Prodigal Son (15 page)

“How is she?” Peter asked about Maggie. He could see the worry in Michael’s eyes when he came down.

“Pretty much the way I’d expect after a long evening. It’s a lot for her,” Michael said sadly. There was a lifetime of regret in his eyes, and Peter’s heart went out to him.

“I hope I didn’t wear her out,” Peter said, feeling guilty. She seemed so normal despite her deathly pallor, and her will to live was strong. It had kept her alive for years, in defiance of her medical problems and now advancing Parkinson’s disease. “Have you taken her to specialists in Boston to see what they can do?”

“I know her better than they do, and I love her. I don’t want them
destroying her quality of life any more than it is now. They would run batteries of tests on her, do unneeded surgery for some of her problems, and turn her into a guinea pig. People with head traumas like hers develop all kinds of complications over the years. She just has to live with it, and so do we,” Michael said staunchly, and Peter nodded. Maybe he was right, although Peter would have been more inclined to avail himself of the latest research to help her, but there was always a risk in that too. Peter had always been more of a risk taker than Michael, and Michael made a good point about the quality of Maggie’s life and not making her a guinea pig. She didn’t want that either, and had said it often to him. She wanted to stay here, and be cared for by him. He would follow her wishes till the end, he just hoped it wouldn’t be soon. But that could change at any moment, and he was constantly aware of it.

The two brothers sat at the kitchen table talking after Lisa went up to bed. Peter commented on what a lovely girl she was, and Michael looked fiercely proud of her. She was a very good girl. They talked about Peter’s future then, and he said he hoped to be back in New York in the next few months, maybe after the summer. It would be a year after the crash, and hopefully things would have leveled out by then, and there would be jobs available for him and countless others who had gotten dumped. Michael was conscious that it was an unsettling time for him, especially now with the divorce. But it was comforting for Peter to feel he had a brother again. That lightened his load immeasurably. The brothers had found new respect for each other by the time Michael walked him to the door that night.

“Don’t be a stranger,” Michael said to him. “Come and see me at the office anytime.” He didn’t tell him to drop by the house, because
Maggie needed to rest most of the time. But he seemed eager to spend time with his brother.

“Why don’t you come fishing some weekend? I’ve been doing pretty well at the lake.”

“I’d love it,” Michael said as the two men hugged each other and Peter left. He got in his truck, and smiled all the way back to the lake.

Peter kept busy with a variety of projects at the lake house for the next several weeks. He built bookcases, waxed woodwork, and chopped down some trees. He stopped in at Michael’s office one afternoon, but he was out making house calls so Peter left him a note. Both men were still coasting on the good feelings of the night Peter had dinner with Michael and his family. Michael had called him a couple of times, and was promising to come fishing up at the lake as soon as he could. He said Maggie wasn’t doing well and had caught a bad cold, so he didn’t want to leave her right now, except when he went to work. Peter understood, and said he hoped she’d feel better soon. It seemed so unfair that everything was life-threatening for her, even going to the supermarket or seeing friends. Michael said she hadn’t been downstairs since she had dinner with them. She was confined to her bed, with a bad cough.

Peter was thinking about her when he drove into Ware one afternoon to get some supplies again. Walt Peterson’s ankle had recovered, and he had gone back to his old glasses and was much happier. The “newfangled” progressives were not for him, he had told Peter
the last time he waited on him, and Peter grinned when Walt told him how dangerous they were.

Peter bought flowers for Maggie after that, and went to drop them off at the house, since she was so ill. And he was going to leave them with Lisa. He walked onto the porch and rang the bell, and was startled when Maggie answered the door, perched on her walker.

“Wow! Are you okay?” Peter said, looking surprised. “Mike said you were really sick. You must be feeling better.” He stood holding the flowers, and she looked happy to see him and invited him to come in.

“I’m feeling pretty good. I have been ever since our dinner. That was really fun.” Peter didn’t insist, but his brother had told him she’d been very sick ever since.

“I enjoyed it too,” he said benignly, and offered to put the flowers in a vase for her. She told him there was a big one under the kitchen sink, and he found it easily and set the flowers on a table in the living room. “I was worried when Mike said you’d been sick.”

“He says that sometimes so people don’t drop by and expose me to their diseases. But you look healthy to me.” She grinned. “He’d put me in a bubble if he could. Poor thing, he always worries about me. I’m a burden on him and Lisa,” she said sadly. “That isn’t how I wanted it to be.”

“That’s not true,” Peter insisted. “They love you. We all do.” It was nice seeing her look better than she had the night he had come to dinner. She looked brighter and had more color in her face, and she was in good spirits. She had been lying on the couch, with her laptop, when he arrived. She turned it off to talk to Peter.

“I wish Michael didn’t worry so much about me. Having you
around will be a good distraction for him. When are you two going fishing?”

“As soon as he has time,” Peter said easily. He didn’t want to tell her that Michael had said she was too sick for him to leave her at the moment. That didn’t seem like the right thing to say, since she already felt like a burden to him.

“I’ll push him to do it,” Maggie said. “It would do you both good.”

They sat and chatted in the living room for a while, and then Peter stood up to leave. He had always loved talking to her, she was bright and funny, and had a good sense of humor, even now in her frail condition, after years of infirmity. She had an indomitable spirit that nothing seemed to break. Peter admired her a great deal for it. And he was just leaving when Michael pulled into the driveway, and looked at both of them. He had come home to check on her between two patients, since Lisa had gone to study at a friend’s for the afternoon. They were doing a joint project for school, and he knew Maggie would be alone. Lisa had helped her mother downstairs before she left. Michael looked stunned to see her on the porch with Peter.

“What are you two up to?” he said as he bounded up the steps.

“I brought Maggie some flowers to cheer her up,” Peter said easily, and Michael smiled at him, and then there was the merest twitch at the corner of his mouth. Peter noticed it immediately, and remembered it from when they were kids. Just a tic of some kind. And Michael was quick to say how happy he was to run into his brother.

“Do you want to come in for a few minutes?” Michael offered.

“I’m just leaving. I don’t want to wear Maggie out,” Peter said, hugged his brother, kissed Maggie again, and went to his truck with a wave. And Michael and Maggie went back into the house. Michael
was scolding her for standing in the chill air without a coat. She reminded him that it was April and it felt good to her. She hadn’t been out of the house in days, but he insisted it was too cold and she’d get sick.

Peter was backing out of the driveway after they’d gone inside, and was turning onto the street when he suddenly remembered what the twitch at the corner of Michael’s mouth meant. It struck him like lightning, and then he shook his head. When they were kids, Michael’s mouth had twitched like that when he was caught in a lie or had done something really bad that no one knew about. It gave him away to Peter every time. But Michael had done nothing bad this time, and if he had lied about Maggie being sick, it was only to protect her. She had explained it perfectly when she said Michael wanted to keep her in a bubble. And he couldn’t blame him. She was a frail woman, with dangerously compromised health, constantly at risk. Who wouldn’t want to put her in a bubble? But he got an eerie feeling as he remembered the twitch. It was an unpleasant déjà vu, a past they both wanted to forget now, and had outgrown. The twitch meant nothing now, Peter was sure of it as he drove home to the lake. He turned the radio on and forgot all about the ridiculous tic.

At Maggie’s insistence, Michael came up to the lake to go fishing with Peter the following weekend. And the twins had a ball together. They caught a bucket of fish, and Peter insisted that Michael take them home to Maggie and Lisa. They shared several beers afterward, but Michael was sober when he drove home. He said it was the first Saturday he had taken off in ages, and it had done them both good. They were building a relationship now for the years to come.

Peter had declined an invitation to have dinner with them in Ware that evening. He said he was tired and had paperwork to do, and he didn’t want to wear Maggie out. He said he’d come another time. Michael looked disappointed but understood, and said he’d had a great day fishing with him.

Peter cooked dinner that night, and sat down to eat it in front of the TV. He did his paperwork afterward, and ran out of paper on his pad. He started rummaging in drawers, hoping to find something to write on, and he found several leatherbound books instead. He had never seen them before. And as he opened them, he discovered that they were journals his mother had kept in her neat, lacy hand. He remembered that she had spent her last summer here, shortly before she died, and they had been overlooked by whoever cleaned out the house and put away her things. Probably Michael, since there was no one else to do it. Their father had died less than a year before, and Peter hadn’t come back to help pack up her belongings. He didn’t want to see Michael by then, they were already at war over their father’s will. Peter sat down on the couch and opened one of the journals. And tears came to his eyes as he read. His mother had written how much she missed her husband and what a wonderful life they had shared. And then she wrote about how sad she was not to see Peter, and how unhappy that he and Michael were so hard on each other. She said it broke her heart, and Peter cringed at the thought of having caused her pain.

As he read on, he could tell that she was already sick. She’d had cancer, and these were the journals of her final days. As he read entry after entry, he could see that Michael had come to visit her every day. He had kept her company, spent the night when he could, taken on her medical care, comforted her, and held her when she was in pain.
He was the son that Peter had never been to her, and suddenly everything his parents had given him finally made sense. It wasn’t about a good son or a bad son, or the measure of each one’s need—Peter had been at the top of the world then. It was about one son who had been there for them incessantly, and another who had all but abandoned them and fled. He remembered with sorrow and regret that he had rarely even called her then. He had been so angry at them for always siding with Michael and never with him, and for believing all the lies Michael told about him. But more important, Michael had been a totally devoted son and Peter hadn’t been. He had been too angry over his youth to be there for them. He had been thirty-one years old when they died, old enough to know better, but still young. And it made Peter feel deep compassion for his mother when he read how much she had suffered physically in her last days.

The diaries were painful to read, and he finally put them back in the drawer, without reading all of them, and he lay awake for hours that night when he went to bed. He hated knowing how much his mother had suffered and that he hadn’t been there for her. He had only visited her once that summer. It was the last time he saw her before she died, and all through the journals he had just read, she said she loved them equally, whether they loved each other or not. She had been far more forgiving than he was at the time. But she was older and she was dying. And in defense of himself, if there was one, he suspected that it was easier to forgive a son than a brother. There was nothing he wouldn’t have forgiven his own sons, and he had hated his brother for years. But he could see the grief it had caused his mother, and he was sorry for that, especially since they had made peace now and were friends for the first time in their lives. So what
was the point of all those years of anger and resentment? It seemed so futile now.

Peter was haunted by his mother’s diaries for the rest of the weekend and for several days after. Reading them was troubling but deeply touching. And he finally drove to Ware to see his brother. He arrived just as Michael was leaving his office to see patients, and Michael had his doctor’s bag in his hand. Peter smiled when he saw it. Michael looked like the perfect country doctor, even more than their father.

“What’s up?” Michael asked when he saw him and stopped to chat for a minute.

“I owe you an apology,” Peter said with a serious expression.

“What for?” Michael looked startled, and wondered what he’d done.

“I found Mom’s journals last weekend, from her last summer at the lake, before she died. Reading them, I realize how much you did for her, how often you were there, how much you comforted her when Dad died, and took care of her when she was sick, right to the end. I didn’t do shit for her, Mike. I came up to see her once that summer. I was still pissed at her and Dad for how they had handled my childhood. No one really understood about dyslexia then, and I was angry all the time and blamed them. And I was pissed at you for being so perfect when I wasn’t. I was the hotshot of Wall Street, and the last thing I wanted to do was come here. I really let her down. You didn’t. You deserve everything they gave you, the house, the money. I was a lousy son. You were a great one.” Peter looked deeply apologetic and was sincere.

“No, you weren’t,” Michael reassured him, although he had five
patients waiting for him and an old man with shingles who was in pain, and he had to get going. “We were both young and stupid in our own way. You were always the handsome one, and charming, even if you were hot-headed then. I think I was afraid they loved you more, so I tried to be perfect all the time. No one is. There was room for both of us. I just didn’t know it then. Maybe it’s not so easy being twins. You start competing in the womb.” Michael had been twice Peter’s size when he was born, but Peter had made up for it later, when he grew taller. “Thank you for what you said, though. I always felt guilty for what I got and you didn’t.” Michael looked as though he meant it.