“I told him not to call,” she said and hugged him, shaking and fiercely weeping.
She fell swiftly. After Christmas, Jack moved in to look after the boys; three weeks later Kay went into the hospital, knowing she would not return. A haze of airports and rental cars: each week, O’Neil taught his classes and then caught the five o’clock plane on Friday afternoon, driving straight to the hospital in spotless, midsized American sedans that all seemed, somehow, to be the same car. Some weeks he didn’t even unpack. His lessons were scattered, but his students seemed not to know or if they did, to care. Some days he simply turned off the lights in his classroom and read to them—
The Grapes of Wrath,
which the ninth graders were hacking their way through like explorers in a jungle—or sent them to the library with assignments he knew he would only pretend to grade. Are you all right? they asked him, barely hiding their pleasure. What’s gotten into you, Mr. Burke? Whatever it is, they assured him, we like it. He slept fitfully or not at all, and yet his body and mind were filled with a strange energy he could not express. At lunchtime, when this internal churning became too much to bear, he put on sweatpants and went running on the paths of the sanctuary behind the campus, his mind drifting formlessly. The winter was snowless and mild; many of the trees were still dropping their leaves, though the autumn was long gone and the first of Mary’s bulbs, the crocus and hyacinth, had appeared. Had he simply failed to notice it in winters past, this anachronistic overlapping of the seasons? The woodlands where he ran were bisected by a weedy creek, and one blustery day in February he paused on the old stone bridge that crossed it, while all around him a showering of leaves, light as paper, came down. He turned his face upward and closed his eyes, receiving them. He had not been to church in years, having long forgotten how. Leaves fell on his shoulders, into his hair. Suddenly he knew that this was prayer, standing in a cathedral of falling leaves.
Later he asked a colleague, who taught science, about what he had seen.
“They’re white oaks, O’Neil,” he replied, his voice incredulous. His classroom was like a greenhouse, filled with every kind of plant. “Didn’t you know? They keep their leaves all winter.”
Weekends, he stayed at a motel on the highway that led to the hospital. Many of the other guests were there because someone they loved was dying, or so he imagined. Surely, he believed, there must be others who were living the same divided existence, one foot in each of two worlds. He spent long days at the hospital with Kay: shuttling the boys back and forth for visits, eating off a tray in the cafeteria, hoping for some glimmer of good news but knowing none would come. At night he fell into bed, exhausted but still humming with wakefulness; sometimes he would talk to Mary for hours, finally falling asleep with the telephone resting on the pillow beside him. For Simon the time was almost happy: their father was at home with them again. Noah regarded it as he regarded everything, with a vague but neutral interest; Mama was sick, Daddy was sleeping where he used to sleep, it was winter, he had to wear gloves and a hat. Sam was trying to be brave, but underneath, O’Neil felt the strain, a disturbance that rippled through his body like a flush of fever. On a Sunday in early March, O’Neil had caught him in a moment when he thought no one was watching. Sam was standing in the snowy yard; at his feet, he had built a pile of snowballs, perhaps a dozen of them, expertly spherical and perfect for throwing. As O’Neil watched from the window, Sam had hurled these snowballs one by one, as hard as he could, at the wall of the garage. The target was unmissably large; accuracy was not the point. Nor was the grace of his throw; he released each one with the full force of his entire body, nearly falling over every time. When he was through, he leaned over, his hands on his knees, panting with exertion. Then he made more snowballs and did it all again.
O’Neil waited to hear from Sam. Finally he did, two weeks later. It was Saturday morning, an ice-cold day at the end of March. O’Neil was driving him to band practice at the high school. After, they would meet Jack and the other boys at a McDonald’s, and O’Neil would ferry the three of them to the hospital.
“I think we should come and live with you,” he announced.
He meant after his mother had died. Of course it was impossible, even if O’Neil had wanted to. He pulled the car over.
“Sam—” he began.
“He doesn’t care about her!” the boy burst out. “He never did!” His face fell. “Nobody told me, but I knew what he was doing.”
What could he say to the boy? That marriage was complicated, that there was more to it than he could understand, that the things that made a man a bad husband did not, necessarily, make him a bad parent? How could he explain something he didn’t really know himself?
“He’s your father,” O’Neil said. “He loves you.”
“He’s an asshole,” Sam said. He sighed and breathed deeply, his mouth curling with anger. “So are you. You don’t want us either. I can tell.”
The boy was trying to hurt him, to hurt anyone. “Sam, listen to me. That’s not it, not at all. If it made even the slightest bit of sense, I’d tell you. But it doesn’t. Not legally, not in a hundred other ways.”
“He thinks you’re going to try, you know. He’s talking to his lawyer.”
O’Neil was astonished. “Well, that should be a very interesting conversation. Trust me, it won’t amount to anything.”
They drove in silence to the school. Sam got out and carried his instrument case toward the entrance, but at the door he stopped.
“Sam?” O’Neil said. “Aren’t you going in?” But the boy was frozen, stockstill.
“You know, I think I’m done with band,” he said calmly, and turned to face O’Neil. “Fuck band. And fuck you. I’m done with everything.”
At home O’Neil called his attorney. She was a friend’s wife who had become a friend herself—a composed, slyly beautiful woman who exuded an air of magisterial competence. The walls of her tiny office were plastered with degrees: law, social work, urban planning, even a master’s in art history that she had, in her words, “picked up somehow along the way.” He described the situation, not even sure what he was truly asking.
“I can’t be very encouraging,” Beth said. “It might be different in Vermont, but in Pennsylvania the law is pretty clear. You’d have to prove that he was an unfit parent, just for starters, and that can be difficult.”
“Well, he isn’t. He’s not going to win any medals, but I wouldn’t call him unfit.”
She thought a moment. “The only thing I can see happening here is, he might ask your sister to sign over full custody. People do it all the time, in situations like this. With full custody there’d be no question. There isn’t anyway, not really.” She paused. “Tell me this, O’Neil. When did you last get a decent night of sleep?”
He almost laughed. “What month is it?”
“Forget about it,” Beth advised. “His lawyer is probably saying the same thing. Get a good night’s sleep, and forget about it.”
Through the spring Kay faded, like a picture going out of focus. Her body was frail and gray. When she had gone into the hospital in January, her doctors had told her it was a matter of a month or two, perhaps less. Her liver, her lungs, the bones of her spine—everything was suddenly involved. And yet it was April, then May.
“I’m like that old Volvo,” she told O’Neil. It was a car she and Jack had driven for years. “That goddamn thing would not be killed.”
He nodded at such remarks, or laughed if she wanted him to laugh. He never knew what to say. Some days he got into her bed beside her, careful of the tubes and wires and her own brittle bones, to read her the paper or brush her hair, which had, after the summer, grown back.
“Remember when you shaved your head?” She said this as if it had happened years ago. “You looked so terrible.”
“I think Mary kind of liked it.”
She closed her eyes. “I hate to break it to you, but she was humoring you, sweetie.”
Sleep dropped on her like a blade. One minute they would be talking, the next she would be falling away. He watched her sleep for hours. Then, without warning, she would be awake again, seamlessly picking up the broken thread of conversation as if she had excused herself only a moment to tie a shoe or answer the telephone. “Noah will do better if they let him nap after lunch,” she said, or “I don’t care if they cost sixty dollars, Sam needs new sneakers,” or “The thing about Jack is, he’s absolutely brilliant. He’s living proof of the sociopathic effects of brilliance.”
Finally she said, “O’Neil? I’ll want one person here.”
It was on a day very near the end that Jack arrived at the hospital, carrying under his arm a large envelope that O’Neil knew, without looking, contained the papers Beth had described. The boys were downstairs in the lounge, playing pinball. Kay was sleeping, and before Jack could say anything, O’Neil pulled him into the hall.
“What’s in the envelope?”
Jack did not meet his gaze. “I don’t see that this is your business, O’Neil. You’ve been a great help to all of us. But this is a private family matter.”
“Stop this, Jack. Think about what you’re asking her to do.”
His brother-in-law sighed with nervous irritation. “Okay, since you seem to know what it’s all about. Let me ask you something. What would you do if you were me? Since you don’t know, I’ll tell you. Exactly the same thing.”
“I don’t want to be you, Jack. I just don’t want you to do something everyone will feel sorry about later on.”
“For Godsakes, O’Neil! It’s just a formality, a few papers to sign!” He made a face of exasperation and lowered his voice. “You and I both know she’s never leaving here. It’s awful to say it, but those are the facts. I have to think about what’s best for the boys. I have to make plans. She’ll understand that.”
Would she? O’Neil looked toward the room, where Kay was sleeping. Perhaps she would. But it didn’t matter. She would never have to.
“Let’s just go someplace to talk about it,” O’Neil said. “She’s sleeping now, anyway. Just hear me out. Listen to what I have to say, and then you can do whatever you want to do.”
Jack folded his arms over his chest. “You’re not talking me out of it,” he warned.
“Trust me,” O’Neil said. “That’s the furthest thing from my mind.”
He walked with Jack to the parking lot, letting his brother-in-law get three steps ahead of him. Jack would wonder where he was taking him, which was exactly what O’Neil intended, and when Jack turned to look for him, O’Neil took two steps and hit him, hard, just below the left eye. O’Neil had never hit anyone before, and the sensation was not at all what he would have expected if he’d thought about it, which he hadn’t. His hand sailed through Jack’s face easily, without a trace of pain, and seemed to pop him right off his feet. As Jack went down, a second surge of adrenaline passed through O’Neil’s body, and his fist clenched again, ready for more.
“Jesus Christ, O’Neil!”
O’Neil relaxed his fist and went to where Jack was sitting, his back braced against the tire of a minivan. One hand covered the spot near his eye where O’Neil had made contact. O’Neil crouched beside him.
“You fucking asshole!” Jack’s sneakers kicked at the pavement. “Get away from me!”
“Oh, stop it,” O’Neil said. “Let’s see that eye.”
A nurse in the ER gave O’Neil a plastic bottle of alcohol and a bandage for Jack’s cut, and some tape for O’Neil’s knuckles, which were split and bleeding after all. Back in the parking lot O’Neil sat Jack on the bumper of the minivan and swabbed his eye clean with a Q-Tip.
“Aw, hell, O’Neil, I probably deserved that. I told my lawyer it was a dumb idea.”
“Dumb is the least of it, if you’ll pardon my saying so.” A purposeful calm had filled him, a feeling beyond exhaustion or anger or fear; he wasn’t threatening, merely stating the facts. He pasted a bandage to Jack’s clean cut.
“There, good as new. Now, give me those papers or I’ll hit you again.”
With a sigh of defeat Jack removed the now-crinkled envelope from the pocket of his jacket and handed it to him. O’Neil opened it to look the contents over. As he’d expected, the document was an agreement giving Jack full custody of the boys. There was more to it—four pages of mumbo-jumbo he was too tired to wade through—but that was the gist. Jack had already signed it, and on the last page, at the bottom, beside his signature, was a place for Kay to write her name, marked with a red arrow. O’Neil saw that Jack’s signature was dated two weeks before. So at least he had waited before deciding to go ahead with it.
“I won’t fight you, if that’s what you’re worried about.” O’Neil folded the agreement and put it in the pocket of his coat. What would he do with it? Burn it? Shove it in a Dumpster somewhere? “If you’d asked me, that’s what I would have told you. They’re your children, and they need you. But I don’t want you to tell Kay anything about this. She’s never going to know you even
thought
it. Agreed?”
Jack frowned hopelessly. “Why should I believe you? You just assaulted me, for Chrissakes.”
“Yes, but that’s all done,” O’Neil said.
At the hospital entrance Jack stopped. “Let me ask you one last thing. Do you even have the faintest idea why I did it?”
“Actually, no.”
“Fucking Saint O’Neil,” Jack said, shaking his head. “So perfect he doesn’t even know it.”