Teddy’s apartment doesn’t have a doorbell, so I knock. Even I can tell that my initial knock is tentative, as if I am reluctant to impose myself, afraid of disturbing him. I am, I suppose. I am struck with bashfulness, or its more insidious relative, cowardice. He’ll be surprised to see you. He won’t want to see you. He’ll be angry. He’ll be glad. He’ll welcome you with open arms. He will slam this door in your face. My inner dialogue is a rant of incoherence.
Shadow stands beside me, his expression suggesting that he doesn’t understand how I’m not using my magic hands and just opening up the door. I knock again, this time with a little more emphasis. Not so much that it would sound like I was a bill collector on the stoop, rather than a friend. Do people ever arrive unannounced anymore, what with the ability to drop a warning text? I don’t even have Teddy’s number. Until an hour ago, I didn’t even know that he was living here.
Maybe he’s not home. Maybe that’s better. I’ll write to him. Give him some warning. Maybe he knows I’m here and is hiding.
When we were little, before his injury, hide-and-seek was one of our favorite games. Teddy was good at it, managing to hold his breath even as I got so close that I could smell him. This thought makes me realize that my dog absolutely knows that someone is behind that door. I can tell by the way his head is cocked, the way he’s capable of hearing even a held breath.
Shadow pushes his head against my hip, as if pushing me to knock again. So I do. The dog pumps his front feet up and down, his signature move for when he is impatient. Obviously, there are no conflicting emotions for him; he fully expects the door to be opened.
Then I hear him, his voice as he calls out, “Who is it?”
I don’t have an answer. “Um, me?”
A solid pause.
“Who?”
“Teddy, can you open the door?” Have I been gone so long that he doesn’t recognize my voice? His only sister’s voice? I think that the answer is yes. I haven’t spoken to Teddy in more than six years. Could anyone hold the memory of a voice for that long? “It’s Rosie, Teddy.”
The extra-wide front door opens and my brother and I face each other across the threshold. Is the look on my face as astonished as his is? I’m surprised at how grown-up he is; how tall, despite the chair, or maybe he looks taller because the chair he sits in is one of those high-tech ultralight chairs that the para-athletes use. No longer sunk in a sling of a seat, he is upright and looking altogether handsome. The last time I saw him, he was hunched, as well as angry and weeping; wearing borrowed funeral clothes. Today, he stares at me and I see a grown man dressed in a tidy polo shirt and jeans. What he sees, I don’t dare guess. An older version of my former self? Someone for whom the sparkle had long since flattened out?
“Rosie? What are you doing here?” His eyes dart to look behind me, as if he thinks I am a fugitive and the cops are on my tail. “How did you get here?
“Brenda told me where you were living.”
“Brenda?”
“Brathwaite.”
“I know who Brenda is. I just meant. I just meant that I am surprised…”
“That she told me? That she speaks to me?”
I’m still standing in the hallway. A door down the hall opens, shuts. “Can I come in?”
He makes room for me to enter his apartment, and Shadow and I follow as Teddy rolls his chair into the comfortably large space of his uncluttered living room. All has not changed with my brother; I spot an unfinished jigsaw puzzle on his dining-area table. A big flat-screen television is on one wall. No coffee table, no obstacles in that room. A two-cushion couch in masculine brown and a plaid armchair are the only pieces of furniture, both neatly pushed to the opposite wall, leaving a wide swath of oatmeal-colored wall-to-wall industrial carpet. A picture window with drapes pushed to either side looks out onto the courtyard central to all four buildings. I see my mother’s influence in the way the drapes are held back with tasseled tiebacks—her signature decorating touch.
I haven’t rehearsed this reunion. I have no preconceived notions about how it might go, and so I stand, then sit, then stand. Neither one of us speaks for the longest time—long enough that the dog finally takes charge. He stalks over to Teddy to sit in front of him, then drops one paw into my brother’s lap, for all the world like a guy putting out a hand in friendship. Teddy stares at the thing in his lap, then says, “Heck of a dog.” He puts a hand out for Shadow to sniff, then ruffles Shadow’s neck fur. The look on Teddy’s face is so plainly distressed.
“I shouldn’t have come, I shouldn’t have surprised you like this. It wasn’t fair.”
“No, it’s okay, Rosie. I’m just stunned, that’s all.”
I lean down and hug my brother.
For half an hour, we babble and cry and babble some more, until finally my story is more or less told. Over a cup of Barry’s Irish tea, I begin to get a sense of his life. This place is designed for people like my brother, all handicap-accessible and with on-call help available. A medi-lift to pick him up to take him to his job delivering interoffice mail at a corporate office park. A medi-lift to bring him back home. This program at the mercy of a successful annual fund-raising campaign by the nonprofit that runs it. Teddy is not quite independent, but better than he might otherwise be.
For a moment it seems like everything that happened to me will somehow be worth it if I can help my brother.
“You should have a dog. A service dog.”
“Is that what he is?” He gestures toward Shadow, who is sound asleep at my feet, stretched out so that he is an obstacle to both of us, or a perimeter.
“No.” For the first time, I admit to myself what Shadow is. “He’s more of a therapy dog. It’s what I did—I trained them, Teddy. Service dogs.”
“When?”
“In prison. It was—is a program. It works. You’d have someone to pick up what you drop, shut off the lights.”
“I can clap for that. And I have a grabber stick.”
“Shark, my first dog, has made it possible for his person, who is now maybe my best friend, to live alone and have a job. She lives in New York City.”
“I live alone. I have a job.”
“You live in a group home.”
“That’s not how I describe it.” There’s the old Teddy, the one with the scowl. The one mad at the world.
“I’m sorry. I’m a little sensitive about living in an institutional setting. This is certainly better than that.”
The scowl doesn’t lighten. It intensifies, as if he’s just realized the elephant is in the room. “What happened, Rosie? Why did you leave us?”
Is this the party line? I left them? That I wasn’t pushed out because I was making a life for myself? I almost say this, but then hold my tongue. “How’s Mom? Is she all right? Brenda said I should go see her, and I got the impression that something was the matter.”
Teddy manipulates himself away from the table, around Shadow, to stare out the picture window. I can tell that his low-set view can’t give him anything but a look at the collection of stunted trees that form the landscaping of the courtyard. Maybe the heads of people walking by. Limited.
“Teddy? Is there something you don’t want to tell me?”
He shrugs, always an awkward gesture, since he can barely lift his left arm. “How can I know what I do or do not want to tell you? You are a stranger to me. How long has it been? Six years? More if you count those months you left us to work out Dad’s terminal illness and how to defend our home against eminent domain.” He puts one palm on the windowpane. I can almost hear Mom yelling at him not to touch her clean window. “You were gone from us even before that. You couldn’t wait to leave, and getting into that fancy college just started the transition from our sister, their daughter, to a stranger who looked down on us.”
“That is so not true!” We could be our elementary school selves.
“Isn’t it? Do you remember how you kept correcting my grammar?”
“I did that?”
“You did.”
“I didn’t want you to be handicapped. I mean…”
We both heard what I’d said and spontaneously laugh.
“Did you think perfect grammar would make anything better for me?”
“It couldn’t hurt.” Shadow is no longer recumbent, but sitting up, his eyes following the conversation, his ears at the alert. “So, you still haven’t told me what’s going on with Mom.”
Teddy rolls himself away from the window, turns his chair to face me. “There’s nothing wrong with her that getting a life for herself wouldn’t cure. She’s being passed around from Paulie to Frankie to Pat. Bobby’s the only one who won’t take her, because he lives in a place not a lot different from this one. Too small.”
“Is she depressed?”
“Probably.”
“Is she getting help?”
“No. Not that I know of.”
I sit down on the couch. Shadow rests his head in my lap and I stroke his ears. I feel a wash of guilt. I should have pushed harder to break through her silence. What kind of daughter am I, what kind of woman, to give up so easily?
“How long has she been like this?”
“Since Dad died.”
“So why hasn’t anyone told me? If not Paulie, you, Teddy. I feel like I was shunned. And I don’t know why.”
“Mom is a very powerful woman and she forbade us to.”
“And you grown men kowtowed to her?”
He has the good grace to blush. Shadow leaves me and waltzes over to Teddy. Again, he drops his big head into someone’s lap and gets an ear scratching as a reward. Teddy looks up at me. “Tell me more about service dogs.”
“I can introduce you to one,” I say.