The Shortest Way Home (29 page)

“She said she told you to take us and leave.”

“Which she did. But you’re Lila’s children, and she loved her sister. She loved
you
, in her bloody arctic way. And she was a damn sight better at caring for you than I was at the time. I was drinking and dreadful depressed. I was out of control, Sean. Vivvy’s no Mary Poppins, but she was better than me. ’Tisn’t the leaving I regret. It’s the not coming back.”

* * *

D
a ate a bite or two of his pancakes and asked the waitress for more tea. He wanted to know about Sean’s life, and Sean gave him an overview, albeit brief. “This is the longest I’ve been back in twenty years,” he said.

“And you never married?”

“No.”

Da nodded thoughtfully. “Didn’t want to do to your own family what was done to you.”

“Right.”

“And Deirdre? I’ll bet she’s married. That girl was as fanciful and romantic as any I’ve seen.”

“No, she isn’t, either. But she’s an actress now. Well, trying to be. She’s in a play out in Worcester, and planning to give it a go in New York if things go well.”

“Ha!” Da chortled. “Of
course
she is. Brilliant!”

It was startling to see his Da grin so broadly. Sean wasn’t sure if he remembered ever seeing such a look on his father’s face. It had always had a slightly stony composition, as if anger, worry, and grief had been part of its skeletal structure.

“And Hugh?” Da asked, still smiling. “Don’t tell me—he never married, the rascal. He’s probably a ski bum. Or a skydiver.”

“No, he never married.”

“And what’s his line of work?”

Help me, Hugh.

“Unemployed?” asked Da. “Well, that’s all right. It’s a down economy.”

“No, uh . . .”

Da waited, but Sean couldn’t find the words. He knew this was why he was here—to tell Da about Hugh. But it seemed cruel, and Sean wondered if it would drive him back to the bottle.

The older man became concerned. “Jail?”

“No. Nothing like that.” Sean took a breath. “He passed, Da.”

The scarred hand went up to his face. “Oh, Jesus, no.”

“Six years ago.”

“Was it the Huntington’s?”

“Pneumonia.”

“Pneumonia?”

“I wasn’t here. I don’t know much more than that.” Sean shook his head. “I guess Kevin had it, and Hugh picked it up but didn’t get it treated in time.”

Da’s face went from grief to confusion. “Who’s Kevin?”

“Hugh had a son,” Sean explained. “He’s eleven now.”

“A son.” Da’s eyes filled. “A son with no da.” Tears spilled down the wrinkled, spider-veined cheeks. “Jesussufferingchrist,” he whispered. “I should have been here.”

Sean waited for the old man to collect himself, but there was no sign of it, and Sean began to get worried. The irony was not lost on either of them. So many fatherless sons. Generations of loss. Da’s tears continued to flow.

Toss him in the air a few times,
came the words in Sean’s mind.
Works like a charm.

His hand slid out across the table and into his father’s battered one. He squeezed it, and his father squeezed back. Sean could feel the slackness in the index and middle fingers, and he felt sympathy for his da—for the ruined hand, and the weakness that kept him so far from his family, and for the heartbreak of losing his wife. The shame and the loneliness.

Da’s crying quieted then. “Thank you,” he said.

CHAPTER 35

T
hey talked a while longer, the melted butter on Da’s pancakes congealing into the jam. Sean was exhausted. He felt as if he’d been through Hugh’s funeral all over again. He wanted to go home and get back into bed. And from bed he would call Rebecca and report that he had done it. He had told Da in person about his son’s death and the existence of his grandson.

“So when do you go back to Tacoma?” he asked Da, politely trying to wrap up the breakfast.

“I’ve no plans to go back there,” said Da.

Sean felt the hairs go up on the back of his neck. “No?” he said.

“There’s nothing for me there.”

“What about Declan Kelly?” Sean was grasping at straws, but panic was setting in.

“He’s gone to California. Law school.”

“Oh.”

“Actually,” Da offered hesitantly, “I’d like to move to Ireland.”

“Wow. Do you still know anyone there?” Sean felt as if he’d dodged a familial bullet.

“None I’ve kept up with. But you know, it’s not people I want to see. It’s the island.”

“Blasket? But there’s nothing there anymore, is there? Everyone moved to the mainland.”

“Yes, well, some went more happily than others.” He tipped his head, a little self-scoffing gesture. “It’s silly, really. But I need to. I have to get back there while I’ve still time.”

“Well, I hope you have a great trip.”

“Yes,” he said, digging a wallet out of his pocket. “So do I.” He tossed a twenty on the table. Sean went for his own wallet, but Da’s stronger hand went out. “Wouldn’t hear of it,” he said, and Sean didn’t have the energy to disagree.

They walked out to the parking lot—his father to a nondescript compact rental car. Sean put his hand out to shake, and Da took it in both of his own. “God bless and keep you, lad,” he said. “And thank you.”

* * *

S
ean sat in the Caprice and watched his father pull out onto the roadway. When the small car disappeared from view, Sean had the strange feeling that maybe the breakfast hadn’t happened at all, that it was some sort of fever dream, and when his temperature came down he’d see that it hadn’t been real. In fact, at the moment none of it—IHOP, Belham, his prolonged stay in the States—seemed entirely plausible. A Talking Heads song from his high school days started to play in his brain. Something about suddenly being in another part of the world . . . driving a large automobile 
. . . You may ask yourself, well, how did I get here?

Holy shit,
he thought.
How
did
I get here?

Going back to Aunt Vivvy’s felt entirely wrong—like it would compound his disorientation. The Tree of Life Spa was just down the road. Sean drove over to see if he could catch Rebecca between clients. He just wanted to see someone real.

Cleopatra sat on her ergonomic throne behind the reception desk. When she saw him, a look came over her face as if someone had just passed some particularly bad gas.

“Just tell me where she is,” said Sean.

“Uh, this is a
spa
? So she’s, like, giving a
spa
treatment?”

“I’ll leave her a note.”

Cleopatra pushed a pen and piece of paper toward him. He scribbled on it and handed it back. She pinched it between her finger and thumb, dropping it onto the desk like a used tissue.

Sean got back in the Caprice and started driving east down Route 9, for no other reason than that Tree of Life Spa was on the eastbound side, and it was illegal to make a left turn and go west. The road took him through Natick and into Wellesley. His mother had gone to Wellesley College, though she’d told him once that it hadn’t been her first choice. She would have preferred to go to a co-ed school in a city. Wellesley had been her parents’ first choice for just the opposite reasons: close to home, no boys.

Route 9 took Sean through Newton and into Chestnut Hill, not far from Boston College. His mother had often visited a high school friend who’d gone to BC. At the same time, his father had lived in Brighton with a guy who also went there. Martin had joined the merchant marine by then, but didn’t miss the chance to go to college parties between runs. That’s how they met.

The BC Mods were townhouse-style apartments with small adjoining yards that created the perfect venue for multiunit bashes. Martin and Lila had each come with their friends and gotten separated from them in the happy, raucous confusion of the party. Lila was standing next to the keg on the patio, knowing her friend would eventually turn up there, when Martin thrust his plastic cup at her for a refill. She had never used a keg tap before and ended up dousing a boy standing next to her, who was inebriated enough to consider this a kindness.

“Your poor mother was mortified,” Martin had told Sean when he was a boy. “I fell in love with her on the spot.”

Sean veered off Route 9 onto Hammond Street toward BC. He circled down past lower campus and pulled over where he could glimpse the Mods behind the newer high-rise dorms.

That’s where it started,
he thought.
This whole godforsaken mess.

His anger surged at a God who would set in motion such a series of heartbreaks—a God Sean barely believed in anymore, yet who was still real enough to be furious with. He slammed the gearshift into drive and pulled out, coming quickly to Commonwealth Avenue. If he turned left, it would eventually take him directly into Belham.

Hell no,
he thought, and turned right.

Comm Ave had plenty of traffic lights, giving Sean ample time to stare out the window, stewing on his family history. A domino effect of misfortune had been set up on the day his parents met, one tile toppling into another over the course of the next forty-five years.

The Caprice seemed to make its way down Comm Ave of its own accord. In Allston the graffiti on the side of a building said,
GOD IS LOVE
.

“You idiot,” Sean told the graffiti. “God is a cruel son of a bitch with a twisted sense of humor. And by the way, you defaced a fucking building with that crap.” His vitriol surprised even him. For so many years, God had been the loving parent he’d so desperately wanted and missed, a guide and protector through all that was sad and frightening about his life.

And now he saw it differently: God had tricked him into doing the hardest kind of work, in sort of a protracted practical joke. It was embarrassing to realize he’d been gullible enough to fall for it. Pranked by God.

Wanting to get off the city streets and drive hard and fast, Sean pulled onto the Massachusetts Turnpike at the Allston tolls. He got confused at the point where it goes into the tunnel toward the airport and several other exit ramps spin off in various directions. Somehow he ended up in South Boston. And then he was headed up Broadway out toward the ocean.

Castle Island is the easternmost point in South Boston, and his mother had loved the place. She’d taken her children there often, especially when Da was at sea. Jutting out into Boston Harbor, it was a gorgeous vantage point for both the ocean and the airport across the water in East Boston. “Look,” she’d say as they stood along the fence that ringed the promontory, “we’re as close to Da as we can get right now. And when his run is over, he’ll either be sailing back into this harbor, or landing right over there at the airport.”

She also loved listening to the occasional brogue that could be heard from the newly arrived Irish in South Boston. “You don’t get to hear a brogue very often when Da’s not home, now do you?” she’d remind them.

Sean got out of the Caprice and walked. To his left was Fort Independence, a site that had been used for coastal defense for as long as Boston had been a city. To his right was Castle Island Park, where picnicking families laid out their lunches and children skittered around the playground. He followed the walkway out until it turned north along the seawall.

It was a hot August day, and the sun had burned the haze out of the sky. Gulls swooped and screamed, diving down on the occasional dropped hot dog or bag of chips. Bare-chested young men grasped the hands of their tank-topped girlfriends; an elderly couple in matching jogging suits walked purposefully by.

Sean sat down on the grassy lawn and stared out to sea. What if just one of those dominoes had somehow failed to knock the next one over? What if his parents had gotten married, but his mother hadn’t had Huntington’s after all, or she had, but his father hadn’t left, or his father had left, but Aunt Vivvy had been warm and loving? What if they hadn’t each been driven to escape—Deirdre into the imaginary world of drama, Hugh into drugs, and Sean to any corner of the world that wasn’t home? What if Hugh had gone to the hospital sooner?

What if Sean had made different choices himself—had taken up his career at one of the numerous Boston hospitals, had married someone who didn’t mind not having kids and was willing to take a chance on his odds of living to a ripe old age?

The test for the Huntington’s gene had become available in the late 1980s when Sean was in nursing school, and he’d decided not to take it. He didn’t want to know when and how he would die.

But what if he
had
taken it?

CHAPTER 36

S
ean woke up to an unpleasant tickling feeling around his nose and chin.

“Rowdy, come!” he heard someone call. “Leave that poor man alone!”

Sean sat up quickly, and saw a large, short-haired dog with no tail and huge testicles trot away from him. He wiped his face with his arm and spit a few times.

His cheeks felt tight and sore. Sunburned. How long had he been lying there?

The sun was behind him now, so it had to be well past noon. He was starving, and went into Sullivan’s, the same little eatery by the parking lot that had been there when he was a kid. He ordered fish and chips; they tasted exactly the same as they had thirty-some-odd years ago: fishy-salty, as if they were the tactile manifestation of the sea air.

He sat down at one of the picnic benches and watched a couple of little brown birds peck at crumbs, scattering whenever someone walked near. In all his ruminations about his family, there was one strange fact that he kept coming back to, questioning it, puzzling at it. . . .

His mother had been happy.

Certainly there must have been things that she’d kept from him as a child, things she’d worried about or fought over with his father. When her mind started to go and her movements got jerky, he saw her fear and anger and sadness. But up until that time, she seemed as happy as anyone he knew. She laughed and joked; she did as she liked. She always seemed delighted and proud of her children. And there had been a strong affection between his parents, simmering below the surface of their casual gestures and comments. It used to give Sean a slightly queasy feeling, once he’d learned about sex, and made him suspect that they might even do it sometimes when they weren’t trying to have another baby.