Remembering Sarah

by Chris Mooney

  Mike wanted to say he was sorry, but didn’t want to disrupt the flow of her thoughts.

  “I caught him—twice,” Sam said. “Both times in a motel. Both times it was raining and I’m sitting in my car with a pair of binoculars, watching him as he opens the door and then kisses his bimbo goodbye. Such a cliché, right? And as pathetic as that was—and it was extremely pathetic—I topped myself by taking him back both times, buying into his promise that he’d stop seeing her. I made a commitment for better or for worse, so I figured the cheating came under the worse category. And I think on some level I thought I deserved this because I had faulty eggs.” Sam drank some more of her wine and when she was done, went to work on rubbing out a crease on her jeans. “Her name was Tina. She was a lawyer at another firm. One of Matt’s lazy sperm hit the jackpot. That’s why he wanted the divorce. He had a woman who was going to give him a family.”

  “I’m sorry, Sam.”

  She shrugged. “Life.”

  “So you knew.”

  “About the cheating, yes, I knew. I didn’t find out Tina was pregnant until after the divorce papers were signed. It was a quick divorce—he basically gave me whatever I wanted. But the pregnancy—Matt managed to keep that very hush-hush.”

  “You ever call and ask him about why he had done that to you?”

  “Matt is a self-absorbed asshole. What’s the point in calling to confirm something I already know?”

  Mike leaned forward and felt Sam’s toes brush against his stomach. He placed the envelope on her lap. “These pictures were taken by Lou,” he said. “The week before I got married.”

  Sam put her wine glass on the floor and then delicately opened the envelope. As she went through the pictures, he pretended to watch the people move up and down the street and tried not to think about the photos—thirty-six snapshots that told a story of Jess getting into a Volvo with a man Mike had never seen before, the two of them driving up to New Hampshire (Lou having taken multiple pictures of the car driving on Route 128 North and then Route 3 North), parking in a bookstore parking lot and then walking across a busy street to climb the steep concrete steps of a blue house, the bed and breakfast Lou had mentioned. The last three pictures of the roll culminated in Jess and this man walking down the stairs together, getting back into his car and then kissing.

  Out of the corner of his eye, he saw Sam tuck the pictures back inside the envelope. “These pictures don’t necessarily mean she had an affair.”

  Mike turned to her. “What about the last picture, the one where they’re kissing?”

  “The focus isn’t that good. To me, it looks like they’re hugging.”

  “Still.”

  “And your father just gave these to you out of the blue today?”

  “I found them at the bottom of a toolbox along with a note from my mother that Lou had intercepted. You remember what happened to my mother?”

  “I remember you mentioned something about her running off.”

  Mike started with the day his mother left and the reasons she did; took Sam through his last three encounters with Lou and ended with the second letter found in the toolbox, Mike telling Sam what the letter said and the lie about St. Stephen’s. When he finished, the sun was gone, the lantern streetlights on.

  “So now you’re thinking your mother never had any intention of coming home?” Sam’s voice was low, almost fearful, like she was afraid to ask the question.

  “Did Lou go over there and take pictures of my mother with this guy? Yes. Do I think she was having an affair? Looks that way. Do I think Lou tried to talk her into coming home? I doubt it. People who cross him disappear. That’s a fact.”

  “He was telling the truth about paying for your tuition. The priest confirmed it.”

  “Sam, this is a man who lies and kills for a living. My mother wouldn’t just vanish. If she’s alive, she’d have written a letter or called. She’d have done something.”

  Sam nodded, listening.

  “When my mother disappeared, the police came around. A lot,” Mike said. “He had those pictures. He knew where she was, who she was with. All Lou had to do was hand them over and he’d be free and clear.”

  “And what if you found out about the affair? Imagine what that would have done to you. How old were you? Nine?”

  “Something like that.”

  “As for the pictures of your ex-wife,” Sam said, “my only guess is that your father found out something about her and thought that if he showed you the pictures, you would leave her.”

  “Only he didn’t.”

  “Maybe he didn’t show you these pictures for the same reason he didn’t show you the pictures of your mother,” Sam offered. “The fact that he didn’t, that’s rather admirable, don’t you think?”

  “One time I saw Lou work a guy over with a lead pipe. The guy was big into debt with Lou’s buddy Cadillac Jack. Guy’s on the ground, crying, begging for his life and Lou keeps whacking him. What’s Lou do afterward? Goes home and takes a nap.”

  “Sully, I’m not going to sit here and play the armchair shrink and tell you that I understand your father. I don’t. From everything you’ve told me, he sounds like a real son of a bitch. That being said, there’s obviously this other side of him. It’s possible that instead of showing you the pictures of your mother, he decided to shelter you from the truth.”

  “That’s what you think?”

  “Why else take pictures? Honestly, I can’t imagine what that news would have done to you at that age. And maybe … this is just a thought, but maybe, on some level, he thought that having you hate him would be easier than knowing the truth.”

  Mike shut his eyes, rubbed them. He saw Jess kissing this other man. He saw Lou wandering through the streets of Paris, following his wife and her longtime love, snapping pictures and thinking about how he was going to get Mary alone. Mike kept seeing all these things and wanted to shut the door on all of it and walk away, only he couldn’t.

  “Maybe I have it all wrong,” Sam said. “I don’t know what makes your father tick. Quite frankly, I still don’t know what makes my own father tick. All I know is that people are messy.”

  “I called Jess today.”

  “What did she say?”

  “She said hello and I hung up.”

  “The day you met Jess for lunch, why didn’t you ask her?”

  Mike had thought about his reason for days now. “I was afraid that if I asked her and she said yes, it would strip away those good times we had together. Change the way I think about and remember her.”

  Sam remained quiet. Mike thought back to this new memory he had just discovered, this Christmas memory of his mother and this man in Beacon Hill. Was it true? Had that man been Jean Paul? Or was his mind coughing up something out of fear? The memory felt true, but he wasn’t sure anymore.

  Sam said, “Walk away from it.”

  “Could you?”

  “Depends.”

  “On what?”

  “On how many more doors you want to open.”

  Mike nodded. “The second letter from my mother,” he said. “There was an address on the envelope.”

  Sam waited for the rest of it.

  “I called your friend Nancy and asked her to see if she could find out anything about that address, about my mother and this guy Jean Paul. I figured Nancy would have a better shot at finding her than I would.”

  “So you’ve decided to try and find her.”

  “All this time I thought, you know, Lou had done something to her. Buried her somewhere. Now I come to find out she might be alive. I can’t turn away from that.”

  “And if your mother is alive?”

  “I don’t know, Sam. Honest to God, I don’t know.”

  CHAPTER 38

  For the next three days Mike buried himself in work. They finished with Margaret Van Buren’s addition and kitchen renovation on Monday and then moved to the next jobsite, the one in Newton—The Urn Lady. Dotty Conasta was retired and very
old (“Seriously, when you babysat Moses, was he a bad kid?” Bill always asked her); borderline senile (she repeated the same stories about her late husband Stan over and over again); and clearly lonely (she followed them room to room). Normally having a customer hovering around them every second sent Mike over the edge; but listening to Dotty was a welcome distraction from the constant, grinding process of sifting and sorting thoughts about his mother, about Lou and Jess and the newest addition, this guy Jean Paul.

  After they kicked off from work, he would go home with Bill and drown himself in the chaos of Bill’s house. Movement was important. Constant movement would exhaust him, so he helped Patty clear the table and clean the dishes, helped bathe the kids—a major project with the twins, who liked to get into splashing fights. He helped Paula with her homework and invited her on walks with the dog. They talked about nonsense stuff really—why TV shows totally sucked now, why boys were so confusing, why tennis rocked. At night he’d head downstairs to Bill’s basement office and go over estimates or watch ESPN, MTV, whatever Bill wanted to watch, Mike forcing himself to stay up as long as possible before heading upstairs to sleep. Bill knew what was going on and didn’t ask any questions.

  Then Nancy Childs called.

  “I have a lead but my French is a little rusty,” she said, and then, as if reading his mind, added, “Yes, some of us Revere girls actually took a foreign language other than Spanish.”

  “What’d you find out?”

  “Let me get everything together first and then I’ll tell you. The reason I’m calling is that I was thinking of getting Sam involved in this since she speaks fluent frog. You okay with that?”

  He was. Sam knew everything anyway.

  It was during these stretches of quiet, usually when he was in bed, that he would start to wonder exactly what Nancy had uncovered. And the stuff about Jess was chewing its way through him. The pictures floated through his thoughts from one moment to the next, and sometimes he would pick up the phone and start dialing Jess’s number and then hang up, usually before a first ring. Did he want the truth? Or was he looking for a whipping post? He wasn’t sure.

  Friday afternoon came and Mike made a promise to himself that he was going to enjoy the evening with Sam. No talk of Lou or Jess, none of it.

  He owned one suit, black, perfect for both weddings and funerals. After he finished dressing, he came downstairs into Bill’s kitchen and saw the twins sitting at the table, the two of them dressed in shirts and shorts and slurping grape popsicles that dripped over their hands and plates.

  Bill whistled. “Looking good, Louis.”

  “Feeling good,Todd.”

  The phone rang. “Slap a Zima in your hand and you’re good to go,” Bill said as he jogged down the hallway to retrieve the cordless from the family room.

  Grace popped the popsicle out of her mouth. Her lips and tongue were purple.

  “Are you getting married?”

  “No,” Mike said. “I’m just going out to eat.”

  “In a suit?”

  “It’s a very nice restaurant.”

  “Daddy doesn’t wear suits to restaurants.”

  “This is true.”

  “Mommy said Daddy’s got bad table manners.”

  “That is very true.”

  “Is Daddy going with you?”

  “No, I’m going with a friend of mine.”

  “A girl?”

  Mike nodded as he searched for his car keys in the mess of newspapers and coloring books piled high on top of the island table.

  Grace said, “Your tie is ugly.”

  “You think?”

  “Daddy has a better one. With Snoopy on it. Girls like Snoopy.” Grace turned to Emma:“It’s in Daddy’s closet. Go get it.”

  This time, Emma did what she was asked and scurried off.

  “You should bring her flowers,” Grace said. “Girls like flowers. Mommy likes flowers but says Daddy never brings her enough and when he does they’re the wrong kind.”

  Mike found his keys. “Hey sweets?”

  “Yes Uncle Michael?”

  “Don’t ever change.” Smiling, he planted a kiss on her forehead.

  Grace smiled back. “Girls like it when you share popsicles too.”

  Traffic on Route 1 South was a mess. Mike forgot this was late Friday afternoon—rush hour—and just as many people were anxious to leave the city as they were to get in. He sat in his truck, bumper to bumper with everyone else, inching forward toward the tolls for the Tobin Bridge.

  A plane had taken off, and as Mike watched it climb in the air above the skyscrapers of downtown Boston, he thought of Jess again, thought about how she, like his mother, had packed up her life and flown away to leave their problems. Only that wasn’t true. You never really left your problems; you just moved them to another place. Fly halfway around the world and you were still who you were. Yet it amazed him how many people packed up and left everything they knew, tried rooting themselves in some new location, thinking they would be someone other than themselves. Like Jess with her clothes. Maybe dressing the part was the key. And buy yourself some distance. And time. Yes. Time and distance could make you forget anything, even a son or a daughter. Just ask my mother, Mike thought. Just ask my ex-wife.

  Dinner was a three-hour production that ended with a bill that cost more than his monthly truck payment. When they stepped back outside, it was dark, the evening air cool and charged with an almost electrical current of excitement, the pure joy that comes from being able to be outside after enduring another horrendous New England winter.

  “You really should have let me split the bill with you,” Sam said as she wrapped around her shoulders some piece of fabric that was a cross between a scarf and a cape. She wore black high-heels and a stunning black dress that had a slit that ran all the way up her right thigh.

  “I said I’d take you out anyplace you wanted. That was the deal.”

  “I know, but to get you all dressed up—and to a gourmet restaurant, no less. Michael Sullivan, you positively shocked me.”

  “I’m trying to branch out as I approach middle age.”

  “So are you ready to go dancing?”

  Mike scratched the corner of his mouth.

  “The look on your face is priceless,” Sam said. “I was just teasing. I couldn’t go dancing in these shoes. They’re killing me.”

  “Let’s take a cab.”

  “And waste a night like this? No way.”

  She led him down Newbury Street, Boston’s equivalent of Rodeo Drive. It was after nine and the street was jammed with traffic, the sidewalks crowded with young people who looked very serious, acting like they were on their way to important places. Watching some of these couples got him to thinking of the pictures of Jean Paul and his mother—his new and improved mother in the pictures.

  “You remember that time we went to Marty’s Crab?” Sam said.

  Mike smiled. It took two hours to drive to this shack in the middle of some neighborhood in Ogunquit, Maine. To date, it was the best seafood he had ever had.

  “We had some great times,” Sam said.

  “That we did. That we did.”

  “So why’d it end?” Sam smiling even after she said it.

  Mike shoved his hands in his pockets, jingling his change and car keys as he looked down the street.

  “I’m just curious,” Sam said. “I promise I won’t beat you up.”

  “You promise?”

  “Pinkie swear.”

  “Well, if it’s a pinkie swear.” His eyes bounced from the ever-present lights of downtown Boston to the traffic wrapping its way around the Public Garden on Arlington. “The truth,” he said, “was that I was scared. You were going to college and onto greater things, and I was going back to what was familiar and safe. What can I say? I was nineteen and stupid.”

  They crossed the street and entered the Public Garden, walking past the bronze statue of Paul Revere riding his horse.

  Sam said, “How
are you doing with everything that happened this week? You didn’t say much at dinner.”

  “I’m to the point where I’m sick of hearing myself talk.”

  “Talking’s good.”

  “Not when you’re dumping your problems all over the other person. It’s nice to hear someone else talk about their life for a change.”

  “You’re not dumping on me, and, for the record, the other night when you came by? I was glad.”

  They walked across the bridge overlooking the lagoon. Below, on the dock where the swan boats were chained up, a little girl was pointing to the real swans and saying something to her father. Mike felt his stomach clench, his breath hitching in his throat.

  “Nancy called me while I was stuck in traffic,” he said. “The address that was on the letter belongs to a café in Paris, only my mother never worked there—at least, not under the name Mary Sullivan. Nancy said you were the one who called and spoke to the owner.”

  Sam nodded. So she knew about the café having been owned and operated by the same family for two generations, the family having also branched out and built two very successful restaurants in the same area, none of which Mary Sullivan had worked in—at least under the name Mary Sullivan. It was possible that she was going by another name when she arrived in Paris,maybe even had legally changed it for fear of Lou finding her.

  Mike had now caught his mother in two lies: about paying for the tuition at St. Stephen’s and working at the café.

  Mike said, “What else do you know?”

  “Just the restaurant stuff.”

  Mike took a moment and sorted through what Nancy had told him.

  “Jean Paul Latiere is still alive. He’s still the owner and operator of his father’s paper company, Latiere Paper. He’s fifty-eight, same age as my mother, and he still lives on the island of—I forget the name.”

  “Île St-Louis.”

  “That’s it. Jean Paul’s been married only once. He married a woman named Margot Paradis about two years before my mother married Lou. Then Jean Paul divorced Paradis in November of 1977—that’s about a year after my mother moved there. He never remarried. No kids either.”