curb. In two leaping steps she was right beside him again. She refused to dawdle. The light could change and strand her on the wrong side of Tremont. There was a chance that Tip might leave her there and even though she could catch him with no effort, she was not in the mood to cross against the light. She hooked her thumbs under the straps of the pack and hoisted it up.

“Let’s at least go back and get the Silver Line.”

“We’re taking the T.” He was nearly to the curb.

“But the T is four blocks at least. We can pick up the Silver Line on the corner and take it to Park Street.” Tip didn’t take the bus. He didn’t like the bus. “We’re going to Back Bay.”

“That’s insane.”

“Then I’m insane.”

She stayed quiet for awhile. She stayed beside him. “You can walk with those things okay?”

Tip straightened his elbows, careful not to rest his weight beneath his arms. “I’m getting the hang of it.” They were moving down Dartmouth Street at a good clip. He could have gone faster but every so often the rubber tips of the crutches would shoot out a quick inch or two on the ice and give him reason for sober consideration. The sidewalk was brick, charming, until you tried to shovel a n n p a t c h e t t ❆ 216

off the snow. It couldn’t have been more than twenty degrees but he was dressed for it now. From Teddy he had borrowed a parka and scarf and the sheepskin hat with earflaps that he had often ridiculed his brother for. From his father he took a pair of soft leather gloves with cashmere knit lining that pressed up hard against his palms, expensive gloves that Tip himself had bought for Doyle as a present several Christmases ago. But even more than the layers, it was the work of moving forward that kept him warm.

“Isn’t this the prettiest street?” Kenya said, her eyes forever turning up to the leaded windows and carved wooden doors that sat on top of straight stone staircases. “Not as pretty as yours, but really nice.”

Tip stopped to shift his weight against the crutches. He tried to carry his left foot higher behind him and he felt the ache in his shin.

The fi berglass casing of the boot that was designed to be so light was heavy. His foot was heavy. He took a moment to look around Dartmouth Street while he caught his breath. Same old Dartmouth Street, a shrine to wealth and minutely polished taste, every narrow side street more precious and perfect than the one before it. He could feel his pulse pounding in the side of his neck and he wondered if it had to do with the Percocet or if he was just out of shape. Last night with Teddy he could have run from Cambridge to Newton and this morning he was struggling with the block. “The street’s gotten too gentrified,” he said, and so dismissed it. He was irritated with his ankle or with himself and in that irritation he took unfavorable notice of the brass mail slots in the doors, the shining knockers shaped like lions’

heads. “There’s nothing interesting here anymore.”

“I don’t know that word,” Kenya said. She was always in the market for a new word.

Tip turned his head up to see four stories of gentrifi cation, left to right, front to back. The South End was a long way away from its r u n

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squatter days, its fire-in-the-trash-barrel days. All of that had come and gone before Tip had even been born. “The rich people came in and pushed the poor people out and fixed it all up so that every house looks the same.”

Kenya took inventory of the empty window boxes, the slender birch trees in the sidewalks, the stair rails fashioned in ornate iron-work. Even in the snow it all looked orderly and neat. She knew full well how lovely it would be once the purple vinca made a carpet around every tree and the geraniums filled the boxes. “But it looks nice,” she said, coming to the street’s defense. “I can think of some places not too far from here that could stand to be gentrifi ed.” To learn a word you had to know the definition, to own the word you had to use it in a sentence.

“You’re missing the point,” Tip said, pushing off again. “While they’re fixing the windows and picking up the trash and planting the flowers, they get rid of the poor people too. I mean the black people, the brown people. They push them out into Cathedral and over into Roxbury. That’s the gentry’s idea of cleaning up.” Kenya wasn’t thrilled with the implication, that at some point in history she or someone very much like her had lived on Dartmouth Street and later had been swept away in the name of a tidy cleanup.

“You still live over here,” she said, imagining that one morning there was a note taped to every black door in the neighborhood:
Time for
you to go.

Tip didn’t know anything about eleven-year-olds, how smart they were or weren’t, how much they understood. It struck him that when he was eleven he would have made the same smart remark to his weak generalization and it frustrated him that he didn’t know how to backpedal out of it. What he said was essentially correct, but her statement was indisputable: he had not been driven out of the neighborhood. He hadn’t factored himself into the equation at all a n n p a t c h e t t ❆ 218

and now he was reduced to telling her the absolute truth as he knew it: “You have to be poor and black to get taken out of this place,” he said. “I was only black.”

When they had made it down all the stairs to the T, Tip took out two tokens and fed them into the slot. The turnstile was a trick with the crutches and so he handed them over to Kenya and hobbled through as best he could. Everything in the city was dead today, including public transportation. People stayed home bundled up in front of their television sets, eating canned soup and watching the Weather Channel to see if there was going to be more of the same.

For this Tip was grateful. If he was going to be slow it was better not to have a long line of impatient Bostonians jostling him from behind. They missed the first train because he couldn’t run for it, but they were lucky and a second one came along before it should have.

He would get the hang of this, he was sure, but for now the only thing he wanted was to be sitting down.

On the T, Kenya pulled off one mitten with her teeth and dug into her pocket. “Here’s the money for the taxi.” She handed the two twenties to Tip. She could not believe that Doyle had given her so much in the first place, but he had said there would have to be a taxi not only to the museum but to the track, and then to the hospital, and it was very likely they would need that much in the end.

“I told you to keep it,” he said, and put his hand over her hand and pushed it gently down towards her lap. There was no point in flashing money around.

“It’s forty dollars!” she said, and held it up again. “I’m not going to keep forty dollars.” What if Doyle thought she’d never told Tip about the money? What if somehow it got back to him that it was her idea to take the train?

“So give it to him when we get home.”

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But the more she thought about it the more nervous the money made her. Nothing good would come of her holding on to it. If something happened and she lost it (and she did lose things, no matter how hard she tried to be careful—she was thinking now about her favorite Red Sox sweatshirt left at a track meet last October ), she would have to ask her mother to pay the money back. She straightened out the two soft bills against her thigh and laid them on the seat between them. “Take it,” she said in a quiet voice. “You give it back to him.”