Natalie was a Jewish girl from Cleveland whose paternal grandfather had brought home the unfathomable surprise of a Japanese bride from his peacekeeping tour of the Pacific. And while no one would have been able to name it by looking at her, the one-quarter Asian blood swimming around amidst the three-quarters Eastern European, there was something quietly exotic in the planes of Natalie’s face and in the heaviness of her hair that she wore in a braid down her back. There were a million boys like Sullivan, Irish all the way back to the dawn of time, but Natalie was a singular genetic concoction. The finest elements from every part of her heritage had managed to step forward. No matter how many grandchildren those four-quarters produced, there would never be another with Natalie’s balance, the warm light of her skin, her intelligence and grace. She was not the girl you saw at first. She did not turn heads coming into a room. But once you saw her, really saw her, there was no looking anywhere else.
“Natalie died.”
“You know she did.”
“I’m sorry.”
“We should be talking about you, anyway,” Sullivan said, and suddenly he was irritated with her. This is what spies do, after all. They get you going on about yourself. She was flat on her back and barely able to open her mouth and still she had gotten him talking about things that should not be discussed. “With all due respect to your impending surgery, any person looking at this exchange would say that you are the one who should be answering questions. We could start with the simplest one: Why did you give up your children? Teddy I can see. Maybe you’re poor and you’re young and you’ve already got one kid and so you have to give the second one away, but then to give away the first one, too? How did you give up Tip? How did you go back to your house and pick up this child who is more than a year old and give him away?”
“She was driving,” Tennessee said.
“You don’t get to make all the decisions.” He kept his voice low, even as it was edged in fury. He managed to stay seated in his chair. She did not flinch at all and again he wondered if she could hear him.
“Finish this,” she said.
He only listens to you, his father had told his mother. She was already sick and moving in one inexorable direction and still his father was complaining to his mother about Sullivan. He could hear their voices from where he stood outside the bedroom door and from that moment on he thought yes, I will only listen to my mother, and if she is gone I will not listen to anyone ever again. So what he could not understand at all was his desire to listen to this woman. He wanted to finish this story. No one ever asked him about the things he needed to say. They were always so busy asking him about things that couldn’t possibly matter. “I drove up Friday night after work to pick up Natalie like I said I would, but by the time I got there I’d changed my mind. I wanted to sleep in her bed and go to a movie on campus. I let it get later and later but she said she wasn’t falling for it. I had promised we were going back to Boston and we were going back. She was restless that year. I was gone. Her friends were gone. I was in a bad mood. I’d taken something, a couple of Darvocet Natalie had in the bathroom from when she’d had her wisdom teeth out over winter break. We were drinking Jack Daniels out of tea cups. She kept laughing even though I knew she was getting mad at me. She was saying, ‘You’re not doing it this time. We’re going to go. We’re going to go.’ Until finally there was nothing I could do. I had to take her back. I had promised to take her back.”
The rest of it he really didn’t remember. Whether that was the time or the drugs, the concussion or the loss or the willful release of knowledge he may once have held, he couldn’t say. He walked into the winter night with Natalie, snow blowing in circles around them, a soft, enveloping sweep. She held his arm. He had her suitcase, a quilted bag containing a toothbrush and a nightgown, underwear and extra sweaters, a copy of The Magic Mountain that she was reading for a course called Twentieth-Century Classics in Translation. Sullivan had taken the class himself three years before and had done well in it. He could remember the contents of her suitcase but nothing about getting in the car, nothing about Natalie getting in beside him. Nothing at all until he saw his father sitting by his hospital bed in a room that was not unlike the one he was sitting in now.
“When I woke up my father was there and he told me that Natalie had died. My memory is that he was kind about it. He cared for Natalie, I think. He saw her as a good influence. I honestly didn’t understand at that point that she had died with me or that my being in the hospital was connected to her death. The accident had shaken everything loose in my head and it was very difficult for me to figure out what part of what was happening was real.”
“I know,” Tennessee said.
He nodded. “Yes. Exactly like that. So it was awhile, a few minutes or an hour, I don’t know, before I put it together: Natalie, me, the car, and I asked my father what I had done.” At this Sullivan stopped for a minute because it was not a sentence he ever said, not to himself, not to anyone. He tipped back the cup for some water but it was already gone. “In my memory, and I don’t know if this is true or not because there were only two of us in the room and God knows we never talked about it again, in my memory my father took my hand and leaned over the bed.” And Sullivan, in a moment of genuine feeling, took Tennessee’s hand and leaned towards her. “He said, ‘She was driving the car. If you don’t remember, that’s fine, but I’m telling you, Natalie was driving the car.’”
“Maybe she was.”
Sullivan shook his head. He didn’t think about her so much anymore, not like he thought about his mother. He thought about how he was adrift in the world, but for the most part he managed to block out the source of his launch into darkness. Sweet Natalie. Forever in her junior year, locked out of Paris, eternally twenty in winter, laughing. “Never.”
“That night–”
“I always drove. She would have been sleeping. If it was dark and we were in the car, then Natalie was sleeping. There was a story that I was sick that night or I’d had too much to drink and she was taking me home. You read those stories.” He looked at Tennessee and smiled. “You never believed them. I didn’t believe them. The whole thing proved to be an enormous miscalculation on my father’s part. He thought that by telling a lie we would all be spared the pain and embarrassment of my killing my girlfriend, but it never worked out that way, not from the very beginning. The press hounded him straight to hell. They rounded up Natalie’s parents, Natalie’s friends, and gave airtime to their opinions. They kept her picture on the front page longer than they would have if she’d been kidnapped. They waited outside his office, outside the hospital, outside the house. It was over for him after that, even though they were never able to prove what I’d done. Not a single cop ever changed his story, my God they were true to their mayor, but Boston proved to have less devotion. I really do believe if he had just kept his hands off of it and let me stand accountable no one would have cared. Saintly Bernard Doyle with the dead wife and the two black orphans, the people would have forgiven him one murderous fuck-up of a son. It might even have helped him in the next election. But people hate to be lied to. It belittles them. They could smell him saving the hide of his privileged boy, and for that, I’ll tell you, they turned on him like feral dogs. My father had a plan, you know. He was already set to run for governor. He had it laid out like a chess match. My father had a plan for the people, not just the people in his family or the people in Massachusetts. He had a plan for All The People and he threw it away on the one person he didn’t much care for to begin with. He ought not to have lied, Bernard Doyle. We might have gotten over Natalie, both of us, but no one ever recovered from him lying.”
“He meant to protect you.”
“Or he meant to protect himself. Either way he made the wrong choice.”
Tennessee breathed in the stale hospital air and felt a sharp pain in her ribs. “You were his son.”
Sally knocked on the door as she opened it. “They just called. They’re coming u
p to get her now.”
“I’m ready,” Tennessee said, her voice so quiet that Sally didn’t know she had spoken.
“No,” Sullivan said to the nurse. “We need more time. She has things she has to tell me.”
“She can tell you everything when she wakes up.” Sally raised her voice. “You have a very nice nephew, Mrs. Moser. He’s been worried about you.”
Tennessee kept her eyes closed but she nodded her head.
Sullivan leaned closer to her ear. “It isn’t fair.”
“Later.”
He took her hand again and pressed it. He could not imagine letting it go. “I never told that story before. Do you believe me? I promised my father I would never tell the truth and from that day on I never did, not about anything, not until now.”
“Thank you,” she said.
“But why?” His heart was enormously open to her now. She had taken his burden for a moment, lifted the thing he had carried with him for so long he hadn’t even understood that he was still holding it. “I’m not the son you’re interested in.”
Tennessee opened her eyes again, but it seemed to take everything she had this time. He knew those eyes. They had been looking at him since he was twelve, asking him why he had done all the things he had done. “I wanted to know why you stole,” she said.
Chapter 7
WHEN KENYA OPENED HER EYES IT WAS TO A FLOOD OF ASTONISHING SUNLIGHT. So bright was this room, so radiant, that for the first few moments she was awake she did not consider her mother or the Doyles at all. She did not think of where she was or what had happened. She could do nothing but take in the light. It had never occurred to her before that all the places she had slept in her life had been dark, that her own apartment had never seen a minute of this kind of sun. Even in the middle of the day, every corner hung tight to its shadows and spread a dimness over the ceiling and walls. Draw the curtains back as far as they could possibly go and still the light seemed to skim just in front of the window without ever falling inside. No matter what time of day it was she had to switch on the overhead bulb to do her homework, or her mother would shout at her, Your eyes! But in the light that soaked this room a girl could read the spines of the books on the very top shelf. “The Double Helix,” she said aloud. “A Separate Peace.” She stretched her arms down the comforter and admired them. She spread her fingers wide apart and took her fingernails under consideration. Every bit of her was straight and strong and beautiful in this light. She glowed. She felt it pouring into her and yet she could tell by her skin, which looked ashy most mornings where she lived, that it was pouring out of her as well. It was just like the leaves they had studied in science class. She was caught in an act of photosynthesis. The light was processed through her and she was improved by it. She wondered if there wasn’t some way that light was divided and somehow, even though it didn’t seem logical, more of it wound up in better neighborhoods. How had she slept so deeply in the presence of all this sun? She sat up and pulled the blankets up with her. The room was cold but not as cold as it got when the radiator shut down at home. It shut down more reliably than it came on. Besides, there were plenty of nice things to offset the chill. For example, it was a very comfortable bed, something she hadn’t taken the time to notice when she had collapsed into it so late the night before. It was a very fine pillow. She knew she had been tired beyond any tired she had achieved through running in her life, but that didn’t account for her good night’s sleep. She swept her gaze around the room. She saw the pictures of Mrs. Doyle and Dr. King, the maps tacked into the wall, the enormously high windows through which light poured in to saturate every surface. She saw that lovely statue with her arms open wide and saw how the light painted the side of the woman’s face and made the halo shining on the back of her head seem almost like a living thing. She would like to have a statue of her own mother to take with her through life and put on various dressers as she grew up. It was a comfort to sleep beneath that watchful eye. The woman on the dresser made everything peaceful and quiet. And with that thought Kenya realized what was so strange about this room, stranger and more wondrous than the light or the pillow or the bed: it was the quiet. Not a single sound floated up from Union Park, not kids screaming, not the drivers of passing cars laying on their horns, not the shouts of men arguing with each other or crazy women arguing with themselves. The radiator did not hiss or clang or make that awful sound like there was someone standing right there beside you whaling into it with a metal bar. There was nobody banging around in the halls, saying things her mother told her not to listen to, banging on their door either by mistake or because the person wanted to come inside without knowing them at all. There were no car alarms or police sirens, no Fire Station Engine 3, no inconsolable babies wailing. All the sounds that woke her up in the morning and woke her up half a dozen times every night were gone. How had the Doyles managed to take all of the light and none of the noise? She got out of bed and pulled the comforter around her like a cape against the cold. She went to the window to see if it was a holiday of some sort and no one was allowed outside, the one day a year when everybody had to stay in and keep their thoughts to themselves. But what she saw from that fourth-story window was the snow, beautiful and silent, as deep as the second step on the house across the street. She had forgotten the snow, but the minute she remembered it she remembered everything. A sudden gasp came up in her throat and she made a small sound she could not hold back. She leaned her forehead against the frosted glass and closed her eyes, though her tender eyelids were ineffectual at blocking out so much light. What she wanted more than anything was to take time back one day to her own dark apartment where she would just now be waking up with her mother.
Kenya got dressed quickly. The doors in the hallway were open and she could see that the bed in the room across from hers was empty and unmade and she went back and made her own bed up. She knew that her mother would want her to show them that she had been raised to know better. She heard her own footsteps on every stair coming down, no matter how weightless she tried to make herself. Was she supposed to come downstairs at all, or should she have waited in her room until they called her? The entire house was luminous. It was clean down to the dowels that held up the banister and the corners of the baseboards, so clean that it was impossible to believe no woman lived there. The glass in the windows looked like something you could put your hand through in order to touch the cold air on the other side. She came down into the front hallway and then stretched her neck to look around the door into the living room. There was Tip sitting up on the couch with a textbook in his lap. As quiet as she was he looked right up like he had been expecting her.
“Where is everybody?” she whispered.
“Teddy and Sullivan went out for a walk a long time ago,” Tip said. “And my father I don’t know about. He may still be asleep.”
She stared at him, her eyes enormous and round.
“Did you sleep?”
“Like I was dead,” she said.
“You can come in here, you know.”
Kenya had lost some of the bravado she felt under the cover of last night’s snow and darkness. She moved slowly into the room and sat on the couch where Teddy had slept, carving a modest place for herself in the jumble of pillows and blankets. She made a point of keeping her feet hanging just above the floor instead of sitting on them when sitting on them was her natural inclination. “How’s your ankle?”
“It’s going to be fine. I just have to get used to it.”
“Any news about my mom yet?” She hadn’t heard the phone ring but maybe the phones didn’t ring on the fourth floor.
“Yours is the first voice I’ve heard since Teddy and Sullivan left at five. They might know something. They were talking about going to the hospital. We can ask them when they get back.”
They stared at each other, both of them thinking the same thing.
“Thank you for letting me use your room,” Kenya said, feeling that she was mining the depths of w
hatever manners she had.
Tip nodded. “It’s cold up there,” he said. “I should probably sleep down here when I come home anyway. It’s so much warmer.” He waited a minute, and when she didn’t jump in he managed to add, “I always liked this couch.”
“It’s nice.” Kenya ran her hand over the fabric of the couch she was sitting on. All her life she had thought about this: sitting in the living room, talking to Tip, but she realized now for as many times as she had dreamed about it waking and sleeping, the movie in her head did not include sound. She felt like now she was straining to hear the interesting conversations they must have had, because as hard as she tried she could think of nothing to say to him. “So you like fish,” she offered up finally. It was the best she could come up with. Tip didn’t even seem to be trying.