Her. Kenya thought the pronoun was cold.
“He said they talked.”
“What did they talk about?” Kenya asked.
Both of the brothers turned and looked at her. “Water. Fill up the whole pot with water and then pour it into that hole on the side.”
Teddy put boxes of Cheerios and Raisin Bran on the table and got the bowls and spoons. “Sullivan said they talked about me. I don’t believe him though. I think he was just giving me a hard time.”
“But you saw her. What did you talk about when you were there?”
Teddy stopped to think for a minute and then he looked at Kenya. “We talked about you,” he said. “She wanted to know if you were all right. She’d gotten confused from all the medication. She thought you were still at the hospital.”
The words came down on Kenya like a blow and she lowered her arms to her sides and rested her fingers on the edge of the countertop. “I should have waited.”
“Nobody ever knows what time it is in a hospital. It was dark outside when we were there. She probably thought it was still night. I think she thought that everything had just happened.” Teddy looked over to Tip.
“Turn the power switch on now,” Tip said. “The red button right on the front. There, perfect. Now you know how to make coffee. When your mother comes home from the hospital you can make her coffee in the morning.”
“We don’t have a coffeemaker,” she said dully, when what she wanted to say was, Shut the fuck up about the coffee. There were tears sitting up high on the lower lids of her eyes and she tried her best to hold them there. She should have stayed at the hospital and never said a word to any of them. She should have brought her hat with her the way her mother told her to. She knew right from wrong. She knew what she was supposed to do and what was expected and she didn’t do it.
“I’ll buy you one,” Tip said.
The three of them sat at the table and ate their peanut butter toast in silence, one of them trying not to cry and the other two holding their breath for fear she might start. Would it have been like this if they had stayed together? The breakfast table, the talking and ignoring one another. Two brothers alone was nothing like two brothers and a sister. If they had had a sister all along they would have been better talkers. They would have known when to take things lightly. If she had had two brothers she would have been protected. All of the kids who gave her a hard time in school, in the apartments, they would have known to stay away from her with two brothers who were so much older and so much taller than everybody else. She would have gotten respect because Tip did well in school and all the priests knew Teddy. Being an only girl meant being resourceful and strong, but to have two brothers would have meant not always having to work so hard at being safe. They would have all protected one another, teased and softened and shaped one another. But if they had stayed together, then either the boys would have had to have stayed with their mother and never known Bernadette, or Kenya would have had to give up her mother and been adopted out to the Doyles. For the three of them to stay together, one of the mothers would have had to lose completely. If that had been her mother then she would be alone in the hospital with no one to look after her. But who was looking after her now? At that thought a second wave of tears pushed up and knocked out the ones that were waiting, spilling those well-held tears down her cheeks and into her cereal bowl as fast as she could wipe them away with her hands.
Teddy put down his toast. “What?”
Kenya shook her head. She held her hand up to shade her eyes as if the light was suddenly more than she could bear. “My mother,” she said.
The two boys looked at her with genuine feeling, but neither of them was able to do the thing that for Sullivan would have come so naturally: put a hand on her wrist or touch her hair. “She’s going to be fine. She’ll come through the surgery okay.” Tip handed her a paper napkin from a basket on the table so that she could blow her nose. “They fix broken hips all day every day at that hospital.”
“But what if she had given me away, too? She’d be all alone now.”
The boys hadn’t realized that she was crying for what her mother was enduring, or might have endured. They had thought that she was like any other child and so would be crying for herself. They had cried for themselves when their mother died. They were younger of course, they understood less, but they had never cried because their mother was suffering. They cried because they wanted her to take care of them the way she always had before. They cried for her reassurance.
“She didn’t give you away,” Teddy said. “She saved you. She loves you.”
They were all three sorry he had put it that way since it raised the question of people only keeping the children they loved. Similarly, they were all three relieved when Doyle arrived in the kitchen and threw them off their conversation. He was dressed in dark wool pants with a shirt and sweater, an outfit that said that the snow had defeated him and he had no intention of going into work today. The law office was closed due to weather. He looked rested and calm, like someone who had been up for hours, possibly sitting in a chair in his bedroom reading after a long night’s sleep.
“Is this what happens when you come down so late?” he asked. “Someone else makes the coffee? I would have started sleeping late years ago.”
“Kenya made it,” Tip said.
“I thought she looked like a clever girl.” Doyle had resolved to stand by his pledge of the night before. He would not put his hesitancy and doubt off on the child. When he smiled at her she pressed the wet napkin into a ball in her fist and tried to breathe through her nose. “Are you feeling all right?” he asked her. “You didn’t catch a cold up there?”
She shook her head. “I didn’t wear a hat last night in the snow,” she said. “My mother told me to.”
“Mothers always turn out to be right about these things. I’ll make you some tea and honey. You don’t drink coffee, do you?”
She told him she did not.
“I hate to see children drinking coffee. I don’t even like to see my boys drinking coffee now. So, good for your mother.” He liked that. He thought it sounded generous. “And speaking of your mother, I need to call the hospital.”
“I went over there this morning,” Teddy said. “She’s in surgery now.”
“You’ve been all the way out there and back? I didn’t even hear you.” Why had Teddy gone to the hospital? What could he have wanted there? Doyle did not ask. Instead he went over to fill up the kettle and for an instant the three of them looked at one another with conspiracy. They had not had to explain Kenya’s crying.
“Sullivan couldn’t sleep. We were going to take a walk together and then we decided to go to the hospital and see how she was doing.”
She, Kenya thought. She has a name.
Doyle raised his eyes to the ceiling for a moment and then looked down at the stove. “Sullivan. I actually hadn’t thought of him yet this morning.”
“You wouldn’t have forgotten him for long,” Tip said.
Doyle sighed. “No, I’m sure you’re right, but for once Sullivan isn’t on the top of the agenda. Tell me about your mother instead.”
“She’s having surgery now,” Kenya reported. “And when she wakes up I’ll go and see her.”
Doyle nodded in approval as he poured himself a cup of coffee. “I like a person who has a plan. When your mother wakes up I’ll take you to the hospital myself.” And then it might be nice to take a trip, take Teddy and Tip to Paris for a week. Leave a note for Sullivan by the door.
“I’m going to take her over to the track to run first,” Tip said. “Burn off a little energy instead of just waiting around.”
“Do you run?” Doyle asked her.
Everything about him seemed animated, interested. How was it she had always imagined him to be so stern? In her mind she could see him walking through lecture halls and museums, outside in the lobby just before the symphony was about to play. He was always wearing a suit and he never l
ooked at anyone. Over and over she had smiled at him just to see if he would ever smile back. More than once her mother had to tell her to stop it. “How could they be happy with him?” Kenya asked, even though the boys looked happy enough. Now she wondered if she had been right about anything at all. “I run all the time.”
“These two are both excellent runners. If they’d stuck with it I think either one of them could have been real contenders.”
“They’re not too old now,” Kenya said.
Tip nodded to her for the vote of confidence.
“I’ll take you over to your apartment,” Teddy said. “That way you can get some things to stay over. You can get your running clothes.”
She would not be staying over again but they would work that out once they got to the hospital. Doyle lifted up from the table. “I’ll call for a taxi. We might as well learn a lesson from last night and get a jump on it this time. The wait’s going to be even longer this morning.”
“I don’t need a taxi,” Kenya said.
Doyle shook his head and picked up the phone. “I’m not going to have you walking over to Roxbury, and you don’t need to take the bus. We’ll have the taxi wait for you. You can just run in and get your things.”
“But I don’t live in Roxbury,” she said.
Doyle put his hand over the receiver. “Taxis will go pretty much anywhere. Where do you live?”
Kenya pointed south towards the dining room. “Cathedral.”
“The church?” Doyle cocked his head. When he thought about it for a minute he hung up the phone and moved backwards, drawing himself down to the table again.
The three of them were staring at her. When they did something all together at the same time it was very clear that they were family.
“No,” Tip said, keeping his voice measured and slow. “The housing project, Cathedral. That’s what you mean, don’t you? You live at the end of the street.”
“It’s not the end of the street,” Kenya said hesitantly. “It’s more than three blocks over from there.” She could have run it in five minutes, four and a half without the coat and the snow. She had done it before. Her address should not have been a betrayal and yet she could feel them each pulling away from her. It was too close. She had been too close to them all along. It wasn’t just that she came to their neighborhood from time to time, she lived there, just on the other side of that narrow line that divided them. Sometimes she and her mother went to church at the Cathedral of the Holy Cross when her mother didn’t have to work on Sunday morning and Kenya didn’t have a track meet but they almost never saw the Doyles anymore and the Doyles had never seen them, so what difference did it make? That was Boston: on one block there were houses so beautiful the mayor himself could be living in one and three blocks away there was a housing project where it maybe wasn’t always so nice but it was still a lot nicer than some other places. Her mother had waited for years for an opening at Cathedral to come up. They had been lucky to get in at all, they had waited in line with everybody else and they got their spot fair and square. It wasn’t like they bothered anybody. They stayed down there like mice. They didn’t take any of the air away from the Doyles, any of their sunlight.
Doyle took off his glasses and pressed the bridge of his nose between his forefinger and thumb. Then the kettle began to whistle and he got up and turned off the burner on the stove without making Kenya her tea.
“Her driver’s license said Roxbury,” Tip said. They had gone through her wallet, after all, looked at its sad contents, counted her money.
“I don’t know.” Kenya’s voice was breaking apart. “We used to live in Roxbury when I was little. What difference does it make where we live?”
Doyle, who should have had the presence of mind to lie, instead said, “It’s very close, that’s all.”
Kenya looked at her hands. She wanted to ask them how far away she and her mother were supposed to stay but she knew she wouldn’t be able to make the words come out of her mouth without some kind of bleating sob and she would not do that.
Doyle would have preferred to not know any of this. If given the choice between yesterday and today he would have opted for yesterday when Tip stood on two solid ankles and complained about having to see Jesse Jackson speak about the responsibilities inherent to democracy. Yesterday Doyle only worried about Teddy cutting his American history survey in order to seek out the company of his uncle. Yesterday Sullivan was scarcely a thought that crossed his mind, seeing as how he never returned phone calls from Africa. Yesterday he did not know that this girl Kenya and her mother lived in unnerving proximity to his family. They could have brushed past him in the aisles of the grocery store or stood beside him on the train and it never would have mattered. After all, he had apparently spent the past twenty years in a state of complete oblivion to their presence, and if he could roll back the clock even slightly then he could slip back inside the comfort of all he didn’t know. But no one was offering him yesterday over today. No one got to choose anything where time was concerned. If time could be rolled back then what would be the point in stopping someplace so close? He would go all the way to the year before Bernadette died and find another outcome for her illness by catching it sooner, and in doing so he would lay down a different set of cards for Sullivan as well. This child who presently sat at the wide-planked kitchen table that Bernadette had purchased in Vermont and lashed to the roof of her car would return to the crowd scenes, another face that blended in with so many others, were it not for a fact that too much of life unfolded beyond his control. But then he looked at his son picking at the edges of his peanut butter toast. Had all of their circumstances been different, he doubted very much that Tip would have been different. Tip’s interest in ichthyology was a transcendent force. No matter what had happened in their life, Tip would have grown into a man who saw Jesse Jackson as a waste of his evening, and he would have stood in the snow to argue against attending a reception. If things had been shuffled ever so slightly so that Bernadette had lived and Tennessee had followed them less, who was to say that the car would not have hit Tip squarely in the back last night, snapping his beautiful and much beloved neck as it pushed him forward? Working against every natural inclination, Doyle had to make himself consider that what had happened might not have been the worst thing at all, not by a long shot. It was possible in fact that they had all gotten off easy, everyone except the woman in the hospital. He cleared his throat. He forced himself to try again. “Lucky for Tip you stayed close,” he said to Kenya.
“Lucky for all of us,” Teddy said, as he had been thinking much the same thing.
Tip considered the point and then he nodded. “True.”
Kenya put her hands flat under her thighs and sat on them. She wanted to compress herself, be smaller. “We weren’t even looking for you last night,” she said, her feelings stung. “It’s not like all we do is follow you around.”
“Then why were you at the Jackson lecture?” Doyle asked her.
“You’re hardly ever at the lectures anymore. We go all the time. We go lots of places where we don’t even think about you.” Kenya knew that her tone was rude but she meant every word of it. “Sometimes one will be really good and my mother will say, ‘I sure wish Tip and Teddy had come to hear that.’ Or it will be boring and long and she’s glad you stayed at home. I wish we got to stay at home more but my mother says we have to hear what they have to say.”
Teddy leaned towards her. Anyone could see how patient he was. He looked like he wanted nothing more in the world than to make sense of what she was talking about. “You have to hear what who has to say?”
“You know, the guys who make the speeches.”
“Why in the world do you have to hear all that?” Tip asked her.
Kenya reached up and gave one of her braids a single sharp yank. “She likes politics, I guess.”
“So you’re saying that she goes to hear lectures not because she thinks we’ll be there but because she enjoys it her
self?” Doyle felt an unmistakable flutter in his chest. No matter how he felt about this woman, he had a desire to slap his hand flat against the table and shout to his sons, Are you listening to this?
“I don’t know how much she enjoys it but she thinks it’s something that a person has to do.”
“If that’s the case, then it proves that certain interests can’t be passed on genetically or environmentally,” Tip said.
“I think it’s brilliant,” Doyle said. He patted Kenya’s shoulder and then sent her up to the top floor to get her coat and her mother’s purse. “And get the hat,” he called after her. “You can wear her hat.”
They remained very quiet, the three of them listening to her footfall on the stairs going up and up. “We have an eleven-year-old stalker,” Tip whispered.
“I don’t think we can blame the child. The child just follows her mother,” Doyle said. His coffee was cold and he pushed it away.
Tip stretched his leg up into the chair where Kenya had been sitting. “I was making a joke.”
“Why do we have to blame either of them?” Teddy said.
“Because they follow you,” Doyle said. “They lurk behind bushes without your knowledge. Even if they’re doing it to save your life it is not a natural relationship.”
Teddy stood up and stretched his arms over his head while he yawned. He had gotten up too early. “Forget it. They’re nothing to us, okay? They’re political groupies following a former mayor, but I’m still going to take her over to her apartment and help her pack. Now that I know where they live I don’t suppose I’ll be gone very long.”
Tip shook his head. “I’ll take her,” he said. “Then we’ll go straight on to the track. After that she can come with me to the lab for a minute. I still have some work to finish and then we’re practically there at Mount Auburn. I’ll take her to the hospital and drop her off.”
“You don’t think the dead fish could manage one day without you?” his father said, though not unkindly.