Safe Passage Read Free

on in the shade of the maples, with its sparse yellow freckles of bloom.
         Alfred was twenty-four now, older than Mag had been when she'd been overrun by children and ached with need for this place. Watching him, his finely chiseled features hiding what might have been pain, Mag usually felt a wrenching in the back of her throat. She decided it must be Cynthia, not Alfred, who really wanted her leafy backyard and rooms with space, and that Cynthia had bewitched Alfred into asking for it …so she managed to choke her sympathies back. Her sons were her own flesh and she'd had no choice but to find a place to raise them. Alfred, on the other hand, could still choose his freedom until a childless woman came along.
          Didn't he see? But of course she never mentioned this to him directly.
         "Face it, Mother," he'd said. "Even the twins are grown now. You always said once the kids graduated from high school they were out of your hands."
          "Yes, but Simon."
         "He'll be better off here with us than if you tried to drag him to Florida to switch schools for half a year.
         "We couldn't leave you with the responsibility."
         "Even if anything happens, you're only a two-hour flight away. Listen, Mother-nothing is going to happen." But that wasn't the point. She'd needed the house then to raise her children. And now for a different reason. If Patrick went blind in Key West, in unfamiliar surroundings, how would either of them survive?
         Someone was watching her. When she turned around, Patrick was standing at the far end of the family room, wrapped in his old blue terrycloth robe. He tied it tighter and then tighter again, as if he hoped to find a twenty-inch waist in the middle. His hair did not seem so gray ruffled up like this, before he combed it. His face was unlined-or maybe just puffy from sleep. "I'm closer to fifty than forty," he often said, but he looked all right. "The father of champions should stay fit," he sometimes told her. He liked to bemoan the fact that he couldn't run with Gideon anymore. Then she would say, "No father is required to keep up with champions," and they would smile at each other. They didn't talk in detail about Gideon's winning a running scholarship to Weber State in Utah, but they were both proud. "I never thought I'd get left so far behind so quickly," Patrick would say. "And I was such a good miler." "So eat more Wheaties ," Mag would tell him. And Patrick would pretend to worry about his running and not to worry about his eyes.
         "God, I hate when you sneak up on me," she said, though for once his sudden appearance hadn't made her jump. He had been moving stealthily ever since his eyes had started acting up, developing his blindman mode. When he thought no one was looking, he went around the house with his eyes closed, touching the furniture and the walls. He wanted to be self-sufficient no matter what. He looked like a maniac, waving his arms in front of him, sniffing like an animal at a world he couldn't see. He experimented with his manner the way he had once experimented with their toaster when it wouldn't produce enough toast for all the boys at once, trying to turn it into a model that would brown ten slices at a time. The result had been an unrecognizable wire contraption that took up half the kitchen counter, with makeshift metal grooves for extra slices of bread and insulated tape over exposed wires that stuck out in odd directions. The contraption worked, but Mag had always thought it a miracle that it didn't electrocute anybody, and eventually she threw it in the trash. Now Patrick was transforming himself from sighted inventor to eccentric blindman in the same dogged way-and she feared the final, transformed version would be as grotesque as the toaster. Lucifer rubbed against Patrick's hairy ankles, and Mag shuddered, getting a rerun in her mind of Patrick tripped by the animal and sprawled blind on the floor.