The Year That Follows (15 page)

“Hey,” he said.

“Let me talk to Mom.”

“She’s still sleeping.”

“Okay, tell her I’m hanging out at Tonya’s this morning. I’ll be back later.”

“Can you take me to practice?” Kyle asked. She had
a Pinto, given to her by her father. He said she should drive Kyle whenever he needed to be driven.

“When is it?”

“Forty-five minutes.”

“No.”

“You’re supposed to.”

“Ride your bike,” she told him. “It’s not far to school.”

“I don’t like to get tired before I get there.”

“Kyle, you run, like, ten miles at these practices. What’s another couple on a bike?”

“Mom said—”

“So wake her up,” Cat replied.

She drove Tonya to Denny’s, where they sat in a booth and lingered over breakfast. Finally, Cat went home. She pulled up under the oak, the Pinto’s wheels crunching the acorns as she rolled to a stop. Inside, it was quiet. She checked the garage. Kyle’s bike was gone, but her mother’s car was still there. Amazing, Cat thought. Her mother never slept this late. Still, she was tired herself, and so she went to her room and took a nap, dozing off thinking of Tommy, of how warm it was to sleep next to him, of how what it would be like to do that every night, like an adult.

She woke a little before three. She found Kyle out in the kitchen, drinking milk from the carton. He was almost as tall as she was now, sinewy and lean.

“Where’s Mom?” she asked.

He managed to shrug without taking his lips from the carton.

“It’s ten to three.”

He just looked at her.

“Did you see her today?”

“No.”

“When was the last time?”

“Last night,” he said. “I went out with Mark. She was kinda getting ready for bed.”

“What time?”

“Early.”

“She seem okay?” Cat asked.

His look was answer enough. She knew then that her mother was in real trouble. Later she would tell Kyle not to feel guilty, that he was just a kid, that he couldn’t have known, but she would have known.

She went to the bedroom, Kyle following. She didn’t bother to knock on the door but went right in. Her mother lay in bed, curled up, fetal position, beneath the blankets.

“Call nine-one-one,” she told Kyle before she even touched her mother. Her idea was to give her mother mouth-to-mouth, to try to keep her breathing until the ambulance came. But when Cat touched her, and turned her onto her back and felt the stiffness of the body, and saw the yellowish purple on her mother’s face, Cat knew it was too late. She reached over and opened the blinds. The light spilled in. She noticed the bottle of gin on the nightstand, and the pills.

“Aw, Mom,” she said. “Mom.” It’s so … stupid, she thought. Stupid, stupid, stupid. She sat on the edge of the bed and felt the tears on her cheek, but then she
turned to Kyle and took the phone from him. He’d dialed the emergency number, but he was frozen, unable to speak.

C
atherine?” says the voice. It’s Saturday morning. Her first thought of panic is Connor, but he’s right here in front of her, with all of his toy cars and trucks running north and south on the floor, a little Lodge Expressway in her living room. So, it must be her father.

“This is she,” she says, just as her mother taught her.

“This is Greg Boyle.”

It’s been less than a week since she was in his living room. She hopes he’s taken Ian’s DNA to the lab. She’s signed the papers so Tommy can get the results, and she prepaid for the test by giving them a credit card number over the phone.

“What can I do for you, Mr. Boyle?”

“You can call me Greg.”

“Okay, you can call me Cat.”

“And I’d like to come see you.”

“Sure,” she says.

“Right now.”

She doesn’t quite understand, which he gathers from her silence.

“I’m at the airport, in Detroit. I’ve rented a car. I need directions.”

She has then another feeling of panic; things are moving quickly. She doesn’t want him to see where she lives. The smallness of it, the cheap kitchen cabinets and
countertops, the yellowing paint, the two small bedrooms. “Ian will sleep where?” she can hear him saying. “In the living room?” There is so much she hasn’t worked out. A child comes into the world, you must know where he will sleep, who will look after him. Who will love him. You don’t back it up on the fly.

She gives Boyle the directions. Saturday morning there won’t be much traffic. Even on a trip that he’s never made before, it won’t take him more than forty-five minutes. She needs to shower, wash her hair, put on some makeup. And she needs to clean up the place.

W
hen he rings the bell close to an hour later, she is almost ready. She’s cleaned herself up, and the apartment, and she’s baking cinnamon buns, Connor’s favorite, the premade kind stored in the freezer. The older she gets the more she avoids cooking, but with a child and little money she really doesn’t have a choice. And Connor, little man that he is, is ruled by his stomach.

“Who’s coming over?” he asked when she started making them.

“A man. His name is Mr. Boyle.”

“What does he want?” Connor asked.

A good question.

“He wants to talk with me. It’s adult stuff. You can watch cartoons in my bedroom.” This was the ultimate luxury for Connor, and yet another bribe.

Now Boyle enters. He’s wearing a blue Windbreaker Cat sometimes sees on older men and union workers,
dying breeds both, and often the same people. It’s still summer and likely to reach the mideighties today. He shakes her hand and she suggests he take a seat on the couch. He collapses into it, sinking deeply into the ancient cushions, an arm over the rest. He seems exhausted, or just relieved to have arrived at his destination.

“My wife doesn’t know I’m here,” he says.

Cat has, a time or two, met with men whose wives didn’t know where they were. It was never a good idea.

“I told her I was going into the city for work. I work a lot of Saturdays. People need water every day of the week. Now, if those crazies ever really wanted to get us, well, they’d go after the water.”

He stops talking, perhaps realizing he hasn’t given Cat a chance to speak.

“Something to drink?” she asks, then gasps. Hadn’t he just been talking about poisoned water?

“Well, a glass of … water.” He smiles. “Yes, water would be nice.”

She hurries to the kitchen, relieved to be able to move.

“My wife,” he says, louder, so she can hear him from the kitchen, ten feet away, “thinks I’m in the city. But I caught a plane out of Westchester, the little airport there. They have a flight that comes right here. I fly back this afternoon.”

She hands him a glass. It’s got a bluish tint, so cheap it might as well be plastic.

“Please,” he says. “Sit with me.”

She sits.

“I want to tell you about Ian. There’s a lot you don’t know.”

“Okay,” Cat says. “I’d like to know.”

“You can imagine our shock when Siobhan told us she was pregnant, that there was no father, or that she didn’t want a father. That she was going to do this on her own. I knew your brother’s name, so I assumed he was the father, but Siobhan said no, there was no father. It was very difficult on Mrs. Boyle and me. Were you given a religious upbringing, Ms. Miller?”

“Cat.”

“Cat, were you?”

“No.”

“Your parents are?

“My mother was Catholic. She died a long time ago. My father is Jewish.”

He shifts in his seat, takes his arm off the rest.
Well
, he seems to be saying.

“We’re Catholic. We raised both of our daughters in the church. Mrs. Boyle and I were very conscientious.”

“Yes,” Cat says.

“My wife, she can ignore things. I knew my daughters weren’t living the life of, well, their mother. Still, I expected more. My younger girl,Tara, she got pregnant, had an abortion. This I found out afterward. I begged her not to tell her mother. But she did. She told her because she knew it would hurt. You think you can forgive your children anything, but that one was tough for me—not the commission of sin, but the intentional cruelty,
the willful violation of the fifth commandment. Then she went off and joined the navy. Not that she told us. One of our neighbors has a boy in the service, and he told his parents he’d seen Tara. She doesn’t speak to us.”

“But, the yellow ribbon?”

“Yes, I put that up. Because, still, I want her to come home. I’ll always want her to come home. Her mother, of course, believes it will happen.”

Cat understands, knows that mothers hope against hope, and believe what they will believe.

“You see, the little boy, Ian, he can’t live with his aunt. It’s just not possible. I’ve got a couple of brothers, but they’re older than I am. Same with Mrs. Boyle’s sister and brothers.”

“Mr. Boyle, I’d be happy to take Ian.” She feels elated saying this; she’d feared he’d fight her. Now it’s as if she’s doing him a favor. “He’s—”

“We’ll see about that. It’s why I’ve come.” He leans forward, his movements slow as he reaches for the water. Cat wonders if he’s not older than she thought.

“I have cancer,” he says. “In the pancreas. It is, truly, a death sentence. The leaves are about to turn, and it’s likely I’ve seen my last spring. This saddens me. I’ve lost two daughters. Tell me, are you close with your father?”

“I suppose,” she lies.

“You see him often.”

“No, not exactly. He lives in California. We talk on the phone.”

“You ought to go see him.”

“I am, for a week. It’s the one-year anniversary of Kyle’s death. And Siobhan’s, of course.”

“My wife, she doesn’t know I have cancer. She thinks I go to the doctor, take the pills for a stomach issue. I just don’t know how to tell her, not with Ian there. She loves that little boy. I know we’re too old to see it through, would be even if I were healthy, and she can’t do it alone. She knows this, but she can do it for one more day, and so she hangs on. But we’re out of time. She’s waiting for me to tell her what we’re going to do.”

“Which is?” Cat asks.

He looks around the apartment as if he’s just opened his eyes and is trying to figure out where he is. Cat is forced to glance with him, at the shabbiness of her home, the cheap couch and chair, the old Matisse print (saved, unbelievably, from her college apartment), a wall that is completely bare.

“Can you give me a tour of your home?” he asks.

This takes a couple minutes: a brief stop in Connor’s disaster of a bedroom, with clothes and toys strewn across the floor even though she’d just picked it up, then to her bedroom where Connor lies belly-down on the bed, giggling at the TV.

“Connor, please say hello to Mr. Boyle.”

Nothing.

“Connor!”

He looks as if to say,
Why are you yelling?
He says his hello, and goes back to the show. Cat and Boyle return to the living room.

Boyle sits back on the couch and looks at her. She
wants to say something but realizes she’s selling herself. So she thinks of Sherri, of how Sheri would tell her not to speak.

“Where would Ian sleep?” he asks.

“I’ll get a bigger place, so he can have his own room.”

“Do you have the money for that?”

Not yet, she thinks. “My brother had money. It’s still tied up in probate, but it’s coming. And the settlement. That alone would be enough. My father is handling it. He says it shouldn’t be long now.”

“Does your father know about Ian?”

“Not yet.”

“Why haven’t you told him?”

“I guess I’m waiting to see if it’s real. He’s an old man, my father. I don’t want to tell him he has a new grandson, then tell him he doesn’t.”

“We’ll need to move quickly,” Boyle says. “Ian won’t remember these days. He’s still young enough that it would be easy to change his caregivers. If you want it.”

“I want it,” she says.

“You are sure? You can’t change your mind, once you’ve taken him.”

“I’ve never been so sure of anything in my life.”

“Okay, then. I should get back to the airport. I need to talk to my wife.”

“Yes,” Cat says.

“May I ask you something?” he says.

The tone sets her on edge, but she nods yes.

“Is there a man in your life? The boy’s father?”

“Not the boy’s father. A better man. I’ve known him for thirty years, so I feel confident saying that.”

“And I’ve known you for less than a week. And I think I’m going to let you raise my grandson. Here’s the thing, Catherine Miller. For me, these are desperate times. I have to trust you. I don’t see where I have a choice, but I want to feel that I can. I want to believe that things will turn out all right.”

“They will,” she assures him. “I know they will.”

“I think about my lost daughters every morning, and then about what am I going to do for the little boy. There is never an answer, but now you’ve presented yourself. I have to go on faith, really.”

“The lab,” Cat asks. “Have you …”

“No, I see no need. If Ian were Tara’s child, then yes, I’d have been there already. But I know my daughters. I know Siobhan. She was different. Very, very loyal. If she was with your brother, then that’s who she was with.”

“You don’t want to be sure?”

“I am sure,” he says.

She asks herself if she is sure and realizes her doubt springs from her own fear of getting exactly what she’s asked for. She needs to banish these thoughts. She’s wanted Kyle’s child, and now that she can have him, she’s questioning it. No, she tells herself, she must do better. The boys demand it.

S
am wakes gasping for breath, a memory of the planes coming at him, always the planes, the deafening blasts of the guns over the roar of the ship’s engines and those of the planes, the smell of the saltwater and smoke and something else. Fear, probably. He survived, which was all that mattered then, to survive and thus receive the blessing of long life, now lived. Always the blessings are better granted than lived.

He rolls to one side, swings his legs out, gets his feet to the floor.
Transferring
, they call this, the simple act of being able to get out of bed. And into it. It had been his first test after the back operation, the nurse coming in one morning and saying, “Okay, Mister. Today is the day you’re going to get out of bed.” She all but shoved him to his feet. Sam felt embarrassed wearing that silly robe, but he let that go and struggled with her till there he was, standing, his feet registering the coldness of the floor, his legs slightly wobbly, his whole body shaking, in part from being so weak but mostly from the whole idea of it, that he could stand on his own two feet. For the first time he could see out his hospital room window, not at just Detroit’s permanently gray sky but at the street below, and at the swirling snow flurries dancing
on the breeze. Snow. He hadn’t seen snow in years. He liked snow, the cleanliness of it, its purity.