Sitting at that same table, with Henry sobbing and Gracie hiccupping through her tears, Alice pressed her fingertips into her eyelids. She could imagine her eyes popping like tomatoes left too long on the vine. She pressed, felt the shape of them, and watched the bursts of silver-black, of purple like an electric current. When she was a girl and her mother was ill, she would stare at the sun and count to ten. If she could make it to ten without closing her eyes, she believed, then Mother would get well. Her eyes would flood with inky black puddles fringed with a hot edge of red, but she would never make it to ten, and her mother never got well.
Now, watching those same pulses and shimmers, she slowly counted to ten. When she reached the last number, her eyes intact, she raised her head and began stacking the plates. She collected the spoons and the forks and scraped a crust of bread and two corncobs into the bucket for the pig Tom insisted on keeping in a sty he had built behind the barn. Henry was sniffling, his breath coming in great, wet gasps, while Gracie was red-faced and sticky with tears. Alice set the dishes in the sink and opened the pie safe, where the jelly tarts she had made that morning were piled on a plate. It had been too hot to make a pie, but a few scraps of dough and last season’s blueberry preserves baked quickly enough, and when she laid one in front of Henry and wiped his face with a napkin, his sniffling gradually ebbed and was replaced with the contented sounds of chewing and mouth-breathing. She half filled Henry’s glass of milk and then scooped up Gracie, holding the baby close so she could smell the top of her head. The scent always soothed her, and she made a slow whooshing sound that eventually brought an end to Gracie’s tears.
“He’ll be home soon,” she said to Henry, and to herself. She ran a hand through the boy’s hair. “I don’t know when, but soon.”
Henry nodded and continued to eat.
“I miss him too,” she said. “But tell me, what would Tom say if he walked in and found us here, crying and squabbling?”
Henry scrunched his face, as if he were puzzling out one of Tom’s quizzes. Tom knew the name of everything that grew, and he would often ask Henry, What sort of tree is that? What’s the name of that flower?
When the answer came to Henry, he spoke in the booming voice he used when he imitated Tom: “What’s all this rumpus?”
Alice had to admit that’s exactly what he would have said. Both of them now looked at the screen door, and Alice knew that they were imagining, hoping for, the same thing. It was getting late but they were approaching the longest day of the year. The sun would be up for another hour, even here, where the low mountains cast shadows across the fields and forests. There was still time, wasn’t there, for the screen door to open, for the spring to creak before snapping the door shut, and for Tom to return home. The day was long, but sooner or later, without Alice noticing the exact moment it happened, the darkness would fall.
FORDHAM HEIGHTS
BEFORE THE CALL FROM the front desk of the Plaza Hotel informing them that young Sir Malcolm had safely returned, Martin and Rosemary were dressing for the rehearsal dinner. The babysitter was due to arrive any minute, cocktails were to be served at the Hallorans’ home in Riverdale at five thirty sharp, and yet Martin moved like a man who’d had the marrow scraped from his bones. He was stiff and fragile, likely to break. He had spent the past forty-eight hours scouring Manhattan’s precinct houses, hospitals, missions, and morgues. Starting on the east side, he had worked his way down to the Battery, then backtracked up the west side as far uptown as Columbus Circle. Michael had simply vanished, it seemed, and it was Francis who had lost him. All through his search, he had seen Francis only once, escorting—or being escorted by—that phantom in the blue serge suit. Martin was sure he would have been able to place the man if only his rage at Francis wasn’t burning so bright. Yoked to that anger was envy; envy that Francis could turn off whatever bond of love and filial loyalty had driven Martin to the streets.
Or maybe Martin was giving himself too much credit. Maybe it was just the hard lump of guilt in his chest—the product of years when he’d barely thought of Michael at all—that kept him looking for his brother. He wanted to say to someone, This isn’t fair! He wanted to shout it. Why this week of all weeks? The wedding reception was going to be his big break, he could feel it. He had put so much of himself into the band, into the arrangements, into keeping the group together, and oh! how they could swing. Only now it was ruined. Francis had wrecked it, and he hated himself for thinking this, but Michael had wrecked it, too. But who wanted to hear that? Even the cold, selfish center of Martin’s heart shrank from the raw truth of it.
Tonight Rosemary had given him a free pass—Skip the dinner, keep up the search—but as much as he dreaded the idea of mixing with the Dwyers and the lace-curtain Hallorans, he told himself that by going he could spare Rosemary a night of sideways glances and halfhearted inquiries into his whereabouts. It was a game she could not win—he lost his brother? How did that happen?—and it would only add another chapter in the story of Martin, the Man Who Can’t Get It Right. Along with that, he had blindsided her when he quit Chester’s band, and she was likely at her wits’ end about his plans for the future. So he owed her one. But he also knew that going to the dinner gave him a high-minded, self-sacrificing reason not to do the thing he dreaded even more, which was roaming the grimy underside of the city to call at cop shops where midnight brawlers and jake-leg drunks were hauled in, or at the rescue missions with their reek of flop sweat and disinfectant, or at the hospitals where a hot fog of infection surrounded him, or at the morgues where the John Does lay half covered in the hallways, their bare bruised feet tagged for some other poor sod to claim. Martin didn’t want to choose between the dinner and the search. He wanted some feat of magic that could give him the week he had imagined rather than the one unfolding around him.