Page 15 of I Will Find You

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.”

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