Faith (12 page)

“He looks good,” I said. “His speech is fine, he's very pleasant and friendly, but after a few minutes you can tell he's faking it. He has no idea what he's talking about.”

“But he knew you, right? He recognized his own daughter?”

“I guess. It's hard to say. Ma is always coaching him.
Ted, Sheila's here.
That kind of thing.”

Silence on the other end. Poor Danny Yeager: fuck a girl twice, and look what you've gotten into. But he is a guidance counselor, after all. (What sane person would accept such a title? An open invitation to the distraught and disoriented, the wounded and the crazed.) And I was tired and hungover and too ragged even to feel ridiculous. I wanted only a familiar voice, someone who knew me. Not some earlier, larval version of myself, the soft simple creature who'd once slept in this bed; but the person I have grown into, whoever that is. I wanted someone to remind me who I am.

I
t's a Sunday afternoon, late summer, church behind me for another week. It's a Sunday afternoon, is not was, because here the past is present, with me always; it will not leave me alone, it doesn't know its place. We are riding in my father's car at noon or half past, the sun directly overhead, the black vinyl seat of the Pontiac Ventura sticky beneath my bare thighs. Route 3A is slow with traffic, the two-lane road that winds past the beach towns, fumes rising from the pavement, the air low and heavy, smelling of melting tar. I am thirteen, wearing denim cutoffs and a Red Sox T-shirt over the bikini I bought with my own money, that Ma has never seen and would not have let me buy. But the suit has been paid for and now worn, the sanitary adhesive strip removed from its crotch so that by law it cannot be returned.

Mike and I are in the backseat and we are riding past the town of Scituate—
the Irish Riviera—
where my uncle Leo and aunt Norma live on a dead-end street, the fine houses set far apart and heavily shaded with trees. We're riding to the marina where Leo keeps the
Sweet Life
, his forty-foot cabin cruiser. Long before it meant anything to me, I knew the phrase “forty-foot cabin cruiser.” My uncle employs it often, as does my father, who enjoys telling people how he spends these Sundays.

He's done well, Leo
, Dad says, holding his glass to his heart.

We will pile aboard the boat, Leo and Dad, then me and Mike and our cousins Brian and Richie and Ann Marie, except that Ann Marie hasn't come this time, which means that I will sit alone all afternoon being thirteen with no one to talk to, not even fat and boring Ann Marie. Ma and Aunt Norma will follow, carrying grocery sacks. My mother is famously nervous about the water, unhappy on, in or near it. Later I will understand what these afternoons cost her, the humming anxiety as she waits for the forty-foot cabin cruiser to return to the harbor, delivering herself and her children to dry land. Those fears live close to the surface. Beneath them is a deeper unease, also unspoken, a dread of what will happen later at home. Because even more than he loves Leo, my father loves Leo's life; and after these hours on the wide ocean, our snug house in Grantham will seem hopelessly constricting. My father, in his cups, will roar just to hear himself, to prove he is alive.

We motor out of the harbor with a noisy burst, belching diesel fumes—prompting dirty looks from the Scituate Yacht Club, genteel sailboaters who disdain our shiny fiberglass tub. My uncle Leo gives them the finger. He opens two beers from the cooler and passes one to my dad, standing beside him at the helm. They raise their cans in joyful salute. The word
cocksuckers
is lost in the engine noise.

Ma and Aunt Norma disappear below deck, to what Ma calls the kitchen until Norma corrects her:
the galley
. Norma wears her usual sailing costume, white Bermuda shorts and gold jewelry and navy-and-white striped tank top. Ma makes sandwiches as her own mother did: buttered bread, a single thin slice of ham.
We have more ham, you know
, Norma shouts over the engine.
No need to be chintzy. Leo likes a thick sandwich.
Watching, I dread my own womanhood, the day when I too will follow along carrying bags of groceries, my mission wherever I go to feed other people who take actual part in life while I am simply the catering staff. I hang back watching my mother take orders from Norma, whose freckled arms jiggle as she mixes green Kool-Aid. Everything—the table, the counters—vibrates with the engine, and Norma spills a little as she fills the plastic jug.

Then, suddenly, the noise stops. I climb the stairs to the deck where my uncle is dropping anchor. The men drain their cans of Pabst, crushing them to save space because the cardboard box on the floor is already half filled. They unbutton their shirts. My uncle's belly is round and hard like a melon. My father's arms are thick and brown, his chest lily-white. Both wear oval medals—St. Christopher, the patron saint of sailors—on silver chains.

I watch them jump overboard.
Into the drink!
Leo shouts. They are both excellent swimmers. My father dives beneath the surface and rises spitting a long stream of salt water, spurting like a whale. As a little girl I'd been delighted by this trick. Now it simply disgusts me, a mouthful of Boston Harbor effluent, untold molecules of factory runoff, dioxin and urine and God knows what.

I stand back as Mike and Richie cannonball into the water with earsplitting whoops. Then I pull off my T-shirt and drop my shorts. As far as I can tell, sun on my skin is the only benefit of this lame family outing. I have built my tan all summer and am mortified by my relatives' pale freckled flesh.

My cousin Brian comes up behind me and reaches into the cooler, as he always does when Leo's back is turned. He is seventeen and adolescence has rendered him mute. But today, for the first time, Brian fishes out two cans. Miraculously, he also speaks. “Catch,” he says, and I do, the wet can nearly slipping from my hands. “Come on.”

I follow him to the rear of the boat, where he takes a pack of Camels from his pocket. I have smoked only once before, not inhaling. I glance nervously over my shoulder.

“Dad doesn't care.” Brian lights up. He wears a silver medal like his father's and mirrored sunglasses that hide his eyes.

I lean forward so he can light one for me. A breeze lifts my hair. “Careful,” he says, holding it away from the flame.

It is the best moment of the afternoon, the summer, the entire year of being thirteen: the diesel breeze off the water, my cousin's bare chest and my own near nakednesss, his hand gentle where it holds my hair. I want it to last longer but there is my mother's voice cawing
Come and get 'em
and then a great mobilization of McGanns, Ma and Norma emerging from below deck, Dad and Leo and then the little boys scampering up the ladder, the boat rocking with their shifting weight.

Brian and I climb over to join the others. I stumble a little, and Brian reaches out a hand to steady me.
I'm drunk
, I whisper.

So are they
, he says, and I am laughing with my handsome cousin who takes the bus into the city to go to BC High School, a thing I would love to do but can't because it's only for boys.

I accept a sandwich and a cup of Kool-Aid, ignoring Ma, who hisses at me:
Put on some clothes
. I'll hear about it later, but right now I feel good. Brian takes off his sunglasses and I feel him looking at my belly and my nipples hard from the cold. The fathers and the boys wait the required twenty minutes, then jump back
into the drink.
Ma accepts a beer and finally relaxes a little, and I go down to use the bathroom (
the head
, Norma corrects me). I want Brian to follow and he does, closing the door behind us.
Let me see them
, he says, and I don't understand and then I do.

They're still small
, he says but kisses them anyway and when he puts my hand inside his shorts there is a funny kind of net inside them.
Swim trunks
, I think, and it is the last thought I will have, until the engine starts and my stomach lurches and I turn just in time to vomit green Kool-Aid into the toilet
the head.

T
hat night, his stomach already full of shepherd's pie, Mike sat down to dinner with his wife. He pulled into the driveway at the stroke of eight and found Abby at the kitchen sink, rinsing greens for salad. “I just put the twins down,” she said. “Jamie almost fell asleep in the bathtub. Ryan is out like a light.”

He watched her bang a drawer shut with her sleek denim hip. Three kids and she'd kept her figure, improved it even. She fed the family carefully, recipes clipped from
Prevention
magazine. His boys ate broccoli without complaint. At holidays this astonished our cousin Rich, whose kids lived on white bread and hot dogs and turned up their noses at anything else.

He helped her carry the plates to the dining room: the salad, a skinless chicken breast, the butternut squash he dreaded but pretended to like.

“How's Sheila?” Abby asked.

It is tempting, almost titillating, to imagine how others speak of us in our absence. In the case of my sister-in-law, it is unnerving to contemplate. My interactions with her have never been easy. On both sides there is a certain disquiet. Abby is beautiful, intelligent and self-possessed. She has never failed at anything as far as I can tell, and if that isn't enough to make you feel small and speechless, then you and I are different under the skin. And yet I jangle her, too, because Mike and I are closer than most siblings. We finish each other's sentences. Often enough, one of us will make the other laugh so hard and long that asphyxiation seems a real danger. It's a heady pleasure rare in adulthood, not unlike—I will say it—the shared breathlessness of rousingly successful coitus. Abby has been present when Mike and I fall out laughing, and her discomfort is so tangible that I suspect this has occurred to her, too.

“She's fine, I guess.”

“How did she look?”

“Better than last time. More hair.” He reached for pepper and salt.

“Your dad must have been happy to see her.”

Mike didn't respond. He sensed that she was baiting him. Abby knew that Dad, his mind gone from drink, did not recognize his own grandchildren, and that this pained Mike more than he would ever say. The old man stared blankly at the boys as though they were packages he hadn't ordered, but never failed to perk up at the mention of Sheila, who wanted nothing to do with the family, who visited only when a relative dropped dead (or, in Art's case, deserved to).
Ah, Sheila. Such a good girl.

“I didn't see him,” said Mike. “He was downstairs watching the game.”

They sat at the table. It was an unbreakable rule of Abby's: on weeknights, after the kids were in bed, she and Mike ate a civilized meal in the dining room, cloth napkins, soft jazz on the stereo. He appreciated this, found it relaxing. But some nights he missed eating with the boys. The squirming chaos, the occasional spilled milk, reminded him of our childhood, Ma barking orders, the two of us winding each other up, kicking under the table and dissolving sometimes in breathless laughter, for reasons he couldn't have named even at the time. This, to Mike,
was
family, the whole reason he'd wanted kids in the first place. Abby was an excellent mother, by every measure better than Ma had been. She rationed the boys' TV watching, doled out vitamins, kept track of their dental checkups, wrestled them into their baths. Yet Mike sometimes wondered: did Abby
enjoy
their children? Wasn't there more to being a parent than simply doing everything right?

He started in on his dinner, chewing slowly. The chicken was a little dry. He pictured Ma's shepherd's pie hardening in his stomach like cement.

“Don't you find it odd?” Abby asked. “She hasn't come around in years. Now she hops on a plane for something like this.”

“Yeah, so? Art's her brother, too.”

“It's not as if they're close.”

Mike shrugged. “Maybe they are.”

His wife closed one eye, her skeptical look. She was about to tell him, in delicate paraphrase, that he was full of shit.

“They have so much in common, right? I'll bet Sheila hasn't set foot in a church since our wedding.”

“Let's not start on that.”

“I wasn't.”

Upstairs a commotion started: crying, a shout. Lately Jamie was prone to nightmares.

“I'll go,” said Mike, springing from his chair.

Bless Jamie, he thought, grateful for the escape.

I
HAVE
said already that Mike is a pragmatist. Having decided on a course of action, he proceeds without hesitation. I have never known him to second-guess himself, or to question his own motives. His energy is fearsome, his immunity to the modern illnesses: inertia, anxiety, ambivalence, regret.

The next morning, a Friday, he rose at dawn, hit the weight bench and ate breakfast with the kids. Abby joined them just as he was leaving, and he made sure the boys saw him kiss her goodbye. They were making an effort to keep things looking normal, though for several days they'd given each other wide berth. Abby went to bed soon after the boys did. By the time Mike came upstairs she was already asleep.

He took a back route to Dunster, avoiding the highway; at this hour the expressway would be a parking lot. He still had friends on the force, and had called in a favor. His old buddy Dan Flanagan had pulled Kath's RMV record. He hadn't asked why Mike wanted the address.

Naturally I have questioned Mike about his intentions that morning. What exactly was he hoping for when he went to Kath Conlon's apartment?

“I wanted to see the kid,” he said.

It's a fair answer—though, I suspect, an incomplete one. Mike believes in the basic honesty of children. In his view, no eight-year-old has mastered the cheap ruses of adulthood. When kids lie, they don't
want
to be believed; their deepest wish is to be known and understood. For my brother this is a point of faith: a child will tell the truth if he feels safe and accepted. All you have to do is gain his trust.

Fenno Street should have been bustling at that hour, and Mike did spot a few commuters, dog walkers, kids hiking to the bus stop. But he also saw young, able-bodied people drinking coffee on porches, smoking cigarettes on front steps. A pack of teenage boys in hooded sweatshirts lingered at the corner. It was what realtors called a
transitional neighborhood
, somewhere between welfare and respectable working class. Though in which direction it was moving—whether it was getting better or worse—was anybody's guess.

Mike parked at a discreet distance, two doors down, and scoped out the house, a run-down three-decker as shabby as (but no worse than) any other on the block. The first-floor shades were drawn. On the front porch were two plastic chairs, a plastic table, a yellow toboggan. An old Buick was parked out front—late eighties vintage, he'd guess, with a landau top. A bigger gas hog than his Escalade: ten miles to the gallon, if you were lucky. Then again, if you were truly lucky, you wouldn't be driving such a car.

It was astonishing what you could learn about people from the way they lived. Mike saw it every day, walking through strangers' houses. Their furniture and keepsakes, their personal photographs; what they kept in the refrigerator, the hall closet, the medicine chest. This apartment, for example. If only he could see inside it, he would know a great deal about Kathleen Conlon and her son.

He turned his attention to the house across the street. Twelve Fenno was a small Cape, its clapboards painted yellow. The windows and doors cried out for replacement. The roof would last another year. Mike had rarely shown a house in such condition, but he'd gone out of his way to get this one. The property was listed with one of their branch offices, and the agent, Teri Pappas, was about to take maternity leave. She'd been mystified by his interest.
Number twelve? Sure, take it. They're asking three hundred. In their dreams.

Mike got out of his Escalade and glanced up and down the street. It was trash day; at each address, a few plastic recycling bins sat at the curb. He strolled casually toward the three-decker. A single bin sat on the sidewalk, full of empty bottles, bargain brands of whiskey and gin.

A drinker, then.

For a second his mind raced, pondering the implications. If the mother was a drunk, could her word be trusted? On the other hand, the child of such a mother would be doubly vulnerable, unprotected from any predator that came along. She hadn't filed criminal charges, a fact that nagged at him. Did that make the accusation less credible? Or was she simply hoping to spare the kid the trauma of a trial? In her place, would he have done the same thing?

At that moment a girl came out of the first-floor apartment, a recycling bin in one hand, in the other a bag of trash. “Aidan!” she called. “Come on already!” She was small and slender, her hair streaked an improbable shade of blond. She wore a raspberry-colored tracksuit and was loaded down with a pocketbook, a tote bag and a backpack that looked weirdly familiar. It was, Mike realized, the same Batman pack Ryan carried.

“Gimme that,” Mike called, approaching her. He took the bin in one hand, the trash in the other, and swung them easily to the curb.

“Thanks.” The girl eyed him warily. “Aidan!” she called, unlocking the Buick. “I'm going to be late again.”

A boy appeared on the porch, pale and skinny, his dark hair shaggy. Mike felt something catch in his throat.

“I can't find my backpack.” The boy's voice was low and troubled, almost comically distressed. A worrier, then, like Mike's Jamie: the kind of kid who sees disaster everywhere. He was small for eight. Ryan had been that size in kindergarten, the tallest boy in his class.

“I've got it, sweetie. Let's go.”

The kid scrambled down the steps and went around to the passenger side. To Mike's surprise, he went straight for the front seat. His own kids always sat in back, in case of accident: a child lighter than seventy pounds could be crushed if an airbag deployed. Of course, this old clunker wouldn't even
have
airbags. While Mike's boys rode around town in Abby's brand-new Explorer, sturdy as a Sherman tank, Aidan Conlon was living a more dangerous life.

Mike turned and headed back to his Escalade, but not before getting a good look inside the recycling bin marked CONLON. Yogurt cups, a milk carton, soda and shampoo bottles. A plastic jug labeled “Juicy Juice
.
”

What happened next was, simply, a stroke of luck.

“I forgot my lunch,” the boy said suddenly.

“Jesus, Aidan.” The girl set her pocketbook on the Buick's roof and handed him her keys. “Lock the door after you. Can you do that?”

Mike watched the boy scamper up the porch steps.

“I have twins that age,” he called to the girl. “I swear to God, it takes us half an hour to get out of the house.” He unlocked his truck and took a stack of signs—
SOUTH SHORE REALTY
—from the backseat.

He was surprised when she came toward him, arms folded across her chest. “Who's selling?” she asked, eyeing the signs. Her lips were glossy pink, the same color as the tracksuit. She looked very young.

“Number twelve,” he said, pointing. “You interested?”

“Maybe. What are they asking?” She smelled of cigarettes and fruity perfume. The top of her head was level with his shoulder. He looked down at the dark roots of her hair.

“Two-fifty. But I'd consider that a suggestion. I'm Mike, by the way.” He handed her a business card from his pocket. “Open house tomorrow, four to six. Stop by, if you want.”

“Maybe I will,” she said.