The Engagements Read online

  But now that he had watched so many strangers take their final breaths, he felt certain that they did not go anywhere at all. The heart stopped and the brain stopped, and that was the life. Gone. His mother believed that there was this brief period of time after someone died but before they got to heaven, when the person’s spirit filled the familiar air. When her own mother passed, she took James to her childhood home and asked, “Do you feel her, Jimmy? Nanny’s still here.” At the time, he thought that maybe he did, and told her so. His mother seemed pleased.

  Cathy returned and handed him the coffees. “Another couple minutes on the burger.”

  James stared up at the TV in the corner while he waited. The highlight reel from last night’s Celtics game flashed across the screen. The Celts had beat the Bullets, 122 to 102. Larry Bird had scored twenty-seven points.

  “Good game,” he said, to no one in particular.

  He had stayed up watching until the end. Even though he was exhausted, he knew he wouldn’t be able to sleep, so what was the point of lying there, turning and tossing? He drank five beers during the game. This was a new habit of his, to buy a six-pack and drink five. It was kind of like the way Sheila devoured her dessert but left the last bite of cake on the plate to show restraint.

  He felt like shit now, but it was worth it. The only times he really felt alive anymore were when he was watching basketball, or listening to his records from high school, or taking his old Ford Coupe out of his mother’s garage for the first time each spring. Pathetic maybe, but true.

  He still loved all the music he had loved back when he was playing with his band—the Beatles, the Stones, the Doors, Aretha Franklin, and the Supremes. When he heard those songs, he was transported to a time when it felt like anything was possible. Every one took him back to a moment. The first time he and Sheila spent the night together, when her parents went out of town, was “Today” by Jefferson Airplane: I’m so full of love I could burst apart and start to cry.

  Junior year, when she said they were through, was Diana Ross singing “Reflections” over and over for three days straight until Sheila changed her mind.

  James had a junky bass guitar that had been handed down to him by his cousin. He used to get stoned in his bedroom playing along with the Velvet Underground on the record player and then, high and inspired, he’d write songs of his own, and tape them to the walls. Days later, making out with Sheila in his bed, or jerking off to one of his older brother’s Playboys under the plaid bedspread, he’d look up at his creations and feel powerful.

  James glanced at his watch. His mother would be up by now, waiting for him to call, like he did every morning around this time. He walked over to the pay phone.

  She answered on the first ring. “Jimmy?”

  “Ma?”

  She paused, he wasn’t sure why. She had made an almost full recovery after her stroke, other than her peripheral vision, which was shot. But sometimes she couldn’t manage to get her words out.

  “Merry Christmas Eve,” he said.

  “How’s your day?”

  “Can’t complain. I saw your friend Doris when I was out walking the dog this morning.”

  “I hope you said hello.”

  “Nah, I just shoved her aside and kept walking.”

  “Jimmy. Don’t be fresh.”

  “Did you sleep okay?” he asked. She had told him that she was waking up short of breath lately, her heart racing. The thought of it made him want to move her into his house so he could keep an eye on her at all times. That was probably where they were heading eventually, though James had no idea where they’d put her.

  He knew in his bones that she wouldn’t live much longer. Whenever he said so to Sheila, she replied, “Every morning when your mother wakes up, she has six months to live. It’s been that way for ten years, Jimmy.” But he was certain, and the knowledge broke his heart. Standing in the small, dim rooms of her house, James sometimes felt sick thinking that someday soon, all he would have of her would be objects—musty tea towels and eyeglasses on skinny gold cords and plaid furniture that reeked of cigarettes.

  “I slept fine,” she said.

  “Good. Whatcha up to now?”

  “Just listening to the cardinal say Mass on the radio, and cooking some eggs for breakfast.”

  “You know it’s gonna snow, right? Don’t be planning any long road trips, okay?”

  She laughed. She couldn’t drive anymore. She never went anywhere on her own. They took her for her weekly outings to the doctor’s office and the church and the beauty parlor, where she still got her hair set every Friday, though he couldn’t figure out why or who for.

  “I’ll be by tomorrow morning to say hi. And then I’ll be back for you around noon for Mass. Then we’ll go to Tom and Linda’s for dinner, okay?”

  “I’ll be ready.”

  “Maybe we can take the kids into Boston to see the Christmas lights on the Common this weekend. We can have lunch at Brigham’s. Would you like that?”

  “Oh yes,” she said. “I haven’t gone in town for ages.”

  His mother was a saint: a sweet, patient woman who had done her best raising two wild boys alone. He had this memory of one of the few times she had tried to take them on vacation. They went to a motel in Hampton Beach. First his brother got in trouble for finding a stray dog and bringing it into the pool. Then James got into a fight with a kid on the boardwalk over an arcade game and ended up with a black eye. Their mother had brought along her electric frying pan so they wouldn’t have to spend money eating out. That night, she tried to make spaghetti in their room, but when she plugged in the pan it blew a fuse, and the entire place lost power. They got thrown out. He could recall her laughing and crying at the same time, all the way back to Massachusetts.

  “We really are a motley crew, aren’t we?” she said through her tears, and oddly enough, James had felt proud.

  The radio was always on in their house growing up—Nat King Cole, Frank Sinatra, The Irish Hour, and Mass every morning at seven. “To keep me company,” his mother had often said, and it was only now that he realized how young she had been. Eighteen when his brother was born, twenty-two when James came along. A widow by twenty-three. He could still see her pretty young face, frowning whenever he lied. Jimmy McKeen, you fess up this instant. It’s obvious you’re fibbing, you have a face like a Russian flag.

  She used to sit out on the front porch before work, chain-smoking in her pink bathrobe and rollers. Now she was fifty-six and looked seventy. Until the stroke, she had worked every day of her life. First as a receptionist in a dental office, and later as a lunch lady at his high school, which had mortified him at the time. Some days James ignored her when he saw her in the cafeteria, pretending she was a stranger. Thinking back on it now made him burn with shame. She waited tables at night some years to make ends meet. Yet she had almost nothing to show for it.

  As a young woman, she had probably never imagined that she’d have to work once she got married. Her husband would provide and she would look after the kids, and that would be that.

  James’s father drank himself to death. That’s how everyone had always put it. Now James knew that drinking yourself to death was just a sanitized way of saying that his father was such a bad alcoholic that he managed to destroy all the cells in his liver, which were gradually replaced with a fatty buildup that turned his skin yellow and made his fluid-filled belly swell so that in the only remaining pictures, he resembled a skinny guy who was eight months pregnant. But he just kept drinking, and eventually ended up with full-blown liver failure, which then led his kidneys to fail, too. It was a slow death that killed him at just twenty-eight. A real overachiever, that guy.

  People seemed to want to comfort James over the loss of his father, but how could you mourn someone you couldn’t even remember? He figured it was harder for his older brother Bobby, who actually knew the man, and maybe that accounted for the fact that Bobby had always been an ass, taking every opportunity to beat
on James and make him feel small.

  Sheila said he buried his feelings. Once, she had even suggested that he might think about talking to a shrink. But really, he had nothing to say. He wished his mother didn’t have to be alone, but then he wished a lot of things. Truth be told, he felt sadder about the time when he was in high school and his fifteen-year-old basset hound died. In Sheila’s opinion, this was significant, since his father had loved the breed and kept a collection of basset hound mugs and statuettes and spoons and things, all of which got left to James and Bobby.

  She said James loved that red ’49 Ford Coupe so much because it had once been his old man’s. His mother had let the car sit rusting in the driveway, and that year after high school, when he had nothing better to do, James fixed it up to perfection. He put in a Hurst floor shifter and the leather seats from a wrecked Mustang that he found in a junkyard. But he did not think of his father when he drove it. The car felt like his and no one else’s.

  If anything, James was defined by the man’s absence more than the man himself. Growing up in the fifties, they really did believe that most families were Ozzie and Harriet. His friends all had two parents—a father who went to the office, and a mother who stayed home. James used to dream that maybe some kind man would come along and rescue them. But his mother never went on a single date after his father died. She still went by Mrs. McKeen to this day, though her husband had been dead since 1954. It wasn’t that she pined for him. She never spoke about the guy. It seemed to James that his mother’s behavior had less to do with devotion, and more to do with some old-fashioned belief that when it came to marriage you got one shot, and that was it.

  “So I’ll be by right after my shift tomorrow to shovel,” he said now. “Just stay inside until then, okay? Don’t even go out to get the mail.”

  “Jimmy, don’t worry about me,” she said. “I’m worried about you. You’re working too much. You need a break.”

  “Sheila will probably go grocery shopping after lunch,” he said. “So get your list together.”

  They took complete care of his mother. Bobby was no help. He had come back from Vietnam with his head a little scrambled. Sheila thought it was unfair, the way he shirked his family obligations, but James was willing to cut him some slack, considering. When they were kids, American children absorbed patriotism without even seeing it, like his own boys got fluoride from the drinking water. Vietnam had killed this in so many of them. No one knew what they were fighting for.

  Bobby drifted around for a while after the war. He got involved with something called est, which he described as a personal improvement course, though it seemed like a straight-up cult to James. He married a maniac he met there. They moved to Arizona, so James didn’t see his brother much anymore. Whenever his wife’s name came up, Sheila said, “The woman sells Mary Kay cosmetics door-to-door. Her greatest desire in life is to sell enough lipstick to win a pink convertible. Your brother’s a nut job for marrying her.”

  James heard the jingling of the bell that hung above the door to Elsie’s. A rush of cold air. Then Maurice’s voice saying, “McKeen, let’s go.”

  “I’m getting called out on a job,” he said into the phone. “I’ll see you tomorrow, all right?”

  “Love you, Jimmy,” she said.

  “Love you too, Ma. And Ma—don’t skimp on your heat. Promise me.”

  There had been a rash of cases lately, old people who couldn’t or didn’t want to spend the money on heating their homes, so instead they froze to death in their rocking chairs. A week ago, they had responded to a call from a woman who hadn’t seen her elderly neighbor for a few days. James knew it was a rent-controlled building, and the heat was the first thing he thought of. But when they got inside, the apartment was warm. Maurice checked the thermostat. “It’s off,” he said.

  In the kitchen, the oven was set to 400 degrees. Its door hung open. Three feet away, a tiny white-haired lady in a pink sweat suit lay slumped on the kitchen floor, dead of carbon monoxide poisoning. The neighbors were lucky they hadn’t all died along with her.

  He hung up the phone and turned around. “Hey Cathy—”

  “I know,” she said with a smile. “You have to go.”

  “Hold on to that burger for me, will ya?” Maurice said, though they all knew she would make him a fresh one when they returned. All the EMTs came here, so Cathy was used to it, and she was a good sport—sometimes after closing, she brought the day’s unclaimed sandwiches to their break room at Cambridge Hospital for whoever might be hungry, free of charge. They, in turn, tipped her like crazy.

  James put a five in the jar on the counter before heading out.

  He got into the driver’s seat. He and Maurice switched off every few hours, and he always took the first leg.

  “Two-forty Albany,” Maurice told him, buckling his seat belt.

  It was a spot they went to at least once a day, the only wet shelter in the city. Every other shelter required sobriety, but at 240 Albany a person could get a bed no matter how drunk he was, as long as he behaved. There were those who wanted to see the place closed, along with the nearby Salvation Army. There was a real chicken/egg debate about the homeless population in and around Central Square—were they there, causing trouble, because that’s where all the services were? Or had the services popped up there, because that’s where the homeless people lived? Could you get rid of them just by moving the shelters?

  It all came down to the fact that while Cambridge types liked to think they worshipped diversity, at heart they didn’t want it in their neighborhoods. The city had changed these past few years. MIT was buying up all the old candy factories and turning them into offices and condos: Superior Nut, Tootsie Roll, the chocolate factory, all of them repurposed. There were high-rises going up in Kendall Square to house Biogen and other new tech companies—it made it so that the area was bustling with activity during the day and then dead at night, besides the Marriott. The mass exodus of middle-class white people back in the seventies was over, and now the yuppies were moving back, gutting old Victorians, and complaining endlessly about the homeless drunks and drug addicts in Central Square, who had never left, and so to James’s mind were the rightful owners of the place.

  The drunks were the worst. Those guys depressed the shit out of him. They usually ended up dead, and it was sad, because you’d run into them sober every once in a while, and it was like meeting an entirely different person: a glimpse of who they could have become had they just been able to kick the booze.

  There was traffic on the road. There was always traffic. In Milwaukee two years earlier, they had started putting paramedics on Harley-Davidsons. James thought it was a good idea, while also thanking God that he didn’t have to do it himself. If they tried to put him on a Harley, he’d be the one who would end up needing an ambulance.

  He switched on the siren. Most of the cars in front of him pulled gently to the right, but a mom in a station wagon just sat there in the middle of the road, as if he should drive through her.

  “Move the hell over, lady!” Maurice yelled.

  Eventually she did. James hit an open patch of road and pressed down on the gas.

  “We’re heading for a psych,” Maurice said. “He was acting weird and someone called on his behalf. He’s bleeding. Possibly violent.”

  “Sounds like a blast,” James said.

  “Yup. Merry Christmas to us.”

  By the time they got there, the guys from the fire department had already arrived. They stood a few feet away from the patient, though they weren’t interacting with him.

  “Thanks for the care stare, guys,” Maurice said under his breath.

  The private companies and the fire departments were always at war. Their company held the 911 contract for all of Cambridge, which meant they saw action every day. Without the contract, they would just be doing hospital transfers, leaving the real work to the fire department. But an engine company still came to every call. The fire department was eager to hol
d on to the funding that emergency services provided, but most firefighters had no interest in helping out in a case like this. They only wanted to save people when it required hazmat suits or a dive team. Anything basic they thought was beneath them. James knew the drill. He had been one of them once. He remembered when blood pressure cuffs had come in to the Lynn rescue squad. The guys had pitched a fit. What do you think we are, a bunch of fucking nurses? they all said. But when they got a cuff with a digital readout, they shut up. They’d take any excuse to use the thing. They were like Parker with his Nintendo.

  James and Maurice left the lights on, and got out. The guy was probably in his late forties, dressed in a flannel work shirt and stained dungarees. He looked drunk or high, or both, bobbing from side to side, his head lolling backward. There was a deep cut on his right cheek, blood trickling down to his collar. He had recently been in the hospital—he was still wearing the plastic bracelet.

  There were certain druggies and homeless guys they knew by name—frequent fliers, they called them. They knew these guys’ complete medical histories, their Social Security numbers, by heart, that’s how often they saw them. But James didn’t recognize this one.