The Shortest Way Home

by Juliette Fay

  “Yeah,” said Sean. “I used to feel that way when I was up to my armpits in a medical crisis—a birth gone wrong or a bad burn. The worse it was, the surer I was.”

  “Admirable.”

  “Maybe. Or maybe it’s just my drug of choice—other people’s medical problems.”

  “Ha!” Da laughed. “Either way, it’s a damn sight better than pickling your own liver and puking in your bed!” He clapped a hand on his son’s shoulder and Sean allowed it. “Doing good for the wrong reason is still doing good. Who’s to say anyone’s motives are completely pure?”

  “I guess I was more of a pilgrim, then. I never felt kicked out. I always wanted to go.”

  “It gets to be a bit of a habit, doesn’t it? The leaving.” He picked up a handful of sand and let it slip through his fingers, studying it as if to gauge it against memory. “You said you were a pilgrim. Are you still?”

  “I don’t know. I certainly don’t have the religious fervor. At least not anymore.”

  “But you did at one time.”

  “Yeah, it was . . . you know . . . my purpose. God’s plan. Go patch up a bunch of people.”

  “What changed?”

  Sean shrugged. “I guess I thought Huntington’s gave me some sort of special status, turned me from a pumpkin into a golden carriage.” He gave a self-deprecating little snort. “Now I know I was just a pumpkin all along.”

  Kevin ran toward them. “Can I go in?” he called. “It’s getting hot!”

  “Okay,” said Sean. “But you’ll have to go in your boxers. We didn’t bring extra clothes.”

  “You can’t go deep,” Da warned. “That current will take you out to sea like a rocket.” Kevin pulled off his shirt and pants and ran back to the water. “You have to watch him,” said Da.

  “I’m watching him.” Kevin waded slowly into the water, holding his arms out.

  “Does he know about the Huntington’s?” Da asked.

  The question caught Sean off guard. “What? I . . . I have no idea.”

  “You were about this age when we told you. He should know.”

  “We don’t know if Hugh had it. It’s very possible Kevin’s not even at risk.”

  “Yes, but we’ll never know if Hugh had it. We have to assume he’s at risk.”

  “I’ve assumed that all my life. It didn’t do me any good.”

  “The doctor told us we should tell you. He said it gets harder as the child gets older.”

  “I can’t think about that now, Da.” Sean watched the boy hop a little deeper. “I don’t even know who’s going to take care of him when I leave, I can’t exactly—Oh, Jesus!”

  Kevin seemed to lose his footing, and suddenly his head bobbed under. Sean was racing toward the shore in an instant. “Kevin!” he yelled. Though it was only about a hundred feet, it seemed to take ages to cover the distance, and the boy still hadn’t come up. “Kevin!”

  Sean dashed into the cold water and immediately felt the pull of the current—it was much stronger than it seemed from the surface. He spun around, arms carving through the water to search out and grab hold of the boy. But they found nothing.

  Da ran into the water, but Sean called to him to stay shallow. All he needed was for the old man to go under, too. They screamed and screamed for Kevin, scrambling back and forth in the waves, Sean’s legs aching against the grip of the current.

  Seconds ticked by, and Sean’s medical brain began spinning through the possible outcomes of oxygen deprivation . . . loss of ­consciousness . . . brain damage . . . death. “KEVIN!” His voice intertwined with his father’s broken cries and the raw wind.

  Finally, a few yards to the right, Kevin’s black hair parted the waves and he came up sputtering. He went under again before Sean could get to him, but Sean dove in his direction and was able to grab an arm and haul him up to the surface. He pulled the boy close and struggled against the current as he carried him toward the shore. As the last wave licked at his ankles, he stumbled and they both fell onto the sand.

  “Are you all right?” Sean grabbed his face to look at him. “Are you okay?”

  “Yeah,” Kevin choked out. “But you’re hurting my scrape.”

  Da was kneeling over them, “Kevin! Jesussufferingchrist, boy!”

  “Sorry,” he coughed, sitting up. “It got deep faster than I thought.”

  “You nearly gave me a heart attack!” Sean panted raggedly. Then he felt his father’s arms come around his shoulders, steadying him, comforting him, and he thought he might cry from the relief—not just for Kevin’s safety, but for his father’s embrace, something he realized he’d longed for for almost thirty years.

  “I didn’t mean to scare you,” said Kevin.

  “I know, it’s okay.” Sean rested his head against his father’s shoulder, took a deep breath, and let it out slowly. “If you’re okay, ­everything’s okay.”

  CHAPTER 51

  “Your last full day in Ireland,” Da said to Sean and Kevin over breakfast the next morning. “What do you want to do?”

  Kevin said, “I want to know why one meat muffin’s black and the other one’s white.”

  “Ah, the black one has a secret ingredient I dare not reveal!”

  “What is it?”

  “Da . . .” Sean shook his head. “Trust me, Kev, you don’t want to know.”

  “Tell me!”

  “It’s blood!”

  “Gross!” said Kevin, stabbing the dark pudding with his fork and flicking it onto Sean’s plate. “That’s disgusting! Why would anyone put blood in food?”

  “Because it’s full of nutrients, lad! If you’ve precious little to eat, you’ll get your nutrition where and how you can.” Da laughed. “Now it’s just tradition. Eat the white one. It’s got no bodily fluids that I know of.” Not surprisingly, Kevin was done with breakfast.

  In Dunquin, Da showed them his parents’ gravestones and took them over to see the small apartment he planned to rent, tacked onto the back of one of the newer homes.

  “In America they call it an in-law apartment,” he told Sean, “though the only in-law I have is your aunt Vivvy. But then she’s more than enough—quite a bit more!”

  * * *

  The next day they rose early for the long car ride back to Shannon Airport.

  “It’s weird that you’re not coming with us, Granda,” Kevin said disconcertedly.

  “I feel a bit discombobulated about it myself.”

  “Da, think about coming back for Christmas. Then we’ll all be there together.”

  “I’ll do that.” Da extended his hand to shake and Sean took it. But then his father pulled him in for a hug. “You’re a good boy,” Da murmured in his ear, and squeezed him a little tighter, as if he could embed a reminder of himself in Sean’s skin.

  “Love you, Da,” said Sean. Because he did.

  “Love you.” He released Sean, took a breath, and stuck his strong hand out to his grandson. Kevin moved forward hesitantly and put his arms around his grandfather’s waist. Da gently laid his hands on Kevin’s back. He whispered something down to the boy.

  “What does it mean?” Kevin whispered back.

  “Pulse of my heart.”

  * * *

  When they got back to Belham after the long flight, Deirdre was packed and ready to go. She would be staying with an old friend in Brooklyn, and said how anxious she was to get there . . . and yet she kept not leaving. “Seriously, how was it?” she asked Kevin, studying him as closely as if he were the basis for a part she might play someday.

  “Great!” He told her about surfing and climbing Carrauntoohil, and nearly drowning, and taught her how to say dia dhuit, in case she met any Irishmen in New York. She listened raptly to his stories and practiced her Irish hello with him until she could say
it as well as he could.

  “And what was the most annoying thing—the worst bad smell or sound?” she asked him with a sly smile.

  “That’s easy,” he said. “Uncle Sean and Granda snoring together. It was like sleeping with a cave full of bears.”

  When Kevin took George outside to play, she asked Sean, “Was it weird with Da?”

  “A little at first. But we got used to him pretty fast. Do you wish you’d seen him?”

  “No,” she said quickly. “I mean, really, what’s the point? But he was good with Kevin?”

  “Actually he was pretty terrific.”

  “Huh,” she snorted. “Making up for lost time.”

  “I suppose he was,” Sean conceded. Aren’t we all, he thought.

  The sound of Kevin jabbering to George filtered in through the kitchen windows, filling the silence between them. “How’s Viv been?” he asked.

  “Same,” said Deirdre, poking around in her purse to find her sunglasses. “By the way, the school called. You got that job.”

  After a loving but not-too-tight hug for Kevin, including a kiss that he promptly wiped off, and an admonishment to Sean to get the kid an e-mail account so she could communicate with him, Deirdre was backing out of the driveway, her little car packed to the roof. Sean and Kevin waved from the porch; Aunt Vivvy stood stone-faced, and Sean wondered if she understood that Deirdre wouldn’t be back—or if she understood all too well.

  “That’s a lot of good-byes for one day,” said Kevin.

  Too true, thought Sean. Deirdre’s departure officially certified that they were all irrevocably his responsibility. He wished he could talk to Rebecca about it—this and a million other things. His need to see her had been rising in pitch like an oncoming train all day. In Ireland it had been easier to accept their separation—or perhaps to deny it. Across an entire ocean, there was no question of access. Now the distance was easily walkable. It was killing

  him.

  This must be how alcoholics feel, he thought, the hundredth time he considered calling her and convinced himself not to. He suddenly had a greater respect for his father, watching his son have a pint, while he himself drank ginger ale.

  That night, as he was turning off lights and locking up, he passed the phone. Ginger ale, he tried to tell himself, but this time it didn’t work. He picked up the receiver and dialed.

  “Hi,” she said, and by the way she said it, he knew she’d checked the caller ID first. The fact that she’d decided to answer anyway made him anxious not to make her regret it.

  “Hey,” he said, and he hoped it was with just the right tone—­enthusiastic but not giddy, warm but not stalkerish.

  “How was your trip?”

  “It was pretty great, actually. We got back a couple of hours ago. How was your week?”

  “Um, good. I’m painting so it’s kind of a mess. But it’s coming ­together.”

  “That’s great!”

  “Thanks.”

  There were a couple of beats of silence, and he started to panic just a little. “So, listen, I was going to e-mail you instead of call, but Deirdre left for New York right after we got home, and she took her laptop with her, so I couldn’t get online, but since I’m going to be here awhile I’m thinking I should probably pick one up.” Nice going, he told himself. Way to babble.

  “Yeah,” she said. “They’re pretty handy.” He could hear the smile in her voice, which was mortifying in a thrilling kind of way.

  “So, it’s okay I called?”

  Another few beats of silence. Don’t talk, he commanded himself. For chrissake, just shut up and let her answer.

  “Yeah.” It wasn’t an open-arms response. But he felt she meant it, and that was enough.

  “I got that job,” he said. “The sub-nurse thing at Kevin’s school.”

  “Is that what you wanted?”

  “I think it’ll help him, having me nearby. Also, I could use the money.”

  “Is Haiti expensive?”

  “No. I mean, I have no idea, but it’s not like you spend a lot of money doing that kind of work. Are you . . . um . . . maybe thinking about what I said? About coming with me?”

  He could hear a little puff of a sigh. Don’t sigh! he wanted to tell her. Just say yes!

  “I thought about it,” she said. “I really did. And it means so much to me that you asked, Sean. It kind of blew me away.”

  “I meant it. I want you to come. It’d be amazing.”

  “I don’t . . . I think it’s not . . .” Her voice was shaky, and it hurt him to hear her that way. “I’m trying really hard to live my own life, Sean. You know how I am—you know better than anyone. I get pulled into the slipstream of other people’s ideas so fast. You were the one who kept pushing me to stop following everyone else’s agenda and do what I want to do.”

  “Yeah, but if you want to come to Haiti with me, that’s doing what you want to do! It doesn’t matter if it was my idea.”

  “But I don’t.”

  In the seconds that followed, he could feel his chest expanding and contracting. It was sort of like meditating, feeling the breath, his mind empty. And yet it was the opposite of meditating. There was no floating. Only crashing.

  “I want to be with you,” she whispered, her voice weak with emotion. “But I don’t want to live in Haiti.”

  “Rebecca—”

  “I have to go now, Sean.” Then there was a soft click.

  For the briefest moment he had this crazy thought that as long as he held on to the receiver, she might still come back on the line. Once he hung up, he would lose her completely.

  No . . . Hell, no. He hung up the phone and got the car keys.

  CHAPTER 52

  “Who is it?” she said when he knocked on the door. He could tell she’d been crying, and that she was pretty sure who it was.

  “It’s me,” he said through the door.

  “If you came over here to try and change my mind—”

  “No, I didn’t, I swear.”

  “I’m finally getting it right. You made me, Sean. I didn’t even want to at first.”

  “I know.”

  “I ordered business cards . . .” He could tell she was starting to cry.

  “Show them to me.”

  “Go home, Sean. Really.”

  “I’m not going home. Please just let me come in.”

  “No.” She was really crying now.

  A sick, hopeless feeling grew in his gut. And guilt. He had pestered and cajoled her into pulling her life together on her own terms. But that seemed like a hollow offering, now that she was sobbing behind a door he couldn’t open. In frustration he grabbed the knob and twisted. It turned easily.

  He came in and put his arms around her, and she continued to cry. He found himself rocking her. And though she still cried, he didn’t feel sick anymore. He felt enormous relief and even a little bit of hope. He kissed the top of her head and gently brushed her teary cheek. Holding her is like a drug, he thought. And I am an addict.

  * * *

  The sex was tender and sad, and neither of them could sleep afterward. She lay on her back and he on his side, head propped on one arm, the other arm around her waist. They looked at each other for some minutes. And then she smiled and said, “It’s kind of like watching something fall, and you know it’s going to shatter, but it hasn’t yet, and you keep hoping it can defy gravity somehow.”

  “So that’s a definite no to Haiti, right?”

  She punched him, but she was laughing.

  “Seriously,” he said. “What if we just hung in there? I mean . . . unless you’re with . . .”

  “No,” she said. “I’ve spent time with him, but at this point I’m just seeing if we even have a friendship.”

 
Sean nodded. It was all he could do not to pump his fist in the air and yell Woo-hoo!

  “Listen,” he said, when he felt like he could talk without a victorious giggle sneaking out. “I’m not going anywhere for at least another six weeks—that’s October. I already promised Kevin I’d come back for Christmas. Long distance sucks, I know, but it’s not impossible. Maybe you’d even come down to Haiti and visit.”

  The smile on her face receded again. The obvious question hung in the air, unspoken.

  And then what?

  * * *

  He slunk back into the house like a cat burglar just as the sky was starting to lighten. George growled from her post by Aunt Vivvy’s bedroom door and then put her head back down, too sleepy for a full-scale rebuke.

  When he woke up, the sun was dappling through the leaves, and the breeze coming through the window felt crisp and dry. Autumn air. Sean hadn’t experienced a New England fall in twenty years, but he recognized it before he even opened his eyes, the August Autumn Appetizer. It would get hot and muggy again, of course, before the cooler weather set in for good. But lying there in bed, he was thrown back to his childhood, and he could feel school coming, as unstoppable as the changing of the leaves.

  He got up and called the middle school, and they put him through to Penny Coyne, who was getting the nurse’s office ready for the first day. “You’re definitely coming, right?” she said.

  “Absolutely,” he told her. “Did you think I was iffy about it?”

  “Not at all,” she said quickly. “I just didn’t know if . . . your plans might’ve changed.”

  “Nope, I’m ready to report for duty.”

  “Any chance you can come down today?”

  Mondays were Rebecca’s day off, and he had hoped to spend it with her, but what was he going to say, “Ready to report for duty . . . but not really”?

  Kevin padded barefoot and pajama-clad into the kitchen just as Sean was hanging up. The outer edges of the scrape on his cheek had begun to fleck off, leaving spots of tender pink. “Who was that?” he asked.