Halfway Home (14 page)

I wonder how long we would have sat there motionless, watching the weather and sports like zombies. But then I heard the bang of the kitchen door, and my heart started racing again—had it stopped entirely? A moment later Gray came walking in, and the breeziness of his stride hurt like a physical pain, as if he had only come in to mock my sudden paralysis. And something in me recalled, like a desperate reach across a chasm, the luxury of my roll on the grass—was it ten minutes ago? All gone. Nothing but death surrounded me.

"I put the kettle on," said Gray, and at last a feeling surfaced, gulping for air. White rage.
So how's your buddy Merle?
I wanted to sneer, as he leaned toward his slumbering aunt. "Hey, Foo," he said softly, "how 'bout a nice cup of bouillon?"

"His brother got killed," said Mona, the words sounding brittle and foolish, like a joke that died.

I turned to look at his face, the puzzled frown of unbelief, his eyes darting from Mona to me and back, the wrench of pain. As Mona haltingly filled in the details, a grim parody of broadcast news, I felt a sharp and guilty pang of relief that the two of them were here. As if I had somehow outwitted the deepest pain by having this family instead, and not those far-off blood strangers who'd just been obliterated. This spasm of coldness only lasted a moment as well. But I remember thinking, as Mona and Gray tossed the horror back and forth, that they would come up with something for me to feel, if I just stayed dumb and motionless.

Then Foo woke up. She made a couple of beeping sounds and flailed the air in front of her face, wiping the cobwebs away. Her great blue eyes swept the room like radar, then lighted on Gray. I don't know how he looked to her, but she said, "What's wrong? Am I sick?"

Gray crouched down beside her. "No, Auntie. Tom just found out his brother died."

The old lady's hands fluttered in her lap. Then her blue eyes, vast as the winter sea, came to rest on my face. "But"—she hated to get her facts wrong—"I thought he was an only child."

And there the unreality broke. I came to my shaky feet and staggered forward, snapping the TV off. I turned and faced my made-up family, every one of them helpless. How would I ever protect them? I held out my arms, and Gray rose up to meet me, cradling me close. I could feel my weight let go as I slumped against him, neither brother nor lover. And then I cried.

F
INALLY I CALLED MY MOTHER, BECAUSE I COULDN'T THINK
of anyone else. All the cousins and uncles and neighbors of my childhood had disappeared—not so much as a Christmas card in the nine years since my father died. The past had taken Brian's side against me, ever since our brawl at the old man's funeral. Well, to be fair, I guess I cut the whole lot of them as much as they cut me. But here I was now, with no ally close to the tragedy, no one to throw an Irish arm around my shoulders and tell me life was a bitch. I must have cried nonstop for a couple of hours, but some of that I think was just the old feeling of being left out.

I don't even remember saying good-bye to Foo. It was decided in the kitchen that Merle would take her home, and Gray and Mona would stay with me. By then I was wrapped in the afghan, curled in a ball on the sofa. Mona put a mug of tea and a box of Kleenex on the coffee table, and when the afternoon shadows began to lengthen, Gray laid a fire. I had fallen away from sobbing—barely ten minutes of that—into a sort of exhausted blubber, like something on the stove at a low boil.

I couldn't exactly see in my mind the blasted house in Southport. It was more like a loop of war footage, bodies blown limb from limb by land mines, naked children running on fire with napalm. Then all my own deaths came back, Bruce and Tim and Mike Manihan, thin as Auschwitz and racked in their final comas. Somehow I couldn't make myself focus on Brian. As for Susan and Daniel, I'd never seen so much as a picture of them. So I more or less blubbered instead for the whole frail world, with a liberal dose of self-pity into the bargain.

It was dark by the time the crying stopped. I realized I was staring blankly into the fire, and that Mona was sitting beside me, stroking my leg. Gray was hunched in the easy chair, elbows on his knees. "I guess it was Jerry Curran who did it," I said in a toneless voice. I tried to imagine this and failed, unable to see around the adolescent image of my brother and his sidekick, joined at the hip as they rollicked through high school. I slapped the arm of the sofa beside me, turning my two friends' heads. "But we don't really know
anything."

Mona pushed her glasses up, tight on the bridge of her nose. "Remember Leslie?" Yes—the twisted affair before Daphne, a grad student at UCLA. Miss Bulimia. "Well, she teaches at Yale now. I called her and had her read me everything in the New Haven papers."

She's so hands-on, that Mona. Briskly she picked up a spiral notepad beside her, consulting a scribble of notes as she filled me in. Apparently the Curran investigation had been a big story for a couple of months, with allegations of a huge skimming operation involving federal highway funds. Obscurely I remembered Brian talking about repaving I-91, new bridges and cloverleaf interchanges. I leaned forward expectantly, suddenly ravenous for details, as if the filling-in would soften the explosion.

Jerry was already under indictment for the highway fraud, out on bail and crowing he was innocent. Meanwhile the grand jury had turned up another whole can of worms. While probing Mob control of the unions in Connecticut, they uncovered another ocean of diverted funds, this time in low-cost subsidized housing. Curran Construction was the builder of record in almost every case, a network that spread over eleven states. Thousands of units at a hundred grand a throw, paid for and never built. And when they followed the gush of that hemorrhage of cash, it all disappeared in the laundry, surfacing in squeaky-clean vaults in Zurich, untraceable.

"Your brother's been giving depositions all along," said Mona. "He and Curran have stuck to the same line since the beginning—that the Mob set
them
up. But then about two weeks ago, something changed. Brian made a secret deal with the prosecutors. He'd settle for a perjury rap, in exchange for which he'd connect all the dots around Jerry Curran. Today he was supposed to testify behind closed doors. Except somebody let out the secret."

The dollar amounts went right by me, as well as the intricate three-card monte by which the money was siphoned off. For the first time I actually took it in that my brother was a crook. No depth of slime surprised me when it came to Jerry Curran, but Brian—Eagle Scout of Eagle Scouts, darling of whole orders of Brothers. Say it ain't so.

Gray snorted and reached to poke the fire. "Sounds like Brian found out he was gonna be left holding the bag. So he decided to sing. And ol' Jerry killed the canary." The gumshoe cadence was filtered through a layer of black irony. Nonetheless, his grasp of the gangster modalities amazed me. I was still groping to catch up, trying to figure where my brother's trip to L.A. fit in.

"Oh yes, and Curran's made a statement," Mona declared. "Leslie saw it on the local channel. He's choking back the tears, and he blames the killings on secret forces out to destroy them both. I guess that would be like the Black Hand."

I shook my head. "Poor Brian. He should've kept playing baseball."

"Leslie's going to fax all the coverage in the morning. Daphne's got a machine in her office." The dyke underground strikes again.

"Tom," said Gray, discreet as a vicar himself, "is there someone in the family you can call?"

Why,
I nearly asked, for it was all over now but the useless tears and bad dreams. Then I realized somebody might want to know my feelings about the death arrangements. I recalled how good Gray was at funerals. And sat there trying to think of the cousins and uncles by name, but they were all gone, or at least I was. Let Susan's family take care of all that, I thought. I knew right then I wasn't going. I didn't care if everyone thought it was terribly bad form.

"No," I said, shaking my head slowly, "but someone should probably call my mother."

I knew of course that the someone was I. So did Gray and Mona. We stood up all three, no further ado, as if we had no time to waste. It was going on eight o'clock, almost too late to call back East. We straggled out through the kitchen, Gray foisting a banana on me, which I ate as we strolled to Mona's car. Then I remembered I didn't have the number, and had to duck back in.

My chewed and battered Filofax was stowed in the drawer of the zinc table. I lifted it out, crammed with prescriptions and lab results, and turned to the phone index. These days it was mostly a log of dead friends and specialists. I flipped to
S,
and there she was:
Nora Shaheen, 130 West Hill Road
in Chester. Though I hadn't dialed the number in seven or eight years, it printed itself anew on my brain like a serial number from an old prison term.

I tossed the organizer back in the drawer and the banana peel in the sink. I spun around to go and caught a glimpse of white on the counter. Then stared: the slip of paper with Brian's address, curled up next to the coffee maker. Haltingly I reached for it. The butt end of the banana was sticking out of my mouth, like a retard monkey. I read the scrap of his handwriting and thought of the unfinished letter I wrote on the beach.

The missed connection stung my eyes. A sob was in my throat, till I nearly choked on the fruit.
Brian, I'm sorry,
I pleaded in my head. Feeling him really dead for the first time. The apology was for him and me, for what I had kept from happening between us a week ago, because of my stubborn resentment.

I was weepy when I reached the car, and Gray and Mona said nothing as we drove to the Chevron station. Mona parked up snug beside the phone booth, but they waited in the car while I made the call. Gray had written out his credit card number for me, which I accepted without complaint, since it would have been pretty tacky to call collect. My stomach knotted as I punched the number in.
I
don't have a son,
I could hear her saying.

The nurse/companion was hostile, right from the start. She'd been fielding calls from the cops and the distant cousins all day long. She was querulous when I gave my name, resistant to my assertions of family ties. "He was my
brother,"
I stated emphatically, at last eliciting a disoriented "Oh." She obviously hadn't a clue that there was another one out there.

"I'm sorry for your loss," she said, straightening the collar of her dignity. Catholic, without a doubt. "We thought it was better not to tell her."

"Who
thought?" I demanded crisply, but secretly relieved. At least I wouldn't have to hear my mother cry again.

"Me and the doctor," she replied, at once apologetic and defensive. "Mr. Shaheen, she don't know any of 'em when they come. She likes the boy, but it don't register who he is."

I pulled back from her use of the present tense, wincing as if I'd burned myself. I could hear Brian at the beach house, talking about the kid and his grandma. "Yes, well that's fine," I said, suddenly feeling stuffy in the booth's close quarters. "And what are
your
plans? I mean—"

"Money-wise?" Miss Mary Alice Lynch had clearly given this some thought. "The lawyer called. He says I'll be paid by your brother's estate, but it might take a couple weeks before it starts coming. Well, I can't wait like that. I'm a woman alone." Even through the tension I wanted to bleat with laughter at the phrase. "Besides, without family around, it's too much responsibility. I'm elderly myself. She's probably better off in a home."

Sweat had sprung out on my forehead, and I could feel the shirt clammy against my torso. The terror of suddenly having the Problem dropped in my lap made me want to scream. But I did the right and gutless thing, purring and kissing her ass with compliments, begging her not to act hastily, wheedling from her the lawyer's number.

"Please—Mary Alice, you can't leave now," I beseeched her, cozy and desperate. "I'll make sure you're paid. But I hope you understand, this is a very hard time right now." I practically gagged on these sentiments, and hoped she'd put it down to the choke of grief.

"Well, all right," she replied in a martyred tone. "You'll be coming in for the funeral?"

"Actually, no." I could feel her stiffen three thousand miles away. "See, I'm in the hospital myself. My doctor won't let me."

"Mm," she replied primly. I imagined she could hear the traffic whizzing by on the coast road.

"But I'll be checking in," I assured her, oozing spunk. "I'll get right on this, I promise. Thanks for everything. Brian always said you were a saint. Bye now."

But she wasn't finished with me, was Mary Alice Lynch. "Don't you want to know how she is?"

The curdle of contempt reminded me of every nun in grammar school. But she had all the marbles, and she knew it. "Oh sure," I replied, suitably chastened. "She doing all right?"

"No, she's slipping," sighed Mary Alice, taking a noisy sip of something vile like Postum. "Hardly gets out of bed anymore. And she doesn't always get to the bathroom, if you know what I mean."