I spit it out.
I jump on him, straddle his chest, and start throwing punches.
I flatten his nose. I can actually feel the cartilage spread under my knuckles. I grab his collar and pull him up. Then I cock my fist again, take my time, and throw hard at his face. Splat. I do it again. Then again. Sumner’s head lolls now as though his neck is a weak spring. I’m almost giddy now. My eyes are wide. I pull back again to hit him, but this time, someone hooks my arm. Then someone tackles me from behind.
The guards are on me now, pinning me to the ground. I don’t resist. I keep my eyes on the bloody mess of a man lying on the floor in front of me.
And for a brief moment, I actually smile.
Chapter
5
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.