Saints for All Occasions Page 21

  “Can I speak to her?” Nora said. Blood pumped like mad in her ears.

  “I’m afraid she’s already on her way. It was very last-minute. That was why she wanted me to tell you. If you could give me the name of the funeral home, I’ll pass it along to her when she calls in.”

  Nora told her the exact location of O’Dell’s as if her sister were a welcome friend. She said thank you and hung up, and then she sat down to catch her breath. She wondered if she might have a heart attack and die. That might not be so bad. Better than facing things, maybe.

  She looked around the room, imagined it full of people, tried to picture Theresa among them. For a second, Nora wondered what she would think of the house. Suddenly, the kitchen disgusted her. Old and worn as it was. Yellow Formica counters and maple cabinets were the style when they moved in. She had never replaced them. Every time John and Julia came over, they remarked on how easy it would be to give the room a face-lift. And it was true, wasn’t it? Why had she never done it?

  She thought of Patrick’s Miraculous Medal. She had given it to him years ago, made him promise to wear it for protection. He did still wear it, sometimes, out of respect for her. But it hadn’t been with him when he died. Theresa had been the one to send the medal in the first place, the summer he was seventeen. Now Nora felt the need for Theresa to see it on him, as if to say that its absence hadn’t been the cause of what happened.

  She picked up the phone and tried Brian again, and when he didn’t answer, she called John.

  You’ve reached John Rafferty, founder of Miltown Strategies. I’m unavailable at the moment, but your call is very important to me. Please leave a message and I’ll be back to you just as soon as I can.

  Communication was supposed to be the thing now. In theory, you could reach anyone anytime. When Nora saw her children, they always had their phones in hand. When she called her children, they rarely picked up.

  “John,” she said. “I need you to go to Patrick’s on the way here before the wake and bring me the medal he wore. He needs to be wearing his medal. It’s silver with blue around the edges. On a long silver chain. It will probably be in the box on his dresser. Or I suppose it could be in a drawer. Or—oh, I don’t know. Just look around. There’s a key under the mat. Call me so I know you got this, please.”

  Right now, the medal seemed like the most important thing in the world.

  Nora stood up. She took a head of iceberg lettuce from the colander beside the sink and placed it on a cutting board. She chose a knife from the block, much sharper than the job required. A knife that could cut through bone.

  As far as she knew, Theresa wasn’t allowed to leave the abbey for the rest of her life. Nora had called her as a form of punishment, she supposed, just as the silence had been up until now. It hadn’t occurred to her that Theresa might actually come.

  Once the children were grown, there had been times when she had thought to tell them the truth. Or part of it anyway. She would tell them she had a sister. But the elements of the story were impossible to separate. If she had a sister, why had she never said so? Why didn’t they ever go to see her? If Nora said that she had taken them to the abbey once, that she and Theresa wrote letters for years, then they would want to know why they had stopped. And she couldn’t tell them that. She had never even told Charlie.

  She cut the iceberg in two, the halves landing with a satisfying plop. The thing before her looked like a child’s severed head.

  It was so like Theresa to just decide, to have a stranger call and announce her arrival. Never mind what it might do to Nora. She could still recall every bit of her anger over what her sister had done.

  She chopped and chopped and chopped, as beads of water leapt from the greens and landed on the countertop.

  From time to time, she had considered Theresa’s point of view, allowed herself to wonder if her sister’s way of thinking would have made the situation any better. Mostly, Nora forgot about the things that might catch up with her. A person did it to herself just by being alive. Planted little bombs without realizing that they had the potential to go off so many years later.

  Try as she might, her sister was never far from her thoughts. Nora thought of her whenever it was absolutely necessary to drive through Dorchester or down Dudley Street. She saw her in Bridget, who was every bit as pretty as Theresa, though Bridget mostly squandered her good fortune. She wore her brown hair cropped short, so that from behind, Nora sometimes mistook her for one of the boys. She refused to wear makeup, or a skirt. The past four years, Nora had given up commenting on Bridget’s appearance for Lent. But sometimes it hurt to look at her daughter. Nora knew what she could do with that face if she tried.

  Bridget preferred dogs to people. She would forgive a dog anything. She was as devoted to poor, pathetic animals as Saint Francis himself. It was admirable, in its way. But she wasn’t a grown-up. She wasn’t ladylike. She went up on rooftops to pull trapped squirrels out of gutters. She battled men who ran dogfights and old women who tried to poison feral cats. She lived in an apartment with a roommate and a pit bull in what Nora considered a bad part of Brooklyn, though Bridget said there were no bad parts anymore. She was forty-four and saw nothing wrong with this arrangement.

  Nora saw Theresa most of all in Patrick. At his best and at his worst, he was like her. Charming, a flirt. Loving and loved. He had Theresa’s rebelliousness, her impulsivity, her willful streak. Nora didn’t like to think it, but there was some of Walter in him too. Patrick could be sneaky. He could make a mess of things and then just walk away. Nothing at all like Nora or Charlie, duty bound until the end.

  And Patrick looked just like Walter.

  There was no one Nora’s children had grown up with who couldn’t pass for the sibling of anyone else. With the exception of the odd redhead or bottle blonde, most everyone they knew in Dorchester had dark hair and blue eyes—Nora and Charlie and the pharmacist at the corner and old Mr. Fallon in the apartment downstairs. And Nora’s children. If you paid attention, you would see that Patrick’s hair was not brown and wavy like the others’, but black and curly. His eyelashes were thicker, the color of his cheeks less ruddy. He was tall like them, but his limbs were long and lean.

  Before they moved to Hull, on the rare occasion when they passed Walter McClain in the street with his wife and children, Nora held her breath, waiting for someone to connect the dots. But nobody ever had. No one looked that closely at a boy.

  When the lettuce had been chopped as fine as it could be, she placed the pieces in a glass salad bowl. She began slicing a red onion, the smell filling her nostrils.

  She thought of Maeve, who had attended an expensive private school since she was five.

  “It’s a Quaker school, actually,” Julia liked to say, but no Quaker Nora ever heard of would charge twenty thousand dollars for kindergarten.

  Her own children had attended Catholic school. They had discipline, obedience, and the fear of God drilled into them, day after day. At Maeve’s school, they learned to be creative. To be good friends. To Drop Everything and Read.

  From the time Maeve was five, Nora picked her up on Tuesdays and Thursdays and kept her until John or Julia finished work. She tried to supplement Maeve’s education by teaching her manners. She took her to afternoon Mass once in a while, since she knew John and Julia never did. She gave her boxes of monogrammed stationery, wrapped in pink paper, to entice her to write thank-you notes. Julia wouldn’t know the importance of a thing like that, but it mattered.

  Nora remembered Maeve, six or seven, sitting on the sofa in the den upstairs, repeating something her teacher had said that day: Secrets secrets are no fun, unless they’re shared by everyone.

  “But if it’s shared by everyone, then it’s not a secret,” Nora said with a frown.

  “Nana,” Maeve replied, exasperated. “That’s the point.”

  When Nora was young, no elder told a child—even a grown one—anything at all. It wasn’t a secret. They just weren’t enti
tled to know. Conviction in this belief had been handed down through the generations like a cherished heirloom. She sensed that this was changing, that the world was awakening to all sorts of ideas that seemed perfectly frightening to her. But maybe Maeve was right. The secrets had done no one any good. They had rotted Patrick, twisted everything, led them here.

  For all her careful orchestrations, he still had his suspicions.

  The night after Charlie died, Patrick said, “Who is my real father? I know it wasn’t Dad.”

  Nora didn’t know how to answer.

  “Not now,” she said. “Please.”

  Later, she felt ashamed. She had acted like it cost a person nothing to ask a question like that. But she didn’t undo it. She told herself that if he asked again, she would put it right. But Patrick never did.

  —

  Nora was covering the finished salad in plastic wrap when she heard the front door swing open. She ran to the hall, and there stood Brian, wearing the clothes he’d left in yesterday.

  He smelled like he’d rolled around on the floor of the bar. She wondered if he’d slept there. Seeing his face, she felt more relieved than the situation warranted, as if Patrick himself had walked in.

  “Brian Rafferty! Thank God. You scared me half to death. I tried to reach you.”

  “I didn’t have my phone.”

  She was going to tell him. Of them all, he would judge her the least. He was her baby boy. Nothing she did could ever be wrong in his eyes.

  But the words wouldn’t come. She needed more time.

  “Go and get cleaned up,” she said. “I ironed you a shirt. It’s on the bed.”

  He walked toward the staircase, then looked back over his shoulder. “I’m sorry I worried you, Ma.”

  He sounded so sincere, like Patrick when he was a teenager. Nora never doubted their contrition.

  If she opened her mouth and spoke, she might cry for a year.

  Nora tipped her chin toward the upstairs. She gave Brian a smile.

  14

  JOHN, JULIA, AND MAEVE left the house ten minutes behind schedule.

  The whole family would gather at Nora’s and then drive on to the wake as a group. They would all sleep at her place tonight and travel together to the funeral tomorrow. John couldn’t say why they did it this way, only that they always had.

  In the passenger seat, Julia held two enormous platters on her lap.

  He had told her not to order anything, tried to get her to see that Nora wouldn’t appreciate the stuff. She would see the store-bought symmetry as a flaw, not a virtue.

  But this morning, a teenage delivery boy stood at John’s front door balancing two trays covered in plastic. Brie platter and stuffed dates, and the crab cakes with shrimp shumai? he said, reading from the slip. The kid was wearing a white T-shirt in thirty-degree weather. His car was still running in the driveway, exhaust pouring from the tailpipe. John just sighed and felt around in his pocket for a tip.

  He wished Julia would understand it without his having to explain. His wife had gone to Georgetown and BU Law. These things his mother toiled over, Julia would handle with one phone call. He already knew that when he died, trim young men in black uniforms would pass around trays of canapés and chicken on skewers. What was so wrong with it? It was what he would do in the same situation. But to John, it felt like something would be lost.

  “Why does a dead man who hardly ever set foot in a church have a sudden need for religious jewelry?” Julia said now. “Is your mother trying to trick God into thinking Patrick was devout?”

  The word God slipped out of her mouth as if surrounded by finger quotes.

  I need you to go to Patrick’s on the way here, Nora had said on his voice mail, like it was nothing out of the ordinary. He needs to be wearing his medal.

  His brother’s place in Dorchester wasn’t on the way and she knew it. The detour would add forty minutes to the drive to her house, out in Hull, at the end of the earth. And John had no desire to go looking through Patrick’s things. It was a job for Brian. For anyone but him.

  Julia reached out and turned up the heat. A moment later, the car felt like an oven. She was always cold. John glanced over at her. She wore small diamond earrings, a simple fitted black dress that landed just above the knee. Conservative, but sexy in its way. He knew that beneath her black pumps, her toenails were painted the same shade of red she had selected at her weekly pedicure for as long as he’d known her. A color called Russian Roulette.

  Among the crowd they would see today, she would stand out. Some of the women he grew up with could be considered pretty if you begged forgiveness. If your definition of pretty included big white arms, thick calves, freckles. He had married a girl of a different order. Toned and tanned with shiny, shampoo commercial hair. Perfect from any angle.

  Julia tilted her head toward the backseat.

  “I’m worried about her.” She whispered, even though there was no need.

  Maeve had her headphones turned up to top volume. He could hear muffled traces of her music over the car radio, probably damaging her eardrums for life.

  “I think all this has her more worked up than she’s letting on. The open casket.” Julia shivered. “She’s never seen a dead body. Hell, I hadn’t seen one until I married you.”

  Julia thought everything to do with wakes was barbaric, odd. Her family would have Patrick cremated by now, his ashes scattered to the wind while a woman in flowing robes played Joni Mitchell on a harp.

  Fifteen years after they got married, she was still ill at ease with the formalities, the rituals of the Raffertys. Whenever she was with them as a group, he could tell she wished she were home in California with her own parents. There, they would be drinking wine barefoot by the fire pit, arguing about some new novel or movie. Not sitting around a table covered in white linen, everyone’s head bowed as Nora led them in saying grace.

  Julia’s family had an ease about them. When they stayed with her parents, her mother wasn’t in the kitchen in the morning, hovering over the stove. She might have left some fruit on the table, or muffins from a bakery in town, along with a note. Gone to yoga! Back by noon!

  As a kid, Julia said, she liked to imagine herself as one in a raucous brood of siblings, forever fighting over their toys or who got to sit in the front seat. She fantasized about a mother who did not work but instead stayed home and baked brownies. This mother never ran late or said shit under her breath in traffic. She kept a well-stocked fridge, which contained things like Jell-O pudding and whole milk and bologna. Not only did she never lose her keys, she knew the exact location of everyone else’s keys at all times.

  But when Julia actually encountered this mother, in the form of Nora, she was slightly appalled. She questioned her in ways John never had. There was a whole life he wouldn’t have known if not for his wife. He had grown up a ten-minute drive from downtown Boston and never set foot in the Wang Center or Symphony Hall. Now they took Maeve to the Nutcracker every December. They had a subscription to the A.R.T.

  John loved taking vacations with Julia’s parents, to the house they rented every summer on Nantucket. Carol and Fred were easy to be with. They all liked the same things. The one time he invited Nora and Charlie, his mother announced the minute she was off the ferry that she had brought sandwiches wrapped in waxed paper to save money on lunch. When they went for cocktails at the White Elephant, his parents had a fit over the cost. They made a thing of just ordering iced tea. Two days later, everyone was lying on the beach, relaxing, when out of nowhere Charlie shouted, Sixteen dollars for a margarita! I can’t get over it.

  His father had died by the time John and Julia bought the Cape house four years ago. Her parents sent champagne. Nora’s first response was, Did you have someone inspect it? Has anyone looked at the roof?

  No, Mom, the whole thing is probably going to collapse on top of us, he said.

  But John felt it then, the sensation that he was just like her. Full of dread. Maybe the roof woul
d fall in. Maybe all of it would disappear. He was kidding himself if he thought he could transform into some carefree moneyed type just by signing a purchase and sale.

  —

  Instead of the family meeting they had intended to have last night, the three of them sat in the living room and talked about Patrick.

  “Is there anything you want to ask us?” Julia said. “Anything at all, sweetie.”

  “What happened exactly?” Maeve said, in a curious, detached way, as if they were discussing the sudden death of a B-list celebrity they’d seen in a movie once.

  “He was drinking and driving,” John said. “Your uncle made a lot of bad choices in his life.”

  Later, Julia said he had been a little harsh.

  “I thought we were supposed to be honest with her,” he said. “Let her think about that the next time she considers getting into a car with some scumbag who’s been drinking.”

  “Honey, she’s thirteen. She doesn’t exactly go out joyriding with guys we don’t know.” Julia paused. “What do you think happened? Why now?”

  “I think if you drive drunk enough times, you’re bound to drive into a wall eventually,” he said.

  “Should we have put something in the death announcement in the paper to acknowledge it?” Julia said. “In lieu of flowers, send a donation to Mothers Against Drunk Driving? Something like that?”

  “No.”

  His mother put no premium on the truth. She would never admit, maybe even to herself, how Patrick had died.

  John had heard Maeve on the phone after the family meeting. She wasn’t broken up.

  My uncle died. I don’t think I’ll have to take the algebra quiz tomorrow. What? I know. My aunt’s coming from New York. My mom said we’ll probably all go to the funeral together in a limo.

  Her words chilled him. Her giddy tone. Maybe every parenting choice they’d ever made had been a colossal mistake, turned her into the monster he saw before him. A limo. Christ.

  “She barely knew Patrick. They had no relationship,” Julia pointed out when he asked if it was weird that Maeve wasn’t more upset.