“I can take that bag,” he said, looking down at her, though he wasn’t completely sure he could, given the compromised nature of his own balance. He needed the books in case he found the time to read for exams.
“I’ve got it,” she said, keeping her eyes fast on the road.
She appeared ready to spring at the first sign of available transportation, ready to sprint down the street and guide the cab back to Tip. Tip thought of her as a little peregrine falcon. Everything in her was designed to dart down, grab the rabbit. On the other side of the street the light turned green, instructing them to walk. That settled it. “We’re taking the T,” he said, and stepped into the street.
Kenya stayed on the curb. Tip was not following the plan. “I told your father I’d make you take a cab,” she called in a loud voice. “He gave me money.”
“Keep the money,” Tip said, working his crutches carefully against the hard pack in the street.
“At least call them again.”
“How many times can I call them?” Anyway, his cell phone was in his pocket and both of his hands were thoroughly occupied.
Kenya hesitated and then followed. If it would be wrong of her to take the T, it would be worse to let him go on alone. Besides, she didn’t want to go back to the house. Teddy and Sullivan were both asleep and Doyle would be too bent on entertaining her if it was just the two of them sitting in the living room together. She had already listened to the Schubert quintet (ironically, he had played her The Trout, or at least Tip said it was ironic) and now she wanted to see the fish museum, the special part that was only for scientists, where she and her mother and regular paying customers were not allowed to go. She wanted to run on Harvard’s track. She knew it was enormous and completely indoors because she had seen it once by peering in through the windows. More than anything, she wanted to get to the hospital so that she would be standing next to her mother’s bed the minute she opened her eyes. She wanted to kiss her hands and put her head lightly to her chest and listen to her heart, the things she did on the nights she couldn’t sleep. None of those things would happen on the curb. In two leaping steps she was right beside him again. She refused to dawdle. The light could change and strand her on the wrong side of Tremont. There was a chance that Tip might leave her there and even though she could catch him with no effort, she was not in the mood to cross against the light. She hooked her thumbs under the straps of the pack and hoisted it up. “Let’s at least go back and get the Silver Line.”
“We’re taking the T.” He was nearly to the curb.
“But the T is four blocks at least. We can pick up the Silver Line on the corner and take it to Park Street.”
Tip didn’t take the bus. He didn’t like the bus. “We’re going to Back Bay.”
“That’s insane.”
“Then I’m insane.”
She stayed quiet for awhile. She stayed beside him. “You can walk with those things okay?”
Tip straightened his elbows, careful not to rest his weight beneath his arms. “I’m getting the hang of it.” They were moving down Dartmouth Street at a good clip. He could have gone faster but every so often the rubber tips of the crutches would shoot out a quick inch or two on the ice and give him reason for sober consideration. The sidewalk was brick, charming, until you tried to shovel off the snow. It couldn’t have been more than twenty degrees but he was dressed for it now. From Teddy he had borrowed a parka and scarf and the sheepskin hat with earflaps that he had often ridiculed his brother for. From his father he took a pair of soft leather gloves with cashmere knit lining that pressed up hard against his palms, expensive gloves that Tip himself had bought for Doyle as a present several Christmases ago. But even more than the layers, it was the work of moving forward that kept him warm.
“Isn’t this the prettiest street?” Kenya said, her eyes forever turning up to the leaded windows and carved wooden doors that sat on top of straight stone staircases. “Not as pretty as yours, but really nice.”
Tip stopped to shift his weight against the crutches. He tried to carry his left foot higher behind him and he felt the ache in his shin. The fiberglass casing of the boot that was designed to be so light was heavy. His foot was heavy. He took a moment to look around Dartmouth Street while he caught his breath. Same old Dartmouth Street, a shrine to wealth and minutely polished taste, every narrow side street more precious and perfect than the one before it. He could feel his pulse pounding in the side of his neck and he wondered if it had to do with the Percocet or if he was just out of shape. Last night with Teddy he could have run from Cambridge to Newton and this morning he was struggling with the block. “The street’s gotten too gentrified,” he said, and so dismissed it. He was irritated with his ankle or with himself and in that irritation he took unfavorable notice of the brass mail slots in the doors, the shining knockers shaped like lions’ heads. “There’s nothing interesting here anymore.”
“I don’t know that word,” Kenya said. She was always in the market for a new word.
Tip turned his head up to see four stories of gentrification, left to right, front to back. The South End was a long way away from its squatter days, its fire-in-the-trash-barrel days. All of that had come and gone before Tip had even been born. “The rich people came in and pushed the poor people out and fixed it all up so that every house looks the same.”
Kenya took inventory of the empty window boxes, the slender birch trees in the sidewalks, the stair rails fashioned in ornate ironwork. Even in the snow it all looked orderly and neat. She knew full well how lovely it would be once the purple vinca made a carpet around every tree and the geraniums filled the boxes. “But it looks nice,” she said, coming to the street’s defense. “I can think of some places not too far from here that could stand to be gentrified.” To learn a word you had to know the definition, to own the word you had to use it in a sentence.
“You’re missing the point,” Tip said, pushing off again. “While they’re fixing the windows and picking up the trash and planting the flowers, they get rid of the poor people too. I mean the black people, the brown people. They push them out into Cathedral and over into Roxbury. That’s the gentry’s idea of cleaning up.”
Kenya wasn’t thrilled with the implication, that at some point in history she or someone very much like her had lived on Dartmouth Street and later had been swept away in the name of a tidy cleanup. “You still live over here,” she said, imagining that one morning there was a note taped to every black door in the neighborhood: Time for you to go.
Tip didn’t know anything about eleven-year-olds, how smart they were or weren’t, how much they understood. It struck him that when he was eleven he would have made the same smart remark to his weak generalization and it frustrated him that he didn’t know how to backpedal out of it. What he said was essentially correct, but her statement was indisputable: he had not been driven out of the neighborhood. He hadn’t factored himself into the equation at all and now he was reduced to telling her the absolute truth as he knew it: “You have to be poor and black to get taken out of this place,” he said. “I was only black.”
When they had made it down all the stairs to the T, Tip took out two tokens and fed them into the slot. The turnstile was a trick with the crutches and so he handed them over to Kenya and hobbled through as best he could. Everything in the city was dead today, including public transportation. People stayed home bundled up in front of their television sets, eating canned soup and watching the Weather Channel to see if there was going to be more of the same. For this Tip was grateful. If he was going to be slow it was better not to have a long line of impatient Bostonians jostling him from behind. They missed the first train because he couldn’t run for it, but they were lucky and a second one came along before it should have. He would get the hang of this, he was sure, but for now the only thing he wanted was to be sitting down.
On the T, Kenya pulled off one mitten with her teeth and dug into her pocket. “Here’s the money for the taxi.” S
he handed the two twenties to Tip. She could not believe that Doyle had given her so much in the first place, but he had said there would have to be a taxi not only to the museum but to the track, and then to the hospital, and it was very likely they would need that much in the end.
“I told you to keep it,” he said, and put his hand over her hand and pushed it gently down towards her lap. There was no point in flashing money around.
“It’s forty dollars!” she said, and held it up again. “I’m not going to keep forty dollars.” What if Doyle thought she’d never told Tip about the money? What if somehow it got back to him that it was her idea to take the train?
“So give it to him when we get home.”
But the more she thought about it the more nervous the money made her. Nothing good would come of her holding on to it. If something happened and she lost it (and she did lose things, no matter how hard she tried to be careful—she was thinking now about her favorite Red Sox sweatshirt left at a track meet last October), she would have to ask her mother to pay the money back. She straightened out the two soft bills against her thigh and laid them on the seat between them. “Take it,” she said in a quiet voice. “You give it back to him.”
Tip sighed and put the twenties in his wallet. He knew what Doyle had in mind giving her the money. He wanted her to feel grown up. He wanted her to feel that he had chosen her for a job. He had given her too much in hopes that she would pocket the change and have a little something for herself, something he didn’t know how to give to her directly, but he had underestimated her. Maybe there was a way Tip and Kenya had had similar childhoods after all. She too had been attending lectures on social responsibility, sitting through the same crushing liturgies on the moral imperatives of honesty and humility. By growing up in the wake of his family she had inadvertently grown up with Doyle’s curriculum as well. If Tip or Teddy found a quarter on the ground when they were boys they’d be half crazed with worry over who had dropped it and how they could possibly give it back. Doyle was always there trying to explain that it was fine to keep the change that was out on the sidewalk and that it was in no way related to taking money from a cash register or a purse. Finding a quarter wasn’t stealing, it was lucky, and even while they understood that rationally they were still left emotional wrecks by the thought that it could have been dropped by some very poor child straight out of Dickens. That was Doyle’s fault. He had made them that way after all, high strung little do-gooders who had to live every moment of their lives as an enactment of the Nicene Creed. Maybe he’d done it to Kenya, too, without even knowing it. Doyle would just have to take the money back as a consequence of his parenting.
By the time they were halfway through Harvard Yard, Tip was seriously questioning the wisdom of his own decision to leave the house at all. His leg had progressed far beyond aching. The pain in his sciatic nerve was sharp and somewhat electrical in nature. It now extended from his foot up the back of his leg. He had, despite all better knowledge, dug the crutches into his brachial plexus and slowly crushed it, sending a radiation up his neck and into the back of his head that was like a persistent hammer slamming in a reluctant nail. He had to admit that from the standpoint of physiology it was interesting to feel his central nervous system unite. His wrists, for example, which he had been so careful to keep straight, had extended somewhere around the Science Center, and now the median, ulnar, and radial nerves were so sore from holding himself up that his entire arms trembled and burned in the warm sleeves of his brother’s parka. His breath was labored and short. His sinuses were scorched from the freezing wind that pushed at him until he felt concerned for his own stability. Blind kittens were more robust in their nature. Once this was behind him he would not assume that pacing around the lab and lifting glass jars full of fish over his head sufficed for physical exercise. As for now he was thinking fondly of the living room sofa.
I can take her running, Teddy had offered.
Need I remind you that you were hit by a car last night? Doyle had said.
A fat yellow plow just as wide as the sidewalk snaked a lazy curve through the center of the yard while students who preferred not to walk through the snow filled the dry path behind it. Everywhere they looked the trees were black and wet and leafless.
“This is the most beautiful place in the world,” Kenya said in a tone best saved for walking up the nave of Chartres and not passing between two freshman dorms.
“It’s nice.” Tip looked up and saw a handmade sign taped inside somebody’s bedroom window, Obama 2012. The truth was Tip always felt better the minute he stepped into Harvard Square. He was a Cambridge resident by nature. Boston was a city that never understood him and therefore Boston was a city he never thought twice about leaving.
“Do you ever just look around and think, I can’t believe I get to go to school here?”
Tip was concerned about the lack of feeling in his fingers. Cold? Nerve damage? It was impossible to tell. “I guess I always thought I’d go to Harvard.” He was working to make his voice sound steady, conversational, to give no indication of what he was coming to see as his imminent collapse. “I’ve been interested in the science department here since I was your age.”
Kenya pulled her mother’s hat farther down on her head until the wind was cut from her eyes. It was hard for her to walk so slow but she did it. “It’s not like they let you in this place just because you’re interested.”
The Museum of Comparative Zoology must have moved. It had never been this far before. By the time they got to the side door Tip didn’t have the fine motor skills to put the key in the lock. After a few pathetic stabs of tapping the metal key against the metal door he dropped the ring.
“I’ve got it.” Kenya plucked the keys from the deep burrow of snow. She shook them off and made a pleasant jingling sound. “Which one?”
Once they got into the lab, he fell into a chair and let his crutches slide with a great deal of clatter onto the floor. The place was empty. The snow had kept everyone away. Tip’s chin dropped forward and he crossed his arms in front of his chest to try and stretch out the ache that was in his back. He had never been so grateful for a chair, for a room, for the warmth.
Kenya dragged another chair in front of him and lifted up his foot very gently. She did not mind that the sole of the boot was encrusted in watery gray ice. She did not put the well-being of the chair before the well-being of the foot as Tip would have done. She picked a coat off the coat tree without any question of who it might belong to and covered his leg, then took down another and spread it across his chest. Tip didn’t know who had left their coats behind, but they were always there, even in the middle of the summer. She pressed her small, neat fingers into the side of his wrist and stared at the clock over the door. When she did the math she pressed them in again to check herself. “It’s bad,” she said.
“It’s all right,” he said, but his head was splitting.
Kenya walked away from him and a minute later she came back with a coffee cup full of water. “Drink this,” she said. “Do you have any medicine?”
Tip took a sip of the water and she held the cup. It was tepid. When he tried to reach in his pocket he couldn’t get his arm to bend back far enough and she brushed his hand away and took the bottle out herself. “Childproof caps,” she said, snapping the bottle open. “I don’t know who they think they’re fooling.”
“They’re fooling the people who can’t read the instructions on the cap,” Tip said, but even he could hear the slur in his voice. He took the pill from her hand and swallowed it with the water she gave him.
“Oh,” she said.
He closed his eyes and took another breath. He would be fine. If he had to stay here another six to eight weeks until his ankle had healed completely he would manage. He knew how to sleep with his head on his coat. He knew which restaurants delivered.
“Keep drinking,” she said. “Little sips.” When the cup was empty she took it from him. She pulled off his gloves and
rubbed each of his hands between the flats of her own small palms. He almost made a sound it hurt so much when she straightened out his fingers. Then she unwound her scarf and put his hands on either side of her neck.
It was like settling his hands on a radiator. He jerked them away and opened his eyes. “What are you doing? You’re going to freeze to death.”
But then, with admirable stoicism, she grasped his hands more firmly and clamped them around her throat, pressing them in with her hands so that for all appearances she seemed to be forcing him to strangle her. “Just be quiet for a minute,” she said sternly. It was like holding a bird, a hot little bird cupped inside his frozen hands. She stood close beside him, her forehead practically against his chest. He felt every breath, every steady thump of her heart as it echoed through her carotid arteries. “Who in the world taught you to do this?”
“Girl Scouts,” she said, not lifting her head.
“They give a badge for treating someone who’s walking with crutches?”
“First aid. You have hypothermia.” She was speaking directly into his sweater.
“I don’t have hypothermia.”
“You think.”
He looked at her, at the crown of her head bowed there beneath his chin, at the straight lines that ran between her braids. At some point she had taken off her hat. At some point her mother had put this child on the floor between her knees and parted her hair with such mathematical consideration that he could read her intentions in the child’s scalp. This was a girl who was cared for, who would not be sent out of the house with her hair gathered into unequal sections. He could see all: hands, comb, soft hair, and for the first time he thought of the woman and the girl in this picture as people who had a tenuous connection to him. When as a child he had thought of the mother who gave him away at all it was as someone who was reckless and halfhearted, someone incapable of finishing anything she had begun. He pictured her apartment as a place that was full of half-read books, half-eaten sandwiches, a jigsaw puzzle of a clipper ship strewn across a table with only a dozen or so pieces fit together. By the time he was six he had named her lazy and selfish and closed the door on her there. He realized that this childish answer to the question of why he had been given away had somehow gotten stuck in the back of his mind without revision, and now it seemed the equivalent of being a scientist who still held with the theory that thunder was the result of God moving furniture around. After the death of his own mother he didn’t have time to reconsider the mother who had given him away. He could only think of the one who had been taken from him forcefully, only think of the cancer that had started in her tonsils and then swept through her body in an irreversible tide. It occurred to him now for the first time with this girl in his hands how the two mothers were linked by their absence, and a wave of loneliness of the sort he did not allow himself came over him. He wanted both of them back, both the one who was living and the one who was dead. He gave Kenya’s neck the smallest squeeze and then he let go. “Let’s stop this now before your neck freezes through and your head snaps off.”