“Maybe the tree fell over,” Kevin says.
“Maybe is Mitzi!” Isabelle says. She hops to her feet, incited by this thought. Kevin knows she would like to give Mitzi a good, sound slap across the face. Mitzi brought Isabelle into the family and then left it herself. “I would like to go out and see.”
“Let’s not and say we did.”
“Kevin,” Isabelle says. “It is your family.”
“Our family,” he says, and he’s so tickled by this thought that he doesn’t even mind following Isabelle out into the hallway.
The main room is freezing because the front door is standing wide open. There is a loud, strange noise like that of a trapped or hurt animal, and Kevin sees his father embracing someone wearing a dark coat. Ava comes rushing out of the kitchen, followed by Scott in his Santa suit.
“Patrick?” Ava says.
Kevin is confused until he realizes that the figure his father is hugging and shushing is indeed the crown prince of the Quinn family. Patrick is crying, but to say he’s crying doesn’t begin to describe it. He’s sobbing, bellowing, howling. Kevin hasn’t seen this kind of emotion out of his brother since childhood-one scary afternoon at Nobadeer Beach when Patrick was ten and Kevin was nine and a wave took Patrick by surprise. It turned him upside down, inside out, and backward, and then there was another wave on top of that, and then another wave on top of that. Kevin had been too stunned and far too cowardly to make any move to help his brother, although he could see if someone didn’t come to the rescue, Patrick was going to drown.
Kelley had run down from where he and Margaret were sitting on the beach, and he pulled Patrick out. Patrick is crying now much as he had cried then-as if his life were in danger.
Ava says, “What… what is wrong?”
Isabelle squeezes Kevin’s arm and heads back to the kitchen. She is family now, but he can’t blame her for not wanting to jump right into this mess. Scott follows Isabelle into the kitchen, so then it’s just Kevin and Ava and Patrick and Kelley in the main room, plus a fifth presence, which is Patrick’s enormous sadness.
Kevin shuts the front door. He’s happy Patrick is here. He can’t wait to see the look on Patty’s face when he tells him he’s getting married and having a baby.
Ava is standing a few feet away from the melded figures of Patrick and Kelley, looking confused and bereft. She doesn’t like being left in the dark; she always has to know what’s going on.
“What is wrong?” she asks again.
Kevin decides the proper course of action is to pour shots of Jameson all around. They are, after all, a family of Irish heritage, their great-grandfather Quinn hailing from County Cork, so whiskey is acceptable in any emergency. Kevin brings the bottle and four shot glasses over to the sofa and coffee table in front of the hearth. The fireplace is laid out with birch logs as decoration for the party-it’s always too hot in the room to light it, plus Mitzi thinks fires lead to inhalation of secondhand smoke-but now Kevin opens the flue and stuffs a bunch of used paper napkins and some kindling under the logs. The room is cold, it’s Christmas Eve, they are a family in crisis, and, along with whiskey, they need a fire.
“Come,” Kevin says once he gets the fire started. “Sit.”
In general, Kevin doesn’t have much luck when he tries to tell his family what to do, but tonight his voice is strong and clear and authoritative. Ava sits, and Kelley leads Patrick over, at which point Patrick collapses on his back, hogging most of the room.
Kevin pours the shots and hands them around. Patrick already smells like a distillery and probably needs a shot of Jameson like he needs a hole in the head. He’s wearing rumpled suit pants and a white dress shirt with a weird yellow-purple stain on the front. It looks like a bruise. He hasn’t shaved in a couple of days. He’s not wearing socks, just fancy Italian suede loafers that probably cost as much as Kevin makes in a week.
Kevin raises his shot glass, and the rest of his family follows suit. Kelley takes a breath as if to say something-perhaps to impart some fatherly wisdom, which, Kevin realizes, they all desperately need. It has been so long since it’s been just the four of them alone doing anything. In Kevin’s memory, the four of them haven’t been alone together since Kelley moved out of the brownstone and into that weird executive apartment on Wall Street. That was during the year of transition: Margaret was gone, and Mitzi had not yet arrived. Patrick and Kevin and Ava used to take the 2/3 train down to see their father every other weekend, and they would always visit the South Street Seaport because the rest of the financial district was closed up. Once, Kelley took them to Windows on the World, at the top of the World Trade Center. Ten years later, on September 11, all Kevin could think about was that dinner. He and Patrick had stared out the window and wondered if anyone could jump and survive.
No.
They, however, have survived. Sort of.
Kelley seems to realize that there isn’t anything wise or even appropriate he can say, and so the four of them merely touch glasses and throw the shots back, then set the glasses back on the table, all of this nearly in unison.
Ava wipes her lips. “I miss Mommy,” she says.
This starts Patrick crying again, and for a second Kevin feels like crying, too. For a second, the four of them are nothing more than refugees of something broken that they all wished could be whole again.
KELLEY
Ava heads off to bed first, and shortly after, Isabelle emerges from the kitchen-cleanup is done-and Kevin rises, takes her hand, and leads her to the back of the house.
Kevin and Isabelle are engaged, Kelley thinks. He’s both thrilled and incredulous. And they’re having a baby. He’d always thought Kevin would make a magnificent father, but, after the way Norah Vale left him bruised and bleeding in the gutter, it didn’t seem likely. Not unless something astonishing happened.
Such as meeting Isabelle.
Kelley feels like Happy Scrooge again, despite his many troubles. He can’t wait to share the news with Margaret. Tomorrow, when she calls from Hawaii, he’ll get her on the line alone, and they will celebrate the advent of a fourth Quinn grandbaby-a piece of each of them coming together in another human being.
Kelley misses Mitzi; that hurt is fresh and new, like a bad toothache. But he misses Margaret, too, differently, in an older way, like a bone that has broken and never been set properly.
And Kelley misses Bart. That hurt is like a thorn in the soft arch of his foot that he valiantly tries to ignore. He wonders if Bart will be allowed to call home on Christmas.
But now isn’t the time to worry about Kevin or Bart. It’s time to worry about Patrick. Kelley can’t remember a single other time when Patrick has sought advice or counsel, when Patrick has come to him crying in pain or shame. He was born knowing what to do-he slept through the night, he crawled early, he walked early, he started reading early, he was valedictorian of his class, he got in early decision at Colgate, then got into Harvard Business School, and, in a handful of years, was made head of private equity at Everlast Investments. He married the right girl, bought the right house, fathered three noisy, beautiful sons. He is just like Margaret, Kelley thinks, in the way he seamlessly pursues exactly what he wants and gets it. Kelley was more like that before, when he lived in New York and was basically single-handedly responsible for setting the price of gasoline in the United States. Of course, Kelley wasn’t a very nice person back then, and he suspects that Patrick isn’t always very nice, either. The other kids think he’s a relentless bastard.