The Year That Follows (12 page)

“What if I told you,” he says, “that I thought we should live together?”

“I think you should tell me you love me first.”

When was the last time he told a woman he loved her? He can’t remember. It has always gotten him in trouble. Always. What the hell, he thinks, I’m eighty.

“I love you,” he says.

“Say it like you mean it.”

“I love you.”

“Kiss me, then.”

He obeys.

“I would tell you it’s about time,” she says.

T
here is, she thinks, not much town to Yorktown, just some strip malls and fast-food joints and gas stations with large convenience-store operations. At least the sky has cleared slightly, letting in the late summer sun and showing off the large trees that have survived the path of commerce. She takes it all in
while following the MapQuest printout, which the Hertz guy gave her with some reluctance, as if York-town had secrets best kept from outsiders.

She finds herself in a neighborhood of modest homes, simple two-story rectangular boxes and ranch houses, the type of neighborhood her father used to drive her and Kyle through when they were kids so they could look for gold stars. “There,” her father would say. “The people who live in that house lost a son in the war.” Cat would picture a dark home with tearful older people moving about in silence. One day they saw two homes with two stars, four dead, unknown sons. Her father said, “When I fought, everyone went. Now it’s just kids from this neighborhood. The ones who have less sacrifice more. Remember that.” And she has.

She finds the address and parks in front of a modest ranch house, an Oldsmobile with New York plates in the driveway, a large oak towering over the front yard, a yellow ribbon tied around it, just like the old song. Actually, the ribbon appears to be plastic, like police tape. Who is in the military? Cat wonders. She glances up to the top of the tree and sees there a light wisp of rust, the first hint of fall. The hedges are clipped, the lawn thin but cut. A bit sad, she thinks, but a house and a yard. More than I have. She feels for her phone. Perhaps she should call. Her visit will shake them up. No, she decides, best to ring the doorbell. It’s harder to turn someone away who is standing before you, in the flesh. She checks her face and adds some lipstick, a little color to her cheeks, but not too much, then takes a deep
breath. She gets out of the car and stands, waiting for her legs to steady.

Her heels clack on the cement of the front walk, and then a large animal—a groundhog, she thinks—runs in front of her, pursued by a dog. No, she realizes, it’s a coyote, its coat thick and lustrous, glowing in the afternoon sun. The groundhog turns right and runs behind the house; the coyote closes. She stares at the empty space they left, waiting for the sound of the groundhog’s demise, but nothing comes.

“Mrs. Boyle?” Cat asks when a women opens the door. The woman has dark hair and lined eyes, a quilted upper lip, but she’s still younger than Cat expected.

“Yes.”

“My name is Catherine Miller. I’m here about Siobhan and her little boy.”

“Are you with the government?” Mrs. Boyle has stepped back almost behind the door, holding it as if it were a shield.

“No, it’s about my brother. I’m fairly certain he’s the boy’s father.”

“How do you know that?” she asks, letting the door open slightly.

“Almost a year ago my brother learned Siobhan had a boy. He thought he was probably the father.”

“So, where is he?”

“He died on September eleventh.”

M
rs. Boyle considers this. Cat lifts her hand, feels the urge to bite a fingernail, but stops herself by holding both hands behind her back. She has no idea what Mrs.

Boyle will do next, can’t guess if she will be invited in or turned away. “Come in,” Mrs. Boyle says at last, as if she’s still making up her mind. Slowly, she opens the door and steps back, giving Cat a glimpse down a dark hallway.

In the living room, Cat sees the boy. He’s standing in a large playpen, one little fist grabbing on to the top of the railing before he lets go and wobbles, hands free, to the other side. He lets out a squeal of glee. “He just learned to walk a couple of days ago,” said Mrs. Boyle. “A late bloomer, and a bit unsteady. Have a seat.”

Cat sits. The boy looks over and smiles at her. He’s towheaded, with big crimson cheeks and a handful of little teeth. “He’s beautiful,” Cat says.

“Yes,” says Mrs. Boyle. “Everyone says so. I’m going to call my husband.”

Mrs. Boyle heads off to the kitchen to call, close enough to keep the boy in her sight through the open door. Cat hears a few words, but she can’t make them out. Not with the boy staring at her, not with her inability to take her eyes off him. He seems to know this. He performs for her, walking this way and that, lifting his arms, giggling, then looking back at her and giggling more. Not a care in the world, Cat thinks. Not one.

M
r. Boyle arrives after fifteen minutes or so, during which time Cat sat on the couch and stared at the boy, who continued to walk back and forth, like a little soldier on sentry duty. Mrs. Boyle waited nearby, said nothing, a thin woman who
gave off the impression that perhaps she forgot to eat. Cat finds her unnerving and is relieved when Mr. Boyle appears, a tall man, with close-cropped hair, no jacket but a shirt and tie. A shirt and tie, but nothing like Kyle wore, or her father. Short sleeves, for one thing, and a collar a size too big. Mr. Boyle walks over and Cat stands and shakes his hand. Then he takes a seat on the coach, rests his forearms on his thighs, exhales with some effort, as if it’s already been a very long day, and says, “Tell me, exactly, what do you want?”

I want, Cat thinks, to take your grandson back to Michigan to live with me. “Do you know who the boy’s father is?” she asks. It suddenly feels very hot.

“You think it was your brother.”

Mrs. Boyle has retreated to the door by the kitchen, where she stands quietly, not really in the room at all.

“I do,” Cat says. “I’m fairly certain.”

“Why?”

“Because he thought so.”

“Because he thought so,” Boyle repeats.

“You didn’t know my brother.”

“He had all the answers.”

“Men don’t own up to paternity when they’re not the father,” Cat says. She is, she realizes, sweating. She feels a droplet run down her ribs.

“You’d think a guy like that, one who would own up to fatherhood, my daughter might want to introduce him to her parents,” says Boyle. He has thinning hair, rust-colored like the upper leaves of the oak outside. From her work she knows his lot. A good man, she
imagines, but with weak finances, meager options, one who has to pay up for credit. Not unlike herself.

“I can’t explain why your daughter did what she did,” Cat says. “But I can guess. You’re a woman of a certain age, you want a child, then you get pregnant, probably by accident, and you think, I don’t know if this will happen again. I don’t know if this will ever happen again, but I have this chance to have a child right now, and so maybe the father’s not perfect, maybe you don’t want the father around at all, but you have this life inside you, and once you have that you’re not going to give it up. It’s going to define you, and you don’t think that one day you’ll go to work and won’t come home.”

“What do you want, Mrs. Miller?”

No missus, she thinks. She never changed her name, never wanted to. She remembers thinking, I’m a Miller, always will be. Of course, it should have told her something, right then, about Michael.

“I want to know that my brother is your grandson’s father. There’s DNA. We can know.”

Boyle considers this.

“It will give your grandson a father,” she says. “Even if that father is dead, the boy will want to know who his father was. He’ll just want to know.”

Again, Boyle says nothing.

“Are you planning on raising him yourselves?” Cat asks.

“For now. We don’t yet have it all worked out. Siobhan has a sister.”

“Where is she?”

“She’s in the military. Navy. Abroad, right now.”

Cat looks at Mrs. Boyle, who’s looking away. She sees that Mrs. Boyle knows why she came, and Cat understands that she’s been right all along: she needs to adopt the boy. She suspects even the Boyles know it.

“I have an eight-year-old son,” she says.

“Your brother, was he Kyle?” Boyle asks.

She feels a jolt at the mention of his name.

“Why, yes, he was. Did you meet him?”

“Siobhan mentioned him once. We knew he existed. My wife and I will need to talk,” he says.

He stands, and Cat follows, relieved to be able to move. She says, “I’ll be honest, I don’t know how DNA tests are done. I’ll find out and then I’ll let you know what to do.”

Boyle nods. He’s not pushing her out of the house, but she feels he’d like to. She takes a step toward the foyer, but stops. “May I?” she asks, nodding at the little boy. “May I hold him?”

Silence. Even the boy stops playing in his pen.

“Let’s wait on that, honey,” says Mrs. Boyle.

“We’ll talk,” Boyle adds.

“What do you call him?” Cat asks.

“Ian. His name is Ian.”

“Ian,” Cat says. She walks out into the bright afternoon thinking it over and over: Ian, Ian, Ian.

M
aybe we’re starting over each day, Sam thinks. Even now. He has decided to keep his place, though he will move, no question about that. He doesn’t want to have to pack up all his stuff, and, besides, it’s a little easier to relax on a boat when you know there’s a life raft. He thinks of the navy, of the rolling green water near the Philippines and the sky off San Diego, of the mountains rising out of New Zealand, and then, his mood darkening, of the control room of a submarine he trained on in the early spring of ’
42
. He hated submarines—no life rafts—but a sonar instructor had noticed his ear and so for a couple of weeks he feared he might spend the war underwater. One day they were training in the waters off the coast of California, only a couple of hundred feet below the surface. The sonar picked something up, something a few miles east of them. The sonar man didn’t think it was a ship. Neither did Sam, who’d trained on the machine about two weeks. He could tell from the return
ping
, which was too soft and fuzzy. The captain, though, insisted it was an enemy sub. A discussion ensued. The chain of command was clear, so they torpedoed the blip, but found no evidence of a sub. It was a whale, coming to the surface for a bit of air.

It is, Sam thinks, no small thing to kill an animal, any animal, but that whale was something else altogether; causing its death was a special kind of hubris, a basic injustice against nature, and the nature of things. He thinks back to the captain, who was probably only thirty-two or -three, as unsure in life as any man, charged with responsibility that was beyond him. Sam wonders if he survived the war. In any case, he’d likely be dead now. Then he was blond and skinny with blotchy skin and a face that did not display a seriousness of purpose. Still, he tried. Hood was his name. Back on shore Sam went to the Officers’ Club for a drink, a new pleasure of rank and adulthood. There, for the first time, he met Higginbotham, a large man (he’d played football at the academy), imposing at the bar, with his special mix of posture and bulk. There was one seat, and it happened to be next to Higginbotham. Sam took it.

“Where you from, son?” Higginbotham asked, his soft drawl exotic, almost foreign. In college Sam knew guys from Ohio and Wisconsin, one from Pennsylvania. The navy was a whole different story.

Sam told him.

“Dee-troit,” said the officer. “Your daddy make cars?”

“No, sir.”

“Tanks?”

“No.”

“I thought everyone in Detroit makes cars.”

“Or tanks,” Sam said.

Higginbotham chuckled and Sam thought it would end there, but Higginbotham really did want to know what Sam’s father did for a living, and so Sam told him: he bought and sold junk. Sam explained that his father was an immigrant, and that things were not easy for him, that he’d come here poor and he still spoke with an accent. Sam did not mention that the accent was Yiddish. No sense bringing that up.

“He sent you to college, though, didn’t he?” Higginbotham asked.

“He did.”

Higginbotham put a hand on Sam’s shoulder and motioned to the bartender with his other. Then he looked down at Sam’s beer, which was barely touched. “You ever had a martini, son?”

“No, sir.”

“We’re going to toast your daddy, then. Since he made sure you got educated. And, since he obviously never taught you, I’m going to teach you how to drink.”

“Learn from the master,” said a voice down the bar. Higginbotham raised his empty glass in a mock salute, then turned back to Sam.

“Now tell me, which tub are you on?”

Sam told him.

“Hood?” Higginbotham asked. Yes, Sam nodded. “No no no,” said Higginbotham. “That won’t do.”

Sam’s transfer came through the following afternoon. Even then he recognized it as a blessing, a gift from God.

•    •    •

S
am wakes from a short nap, twenty minutes in his reading chair, he guesses. How can he explain to Phyllis the joy he feels just waking up? With death so close, it’s like the war. If he woke at sea and it wasn’t a general quarters alarm—sometimes it was—then he felt he’d been granted a new life. He wanted to survive. He did what was required of him; often he did more. He understood that luck was the main component of the formula that resulted in life or death, but he wanted to move the odds. Higginbotham wanted this, too.

One day late in the war, though of course he had no idea it was so, Sam found Higginbotham in the officers’ mess, drinking from a flask. “This is the last whiskey,” Higginbotham said. “After this we’ll need to hit a decent port to restock.” He paused, then asked Sam, “You got any?”

“No, sir.” It had never occurred to Sam to buy alcohol unless he was going to consume it on the spot.

“What do you have?” Higginbotham asked.

“Chocolate,” said Sam.

“Well, let’s have it.”

Sam’s parents had sent the box, Saunders Chocolates, individual pieces set nicely into pleated pieces of paper. Except that it had taken three months for the box to find him in the Pacific, during which time the chocolate and fillings and paper had melted into a single block. Sam set the box on the table, gave it a hit with the heel of his hand, and then took off the cover. “Help yourself,” he told his commanding officer.