Sullivan wondered if his mother would be happy to think that the only sweet child she had was growing up to be a priest. He wondered if she would be horrified. He was genuinely sorry that he had no idea what she would think. He remembered his mother in the snow when he was still her only son, pulling him behind her on a bright blue plastic disc. He remembered the snow in her hair and later how when they were back in the warm kitchen she would rub his hair dry with a towel. He remembered how she sang to him, “To know, know, know you, is to love, love, love you.” She was pregnant then. He could see her belly pushing out against her sweater. One more thing that never came to pass. If Bernadette had shown up, Teddy had said, but that couldn’t happen, even though at some point Doyle was bound to throw that possibility out to him: What would your mother say if she knew what you’ve done? But his mother wasn’t there, and as long as the universe continued to operate in the same way it always had there was no chance she was coming. If she had shown up even once, just to him, he believed that things wouldn’t have turned out like this at all, and if she had lived, there was a chance that even Sullivan might have gone so far as to make someone proud. He might have been a politician or a scientist, even a priest. He wouldn’t have made the same mistakes because he would not have been in those places at those moments. If his mother had lived, the chain of events would never have begun. There never would have been an accident. He would not have been sent off in the world by himself. Surely he would still have made mistakes, but they would have been smaller ones. He shook the thought out of his head. It got him nowhere.
When they arrived at Back Bay, Sullivan dug his hands in his pockets, but all he found there was a Percocet. It was a very small thing but still something to look forward to later on. He looked at Teddy.
“I’ve got it,” Teddy said and pulled out his wallet. His face was soft again and he smiled at Sullivan. Teddy, unlike the other members of his family, never held a grudge about anything.
Like Sullivan, Kenya’s mother had been awake off and on for most of the night. Every time she fell asleep for a second there was someone there to wake her up. It seemed to be the responsibility of every person in the hospital to wake her up, and they took their job seriously. They shook her shoulder and called her name and shined a light in her eyes. “Miss Moser, how you feeling? Can you tell me how you feeling?”
But Tennessee couldn’t say how she was feeling. The only word that came to mind was suspended. She was hanging off a thousand tiny wires. She didn’t tell them that. It wasn’t worth the effort to make the words. She couldn’t take in a proper breath. How was she feeling? She looked at the woman standing over her bed. She was tall and bony with jet black skin and three gold chains around her elegant neck. African, you could hear it in the voice. That wasn’t a Boston voice. That wasn’t Roxbury. She closed her eyes and wondered where in Africa she was from, but when she started to ask, there was an Asian man holding her wrist. He wasn’t as tall as the African woman but he was even thinner, no bigger around than a six-year-old. Didn’t anyone eat in this hospital? Did they hire starving refugees to come in and wake you up at night? “Miss Moser, can you open your eyes for me now?” It was an Irish girl, fat and sickly pale, who was checking the line going into her hand.
Tennessee thought of Ebenezer Scrooge and wondered if this last girl was her ghost of Christmas future. She had a vague memory of Christmas, Kenya sitting cross-legged on the floor with a present in her lap. She could see her tearing the paper but she couldn’t be sure if the Christmas she was seeing in her mind was the most recent or a year ago. She had a terrible feeling she had left Kenya someplace she wasn’t supposed to, that she had forgotten her, though how could that be possible? She would never forget her daughter. Had Christmas come and gone? It was winter. For all of her uncertainty, that was the one thing she was sure of, she had been so cold in the snow. She blinked her eyes and everything shifted like magic. People were there at a distance, and then touching her, and then she was alone. She was awake in one room and then later on she was awake in another, or at least she thought it was another room. It seemed larger and not nearly as bright. She didn’t think there had been any window before. She had no memory of being moved, but that didn’t tell her anything either. She had no memory of coming to the hospital in the first place. The room was mostly dark except for a long, thin light that was mounted on the wall above her headboard, and that light fell directly into her eyes. She would have liked to turn it off so that she could better see out the window, but turning off a light seemed like the single most impossible task she had ever considered and so she left it alone. She could never seem to remember to ask anyone about the light when they were there.
What she thought about, what consumed her past the point of speaking, was the pain. There was a web of pain that extended from the top of her head down to her knees. First she tried to stay very still so as not to disturb it, but then it would get disturbed anyway and so she would experiment: she moved a hand, she flexed her toes. She was at all times very careful to keep her pelvis straight and pointed up, as she knew it was her pelvis, or more precisely her stomach, that was the center of what was wrong.
“Miss Moser, I’m taking your blood pressure now. You’re going to feel a pressure.”
When there weren’t people talking directly to her, there were still people talking. Their voices came out of the ceiling. People called for doctors. People called Code Blue. Bells rang out a little symphony. Again and again they woke her up.
And then Tennessee woke up alone in a room and everything was different. As soon as she opened her eyes she remembered. The great fog that was dripping down the little plastic tubing into her arm burned off in the bright light above her head and she remembered Jesse Jackson was speaking at the Kennedy School. She had barely made it in time, rushing home from work to pick up Kenya. She made them both peanut butter sandwiches, standing in the kitchen with her coat on, and put the sandwiches together in the bottom of a paper sack with an apple.
“I don’t know why we can’t stay home,” Kenya had complained. “It’s freezing cold and I’ve got homework.”
“You should have done your homework already,” Tennessee said. “You can do it on the train.”
“I can’t do it on the train because then my handwriting gets all sloppy and it’s points off.” Kenya bent over and put her hands on the floor then straightened out her legs. Bend and straight, bend and straight, until her torso rested flat against her thighs and the backs of her hands were pressed beside her shoes. “There was an extra-short recess today because it was so cold outside, so I went and ran circles in the gym until Miss LaPiana came and said I wasn’t allowed to be in there by myself and that I had to go back to the cafeteria with everybody else.” She was like a dog that had spent the day penned up. Tennessee had to figure out a way to get her into a better school. Cathedral Grammar had offered her a scholarship of four thousand dollars last year, but that wasn’t any more helpful than offering four. She had to figure out a way to make them pay for all of it. She had to get someone from the school to come see Kenya run. Kenya could be their fleet-footed child star. She could run and earn her keep.
“I could run all the way to Cambridge if you’d let me,” Kenya said, turning a deft finger inside the peanut butter jar. “I could run beside the bus and then beside the train and you could watch. I’d stay right next to your window.”
“Quit horsing around and put your coat on. Wash your hands first. Did you get your hat?”
Kenya said it was in her pocket, but once they were halfway to the stop and Tennessee told her to put it on, Kenya admitted to leaving it at home, saying that it made her head look lumpy. The child went out into the freezing cold night with no hat on and Tennessee scolded her while they stood on the corner and waited for the bus that would take them to the Park Street Station.
She saw the lights of the bus coming from a long way off. She saw the lights of the car.
Kenya had been on the sidewalk. She
was sure of that. She could not say where her daughter was now, asleep in the waiting room probably, not too far from here, but she was positive that when the car came, Kenya was nowhere near the car.
She was less sure about Tip. She had been half surprised to see them at the lecture. More and more often now she saw Mr. Doyle alone. The boys were growing up. They were busy with school. Tennessee had not been able to find a seat and she watched the boys from high up in the auditorium where she stood behind the back row against the wall. There was nothing she did not know about the backs of their heads. She listened to Jesse Jackson, but her eyes stayed fixed to her sons’ heads. Why was Tip only wearing a jacket? She wanted to ask Jackson a question but she never raised her hand when the Doyles were there, and anyway, Jackson only seemed to call on the dreamy-eyed students. I do appreciate your inspiration and leadership, she wanted to say, but I need some more specific advice. I need to know how to keep my child safe in public schools, safe from guns and chipped lead paint and pushers and bullies who have been bullied too much themselves. I need to know how I can walk her straight to the door of her classroom in the morning and still get to work on time and how she can learn enough to get to college when there are thirty-five other children in the room and half of them did not get breakfast. Can we talk, sir, about those things? All these speeches were so inspiring, yet every time she left the building with no more information than she had come in with. Politicians never mentioned the details of life because of course the details that appealed to one person could repel another, so what you wound up with in the end were a long string of generalities, stirring platitudes that could not buy you supper. For years Tennessee had wondered how Mr. Doyle and the boys could stand it, so much talk that added up to nothing. She thought that Mr. Doyle must have been obligated to go because he had been a politician himself.
Mr. Doyle had led her to politics, but when she actually started to understand it all she was with her neighbor, a girl who didn’t go to hear speeches. It was years ago, and Kenya was just a baby, and she was cooking dinner with her neighbor, who was also her best friend, in the apartment three floors up from hers. It was January and freezing cold and they were making soup the two of them with the baby held in place on the sofa with a nest of pillows. The two women were talking with the radio on, and then they heard Dr. King’s voice. Her friend leaned over and raised the volume until that giant baritone covered them whole. “It’s his birthday today,” she said, and Tennessee said she knew that because there wasn’t any mail.
For another minute they tried to continue their chopping and then they simply stopped and stood, eyes closed. Tennessee had read the speech in school when she was a girl but it meant nothing to her then. They had even played it from a record album once in the school gymnasium and made the children listen, but she had managed not to listen by looking at a magazine instead. So, truly, when it came over the radio in her girlfriend’s kitchen the year she was twenty-nine it was nothing she had heard before.
“Now is the time to make real the promises of Democracy,” Dr. King said.
“Now is the time to rise from the dark and desolate valley of segregation to the sunlit path of racial justice.
“Now is the time to open the doors of opportunity to all God’s children.”
That was the first time Tennessee saw just how politics, once you dug through everything that was worthless, could leave you stunned. There were some people who had the ability to tell other people what was worth wanting, could tell them in a way that was so powerful that the people who heard them suddenly had their eyes opened to what had been withheld from them all along.
When it was over, Tennessee turned off the radio and her friend wiped her hands on a towel. “Now that would be worth getting shot for,” her friend said thoughtfully.
“What a thing to say.”
The friend shook her head. “Think about it, to have the chance to say all that, to have it played every year on your birthday so people remember you. I would die if I could do as much as that.”
At the time, Tennessee had not understood the logic, but five months later her friend was dead from a sepsis that had seemed at first to be nothing more than a fever. She had decided she didn’t need to go to the emergency room until it was very late. She kept saying that she could tough it out. Later, when Tennessee was alone with the baby, she thought often about that January night in the kitchen and Dr. King’s speech and how her friend had been right: it was better to have done something, to have stood for something great and gotten shot for it than it was to never stand up for anything and die like everybody else. Tennessee had meant to do something with her life. She had thought that one day she would make a speech that addressed the simple details of daily existence that the politicians all neglected. She had always thought that one day she would find a way to stand up for the things that people were afraid to say, and let them know it was fine to ask for what you needed. She had thought there would be plenty of time, that she would go back and finish college and how people would respect her for that. But now she was in a hospital bed and she wondered if she might in fact die just like her friend, which was to say, die like everybody else.
While Jesse Jackson gave his speech, Kenya sat on the floor of the auditorium finishing her math homework in a spiral notebook. Afterwards she lost a glove and it had taken them awhile to find it under the bank of seats in front of them. The glove was the reason they were among the last people to leave. So Tennessee was surprised when she saw the boys and their father standing out in the snow. Most of the crowd had gone already. It was a lousy night. She saw the three of them talking and she turned away, wanting to get Kenya, who had no hat, out of the weather as soon as possible. But then Tip was walking towards her, wearing a slight red jacket that would not have been enough to keep a cricket warm. When he stopped he wasn’t more than three feet away from her. She could see that he was talking to Mr. Doyle but she could not understand what he was saying for the relentless thud of her own heart beating in her ears. He had passed her countless times in his life and it never failed to cause a flush of adrenaline: a singular desire for flight. Would this be the one time he would notice her? Are you following me? She pushed her hand down on Kenya’s shoulder harder than was necessary, as if forgetting that Kenya knew better than to say anything. But there was nothing to worry about, Tip never saw them. He passed by them, still talking, into the night thick with snow. Then walking halfway backwards he stepped off the curb and into the street, into the lights that she only at the moment realized were coming towards them. He could have been anybody. He was a boy stepping out in front of a car he clearly did not see. Tip kept his head in his books, in the clouds, with the fishes. He didn’t pay attention. She pushed him, but not because he was hers. She pushed him because he was there and the car was there. She pushed him so hard she was certain she had sent him sailing up through the falling snow and into the night like a punch from a cartoon character. POW! He spun off towards the stars. Had she knocked him clear to safety? She had never hit anyone as hard as she hit Tip, and then, as if in reply, she was hit by the car. She held up her hand and felt it crack against the front fender. For a single second she had touched him, and even if it happened through gloves and coats, it was miraculous. She had not touched him in over nineteen years.
The car had not hit him. She had pushed him away. She had saved him.
The Asian nurse in the bright blue scrubs was back and slid a thermometer beneath her gown and under her arm. He wanted to know how she was feeling.
There was a night two years ago she could have touched him easily. She was coming home from work, changing trains at Park Street, when she saw Tip leaning back against a wall, a backpack hanging from one shoulder. He was reading and he was alone, no Teddy, no Mr. Doyle. Tennessee had never thought of it before but in all the years she had been looking for the boys she had never seen either one of them by themselves, though of course they were older at this point and surely went places without each
other all the time. The station was crowded and she didn’t have to stand too far from him. She liked the way he seemed so comfortable. He wasn’t looking around or shifting his weight from side to side. He was handsome, but handsome wasn’t the thing you’d think of first because his head was tipped forward and he didn’t smile. What you’d think if you saw him was that he looked smart. He looked like someone who had a purpose in this world. He wasn’t some kid who was hanging out riding the trains. He looked exactly like what he was, a college boy. While he was waiting, a pretty Spanish looking girl walked by, black hair long down her back and big gold hoop earrings, high heels on her black boots, and for a second she glanced back over her shoulder at the boy who was reading, the boy who didn’t notice her, and Tennessee smiled.
The B train to Boston College pulled up and Tip got on and without even giving it a thought Tennessee followed him up the steps and into the car and sat down across from him. All the people and all the trains and all the cars on the trains and seats on the cars and yet there he was right in front of her. It was dark by then and she could see him and see his reflection in the glass behind his head. She kept her eyes out the window but it didn’t even matter. She could have been looking anywhere, and he never once so much as straightened up his neck. After a concerted effort she could see that he was reading a book called Inland Fishes of Massachusetts. It was written by three people, Hartel, Halliwell, and Launer. She took a pen from her bag and she wrote their names on the palm of her hand. Normally when she saw him she didn’t do more than sweep her eyes briefly past the places he was, but now they were together on the gently rocking train. For once in her life there was nothing but time. When the train finally made its last stop, Tennessee felt a prickly sweat of dizziness come over her. Everybody stood up and gathered their packages and scarves. It was October and dark and she followed Tip nearly two blocks down the street before she remembered that Kenya was still at the after-school program and she was now very late picking her up. She stood where she was and watched him until he finally turned at a corner and the night swallowed him whole. She didn’t know why he’d be going out to Boston College or who he was going to see, it wasn’t her business to know, and she paid a second fare to get back on the train going home.