“Kelsey who?” my mother asked, a flicker of fear in her eyes. I knew she worried Kelsey was a name she’d known but forgotten.
My father sensed it, too, and jumped right in. “Yeah, Professor. Kelsey who? I’ve never heard you mention no Kelsey.”
“She’s a friend of mine from work,” I said. “We had lunch together this after—, last week, rather, and she brought homemade lasagna.”
“That’s nice, boy,” my father said, “but get to the point. She a ‘just a friend’ friend or a ‘friend with benefits’ friend?”
I dropped my fork and glared at him, blood rushing to my cheeks. “Jesus, Dad.”
My mother slapped the back of his huge hand. “Robert W. Curran.”
“What? We’re adults here,” my father said, wide-eyed, clutching his injured hand to his chest. He’d always excelled at playing the misunderstood innocent suffering under my mother’s iron thumb. My mother tried not to laugh at him. She failed. They traded sly glances. I was watching my parents flirt. I dropped my eyes to my plate.
As parents, my folks were an inseparable team. Even Danny had struggled to play them against each other. But that night I realized for the first time that they had never hidden being a romantic couple, too. That they were the best of friends. I finally started to grasp how deeply and hard my father’s heart must be breaking. I knew he held his rosary every night praying for one thing. A little more time with his beautiful girl.
My eyes watered. I missed Danny like crazy. I was furious with him, too. What the hell was he doing in Brooklyn, staring at those screens, the monster Saturn staring down at him? What was he so afraid of? I had to get him back here, no matter what it took, before the nightmares dragged him under again, and before Mom got too far away for any of us, even Dad, to reach her.
My mother covered my father’s hand with hers. “You’re awful quiet over there, Kevin. Forgive this silly man. I know you forget what a Neanderthal he is; you don’t live with it every day like I do.” She smiled at him and then at me. “Please do tell us about Kelsey. I promise your father will behave.”
My father left one hand under his wife’s and resumed loading lasagna into his mouth with the other. I was relieved he used a fork.
“Kelsey and I work together at the college,” I said. “She’s in my department. It’s nothing serious. We’ve just recently started hanging out away from work. I like her, she’s cool. Smart, intense.” I decided to skip the part about her leaving town. “We’re getting together tonight, in fact.”
“That’s excellent news,” my mother said. “If the chance comes along, I’d love to meet her.”
“She Irish?” my father asked, his mouth full. He was being extra slovenly for my mother’s entertainment.
“Her last name is Reyes,” I said, “so probably not one hundred percent.”
Mom splayed her fingers on the tabletop. “It doesn’t matter. Besides, the Currans are black Irish, which means there’s probably some Spanish in you anyway. Right, Robert?”
My father grunted, tossing his crumpled napkin onto his empty plate.
“Well, I’m pleased as punch for you, Kevin,” Mom said. “Let us know how it goes.” She rose to clear the table. My father touched her forearm. He stood and started gathering the plates himself. She sat back down, glaring up at him. “I’m not an invalid.”
“I know, Eileen,” Dad said. “You cooked all day. Fair play to you. Talk to your son. I’ll do the dishes and make us a round of whiskeys.”
“Come sit by me,” Mom said, patting the back of the chair my father had just left. “I’m very happy to hear about that girl.”
“Kelsey,” I said.
“I know that,” my mother said, hurt. “You just told me her name a few minutes ago.” She feigned a grin. “I’m not that far gone just yet.”
“I’m sorry,” I said, feeling awful. Not for the first time in my life, I wished I’d inherited my father’s charm. “We get along well, I think it helps we knew each other already, but let’s not get ahead of ourselves.”
“How could anyone not get along with you?” Mom said. “I just . . . I want to see you with someone who loves you. And I want to know her, too. While I still can.”
“Don’t say things like that,” I said.
“Why? Because they hurt? Because they’re true? I made that mistake with your brother, looking the other way. Let’s not you and I make it. Don’t be afraid of me, Kevin. Please.” She reached out and touched my cheek. “You’re a handsome, smart, wonderful boy but you were never very brave.”
I groaned, clutching at my chest with both hands, a sad attempt to imitate my father. Mom didn’t laugh, maybe because my feelings really were hurt. And she was right. I thought of Danny walking the halls of Bloodroot, and of Kelsey gripping my thigh on the park bench. I had to toughen up, as my father would say. My time to be brave had arrived.
“The two of you,” she said, shaking her head. “Danny running headlong into everything, you running away. It’s no wonder you lost each other. You seem so lost to me sometimes, too, Kevin. Adrift. Like your father was when I met him. This life is hard and full of surprises. You need a partner, an ally. You can’t drift though life up among the clouds, waiting for wherever the wind takes you. You’ll miss too much. You need a compass, Kevin. I don’t want both my babies lost in the world.”
She looked over her shoulder at my father, who stood at the sink, washing the dishes and whistling “Whiskey in the Jar.”
“What would happen to me now if I didn’t have your father?” she said. “Crazy as he is, he has always been true. This Kelsey may be your compass; she may not. But be brave enough to find out.”
“I will. I promise to be brave,” I said. “If you promise me the same, right now.”
“I’ll do the best I can,” Mom said. “I know we’ve never talked much about it.” She scratched at a stain in the tablecloth. “There’s a lot we’ve never talked enough about.” She looked back up at me. “And now I’m forgetting what a lot of those things were. It’s a terrible disease, but I’m facing it as best I can.”
I reached out and took her hands. “I know you are, and one day soon we’ll sit and talk about it. Tonight, though, there’s something else.” I squeezed her hands. “I know about Danny.”
“What about Danny?”
“I know where he came from,” I said. “How he got here. How come you never told me?”
My mother snapped around in her chair. “Robert! Come in here, please.”
Dad rushed into the room, wiping his hands on a dishrag. “What? What’d I do?” He jerked his thumb over his shoulder. “It ain’t broke, just chipped it a little. I swear.”
“It wasn’t Dad,” I said. “It was Danny. He’s back. He turned up at my house a few days ago.”
Mom whirled back around. “What do you mean turned up? How is he?” Her eyes darted back and forth between my father and me, betrayal burning in them. “Bobby, you knew about this?” She covered her heart with her hand. “Danny. My God.” Blood rose to her cheeks. “Where is he? Why hasn’t he come to see me?”
My father put his hands on her shoulders. “That’s my fault. Kevin told me right away but I wanted to make sure Danny wasn’t pulling the same old act. I didn’t want him putting you through that again.”
“It’s only been a couple of days, Ma,” I said, leaning across the table. “I had the same concerns Dad did.”
Mom shook her head. “All the time you men have lived with me and what do you know? Nothing. He’s my
boy
, for chrissakes. That’s all that matters.” She stared me down. “Tell me about my son.”
“He’s good,” I said. “Clean for over a year. Living in Park Slope. He’s got his own business installing home electronics and computers.”
“All this before he comes to see his mother?” Mom said, pressing her palms to her cheeks. “I’m so relieved he’s doing so well. He’s never been clean that long.”
A line of sweat had gathered along her hairline. She didn’t know what to feel, the poor woman. She was overjoyed that Danny was alive and well, outraged that she was the last to know. I watched the emotions battle it out across her face, wanting to rewind the evening back to when we first sat down. My father brought her a glass of ice water from the kitchen. She sipped it and then looked up at him.
“I thought you were making whiskeys,” she said.
“Coming right up,” Dad said, grateful for an excuse to bail.
Mom held her glass but didn’t drink again. She rubbed at the fog on the side with her thumb. She hadn’t answered my questions.
“Did Danny tell me the truth?” I asked.
“It depends on what he told you,” Mom said.
“He told me you worked at Bloodroot,” I said. “That you brought him home from there.”
Mom slumped in her chair as if exhausted, staring away from me.
Dad placed three glasses of whiskey and water on the table. He sat at the other side of my mother, across the table from me. “What’s going on?” he asked.
Mom turned to him. “Danny told Kevin we got him from Bloodroot.”
My father lowered his untasted glass from his lips. “The asylum? That’s ridiculous.” The ice rattled against the glass as his hands shook. He couldn’t look at me. “It’s all lies. It’s more of your brother’s crazy bullshit. Another one of his crazy excuses for becoming a junkie.”
“Bobby,” my mother said. “Calm down.”
“I have to give him points for originality on this one,” my father said. “You see, Eileen? You see why I thought twice about letting that boy come back around?”
Mom straightened in her seat, gathering her strength for my father’s sake. Her jaw was tight and she wouldn’t look at either of us. “I know. I understand. It’s okay.”
I drank half my whiskey down, shifting in my seat with discomfort. It wasn’t the tension that unnerved me but the intimacy between my parents as they struggled to protect each other from my brother, the great burden of their lives. I’d caused the moment, but it still felt like something that should have no witness, that should exist only between them. I racked my brain for a graceful exit, checking the clock on the wall. Could I go to Kelsey’s early? No, I wouldn’t run. I’d promised my mother I’d be brave.
My father finally turned to me. “Yes, your brother is adopted.” He drank. “We never told you because it never mattered. The minute we carried him through that door, he was our boy, our blood. So now you know. What’s the big deal?”
“Then where did he come from?” I asked. “Really?”
“Back when I was a nurse at Methodist,” Mom said, “when we still lived in Brooklyn, a cop brought him into the emergency room—”
“Ei, why go into detail?” my father asked. “Kevin knows the important parts. None of that matters now. Right, Kev? The past is best forgotten.”
My father’s fierce eyes warned me, his history teacher son, not to contradict him. I struggled to make up my mind whose story I would believe, my folks’ or my brother’s. I decided the choice could wait. Right then, I just had to decide whose version of the truth I’d
say
I believed. I gave my parents another chance to be more convincing than my brother.
“So what about the nightmares?” I asked. “They make perfect sense if what Danny said is true. He told me the doctors there tested vaccines on the kids, hepatitis vaccines. Malaria, measles. Kids died, six, eight at a time, from the mistakes. He said most of the kids had severe deformities or retardation and they were just abandoned there, like Bloodroot was a junkyard.”
My father leaned across the table, a forced calm on his face. “Do any of those things describe Danny? Those things about Bloodroot are true. It all came out in the papers and on TV. It’s public record. You can look it up.”
“I did,” I said.
My father choked down something angry. “That doesn’t mean Danny’s
from
there. What it means is that he could’ve found out about it, heard about it anywhere.”
“Danny mentioned a doctor by name,” I said.
“Calvin,” my mother said. “The doctor in charge was named Calvin.”
My head snapped around. I’d almost forgotten she was there. I studied her for signs that she recalled speaking that name herself. I saw nothing. I turned to my father. His face had gone pale. He remembered. “That’s him,” I said.
“Kevin, listen to me,” my mother said, crossing her forearms on the table. She scratched lightly at the inside of her elbows, watching her fingers as if they moved of their own accord. “I worked with children a long time. What happened at Bloodroot was an atrocity.” She looked up at me. “But these stories Danny tells? It’s just his own confused explanation for his problems.”
“Ma, he gave me a
tour
,” I said. “Level by level. He showed me his
room
. He knew things that happened, details.”
“Calvin was a monster,” my mother said, blood rising to her cheeks. “He was a disgusting man. He devoured children in the name of progress, as he called it. My father, your grandfather, I’m proud to say, was instrumental in exposing Calvin’s sickness to the world and putting an end to it. But Calvin never preyed on your brother. Danny has never been able to let go of what scares him, so he’s never been able to let go of the stories.”
“Then what about Grandpa?” I asked my mother. “Bloodroot was a horror show for years and no one knew. If you didn’t tell him, how did he find out?”
“People knew,” Mom said, “but until my father came along, they looked the other way.”
“Your grandfather was a strong man,” Dad said. “And he had powerful friends in the hospital and around the neighborhood.”
Mom glanced at my father and then at me. “Kevin, listen to me. No one loves Danny as much as I do, but he has terrible problems. He has awful fears and so he needs terrible stories to make sense of them. It’s something children do. They’re afraid of the dark so that means there’s a monster under the bed. Nobody wants to be afraid of just the dark, of nothing.”
“So you’re telling me Calvin’s a bogeyman that Danny’s latched onto,” I said, “and that’s all it’s about.”
Danny’s horrid painting of Saturn flashed across my mind. I put my face in my hands. My faith in Danny was wavering and it felt like a terrible betrayal. I didn’t know what to think. He had been so convincing, so calm and sure. But he’d been that way before and been full of shit.