Ask Again, Yes (34 page)

Otherwise, it was only Kate she glimpsed. Kate with that baby who turned into a toddler. A boy. Brown curls. Wriggly in her arms. Then, not terribly long after that boy began taking steps, there was Kate rushing to the car with another baby in her arms. Even when there were two cars in the driveway and Anne thought, surely, he was in there somewhere, all Anne glimpsed time after time after time was Kate moving
through lighted rooms, saying things that Anne couldn’t hear. “Those babies are my grandchildren,” she’d say aloud over and over. Where before she used to leave feeling sad but somewhat reassured—he was doing okay, after all, he had a job, even if he was a cop; he had a partner, even if that partner was Kate Gleeson—since that first baby was born she felt unsettled.

Twice, she spotted George, though he looked different, and it wasn’t until the second time that she figured out who he was. He appeared taller than he used to and younger than he should be, though that wasn’t possible, was it? The way he carried himself down their front path told Anne he’d been there more times than he could count.

It was too much to think about, and so she found things to do up in Saratoga to keep herself away. She volunteered at the food bank every week. She walked dogs around town for people who were on vacation. She tried reading stories to kids at the library but they all seemed so needy, more interested in telling her stories about themselves and their pets and their brothers and grandpas than listening to the story she read. She kept track of the ages of her grandchildren, though she didn’t know their birthdays. Whenever she saw them for the first time after not seeing them for several months, it was as if they’d transformed. A few times she felt too tired to drive all the way back upstate, so she stayed at a motor lodge on Jericho Turnpike. She glimpsed Peter driving toward her one morning as she was heading toward his house. The sun was in his eyes.

Who did the children look like? Not Peter, really. Not Kate. The older one looked to be about eight already, the girl maybe six. In the spring they shed their layers like skins, leaving jackets and sweatshirts thrown over bushes and on the steps. In the warm months they turned on the sprinkler in the side yard and played in their bathing suits
with some kids Anne recognized from up the street. Had they met their other grandparents? she wondered. Of course they had. What word did they use for Lena Gleeson? She wondered if Peter and Kate ever mentioned her. She could already imagine the story they might tell about that one terrible night. Or maybe they would take the easy route and simply tell them she was dead. Each time she pulled up to the curb and turned off the car, she decided the moment had come, that finally, after so many years, she was going to walk up and ring the doorbell and say she was sorry for everything and it was time to know each other again. She’d think and debate with herself about the best way to do it and then she’d decide: next time. Again and again and again: next time.

And then, late June 2016, the smell of a thunderstorm followed her all the way to their street. She parked several houses past theirs, as usual, nearly hidden by the weeping branches of their neighbor’s tree, the rearview mirror tilted to show their front door. It was dusk. She did a quick calculation, as she always did when she first pulled up. Peter was thirty-nine, Kate was still thirty-eight for several more weeks. Anne turned the radio on low and unwrapped her sandwich and settled in to watch the house while she still had the light. When it was fully dark she took a short walk to stretch her legs and get closer, pulling up the hood of her light summer sweater in case they should come outside. She looked at their cars and their flower bed and their beach towels slung over the railing of their deck to dry. He was in there. His car was parked in the driveway, Kate’s behind it. Lights approached from the main road and Anne picked up her pace, dropped her chin to her chest, and turned away. The car slowed outside Peter’s house, and Anne waited until she was well out of sight before crouching to pretend to tie her shoelace. It could be him, maybe, someone dropping him off.
But when she looked over her shoulder, it was not Peter she spotted but another familiar person, a man, though it took her a few seconds to place him.

“Francis Gleeson,” she whispered to the cicadas, to the automated sprinklers that were beginning to rise and whir. She watched Francis cross the lawn, how he ignored the walking path. She tried to get a good look at his face, to see what damage she’d caused there, but it was impossible in such low light. She watched him knock on their door three times before simply pushing it open. Something was happening.

When she returned to the car, she didn’t bother with the rearview mirror and instead turned fully around in her seat, her back to the steering wheel. She just watched the house, to see if Francis would come out again, or Peter or Kate, to see if she might be able to tell what was going on and who was in trouble. He had the same expression on his face as he had all those nights ago. Not one of the little ones, she prayed.

She waited and waited and waited, but the house betrayed nothing and the front door stayed closed. So he could drive then. His posture was good, his gait was just that tiny bit off, something about the way he swung his arm on one side, but a person might not notice it if they weren’t searching for it. She remembered that he’d once carried her in his arms all the way across her front yard and up the stairs to her bedroom. How had he gotten the door open without setting her down?

She must have dozed off because when she woke up, the neighborhood was steeped in a middle-of-the-night kind of silence except for the sound of a sharp knock—one, two—on the roof of her car.

She opened her eyes to see, first, that Francis Gleeson’s car was gone. Then she turned just slightly to find Kate Gleeson’s face framed in the driver’s side window, which she’d rolled down to let the air circulate. The night was hot.

“Jesus Christ,” Anne said, hand to heart.

“I didn’t mean to scare you,” Kate said.

Anne wondered if she’d always known when she was out there, every single time.

“We have to talk,” Kate said.

sixteen

I
T DIDN’T MEAN SHE’D
forgiven her, Kate told herself. It didn’t mean that history didn’t matter. It only meant she’d try anything that might help.

And there were things she wanted to know—about Peter, about Peter’s father, about Anne, about Ireland, about all the people connected to Peter by blood so that she’d know for sure what she was dealing with. George could help, maybe, but whenever he sensed questions pushing up from her, he was suddenly in a hurry to get to the restroom, the fridge, his car. Peter, though, Peter he stopped for, tried to make listen. She’d seen them conferring on side-by-side recliners. She’d seen him sidle up to Peter at the grill. “It’s the job,” George always said, before Kate even got a whole sentence out. It was the weather. The mortgage. Being a man. But he frowned when he watched Peter navigate around their kitchen, offering drinks and things to eat. Peter drank O’Doul’s when George was over, one after another, like the next one might quench his thirst.

“Have a real one,” George said once, last summer. They were out on the patio, the kids trying to catch fireflies.

“Nah, this is fine,” Peter said.

“But you did already, right? Before we came? And you’ll have more once we leave?”

“George,” Rosaleen said.

“Brian used to do that.”

Peter just looked over at him, and George held his gaze for so long that even Kate got uncomfortable and had to look away.

When did it begin? If she had all the information, then maybe she’d be able to figure this thing out, find that critical moment in time when things could have gone in one direction but instead they went another. She was a scientist. She solved problems. Since moving in together they’d always ended their days with a drink or two. If he was on a midnight tour, he came home, slept, and then maybe had a drink after lunch, to tide him over until Kate got home from work. They were always too broke to afford more than one or two drinks at bars in Manhattan, so they mostly drank at home. When he was on a day tour they’d have a glass of wine while they made dinner, and then another with dinner. As they got older they became a little pickier, learned about body, legs, tannins. Peter learned about tequila and gin. They remembered the cheap booze they’d been happy with in college, and laughed. When Kate was in her late twenties, something about a glass of red wine with dinner on a Monday or Tuesday felt sophisticated, and Kate often thought of her own mother, who had a Diet Coke with almost every meal.

Kate was capable of rigorous study, of drawing complex, defensible conclusions. Since her undergrad organic chemistry class she’d imagined the world as a ceaseless machine: churning, grinding, turning matter into other matter. On the day she realized she might be pregnant—a quick calculation of days, the fact that her breasts were spilling out of her bra—she sat on the crackled plastic of her favorite lab stool and swabbed her arm, held the tourniquet with her teeth. She did a qualitative test first: positive for hCG. The quantitative test told her she was about seven weeks. Then she disposed of everything neatly, rolled her
sleeve down, and did every single thing she had to do that day except with the feeling that she’d been hit by a shooting star.

Her job, most days, was to find the contours of an invisible universe and then map it for others to see. She performed forensic analyses on hair, fibers, body fluids, fingerprints, gunshot residue, fire accelerants, documents, soil, metals, polymers, glass. On her best day, she found a whole story contained in the pull tab of a hoodie. Another day, she unlocked a riddle with one single strand of hair. So why couldn’t she solve this problem, too?

When Frankie was born, Kate began noticing how quickly Peter poured that first drink after coming home from work, how eager he was to get to it, but she thought maybe she was just jealous that he could stick to the old routine when she was always worried about nursing, pumping, getting a decent night’s sleep. There was nothing wrong with a man having a drink at the end of a long day. Her father had always had two whiskeys while he watched the evening news, and the sight of his glass sweating rings on the
TV Guide
where he set it down was always comforting, a sign that he was home safe.

So when, exactly, did the sound of a bottle clinking against the kitchen counter and the second clink of a glass set down beside it begin to annoy her as the years went by? In her most reflective moments—alone in the car on her way to work, or in the shower before the rest of them woke up for the day—it didn’t seem fair that she should feel angry with him for having a drink when it so rarely showed on him. He’s bigger than I am, she told herself, seventy pounds heavier. He can handle a lot more. He always cleaned up after dinner, helped bathe the children, read them their books. When they were infants he did his best to soothe them when they cried in the middle of the night. He’d put a hand on Kate’s hip and tell her to keep sleeping, and then he’d pick up Frankie or, two years
later, Molly, and rock them or offer a bottle or a song hummed low. It wasn’t his fault that neither of the kids ever settled until Kate had them in her arms.

Once when Molly was about a year old, she started wailing in the middle of the night, which wasn’t unusual. Kate was so exhausted that she rolled over to ask Peter to please go pick her up, but Peter wasn’t there. So Kate went to Molly, tried to get her to breastfeed, and when she refused, using her angry little fists to push Kate’s breast away, Kate went downstairs to warm a bottle. When she got to the bottom step, she thought she saw something dark on the living room rug, and when she flicked on the light, she gasped. A bottle of wine had tipped over, staining the cream carpet a deep blood red. “Peter,” she said, trying to nudge him awake. She thought back to earlier in the day: two vodka sodas when he came home from work; they’d split a bottle of wine with dinner but actually Kate had had only one glass, and he’d had the rest; a few beers after dinner, she didn’t know how many; and this, a different bottle of wine. Not an extraordinary amount, but it was a lot when she added it up, a lot for a Tuesday night, a lot considering he’d had the same the night before and would have the same the next night. How much did other people drink when they were at home doing nothing? she wondered.

The thing was, he didn’t really drink that much when they went out, met up with friends. A few, yes, but at the same pace as everyone else. If she told him ahead of time that she wanted him to drive home, then that was never a problem. It was at home that he kept going and going. But he always got up and off to work the next day. He always showed up exactly when and where he was supposed to show up. He was patient with the kids, and listened to their endless stories, and he made funny faces while he plunged spoonfuls of mashed food into their mouths. Surely a person with a problem would have to call in sick sometimes. Surely a person with a problem would not be able to play rodeo with a toddler for a solid hour almost every day. That night, as she pressed mounds of
paper towels into the carpet to soak up as much wine as she could, she thought back on a recent autopsy at work. A man had been found dead by a piling near Pier 57, and the death was deemed suspicious, though there were no signs of trauma on the body. Friends reported he was not a drug user. He drank a lot of craft beer, considered himself something of a connoisseur, but no wine, no hard alcohol. In the autopsy report, the pathologist had identified fatty liver with cholestasis, and acute portal fibrosis.

“An alcoholic,” Kate said, looking up from the paperwork. “But his friends and family reported only beer. Do you think he was drinking in secret?”

“Not necessarily,” the pathologist had said, looking at Kate with a curious expression. “His ex said he drank as many as eight or ten beers a day, every day.”

“But no alcohol.”

“Beer is alcohol, Kate.”

“No, I know. I’m just—” But she didn’t know, exactly, why she felt confused.