House on Fire

44

Patty was waiting for me, behind the screen door. She opened it as I approached and gave me a kiss. She’d just come back from a run, I could tell. She was still wearing her shorts and colorful running shoes and a wicking T-shirt, and she smelled of perspiration and something floral, maybe a shampoo or conditioner. Patty looked a lot better than she had just a few days earlier, though still visibly tired.

“Thank you so much for coming.”

“Of course. Kids at school?”

She shook her head. “He’s upstairs. He refuses to go to school. And I can’t make him, Nick. Though I try. Maybe you can.”

I nodded.

“I took him to a therapist and he wouldn’t talk. Nick, he hates me. He actually says that. And he’s saying stuff like, ‘My dad was just a junkie, he wasn’t a hero.’”

“Okay,” I said. “Let me try to talk to him. How are Molly and Andrew doing?”

“They’re in school. Andrew seems the most normal, like nothing happened, and I really worry about that. Molly is sad, sometimes oppositional, but she’s coping. She’s going to school, and her friends have been great. We’ve talked a lot. But Brendan — Brendan used to be the easy one.”

“Okay. I’ll go upstairs.”

“I have to get to work,” she said. “And, Nick? Thank you.”

I found the kid lying on his bed playing with his phone. He barely looked up when I entered, which surprised me. “Hey, Uncle Nick,” he said flatly. His eyes still had that bruised look.

His room was crowded with posters — for Minecraft and Fortnite, for Marvel superheroes, for the Boston Red Sox and the New England Patriots and the Boston Bruins. And old soccer and baseball trophies. He was an outgoing, popular kid, like his late father had been. A happy kid, most of the time. Or he used to be.

“Hey, Brendan, what’re you up to?”

“Nothing.”

“Your mom wants me to get you to go to school, but I have a better idea. Let’s play hooky.”

“Hooky?”

“Skip it. Skip school.”

He looked at me now, as if to determine whether I was messing with him. He saw I wasn’t.

“Okay,” he said uncertainly.

“Come on, get out of your PJs and get dressed and come with me. I have an idea.”

I left him to it and went back downstairs. Patty was in the shower.

Brendan came downstairs twenty minutes later. He was taking his time. He got into the Defender without saying anything. Instead of trying to cajole a conversation out of him, I followed his lead and said nothing. So we drove in silence. I turned off my phone so when it rang it didn’t disturb us.

“Where’re we going?” he finally said.

“The beach.”

He just nodded. It wasn’t beach season; it was the fall, and no one went swimming in the ocean without a wetsuit this time of year. But he knew which beach I was talking about. It was the secluded beach he and I always went to when I visited in the summer.

I drove down a long, narrow tree-lined road that ended in a gulley and a serious-looking no parking sign and a dirt path through the woods. Since there was no parking, the only way to get to the beach was to walk nearly a quarter of a mile through the woods. As a result, this nameless ocean beach was almost always deserted.

I parked, expecting to get a ticket, considered it the price of convenience. We got out wordlessly and headed down the dirt path.

We walked in absolute silence through the dense, twilit woods. I could hear the cracking of twigs and the tweeting of birds and the chiggering of insects.

Finally the woods began to grow light and then bright and the trees became sparse and we came to a big sand dune, and there was the Atlantic Ocean spread out before us, blue-gray and glistening, lapping loudly on the shore. A sunny blue sky, a postcard.

We took off our shoes. I took a left, and he went with me. I walked beside him on the smooth wet sand. And I waited for him to say something.

And waited.

Finally, after another ten minutes of silence, I put up the white flag of surrender. “Remember the first time I brought you here?” I said. I kept walking.

He glanced at me but didn’t answer, kept walking. About half a minute later I saw his face redden and he started to cry, silently.

“I hate him,” he said. “I hate that he did this to us.”

“Sometimes I hate him too,” I said. “But he was my friend, and I loved him. And you know he saved my life.” I’d told him the story too many times. “He made some really bad choices, and that hurt a lot of people I love, like you.”

“So why did he do it?” he near-shouted.

“He had an illness, and sometimes that’s stronger than love. It can take someone over. Addiction to Oxydone or any of those other opioid drugs is incredibly powerful. Too powerful for most human beings, even strong, great men like your dad.”

He cried, still silently, and he stopped walking. Then he cried a little louder and put his hand over his red face. After another minute he put his hand down and said, “It’s not fair. I can’t do it all.”

“Do what all?”

“Everybody says now I’m the man in the family. I gotta be the man in the family.”

“No,” I said. “No, you don’t. You’re a kid. Who’s hurting because you’ve lost your dad. Look, you know I’m not going to take your father’s place, but I’m a grown-up, and right now the grown-ups need to be in charge. And you get to be a kid.”

Now his sobbing became convulsive. He sank to the sand, nearly collapsing, and I sat down and held him. I sort of rocked him, let him be a baby.

“You know I’m there for you, Bren,” I said. “Whatever you need.”

He just sobbed.

“You’re going to get through this,” I said. “I know it doesn’t feel like you will. It feels like the hurt will never go away. But it will.” I was quiet for a long time. “And let me tell you something else. Your dad was a hero.”