The Homecoming

by Andrew Pyper

  “Maybe this isn’t the best time for a family therapy session,” I say.

  “No? When would have been a good time, Aaron? When I was in trouble taking care of Nate on my own and you were barely able to force yourself to return my calls? Or how about when he died? Even then you showed up late to the service and left early because you couldn’t wait to disappear back to the hospital, where you could be everybody’s savior.” She cracks a wincing smile. “You know something? You’re more like Dad than I thought.”

  Most of this strikes me as unfair. I had tried with Franny, taken dozens of runs at being a brother and a friend. But once she’d decided on her course, there was nothing I could do to coax her back, other than running my own life aground in the process. She might be cured now, she might be clean. But that doesn’t mean she gets to rewrite the story.

  Where she may not be entirely off is the disappearing act I’ve cultivated over the years. I have to go. My refrain the same as Dad’s.

  “I’ll give you a little privacy to discuss amongst yourselves,” Fogarty says, only half suppressing his pleasure at all this as he starts toward the walkway to the entry hall. But Mom stops him.

  “We’re staying,” she says, and shifts her gaze around the table, taking her children in one by one. “All of us.”

  “We don’t have to do this, Mom. We could challenge it. In court, I mean,” I say, with a confidence I don’t actually possess. “There’s no way this is enforceable.”

  “He wanted us to stay, Aaron,” she says. “Which means he wanted it for a reason.”

  “What reason?”

  “To show us something. Reveal his secrets. Or maybe just one of them. That’s enough for me.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “I’ve devoted my life to a stranger,” Mom starts, measuring her words, “and it’s left something missing in me. Just as the three of you—it’s damaged you. So I need to see the truth. Don’t you?”

  It strikes me how close Mom’s words are to what I told Bridge when we first got into the limo. Some part of me felt empty before you came along A corner the light couldn’t reach. I meant it as a consolation for her losing Dad, the comfort that might come with knowing that although she’d lost a life in the past two days, she’d saved mine over the years before this.

  But now here was Mom saying the same thing. Something missing in me. It’s fairly obvious Franny has felt the same from the very beginning. Was it true for Bridge as well? Always a note about her “perfectionism” on report cards, and worryingly friendless outside of school hours.

  “Bridge?” I say, turning to her.

  “I’m not going.”

  “Me neither,” Franny says.

  “Okay. Looks like we’re all in,” I say, checking to see Fogarty’s reaction. The lawyer is already starting away with a flapping wave of his fingers, clapping down the walkway in his hard-soled shoes. We all wait for him to call back with final instructions or wish us good luck. But a moment later we hear the front door swing closed, and there’s nothing more.

  5

  WE PRETEND TO BE LESS freaked out than we actually are for maybe three or four minutes before Franny goes to check out front. When she returns, she looks even skinnier than before. The limbs she’d held straight through force of will are now rolling and loose, her gait wobbly as a baby giraffe’s.

  “He’s gone,” she says. “The cars too.”

  “So this is real,” I say.

  “Yeah. I pinched myself to make sure. Like, hard.”

  There’s a sense all of us share of having a lot of important things we should be doing right now, rules and assignments to be written up. But none of us move.

  “He wasn’t lying about the duffel bags,” Franny says. “And there’s a bicycle outside the door that wasn’t there before. One with a wagon attached to the back.”

  “I’m guessing that’s for the deliveries,” I say. “It’s up to us to go to the gate and bring back whatever gets left there.”

  “Why a bike? Why not a pickup truck or golf cart or something?”

  “Dad wanted us to get more exercise?”

  The fact is I have an immediate idea about the bike. Nonmotorized. Our phones are already gone. Fogarty was careful to mention no TV or computers or radio. It may be less about denying us connection to the outside world than it is about limiting our options. Dad wanted to leave us with everything except an easy way out. He wanted to leave us with us.

  “Anyone hungry?” This is Mom. Abruptly standing and clearing away her previous displays of emotion with a sharp sniff. “Where do you think the kitchen is in this place?”

  She starts off, and our eyes follow her around a partition at the end of the dining area, up a few steps to another platform that looks down not only on the great room but the walkway that runs the length of it.

  “It’s up here!” she calls. There’s a rubbery sucking sound as she opens the fridge. “Well, look at that. Something for everyone!”

  She’s working so hard at restoring her role as mother, chief children feeder and normalizer, it would be heartbreaking if the three of us didn’t need it so badly. That, and judging by the way we wordlessly move away from the table and closer to her voice, we actually could use something to eat.

  We come up the steps to find that the kitchen is just as impressive as the lodge’s other spaces. Rectangular like the great room, it runs for perhaps forty feet from the dining area to the pantry, with an industrial gas range and a butcher block of the kind you’d find in a restaurant kitchen and steel shelves holding enough stacked plates and bowls to serve a wedding. A series of three long windows look out the front where I confirm that the limos are in fact no longer there.

  There’s a tinted mirror at a corner of the ceiling opposite the sink, one that’s angled downward to reflect whoever stands at the butcher block like the ones they have on cooking shows. I catch a glimpse of myself in it when I turn, a more lost-looking version than my usual confident self as I scrub in or do rounds with a pack of interns following behind me.

  By the time we gather around Mom, she’s laid out open Tupperware containers of cold roast chicken, broccoli salad, spinach dip. Picnic food. We set to spooning it onto plates, eating as we stand there together, not wanting to return to the unprotected expanse of the dining room’s banquet table.

  “That shit’ll kill you,” Franny says as I drop a handful of potato chips onto the side of my plate. “And didn’t you used to run four times a week or something? No offense, Aaron, but don’t you think you could lose a few pounds?”

  I’m not especially tall, but despite the couple extra inches around the waist added over the last few years, I remain slight in the limb-stretched way tall people generally do. Even in my marathoner days, I would often look like someone suffering a nutritional deficiency. Back then it was because I ran too much. Now it’s because I work too much.

  “Don’t you think you could gain a few ounces?” I say, pouring some chips onto her plate before scouring the cupboards. “Oh no. This is bad. No booze.”

  “It’s for the best, believe me. Think of this as rehab.”

  “If you start twelve stepping me, Franny, I swear I’m out of here.”

  “Great! The rest of us will split your share. So, first step: admit you are powerless and your life is unmanageable.”

  “Now that I think of it, as of today, both are officially true.”

  It’s teasing banter, brother and sister giving each other harmless jabs like old times. Except I don’t remember us ever being this open and easy in the old times.

  A family eating a meal together. For a moment we’re relaxed, relieved of all the questions that demand replies. Then I look over at Bridge, and, watching her chew and swallow, the moment of ease instantly passes. The scar along her throat reminds me how close we can come to losing everything.

  For me, that’s her.

  From time to time, I’ve thought it was odd—maybe even a little pathetic—to not have any
real social life other than my Tuesday get-togethers with Bridge. Should I be living a fuller life than this? Is even asking this question an obvious sign that I’m not? Then again, the people I know with spouses or kids—most of them feel the same way. There could be dozens who cared about you, or only one, and in both cases you were left to wonder if it was enough.

  Bridge looks over at me. Sees—as she can always see—how I’m muscling through these kind of thoughts. She gives me a kick in the shins.

  “Save any chips for me?” she says.

  “Really? Now you’re giving me flak about the damn Pringles? Here, have mine.”

  I offer her a chip, holding it like a communion wafer, and she comes at it, teeth bared. I pull my fingers away a quarter second before she bites the chip out of the air.

  6

  AS WE TIDY UP AFTER dinner, I catch myself watching my mother as if she were someone I’d only seen pictures of, a washed-up celebrity in a check-out counter magazine, but now had the opportunity to observe up close. She would have been beautiful when my father first met her. A sophisticated face, but one from a different era. An aging screen star from the old studio system, Olivia de Havilland, say, or Joan Fontaine. It makes her appear older than she is. Not necessarily in years but in her place in cultural time. Slightly lost in the way of a foreigner who doesn’t understand the local slang.

  In recent years, her face has been difficult to find, as she’s taken to hiding it behind longish bangs, the collars of her coats raised to her jawline. Her body is increasingly hidden too. Mom entered the Shawl Age earlier than others, abandoning dresses in favor of layered wraps. For other women, these bundled fineries might be seen as a way of expressing yourself as one moves from a certain age to another. But I don’t think my mother saw it that way. For her it was protection. A suit of armor composed of cashmere and silk.

  As if feeling my eyes on her, Mom turns to face me. Smiles with a widow’s exhausted pride.

  “It’s good you never got married, Aaron,” she says.

  “Never say never, Mom. I’ve still got time.”

  “Take all the time you want. It will still be someone you’ll never really know.”

  Franny and Bridge pause to observe this exchange, but from a distance, like a show on TV in a dentist’s waiting room.

  “That’s kind of negative, don’t you think?” I say, offering a quick eye roll in Bridge’s direction. “You’re talking about Dad. Not everyone’s like him.”

  “It doesn’t matter who it is. They’ll be someone with thoughts and plans they won’t share—even when they’re sharing their thoughts and plans.”

  “Not if they love you,” I say, and it sounds pitiful, even though I believe it to be true.

  Mom comes over and touches my face with a hand covered in dish soap, leaving a trail of popping bubbles on my skin.

  “I don’t know about love,” she says in her singular tone of cheerful defeat. “But marriage? It’s a game. And people like us are built to lose every time.”

  “What do you mean, people like us?”

  “The bad liars.”

  My parents never spoke of divorce, not in front of me anyway, yet it haunted their marriage like a missing child. They couldn’t have been satisfied. They weren’t together enough for that. Our family wasn’t together enough for that.

  Other kids at school had more outwardly objective reasons for being pushed off course in their lives. The captain of the swim team, Jake Envers, had a mother who committed suicide by idling her car in their closed garage while sitting in the back seat with a bottle of pinot grigio and all the Mother’s Day cards Jake had ever given her. Mr. Illington, down the street from us, went to prison for fraud, and the rest of his family had to stand on their front lawn as they watched the bailiffs take the furniture out of their home. I could never say so, but part of me envied those kids. At least they had clear answers to “What happened to you?” The best I could come up with was that I had no memory of my father ever opening his arms to me.

  I tried to make up for it. I clung to my mother as much as I could, for one thing. I told Franny I loved her so often she asked me to cut it out. I left letters for my father on the desk in his study, and when he came home, he would place them into a drawer, unopened.

  Through high school, Franny busied herself by skidding into the slow-motion crash of her life. And dancing along with her was Mom, always a step behind, hopelessly trying to shield her daughter while, at the same time, denying there was any real problem at all.

  It left me to keep us a unit. Keep us the Quinlans. That’s how I saw it, anyway. Like the passenger with a fear of flying who believes she alone maintains the plane suspended in air by holding her breath, I thought I was preventing us from spiraling apart by being good. Good grades, good at sports. Avoiding trouble in all its forms. Not too good—I was conscious of not shaming Franny—but striking a balance between being the kind of son and brother you could be proud of while not having to think about him too much.

  I declined acceptance to colleges back East and went to Washington State. Mom agreed it was a good idea. “Just in case,” she said. It was what she would say every time I decided against taking a risk. You should be here, Aaron. Just in case. She never said what dire possibility she had in mind, but we both understood it to mean one of them dying. Franny, Dad, herself. If any of them dropped, I would come in and clean things up, make sure Bridge was taken care of. Until then, I would remain on standby.

  Waiting for something terrible to happen can leave you with a lot of free time. That’s why I started running. Marathons that wiped me clean. Provided the illusion of a fresh start.

  I ran to get away.

  But I could never get away.

  There was no getting Dad back, even then. Mom was too swaddled in antianxiety pills and defense mechanisms to be fully reached. Franny was Franny. Which left Bridge. The only child in a home that felt underpopulated even on the once-a-year-or-so occasions we all found ourselves in it.

  I slipped into the role of surrogate father without much effort. Not just because Bridge’s real dad had resigned from the post, but because the two of us got along so well. There was an ease between us you wouldn’t necessarily expect across the awkward chasm that divides a five-year-old girl from an introvert grown man. I think part of it came from the fact that I saw something of myself in Bridge. The brave solidity that, if you looked close enough, was slightly askew.

  But along with this, I was curious.

  How did she see our home, our mother, our father of the top secret phone calls that yanked him away from birthday parties and dance recitals and nine-tenths of the meals we’d eat? How did she seem to know him in a way the rest of us didn’t?

  • • •

  Once the kitchen has been returned to design-magazine spotlessness, we all take a tour of the lodge. At the end of the walkway that acts as a spine for the whole building, dividing the kitchen on top from the living area below, we come to the bedrooms. There are three, each with its own en suite.

  “Is it all right if I take this one?” Mom asks before sitting on the edge of the bed in the third bedroom we poke our heads into.

  “Of course,” Franny says. “I’ll be right across the hall.”

  “What about you two?”

  “I want to check out one of the cabins,” Bridge answers before I do.

  “You can’t stay out there all on your own,” Mom says, making a move to rise but finding she doesn’t have the strength.

  “I won’t be alone,” Bridge says, and elbows me in the side. “Aaron will be with me.”

  After I carry Mom’s duffel bag to her room and tell her and Franny good night, Bridge and I head out the front door, each of us with our own bags strapped over our shoulders, to once again choose between the four trails into the woods.

  “How about Orange,” I say. “Anything but Green. I don’t like Green.”

  “Orange it is.”

  What I hope will be enough dusky light
to see by instantly snuffs out as soon as we start into the trees. There are LED headlamps included in each of our packs, and we stop to put them on, clicking the beams to their brightest setting. The light pushes back against the encroaching charcoal night like a yellow fist.

  We walk along a trail that, after the first fifty yards, narrows so that we have to proceed single file. Me ahead and Bridge behind, both of us crunching over twigs and fallen leaves more loudly than I would have thought possible even if we were jumping up and down in steel-toed boots.

  “Hard to believe we’re the only four people on all this land,” she says.

  I prevent myself from saying it, because I don’t want to frighten her and because I have nothing to back it up with. But the truth is it doesn’t feel like we’re the only ones here. It could be other people, waiting. Or not. Whatever it is, it doesn’t feel hidden. It feels like everything around us. Belfountain. The trees themselves seem to observe us with an interest bordering on hunger. The ground softening under our steps, testing its hold on us with tiny grasps of our heels.

  “The time you were here with Dad,” I say. “What did the two of you do?”

  Bridge likes to wear her hair in a ponytail. When she turns to look at you—as she looks at me now—the hair follows a half second later, perching atop her shoulders as if interested to hear what you’re about to say for itself.

  “Just hike around,” she says.

  “Did he say anything?”

  “Not really. He was kind of rambling, y’know? I was only five or something like that. Everything he said sounded like philosophy.”

  “Or riddles.”

  “Same thing.”

  “Do you remember anything from what he was rambling about?”

  “One thing, I guess,” she says. “We were walking along a trail like this one and we came to the end. There wasn’t a cabin or anything. It just stopped. Dad stopped too. Asks me this question. Looking at me, totally serious, y’know? Like he was searching for the answer himself.”