The Homecoming

by Andrew Pyper

  Lauren is momentarily startled by the question, and it’s not what I was expecting Franny to say either.

  “No, I don’t. You?”

  “Yes. A boy. But he died.”

  “I’m sorry to hear that—”

  “Franny.”

  “I’m very sorry, Franny.”

  “You’re a therapist or social worker. Something like that, right?”

  “A psychologist. That a guess?”

  “I’m an addict. Been all over the rehab map. I can tell the professional listeners from civilians right away.”

  “You’re good.”

  “Nah. I’m bad, actually,” Franny says, and while it’s meant as a self-deprecating joke, it comes out so crushingly sad all of us are struck by it, even the twins, who stop their murmuring.

  “My name is Brigit, but I like Bridge,” Bridge says after a quick suck of air.

  “Okay, Bridge,” Lauren says.

  “Can I ask you something else?”

  “I think we’ve all got a lot of questions, so fire away.”

  “Are you related to me? Like, genetically?”

  “I understand,” Lauren hedges, and now I can see the psychologist in her now too. “You’re asking because we look different.”

  “Yes.”

  “Different from my brothers. From you. You’re asking because I’m black.”

  “I guess.”

  “Fair enough. I’m adopted. Me and you? No genetic relation. But your dad is our dad,” she says. “So for better or worse, I’m a Quinlan from the ground up.”

  Bridge nods at this, and so does Lauren. We all do.

  “I’d like to know who you are,” Mom says finally with the willed composure of a hostess attempting to recover a dinner party conversation from difficult terrain. “Not just your names.”

  “We’ll go first,” Ezra and Elias say at the same time, not seeming to notice their shared words and mirrored facial expressions, the consistent oddness of their twinship.

  They don’t wear the exact same color clothes, but the same style, same brand. Preppily rumpled shirts with frayed collars, the galloping horses and mallet-waving jockeys faded and curled over their hearts. They look like golfers. Like men who never resist the opportunity to tell jokes to dental hygienists and flight attendants.

  As it turns out, they’re actors. Mostly commercials now, some guest spots on police procedurals (“Every show eventually has twins that murder their parents”), though it’s been rough the past few years. While their identical appearance was their main selling feature, it put them in competition with the three other sets of twins of the same age in LA up for the same parts—parts that now mostly went to the Ludmarks, a pair of broad-shouldered brothers from Nebraska who sold themselves as “decent Mormon types,” but were in fact “coke-snorting dicks.”

  They’ve tried getting out of the business. They almost made a go selling real estate, investing in ads on bus stop benches that played up the twin angle (Most Agents Can’t Be in Two Places at Once . . . But the Quinlans Can!). The phone rang for a time. But they soon discovered that while they were good at acting like real estate agents, they were terrible at actually selling real estate. And to live in LA was to be constantly reminded that they were semi-famous once. Ezra and Elias were on the cast of Better Together, a family sitcom that ran for two seasons in the ’80s.

  “I don’t remember that show,” Franny says.

  “We get that a lot,” Ezra says.

  “I remember. You two played the same part,” Mom says. “I read an article about it ages ago. You weren’t twins on the show; you traded in and out playing the same child.”

  “There are laws about on-screen time for kids,” Ezra explains, pleased to be recognized. “So they’d hire twins to put one on set in case the other one was sleeping or had to get his diapers changed.”

  “Yes, that’s right,” my mom says, tapping the side of her chin. “You were the youngest. They gave you all the best lines.”

  “ ‘Ah poop,’ ” Ezra quotes.

  “That’s it. ‘Ah poop.’ You were the cute one.”

  “We were adorable,” Elias confirms dismally.

  Lauren is next. A private practice in Spokane. Trauma recovery. Victims of violence, soldiers returned from service, survivors. She chooses to take only the ones she can assist in making measurable improvements, instead of the “midlife crisis cases and suburban melancholics” that bring home the bacon for the majority of her colleagues.

  “You got any openings?” Franny asks, in her joking-but-not-joking way.

  “Are you a survivor?”

  “I was actually thinking about my brother.”

  “Franny. Don’t—”

  “What? Aaron is a doctor. But definitely a physician who won’t heal thy self. Because despite the stoic exterior, he’s a shitshow on the inside. Not that it’s his fault. He went over to Africa, see, to do the savior act there instead of here, but he—”

  “Don’t.”

  “Got caught up in more than he signed up for. An ambush. The real shit. And the good doctor couldn’t do anything to—”

  “Stop it, Franny!”

  Overseas.

  I close my eyes against seeing it, but see it just the same.

  The rust- and blood-speckled blades of machetes thudding into bodies. The dying at my feet, writhing and choking. So many of them it appeared as if the earth itself was fighting for air.

  “Aaron?”

  Bridge’s voice brings me back. Not entirely, but enough to nod as if I’m fine.

  Lauren looks between the two of us. When it’s clear we aren’t going to offer anything more, Franny starts to tell us who she is. Which is, for her, the telling of how she lost Nate.

  She speaks matter-of-factly, so that the story of how she was a crackhead who left her four-year-old with a group of other addicts she was squatting with in Rainier Beach one night is conveyed with the same evenness as an account of how she forgot her purse after heading out for groceries.

  While she went out to score, Nate suffered an asthma attack. His mostly comatose caretakers later claimed they didn’t notice the boy clutching his throat in the room they were sitting in, “But they were all liars, so they probably closed their eyes so they wouldn’t have to get up off the floor.” What’s known is that none of them went to find the boy’s inhaler. By the time Franny returned, it was too late.

  “I found my rock,” she says, “but I lost everything.”

  It would be a difficult, if not impossible, story for anyone to follow. But Jerry does a remarkable thing. Wearing a look of empathetic loss, he comes over to place his hand atop Franny’s shoulder. A simple gesture, one that might otherwise risk the appearance of insincerity. Not from him. There’s a directness about Jerry that marks him as the only one in the room who seems able to fully register the horror that Franny has just confessed to.

  “I’m a gym teacher in Portland,” he announces after withdrawing his hand, as if there were no other imaginable outcome to his life.

  After a football scholarship to Wisconsin that ended with a thwarted attempt at a career in the pros (“Got dinged going up for a catch one time too many,” he says, tapping his skull to lightheartedly indicate repeated concussions), he pursued the next best thing. Teaching.

  “Those who can, do,” he says. “Those who can’t, join a union.”

  He laughs at his own expense, good-natured and mildly heartbroken.

  Over to me.

  I swiftly hit the bullet points of my medical training, the surgery post at Swedish First Hill Hospital in Seattle. The truth is I love what I do: repairing bodies, taking out the bad parts, fusing and cleaning their interiors. So much simpler to fix people than understand them.

  I don’t talk about overseas.

  But a quick glance at Lauren makes me feel certain that she knows. Not the details. The damage it left me with.

  None of us, aside from Franny, mention children. None of us speak of a spous
e, boyfriend, or girlfriend. It may be that they don’t rate as figures of sufficient importance. It may be that, as Quinlans, we’ve all been similarly injured in ways that have conspired to see us live alone.

  When we’re finished going around the circle, Elias addresses us all.

  “Excuse me for pointing out the pregnant elephant in the room, but does anyone else think this is fucked up?”

  “I do,” his twin brother answers.

  The fact that no one else speaks to this suggests unanimous agreement.

  “This may seem weird to ask at a time like this, so please don’t think I’m too much of a jerk,” Jerry says, addressing us with a bashful apology that I can sense Mom and Franny responding to. Me too. Perhaps it’s impossible to respond any other way. He’s my brother. There’s some of me in him, and at the same time I recognize I want him to see something of value, something of himself, in me.

  “Is there anything to eat?” he asks.

  15

  A FULL-ON FRIDGE RAIDING. THE same emotional hunger translating to the physical appears to be as true for the second Quinlans as much as the first, judging by the way they divide up what’s left of the roast chicken and zap a pair of frozen pizzas in the microwave. Still feeling weak from my run, I make grilled cheeses for Bridge and myself. All of us carry our plates to the banquet dining table and take seats—accidentally or otherwise—alternating a member of the first Quinlans with a member of the second. There’s a moment when all of us look across at one another, acknowledging the way we would appear as one family, not two.

  “Did you guys say grace before dinner in your house?” Jerry asks me.

  “No. You?”

  “Not even at Christmas.”

  “Have at it then.”

  Me, Mom, Franny, and Bridge watch as the others destroy what’s on their plates. It makes me tentative at first when I pick up my sandwich, but after the first mouthful my body responds, and I eat as ravenously as they do.

  When we’re done, we look up at one another and are plunged into a deeper awkwardness. The twins reddening. Lauren can’t stop shaking her head. Franny, I can tell, is on the verge of telling one of her pitch-dark tales from her years in the gutter. As for Mom, she casts her eyes over the four newcomers and squeezes her lips tight.

  Eventually Jerry pushes his chair back and pulls a silver flask from the inside pocket of his jacket.

  “Those limo assholes took my phone,” he says. “But they didn’t take this.”

  He unscrews the flask’s top and takes a drink. Then he offers it to Mom, who surprises all of us, or certainly the first Quinlans, by accepting it. She swallows a dainty sip before passing the flask to Lauren.

  It goes around to all of us wordlessly, Bridge and Franny passing it on without drinking each time. Yet they too seem to be warming to the liquor’s effects, the animosity and shock gradually giving way to an acknowledgment of the absurdity we’ve found ourselves sharing.

  When the flask returns to him for the third time, Jerry frowns, shakes it, proving it’s empty before returning it to his pocket.

  “Well, what do you all think?” he says. “You figure we could talk for real now?”

  We take it in small steps. The whisky helps. Chatter about where we grew up, the possibility that we’d unknowingly crossed paths at Mariners games or during childhood trips up the Space Needle. It’s as if we’re people who’ve found instant camaraderie with another group waiting to board a flight, and now we were working to discover the extent of the shared ground between us, plotting out the dots of coincidence between our lives.

  The second Quinlans lived in Kirkland, while we, the first Quinlans, lived on Mercer Island. Similar suburbs on different compass points from downtown and far enough apart that we attended different high schools, dated boys and girls whose names we don’t recognize, never played on a team that met the other in an all-city tournament. Yet there must have been close calls. So many, in fact, it’s stranger that we aren’t able to find a direct hit between us than if we did.

  Our conversation is buoyed by full stomachs and Ballantine’s and the mutual experience of the peculiar. Confronting one another and the secret that’s now been exposed could have gone one of two ways, the traumatic or the humorous, and for now at least we’ve opted for the latter. We relate anecdotes of our father’s behavior. Funny stories about how he never remembered our birthdays or would present random gifts bought exclusively at airport souvenir gifts shops, handing invisible ink pens to toddlers or electric razors to Jerry and me five years before puberty. Also hilarious were the times he would assure us that he’d join us on a holiday only to invariably bail at the last minute, waving at us as we reversed the station wagon out of the drive on our way to a golf resort (nobody played except him) or drive north to Canada only to be quizzed by customs agents suspicious about a mother, husbandless, driving her children over the border.

  Mom is the only one who doesn’t join us in the performance of One Big Happy Dysfunctional Family. She listens and pretends to recall the details as bittersweetly as we do, but it’s obvious there’s something she can’t shift her mind from.

  “How did they meet?” she says finally. “Your mother and Raymond.”

  Mom’s curiosity leaves her so vulnerable all of us lean toward her to participate in it, a communal attempt to bear some of her pain so that she won’t be crushed, as she appears she may be.

  “It’s a little bizarre, actually. But Mother thought it was romantic,” Lauren says gently. “She was a nurse and Dad was one of her patients.”

  “Go on,” Mom says.

  “ ‘He had a way of talking.’ That’s what she’d say when I asked how an older man in a hospital bed could charm a young woman into being his wife. ‘He had a way with words.’ She said it like it was a spell that had been put on her. Like she’d been fooled.”

  “Pleurisy,” Mom says.

  “Yes,” Lauren says. “That’s what he was in for. Lung infection.”

  “We were married then,” Mom says. “I was pregnant with Aaron, but there wasn’t a day I didn’t visit him. I must have spoken with your mother. To think I was witness to it! My ill husband falling in love with one of his nurses right before my eyes while I was carrying his child.”

  It’s not me or Franny who reaches out to Mom. It’s Jerry. Cupping her hand under his as if to warm it.

  “What was she like?” Mom says, looking to Jerry.

  “She was a good mom,” he answers. “Kind, a little fragile. A good cook, in a tuna casserole sort of way. She looked after us fine, but mostly her job was covering for Dad. ‘He’d like to be here for your game, but work called him in.’ ‘Don’t be angry at him, he’s doing important work for the good of the country.’ She was really good at deflecting blame. But she blamed him the whole time, like she was the only one who was allowed to.”

  He squeezes Mom’s hand under his.

  “She was probably a lot like you,” he says.

  Mom hasn’t had much experience with honesty from men. Now that she’s hearing it from Jerry, she sits up straighter to absorb it, weigh it. Eventually she draws her hand away and rises, leaving the table and going down the steps into the great room to stand at the windows with her hands on her hips, a homemaker’s pose, as if discouraged at all the work ahead of her in raking up six hundred acres of leaves.

  Bridge is about to go after her, but I shake my head, signaling Mom’s need to be alone, but as soon as I’ve done this, I wonder if I’m right. I’ve been brought up to manage hurt by retreating, and to manage others’ hurt by standing back from it, just as I kept away from Franny when she cried out watching them lower Nate into the ground and said nothing more than It’s over now when Mom called to say Dad was gone.

  “So other than doing the dishes—” Ezra starts.

  “What happens now?” Elias finishes.

  “Well, that depends on us,” Jerry says. “It looks like we’ve got to make some decisions.”

  He pushes his
chair back from the table, and I notice again how this man conveys physical strength built for practical purposes yet remains so boyish, almost cherubic. He’s athletic, but he’s only playing tough. This is what his rounded cheeks and over-long eyelashes say. The muscles and willfully deepened voice parts of an unsuccessful effort to disguise his prettiness.

  “Before we get to that, tell me about the lawyer,” I say.

  “Fogarty?”

  “That’s the one.”

  “Lauren? You want to field that? I’m going to scare up some coffee.”

  “There’s some in the kitchen,” Mom calls at us, automatically shifting back into hospitality mode and then, hearing herself, returning her gaze out the window.

  It leaves Lauren to explain how the four second Quinlans were awakened early this morning by drivers who told them they were to be taken to a meeting. The drivers could say nothing more about it, other than it concerned the administration of their father’s estate. They were given no time to pack, and once they were in the cars, they had to surrender their phones. Fogarty addressed them over the limos’ speakers on their drive to Belfountain, telling them their father had a considerable fortune, the primary piece of which was a property in the forest. The will instructed him, as executor, to distribute the assets among all the surviving members of his immediate family upon the satisfaction of a condition.

  “To stay here for a month,” Franny says.

  “Without leaving,” Ezra says.

  “Or TV,” Elias adds bitterly.

  “All of which was twisted enough,” Lauren goes on. “But then we arrive and find you.”

  “What about this place?” I glance over at Bridge, then back at Jerry. “Did he—did Dad—ever mention it?”

  “Not directly,” he answers, squinting. “But there were the stories.”

  “Stories?”

  “The ones he’d tell us when we were kids,” Lauren explains. “All about this magical place called Belfountain. I never liked them much myself. Made me think of that one about the witch and Hansel and Gretel.”

  “Well, here you are,” I say, sweeping my arm around. “Welcome to the gingerbread house.”