Warden Philip Mackenzie’s plane touched down at Boston’s Logan Airport without incident. He had grown up a stone’s throw away from Logan in nearby Revere. Back in those days, Logan Airport’s main landing route had flown the noisiest of jets over his house. To a little boy, the sound had been deafening, earth-shattering. His two older brothers, who shared the bedroom with him, would somehow sleep through it, but Little Philip would grasp the railing of his top bunk as the planes passed, the bed shaking so hard he feared falling off. Some nights, the planes seemed to be swooping so low they’d rip the fraying roof right off the house.
Back then, Revere Beach had been a blue-collar community right outside of Boston. It still was in most respects. Philip’s father had been a house painter, his mom stayed home (no married women worked in those days—single women could be teachers, nurses, or secretaries) with the six Mackenzie kids—three boys sharing one bedroom, three girls sharing another, one bathroom for all of them.
The taxi dropped Philip off in front of a familiar four-family home on Dehon Street. The dwelling was decaying brick. The front door was shedding faded-green paint. The large stoop, the stoop where Philip had spent countless childhood hours with his buddies, especially Lenny Burroughs, was made up of chipped concrete. For thirty years, the Burroughs family had taken up all four apartments. Lenny’s family was on the first floor on the right. His cousin Selma, who had been widowed young, had the apartment above with her daughter Deborah. Aunt Sadie and Uncle Hymie were on the first floor left. Other relatives—a churning potpourri of aunts, uncles, cousins, who-knows-what—took turns in the fourth apartment above Hymie and Sadie’s. That was how this neighborhood was in those days. Immigrant families—Philip’s being Irish, Lenny’s Jewish—had poured in from across the Atlantic over a three-decade period. Those already here—they took in family. Always. They helped the newcomers find jobs. Some relatives slept on a couch or a floor for weeks, months, whatever. There was no privacy, and that was okay. These homes were breathing entities, in constant motion. Friends and family members constantly flowed through the corridors and stairwells like lifeblood through veins. No one locked their doors, not because it was super safe—it wasn’t—but because family members never knocked or were denied access. Privacy was an alien concept. Everybody minded everybody else’s business. You celebrated one another’s victories and mourned their defeats. You were one.
You were family.
That world was gone with so-called progress. Most of the Burroughses and Mackenzies had moved on. They now lived in quasi-mansions in wealthier suburbs like Brookline or Newton with shrubs and fences and fancy marble bathrooms and swimming pools and where the very idea of living with non-nuclear family was nightmarish and incomprehensible. Other family members had moved to gated communities in warmer states like Florida or Arizona, sporting leathery tans and gold chains. Newer immigrant families—Cambodians, Vietnamese, whatever—had taken over a lot of the old homes. They, too, worked hard and took in all manner of extended family members, starting the cycle anew.
Philip paid the cabdriver and stepped onto the cracked sidewalk. He could still get a faint whiff of the salty Atlantic Ocean two blocks away. Revere Beach had never been a glamour spot. Even in his youth, the threadbare mini-golf and rusty roller coaster and worn Skee-Ball machines and assorted boardwalk arcades had been on their last legs. That didn’t bother him and Lenny and their friends though. They hung out behind Sal’s Pizzeria and smoked and drank Old Milwaukee because it was the cheapest and rolled dice. The guys they hung out with—Carl, Ricky, Heshy, Mitch—all became doctors and lawyers and moved out. Lenny and Philip stayed in town as local cops. Philip debated taking a quick walk down to Shirley Avenue to see the house where he and Ruth had raised their five children. But he decided against it. The memories were pleasant enough, but he was not in the mood to be distracted.
Memories always sting, don’t they? The good ones most of all.
The concrete steps were too damn high. As a kid, as a teen, as a young man, Philip took them two at a time, with a skip and a jump. Now he winced through the creak in his knees. Only one of the four apartments still housed Burroughses. Lenny, his oldest friend, his former partner in the Revere Police Department, was back in the same first-floor apartment on the right that his family had called home seventy years ago. He lived here now with his sister Sophie. For some reason, Sophie had never moved on, almost as though someone had to stay behind to watch the old homestead.
He thought about Lenny’s son serving a life sentence at Briggs. The whole incident was beyond heartbreaking. David wasn’t well. That was obvious. Philip was David’s godfather, though they managed to keep that secret so that they could conspire to get David into Briggs. David had no siblings (Lenny’s wife, Maddy, had a “condition” of some sort—in those days, you never talked about such things), but Philip’s oldest son, Adam, was David’s best friend and nearly a brother, their relationship not unlike Philip’s with Lenny. Adam too had spent hours here, in this four-family dwelling, just as Philip had. The Burroughs household had been a strange and wonderful place in those days. Back when Philip was young—and even when his son was young—this was a house of warmth and color and texture. The Burroughses lived life out loud, like a radio always set on high. Every emotion was felt intensely. When you argued—and you argued a lot in here—you did it with passion.
Then David’s mother, Maddy, died and everything changed.
Now the building stood silent, joyless, a withering apparition. For a moment, Philip couldn’t move. He just stood there on the stoop, staring at the door. He was about to knock when that faded-green door opened. Philip froze. If he had been disoriented before, he felt completely lost now. Being in the old neighborhood had brought on a bout of nostalgia, but seeing Sophie’s face again, still beautiful despite the years, plunged him back. She too was closing in on seventy, but all Philip could see was the breathy teen who’d answered the door for him on this very spot the night of senior prom. A lifetime ago, Philip and Sophie had dated. They had fallen in love, he guessed. But they were young. Something happened—who remembered what anymore? The military, the police academy. Whatever. Fifty years ago. Sophie had married an army guy from Lowell named Frank. He died in some kind of training exercise in Ramstein, making Sophie a widow before her twenty-fifth birthday. She’d moved in with Lenny after Maddy’s death to help raise David and never remarried. Philip had been betrothed to Ruth for over forty years, but some nights he still thought about Sophie more than he cared to admit. The sliding door. The road not taken. The big what-if. The good one he’d let get away.
Was that a crime?
He stared at Sophie now, his mind still traveling through some alternate universe where he hadn’t let her go.
Sophie put her hands on her hips. “I got something stuck in my teeth, Philip?”
He shook his head.
“Then why are you staring?”
“No reason,” he said. Then he added, “You look good, Sophie.”
She rolled her eyes. “Come on in, Silver-Tongue. Your charm is making me woozy.”
Philip stepped inside. Little if anything had changed. He could feel the ghosts surround him.
“He’s resting,” Sophie said, heading down the corridor. Philip followed. “He should be awake soon. Want some coffee?”
“Sure.”
They reached the kitchen. It had been updated. Sophie used one of those new coffee pod machines everyone seems to have. She handed him the thick mug, not asking how he took it. She knew.
“So why are you here, Philip?”
He forced up a smile over the brim of the mug. “What, can’t a man visit an old friend and his beautiful sister?”
“Remember what I said about your charm making me woozy?”
“I do.”
“I was joking.”
“Yeah, I figured.” He put down the mug. “I need to talk to him, Sophie.”
“This about David?”
“It is.”
“He’s sick, you know. Lenny, I mean.”
“I know.”
“Almost completely paralyzed. He can’t talk anymore. I don’t even know if he knows who I am.”
“I’m sorry, Sophie.”
“Is this going to upset him?”
Philip thought about that. “I don’t know.”
“Not sure I see the need.”
“There probably isn’t one.”
“But this is what you two do,” Sophie said.
“Yes.”
Sophie turned her head toward the window. “Lenny wouldn’t want to be spared. So go ahead. You know the way.”
He put down the mug and rose. Philip wanted to say something, but no words came to him. She didn’t look at him as he left the kitchen. He made the right and headed toward the bedroom in the back. The grandfather clock still stood in the hallway. Maddy had bought it at an estate sale in Everett a hundred years ago. Lenny and Philip had picked it up in Philip’s old pickup truck. The thing weighed over two hundred pounds. It took them forever to disassemble it and move it. They had to wrap the pendulum and the main spring and the cable and the chains and the weights and the chime rods and Lord knows what else in heavy blankets and bubble wrap. They used masking tape to affix cardboard over the beveled glass door and then something still chipped off the toe molding. But Maddy loved it and Lenny would do anything for her and hey, when you add up the pros and cons, there was no doubt Philip got the better end of the deal on the friendship. Not that either would ever keep track.
Philip stopped when he reached the bedroom. He took a deep breath and plastered on a smile. When he entered, he fought hard to keep that smile locked in place and hoped his eyes didn’t betray the sadness and shock. For a moment he stayed near the doorway and just stared at what had been his best friend. He remembered how powerful Lenny had been. Lenny had been all coiled muscle, built like a bantamweight fighter. He had been a health nut before it was in fashion, a careful eater in the days before that became so mainstream. Lenny did a hundred push-ups every morning. Exactly. Without break. His forearms had been steel cords, his veins thick and ropey. Now those powerful arms looked like milky reeds. Lenny’s filmy eyes had the thousand-yard stare of the guys who had seen too much action in Nam. His lips were colorless. His skin resembled parchment paper.
“Lenny,” Philip said.
No reaction. Philip forced himself to take a step closer to the bed. “Lenny, what the hell is going on with our Celtics? Huh? What happened to them?”
Still nothing.
“And the Pats. I mean, they were so good for so long so we can’t complain, but come on.” Philip smiled and inched closer. “Hey, remember when we met Yaz after that Orioles game? That was something. Such a good guy. But you said it early on. Free agency. It’s going to kill the teams, just like you predicted.”
Nothing.
From the doorway behind, he heard Sophie’s voice. “Sit next to him and take his hand. Sometimes he’ll squeeze it.”
She left them alone. Philip took the seat next to Lenny. He didn’t take his hand. That’s not what they were about. All that touchy-feely stuff. Maybe David and Adam were into that, but not him and Lenny. Philip had never told Lenny he loved him. And vice versa. They didn’t have to. And despite what David had said, Lenny had never told him that Philip owed him one. That wasn’t their way.
“I got to talk to you, Lenny.”
Philip dove in. He told Lenny about David’s visit to his office. The whole story. Everything he could remember. Lenny, of course, did not respond. His eyes kept that same stare. His expression may have grown grimmer, but Philip chalked that up to his own imagination. It was like talking to a bed frame. After some time passed—when Philip was getting closer to the end of the story—he did indeed slide his hand over his old friend’s. The hand didn’t feel like a hand either. It felt like some distant inanimate object, a frail object, like a dead baby bird or something.
“Not sure what to do here,” Philip said, as he started to wind down. “It’s why I came to you. We’ve both seen perps try every which way to claim innocence or justify what they did. Hell, we spent our careers listening to that psychobabble. That’s not what this is. I truly believe that. Your son wouldn’t do that. David believes it. He’s wrong, of course. I wish it was true—God, do I wish it—but Matthew is dead. David did it in some kind of fugue state. That’s what I think. You and I talked about this already. He doesn’t remember and hell, I don’t know about guilt or blame. Neither of us were big fans of insanity defenses, but we also both know David is a good kid. Always has been.”
He looked at Lenny. Still nothing. Only the rising and falling of his chest told Philip that he wasn’t talking to a corpse.
“Here’s the thing.” Philip leaned a little closer and, for some reason, lowered his voice. “David wants me to help him break out. I mean, that’s nuts. You know that. I know that. I don’t have that kind of power. And even if I did, I mean, where would he go? There’d be a massive manhunt. He’d probably end up being gunned down. We don’t want that for him. I still wish he’d tried to get help, maybe a new trial, something. That’s his best chance, you know what I mean?”
A radiator pipe started banging. Philip shook his head and smiled. That damn pipe. It had been banging for, what, forty, fifty years? He remembered trying to bleed the radiators with Lenny, but they could never figure out what caused the banging. Trapped air or something. They’d go down and fix it and it would be okay for a few weeks and then—bang, bang—it would come back.
“We’re old men, Lenny. Too old for this crap. I’m retiring in another year. Double pension. I could lose it all if I mess up. You know what I’m saying? I can’t risk that. It wouldn’t be fair to Ruth. She’s got her sights set on some gated community in South Carolina. Nice weather year-round. But you know I’ll always look out for David. No matter what. Like I promised. He’s your boy. I understand that. So I want you to know. I’ll look out for him…”
He stopped talking. His chest started to heave. Right now, today, this moment—this was probably the last time he’d ever see Lenny. The thought hit him out of nowhere. Like a punch he didn’t see coming. He felt tears start to come to his eyes, but he bit them back. He blinked hard, turned away. He stood and put his hand on his friend’s shoulder. There was no flesh there, no muscle. It felt like he was touching naked bone.
“I better go, Lenny. You take care of yourself, okay? See you soon.”
He walked toward the door. Sophie met up with him at the threshold.
“You okay, Philip?” she asked.
He nodded, not trusting his own voice.
Sophie met his eye. It was almost too much for him to bear. Then she looked over at her bedridden brother. She gestured for Philip to turn around. He slowly followed her gaze. Lenny had not moved. His face was still that skeletal death mask. His eyes still stared out, lifeless, the mouth still slightly open in some awful silent scream. But he saw what Sophie was trying to show him.
A single tear track glistening off Lenny’s ashen skin.
Philip turned back toward her. “I have to go.”
She led him back down the corridor, past the grandfather clock and the piano. She opened the door. He stepped out onto the stoop. The fresh air felt good. The sun shone in his eyes. He shielded them for a moment and smiled weakly at her.
“It was good seeing you, Sophie.”
Her smile was tight.
“What?” he said.
“Lenny always told me you were the strongest man he ever knew.”
“Were,” he repeated. “Past tense.”
“And now?”
“Now I’m just old.”
Sophie shook her head. “You’re not old, Philip,” she said. “You’re just scared.”
“I’m not sure there’s any difference.”
He turned away. He did not look back as he descended the concrete steps, but he could feel her eyes on him, heavy and perhaps, after all these years, unforgiving.