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  Anna met her mother and Alice back in the special ICU waiting area, a pale yellow room that contained all the terror and sadness from past visitors. A TV was anchored to the wall and a cooking show was on; the host demonstrated a way to make fresh chicken sausage.

  Mary Louise said, “We need to tell your father. You have to tell me if you’ve heard from him, you have to tell me.”

  So this is what it takes, thought Anna. It takes a burr hole in Patrick’s head and a brain that might never be the same for her father’s name to be brought into the mix. Her father had left twenty years ago and he had never returned, had not sent birthday cards, or called on graduations or births. In fact, her father knew nothing about the family since his leaving, at least not that Anna knew about.

  Anna had hired a detective after she’d passed the bar exam to find her father. That was seven years ago. He was in Thailand, teaching English. Charles O’Shea, director of English studies in Bangkok. Anna held his address for days before she used it, finally firing off an email that said, “Your son, daughter, and ex-wife are living stellar lives without you. But I know where you are. Dad, how could you? I loved you.”

  She recalled the last time she saw her father and Anna felt like she was fourteen again, coming home to the sirens, police cars, flashing lights, and ambulance. As Anna ran into the house, her heart pounding, her father, face bloody and sweaty, pushed past her to leave the house.

  “Daddy!” she screamed. “Come back.”

  Patrick had been twenty. It looked to everyone as if Patrick and his father had tried to kill each other. Each one was beaten bloody. Patrick was fully grown, and could finally fight back.

  Anna’s mother came out of Patrick’s bedroom, her forehead tight, a bottle of medication in her hands.

  Anna took a broom and began sweeping the broken glass, too afraid to do anything else, despite her mother’s warning about getting cut by the shards. Anna wanted to clean everything up. She scooped four dustpans of broken glass and dumped them into the garbage can on the porch.

  The overhead light in the kitchen, hanging on a chain in artful swags, now hung crooked over her mother’s head, over her mushroom-bobbed hair.

  “Is he okay?” asked Anna.

  Her mother set the prescription bottle on the kitchen island.

  “The broken nose and ribs? Bones mend. It’s the rest of him that I worry about. I should have been home.”

  “The next time that Daddy does this I’m calling the police,” said Anna, closing the door to the porch, to the people in her neighborhood who had seen the ambulance, the flashing lights, and to her friends at school who would know all about this.

  “There won’t be a next time. Come here, sweetie,” said her mother, patting the stool next to her.

  Anna smelled something worse than the musky feral scent left behind by the fight, something reaching for her.

  “Your father won’t be coming back.”

  The wobbly legs of her existence began to shatter, the molecules exploding from the inside out. Her balance went first. That’s what happens when a father leaves.

  Money appeared in Mary Louise’s account from the early withdrawal of his pension.

  Anna stared at her mother in the waiting room. “You think Patrick isn’t going to make it. That would be the only reason to contact Daddy. You think he deserves to know.” She didn’t mean to say Daddy. It sounded like she was little again.

  The furrow between Mary Louise’s eyebrows was deep. “You two children only had one set of parents to choose from. Patrick needs his father right now. I don’t so much care about what Charlie needs. You know how to contact him, don’t you?”

  “Yeah, I do. I sent him an email once. I’ll do it when I come back from retrieving our wannabe gangster.”

  Chapter 3

  Anna waited in the reception area of the detention center. Juvie Hall, that’s what kids called it. That’s what her brother’s friends had called it when they’d been teenagers and had organized like guerilla fighters to avoid getting caught for their petty crimes of vandalism. Patrick had never been caught for any of his misdeeds.

  Metal detectors lined the doorways leading to the interior of the building. Why had Joseph broken the law in New Jersey? Nothing about this was going to be easy. New Jersey apparently hadn’t thought about painting this place in a long time. The walls of the reception room were light blue. The color was probably intended to be calming, cooling down the raging spirits of adolescents. Anna didn’t know exactly what her nephew had done, and part of her was holding tightly to the hope that his crime was the most minor, or that a mistake had been made.

  She hadn’t truly slept in two days; her eyes were dry from staring down the highway for five hours, driving from Hartford in the rain and fog. Her stomach echoed in dark fear every time she pictured her brother’s swollen and bandaged head, the respirator forcing breath in and out of his broken body, and the chorus of blinking machinery that echoed in his room.

  Her nephew didn’t know that his father wasn’t coming for him, or that he had been in an accident. Anna had asked to speak with the director of the detention center. It was 11:30 in the morning and the director wasn’t in yet. The correctional officer at the desk said that nothing was going to happen until the director arrived. She would have to wait until after lunch when the caseworkers returned.

  Anna approached the desk, with its shoulder-high barrier between her and the officer.

  “My brother was on his way here to get his son, Joseph O’Shea, when he had a very serious accident. That’s why no one showed up yesterday. My brother is in the intensive-care unit in Hartford right now. Could you please just release Joseph to me so that I can bring him home?” asked Anna. She had already produced her driver’s license. “Here’s the phone number of the hospital. You can call to check and see if he’s there.”

  The correctional officer listened with an expressionless face. “I worked the graveyard shift, so this is a double for me. I don’t know who you are, and this kid was taking drugs across the state line, in a stolen vehicle.”

  He did not add, “…and I’m sorry about your brother.” The officer had a small television set tucked under the counter and clearly intended to continue watching it. On a better day, Anna would have understood, she would have known that this guy was at the end of his graveyard shift and that his circadian rhythms were screwed up, making him out of sync with everyone else. She would have known that this guy had perfected an invisible shield around his heart that got him through the worst times at 2:00 a.m. when coked-up kids came screaming through his waiting room. But right now she didn’t want to care about him.

  Anna looked at the clock. 11:45. She sat down and scribbled a note, came back to his counter, and pushed the note toward him. “I’m going out to my car, where I am going to try to close my eyes for an hour or so. Please give this note to the first supervisor or caseworker who comes in. Tell them Joseph O’Shea’s aunt is here to pick him up, that I am acting on behalf of my brother. And I’m a lawyer.” The officer pushed the note to one side of the counter and nodded slightly to her, as if he was conserving energy.

  She pushed her car seat back as far as it would go, rolled the car windows down one quarter of the way, and hoped that the shade of one asphalt-strangled tree would hold for an hour. Was there any danger in sleeping in the car? Was she safer in a parking lot of a detention center for kids, or less safe? Would gun-carrying officers notice and come to her if someone reached their hands into her car? Anna closed her eyes, but like a cat, she kept her ears alert. She drifted, half in sleep, half crouched at the ready.

  Joe had been born with an expectant look on his face, as if to say, “I’m waiting,” as if he had heard the beginning of the story and was prepared for the ending. Patrick had uncharacteristically insisted that Anna come to see his newborn. It had been her first year of college, only a month before final exams, but she’d been intrigued by her brother’s sudden insistence. She’d used her boyfriend�
��s frequent flyer miles to fly from Chicago to Hartford. Her mother had picked her up at the airport and driven to Greenfield, Massachusetts, where Patrick had lived with his new wife and infant. He’d never told Anna where he’d met Tiffany, his tiny, pale wife, who liked to read by the hour curled in a corner of the couch. Oh no, thought Anna, too delicate; she’ll never last with Patrick.

  Patrick and Tiffany had lived in a 1950s ranch-style house that had not changed at all since it was built. They’d lived two miles from the center of town, with the other last poor houses.

  Anna and her mother had pulled into the muddy driveway.

  “They could use some gravel,” her mother had said as she’d turned off the car.

  Tiffany had opened the hollow-core door looking pale and exhausted. Anna had hugged her and felt like she might crush her new sister-in-law, as if Tiffany’s bones had been filled with air and that only her shoes had kept her from levitating. Tiffany had brushed her thin hair from her eyes and offered a smile.

  “Come on in, he’s in the kitchen with Joey,” she’d said.

  Anna had prepared herself, as she always did, for the unpredictability of her brother, the chance that she might say or do something that would cause an explosion. With her mother’s guidance, she had purchased a jersey sleeper with little blue lambs on it for the baby. She’d followed Tiffany to the kitchen, then remembered her gift.

  “Hey, I’ve got something for the little guy…” she’d started, but she’d stopped at the sight of Patrick in white T-shirt and jeans with the infant in his arms. The baby had looked straight up at his father with dark marble eyes. Patrick had placed his forefinger near the baby’s hand and the baby had latched on, holding onto his father’s finger with his entire fist. Anna had never seen anyone hold Patrick like that; everyone else had been afraid to. But this baby boy had not yet known his father, so he’d grabbed on and offered Patrick the elixir of complete faith. Patrick’s face had softened.

  He’d looked up at his sister and mother and said, “I love this baby.” Anna had never heard Patrick say that about anyone.

  The height of the sun and the heat in the car woke her from her reverie. She had not been asleep, not the nourishing depth of sleep that she craved, but her eyes had been closed and they no longer burned with fatigue from the night drive. She popped the seat back up, closed the windows, and went back into the detention center.

  She figured they’d be on the road by three o’clock. Four hours later, Anna finally saw Joseph, after a mountain of paperwork and phone calls finally released him into her custody. There were charges of auto theft in Massachusetts, and, if the substance that the troopers had found tested positive for illegal drugs, they would have to return to New Jersey for court.

  The first thing that she noticed was that he hooded his eyes with disdain. His running shoes had been stripped of laces. Had they imagined that he was a particular risk for suicide, or was it general policy that everyone had to hand over their shoelaces? Anna didn’t know; she had never been inside a prison, or even a juvenile detention center, until this morning. She hadn’t been that kind of lawyer. Contract law was not about detention centers.

  She watched her nephew as he walked between two guards across a black paved walkway. His shadowed eyes looked at some unknown horizon, ignoring the men on either side of him but keeping them on a short leash in his peripheral vision. Anna could see that Joseph was terrified to walk between two armed, uniformed guards and that a perfectly reasonable choice was to walk with an attitude. One guard pressed a button on the external door, and a man at the front desk hit a button that opened a loud metallic door with a shattering clank.

  Anna had already talked at length with the intake supervisor about Joe and his father’s accident. The state of New Jersey was glad to be rid of one more child car thief. Joseph was going to be transferred to Massachusetts courts and released into Anna’s custody. That is, if Anna didn’t kill him first.

  Joseph raised his eyes to scan his aunt for two seconds, then turned to the guard on his right.

  “Why is she here? Where is my father?”

  The supervisor pushed a large Ziploc bag toward Joseph. It had, among other things, his shoelaces, matches, a few wadded-up dollars, and a pocketknife. It was late afternoon, the hottest part of the day, and the window air conditioners clattered and hummed a guttural dirge. All the staff by now knew that the boy’s father had been in a car accident on the way to get his son.

  Joseph seemed to sense a shift in the immediate atmosphere. One of the guards put a hand on his shoulder and said, “Good luck, son.”

  Joseph walked into the waiting room with his plastic bag. The tongues of his shoes flapped open, tangling with the shredded hem of his pants. At three years old, he would have run to greet her and clung to her legs, pulling her by the hand. At ten he would have needed thirty minutes of warming up, but at sixteen, he kept two arm’s lengths away from her. She hadn’t actually touched him in several years.

  “Come on,” she said, stuffing papers into her day pack, wishing for her more professional briefcase. “Let’s get out of here.”

  Joe pushed open the double doors and let them slam on his aunt, not looking back. Anna sighed. They stepped into thick September air, a fetid pool of humidity and air pollution.

  “I need to talk to you about your father,” she called after him, making him pause on the sidewalk. “But let’s get in the car, I’ll turn on the air conditioner as we talk.”

  He was already close to six feet tall, taller than his father. He folded into her green Subaru. He reached down with his right hand and found the lever to move the seat back. Anna started the car, rolled down her window to release the boiling air, and turned the air conditioner full blast.

  “Your father was in an accident on his way here,” said Anna.

  She chose the direct route in a crisis; facts were important to Anna, and she wanted him to have the facts. She was not a good hand holder. But the jolt that ran through the boy shocked her. His neck turned crimson in scattered blotches as the red tide marched up his neck and across his cheeks. The car was too small to contain the body slam that the boy absorbed.

  Anna rushed in with more information. “He’s in a hospital in Hartford. That was the closest hospital, but he’s going to be transferred to Boston. Your grandmother is with him. He’s had a head injury and a broken leg. I got here as soon as I could. I just got back from my trip.” Anna waited for the boy to speak. Then Joseph slammed his fist on the dash.

  “I told him to slow down when he was driving! I told him to be careful,” he shouted.

  “Grandma talked to the state cops. They said he went into a slide when someone made a sudden stop on the highway. He did a one-eighty into oncoming traffic and then went into the median. He flipped the truck and hit some boulders.”

  Hearing more details gave Joseph something to focus on.

  “Where? What boulder? We’ve driven that road a hundred times.”

  Useless questions, really; it didn’t matter which boulder had crushed the truck. But Anna was glad just to have the boy in her car, belted in, and talking. She pulled out of the detention center parking lot. She had written down the directions on a scrap of paper, and now she tried to figure them in reverse. She propped them on the ashtray.

  “Is he going to die?”

  The picture of Patrick’s swollen face, blackened eyes, and the breathing tube taped over his mouth made for a convincing picture of someone who was going to die. She remembered what the doctor had told her: head injuries could go either way. People made stunning recoveries, or things could go haywire.

  “Your father is in the intensive-care unit. They’ve induced a coma to control the swelling in his brain,” said Anna as she pulled the car onto a four-lane road. She searched for road signs. She decided against telling him that they had drilled a hole in his head to relieve pressure.

  Driving with her nephew, she didn’t know how much teenage boys understood or what was most impo
rtant for Joseph to know. Her head throbbed over her left eye. Lack of sleep made her brain feel like crushed rock. She reached up to unclip her sunglasses from the visor. It was 5:00 p.m., and the sun struck her left side as she pointed the car north.

  “Auntie Ann, this is my fault, isn’t it?” said the boy.

  He had not called her Auntie Ann in years. She chanced a glance to the right, and for a moment he looked familiar again. His curly brown hair was soaked in sweat around his brow, just like it used to when he ran with the neighbor kids when he was eight. She reminded herself again to call him Joseph, not Joey; he had recently insisted on the change.

  “We’re going to call first thing in the morning to find out how he is. Then we’ll go to the hospital. And Grandma will have left us a message on my phone.”

  “Why don’t you have a cell phone? Everyone has one. Cell phones are made for times like this,” he said.

  “I had too much cell phone and too much Blackberry when I was a lawyer. I’m trying life without one. Possibly a mistake. Hey, your dad said something after the accident. One of the nurses told me. He said, ‘Mind the coin,’ or something like that. Do you have any idea what he was talking about?”

  The boy shook his head.

  They drove past Newark and tangled with the worst traffic of the day. Anna considered pulling off the highway, huddling under the arms of a gas station, and waiting until the last of rush-hour traffic subsided and dispersed into the agony of Newark. But this was an emergency and the chemical change of disaster propelled her forward. She smelled the acid scent of crisis on her breath; she had to keep driving. So they crawled for hours, willing the thick traffic to move along.

  She had forgotten to eat, but she remembered to ask the boy if he had eaten. Joseph was famous for eating not one hamburger but two or three, for gulping not one glass of milk but two. He declined. The inside of Anna’s car crackled with shards of his fear.