“Hi, Dad,” Marlinchen said now, brightly. “We’re all here. It’s not just a visit, it’s an invasion.”
Hugh, in his rocker, looked improved from the last time I’d seen him. His color was better, as was his posture. Marlinchen set the ivy at his side, and leaned over. “Can you give me a kiss?”
Hugh leaned close to her, one hand steadying himself on the arm of the rocker, and obeyed. The doctors were right; he did understand what those around him were saying.
But he didn’t, or couldn’t, speak. Marlinchen carried the conversation, with Colm and Liam adding their comments sporadically. Hugh was clearly listening, but his voice came out as an unsteady rumble, or telegramlike half sentences that didn’t make immediate sense. He seemed to understand he wasn’t making sense, either, embarrassment lighting his blue eyes.
Something else: Hugh seemed focused only on Marlinchen and the three boys on the couch. After about five minutes, Freddy leaned over to speak to him. “Mr. Hennessy, remember what we’ve been talking about, turning your head to scan the whole room?”
He was coaching his patient to compensate for the neglect, the tendency of some stroke patients to ignore stimuli from the side affected by the stroke. Hugh did as instructed. He turned his head, looking past the boys on the couch, and stopped. For the first time, he saw Aidan. A muscle jumped under his left eye. There was nothing impaired about his vision or his memory.
Marlinchen’s smile became even more set. She seemed to realize what had happened, but said nothing to acknowledge Aidan’s presence.
“I’ve been saving The New York Review of Books for you,” she told her father. “I didn’t throw any of them out. I’ll read the better articles to you.”
Hugh’s attention had not shifted. The muscles of his face were working, and a small bubble of saliva had appeared at the corner of his mouth. The sound he was making took shape. “What is,” he said. “What is. What is she. She is…”
Marlinchen shot me a nervous glance. “Oh,” she said. “Dad, this is Sarah Pribek. A friend of ours.”
But Hugh clearly wasn’t looking at me. He was staring at Aidan, and I remembered what Marlinchen said, that Hugh was confusing his pronouns. Hugh didn’t mean to say she; he meant he. Hugh’s blue eyes were narrow, and trained on his oldest son.
Beside me, Aidan shifted on his feet. “Maybe I should take a little walk,” he said.
Marlinchen, forced to acknowledge what was happening, looked pained. “I don’t know,” she said.
On the couch, Colm seemed to have recused himself psychologically from the situation, examining a small callus on one of his weightlifter’s hands. Liam looked from his father to his sister. His eyes were intent, but he said nothing.
I took the decision from Marlinchen’s hands. “Yeah, that might be a good idea,” I said. It was probably best that Hugh didn’t have another stroke at the sight of his long-lost son.
Aidan slipped from the visiting room. After he left, Marlinchen carried on with her open-ended conversation, with Liam and Colm still helping at irregular intervals. Increasingly, I felt like an interloper, and after a moment I left the room, as Aidan had.
It was around one o’clock, with the iron heat of a June midday in full effect, but I wandered outside. The exit door was conveniently just beyond the visiting room, and I’d somehow wanted relief from the atmosphere of the nursing home: aseptic, yet cheerful; verdant with plants, yet somehow stale.
Once outside, I saw that Aidan had made the same decision. He was at a distance on the grounds, walking, and had drifted toward the only shade available, where willows overhung the shallow, reedy pond. The Canada geese that had been bathing there rose up and flew off at Aidan’s approach. All but one, which was flopping awkwardly.
Aidan still hadn’t noticed me following him. His attention was on the straggler goose. As it flailed forward into the sunlight, I saw a tiny flash of metal in its beak, and I realized what had happened. At one of the small lakes nearby, the bird had gotten a fishhook caught in its beak. It had flown here before settling down in this safe haven and trying to dislodge the hook, probably making things worse in the attempt.
Aidan, surprising me with his reflexes, snatched up the goose by its neck. The bird squalled with surprise. Its outstretched wings worked wildly, the tip of one scraping at Aidan’s cheekbone and forehead while he worked at the goose’s beak with his free hand. Aidan pulled his head back, out of reach of the bird’s thrashing wings, and spoke to the goose, not loud enough for me to overhear. Then he withdrew his hand, and I saw light glint off the small crook of metal.
Aidan released the bird, which shook itself indignantly, then took to the air. It flew low at first, only a few feet over the turf, as if making a test flight to see that all systems were go. Then it banked higher and was out of sight. Aidan, after watching it disappear, moved toward the pond’s edge. He cocked his arm and threw the fishhook out into the waters of the pond.
In a field full of cool, analytical thinkers, I’d always worked from instinct. In that moment, I made up my mind about Aidan Hennessy.
It was such a small thing Aidan had done, removing the fishhook from the goose’s beak, yet it spoke volumes. I didn’t believe that Aidan had known that anyone was within view of him. He had acted naturally and without forethought to ease an animal’s pain. I couldn’t reconcile that image with the idea of him ripping up Marlinchen’s cat.
Other people had tried to tell me. Marlinchen had been his staunchest defender, of course, but Liam had said it as welclass="underline" he’s our brother. And Mrs. Hansen, the grade-school teacher, had called Aidan a fighter but not a bully. I just hadn’t been able to hear any of it. Gray Diaz’s investigation, Prewitt’s suspicion… it had all set me on edge, and the resulting paranoia had spread throughout my life, coloring how I’d viewed Aidan, making his unexpected return seem sinister.
When Aidan sat down in the shade of the willow, I went to join him.
“Hey,” I said, sitting with my knees drawn up, resting my forearms on them.
“Hey,” he said.
“Look,” I said, “I should say something. I think we might have gotten off on the wrong foot.” Come on, Sarah, you can do better than that. “I was too hard on you, the night you came home.”
Aidan looked over at me.
“Suspicion is a cop virtue,” I explained. “It’s my fallback position when I don’t know what to think.”
“It’s okay,” he said, taking out a pack of cigarettes and starting to remove one. I suspected that he, like most smokers, fell back on cigarettes at awkward moments, not necessarily for the nicotine but just for the distraction of a simple physical activity. “I mean, I can see how it might have looked to you.”
I nodded but said nothing else.
“I guess I should say, too…” He paused, thinking. “Well, Marlinchen says you’ve been looking out for them, since Hugh had his stroke.”
I shrugged. “Mostly, it was my job.” I wasn’t sure that was true, but it sounded good.
“Well, anyway, it’s…” Aidan tore up a handful of grass. “I’m glad someone was there.” He slid the cigarette back in its pack.
“Quitting?” I asked him.
He shrugged. “Marlinchen’s on my case about it.”
That was Marlinchen, nothing if not forceful in her opinions. I plucked a dandelion globe. “Can I ask you a question?” I said. “It’s another cop habit.”
“Go ahead,” he said.
“I know you don’t have a criminal record,” I told him. “That’s kind of hard for a runaway to do, to survive without breaking the law. I don’t mean to get in your business, but were you really law-abiding, or just lucky?”
“Mostly law-abiding,” Aidan said. “There’s always work off the books, if you know where to look for it. When I couldn’t find jobs, I raided garbage bins behind stores. Panhandled. Made up stories about having a bus ticket stolen. That kind of thing,” he said.