We Are Not Ourselves(180)

“She’s in a good mood. She’s going to be happy to see him.”

Ruth walked a little distance away and motioned him away from the wheelchair. He locked it in place and headed over to her.

“Believe me,” Ruth said, “she’s doing whatever she has to do to get through it. She’s doing the best she can. Why don’t you take him back to the home?”

“I brought him all this way,” he said. “I don’t want to upset him.”

She gave him a hard look. “You will not be upsetting him. He won’t know the difference. Why don’t you take him back? We don’t have to mention anything to your mother.”

“She’ll be angry at me for disappearing for that long.”

Ruth threw up her hands in exasperation. “Let her be. Don’t make it harder for her than it has to be.”

“But it’s Christmas. She’s going to be happy to be spending it with him.”

“At least go in and tell her what you’re thinking. I’ll stay with your father. Tell her your plan and give her a chance to decide. Don’t spring this on her.”

Ruth went to the wheelchair, put her hand on his father’s shoulder, and patted it.

“I want her to see him in the kitchen,” Connell said. “I want to see the look on her face. I want to see his face.”

He took the handles of the wheelchair and released the wheel lock.

“Would you listen to me? I’ve known your mother for decades.”

“She’s my mother.”

“Connell.” She glared at him.

“I can’t take him back now.”

“You can.”

“It’s cold out here,” he said. “I want to bring him in.”

“At least give me a chance to go explain this to her.”

“It’ll be fine,” he said, but she had already picked up her bags and was heading up the driveway ahead of him. He wheeled his father between the cars to the house. He pulled his father to his feet and they started up the stairs. There was no handrail, so he had to push against the wall with a stiff arm while the other wrapped around his father’s waist as he dragged him up a step at a time. An anxious expectancy rose in his chest. Again his father was emitting that low moan. They advanced slowly toward what felt like a climactic moment, though he hoped it would be more of a prelude to a memorable night and a conclusion on his mother’s part that the holiday had turned out perfect. He felt suddenly queasy. He tugged the screen door open, hoping to catch it with an elbow, but it swung back with a bang as he secured his grip on his father. Then the door behind it opened and Jack Coakley smiled warmly until Jack saw Connell’s father and his expression changed and he held the screen door open and made way for Connell to bring him in, which he did just as Ruth came in from the vestibule with his mother, the two of them moving in a brisk conference punctuated by restive hands, neither looking up as they walked swiftly, and then his mother raised her eyes and saw the two of them there and stopped, and everyone gathered in the kitchen was turned toward him with either confusion or gravity on their faces, and it was only then that he realized that he had made a costly error in judgment. His mother didn’t rush over as he’d expected her to but stood there with her mouth moving silently for what was surely only a moment but felt like a lifetime and would surely last that long in the slow-exposure image his mind was capturing of it. Sergei shifted on his buttocks in his habitual seat, and glasses of punch dangled from fingers as if arrested in their journey upward, and then a quick, throaty sob emerged from his mother as she said, “Oh, Ed,” once with a falling cadence and put her hand to her mouth. He turned to consider his father for the first time since he’d arrived at the home to pick him up, his hurrying having prevented it, though he was starting to feel now that he wouldn’t have seen him even if he’d paused to look. A thick rope of drool hung from his father’s mouth, indecorously refusing to break off and fall to the floor. Connell wiped it off and stood there in an agony of regret as the gathered crowd, led by his mother, converged on his father to pull him back toward the fireplace in the den with purposeful seriousness. The party was over before it had begun. Sergei rose and left the kitchen as if compelled by the heat of wordless gazes. Connell would have to wait for another day, perhaps another life, to feel redeemed. He had never felt so far from his father, who disappeared behind a wall of backs as his mother approached him to deliver the rebuke he knew he deserved.

“Help me with the coats,” she said with a quiet urgency that had no time for rancor. She had spent a lifetime adjusting hopes downward and knew what order to handle things in. “Get some drinks going. We have to make the best of this.”

? ? ?

When he was done, he went out to the front porch and picked up the string he had disconnected from the others and plugged it in. The lights came on at once, completing the outline around the railed fence that his mother had drawn for passing cars and those making the turn into the driveway. It made a neat picture, and he stood taking it in, trying to derive a simple pleasure from the lights, trying to forget that they and the hundreds more inside had not prevented the encroaching of a fathomless darkness. His father was gone, gone.





89


She had worried that the party would last late into the night, everyone frozen by Ed’s presence, unsure when they could leave, if they could leave, but then one by one they started to go. Before everyone had departed—because she knew it would be impossibly painful for her to get him out of there once they had—she announced that she was going to take Ed back to the home, and she had Jack and Connell get him down the stairs, said some quick good-byes and asked Ruth to handle everyone’s coats. Connell wanted to drive Ed himself, or go with her, but she insisted on doing it alone.