Faith (20 page)

At this Ted snorted. At Arthur's age he'd helped Leo steal their uncle's cape dory; the two boys had sailed to Plymouth and back in the leaky old tub. No radio in it, no Coast Guard to bail them out if they ran into trouble. They were boys, and figured it out for themselves.

Oh, Ted
, Mary said.
He isn't like you.

And Arthur, listening, knew that it was true. He was not, would never be, anything like Ted McGann. Ted unafraid, rushing into the surf with fierce pleasure. Ted, a man.

“HE TERRIFIED
me.” Deliberately Art lit a cigarette. It was his sixth or seventh, I had lost count. Halfway though his story he'd disappeared into the kitchen. He'd come back with an ashtray and a fresh pack of Marlboros, his secret stash.

“And yet in the end it was Ted who saved me. After they got married, Fergus stopped coming around. I always wondered if Ted said something to him. And then tonight, on the porch—” His eyes welled. “Ted called me Fergus. He was confused, Sheila. And he told Fergus to leave Arthur alone.”

“My dad knew?” It was the first I had spoken. My jaw ached. For twenty minutes, more, my teeth had been clenched. “Not Ma?”

Art stared at the floor.

“She must have! I mean, wouldn't Dad have told her?”

Art closed his eyes. He looked, suddenly, exhausted. “I doubt it. Can you imagine that conversation? Imagine Ted saying such a thing.”

“She should have known. She should have done something.”

“Sheila, it doesn't matter now. I don't even know why I'm telling you this. It was so long ago.” Art looked, suddenly, at the cigarette in his hand, as though someone else had put it there.

“I'm sorry,” he said, butting it in the ashtray. “I know you hate these things.”

I had the urge to reach for his hand, but didn't. As I have said, we are not a demonstrative family, and even when he is your brother, there is something strange about touching a priest.

We said our goodbyes at the door. I had a long drive ahead of me. I have thought a great deal about what I might have said next.
You're my brother, Art. Whatever you did or didn't do, I will always love you.
All that I might have said and didn't.

“Thank you, Sheila,” he said. And to my astonishment he kissed my cheek.

As I left the lobby, I saw that Art's neighbor had been busy: another flyer was posted on the front door.

HAVE YOU SEEN THIS MAN?

I stood a moment, deliberating. In the end I left it there, fluttering a little in the wind.

I
drove back to Philadelphia through a dense fog. The sudden rain had cooled the air and left the ground steaming. At times the road disappeared completely. Still I ignored the speed limit. I drove as if someone were chasing me.

I thought back to the story I'd coaxed out of Clare Boyle: the day Harry Breen vanished, leaving Ma and Art behind. Art's revelation had given it a whole new meaning. The story had fascinated me for all the wrong reasons. I'd been so preoccupied with the man who wasn't there—the ghostly Harry Breen—that a far more important character had escaped my notice.

Fergus was a great one for children.

When Harry didn't come home, Ma had phoned her uncle. And for years afterward—until she remarried—it was Fergus who'd looked after her and Art.

There is a vast body of scientific literature devoted to those who molest children, an entire field of psychology of which, until recently, I was completely ignorant. Yet somehow—newspapers? osmosis?—I had absorbed one fact: that victims often repeat the pattern. Molested in childhood, they grow up to do the same.

Art had been molested.

This one fact changed (didn't it?) the shape of things.

For the first time, I let myself believe it. Suddenly it seemed not just likely, but probable, that the worst was true.

As moral beings we despise the predator; we feel compassion for the victim. Conscience and humanity demand this much. But when it comes to a man like my brother, nothing—nothing—is clear.

Art, and others like him: grown men maimed in childhood, infected by a repellent desire—and, like vampires in a horror movie, powerfully driven to infect. In a single evening Art was transformed before my eyes, not once but twice. I saw him as both predator and prey. I found myself thinking back—I couldn't help it—over his history. He'd been a youth minister at St. Rose of Lima. He had worked with altar boys.

And so by some instinct that now seems cowardly, I withdrew from him. I didn't do it consciously—at least, there is no single moment when I recall thinking, Art is a pedophile; therefore, I will have nothing to do with him
.
I simply returned to my life in Philadelphia with unusual gratitude: for my friends and colleagues, my familiar apartment and even my squirrelly students, in those fitful last weeks when spring is bursting forth and it seems ridiculous, utterly, to confine the young indoors. I took pleasure in my daily routines, the glorious weather. I joined a weekly game of Ultimate Frisbee. I had the diversion of Danny Yeager in my bed.

Meanwhile, back in Boston, my brothers moved inexorably along their courses, like locomotives in an algebra problem: two trains moving at different speeds, their tracks about to intersect.

K
ath woke the next morning in a state of dazed wonder. It is a sensation I have experienced myself, a frank amazement when my cynicism is confounded. When, defying all precedent, the thing I most desire actually appears.

She woke before the alarm, a thing that seldom happened. After years of night work, in a temperate climate, winter mornings in Boston had seemed a bleak punishment. Father Art had told her, once, how certain monks rose in the night to pray, interrupting their sleep as a kind of penance; and Kath recalled this every single morning as she dragged herself from bed to dress in the dark in a cold apartment and drive a shitty car through bad weather to a job she despised. But now spring had arrived, and by 6
A.M.
the bedroom was filled with a golden light. In the kitchen she switched on the Weather Channel and caught the tail end of the forecast:
Winds light and variable. Ceiling unlimited.

She made a cup of tea and drank it on the porch, like a woman in a TV commercial for laxatives or antidepressants, a calm and centered adult enjoying the morning's quiet pleasures. She did not smoke a cigarette.

I am lovable and capable.

She finished her tea and took the cup inside. As if seeing it for the first time, she noticed the clutter and chaos of the apartment, the overflowing ashtrays, the piles of junk mail and unpaid bills, the Batman action figures littering the floor. After work she would run the vacuum. She would buy a plant for the windowsill.

In the bedroom Kevin Vick lay tangled in the sheets. He'd let himself in with his key, crawled in beside her and passed out cold in the bed she'd shared, just hours before, with Mike McGann. In the morning light he looked ragged, blemished, his arms bruised.

“Hey,” she said. When he didn't move she gave his shoulder a shake. “Kevin. You need to go.”

He didn't take it well. There was whining protest—
Jesus, what time is it?
Then grumbling. Then, finally, genuine anger when he realized Kath didn't mean just this morning. She meant for all time.

Luckily he was still half asleep, even more crippled by the morning than Kath usually was. She gathered his things: toothbrush, razor, a rank pair of sneakers from under the bed. In the front pocket of his jeans she found the key chain she'd bought him—a pewter charm attached, shaped like a tiny mug of Guinness. (Kevin who lived nowhere, who owned nothing: what was he doing with all these keys?)

Carefully, minding her nails, she slipped her key off the ring.

“Where am I supposed to go?” he said.

“Your mother's. I don't know. Wherever you used to go.”

It wasn't her problem to solve; it was Kevin's. Let God fix him. After repeating the words for months, she finally understood what they meant.
Let go and let God.

She was driving Aidan to school when her cell phone rang. “It's me,” said Mike McGann, his voice warm and rough, like something she could wrap herself in. They made plans for later. He had afternoon showings in Quincy, and one in Dunster. If he finished early, he would swing by the apartment.

“Who was that?” Aidan asked when she hung up.

“That was Mike,” she told him. “Mommy's new friend.”

O
F MIKE'S
affair with Kath Conlon I know very little. In sexual matters there is an instinctual reserve between a brother and a sister, a shyness that I suppose serves an evolutionary purpose. Mike claims he saw her—a vaguer euphemism cannot be imagined—just a few times, in the evening after work. He found it surprisingly easy to arrange.
I have a showing later. I'll grab dinner out.
It was a plausible excuse—spring is every realtor's busy season. And when he sold, in rapid recession, two pricy houses that had lingered on the market for months, it was as if some external force had intervened to corroborate his alibi. In his deluded state, it seemed a kind of sign. Each time he left Kath's bed, he took a quick shower and drove across town just as the rush hour traffic eased. He arrived in time to kiss the boys good night.

My whole life I have held my brother in a certain regard, and it unnerves me to imagine him going home to Abby on those nights. He insists that she suspected nothing, but in this, I'm fairly certain, he has underestimated her. I speak from experience when I say it's hard not to notice a husband's hair damp from an evening shower, smelling of unfamiliar shampoo.

It isn't clear to me, as I recount these details, where Mike's heart lay. He maintains to this day that Aidan Conlon was never far from his thoughts; that what happened with the boy's mother was an accident, an unforeseen complication. He swears that he never wavered in his original intent: to know Aidan, to hear his story. To find out once and for all whether the unthinkable could be true.

T
HAT WEEK
or the following, Mike no longer remembers, he showed Kath the house at Twelve Fenno. “Bring Aidan,” he said, a suggestion that delighted her. Unlike any of her previous boyfriends, he wanted to spend time with her son.

I imagine the three of them walking through the little Cape, Mike skipping the usual sales pitch, letting Kath move at her own pace, opening closets and drawers. Anyone watching would think them a small family, and I wonder if Kath herself pictured Mike's clothes in the double closet, his shaving things in the renovated bathroom with its his-and-hers sinks. Aidan, for his part, loved the snug rear bedroom with its gables and skylight, the small backyard with a cement birdbath in one corner—long unused, filled with dirt and leaves. Kath was pleased when Mike took him outside to examine it. He was good with kids, that much was clear. She thought fleetingly of his three boys waiting for him at home. For just a moment she craved a cigarette, an urge she resisted. She hadn't smoked in six days.

She was alone in the kitchen, trying to figure out the convection oven, when her cell phone rang. It was Kevin Vick, talking fast. She knew instantly that he had scored.

“I was at your house,” he said. “Your car was there. Where the fuck were you?”

“None of your business. I'm out.”

He inhaled wetly, the cokehead's sniffle. The sound triggered something in her. Her mind tried to forget, but her body still remembered. Sour and delicious, that burning postnasal drip; whatever was left of the drug sliding down the back of her throat.

“You scored,” she said.

“Yeah. Great shit, too.”

For just a moment she hesitated, hating herself. Then she heard Mike's voice at the back door.

“I'm hanging up now,” she said. “I told you. Leave me alone.”

She turned off her phone and stowed it in her purse.

“Can we get a feeder?” Aidan demanded, bursting through the door.

“As many as you want,” Kath said.

She led him by the hand as Mike turned off the lights and locked the doors. It was nearly Aidan's bedtime. In half an hour she and Mike would be alone.

But to her surprise he headed straight for his truck, kissing her briefly at the curb. “I'll call you,” he said.

M
IKE DROVE
away in a bewildered state. Walking through the house with Kath had affected him powerfully, in ways he couldn't have predicted. Over the years he'd encountered every sort of difficult client, the critical, the demanding; but Kath was openly delighted by the modest little Cape. There was something touching in her simple enthusiasm, her palpable longing for a home. His own boys would have roared through the empty rooms like hyperactive banshees, but Aidan had stayed close to Kath, reaching often for her hand. Mike watched them intently. Kath was an affectionate mother, a spontaneous kisser and hugger, but her mood could shift in an instant: tender one moment; then impatient, sardonic, profane.
Slow down
, she'd yelled when Aidan raced down the staircase.
You want to wind up paralyzed? You'll break your fucken neck
. Minus the expletive, it was a comment that would have rolled easily off our own mother's tongue. Abby, of course, would never say such a thing.

And that, really, was the source of Mike's confusion, the reason his instincts contradicted themselves. Was Aidan a normal, well-adjusted kid with a loving, responsible mother? It depended entirely on how you defined those things. By Abby's standards, the kid's home life was catastrophic—
dysfunctional
was the word she liked to use. But was her way the only right way? What made her the authority on such things?

In the end, a single moment troubled him. When he took Aidan's hand and led him into the backyard, Kath had stayed behind to examine the appliances, opening the dishwasher and the side-by-side fridge. Everything about that seemed wrong.

If her son had been molested, would she let him walk off hand in hand, even for a minute, with a strange man?

T
HAT LONG
Memorial Day weekend passed in a blur. He was a realtor and a father. He was always driving somewhere. There were open houses, two each on Saturday and Sunday; T-ball practice, a birthday party. For three days Mike's Escalade crisscrossed the South Shore, idled in suburban weekend traffic. Periodically Kath's number popped up on his cell phone.

“Who keeps calling?” Jamie demanded from the backseat.

“Nobody,” Mike said.

It would have been easy enough to return her calls, but Mike didn't. He was still brooding over that moment, her blithe disregard when he took Aidan's hand.

On Sunday morning, Abby made a great show of sleeping in—
Mom's morning off
, she called it—and so it was Mike who fed the boys and got them into their church clothes. Shepherding them out the front door, he noticed—it was hard to miss—a familiar car disappear down the street. In his neighborhood, a fifteen-year-old Buick Regal was as conspicuous as a hearse.

He knew, then, that trouble was coming. He'd have known it sooner, had he checked the messages she'd left on his cell phone.

Hey, how's it going? It's Thursday night. Give me a call.

And then:

Hey, it's Friday. Happy long weekend! Aidan's at my mom's, so stop by if you want.

And then:

Saturday night. Where are you, anyway? I mean, what the fuck?

O
N MEMORIAL
Day Mike showed a house in Milton, a handsome old Victorian on a wide tree-lined street. The seller was asking eight hundred, but in this neighborhood it could easily go higher. The open house was crowded with prosperous-looking buyers. Mike expected an offer by the end of the day.

He was standing on the front porch talking to the Weinbergs, a young orthodontist and his wife, when he saw the Buick out of the corner of his eye. Kath stepped out of the car and left the engine idling. Aidan waved from the front seat.

“Hey,” she called from the sidewalk, shading her eyes. Kath in blue jeans and a bikini top, the nicotine patch on her shoulder, her jeweled navel flashing in the sun. “We're on our way to the beach. I thought we'd stop by.”

The orthodontist's wife gave her a smile. Her eyes went from Kath to the Buick. “Is this your family?” she asked Mike.

He did not answer the question.

“The roof is two years old,” he told Dr. Weinberg. “They're thirty-year shingles, which means fifteen. Even still, you're good for a while.” He shook the man's hand. “Sleep on it if you need to, but don't sleep in. It'll go fast. Any questions, give me a call.”

He gave them a wave as they got into their car, a shiny Lexus. The wife gave Kath a piercing look.

“What are you doing here?” Mike demanded, his voice hushed.

“I was in the neighborhood.”

It was a winding, dead-end street miles from the highway, even farther from the beach. The sort of place nobody passed through.

“All right. Fine. Your secretary gave me the address.”

“Did you drive past my house this morning?” Mike could barely contain his anger. His boys had noticed the car.

(
It's a bomber,
Ryan said, laughing.

I love it
, Jamie said.)

Kath frowned. “Maybe. How the fuck do I know? You never told me where you live.”

“Kath.” Mike ran a hand over his head. “This is not cool.”

“No shit. I haven't heard from you since, like, Wednesday.”

“I'm sorry. It's been a crazy few days.”

“Aidan's staying at my mom's tonight.”

Mike glanced at his watch. “I have another showing after this. In Quincy. I'm not sure how long it'll run.”

There was an awkward silence.

“Are you mad at me?” she asked.

“Jesus, no,” he said, an edge in his voice. “But I can't just drop everything every time you call. This isn't easy for me. I have responsibilities.”

A woman came out of the house then, a tall blonde in a flowing sundress. Mike treated her to the full wattage of his smile.

“What can I do for you?” he asked.

K
ATH SLEPT
poorly that night, worry gnawing at her stomach, a creeping dread. The feeling was all too familiar. It had visited her periodically since the age of twelve, the year her father died, the year she'd undressed for a sophomore: the horrible knowledge that she had surrendered too much, that she had given herself away. The last time—the worst time—had nearly killed her; and except for Kevin (who didn't count), she had sworn off men entirely. Then she met Mike McGann.

The holiday weekend had come and gone, and except for three miserable minutes on the sidewalk, there had been no Mike. She'd stood by like an idiot as he chatted with the well-dressed couple, smiling his salesman's smile. He'd looked through her as though she were invisible. Nothing for her to do but wait there, her cheeks flaming, as Mike shook the man's hand.

Are you mad at me?

She hated herself for asking the question, for caring one way or another. She had not gone looking for Mike McGann. He had come to her. He'd inserted himself into her life and turned it sideways. She'd been fine on her own, just fine.