Maybe that hadn’t been shock. Maybe that had been genuine disregard.
God, what could cause a father and son to lose touch to such a degree?
***
It was 3:16 in the morning when Sean stopped his rental car in front of the Southie row house where he and his brothers had grown up.
The duplex looked exactly the same: two stories of nothing special sided in an ugly pale blue. Front porch was a shallow lip of a thing, more a landing than a place to sit outside. Upstairs was all dark. Downstairs had what looked like a single lamp on in the living room.
He wondered who was staying in the bottom unit now. They’d always rented it out and clearly that was still the practice.
With a twist of his wrist, Sean turned the engine off, took the key out of the ignition then eased back in the seat.
On the flight from Teterboro to Logan, he’d made two phone calls, both of which had dumped into voice mail. The first had been to his younger brother, Billy, who was traveling around to preseason games with the rest of the New England Patriots football team. The second was to an international exchange that was the only way he had to get in touch with Mac. The oldest O’Banyon boy was a special forces soldier in the U.S. Army so God only knew where he was at any given time.
Sean had told them both to call him back as soon as they got the message.
He looked up to the second story of the house and felt his skin tighten around his bones and muscles. Man, Pavlov had been right about trained responses to stimuli. Even though Sean was a grown man, as he stared at the windows of his childhood apartment, he felt his ten-year-old self’s terror.
Dropping his head, he rubbed his eyes. The damn things felt as if they had sawdust in them and his temples were pounding.
But then stress’ll do that to you.
He so didn’t want to go into that house. Probably should have stayed at the Four Seasons, which was what he usually did when he was in town. Except on some molecular level, he needed to see the old place even though he hated it. Needed to go inside.
It was like peeling back a Band-Aid and checking out a cut.
With a curse, he grabbed his leather duffel as well as the two bags of groceries he’d bought at a twenty-four-hour Star Market, then opened the car door and stood up.
Boston smelled different than New York. Always had. Tonight, the brine of the ocean was especially heavy in the air, buffered by the sweet sweat of summer’s humidity. As his nose ate up the scent, his brain registered it as home.
He followed the short concrete walkway up to the house then long-legged the five steps to the shallow front porch. He didn’t have a key, but as always, there was one tucked behind the flimsy metal mailbox that was tacked onto the aluminum siding.
The door opened with the exact same squeak he remembered, and, hearing the hinge complain, his blood turned into icy slush.
That squeak had always been the warning, the call to listen hard for what came next. If it was a door closing underneath them, he and his brothers would take a deep breath because it was just the tenants coming home. But if it was footsteps on the stairs? That meant pure panic and running for cover.
As he stepped inside the foyer, Sean’s heart started to jackrabbit in his chest and sweat broke out on his forehead.
Except, damn it, he was thirty-six years old and the man was dead. Nothing could hurt him here anymore. Nothing.
Uh-huh, right. Too bad his body didn’t know this. As he went up the staircase, his knees were weak and his gut was a lead balloon. And God, the sound of the wood creaking under his soles was awful in his ears. The dirge of his approach was the same as when his father had come home, and hearing his own footsteps now, he remembered the fear he had felt as a boy as the thundering noise grew louder and louder.
At the top of the landing he put his hand on the doorknob and the key in the lock. Before he went in, he told himself this was only a door and he wasn’t stepping back into his past. The space-time continuum just didn’t work that way. Thank God.
But he was still in a cold sweat as he opened up and walked in.
When he turned on the lights, he was amazed. Everything was exactly the same: the tattered Barcalounger with the TV tray right next to it; the rumpled couch with its faded flower print; the 1970s lamps that were as big as oil drums and just as ugly; the crucifix on the wall, the yellowed, exhausted lace drapery.
The air was stuffy in spite of the air conditioner that was humming, so he cracked open a window. The place smelled of cigarette smoke, but it was the kind of thing left over after a four-pack-a-day addict stops. The stench lingered, embedded in the room’s paint and flooring and fabrics, but wasn’t in the air itself.