The Shortest Way Home

by Juliette Fay

  “What’s he like?”

  “Nothing like Hugh. It’s kind of weird. For one, he’s particular about things. Smells and crowds, stuff like that. Loves being in the woods.” Sean told her about Kevin being chased by teenagers, and his unsuccessful attempt to get Kevin into camp. “Also, Hugh always had loads of friends—too many sometimes, if you know what I’m saying. Kevin doesn’t seem to have any.”

  “Kids don’t always turn out like their parents. Or their uncles.”

  “Hey, I was no Big Man on Campus.”

  “Maybe not like Hugh . . .”

  “Not at all.”

  “Well,” she said. “You always had people around you. You had options.”

  Options? he wondered. For what? Falling in love? Getting married and having kids? Any kind of a normal life?

  At that moment she started on his feet, and though it wasn’t quite as pass-out painful as it had been the first time, it was no walk in the park, either. “Now you talk,” he said, gritting his molars against the urge to shriek like a twelve-year-old girl at a horror movie. “How are Sol and Betty?” He was pleased that, even with his eyes rolling back in their sockets, he could pull up her parents’ names.

  “They’re happy as clams,” she said, though her voice didn’t reflect any glimmer of joy. “Living in Florida now. In one of those communities. Shuffleboard, a pool the size of a Ring Ding, all the kvetching you could want.”

  “They sold the house? What did you used to call it—the split something?”

  “The banana split-level.”

  “With extra nuts, right?”

  “Yeah.” She chuckled, glad, it seemed, that he’d remembered. “No shortage of nuttiness.” She tugged on his toes one by one. “Actually, I’m still living there. I mean, I left for years,” she added quickly, “but I moved back when I went to school for massage. And then they moved out, and there didn’t seem any reason for me to leave. They don’t want to sell, and I pay the utilities and taxes and stuff . . .”

  “Sounds like a perfect arrangement.” It did sound pretty great, yet he could tell by her voice that for some reason, it wasn’t. He realized it could be very revealing to listen to a person without seeing them. You noticed things that would otherwise be obscured by a smiling face.

  It was time for him to flip over, and she held the sheet so he’d be in no risk of a coverage malfunction. He still couldn’t decide if it was weirder to be so thoroughly explored by a complete stranger or by an old friend. When her fingers scrubbed gently across his scalp, chasing tension off into the atmosphere, he decided he didn’t care. The soft pads of her fingers pressed around his eyes and nose and cheeks, and he realized it had been a very long time since anyone had been so intimate with him as to traverse the topography of his face. It felt unbelievably good and a little depressing all at the same time.

  CHAPTER 12

  The next day was so hot and so dry it reminded Sean of the time he spent in a refugee camp in the Sudan. Except your mouth doesn’t fill with dust the moment you open it, he thought. By the time the Confectionary closed at four, it seemed the entire population of MetroWest Boston had stopped by in dire need of a frothy, frappy drink.

  He walked home enjoying the heat-purified breeze after working in the freezer smell of air conditioning all day. He hoped there would be a message from Chrissy Stillman on his aunt’s ancient answering machine. The thing had a microcassette with magnetic tape that wound around tiny spools. Sean wasn’t a technology guy, but even he thought it was only about two steps up from tin cans connected by string. Chrissy had taken his number a little over a week ago, and he was beginning to wonder if the machine had eaten her message. Assuming she’d left one.

  When he got home, there was no message waiting from Chrissy or anyone else, and he was a little alarmed by how disappointed he felt. To distract himself, he decided they would eat dinner outside in the shade of Aunt Vivvy’s prized red maple. He got Kevin to dust off a card table and some folding chairs while Sean sliced vegetables for stir-fry.

  Deirdre was barely home long enough to shower and grab her script, so it was just the three of them for dinner al fresco—four if you counted the ever-present George. Sean reached for Aunt Vivvy’s hand as she descended the three steps to the yard, but she batted his hand away, her feet searching for each stair as if it couldn’t be counted on not to have moved. She made her way across the lawn and sank elegantly onto her chair. Kevin plunked down next to her, serene as a saint under the bower of the maple tree, face speckled by the glittery late-afternoon light.

  The disquiet Sean felt about being forgotten by Chrissy—in fact, about anything—dissipated as he surveyed the scene. Aunt Vivvy reached over and handed Kevin his napkin. He put it in his lap, and she gave him an approving little smile. The dog wandered along the edge of the property sniffing at the old stone wall that ran across the back of the yard. Then she trotted over and put her chin in Vivian’s lap, eyes half-lidded in pleasure as her head was stroked.

  Everyone’s happy, thought Sean. Even the dog.

  * * *

  Deirdre came home that night with her face lit up like a hundred-watt bulb in a sixty-watt socket. She yanked The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe from Sean’s grasp and tossed it onto the coffee table. She pulled him up and held his arm aloft while she twirled beneath it.

  “What?” He laughed. “What is it?”

  “A toast!” she sang out, now towing him toward the kitchen.

  “To . . . ?”

  She slid a chair over to the cabinets, leaped onto it, and pulled out the vodka with a flourish. She looked at Sean. “You want this or a beer?”

  “Beer.”

  “Then get it!”

  By the time he’d opened a Sam Adams, her drink was sloshing around in a short glass as she danced with herself across the linoleum. He knew she was waiting for him to ask one more time, so he said, “Please, dear sister, reveal the cause of your merriment!”

  “Me,” she said with a proud grin. “I am the cause.”

  “You got Mrs. Potiphar,” he guessed.

  “Damn straight, I did! The stupid hack got into a throw-your-script fight with the director and stormed out.” She took a gulp of her drink, then wagged it at Sean, ice cubes clacking. “He actually clicked his heels, pointed to me, and said ‘It’s all about you now, Eve.’ ”

  “Eve?”

  “From the movie.” She waited for him to get it and rolled her eyes when he didn’t. “All About Eve? Bette Davis? Oh, never mind.”

  Sean raised his beer and clinked her glass. “Way to go!” he said. “I can’t wait to see it. Cormac and Barb were raving about you in that wicked witch show.”

  She snorted her disgust at his ignorance. “Anyway,” she said. “The show goes up in two weeks, so you won’t have long to wait.”

  “I’m really happy for you.” And he was. Truly. He wanted to show her, and though they’d never been a demonstrative family, he’d become used to hugging in his travels. Patients hugged to show their gratitude. Coworkers hugged about their sadness over a particularly pitiful patient or their relief over a life saved. Bodily contact had become the norm for Sean.

  He reached out to Deirdre, and for a second she didn’t seem to know what his purpose was, but then she stepped into the embrace and put her arms around him. “Sean,” she said, her cheek resting against his chest. “It really means a lot to me that you understand how big this is.”

  He pulled his head back to look at her, and she lifted her chin. There were tears in her eyes. “I’m thirty-two,” she whispered. “Mom was thirty-three. Maybe this is all I get.”

  He could feel his eyes well up, and shame stung at him. Because he hadn’t really understood—hadn’t done the math. In his mind she was still somewhere in her twenties. But that was wrong. She was thirty-two. “Is it . . . are you fee
ling . . . anything?”

  She shook her head. He studied her eyes for telltale flicking motions, wracked his brain for any time he’d seen her twitchy or ungraceful or confused. He couldn’t remember noticing anything, but then again, he hadn’t been looking.

  How could I not have been looking?

  “What about you?” she murmured.

  He shook his head. “I think I dodged it.” She closed her eyes and squeezed him.

  They released each other, slumping exhausted into kitchen chairs as if they’d just run for their lives. She reached for the vodka and refreshed her drink. “I told myself that if I got to play Mrs. Potiphar even once,” she said, “I’d go to New York.”

  “You should. You deserve a trip like that.”

  “No, I mean, to live.”

  Oh, he thought, the gravity of it pressing harder on him with every passing second. Shit.

  He fiddled with the beer cap on the table. She tapped her fingers soundlessly against her glass. He glanced up, and she met his gaze with a look of intractability too real to be acting.

  “How’s it going to work?” he said finally.

  “They can’t live alone.”

  “Could we hire someone?”

  She stared at him a moment, barely controlled disgust in her gaze. “Well, if no one they actually know will stay with them . . . I suppose we’ll have to. But it has to be somebody good, Sean, not some cheap rent-a-maid. They both need more than you think.” She let out an annoyed sigh. “You got anything left in your fund? Because mine’s gone. That’s why I’ve been working so much, so I’d have money for New York.”

  “Did Hugh—?”

  “Right,” she snorted sarcastically. “A motorcycle, a boat, and a really expensive fishing rod.” She snapped her fingers. “Gone before he was twenty.”

  Sean felt a surge of disgust for his brother’s prodigality. But it was just Hugh being Hugh, at the height of his Hugh-ness. “Viv?”

  “No idea,” said Deirdre. “She could be loaded or she could be broke, for all I know. I contribute every month, but she’s still paying the bills.” She tipped her glass up, finished off her drink and rose. “I’m going as soon as the show’s over, middle of August.”

  “Dee, you can’t just leave me holding the bag!”

  “Yeah, I can,” she said. “I’ve earned it, and then some.” She put her glass in the dishwasher and left.

  * * *

  Sean hadn’t been to church in months. There were times in his life when he’d gone every day. There was always a church of some kind near the clinics and hospitals where he’d worked—not always Catholic but it didn’t matter much to Sean. A holy place was a holy place.

  But about year ago, he’d found himself feeling irritable during services—especially if it was a Catholic Mass. Either he thought the priest was too young to know what he was talking about or too old to understand today’s world. They burned stinky incense or sang songs like “Onward, Christian Soldiers.” Marching as to war? He’d had enough of that.

  Worst of all, he couldn’t say the prayers. The Penitential Rite drove him up the wall. Not because he didn’t feel penitent about things. Hadn’t he been too stern with a parent who should have brought a sick child in sooner? Hadn’t he slept with that cute, slightly insecure med student, knowing it meant more to her than it did to him? He had plenty of things to regret.

  But, confessing to almighty God, and to you, my brothers and sisters? Why should he confess to a God who was giving him the silent treatment? And the majority of his “brothers and sisters” were too busy just trying to survive. What did they care about his petty misdemeanors?

  I have sinned through my own fault. Well, fault—it was a matter of perspective, wasn’t it? If he hadn’t thought he’d only get half a lifetime instead of a whole one, wouldn’t he have made other choices? Wouldn’t he have lived a less stressful life, where the temptations were easier to withstand? Whose “fault” was that?

  In what I have done, and in what I have failed to do. Had he failed to go to the most primitive, dangerous places on earth to tend and comfort the least fortunate? Had he failed to put his own needs last? Failed, my ass!

  That was generally the point at which he slunk sullenly out the back, eventually deciding there wasn’t much reason to go in the first place.

  But Sunday morning he woke in such a funk it seemed that drastic measures were called for. It had been two days since Deirdre had confirmed her plans to leave, throwing him into such a stew of resentment that he’d spent half of Saturday in the den on her laptop making plans for his own departure while she was at rehearsal. He’d narrowed it down to three aid organizations when Kevin came in to see what was on TV. Sean felt as if he’d been caught looking at porn.

  “What’re you doing?” Kevin had asked, searching for the remote.

  “Nothing. Just surfing around.” He shut down the laptop.

  Kevin had given him a look as he clicked on the TV. Sean couldn’t quite decipher it—quizzical, maybe? Skeptical? Disapproving in some way? He didn’t stick around to find out.

  * * *

  On Sunday Sean woke early, the blinking vestiges of a dream still firing across his brain, the word Da unspoken on his tongue. It was what he’d always called his father, in the Irish tradition. Da’s given name was Martin, and he was a short, muscular man with wiry red hair and forearms to rival Popeye’s. He spoke with a brogue so thick that Sean’s friends often needed him to translate when Da spoke to them. The thought of his father could still ring a faint note of longing in Sean, despite the hateful fact of his desertion.

  On Sunday mornings, Da would corral everyone for church, saying, “When I lived on the Great Blasket Island, the priest only came across the sound once a year. Here in America we have a lovely church sitting right up the road, and we’ll go if we’ve legs to carry us.” They had a car, of course, but that was how he’d say it, as if he were prepared to march them forcibly.

  Sean’s mother, Lila, had been Anglican but had converted to ­Catholicism at Martin’s request. Her older sister, Vivian, was none too thrilled with the prospect of sweet, lovely Lila becoming a contemptible Papist—and married to a rough Irishman, to boot. But Lila loved the Irishman and didn’t mind the Church, so she married him despite her sister’s protestations. However, Lila was a bit lackadaisical about Mass when Martin was at sea. There were Sundays when she said, “God can visit with us over a nice leisurely breakfast, and then we’ll offer up our prayers and petitions all the more ­fervently.”

  Lying there in bed, Sean didn’t really want to go to church. But he wondered if it might feel different at Our Lady Comforter of the Afflicted, his home parish. It had been there, listening to the story of Jesus healing his friend Lazarus, and worrying about his mother and his own uncertain future, that he’d had an epiphany. Right then at the tender age of thirteen, he’d decided that if he couldn’t live a normal life, never knowing when or if he’d start to lose his mind, then he’d make the most of what he had: an interest in medicine, a willingness to live without the usual comforts, and a strong desire to get far away from Belham.

  His father had beaten him to the exit, however, and Sean tried to remember when exactly Da had failed to return from one of his many stints as an able seaman in the merchant marine. He had taken shorter trips for a while when they’d first moved in with Aunt Vivvy, and he’d been home two years later when Lila fell down the steps into the fieldstone basement, knocking her head against the rock wall as she tumbled. Da had discovered her and had screamed up the stairs for Sean to call an ambulance. That desperate, agonized roar was the last time Sean could remember hearing his father raise his voice. His mother was pronounced dead at the scene.

  After that, Da’s trips at sea were longer. Then one day Sean realized that his father had been gone longer than ever before, and that they hadn�
�t received any postcards from him in a while. “When is Da’s trip over?” he’d asked his aunt.

  The sympathy in her eyes worried him—it was unlike her. “Sean,” she said. “It was over three months ago. It appears that he’s decided to move on.”

  For a moment he couldn’t believe it. He was only starting to accept that his mother was truly gone for good, and now his father had left them? But Aunt Vivvy never lied. She never even coated the truth, so it must be true. The cruelty of it hit him like a grenade, and he broke down crying right in front of her. At almost seventeen he was already far taller than her, and she’d had to reach up to cup her hands around his face and gently swipe the tears with her thumbs.

  “We’ll get through” was all she said. And her word was law, so he believed her.

  * * *

  Sean got out of bed and with no small ambivalence made his way to Our Lady’s. He sat in the back in order to have a clear escape route in case he started to get that annoyed, slightly sociopathic feeling he’d been subject to in Mass lately. As the priest, lectors, cross and candle bearers processed up the aisle, he noticed that the priest was fairly young. Great, thought Sean sardonically. Another dewy-eyed homily about how nothing bad can happen if we just believe.

  To his credit, he did try to listen. But the Word of God sounded remote and static-ridden, as if it were the disembodied voice of a subway conductor on the T in Boston. The priest’s voice rose and fell with instructions that no longer seemed to apply to him, words and whole phrases drowned out by his indifference, like the passing of an oncoming train.

  He watched a baby wriggle irritably in its mother’s arms across the aisle, eyes half-lidded and unfocused. The child rested his cheek against her shoulder for a moment, then popped up again. The mother guided his downy head back to the sleepy haven of her shoulder. Then his eyes closed and his body went slack, a chubby leg bouncing once against her belly, a bare foot twitching and then coming at last to rest against her hip.

  This serene tableau might have happened in any country in the world; their skin could have been any color from freckled white to root beer black. The reassuring arms of the mother, the child’s utter confidence in her love and the safety of sleep. Not long ago the sight would’ve been heartwarming to Sean. But not today. He felt his nerves twang with envy toward them both.