The Shortest Way Home (24 page)

Sean dipped a wedge of cucumber into the hummus. “I’m available,” he said.

“For what—adoption?”

“Yeah, I don’t have parents, you don’t have siblings. It’s the perfect solution.”

“Okay, poof,” she said. “You’re adopted.”

He grinned. “This means I have a say in how we handle the house. I’m calling Salvation Army in the morning to haul half the furniture away. Assuming they’d actually want any of it.”

She rolled her eyes. “You’re hilarious.”

“Don’t worry.” He patted her hand. “I’ll be the one to break it to Mom and Dad.”

They snacked on the vegetables, and Sean told her about the trip to the Scout Store with Kevin. “He totally fell apart, and I have no idea how to help him. From what I remember, being loud and slamming into one another is pretty much what middle school is all about.”

“Has he always had it?”

“Had what?”

“A sensory integration problem.”

“What is that? I’ve never even heard of it.”

“Really? It’s pretty common pediatric stuff.”

“Yeah, well, the pediatric stuff I’m familiar with is more along the lines of malnutrition, burns from falling into fires, and preventable childhood diseases.”

Rebecca described what she’d learned about it in massage school—that it’s generally associated with being easily overstimulated, and not much is known about its root causes.

“There are all kinds of interesting ways to treat it,” she said. “Massage, chiropractic, various products. For instance, does he sleep with a lot of blankets?”

“Yeah, a ton. Even in this heat.”

“Physical pressure is very calming to the senses. You could get him a weighted blanket.”

“So this is real, this sensory thing—they have devices for it and everything?”

“Absolutely real. And it looks like Kevin’s a clear example.”

Sean’s assessment of the boy shifted in that moment, from merely odd to someone with a definable medical problem.

“I need to find a cassette player, too,” he said. “I guess my brother would play soothing music for him when he got overcooked. Kevin still has the tape, but the tape player broke and my aunt threw it out.”

“Oh!” Rebecca jumped up. “We have one! When I was a kid I used to love books on tape, and I know the player’s around here somewhere.” She grinned at him. “Because as you know, bro, we never throw anything out.” She began opening overstuffed drawers and cabinets, without luck. Then she said, “I know where it is.” She took the stairs two at a time and was back in a matter of moments with an oversized cassette player. “My mother’s a huge Barbra Streisand fan. She would always listen to Barbra tapes in bed.”

Sean chuckled. “You’d need something to distract you in
that
room.”

Rebecca flipped the switch, and two tiny wheels began to turn behind the clear plastic casing. “Jingle bell, jingle bell, jing-jang-gul,” sang Barbra.

“A Jew singing a Christmas song,” chuckled Sean. “Very ecumenical.”

“Oh, yes. We’re open to all creeds, here in the Feingold house,” said Rebecca with a smile. “We even adopted a nice Irish Catholic boy.”

CHAPTER 27

T
he hall clock said eleven-fifteen when Sean came in that night. As usual Aunt Vivian had left on the small lamp with the bulbous glass shade that sat squat and homely on a side table. The rest of the house was dark. The phone ringing in the kitchen seemed like a fire alarm in the silence.

“Hello?”

“Hello.” A heavy voice, old and cracked like a scratched record. “Who’m I speaking to?”

Sean’s heart started to pound, and he didn’t know why, exactly. The voice gave him a startled, panicky feeling. And there was something else. Anger. It was as if he were bracing for a fight. “Who’s calling?” he said sharply.

“Is this Sean . . . or Hugh? I ask you to tell me.”

“Who the hell is
this
,” Sean demanded.

“Ah,” said the voice. “Is it you then, Sean?”

Sean dropped into a kitchen chair like a bag of rocks. He wanted to hang up. And he wanted to crawl through the phone line toward the voice.

“Sean, it’s your da.”

“Jesussufferingchrist,”
muttered Sean. “You’re alive.”

“Yes, son. And I need to see you. All three of you.”

You need . . . ? YOU need?

“I should say,” Da corrected himself, “I very much
want
to see you. If you’d be willing.”

“Jesus, Da.”

“You owe me nothing, son. Not a kind word. Not a welcome. But I hope you might be willing just to see me, and maybe talk a little. I’ll ask no more of ye.”

Crazy things ran through Sean’s brain.
Hugh’s dead!
he wanted to scream.
And Deirdre’s leaving! Viv’s losing her mind and Kevin’s got problems I’ve never even heard
of!

“Please,” he said, feeling weak. “I can’t even—”

“I know it, boy. It’s a shock. And I’ve put it off for so long. And then it came to me that maybe it’s just what you’d been wanting—for your da to call and ask.”

For my da to call . . .
Of course it’s what he’d wanted. To be somebody’s son, cared for and encouraged. To be just a little less alone in the world. It’s what he’d been desperate for. . . .

Twenty-five years ago.

And now? After having been abandoned when the need was greatest?

“I don’t know,” he said. And truthfully, he didn’t.

“Okay,” said the old man. “I’ll give you some time. It’s the least I can do.”

Sean sat there in the dark, moonlight sifting in through the sheer curtains, the receiver gripped in his hand like a weapon. It wasn’t until the line went dead and a steady beep hummed that he was certain his father was no longer on the other end.

Gone again.

CHAPTER 28

S
ean woke early to a pounding rain. In the half consciousness of waking he imagined his father standing out in the downpour. Because he didn’t actually live anywhere, did he? Had he simply made his life aboard ships for the last quarter century? Or had he bought a house or rented an apartment somewhere? Had he signed a lease or mortgage and looked at the address listed, and said to himself,
This is not where I live. I live in Belham, Massachusetts. I have a family there. They don’t live at this address.
And then signed the goddamned paper anyway?

Where the hell on this big blue ball of misery called Planet Earth was he?

Sean couldn’t stay in bed, remembering that it had been his father’s bed at one time, and feeling as if the mattress would rise up at any moment and attach itself to Sean like some sort of blanket-shrouded succubus. He stood in his boxers, shivering in the dampness that had seeped into the house. At one hip, the fabric of his boxers was separating from the waistband, and he randomly thought about throwing them away.
Or I could go somewhere where holey boxers are the norm—where having boxers at all is a luxury . . .
Yeah, that was looking better and better.

He slid them to the floor, put on a pair of running shorts he’d purchased recently and a T-shirt and sneakers. The hell with his back, he was going for a good hard run. When he stepped into the hallway, he glanced down toward Aunt Vivvy’s room. George lay outside the door as usual. She picked up her head and looked at him. He found himself walking toward her. She stood, a barely audible growl in the back of her throat.

“Don’t fucking start with me,” he muttered at her, and knocked on the door.

“Who is it?” came the weak but aggravated response.

“It’s Sean. I need to speak to you.”

Sean turned the knob and entered. Aunt Vivvy was drawing herself up to a sitting position in her bed, the faded Lanz nightgown slightly askew around her tiny frame.

“What could this possibly be about?” she demanded.

“My father called last night.”

She stared at him for a moment, assessing the veracity of the statement. “Here? You spoke to him?”

“Yes.” Sean sat down on the edge of her bed.

Aunt Vivvy looked away. “What does he want?”

“He wants to see me. Actually all of us. Apparently he doesn’t know Hugh’s unavailable.”

A look of mild disgust. “Don’t be dramatic. One Bette Davis in the family is enough.”

“Forgive me, but this is
actually dramatic
. For all I knew, the guy was dead!”

A whine outside the door from George was shushed by both of them.

“Aunt Vivian,” Sean said, trying to rein in his temper. “I need to know what happened.”

“He left.”

Sean slammed his hand down on the chenille bedspread, which caused no sound, of course, but made the point nonetheless. She narrowed her eyes at him, the glint of the light saber glowing behind them. “Think, Sean,” she said. “You know almost as much as I do. The drinking, the crying. He couldn’t take it, and he left.”

“When. How. What was the precipitating event, Vivian. I may have the gist, but you have the details, and I want them.”

“How can you be sure that I’ll even remember them correctly?”

“Jesus, I can’t be sure of
anything
, can I? Just tell me what you know—what you
think
you know—and we’ll start there.”

She stared off for a moment, her bony fingers skimming slowly across the white-on-white pattern of the chenille. “How old were you when we told you about your mother’s condition?”

“Twelve.” He remembered it more vividly than he wanted to. Auntie Vivvy and his father sitting there, his aunt doing all the talking, his father looking as if he’d just been Tasered.

Sean had asked, “Could I get it?”

Auntie Vivvy had looked to his father, urging him with her light-saber eyes to say something, contribute in some way. “Yes, Sean,” she’d said finally. “It’s an inherited trait, like your brown eyes, which you obviously got from her, instead of the green from your father.”

Da’s eyes were the color of sea glass, which Sean had always thought was kind of cool, since his father spent so much time at sea. But those eyes had been lowered, staring at his huge callused hands.

“Could Hugh get it, or Deirdre?” Six-year-old Hugh had been swinging by his knees from a limb of the magnolia tree. Sean had caught sight of him through the front window. He hadn’t said anything. Auntie Vivvy hated when Hugh climbed her trees.

One-year-old Deirdre had sat on the floor nearby, babbling and clapping to herself. Sean remembered wishing he were little, like her, and didn’t have to hear all this Huntington’s crap.

“Each of you has a fifty percent chance of carrying the gene,” Auntie Vivvy had said matter-of-factly, the way she said most things. But it had delivered a jolt of understanding—Sean realized what she was
really
saying was they could all end up like their mother—twitchy and weird, saying things that didn’t make sense. “There’s no way to know until symptoms emerge,” said his aunt. “But that wouldn’t be until you’re older, so you don’t need to worry about it now.”

Right,
he remembered thinking at the time.
I’m twelve, but I’m not a frickin’ idiot.

There in her bedroom, Aunt Vivvy was remembering this scene, too. “He never said a word. I had to do everything. Such a big strong man,” she scoffed, “weak as a baby.”

“He was heartbroken!”

“We all were.”

“It was his wife, for godsake. The love of his life.”

“And what would you know about that, Sean Patrick? You’ve never allowed love into
your
life.”

“Neither have you!”

Her face softened slightly, a shadow of a smile, and he realized that she had. Somewhere, at some point, she’d had love. But Sean wasn’t interested in his maiden aunt’s now-defunct love life. “What made him leave?” he demanded.

“How old were you when she died?”

“Just turned fifteen.”

“And Deirdre would’ve been . . . approximately four.”

“What does that have to do with anything?”

Aunt Vivvy’s gnarled hands laced together in her lap. “When your mother died, he broke. I’ve never seen anything quite like it before or since. Possibly it was because his family had scattered to the winds when they’d immigrated to America, and he had no one to turn to. I’ve thought about it many times. He had planted all his potatoes in one garden bed, as it were, and when the crop failed, he had nothing.”

“He had three children.”

Her eyes went half-lidded in disgust. “And don’t think I didn’t remind him of that. Often. Moving here was intended to be a temporary measure. I told him he had to stop the infernal sailor business and get a job that would have him home every night.”

“But he didn’t.”

“I suppose it was some solace to him—the sea. He was raised on an island. He kept threatening to take the three of you and go back to it. But there was nothing there anymore. It had been abandoned in the 1950s, I believe.”

“Great Blasket. I remember him talking about it.”

“Yes.” She sighed. “Ad infinitum.”

“You haven’t told me when or why he left.”

“The crying and the drinking, Sean. The drinking and the crying. My
God
, but it was annoying! After a while I told him I’d had enough. He had one more trip scheduled, and I informed him that when he returned, he’d have to take the three of you and move out.”

“Well, we know
that
never happened, so what was it?”

“He hit Deirdre.”

“He hit her?” Sean could remember getting cuffed from time to time, and Hugh got spanked regularly. But he never remembered Deirdre being on the business end of those enormous hands.

“He was packing to go, drinking as if every port would be a dry town, and she was pestering him about something. I can’t remember what, and it certainly doesn’t matter. You know how Deirdre can be—every little thing an opportunity for a scene.” Aunt Vivvy’s eyes went a little unfocused as the memory came to her, her faced pinched in residual horror. “They were at the top of the stairs. He hit her so hard with the back of his hand that she flew up against the railing. She would have gone over if I hadn’t caught her leg.”

“Holy
shit
,” he murmured. The image of four-year-old Deirdre falling headfirst into the foyer below was a grim one.