Halfway Home (17 page)

"I'm Daniel," he said evenly. Statement of fact, no more.

I nodded dumbly, pointing to myself, but couldn't seem to say my name. I grappled to understand. Somehow he had survived—escaped—got himself out here. Because I was all he had left. I could see the exhaustion in his pallor, the joyless blank of his eyes, and didn't know where to begin. I walked toward him, my brain still wanting to run to the airport and the lavish melodrama of my prodigal return. I put out my hand to shake, my tongue still tied, and stumbled out, "I guess I'm your Uncle Tom."

"I guess," he replied with a rueful smile, but taking my hand manfully, a reflex clearly learned from his father.

I stood there floundering. How do you comfort a kid who's lost everything? If he got here by himself, then he had more wherewithal than I. I still could hardly believe how much he looked like me—only not so fragile, even after what he'd been through. "What're you reading?" I asked, loathing myself, as if the banality of all grown-ups leered at him out of my fatuous smile.

He raised the book from his lap and showed me the cover:
Treasure Island.
My ego burst to the surface again, for I could have told him exactly the crook of the tree where I'd read it myself, skipping confirmation class. As if it would matter to him. I bit my tongue on the book report, as he waited politely for me to speak. I didn't want to feel it, but it was there. The same helpless panic as when I'd talked to my mother's nurse, the impossible thought that this had all become my responsibility. And I couldn't do it—
wouldn't.
I had my own dying to get through, and that was that. No more room at the inn. It was horrible. I'd known this boy for thirty seconds, and already I was trying to palm him off like a Dickens foundling.

"Are you all right?" I asked, trying to focus, reeling with inadequacy. "Have you eaten?"

But before he could answer, the french doors opened from the parlor, and my brother stepped out. It was oddly anticlimactic, not like Lazarus clapped from the dead.
Oh, right,
I thought, awakening at last. The midnight-blue Mercedes at the airport—they'd missed their deaths entirely. Brian walked gravely toward me across the terrace, in jeans and a Fordham sweat shirt. "Tom," he said, and the guilt in his voice amazed me, "it's just for now. We had nowhere else to go."

I felt terribly embarrassed for the boy, that he should have to hear his father squirm. I avoided Brian's eyes and smiled at Daniel again. "I'm glad you came. It's a big house for just one person."

Then I felt the force of Brian's hand on my biceps, tugging me off to talk in private. It was such an eerie echo of the dream, pulling me toward the fatal door, that I shuddered as I followed him into the cactus patch. He felt the tremor and drew his hand away, misreading it as revulsion, I think. For his eyes flinched in shame as he looked over my shoulder to sea.

"I'm sorry, I should've told you when I was here. My life is totally fucked." Then he clenched his teeth in self-contempt. "And I've got no right to dump it on you."

I felt light-headed, like someone about to laugh at a funeral. I reached my hands and gripped his shoulders. "Hey—I'm glad you're alive, Ace. Nothing else matters."

For a second I thought he was going to cry, just from the break in the tension. I liked holding on to his solid mass, but my touch was easy, nothing to weigh him down. He shook his head bitterly, as if to deny himself any release. "We were supposed to be
back,"
he said, meaning Sunday night. "We only stayed over in the mountains because she was getting her period. She didn't want to be sick in the car. Otherwise—" He stared in stupefaction at the water. He was going on the assumption that I knew everything.

"But I thought—" I didn't know quite how to say this. Certain details might be too unbearable still. "Didn't they find—I mean, there's a picture in the paper of these body bags." Three of them lined in a row on the lawn, a picture I couldn't look straight in the face.

"Ita and Kim," said Brian, wincing again in shame. Then he must have seen how puzzled I looked. "Sorry—the Vietnamese couple. They've been with us for years. They had a little girl." He gave a helpless shrug of despair at the insanity of it all. "They didn't do
anything.
Except trust me."

"So nobody knows you got out of there," I declared, cutting impatiently through his guilt.

"Now they do. Susan called her sister this morning. The coroner just had a news conference, to say they made a mistake." As he turned his body to face directly out to sea, my hands fell away from his shoulders, reluctantly. "Tommy, I just need a few days to figure my options. I'm not gonna get you in trouble."

"Hey, not to worry. Trouble's my middle name." I think what startled me most was that I had no sense of judging him. The blood went deeper than what he'd done. This from me, who'd never felt a blood tie in my life, unless you included hate.

"There's a lawyer out here," he said. "That's who I came to see before, soon as I realized Jerry was setting me up. He's trying to work out an immunity thing. So maybe I'll check in with him." He shrugged again, no more sure of this than any other plan.

"But nobody knows you're
here?"
I asked precisely, relieved when he shook his head.

"We spent the night in a motel down by the airport, full o' hookers." He laughed at the layers of absurdity. "All we got is what we've got on, and one duffel bag from the weekend. We caught a cab up here, took my last thirty bucks. I'm scared to use a credit card."

His voice betrayed a sort of permanent astonishment, as if he couldn't believe the abruptness of the change, from having so much to nothing. Safe by the skin of their teeth, overnight they'd turned into a little band of refugees—like Ita and Kim on the South China Sea. I turned to look at Daniel, reading his book again. Strangely, he seemed not astonished at all, even rather used to it by now. Just like me. My first conscious memory, four or five years old, was a sinking feeling of having no expectations. Life would just do what it did.

"The papers didn't mention the dogs," I said.

"Dead."

I nodded, studying Daniel, trying to figure how high he'd already built the wall. Then Susan appeared in the parlor doorway, blonder than her picture, stunning even forty feet away in a lilac jogging suit. I lifted a hand and waved, smiling brightly at this woman I'd never met. She didn't wave back, seemed uncertain whether to step outside, as if she had trespassed far enough. "Come on out!" I called cheerfully.

Brian's head swiveled around as I made a move toward her, and he grabbed my arm, harder than he meant to. For a second it felt like a punch from twenty-five years ago. "Tom," he murmured, squirming again, "she doesn't know about..." It died in his throat, but I saw his eyes lock on my cheek.

Okay. Gently I pulled away from him and continued toward my sister-in-law. For some reason it didn't enrage me that he hadn't told her. Usually I want it screamed in people's faces. Right now there was too much else, especially when I saw the pained embarrassment in her face, and beneath it, stark as a skull, the fear. "Finally," I said, brimming with warmth, sticking a hand out.

She barely touched it, her small cold fingers limp. She mumbled hello and stared at her son. By now Brian had strode up beside us. "I told him it's just for a couple of days," he said to his wife—defensive, almost stilted.

But I'm not sure how much I really picked up. I was too busy overcompensating. "Let's get you settled," I announced—the perfect hostess, who knows just how weary her guests must be from the trip. Imperiously I led the way into the house, and the two of them followed without a peep. Up the stairs, me chattering over my shoulder a shorthand version of the aunts' tale.

"We'll put the two of you in here," I said, sweeping us into Cora's room. I blinked at the swirl of dishevel, having forgotten we'd slept there. With two men's underwear strewn about, it looked like more than sleeping had been going on. "We'll get this made right up," I declared, as if I had a chambermaid at the end of a bell pull.

They stood there grimly serious, which I chalked up to the terrible disruptions of the last two days. I ducked into the bathroom and pulled from the cupboard a fluffy stack of towels, for I'd finally done a proper laundry in preparation for Foo's visit, as well as a vigorous scour of the bathroom hardware. I set the towels down on the green wicker chair and beckoned them out to the hall again. At the far corner of the stairwell a low arched doorway opened onto four narrow steps. They followed me up to a small round room with windows in every direction, a sort of squat tower.

"Nonny's room," I announced with pride. It was sparsely furnished with a single bed and a rag rug, and otherwise cluttered with boxes, having evolved by default into a semi-attic. "He'll love it up here, it's like a lighthouse."

This didn't seem to perk them up at all. Susan looked mortified, as if she was being reduced to charity. I let her be. Four different AIDS support groups had drummed it into me: you have to let people have their process. So I stepped to one of the casements and threw it open, looking down on the terrace below. "Daniel," I called, and he tore his eyes from Long John Silver, squinting up at me. "This is where
you'll
stay."

"Thanks," he replied, rigorously well mannered, but made no move to run up and look. They all seemed so defeated, but could you blame them? When I turned back, Susan was sitting on the foot of the bed staring at the floor, Brian standing above her, a pang of grief in his face as deep but not as clean as death. It was so obvious they needed to be alone. I murmured about checking the linen and beat it out of there.

As I stripped the bed in Cora's room I could hear Susan raising her voice, hammering at him, shrill with rage. I couldn't make out the words and didn't want to—or only the one word
not,
repeated like a curse. I will
not
do something-or-other, she swore at him. This was
not
what she wanted. I put these beautiful creamy sheets on the bed, the border embroidered in garlands, probably bought when the house was built. I shoved Gray's scattered clothes in the bureau and fussed about with a dust rag, all the while hearing the blur of accusations through the wall. I think what jarred me the most was that my brother appeared to be taking it all in silence.

I stood there a moment, surveying my chamberwork, winded and softly coughing. I thought:
Can't they just be glad to be alive?
Awfully Pollyanna coming from me, who bit people's heads off when they told me I looked terrific. Or as one or two former friends had said,
Be glad you're alive today.
So no, I didn't expect my brother and his family to be giddy with relief. They were up to their nuclear neck in problems. All I could do—and I liked this part—was make them a place that was safe and calm.

I came out into the stairhall and was starting down the steps when Brian emerged through the arch from Nonny's room. I gave him a bland smile, not wanting him to know I'd heard his wife's tantrum. He leaned over the banister. "Things aren't so good with Susan and me."

I nodded dumbly. He turned away and lumbered into Cora's room, closing the door. I hurried downstairs, suddenly fearful that Susan would appear.
Don't take sides,
I warned myself, knowing the mire was deeper than I was used to, even including Daphne and Mona smashing clocks.

I saw through the parlor windows that Daniel hadn't moved an inch. Even I, who'd been such a desperate reader at his age, wondered how spellbound he really was. Stevenson was no slouch, but still. I'd done my own share of staring at books till the print ran, when the pain of my father and Brian was too much. How old was he—seven, eight? I'd forgotten exactly, and with no kids anywhere near my orbit, had no skill at guessing. All the same, I had an irresistible longing to go out and sit beside him, stumbling around till I found the words to tell him I understood.

Understood what—that life sucked? Who said the chaos of his life was anything like mine, eons ago in the Donna Reed graveyard of the fifties? I told myself
Not yet,
painful as it was to see him out there all alone, finding his island in a book, not trusting the one he had landed on. Let him get settled first. The last thing I wanted to do was come to him from a place of ego, wanting him too much to be like me. Let me want him to be like him, I thought.

And turned away from his melancholy figure and headed through the kitchen out to the yard. Keeping it simple. I stopped at the potting shed behind the garage and pulled on canvas gloves, grabbing the hand clippers and a basket. I was back to the care and feeding of my guests, and figured they could use fresh flowers, especially if they'd be holed up bickering and cutting losses.

The roses grow on the south side of the driveway hedge, the hottest spot in the whole five acres and the most protected from the sea. Several bushes were bright with blooms big as a man's fist, bursting into the sun after all that rain. Like I said, I never bring roses in myself, because I can't stand the swiftness of their passage, here and gone. Happily Brian and Susan wouldn't have all that superstitious baggage. I clipped the stems long, laying them one by one in the basket, yellow for Cora's room, red for Nonny's. There wouldn't be quite a dozen for each, but nearly.

The sweat was pouring off me, and as I wiped the back of the glove across my forehead, I heard the sound of tires in the drive. An instant goose of adrenaline—what if it was the FBI? I didn't know precisely who was after Brian. I tossed my head back coolly and walked to the end of the oleander, prepared to stand my ground and demand to see a warrant. I came around the hedge. It was the pickup. The door opened, and Gray stepped out, flustered already and red in the face, not expecting to run into me so fast.

"I won't get in your way," he blurted. "I just didn't want you to be here all by yourself."

"Gray—you won't believe it—"

"I'd never intrude, I hope you know that." He didn't know what to do with his hands. Jammed them in his pants pockets.