The Homecoming Read online

  When the light finally grows from the color of weak tea to limestone against the window’s curtains, I knock on Bridge’s door.

  “You up?”

  A moan sounds from the other side. “You’re waking me up to ask if I’m up?”

  “That’s a yes?”

  Once Bridge has pulled on some fresh clothes—a pair of jeans and a Yale sweatshirt, Dad’s college, another gift from the grave more thoughtful than any he’d given in life—we head out into the forest’s mist in search of coffee.

  She’s a tough kid. Not quick to cry when she falls out of the trees she still loves to climb or takes a kick to the shins on the soccer pitch. But that’s not the kind of toughness I’m thinking of as I look at Bridge now. Hair a shiny auburn, the elongated green eyes and gap-toothed smile that communicate how she sees the comical aspects behind even the most earnest gestures. The kind of person people will fall easily, if perilously, in love with. She’s laughingly told me stories about boys at school who already have, though she admits she doesn’t know why. I have an idea. It’s not because of her looks, not really. It’s because they want to know what she’s thinking.

  “How’d you sleep?” I ask as we make our way along the trail, a steeper climb toward the lodge than I remembered it being in the night.

  “Okay, I guess.”

  “Better than nothing. So, remind me of your position on bacon. I noticed some—”

  “Aaron? What really happened with Franny last night?”

  “I told you. She thought she saw something, but there was nothing there.”

  “How do you know that?”

  “I looked.”

  “And you don’t believe her.”

  “It’s not that.” I work to find the words that might get me out of saying what I don’t want to say. “Franny is in recovery, on top of a whole world of grief. You might be able to recover from addiction, but I don’t think you ever recover from something like what happened with Nate.”

  “I guess not.”

  “It wouldn’t be surprising if someone who’d gone through that might hallucinate a bit here and there.”

  Bridge stops. I carry on for another couple strides before stopping and turning myself.

  “You don’t believe that,” she says.

  “Really? How are you so sure?”

  “Because you don’t sound like you. You sound like Dad. And because you think you might have seen something out there too.”

  How do parents do it? How do they stay ahead of their kids, cut them off at the pass, shield them from whatever they need shielding from? Either I’m too inexperienced at it to know, or all parents fail the same way I’m failing now.

  “You’re right,” I say. “I don’t think Franny was hallucinating. But just because she saw something doesn’t mean it was anything bad. We’re in the middle of hundreds of square miles of rain forest. There’s still bears and deer and I don’t know what else out here. It could’ve been anything.”

  Bridge absorbs this, stone-faced, before catching up and taking my hand.

  “Don’t lie to me again,” she says.

  “I won’t.”

  “What we’re doing here—this whole thing—won’t work if we can’t believe each other.”

  I squeeze her hand three times. Our code. We haven’t used it in a while—we haven’t held hands in a while, as she’s moved into the physical aversions of teenagerhood—but she understands.

  One squeeze means I’m here.

  Two squeezes mean I love you.

  Three squeezes mean It’s just me and you.

  We developed the code over the time we spent sitting side by side in the backs of taxis during our Tuesday get-togethers. Sometimes we go to the movies; sometimes I take her to her soccer practice or ballet. But there’s always time to grab dinner, time to talk. While we both enjoy these meetings, I’ve come to rely on them probably more than she does. Her calling me out on the lies I tell myself is of greater use than the counsel I can offer about how to handle boys or teachers or bullies.

  I’m about to say something along these lines when we come to the top of the slope. There, in the distance, the rectangular outline of the lodge appears through the tangled mass of trees.

  I start toward it, but Bridge remains where she is.

  “My turn,” she says.

  “Your turn what?”

  “To be honest about something.”

  “Okay,” I say, turning back to face her.

  “The last few Tuesdays I haven’t been able to make it to our dinners. Right?”

  “You had rehearsals. The school play.”

  “They weren’t rehearsals, Aaron.”

  “Where were you?”

  “At the doctor.”

  “Why would—”

  “I was being treated. But it’s over. They say it’s—it’s over.”

  She’s trembling. But I don’t go to her. Not yet.

  “Treatment for what?”

  “Childhood leukemia. You know what that means. You’re—”

  “Oh my God.”

  “The doctor. Chemo. Four rounds. The oncologist pretty much said I’m in full remission.”

  “Pretty much.”

  “Yeah.”

  She doesn’t have to say the chances of recurrence are on the high side. She knows. We both know.

  “Why didn’t—you could have—”

  I try to speak the one question that needs answering first, but I’m fighting against throwing up. So she answers it for me.

  “That’s why I wanted you to go. The whole Doctors Without Borders thing. I wanted you to get away from here and help overseas,” she says, and it’s so painful to hear the apology in her voice, but she shakes her head when I take a step closer. “You were always talking about doing something, Aaron. Well, that was something. Saving people who never thought anybody cared enough to save them. And I knew if you stayed here, you’d just be with me all the time. Waiting in the waiting rooms, waiting for results. Waiting to see if any of it worked.”

  “What’s wrong with that?”

  “Because I’m all you have. And if the treatment didn’t—if I wasn’t here anymore, I wanted you to have something else.”

  She puts her arms around me. I hold her and feel the life in her and imagine part of my own life transferring into her, strengthening her blood so it can better fight the alien cells drifting in it.

  Because I’m all you have.

  That this is true doesn’t shock me. What leaves me standing there, empty and still, is the realization that she blames herself for injuries I suffered. Overseas. The changes in me that came after. The never being what I was before.

  “It was nobody’s fault,” I manage to say, pulling away from her so I can see her face. “It sure as hell wasn’t yours.”

  “I know that in my head. But it doesn’t feel that way. I see what it’s done to you, Aaron. And it—”

  “No. Please—”

  “It was me who made you go.”

  “You didn’t make me. You were trying to shield me. And what happened over there happened to me, not as a consequence of anything you did. Promise me you’ll try not to carry that, okay? Because it’s bullshit if you do.”

  “Okay.”

  “And no more holding things back. The big things, anyway. It’s like you said. This whole thing won’t work if we can’t believe each other. Right?”

  Bridge nods. Uses the sleeve of her hoodie to dry my cheeks. Sniffs the air.

  “Someone’s up before us,” she says.

  “How do you know?”

  “There’s a fire.”

  10

  MOM KNEW, OF COURSE.

  She was the one to take Bridge to chemo treatments, sit with her in the doctor’s offices, ask the questions phrased in ways that opened the door widest to optimistic interpretation. Mom kept all of it from me because Bridge asked her to.

  “Don’t get mad at her, okay?” she says.

  “I’m not mad.”
>
  “Are you going to bring it up?”

  “Can I?”

  “I can’t stop you. But it would be better if you didn’t. Not here. I mean, what difference would it make?”

  “Probably none.”

  “So. Breakfast?”

  “To be honest, I don’t know if I want to puke or eat.”

  “Start with eating. Then we’ll just roll with it.”

  I can tell this is something Bridge told herself during her treat-ments, a way of summoning the will to move on to the next task, the next meal, the next endurance of discomfort. I decide to use it the same way.

  We start for the lodge. Now I smell the fire too. The cherrywood smoke from the lodge’s chimney.

  And in the next second, both of us see that the front door is open.

  Had it been this way moments ago when we’d come out of the trail? Had it been this way all night, for anyone to enter, or had Mom or Franny opened it this morning for us once they got out of bed? It’s a question I mean to ask but slips away when Bridge and I come around the corner of the foyer to find Franny loping at us. Sliding on the walkway’s smooth wood in fluffy pink slippers that must have been included in her duffel bag.

  “Morning, Brigitte,” she announces, saying Bridge’s name in a French accent that has always annoyed her but Franny has never seemed to notice. “Mom’s in the kitchen and there’s orange juice and Lucky Charms. You like Irish cereal?”

  Bridge recognizes that Franny is trying to get rid of her, but she decides to be obliging. Once Bridge is around the corner and out of sight, Franny leans in close.

  “Don’t tell Mom,” she says, looking at me in a way that makes it clear she’s referring to last night. Two sisters, two requests to not bring up upsetting things with our already upset mother within the last two minutes. All of which is fine with me. We’re Quinlans. We might be bad liars. But all of us are good at keeping secrets.

  “You’re sure she didn’t hear you?” I ask.

  “I’m sure. She took a double dose of her bye-bye pills and she was zonked,” Franny says. “This morning she’s all ‘I slept like a baby! Must be the fresh air!’ ”

  “I already talked to Bridge about it.”

  “That’s fine. She won’t say anything to Mom either.”

  “How’re you so sure?”

  “Because she wants to protect her the same way we did when we were her age.”

  Once more I’m surprised by how one of my sisters knows so much more about the dynamics of my family than I do.

  “You okay, Aaron?”

  “Yeah,” I say, rubbing at the itchiness of my face and feeling the new growth of beard there. “How about you?”

  “Could use some sleep. Which is a hell of a thing to say first thing in the morning.”

  “Nothing that coffee can’t fix.”

  “You’re in luck then. I made a pot. Strong enough—

  “For a spoon to stand up in it.”

  It’s a Dad line. One of the few jokes I can remember him making.

  “This stuff? Forget the spoon. It would hold up a fucking knife,” she says, and slips her arm around mine, guiding me along the walkway toward the smell of toast and Danishes being warmed in the oven. It’s sweet enough and I’m hungry enough that it fills the cavernous space of the lodge with a passable simulation of home.

  “Hey, I wanted to ask you something. What ever happened to your friend from high school?” she says. “The super-cute one with the dorky name?”

  “Lorne?”

  “That’s it. Lorne Hetman.”

  “Huffman.”

  “Whatever. Where is he now?”

  “I have no idea. We weren’t exactly friends by the time we graduated. In fact, we never spoke to each other again after that party at the Chaplets’ house.”

  “Why? What happened?”

  “Seriously? You were there.”

  “That doesn’t mean anything,” she says, and stops. “Tell me.”

  Lorne was the only person I might have once described as a best friend. We were both jocks but discovered a shared love for old movies, particularly the drive-in monster flicks from a generation earlier. The Blob Creature from the Black Lagoon. Godzilla. We’d work our way through the cheesiest corner of the classics section of Blockbuster, then start all over again, staying up until dawn for sleepovers at my house.

  It gave us the chance to talk about girls, his parents splitting up, my mysterious dad. It also allowed Franny to “bump into” Lorne after she came out of the shower wrapped in a towel, or for Lorne to ask Franny to join us, patting the cushion on the sofa next to him, promising her that Vincent Price in The Tingler would forever change her mind about “that dumb horror crap.”

  I was aware they were flirting. But I took it as only the most harmless kind: training for Franny (she was two years younger, a tenth-grade kid) and time-killing for Lorne. That’s why when that spring Franny came down the stairs into the Chaplets’ crowded rec room, reeking of pot smoke and wearing a Led Zeppelin T-shirt and cutoffs, I was surprised when Lorne immediately got up to offer her a beer. He wasn’t being nice. He was acting nice.

  A few beers later, as I watched from across the room, I could see Franny turn from looking playful to looking like she was going to throw up. I figured Lorne would retreat. She was wasted. She was my kid sister. But when he whispered something in her ear and started down the hall toward one of the basement bedrooms, Franny followed.

  I remind Franny of all this, and when I’m done, she says she can’t remember any of it.

  “Well, the party, maybe,” she concedes. “The Chaplets’ place. The smell of it. Like cinnamon apples or something. We were there a lot, weren’t we? Like, did the parents even exist? But Lorne and me getting it on—no, not really.”

  “You weren’t getting it on with him, Franny. You were almost unconscious. He was—you were being assaulted. Or about to be, anyway.”

  “How would you know?”

  “Because I checked on you. You heard me come in and looked at me from a thousand miles away.”

  “What did you do?”

  “I told Lorne to stop. He told me to mind my own business. ‘This is private, man.’ As if that made everything cool. As if I had to honor whatever he wanted to do because it was happening in a room with a door.”

  “Did you leave?”

  “No, Franny. I didn’t leave. I threw Lorne off you, and when he started to talk shit to me, I punched him in the ear.”

  She looks like she’s about to cry. But she laughs instead. “Why the ear?”

  “I was aiming for his nose. But he moved.”

  “He must’ve been pissed.”

  “Not as much as I was. I started whaling on him in the hallway and into the rec room with everybody cheering us on at first and then, when they saw how freaked I was—like Lorne’s-teeth-on-the-shag-carpet freaked—they got as far away as they could. I nearly killed him.”

  “I knew you guys had a falling out. I figured it was over a girl,” she says. “I just didn’t think I was the girl.”

  She looks out the enormous windows at the trees. Each taking on their own personality as the morning light plays over them, mutant branches and patches where leaves failed to fill in their green coat. An audience we’d only become aware of in the last moment.

  Franny loops her arm around mine and pulls herself close, still looking outside.

  “You gotta admit. This place is beautiful,” she says.

  “It’s kind of unbelievable, actually.”

  “You’re going to think I’m crazy, but maybe it’s good we’re in this place. Maybe we can be together here in a way we never could back there.”

  It’s what I’ve hoped too. And right now it feels like something approaching the possible.

  “You’re right,” I say. “I do think you’re crazy.”

  She pulls away the arm that was around mine and gives my shoulder a whack, which is Franny’s way of saying you’re all right. You might
just stand a chance.

  11

  WHEN WE JOIN THE OTHERS in the kitchen, I assume the bacon duties as Bridge works at her bowl of marshmallows and Mom looks in all the drawers and cupboards, taking inventory. Franny hands me a mug of coffee as the strips of meat send up salty smoke from the pan.

  “Why would he make us do this?”

  This is Bridge. And she’s asking it of Mom, who rises from where she’d been rummaging through a stack of Tupperware under the counter.

  “I was only his wife, baby,” she says. “You’re asking the wrong person.”

  “Whoever he worked for, did he do good things or bad things?”

  “I always assumed they were good. Now? To be honest, I’m not so certain there’s anything good you could do where they’d pay you the kind of money to buy a spread like this.”

  “But you have an idea,” I say, and Mom turns to me.

  “An idea about what?”

  “Why we’re here. You’ve got a theory.”

  Eleanor Quinlan is a woman who can say a hundred different things with a sigh. Right now, it’s one of gathered strength. The resolve required to say the thing she’d rather dance around forever.

  “Your father didn’t have a very good family life growing up,” she says. “I didn’t know the details, but his own father left when he was young. His brother turned out to be a criminal of some kind. And his mother was unwell. Her nerves. That’s all he would say about it. ‘She had a nervous condition.’ So he had to take care of her instead of the other way around.”

  “So what?” Franny says.

  “I think he wanted something better than that for his own family, even if he didn’t have the first clue how to achieve it. He approached you three, his marriage, his estate too, as it turns out—he managed all of it like chemicals in a beaker. And now that he’s gone, he’s hoping that by mixing us all together we’ll grow.”

  “My guess is it’s a challenge,” I say. “Like rats finding their way out of a maze.”

  “More like rats making a home out of the maze,” Mom says, and sits next to Bridge, picking a marshmallow star off the edge of her bowl and popping it in her mouth.

  I’ve learned more about my father’s history in the last three minutes than the preceding three decades, and I can only guess it’s the same for Franny and Bridge. None of us, however, ask Mom for more. Maybe because we’re absorbing what’s just been shared; maybe we figure that’s all Mom knows. In any case, there’re only the pops of the bacon frying until Franny starts out in a new direction of her own.