The Year That Follows (20 page)

“I like this one,” Connor says, holding up a standard-issue shell, the name of which Sam will likely never know.

“That’s a nice one,” he says. “Put it in the bucket.”

A moment later the boy stands again. “And this one.” And so it goes, the boy making his choices and Sam praising them. Sam wonders at the adult idea that children don’t really know what they want. At any given moment, they know exactly.

T
he day warms, the sun sliding higher in the sky, its rays more direct. The boy is in a rhythm now, finding shells, often running to the water to rinse away the sand, after which he makes a careful examination, then runs back and places the shell in the bucket, which has become too heavy for him to move. Sam is reminded of a trip he took with Ann and the children in the sixties, when Kyle was about this age, a drive over to Holland, Michigan, where they visited the fake Dutch village and stayed mostly at the beach, the
Great Lake rolling up the sand with more force than this ocean bay usually musters. Cat and Kyle were always playing some game, and Sam sat on a towel next to Ann, who wanted only to lie in the sun. He watched his children. He could watch them for hours, for days, never tiring of it, the bigger and older Cat, the fair Kyle, running, building sand castles, endless activity, always happy. It was a tricky thing for Sam to sit on a beach with a fused spine, but he managed it with a sideways lean, an elbow always digging into the sand, needing always to be moved. Every once in a while the kids would call to him, and he would examine the little treasure they had found or help with their construction project. These were, he thinks, the spoils of war, the basic blessing, then and now.

He looks up and doesn’t see Connor. He starts toward the water, searching, scanning the beach. He feels almost as if he’s drowning; he can’t seem to get enough air into his lungs. He’s lost the boy, lost him. He moves as well as he can to the water—would he have gone in the water?—but it is too difficult, and he sits in the sand, tries to breathe, his chest tight, very tight, till he thinks, This is it, this is the heart attack Cunningham warned me about. Then, miraculously, he gets a breath, feels the life-giving air course through his body like an electric current, and he is okay. Alive. Moreover, Connor has found him.

“Grampa,” he says. “Come help.”

When your spine is fused, it’s no little thing to get off the ground. Sam moves to all fours, then stands, finding
himself dizzy, light-headed. Connor moves on. Sam collects himself, then walks across the wet, hard sand and lifts the bucket. It’s heavy. “This is quite a take you’ve got. We might need to do a bit of quality control before you pack this up for the trip home.”

“What’s that?”

“Quality control? I’m sure you’ve never heard of Deming, right? The Japs give an award named for him. Quality control, it’s the way you make sure whatever it is you’re making is how you want it. Of good quality.”

“So, Grampa?’

“Yes.”

“Tell me again about Mom? How she also had a different father once? Like, besides you?”

Sam sets down the bucket, which he needs to do anyway, heavy as it is. “What?”

“Yeah, like she had a different father, or something?”

Sam feels something shift inside him. Another tug at the heart. He reaches up and touches his chest with his right hand, like a man making a pledge. “Your mom told you this?” he asks.

“My dad.”

All these years Sam wasn’t keeping a secret at all. Cat was.

“Well, yes, that’s how it was. Your grandmother, whom you never knew, she already had Cat and so we all became a family. And so your mother became my daughter, and I raised her. And then she had you, and so she’s raising you.”

The boy looks at him, understanding, or not, his own origins. “But you’re still
my
grampa.”

“Yes, of course. Always. I am.”

“Good,” the boy says.

Sam smiles. The boy has spoken. “Shall we go back?” Sam asks.

They start up the beach, a slow trudge when they hit the dry sand. Sam is right handed, but he has trouble with that shoulder, and it’s the right hip that’s bad, and so he carries the bucket with his left hand. After a few steps he feels a tweak. The bucket is heavy, and he sets it down.

“I need to rest,” he says.

“We just started,” says the boy.

Sam grabs the bucket, intending to walk on, but something is changing. Slowly at first, then suddenly, the pain in his arm tugs, as if the bucket weighs four hundred pounds. Then it feels as if someone is standing on his chest. It seems that he’s watching—or really feeling—from afar. He drops to his knees; he can feel them in the sand. My heart, he thinks, but it is almost an afterthought, because other thoughts are coming to him now, like the time long ago when he actually flew down to Florida with Goodman because Goodman wanted to see his boys and promised Sam a free vacation, and so Sam and Goodman flew on People Express, that crazy airline that ran its planes like city buses, with every plane traveling to or from Newark, and Kyle came out to the airport—these were the days when anyone could
go through security—because they had a three-hour layover, which was enough time to get together and have dinner in the terminal. Except that the first plane was delayed, then delayed again, so that when Sam did get to Newark there was only time to walk through that overly crowded terminal, bodies crammed together like a crowd exiting a game at Tiger Stadium, till they got to the plane to Florida and boarded.

Kyle was standing at the gate when Sam and Goodman disembarked from Detroit, and he walked with them, wearing a suit—he’d come straight from work—tall and young and looking exactly as you’d want the future to look. Sam was proud, almost overcome with pride, but he kept it to himself, knew of Goodman’s troubles, and didn’t want to add emphasis to the obvious differences in their situations, though when Sam and Goodman took their seats on the plane, seats they practically had to wrestle for, Sam noticed that Goodman’s eyes were damp, as if he’d been crying, though of course he tried to hide it. Sam wanted to put an arm around Goodman. Goodman had made him, and for reasons Sam would never understand.

Sam wanted to put his arm around Goodman and tell him it would be okay, though of course he knew it wouldn’t be, knew that though Goodman was a good man, a successful man, one who’d risked limb and life for his country, he would never have the one thing he wanted: his sons. He wouldn’t; wouldn’t ever walk beside a tall kid in a business suit and hear him say,
“Hey, Dad. How’s it going? I guess dinner is going to have to wait.” He’d never hear in that voice the man he’d made, how easily he’d grown and learned to handle life, the way it unfolded, uncertain and unknowable. He would never stand in a hospital and hold a tiny infant and look at the true wonder of it, how everything was there already in miniature, even the tiny fingers with their tiny, tiny nails, the delicate lines about the knuckles, that little hand already able to grab, in its first hour, the hand of the son of your child. Goodman would never feel his daughter put her hand on his shoulder and say, “Well, Dad, there you go,” as if the infant were a gift, which of course it was. He would never know, as Sam knows now, that his blood will live on, in the child of his child, and that child’s child, on and on down through the ages, a man’s one real way to immortality. And now the pain has grown and grown and is at the same time receding, as if he were not there at all, though Sam is, he is here, completely here, wanting more.

For a second his eyes almost focus and he sees the boy, slight, fair, and it takes him a second to realize who it is, really he’s not sure with the glare, but the boy moves and in that movement he sees Kyle, his young Kyle, too young, but Sam needs help and starts to speak. He can’t, not yet, but then finally he pushes up some air and gets out the words, grunting and gasping. “Kyle!” he yells at the boy. “Go! Get your mother!”

T
he boys are giggling. She can hear them in the living room, the giggles and peals of laughter at an old Warner Bros. cartoon, Bugs Bunny, perhaps older than Cat herself.

She goes back to the papers drawn up for the boy. The court has granted her motherhood. Guardianship, they call it. Mrs. Boyle will be here soon with Ian. It is Mrs. Boyle’s plan to stay a week and then head back. Cat has been holding her breath. She has been back and forth to New York four times. The legal impediments were many, and a lawyer made a small fortune handling the adoption of this orphan. Legally, everything is in order, but Cat senses Mrs. Boyle’s reluctance. Her anger. Cat worries that were Mr. Boyle not so ill, confined to a bed in a hospice, the adoption might not be happening. Mr. Boyle set the timing of this handoff, insisting that it happen now while he could still effect it, worried, perhaps, that later his wife might back out. Cat worries that she still might, papers be damned. She has the boy, and she doesn’t really want to give him up. Possession, they say, is nine-tenths of the law. Still, Mrs. Boyle claims she will hand Ian over after she stays a week, to help with the boy’s transition. Then she will leave, back to New York, three days before Christmas, to be with her dying husband.

The phone rings. It’s Tommy.

“I’ve got them. We’re already on ninety-four.” Out the window she notices the first twisting flurries of snow floating out of the gray Michigan sky.

“Great,” she says. “See you soon.”

She almost can’t breathe. She is so close. Ian is so close. She thinks of Tommy and Ian and Mrs. Boyle driving on I-
94
, of how the planes float down over the road like giant birds, of how once a Northwest flight couldn’t get off the ground and crashed in the median. Everyone was killed except for one little girl. Cecilia, Cat remembers that was her name, a little girl who somehow survived the crash and the flames, a little phoenix—saved, it was guessed, because she was protected in her mother’s arms. Cat wonders who that woman was, that forgotten, perfect mother.

Connor has sneaked into the kitchen, and surprises her now by tugging at her hand. She jumps.

“You scared me.”

“Sorry, Mommy.”

“What is it?”

They hear Jonathan laughing in the other room.

“Are we really going to stay here?” Connor asks.

“Do you want to?”

“Oh, yes. This place is awesome. I don’t want to leave.”

“Well, then,” she says.

“Tommy won’t kick us out?”

“No, of course not. We live here now.”

He nods, trying, she supposes, to believe it. Then he
turns, and slowly walks out of the kitchen. “Are you sure?” is what Tommy asked. He didn’t want her to move in just because it was convenient. He would help her get a place big enough for the extra boy if she didn’t want to move in with him. But if she was sure, he said, then she should make the move. It was the last chance they were going to get, he said. The last chance to get it right.

It’s been five weeks. Connor has changed schools. With the re-fi boom, her income has doubled. The settlement money came in, and a chunk from her father’s estate. She is now the mother of two, and soon three. And she has allowed herself to be in love. She intends to be happy.

M
rs. Boyle comes through the door first, wearing a wool overcoat and a paisley scarf over her hair. Tommy walks behind her with Ian in his arms. Ian, in turn, holds a worn, well-loved stuffed animal, an orange tiger.

“How was the flight?” Cat asks.

“Fine. But there is no food anymore. And the seats are very small. People haven’t shrunk. The man in the seat next to me was certainly not small.”

Several sentences in a row. Cat has never heard this from her.

Tommy smiles. “We’re all sardines in the can, now. Let me show you to your room,” he tells her.

“Thank you, Thomas,” she says.

“Hello, Ian,” Cat says.

The boy sticks his face into Tommy’s shoulder and covers one eye with the tiger, a shy move of hide-and-seek. He’s still a towheaded little thing.

“Oh, say hello, Ian,” says his grandmother.

“Hello,” Cat hears him say, his face pressed into Tommy’s shoulder. She hears him sniffle.

“What do you say we hand you over,” Tommy whispers to Ian. “She’s got very strong arms.”

And so Cat comes to hold him. And when she feels him, feels the weight in her arms, she knows he is hers. This, she thinks, is right. And she thinks of her father, wonders if once, four-odd decades ago, he had held her, if it all could be explained by the simple act of touch.

B
y the time he goes to bed, Connor has the sniffles, probably from Ian, who came with a cold. Jonathan, too, has picked it up. At least the evening has come to an end. Earlier, the bigger boys spent a few minutes entertaining the little boy, and then all three settled back into Looney Tunes. There was a pizza dinner, and a long, slow conversation with Mrs. Boyle. She seemed slowed by all that had happen: the loss of her daughter and the impending loss of her husband, the effective loss of her other daughter, and now her grandson.

“Eventually you could move here,” Tommy said. “To be close to Ian.”

Tommy is like that. A funny man. Guarded, and then he’ll invite you to live in the neighborhood—or to bring
your whole family, newly pieced together, to live in his house.

“I don’t know a soul here,” said Mrs. Boyle.

Tommy let it go. But it made Cat love him that much more, that he would even offer. She wouldn’t have and then later would wish that she had.

Now, at last, they are alone together. She has finally gotten comfortable with the idea of walking from the bathroom to the bed without a robe or towel. She slides in beside Tommy, kisses him, then rolls to her side.

“Come back here,” he says.

“What?”

She feels his hand on her. It’s cold, but she doesn’t flinch.

“I want to take all three boys to a buddy of mine. Tomorrow. Jonathan’s pediatrician.”

“Why?”

“’Cause Ian’s making everyone sick. Might as well do something about it now.”

“Sure,” she says.

“And I want to propose something.”

“I like what you’re proposing,” she tells him. She’s backed into him, and his free hand is cupping her breast with just the right amount of pressure, as she’s taught him. She’s taught him plenty in the last three months. Sex has become a part of her life again in a way that makes her wonder how it ever wasn’t.