I am so close now to my father.
I realize the danger here. There is, I’m sure, a fairly massive manhunt for me. That may mean that they are watching my childhood home, where my father and aunt still reside. It makes sense. But as I noted before, the cops can’t be everywhere. They know that last night I was in New York City. Do they think I would come up to Revere from there? It would depend, I guess, on what Hilde Winslow has told them, but I would highly doubt she would confess to committing perjury during my trial.
I check all the angles as I duck into the backyards of my youth. I realize that surveillance doesn’t require a van parked in front of the house, but I see nothing indicating danger. I wonder whether it’s safe. I wonder whether this even makes sense. Taking a step back for a moment: What’s the point in seeing Dad and Aunt Sophie after all this time? Won’t my visit just upset them?
But I’m drawn to my old home. I am an escaped convict with a few hours to kill, and I want to see the people I love the most. Is that so strange? No. But my motive and focus remain locked on finding Matthew.
I feel safe as I hit the backyards between Thornton and Highland. The homes, mostly multi-dwellings, were stacked close together so that you never really knew where your property ended and the next one started. That had led to some interesting battles over the years. When I was fourteen, the Siegelmans claimed that Mr. Crestin’s garden went over the property line, and so they wanted some of Crestin’s award-winning tomatoes. I pass by that disputed border right now and reach Mrs. Bordio’s place. Mrs. Bordio lived there with her son Pat, who had what we used to call a lazy eye. They moved out in the early 2000s, and the place looks well cared for by the new owners. Mr. Bordio, Pat’s father, died before my time, in Vietnam, and the yard was always overgrown. My old man finally set up a rotating schedule where the men in the neighborhood took turns mowing her lawn. Mrs. Bordio repaid the men with her homemade peanut brittle. Mr. Ruskin—I’m walking past his place now—had spent an entire summer building an enormous pizza oven out of brick and concrete. It’s still there, of course, even though the Ruskins moved out in 2007. If a tornado ever took out this neighborhood, that oven would be the only thing left standing.
Up ahead I can see the back of my childhood home.
The shrubbery is thicker here. One of my earliest memories—I must have been three or four—is my dad and Uncle Philip building a swing set in the yard. Adam and I watched our dads in awe. It was a hot day and mostly I remember the way my dad would pick up a bottle of Bud and bring it to his lips. He’d take a deep sip, lower it, notice me watching, wink.
And of course, I remember my high school girlfriend Cheryl.
As I make my way closer to my home, my strongest memory is a sacrilegious one involving the tent that Mr. Diamond put up every year to celebrate Sukkot. A sukkah tent, if you will, is normally a hut-like structure made out of twigs and branches with no roof. You keep it outside. That’s a must. I don’t remember all the religious details anymore. The guys in prison are oddly the most religious I’ve ever met. I do not fit into that camp.
Anyway, the Diamonds’ sukkah was a step above everyone else’s in the neighborhood. It was a large tent with rich color and Hebrew lettering, and when Cheryl and I were seventeen years old, late on a cool October evening, we sneaked into the Diamonds’ sukkah tent and lost our virginities.
Yep. Just like that.
I can’t help but smile and wince at the memory.
Man, I loved Cheryl.
I’d had a crush on her since her family moved onto Shirley Avenue when we were in eighth grade, but it wasn’t until right before junior prom that Cheryl reciprocated at all, and even then, we’d end up going to the prom as “friends.” You know the deal. We were in similar friend groups and neither of us had anyone to go with. We ended up making out that night, in her case more out of boredom than anything else.
That’s when we became a couple.
I lean against the tree in the Diamonds’ old backyard. Cheryl and I had been good for so long. We had a brief breakup in college. That was more my doing than hers. Everyone told us that we were too young to settle down and never experiment with anyone else. We gave it a try, but for me no one else measured up. We got engaged our senior year of college, but we promised ourselves no marriage until Cheryl finished med school. We stuck to that plan. Then we got married and she got the residency of her dreams and then, following on this smooth, predictable, happy streak, we decided to have kids.
This is where things went wrong for us.
Cheryl—or should I say we?—couldn’t get pregnant.
If you’ve had fertility issues, you know the stress and strain. Cheryl and I both wanted kids. Badly. It had been a given. We wanted four. That was our plan. We had agreed to that. But we tried for months and months and nothing happened. When you want to get pregnant, it seems as though everyone else in the world—the worst people, the most undeserving people, the people who don’t even want children—are all getting pregnant. Everyone is getting pregnant but you.
We visited a specialist who ran tests and more tests and discovered the culprit was me. Yes, we all know that it’s “no one’s fault,” that you’re in this together, that it doesn’t make you less of a man yada yada yada, but discovering that my sperm count was too low to have children messed with my head in an awful way. I know better now, I guess. I know about toxic masculinity and all that, but when you grow up the way I did, in a place like this, a man has certain jobs and responsibilities and if he can’t even get his own wife pregnant, well, what kind of man is that?
I felt shame. Dumb, I know. But your feelings don’t know from dumb.
Cheryl and I tried and failed at IVF three times. The strain between us grew. Every conversation was about having a baby or worse, when we tried not to let it consume us—we’d been told that sometimes if you just relax, it magically happens—it became the figurative elephant not only in the room but in the bed. That elephant never left us.
Cheryl was great about it.
Or so I thought.
She never blamed me, but being an idiot with self-esteem issues, I let my imagination run wild. She is looking at me differently, I thought. She is looking at me and finding me wanting. She is looking at other men—virile, fertile men—and wondering how she ended up with such a dud.
It almost destroyed us.
Then we got some good news. One of my dad’s old Revere buddies was a general practitioner in New Hampshire. Dr. Schenker told me that he’d had the same issue and got cured with varicocele surgery. I don’t want to go into the details and you don’t want me to, but in short, you remove swollen veins inside the scrotum. Long story short: It worked. Suddenly my sperm count soared past normal.
Four months later, Cheryl was pregnant with Matthew.
It was all good again.
Except it wasn’t.
The years of infertility hell had played havoc with us and our relationship, but once Matthew was born, I thought that it would be behind us. And it was. Until I found out that while saying all the right things to me, Cheryl had gone behind my back and visited another fertility clinic to look into donor sperm. She hadn’t gone through with it. That’s what she kept reminding me. She explained it so clearly—she had been desperate not just to have a baby but to put us both out of this purgatory and so for a moment, a brief stupid moment, she considered getting donor sperm, something she knew that I would never agree to, and not telling me.