THE HOMECOMING BY JIM FUSILLI
He felt his stomach clench as he approached the Fort McHenry Tunnel, and already he had a pounding headache, a growing tightness in his throat. But then Tess spotted the towering cranes in the harbor, said, “Giraffe skeletons,” and laughed aloud as flatbed containers swung across the graying sky. He saw her smile through the rearview mirror; sitting back there among the empty seats, she pointed east with the eraser end, amusing herself again, and then made a note in her diary, shaking her head, beaming.
As he packed the van, she asked if he’d show her where he grew up, where he went to school, where he took his trumpet lessons.
“Sure, sweetheart,” he said, wishing she hadn’t.
Six hours later, crossing the Delaware Memorial Bridge, he could feel the red brick closing around him, the dry dust of the bocce courts at St. Leo’s scratch-scratching his shoes, and he heard the murky water slapping Pier 5 at 4 a.m. as the Domino Sugars sign flickered across the harbor: a fourteen-year-old boy with his horn, Little Italy over his shoulder, and his father telling him there was nowhere to go, that he would never change.
Cars were backed up at the tunnel mouth.
Tess swung her bare feet in rhythm as she hummed and sketched, and he remembered her mother would do the same as she read a script, straddling the arm of their red love seat, iced tea on the table, a mint leaf.
He didn’t know if Tess thought her mother the ice-eyed murderer on TV’s
The photo was taken in Harvard Square the day he quit Berklee to follow her down. He wasn’t ready to play the New York clubs, and he’d already been shunned by Julliard, but she wanted Broadway and there was nothing he could do.
And then came the news, and Margaret Mary turned to fury, a relentless blame spout. Seven months later, only five pounds, six ounces, but otherwise fine. She insisted on Therese Ann, bitterly and without explanation. He shrugged, thinking Tess. Short for
Her figure returned in less than a year, and Margaret Mary bolted west. Her two-word exit line: “Keep her.”
He got the furniture too. Needing sanctuary, he loaded the van and went back to Boston, buoyed by his love for little Tess but certain one day she would leave too. A promise: For as long as he had her, they’d be together and he’d give her something they could always share. He couldn’t chance it’d only be music-Margaret Mary hated jazz, snickering at his tears when Miles played “Summer Nights”-so he brought his
At the end of each summer, they traveled south: Yankee Stadium, Shea, Veterans Stadium in Philadelphia, and now they were going to see the Orioles at Memorial Stadium, Cal Ripken Jr. on his toes where Mark Belanger once roamed. Tess liked the O’s logo, the blackbird with the orange beak, the sly grin.
By the time they finished the new ballpark at Camden Yards, it’d be too late. She’d be a teenager, gone.
On went the dome light so Tess could keep sketching. He was going to mention he’d never been in the tunnel before, since it was built after he fled. But knowing Tess, she’d ask why he left and he couldn’t lie to her.
They beat the Brewers, but it’d started to rain in the fifth and the sparse crowd filed out early. He saw Tess yawn, and she was drawing in her diary, no longer keeping score. When Ripken popped to third to end the seventh, they packed up to go. A cold August night now, Tess in his denim jacket, O’s cap on the back of her head, her auburn ponytail draped over the black plastic band. Smiling, but she was dragging.
By the time he warmed up the van and headed south on Ellerslie, she was asleep, stretched across the seats, hands folded under the side of her head.
Mind wandering, listening to Chuck Thompson call the ninth, he missed Lombard, and then he was lost on the way back to a Holiday Inn standing less than two miles from his childhood home. A detour sign pulled him into the construction site for a ballpark where the B & train yard once stood: orange cones and wooden horses pressing him toward the long, narrow warehouse looking ghostly, hovering above a hole in the ground where the freight shed had been. Eutaw Street blocked off like they were going to make it disappear, and he muttered, “Where the hell…?”
Tess mumbled, brought her legs close to her chest, using his jacket now as a blanket.
He didn’t know where he was, the rain a thick mist. Lost in his old hometown, streets gone. Yellow bulldozers parked haphazardly, oily balls of light, flames flapping in the wind, and he decided he’d go east, away from the warehouse and toward the harbor. Find Lombard and get Tess to bed. The Aquarium tomorrow, a drive over to the Peabody, and then Obrycki’s for lunch on the way home.
He stopped, using the sideview to see if he could turn around without winding up in the muck.
A man shouted loud, harsh, and he snapped back, startled.
Bursting from the darkness, a girl scrambled as she raced away, terror in her eyes. Naked above the waist, her blouse torn, she tried to hold her heavy breasts in her arms as she ran, her skirt ripped too, her olive skin glistening in the van’s harsh headlights.
And the shouting man drew toward the high beams. Pockmarked and stern, short-cropped curly hair and vacant, wide-set eyes, he tugged angrily at his slacks as he splashed through a puddle and another.
The girl hurried toward the old roundhouse, her face gripped by fear.
The man stopped, his shoes catching in the mire, and he looked directly into the van, raising his hand to block the beams.
Two fists clutching the wheel, his daughter asleep behind him, and he recognized the man.
Bigelow was his name, and he could tell Bigelow didn’t know whether to chase the girl into shadows or to come over to tell whoever was in the driver’s seat to go the fuck home, sealing his mouth forever along the way.
Walking relentlessly toward the van, Bigelow tucked in his shirt and did up his zipper.
He saw Bigelow eye the Massachusetts license plate.
“Dad?” Tess said, sitting now, rubbing off the sleep.
Reverse, a K-turn, and he roared away from the construction site, then said, “Let’s get out of the rain,
Arthur Bigelow, he added, mimicking his father’s thick accent.
Half a mind to drive to 95 and head north, but their clothes were at the hotel, and Tess’s Barbies. His Jerwyn mouthpiece in a velvet pouch.
Bigelow saw him despite the blinding lights, and Bigelow had the letters and numbers on his rear plates.
He came back around on 395 and he was near the B & warehouse again, and there was the green Holiday Inn sign, where it had been all along.
Parked underground, and as he hoisted his drowsy daughter onto his shoulder, damp jacket and her diary tucked under his arm, he tried to remember when Bigelow went from the Baltimore City Jail to the Maryland State Pen. Figured maybe Bigelow was twenty years old by then, a man, since he was entering his junior year at Mount St. Joe’s High.
Even as a kid, Bigelow was a thug, a moron, and he had a mouth on him too, and he ran down the son of the fruit-stand man, a quiet boy who wasn’t quick to fight, the boy who now clutched his daughter, the elevator rattling as it rose.
His classmates, a loud, swaggering bunch, encouraged him to smash a two-by-four across the back of Bigelow’s head. But he found it easier to withdraw, spending late afternoons and early evenings alone in the tumbledown three-room flat off Slemmers Alley.
He took a job at age thirteen as a bus boy at Sabatino’s, offered as charity to his father who held off the Arabers from his shoebox store, doing his sums on the backs of brown paper bags, totaling the cost of a half- pound of this, a quarter-pound of that, knowing not a word of English save greetings and numbers. “
