After Soma had wrapped it all together on some pithy note about the implicit dignity of human life, the dean of the medical school began reading through the names of the class. When Thomas O’Neill Doyle was called, Tip crossed the stage and heard a small, unrestrained cheer go up from the middle of the hall. Tip’s anatomy professor would be pleased to know that at that moment Tip was thinking about the spleen. That was specifically the thing that had driven Tip to medical school, an organ that ranked only slightly above the appendix in its unnecessary relationship to the human body. “The spleen,” he had screamed at Dr. Spruce, because even as an ichthyologist he had taken human physiology his sophomore year. He gave himself four and a half years to wonder how any competent doctor could fail to inquire as to the state of the internal organs of a woman who had been hit by a Chevy Tahoe in a snowstorm, four and a half years to wonder if they would have failed had she not been black and uninsured. It wasn’t until his third year during a surgical rotation that he understood that the laceration would have bled into the abdomen all night, the slowest drip a body would allow, and that they then gave her post-surgical blood thinners to prevent the possibility of blood clots to her lungs after her hip replacement, and that was the thing that opened up the flow so that by the time she was awake enough to grab at her own round, hard stomach and cry, she was already as good as dead.
Tip’s penance was neither as cruel nor as abstract as his brother’s. All he had to do was save someone else, if not someone stepping out in front of a car then at least that same person brought into an emergency room after the fact. He had thought the world was in need of a few decent doctors, ones who could see past the bones, and after his years at Johns Hopkins he was greatly assured that the world would have them. All the students he met were intelligent, many were compassionate, a few, like Tip himself, were true scientists. He did not regret the time he had spent there. The knowledge he gained could only improve him. After he got a doctorate in evolutionary biology he would be perhaps the first medical doctor of fishes.
Tip pulled up his mortarboard on the left side and discreetly scratched the scar over his ear which had never stopped itching. The ankle and the shoulder had turned out fine. He went running on the weekends and never gave it a thought, unless he ran with Kenya. He told her the ankle was the reason he couldn’t keep up with the pace she set. It was Kenya who was always pressing him back towards the fishes, whose unwavering call he had on this night finally agreed to answer. You are insane! she e-mailed him day after day. I am going to the Amazon without you. Everyone knew that Tip had gone to medical school because he felt responsible for their mother’s death, because he saw himself as too self-involved to even lift up his head and look through the snow for the lights of a car, and too scientifically limited to realize a leaking spleen when it presented itself. Only Kenya thought that this wasn’t reason enough to give up the science he loved.
At the end of the program the graduates stood and repeated the Hippocratic Oath, the updated version that did not make the doctor forswear sexual relations with the male and female slaves in the patient’s home, then there was a hearty round of applause, an orderly procession, and it was done. Tip turned his back on it all and set out to find his family. As he swam into the crowd, he was struck by the way everything looked different now. His heart was nearly bursting from the joy he had chosen to allow himself. There were no tonsils in front of him, no earaches, irritable bowels, cancer, cracked femurs. There was only an endless ocean of schooling fish, the quick and shimmering dart of life that he belonged to. He walked past all those happy parents snapping pictures of the young physicians they had produced, all those young physicians nervously thinking ahead to their residencies. It was not the day to break the news to Doyle, even if Tip believed the decision would not affect him as it would have in what they referred to as the pre-Kenya days. He milled through the people spreading out across the lobby and he saw them as anchovies, smelts, and grunions flashing silvery in the light. Ten feet away he saw Teddy wave his long arm above his head and Tip went to him gratefully.
“Dr. Doyle,” his brother said and kissed him unabashedly on the lips. “I am so proud of you.”
“I can’t believe you left the poor,” Tip said and put his arm around his brother’s shoulder.
“The poor can soldier through for a weekend without me.”
Then the crowd shifted imperceptibly and opened up a narrow path for Doyle and Sullivan and Kenya to meet them. They were all together, each one singing Tip’s praises, giving their congratulations. “Every family needs a doctor,” Sullivan said as Doyle arranged his children for a photograph.
Kenya, now impossibly tall and wearing a lemon yellow sundress, looped her lanky arms around Tip’s neck and for a moment allowed herself to hang there. “What a waste of a mind,” she said.
Doyle shook his hand and then clapped him hard on the shoulder. “We have reservations,” he said. “The Brass Elephant.” He looked at his watch. “We don’t want to lose them.”
Sullivan looked out over the milling crowd. “Think of all those poor fools with no reservations.”
Together they trudged through the miserable neighborhoods of downtown Baltimore in the dark, feeling the car might as well have been parked in West Virginia. Tip, as the graduate, got the front seat, and Sullivan drove. Doyle and Teddy and Kenya crowded in the back.
“Well,” Doyle said and shook his head. “It’s a remarkable thing.”
“Not so remarkable. Didn’t you see all those people graduating?”
“We saw the two people who graduated ahead of you,” Teddy said. “We didn’t care about the rest of them.”
“You only notice the ones who beat you in the race,” Kenya said.
Sullivan looked in his rearview mirror. “Which would mean what, exactly? That you’ve never noticed anyone?”
Kenya leaned forward and slapped the back of Sullivan’s head while Doyle slid a trim white box between the seats and tapped it against Tip’s arm. “This is from us,” he said.
The sight of the box made Tip strangely anxious. It was like getting a wedding present on the day of a broken engagement. “You shouldn’t have gotten me a gift,” he said. He meant it.
“A little something. Open it up. Kenya did the bow.”
“I’m a genius,” Kenya said.
Tip slid the ribbon over the top so as not to disturb his sister’s work and rustled through the tissue paper. It was a stethoscope, a Littmann. He held the cool metal in his hands and wondered how many of his classmates were unwrapping their own Littmanns at this exact moment. “It’s lovely.”
“I know you have one,” Doyle said.
“This is much nicer.”
Sullivan smacked the steering wheel with the open palm of his hand. “I think we should give him something else!” he said. “What is a stethoscope on such a momentous occasion? We should give him something momentous!”
“I did my best,” Doyle said.
“This is plenty,” Tip said. What if he was wrong? All that money, all that time. Everyone they knew so full of pride and expectation. Already distant family members and friends of the family were waiting in the wings for free medical advice. Tip slid back the knot of his tie and flipped the collar button out of the hole.
“Give him the house,” Teddy said. “He could set up his office in the dining room.”
“Listen,” Tip said, because suddenly he was terrified of losing his nerve. It was starting to sound terribly childish even to him that something as cumbersome as medical school could be written off as lightly as a simple error in judgment.
“The house is too big,” Kenya said. “He won’t have any place to keep it.”
“I’d miss the house,” Doyle admitted. This was the day, the perfect day, all five of them together in the car, everyone laughing except for Tip and there was nothing new about that. That’s why he had been the one to get through medical school. All that seriousness had paid off.
And then Tip
hit on the one idea that could change everything. “Give me the statue,” he said. It’s what they all said now that they had moved away, all three of the brothers longed to have it with them. All three were ready to stake their claim to that one thing that could not be divided among them, and in the meantime it stayed where it was. But for the briefest flash Tip felt the depths to which this time he meant it. He was the least likely candidate for inheritance, neither the blood son that Sullivan was nor the soulful Catholic like Teddy, but he craved ownership every bit as much. Give him the statue and he’d go ahead with the plan, he would take that residency at Vanderbilt that he was already declining in his mind. Give him the statue and he would do everything he said he was going to do.
But his brothers only laughed, and Doyle laughed with them. Finally Tip had made a really good joke. “I’d sooner see you have the house,” Sullivan said.
Tip put the stethoscope back in its slender box and was free again. He would keep the gift to remember tonight. He would keep it in his desk as a cautionary tale when he was safely back with the fishes.
Doyle had rented a suite in a good hotel and the five of them slept there in Baltimore, he and Sullivan in one room, Tip and Teddy in the other, and Kenya on the foldout couch in the sitting room between them. They had laughed and talked all night. They had eaten too much and had too much to drink too late, and this time they all fell asleep fast and hard.
Except Kenya.
Kenya lay awake, her arms folded back behind her head. She stared out at the darkness and thought about her mother. It wasn’t only nights like these she thought about her mother. She thought about her every night. But on a special night like this it was easy to imagine how it would have been, the two of them taking the bus down to Baltimore to stand outside the Meyerhoff Symphony Hall, the two of them watching as everyone went in and the Doyles went in, how her mother would have stepped aside and pretended they were waiting on someone and how she would have squeezed her shoulder hard when Tip went by, the cap in his hand, the black gown over his arm. She thought about things like this all the time but the problem with thinking about it tonight was that Tip never would have gone to medical school if Kenya’s mother hadn’t died, and so it was hard to figure out how her mother could have gone to the graduation. She would have the same problem again when Teddy graduated from law school. How could she think of her mother there? The present life was only a matter of how things had stacked together in the past, and all Kenya knew for sure was that if she had the chance to hand over everything she had now in order to regain what was lost there would be no words for how fast she would open up her hands. It had been fine out there with her mother, it had been paradise, when they were only watching.
In her chest she felt her heart beat faster and faster. She scratched at her head, her arms, until it was unbearable to try and be still. She got up quickly now and felt around for her clothes and shoes in the darkness: shorts, shirt, socks. She would lace up her shoes in the hall. It was easy to find the room key card because Doyle made everyone put theirs on the table by the door. She had meant to go and ask at the front desk how late the gym was open, but when she got to the lobby she could see the floodlights pouring over the parking lot, the parking lot that went all the way around the hotel, and so she stepped outside into the grass-scented air. It was a perfect night, clear and cool, with half a moon for company. She stretched up and down on her toes and then put her hands flat on the pavement. The night doorman looked at her, and, still bending forward, she waved. “Running,” she said to him through the door, and he nodded back. Then she was gone.
She kept it slow on the first lap, making a clockwise sweep past the rental cars that fit together in neat rows. It was perfect really, bigger than she thought, bigger than any track she was going to find, and no one else was there. It was past midnight and she started to open up, but just a little. She wanted to save herself now, she wanted to run for a very long time. She didn’t get bored by the loops she made. She didn’t think about the cars. She was thinking about her mother. She liked to imagine that her mother had arranged everything as a way to get Kenya into that house, to have her live safely with her brothers. She pushed her shoulders open, stretched her neck up long. She filled up the great bellows of her lungs, then blew the air away. Her mother had it all fixed in advance. Fixed with the driver of the SUV, fixed with the men who drove the ambulance, fixed with the doctors, or maybe just one of them, maybe only the last one who took her away because it never made any sense, really, that she could have been fine and then so quickly dead. Or not dead. It was possible. Kenya listened to the tap of her own feet and spread out her steps to match her exhalations. She let her eyes trail from one lit up window to the next. What other way could she have done it if she knew that Kenya never would have gone willingly along with the plan, that she would have clung to her as tight as muscle to bone and cried and run straight back every time she was pushed away? And how else could her mother have gotten Doyle and the boys to love her unless she left her like a foundling on their stairs? Of course it wasn’t likely. She was a smart girl, she knew what the chances were, but it was not entirely impossible either that even now her mother was watching her, that even tonight she was standing outside the symphony hall, or that she was in one of these cars that she ran past in circles, over and over again. Kenya kept herself out there just in case. She made sure to win her races so that her picture would be in the paper and she made sure that in every picture she was smiling, because if a person was willing to go through so much to give you what she thought would be a better life, it was the least you could do to look happy.
She would run all night, or at least until she was almost too tired to take the elevator back to her room, and in the morning her brothers would stand over the couch of the sun-soaked room and tease her about being so lazy. Her legs flexed out in front of her, pointed behind her. Without meaning to she was racing herself to the next Ford Taurus, to the stand of flowering cherry trees that framed the electric doors on either side. She decided that for a lap or two she would let herself run as fast as she wanted because she understood there was also a better than good chance that her mother wasn’t watching her, and she was alone in that parking lot, in which case anyone who was around should know that there was never going to be a chance of catching her. When she was in her own room at night, the room on the fourth floor that once belonged to Teddy and Tip, she slept under the watchful eye of her mother and another woman in a photograph that Tip had found when they were packing up her old apartment at Cathedral. It was stuck in the Field Guide to North American Fishes that her mother had. It was one of the few pictures of her mother they found, and in this one she was definitely the happiest. Doyle took it to a photo shop and had it blown up to be as big as the picture of Bernadette. He framed it and put it on the dresser beside the statue. The three of them watched over her now, her mother and the woman she didn’t know and Bernadette, who was both a photograph and a saint carved out of rosewood. Doyle had told her the story when he gave her the statue on her twelfth birthday, all about the grandfather in Ireland who stole it and his wife who wouldn’t forgive him. He told her he had written it down that the statue would go to her, just in case anything ever happened, but that he figured they might as well put off telling her brothers for as long as they could because none of them was going to be happy about it.
“Then why give it to me?” she had said. She reached out and laid a finger on the gold of the halo. She had only owned it one minute and already she never wanted to let it go.
“Because you’re the daughter is why,” he said. “The statue always goes to the daughter.”
“But what would you have done if you didn’t have one?”
Doyle put his hand on her head and pulled lightly on one of her braids to save her the trouble of having to do it herself. “But we did,” he said. “We did.”
Kenya looked down the long side of the hotel, a straight shot to the next right turn, and for a moment she close
d her eyes. Maybe one of them was awake, Teddy or Tip or Sullivan or Doyle. Maybe one of them was standing at the window now looking at the parking lot, and he saw her flash by eight stories down, her long legs cutting through the night, her Johns Hopkins T-shirt flying out behind her. Maybe he never fully realized how fast she was until he had seen her at a distance, and so the one who was awake went to get the others up so that they could all stand at the window together and watch her run.
About the Author
Ann Patchett is the author of four novels: The Patron Saint of Liars, which was a New York Times Notable Book of the Year; Taft, which won the Janet Heidinger Kafka Prize; The Magician’s Assistant, for which she was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship; and Bel Canto, which won the PEN/Faulkner Award, England’s Orange Prize, the Book Sense Book of the Year Award, and was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. It has been translated into thirty languages. Her nonfiction book, Truth & Beauty, was a New York Times bestseller and the winner of a Books for a Better Life Award. Patchett has written for many publications, including the Atlantic Monthly, Harper’s Magazine, Gourmet, the New York Times Magazine, Vogue, and the Washington Post. She lives in Nashville, Tennessee.