Safe Passage (14 page)

   
 
The first year of her widowhood, Angela had relied heavily on Father James. Patrick would not have minded if he hadn't seen at once that while the priest's attentions were comforting, he had no more grasp of mortgages and fuel bills than his mother did. The only practical help he finally provided was to get Angela a job in Dorothy Whitmore's dress shop.

    
"See, God is providing," Angela had said. "All we have to do is trust." But it was hard to trust when God was providing only minimum wage.

    
"Ask her for a raise," Patrick begged his mother as the years went by. "You certainly deserve it."

    
But Angela wouldn't. She went to Mass on her way to work, she fasted and visited the sick. God provided, Angela said; she would not ask for more money. In the end her rituals seemed inspired less by religion than by fear, just like Simon's offering up his ear.

    
Angela had become even more helpless as time went on. When the plumbing leaked, she prayed for endurance while Patrick borrowed plumbing books from the library and took the pipes apart. Patrick learned to fix the furnace and took a paper route to earn spending money. When he was fourteen, he realized that Dorothy Whitmore was too ill to run her store alone and depended on Angela to manage it. Nervous but determined, he went into the shop on his mother's day off, hinting that she had been offered work elsewhere and might take it unless Dorothy raised her salary and provided a retirement plan. Dorothy Whitmore gave in. It was then that he decided you had only your own good sense to rely on and must not turn the responsibility over to God or anything else.

    
"You've done all right so far, but you can't expect everything," Angela had said when Patrick announced he intended to go to college. She feared he was proud, setting his sights so high, and cautioned him to be humble, lest God do worse than deny him a university education. "You'll always be able to make a living, you're so good with your hands," Angela maintained. "Think about taking the
vo
-tech course at school." But Patrick signed up for college prep, got a part-time job at the lumberyard on weekends, and continued to deliver newspapers every morning. He also made the track team. He was a good miler and hoped for a running scholarship. Angela wasn't surprised when he didn't get one. "Think of Job. You don't understand everything, but usually it works out for the best," she said. When Patrick won the Paper Carrier's Scholarship, she changed her mind, saying God had sent it after all. But Patrick credited his own hard work. He left for college in Maryland, a long way away. He never went back to Maine except for visits, though he arranged through friends to have the repairs kept up on his mother's house until the day she died. He never argued with her about religion, but he stopped going to church when he left home and later never foisted it on his sons.

    
His self-reliance served him well. Watching
Mag
insist her life was hopeless if it consisted of soaking diapers in the toilet twenty-four hours a day, he'd invented disposable diapers to show that even a houseful of babies was manageable. Seeing that he would never make enough money working for someone else, he'd done a market study and finally opened his upholstery plant. He'd invented a ten-slice toaster to stop the fighting at breakfast and made
RipOffs
to keep his sons running in the cold. Even when his blind spells came and the doctors at Hopkins couldn't help him…even then he wasn't surprised because he already knew nobody else would ever bail you out. He was going to find his own solution. If God was up there, His mind was on larger matters. Why should He let Percival live just because Simon offered up his ear?

    
Yet he understood. If Percival were lying beneath a building, unable for once to rely on his own wits, how could a bunch of nineteen-year-old Marines— boys who had just been through a blast themselves—be trusted to pull him out? Of all Patrick's sons, Percival had needed most to be unfettered …and now he might be trapped even more
permanendy
and more horribly than Patrick was trapped inside his own head, blind. He knew Simon offered surgery because he found the idea as unbearable as
Percival's
entrapment, but all the same it was like trying to buy grace the way Angela had, with her candles and Spartan ways and strict attendance at Mass. A perfect hollow formed in his stomach. He was exhausted—from the aftereffects of Valium, from the headache, from the stress. A
trembly
weakness filled him. Blind, and thinking of Percival dead, he felt very nearly defeated.

    
Then he remembered something Percival had said after losing a race in high school. He had said, "Sometimes you just don't have anything left."

    
And Patrick had replied, "That's why you slow down, that's why you psych yourself out, because you think in the end you aren't going to have anything left. But what you'll find out is you always have something left."

    
Of course it was true. Perhaps, five thousand miles away, Percival would remember that. Willing the weakness away, Patrick took the washcloth off his eyes and sat up.

     
"What time is it?" he asked.

    
"Almost eleven," Alfred said.

    
"Don't you think it's time we finally called Gideon?"

    
"It's only nine out there," Alfred said.

    
"Still, we should call." Usually he kept his eyes closed during the blind spells, but he made himself open them now. The world in front of him was not black but grayish, flecked with orange, as if he'd closed his eyes tight and clenched them shut. But his eyes were open.

    
"I'll dial," one of the twins said. Whichever one it was sounded like a child excited about speaking with his big brother on the phone. The twins still worshipped Gideon. In high school they'd gone out for running because of him—not because they were good at it or even particularly enjoyed it, but just to be with their brother. But Patrick was disturbed by their exuberant tone now. Calling Gideon was going to be no joyride. "You can dial," he said. "But I want to talk."

    
So Merle—or Darren—dialed. The headache was a weight, and the orange dots floated in the gray distance of Patrick's vision. In Utah, the phone rang three times. When a voice answered, it
wasn
t Gideon's but a roommate's. Patrick remembered. It was Sunday morning. Gideon would have let himself sleep a little later and then gone out for his weekly twelve-mile run.

    
He had thought at least to get this conversation over with. He left a message for Gideon to call back. He would have to pace himself, allow himself just so much stress, to get through this day. "Wait a minute," the roommate said as he was about to hang up. "I see him coming."

    
There was a long pause while Gideon came into the apartment. For a moment Patrick wished he hadn't caught him after all, only to give him bad news at the end of a grueling workout. He regretted that his role with Gideon was always to make difficult demands. When Gideon had started running, Patrick had not only seen how talented he was, he'd also discovered how well he responded to criticism, while Percival did not. So he was easy on Percival and hard on Gideon, and the harder he was, the better Gideon ran. It was not always wise. There were the inevitable difficulties of having two sons who ran competitively, the difficulties of
Percival's
having
started first. After the race at Brunswick that changed Gideon's career, Patrick had acted badly toward him. He still regretted it. He remembered Gideon running track as a high school freshman, throwing up after every race, enduring.
Such capacity for pain.
Later Patrick suggested to the high school coach that Gideon wasn't really a miler, and when the coach put him in the two-mile, Gideon stopped throwing up. But more often, Patrick inflicted the pain rather than eased it.
As now.
Gideon's voice came suddenly on the line, tense and expectant, and Patrick almost shuddered.

    
"Hello? Dad?" Gideon was out of breath. Patrick pretended that his headache was a black ball outside of him, hanging in the gray air of his blindness, several feet away. He told Gideon what he could.

    
"I'll come home," Gideon said.

    
Patrick breathed deeply. "Christ, coming home is the last thing you should do," he said. "Aren't your conference championships coming up?"

    
"This puts the conference championships in one hell of a perspective, Dad."

    
"Until we know something, the best thing is to stay right where you are. Train. Besides, Percival is probably all right. We all have a good feeling about it."

    
Horsecrap
. But what good would it do to have Gideon home, thinking how he'd beaten his older brother in every race that mattered—including, perhaps, the ability to stay alive?

    
The orange dots danced in front of Patrick's eyes. He smelled
Mag's
bath powder as she took the phone from him. He went out of the phone room, feeling his way along the wall.

    
"Gideon, do me a favor," he heard her say. "Stay where you are. Your father is having a difficult time trying to entertain all his sons."

    
She believed he was trying to entertain them.

    
"No, not his eyes, just stress," she lied. "But humor him anyway.

    
When she hung up, Patrick said, "We didn't even ask him how his team did in that big cross-country meet yesterday."

    
"He doesn't care about that now,"
Mag
said.

    
"We should have asked." Gideon would always care about such things. Not thinking meant that he was not as much in control as he had tried to be.

    
Patrick felt as limp as the washcloth he had used to cover his eyes. He could not go on like this, setting the example. And then, just at that moment, it seemed to him that the gray he was seeing was not the gray of blindness but of light outside his eyes.

    
"I feel it easing up a little," he said.

    
"What?"

    
"The eyes—easing up.

    
"Can you see?"
Izzy
asked.

    
"I'm starting to." The headache was still very powerful, but daylight was clearly visible as he looked through the windows. The orange dots had disappeared. Inside the room the light was a cozy yellow, almost golden. He could see one of the twins.

    
"Focus on my mustache," Merle said.

    
"I can just make it out." Yes, yes, his vision was definitely returning. "It looks like a disease," he said to Merle. "Or maybe a fungus."

    
"That's just how I would have described it," said Darren.

    
The relief was enormous. He looked down at his clothes. "I can see well enough to go upstairs and get out of this bathrobe," he said. "I didn't realize I was still in my bathrobe. Maybe I'm going senile."

    
"How's the headache?"

    
"Hurts."

    
"Probably low blood sugar,"
Izzy
said. "You need to eat something."

    
"Maybe." It was generous of
Izzy
to try to offer a solution. But if it was just the headache, he could cope. It was a trifle compared to the feeling of entrapment when he was blind. His eyesight was blurry—it would stay blurry for hours—but it was functional. It would get him through the day. He felt that his vision had not returned just then by accident. He felt that he had willed it.

    
Mag
could not believe how pathetic Patrick was acting. Pathetic. There was no other word. Pretending to concentrate on Merle's mustache as if that were the important thing, and not his eyes opening up. Acting as if he was shocked to find himself still in his bathrobe. Pretending he'd been in charge all along, when in fact everyone had been doing for him all morning—getting his medicine, wetting his washcloth, dialing the phone. Patrick the
Stoic,
replaced by Patrick the Clown. And all the time pretending Percival was in no particular danger, that this was some sort of cheerful family gathering. Telling Gideon not to come home—and she going along with him,
trained
to go along with him—when Gideon had every right to be here if he wanted to. If it were not for that sense of separation that surrounded her, she would have screamed or shaken Patrick. But now he was upstairs dressing—he had been up there much longer than he needed to be—and his absence unsettled her, too. Every moment things were becoming more bizarre.

    
At first, in the early hours of TV bulletins and interrupted shows, the phone and door had both been ominously silent. Then suddenly they both started ringing nonstop. It was as if everyone had absorbed all they could of the TV fare and wanted the drama raw.

    
The first newspaper that called was the
Freestate
Sentinel
.