“Euthanasia?” I repeat the clinical term. “Patricide.”
Piper’s eyes turn to steel, and she speaks slowly, with visible restraint. “You have no right to judge. You left him there, by himself, to deal with your father’s failing health. You went off to college while Tommy stayed home and put his life on hold. You took your classes, played tennis, and went to frat parties while Tommy struggled at a job he hated just to pay the bills.” She holds up a hand to stop my protest. “Yes, you offered to stay home and help. But Tommy knew, and your father knew, where your heart really was. So they told you to go back to school, finish up. While Tommy watched the man he idolized, his hero, waste away. In the end, Tommy was bathing him, helping him on and off the toilet. Feeding him. Listening to him moan and cry out, so delirious with pain he imagined he saw your mother in the room with him.” Piper is crying now. “Think about it. How could Tommy feel anything other than that you’d abandoned him and your father both?”
I bend over, put my hand on the marble top of the island in the middle of our kitchen, lean into it as I lower my head, close my eyes. My voice is quiet when I ask, “Why didn’t he tell me . . . about Dad? Why did he hold it back all these years?”
“I asked him that when he first told me. Tommy said he didn’t want to lay that at your feet. He thought it would mess you up. And make things worse between the two of you.”
“But now he has laid it at my feet. Why? And why now?”
Piper shakes her head. She doesn’t know why any more than I do. She stares at me, searching, it seems, or wanting to say something more. But the air goes out of her. She turns and walks toward the stairs. She pauses at the threshold, closes her eyes, takes a deep breath. After a moment, she opens her eyes again and walks up the steps.
I stay where I’m standing for a long time, watching the space at the bottom of the landing. I am spent, wiped out. I’m also still confused, unable to figure out Tommy’s motivation for suddenly telling me what he did. And I’m pissed because Piper has known all along. I’m feeling like the odd man out in my own marriage, the schmuck left standing without a chair when the music stops. Then again, I’ve been feeling that way for a long time.
A few minutes later, I’m in my home office, throwing back a glass of eighteen-year-old Macallan, the thick liquid burning the back of my throat.
Much later, the bottle sits half-empty on my desk. My head aches. My stomach is churning. I haven’t eaten since breakfast. Tommy’s revelation has unhinged me. Piper’s indictment has cut me to the quick. I see my brother, twenty years old, no one around to help him, looking down at our pain-racked father. I see him crying as Dad’s face disappears under the pillow. I feel Tommy’s strong, resolute hands hold down the pillow as our father goes through his death throes. And when it’s over, I hear Tommy wailing as he cradles Dad, begs his forgiveness.
I pour another glass of the Macallan, seeing it all clearly now. I’ve spent my entire life leaving the people I love. First, I disassociated myself from my mother’s death. Then I abandoned Tommy and our dad. The DA’s office was another example. Everyone was stunned by my announcement. It was sudden, and I’d done nothing to prepare my team for my leaving, for the onslaught they expected would come from Devlin and his allies. No chance to mend the political fences they’d broken in my name. It was lucky for them that Devlin turned out to be a good leader and welcomed them to his own team.
And what had it done to Piper? During my years with the prosecutor’s office, Piper and I had done a lot of socializing with my colleagues. Not just the ADAs, but with the detectives who worked side by side with us to build our cases. There were backyard barbeques, picnics, and pickup baseball games in Fairmount Park. Kids’ birthday parties, more than a few weddings. Piper became close with many of my colleagues and their spouses. And yet—inexcusably, I now see—I never considered what my leaving the DA’s office would do to Piper. Looking back, I realize that my abruptly switching sides to become a criminal-defense attorney must’ve been awful for her. Her many friends in law enforcement must surely have given her the cold shoulder. I envision Piper leaving messages on answering machines and getting no return calls. I see the invitations to parties and girls’ nights out drying up. But Piper kept it from me, never once complaining.
And to bookend the evaporation of Piper’s social life, I gave her less of myself as a private practitioner than I had as a prosecutor. I stayed later at the office, worked every weekend. And when I was home, I wasn’t engaged. As she told me recently, Even when you’re here, you’re not here. Piper had been sitting across from me at the dinner table, helping Gabby relate a funny story about something that had happened at school. I wasn’t reacting, and Piper flipped out. “You may as well go back to the office,” she snarled. “You just pretend to be at home with us.” Piper slammed her fork onto her plate and left the table. Gabby started crying. I looked back and forth at the two of them, oblivious.
“You idiot.” I say it out loud. “You prick.”
And with that, something inside me, something that’s been lurking for a long, long time, reaches up and pulls me down from the sky and throws me through the window, into the kitchen, where Mom lies dead and Dad weeps over her body. I sit across the table from my little brother, so small, racked with pain and incomprehension, staring at our parents and then looking to me for help. And this time, there is no escape for me. The window is closed; the birds fly past without me. Sorrow slices my heart.
But this time, I do what I should have done before. I walk Tommy to the floor, where we hug and hold on to our broken father, showing Dad and our departed mother that our love lives on.