Ask Again, Yes

by Mary Beth Keane

This was the great shock of America, winters that would cut the face off a person, summers that were as thick and as soggy as bogs.

Francis braced for something more personal than he wanted to be asked. It was one of the first things he’d noticed about America, that everyone felt at ease asking each other any question that came into their minds.

Francis noticed that Patsy said “twenty years” as if it were nothing, a mere blink, though at that moment it was more than the length of Francis’s whole life. After twenty years, as long as he didn’t get killed, he could do something else if he wanted. He saw his life split up into blocks of twenty, and for the first time he wondered how many blocks he’d get.

because you try it and try it and try it a little longer and next thing it’s who you are.

When a father taught a son how to throw a ball, he marched that boy to the middle of the road as if they were on a block tight with tenements, because that’s where he’d learned from his father.

He couldn’t explain to her that he needed the trees and the quiet as a correction for what he saw on the job, how crossing a bridge and having that physical barrier between him and his beat felt like leaving one life and entering another.

The quiet of the house when she kept to her room was not the peaceful silence of a library, or anywhere near as tranquil. It was, Peter imagined, more like the held-breath interlude between when a button gets pushed and the bomb either detonates or is defused. He could feel his own heartbeat at those times. He could track his blood as it looped through his veins.

“Like Dad?” she mimicked, exaggerating his expression without looking at him, making her face dopey and stupid, like she was performing for an audience she hoped to make laugh. “Like Daaaad? Like Daaaaaaaaaaaaaad?” He calmly took his backpack from the peg by the door and fitted it over his shoulders. He felt lonely all of a sudden. Everything in their house was lonely: the dark china cabinet filled with fragile things no one ever touched, the fake plant sitting next to the sofa, the crooked window shade, a silence so violent he wanted to clap his hands over his ears.

It was his fault, he knew. Even as he was yelling he knew it was on him. Anne Stanhope rang an alarm in him the first moment he met her, and yet he’d done nothing.

Together in their black dress socks pulled up to mid-calf and their plaid shorts—all of them with their off-duty weapons holstered under their short-sleeved button-down shirts—they scrutinized every manner of bit, nail, and screw without having the first idea what to do with any of it because they’d all moved up from the city where they’d just badgered their supers until things got fixed.

The sky seemed bigger, emptier, since high school started, and for the first time she saw Gillam as a small place, set among other small places, and she craved to know what it would be like to walk beyond it, walk beyond the next town over, too, and the one after that, until the craving had been satisfied.

He knew it didn’t quite have anything to do with him, but some days, often when he least expected it, he removed his sympathy from her and took it back to wrap around himself.

“The thing is, Peter, grown-ups don’t know what they’re doing any better than kids do. That’s the truth.”

All in one week the cold ended and the heat began and they talked as they did every year about how that’s not the way the seasons used to work.

All week he’d been looking at the proximity of the two beds in his room, trying not to think about the fact that he’d never—not even in George’s apartment—lived in such close quarters with another human being. He didn’t know if his habits were normal, if he was too neat or too messy, if he was too quiet or too loud, when a person should ignore one’s roommate in order to grant a sort of false privacy, or if it was better and less weird to always acknowledge the other person and try to keep up light conversation.

He should have been so wild that George would have had to hunt his father down and make him come back, so wild he would have had to get his mother’s lawyer involved to figure out what could be done. But instead, he’d been so very good.

Instead, she got a monthly injection, and ever since that change she’d felt steadier, less haunted by the feeling that something bad was always about to happen.

But the worst times of all were when she punctured his strength on purpose just so she could see whether it was possible for those shoulders to wilt, to see if there was a limit to what he could handle.

But Brian said not one single word. Instead, he turned around and walked upstairs. That’s the part she could play for herself, for a lawyer, for a doctor, at any hour of the day or night, no matter what medication she was taking, no matter what sort of week she was having, if only they could hook up a cord to her brain and see it for themselves. Anne knew what he was hoping for, she knew exactly what he was hoping for, and he didn’t even have the basic decency to take Peter upstairs with him.

It was easy, and that surprised him. He felt young and strong and completely unconnected to the person Lena had been fussing over for so many years.

It was time to have fun. And he’d figured out that the fun was often not the thing itself—the party, the keg stand, the naked running into the duck pond—but the endless talking about it after, the reliving and describing, and laughing about it in front of people who wished they’d been there.

Finance didn’t interest him, plus there was a towel-snapping vibe in any econ seminar he’d taken that reminded him of the locker room at Dutch Kills.

“Isn’t that what every minority in this city has to deal with every single day? Whole groups being judged based on the actions of a few?”

She’d learned that the beginning of one’s life mattered the most, that life was top-heavy in that way. Why else would the doctors keep asking about it, when the events that had gotten her locked in a hospital had happened so much more recently?

But to come all the way here and raise a child who became a cop (how Irish, how typical) and fall in love with any old girl—what was the point? When she thought too much about all of this, she wouldn’t be able to sleep for staring at the ceiling.

He once told her a cop could spot the drunk drivers not by how reckless they were but by how careful. Both hands on the wheel, never breaking the speed limit, until—oops—the car strayed over the double yellow for just an instant. She thought of that on the nights when he set out plates for supper—how careful, how deliberate. Or when he asked about her day, the way he neatly lined one word after another and made the right shapes with his mouth.

He regretted it immediately. He didn’t ever speak that way. Not to women. Not to his wife. Not to Kate, the person he’d loved his entire life.

He knew exactly what she meant, but it was exhausting to think about it all the time, to drag the weight of their shared history around with them every minute of the day. They won. They were together. Why go over it again and again? Kate thought about their wedding day as a conclusion to something, where he thought about it as a beginning. Rising action versus falling action. They were reading different books.

He did want George there but he didn’t want to rattle her, not when she’d be nervous already. It was an old habit, anticipating her moods, and it came back easily.

For part of the drive home she tried to understand how the scariest person from her childhood was at that moment sitting in her living room, waiting for her, and that their worry for Peter, the person they each loved most, bound them, put them in the same boat together, and they could either row hard as one or else drift while he drowned nearby.

He thought of Frankie and Molly doing their homework with music and talking and laughter in the background. The doorbell ringing, kids stopping by, Kate on the phone, pots boiling over, everything a chaos of love. Then he thought of himself at their ages, alone in a silent house, listening for a creak on the stairs.

Her hair fell over one of her shoulders and he thought about how lovely she looked that evening. He’d been looking at her face for so long that sometimes he forgot to notice it.

And then he saw what he’d never seen before, which was that Peter was fine. And Kate was fine. Lena was fine. And he, Francis Gleeson, was fine. And that all the things that had happened in their lives had not hurt them in any essential way, despite what they may have believed at times. He had not lost anything; he’d only gained.

For the very first time, he felt that Peter was his blood.