Ten Thousand Saints - Eleanor Henderson [28]
In the phone booth at the corner of Tompkins, a man was sleeping. Johnny knocked gently on the glass to wake him and, addressing him by name, asked if he could use the phone.
“You got to call your old lady, Mr. Clean?” The man stumbled out of the booth, the smell of urine following him out into the cold.
“You know it, Jack.” One of the man’s eyes coasted luridly over Eliza, staring through her, before he wandered into the park. The tents across the park were blue and yellow and army green, made out of cardboard and bedsheets and tarps, drooping with snow, and she might have thought she was in a third world country, or on a battlefield, or at some abandoned circus, if she hadn’t known she was standing in her own hometown. The park was full of tents, and this was why it was called Tent City, and seeing it she felt a dull stab of shame and distaste. Not long ago she had heard on the news that a man had frozen to death in this park. Or maybe it was another one.
“Is that guy blind?”
Johnny looked up from the number he was dialing. “He’s just a faker. Hang around a sec, would you? Make sure I have the right number?”
She’d been hoping to, of course. She wondered if there was a gracious way to insert herself into Johnny’s conversation. She would linger at a distance, pretending not to eavesdrop, and then tell him not to hang up. She’d ask Teddy how Jude was feeling, if he’d had any word from his mom, what his plans were.
“Prudence, hey, it’s Johnny McNicholas. Teddy’s brother. Remember me?”
The snow that had fallen the week of Christmas had hardened into slick, icy mounds, stretching across the park like the tentacular roots of trees. She missed the cold purity of New England.
“Who did?” Johnny asked.
Eliza thought of the snow that had fallen over them last night, the flakes like small, wet mouths, whispering.
“Where is he?”
Johnny was standing up straight in the booth, gripping the phone cord. Eliza pulled the collar of her coat tight around her ears. She had been too young when her father died to remember her mother’s face when she got the call, but she’d imagined it. She had not known until now that she’d imagined it, but she had, a thousand times; she knew this grim dream as well as she knew her mother’s voice.
Johnny’s eyes froze, and then darted for a place to land, and then pinned her where she stood.
Prudence hadn’t gone with them to the hospital. The vehicle into which Jude’s stretcher was fed had room only for their mother. The sirens had woken her, and by the time she’d found her bathrobe and slippers and dashed down the stairs, the paramedics were already loading the boys into the twin ambulances, their bodies draped in blue blankets, and from the look of them there was no reason to believe that one was alive and one was dead. The same substances were discovered in their systems—THC, alcohol, petroleum distillate, and chlorofluorocarbons—except in Teddy’s there was also cocaine. Whether this distinction was of significance the doctors could not say. Her brother had fallen into a severe state of hypothermia, but Teddy had died of heart failure before he’d had the chance to freeze, had been dead all night behind their house, not far from the bed where Prudence had been sleeping.
She spent two nights at her friend Rachael’s. Rachael’s mother, who was a student at the New England Culinary Institute, practiced her foie gras on them both nights, and each time it tasted marvelous. Rachael’s father kept talking about his frat brother Rusty who’d OD’d in college, and they all went to church on Sunday morning and prayed that Teddy’s soul would be accepted into heaven. Afterward Rachael’s sister took them to the mall to buy black dresses to wear to the funeral, which was held at the same church the day after Jude was released from the hospital.
Beatrice McNicholas wasn’t there. She’d disappeared. Her housekeeping clients were questioned, but nobody had a clue where she’d gone, and as far as anybody knew, she didn’t know her son was dead. After two days, when it was determined that neither of Teddy’s parents could