The Beloved Son

by Jay Quinn

  Melanie gave him a smile and then led the way to security. As they followed along behind her, Karl noted that she had not lost all of the coltishness she had possessed as a teenager. She had inherited his long legs, and as she strode purposefully to the long security lines ahead of them, Karl imagined that she shared his long-legged dread at being corralled when he was ready to move, move, move. Now that the weekend had drawn to an end and his family was in the process of reclaiming their own routines, he wanted nothing more than to be moving toward home.

  They passed through security slowly but without a hitch. Each of them surrendered their shoes and bags and miscellaneous accoutrements to the gray bins with the complacency of sheep. Only Karl had to find a bench to become properly shod once they’d reclaimed their belongings. Melanie announced that she wanted a magazine and left them to find a news shop on the concourse. Karl sat on a bench to coax his feet back into his sneakers as Caroline waited patiently. As he stood, Karl again experienced the familiar head rush, which made him pause momentarily and clutch at Caroline’s arm.

  “Are you okay?” she asked him quietly as his head stopped spinning and the walls became still.

  “Lately I’ve been getting light-headed if I stand too quickly,” Karl told her. “I’ll call Dr. Harraksingh about it next week. My blood pressure must be low or something.”

  “That’s probably all it is,” Caroline said comfortingly. “But it wouldn’t be a bad idea to get yourself checked out. How long has it been since your last physical?”

  Karl made an annoyed gesture with his free hand and began to walk down the concourse. “Don’t start,” he warned her.

  “I have some other questions I want to ask him, too. Like what the chances are that Mom’s dementia is genetic. It wouldn’t hurt to find out, for Melanie’s sake as well as my own. I forgot to ask Sven about it. But he didn’t bring it up, either, so I’m hoping it’s not a high probability for us.”

  Caro nodded but looked determinedly ahead. “I’m not going to be slack about this,” she warned.

  Karl accepted that with a nod of his head and merged into the concourse traffic with other hurried passengers. When they reached the restrooms, Karl stopped and looked down at Caro. “Do you need a pit stop?”

  She looked up at him gratefully and said, “It wouldn’t be a bad idea, for both of us.”

  Karl nodded and said, “I’ll meet you back out here.”

  With that, they separated and Karl made the quick turns into the restroom and to the wall banked with urinals. Once Karl was in place at the urinal and unzipped, his prostate decided to thwart his attempt to urinate. He closed his eyes and tried to picture rushing waterfalls, the sound of a fully opened tap, until finally he was rewarded with a result. Mentally, he added another question for Dr. Harraksingh. He thought of the gloved, probing finger with some dread, but it was a demand of middle age. Finally relieved, he quickly zipped up again and washed his hands. Finding the paper towel holder empty, he rubbed his hands on his jeans and then made his way back out to the throng.

  As he stood waiting for Caroline, he watched the people as they passed by. Everyone wore an expression of tension and eager determination; even the children, dragging their own small carry-ons behind them, already wore the heavy concentration of their elders as they made their way to and from the surrounding gates. Only the babies in the strollers seemed to be enjoying themselves, glancing with interest at their surroundings as they rolled serenely along. Karl marveled at the number of people making their way out of southern Florida on a late winter Sunday evening. Everyone had somewhere else they wanted and needed to be. He lived in a nation in constant motion. If anything distinguished Americans, he thought to himself, it was their capacity for restlessness and movement.

  “Are you ready?” Caroline asked him, interrupting his reverie.

  “Where do you suppose all these people are going?” he asked rhetorically.

  Caroline placed her hand on his arm and guided him back into the flow of travelers. “Everywhere and nowhere, sweetheart. Just like us.”

  They found Melanie waiting for them at the gate, holding two additional seats on the row facing the gate. “Here, Dad,” she said as Karl sat next to her. “Switch boarding passes with me so you can sit with Mom. I don’t care where I sit.”

  Karl obliged and eyed her boarding pass. “Do you prefer the window?” he asked Caroline.

  “No,” she said, drawing a medicine bottle out of her purse. “I’m going to take an Ativan and hopefully sleep all the way home. Would you like one?” Karl thought about it briefly, then held out his palm to receive the tiny white pill. As he popped it in his mouth and dry-swallowed it, he watched as Melanie declined the same offer. “When did you get a prescription for tranquilizers?” Melanie asked her mother.

  Caroline laughed as she screwed the lid on the medicine bottle and slipped it back into her purse. “You get one automatically when you are diagnosed with menopause. Believe me, sweetheart, they come in handy, and I’m not ashamed of taking one if I need it.”

  “No wonder you always seem to have it so together,” Melanie teased. “You’re high as a kite.”

  “Not always,” Caroline assured her, “but keeping order over a bunch of hormone-crazed teenagers in English class does have its challenges.”

  “What do you have them reading now?” Karl asked.

  “Well, besides the approved survey textbooks, I’ve got them reading Ian McEwan’s Saturday,” Caroline told him. “It’s amazing how seriously they’re taking it. The class discussions are very lively.”

  “That’s an interesting choice,” Melanie said approvingly. “I wish my high school English teacher had been as challenging.”

  “I think they like being challenged,” Caroline said. “But more than that, I think they like the way I listen to their opinions. It’s exciting to watch them open up and articulate what they’re getting from the book. “

  A gate agent stepped to the counter and called for passengers needing special assistance and travelers with small children to begin boarding. Karl glanced at his boarding pass and wistfully recalled his first-class seat on the way down. He was consoled by the Ativan already stealing into his system. In a way, that would be better than a free drink in first class. He realized he’d drunk more in the past few days than he had in months. He wasn’t sure he approved of his increased level of alcohol intake as he recalled his father downing shots of scotch.

  When their seats were called, Caroline and Karl stood and gave Melanie a sympathetic look. “We’ll meet you at the gate at RDU,” Karl told her.

  Melanie held up her copy of People magazine and said, “I’ll have all the news about the beautiful people to keep me company. I can’t believe I’ve been so neglectful in keeping up with the state of Jessica Simpson and Nick Lachey’s marriage.”

  Caroline and Karl stepped up to the kiosk and surrendered their boarding passes to be scanned before making their way quickly down the jet ramp and onto the plane. Seated in row nine, they were well forward, and Karl found himself pleased he didn’t have to lift his and Caro’s bags into the overhead bin. He ducked and got into his seat by the window, and Caro squeezed in next to him. Immediately after buckling up, Caroline looked at him and asked, “Would it annoy you if I put my head on your shoulder when I get sleepy?”

  “Of course not,” Karl told her with a smile. “What good is a husband without a shoulder to sleep on?”

  Caroline gave him a smile before leaning her head back against the headrest and closing her eyes. “I’m afraid I won’t be much company on the flight,” she said. “I just all of a sudden I feel talked out. I feel like I’ve been on for three days.”

  “Tell me about it,” Karl said sympathetically. “I’m just waiting for the Ativan to kick in so I can let go myself.”

  Caroline opened her eyes and looked at him lovingly. “You did good, Karl. I’ve never seen you so empathetic and engaged with your family. But now we can get back to being our norma
l self-absorbed selves.”

  “Thanks for noticing, Caroline. I really surprised myself,” Karl said quietly. “I admit there were times when I wanted to hold up my hands and say, ‘Boundaries, people. Boundaries!’ But this wasn’t a weekend to hold any of them at arm’s length. I think they really needed me this weekend. I hope I was there for them.”

  “You were, and more,” Caroline assured him. “But I have to admit, it was intense.”

  Karl chuckled in agreement and turned to look out his window. The rampers busily went about their purposeful tasks as the last of the sunshine turned the airport’s landscape vividly pink and orange in the level light. Karl turned from the scene in time to see Melanie making her way past, heading to the rear of the plane. They exchanged little waves before she moved on.

  Karl closed his eyes and laid his head back against the headrest. The tiny white pill was potent and fast. Karl could feel himself relaxing all over. It was not unlike the sensation he’d felt after communion that morning at mass, but the pill promised a deeper and longer-lasting cessation from his tension and anxiety. Karl kept his eyes closed as the flight attendant made her way down the aisle, loudly closing the overhead bins. Not long after that, he felt the jolt and slow movement backwards as the big plane was pushed away from the gate. Karl heard the engines rev up and pull the jet forward toward the runway, but he elected to keep his eyes closed and ignore the flight attendants’ pantomime of seat belt fastening and oxygen mask adjustment. The captain’s voice penetrated Karl’s dwindling consciousness with a cheerful welcome and announcement of weather and anticipated arrival times.

  Karl had made this flight many times in years past. Now, more than ever before, he was aware of exactly what he was leaving behind as the plane accelerated and lifted him back toward home. His southern Florida role of son and brother had been only a small part of his life. The fact that the role he had relegated to Boca Raton had now burgeoned and would require more consideration in his life in Cary was bearable under the pill’s spell. How it would be twisted and adapted to in reality remained to be seen, but Karl was relieved to feel he had the capacity to adjust.

  He thought of his mother, bravely walking the streets of the old neighborhood as it changed, with new faces and stories that no longer captivated her or held her interest. She had seen out the lives of the original residents of those homes, and she didn’t have the capacity to absorb the lives of their replacements. What she had remaining from forty years of living in Boca Raton was only herself. Annike was determined to remain herself, though soon her self would be a reduction—a distillation, really—of who she had been before. Without much fuss, his mother had hugged him good-bye and left him with a no-nonsense answer to his questions of how he was supposed to act. It was no different than when she had packed him off to kindergarten or college. He knew he was loved, but he also knew what was expected of him. While his mother might be leaving him before she was really gone, she had made it alright, just as she’d kissed his skinned knees, and later soothed his abraded heart when early crushes had instructed him in the first lessons of love lost. Reflecting on her last good-bye now, he could not fault her for anything she’d said in freeing him from responsibility and guilt.

  Karl’s thoughts turned to his father. Like Annike, Frank had made it easy for Karl to walk away and reclaim his own life, despite the diminution of his father’s vitality. Karl saw him in his beloved backyard, mourning the debilitation of his friendly orange trees. They had outlived their fruitfulness, yet Frank couldn’t have them cut down and hauled away. He still tended them as if they were at the height of vigor, though they needed little more than rain and sunshine. Likewise, his father had asked him for nothing more than the occasional pleasure of his company.

  By moving himself and Annike to Palladian Gardens, Frank had provided for them as he always had, making even the end as practically deliberate and efficient as his life had always been. Frank promised no unseemliness of need or emotion. He would die as self-contained as he’d lived. It was just a matter of Karl providing a comforting bit of company along the wait. All Frank required from Karl was a dependable reflection of his own former strength.

  Karl’s thoughts turned to Sven. The grown man remained in many ways the skinny little boy Karl had held and tossed like a golden dolphin to flash in the sunshine before diving into the sea. Karl realized that no matter how old they became, he would always remain Sven’s big brother. It had been a pleasure to discover Sven still held him in the esteem and with the love he’d had as a child. Karl had never recognized Sven’s loss as he’d left him behind to stride into his larger world. Sven had missed him as the years went by, and Karl had relegated him to the status of a fond plaything left on a shelf as the teenager became a man. It was only now that Karl realized his honest tolerance and mild interest in his brother had managed to sustain a love forged much earlier, when he’d played a larger role in his brother’s life. He’d never given any thought to the notion that his opinions still had the power to inspire and guide his little brother. Yet over the weekend, Sven had managed to move from the periphery of Karl’s concern to a closer state of connection. While he naturally loved the brother, it felt to Karl like an unexpected gift to find he liked the man his brother had become.

  As the jet cruised along, Karl dozed, thinking of these things. While he had flown down anticipating his family as a set of obligations, he had found them to be more obliged to him than the other way around. He was, as Sven pointed out, the one who got to grow up and go away. Karl had lived extricated from the daily routine familiarity with his parents and brother. They had no chance to make demands of him when he was physically and emotionally distant enough to preclude any expectations.

  Yet the bonds between them all were real. Karl realized he had done them a disservice by expecting them to be like the hastily dressed mother and son that shouted in the street under his window on Thursday morning. Frank, Annike, and Sven were knit of the same stuff that made Karl, he realized now. In the emotional hothouse of his four days at home, with its disturbing revelations and comforting connections, Karl found himself enhanced by their interaction, not diminished, as he’d fully expected to be. As he flew home, he carried them still. There was no sense of letting them go, only the recognition that they were a part of the warp and weft of his life. While the future would require his attention to each of them in different ways, it wasn’t a future that seemed weighty and hard to carry. His family was all of a piece with who he was.

  In his deeply relaxed state, Karl’s thoughts turned to revisit the landscape of his early-morning dream. He wondered if such a beach really existed. He had no immediate recollection of a bridge that led out over the ocean so clearly leaving a beach. Certainly not one that required a lifeguard’s chair to watch over swimmers. Though his chosen profession had made him familiar with many bridges, most took their departure from land in isolated places, not beaches, and certainly not a beach with a lifeguard tower. No, his dreamscape must have its place in reality on some island, but he had no island ready on which to locate it.

  But now, seeing once more that humid light as he remembered the dream scene, Karl was again aware of the possibilities of the place. It was a young man’s beach. That he found himself there at fifty-two, renewed in vigor and vitality, with every assurance of physical and intellectual fulfillment, represented his own resistance to growing older. While he was realistic about his age and its wear and tear on his body and spirit, that he could still find that beach in his dream and stand on it with a younger man’s enthusiasms and desires was his assurance that he would not face his father’s future. Karl felt like he would never come to believe he was irrelevant. Instead, he felt the fulfillment of his mother’s promise in his name. Karl felt strong, and he felt up to the challenges of growing older. In the course of four days he had both regained and lost some of his most closely held beliefs about family. The weekend in Boca Raton had left him with family relationships he knew he could sustain. It was
beyond any doubt. He still had the fulfillment of many possibilities to look forward to. He needn’t go looking for the dream; the dream found him and sustained him with a growing sense of who he was.

  Karl was smiling to himself when the plane’s wheels skidded along the runway at RDU. He eagerly looked out the window as the lights of the runway and terminal flew past. He was almost home. Caroline lifted her head from his shoulder, and he looked into her drowsy, questioning eyes. “We’ve landed,” he said gently.

  Caroline smiled and reached to brush away at the dampness she’d left on his shoulder. “That went fast,” she said as she stretched within the confines of her seat.

  “I think you slept all the way,” Karl told her. “Now I’m dying for a cup of coffee.”

  “Oh, that sounds good,” she said as she bent to look out the window. “Are you hungry at all?”

  “Not really,” Karl told her as the plane began a slow, sharp turn back toward the terminal. “I’d be happy with a scrambled-egg sandwich later on.”

  “I can do that,” Caroline said evenly. “Now I’m just ready to be home.”

  “Me, too,” Karl told her honestly.

  Within the hour, Melanie turned the car onto Belgravia Street and drove much faster than Karl would have preferred. He didn’t say anything to his daughter, however, because he could sense in her speed the urge to be back at the town house, which he felt, too. In the early evening, the street was deserted. All of the neighbors had withdrawn into their houses, and lights filled the second-floor living rooms in a line of warmth and welcome. When they pulled into their own drive, Karl noted that the lamp in their own living room window, set on a timer, was lit and waiting for them. It was warming to find the town house ready for their return.

  Melanie left the car in the drive, and they all stepped out into the streetlight’s glow. With choreographed efficiency, Melanie marched to the trunk of the car and pulled out their carry-on bags while Caroline walked up the steps and unlocked and opened the front door. Karl carried Caroline’s bag and his own up the steps and over the spill of mail waiting on the foyer floor. He walked past Caroline and climbed the stairs to their bedroom. The familiar squeaky step made Karl smile. Surrounded by his own walls and the scents of home, he laid the suitcases on the bed and unzipped his own. He wanted the Tynnigo candle.