Inside the O'Briens

by Lisa Genova

  “Just lost in thought, honey.”

  “Havin’ two of them in there can be tough,” ribs JJ.

  Joe smiles.

  “Now I’m thinkin’ you should go get me a beer,” says Joe to JJ.

  “Me, too,” says Katie.

  “I’ll have one,” says Colleen.

  “No beer until supper,” says Rosie, stopping JJ at the fridge.

  Rosie looks up at the kitchen clock. It’s now five o’clock. She continues to stare at the time for what feels like a full minute and then, without warning, slams her wooden spoon down on the counter. She unties her apron and hangs it on the hook. That’s it. They’re eating without Patrick. JJ opens the fridge and retrieves a six-pack of Bud.

  Rosie pulls what used to be roast beef out of the oven, or the “taste extractor” as Joe likes to call it, and Meghan helps her transport the entire meal to the small, round table. Everything is overcrowded—elbows bump neighboring elbows, feet kick opposite-facing feet, bowls touch plates, plates touch glasses.

  Rosie sits down and says grace, and then everyone rotely says “Amen” and begins passing food.

  “Ow, Joe, quit bumping me,” says Rosie, rubbing her shoulder.

  “Sorry, honey, there’s no room.”

  “There’s plenty of room. Stop fidgeting so much.”

  He can’t help it. He had three cups of coffee this morning instead of his usual two, and he’s feeling on edge, wondering where Patrick is.

  “Where’s the salt?” asks Joe.

  “I got it,” says JJ, who showers the food on his plate and then hands the shaker over to his father.

  “Is that all you’re having?” Rosie asks Katie, looking at her big white plate sporting only a modest mouthful of wilted gray beans.

  “Yeah, I’m good.”

  “How about some potato?”

  “You put butter in it.”

  “Just a little bit.”

  Katie rolls her eyes. “Ma, I’m not just a little bit vegan. I’m vegan. I don’t eat dairy.”

  “And what’s your excuse?” asks Rosie, referring to Meghan’s similarly empty plate.

  “Do you have any salad?” asks Meghan.

  “Yeah, I’d like a salad,” says Katie.

  “There’s some lettuce and a cucumber in the fridge. Go ahead,” says Rosie, sighing and waving the back of her hand at them. “You girls are so difficult to feed.”

  Meghan pops up, opens the fridge, finds the two ingredients and nothing else, and sets herself up at the counter.

  “How about some cow?” offers JJ, extending the platter of roast beef under his sister’s nose.

  “Stop it. That’s disgusting,” says Katie, pushing the plate back toward him.

  Meghan returns to the table and portions half the salad onto Katie’s plate, the other half onto hers, and then dumps the empty bowl into the sink. Meanwhile Joe works at cutting his roast beef with the same level of effort a lumberjack might use to saw through a tree. He finally frees a piece and watches his girls happily crunching on their salads as he chews on a salty roof shingle.

  “You know, the farmers who grew that lettuce and cucumber probably used fertilizer,” says Joe, wearing the straightest expression he’s got.

  Katie and Meghan ignore him, but JJ cracks a smile, knowing where this is going.

  “I’m no farmer, but I think they use cow manure for fertilizer, don’t they, JJ?”

  “Yup, they sure do,” says JJ, who has never stepped foot in a garden or on a farm in his life.

  “Stop,” says Meghan.

  “The lettuce and cucumber seeds use nutrients from the cow manure to grow. So basically, if you do the math, that salad you’re eating is made of cow shit.”

  “Gross, Dad. Really gross,” says Katie.

  “I’d rather eat the cow than the cow’s shit, wouldn’t you, JJ?”

  JJ and Joe have a good laugh. For many reasons, the women in the room are not amused.

  “Okay, that’s enough,” says Rosie, who would normally find Joe’s teasing at least good-natured. She doesn’t understand the whole vegan thing either. But he knows that she’s still fuming about Patrick’s unknown whereabouts and is too distracted by his absence to think anything is funny. “Can we please talk about something other than shit?”

  “I have the dates for Coppélia,” says Meghan. “It runs August tenth to the twenty-fourth.”

  “Me and Colleen are going on the first Friday,” says JJ.

  “Colleen and I,” says Rosie. “That works for me. Katie?”

  “Uh, I’m not sure yet. I might have plans.”

  “Doing what?” asks Meghan in a dismissive tone that Joe knows Katie will find offensive.

  “None of your business,” says Katie.

  “Lemme guess. Ironsides with Andrea and Micaela.”

  “My Friday nights are just as important as yours. The whole world doesn’t revolve around you.”

  “Girls,” warns Rosie.

  Growing up, Katie was Meghan’s dutiful shadow. As Joe remembers it, he and Rosie always parented them as a single unit. Except when it came to dance, Joe and Rosie referred to the girls together so often, their individual names seemed to blur into a single third moniker. Meg-an-Katie, come here. Meg-an-Katie are going to the parade. Meg-an-Katie, time for supper.

  But since high school, the girls have been drifting apart. Joe can’t put his finger on exactly why. Meghan’s so consumed with her rigorous ballet schedule; even though the girls live together, she’s not around much. Katie could be feeling left behind. Or jealous. They all do make a pretty big deal over Meg. Joe listens politely whenever other parents in Town brag about their daughter who works at the library or the MBTA or who just got married. He beams when they’re done, when it’s finally his turn. MY daughter dances for the Boston Ballet. No other parent from Town can top that. He realizes just now that he doesn’t mention anything about his other daughter.

  Katie teaches yoga, which Joe will admit he knows virtually nothing about except that it’s today’s latest fitness craze, like Zumba or Tae Bo or CrossFit but dressed in a New Age, hippy-dippy, cultlike kind of following. He thinks it’s wonderful she’s doing something she enjoys, but Joe can tell she’s dissatisfied. He’s not sure whether it’s with yoga or all the attention they give Meghan or a boyfriend Joe doesn’t know about, but there’s a tension in the posture of Katie’s voice that seems to be squeezing tighter each week, a chip on her shoulder that she wears like a favorite accessory. She was such an easygoing kid. His baby girl. Whatever’s going on, he assumes it’s just a phase. She’ll work it out.

  “Dad?” asks Meghan. “Are you coming?”

  Joe loves watching Meghan dance, and he’s not ashamed to admit that it always makes him cry. Most little girls say they want to be a ballerina, but it’s a wish in the same category as wanting to be a fairy princess, a whimsical fantasy and not a real career goal. But when Meghan said at the age of four that she wanted to be a ballerina, they all believed her.

  She began with lessons at the local dance studio and then entered the free Citydance program when she was in the third grade. She was focused and tenacious from the start. She received a scholarship for the Boston Ballet School when she was thirteen and was offered a contract in the corps de ballet when she graduated high school.

  Meghan works hard, harder than any of them probably, but Joe also believes that she was born to dance. The stunning beauty of those spins, whatever they’re called, the impossibility of how high she holds one leg in the air while the rest of her is balanced on one big toe. He can’t even touch his toes. Meghan has Joe’s eyes, but thank God that’s about it. The rest of her comes from Rosie or is a gift straight from God.

  He missed The Nutcracker this year. He’d seen her in it many times before, although not in this role in the Boston Ballet, Meg
han would be quick to point out. And he got called in for an evening shift when he was supposed to see The Sleeping Beauty in April. He knows he’s disappointed her. It’s one of the worst things about his job, missing out on Christmas mornings and birthdays and his kid’s Little League championship game and every Fourth of July and too many of Meghan’s dance recitals.

  “I’ll be there,” says Joe.

  He’ll work it out. Meghan smiles. Bless her for still believing in him.

  “Where’s the water?” asks Rosie.

  Joe spots the water pitcher on the counter.

  “I got it,” he says.

  The pitcher is heavy, real crystal, probably one of the most expensive things they own if Joe had to guess. It was a wedding gift from Rosie’s parents, and Rosie fills it with water, beer, or spiked iced tea, depending on the occasion, every Sunday.

  Joe fills the pitcher at the sink, returns to the table, and, still standing, requests everyone’s jelly jar one at a time, ladies first. He’s pouring water into Katie’s glass when he somehow loses hold of the handle, midair, midpour. The pitcher drops, knocking Katie’s glass out of his other hand, and both hit the table, instantly shattering into hundreds of the tiniest pebbles of glass. Meghan screams and Rosie gasps, her hand over her mouth.

  “It’s okay. Everyone’s okay,” says JJ.

  His right hand stuck in place as if still holding the pitcher, Joe assesses the damage. The pitcher is destroyed beyond recognition. Everything on the table is wet and seasoned with crumbs of glass. He finally unfreezes and rubs his fingers and thumb against the palm of his hand, expecting them to feel greasy or wet, but they’re clean and dry. He stares at his hand as if it doesn’t belong to him and wonders what the hell just happened.

  “Sorry, Rosie,” says Joe.

  “It’s all right,” she says, unhappy but resigned to the loss.

  “I have glass in my food,” says Katie.

  “Me, too,” says Colleen.

  Joe looks down at his plate. He’s got glass in his mashed potatoes. What a mess.

  “Okay, nobody eats anything,” says JJ. “Even if you can’t see any glass, it’s not worth taking the chance.”

  As Katie is cleaning up the floor with a dustpan and broom and Rosie and Meghan are clearing the plates of ruined Sunday supper, Patrick strolls in, yesterday’s clothes rumpled and hanging on his skinny frame, smelling of stale beer, cigarettes, and mint, a box of Dunkin’ Donuts under his arm.

  “You’re late,” says Rosie, her eyes two formidable laser beams fixated on boring a hole through the center of her boy’s forehead.

  “I know, Ma. I’m sorry,” says Patrick.

  He kisses his mother on the cheek and sits down at the table.

  “I don’t even want to know where you were,” says Rosie.

  Patrick says nothing.

  “There’s no excuse for missing Sunday supper.”

  “I know, Ma. I didn’t miss it, I’m here.”

  “Oh, you missed it,” says JJ.

  Katie smacks Patrick on the shoulder, a signal to lift his elbows off the table so she can wipe it down with a sponge.

  “Where’s the food?” asks Patrick.

  “Dad thought supper needed more water and a dash of glass,” says Meghan.

  “Be thankful you’re not a klutz like your father,” says Joe.

  Patrick proudly sets the box of Dunkin’ Donuts on the table. Today’s O’Brien family Sunday supper. JJ dives in first and pulls out a Boston Kreme. Katie peeks into the box expecting to be disappointed, but instead her face lights up.

  “You got me a toasted bagel with peanut butter.”

  “Course I did,” says Patrick. “And an egg-white veggie flatbread without the flatbread for Meg.”

  “Thanks, Pat,” says Meghan.

  Rosie’s posture softens, and Joe knows that Patrick is forgiven. Joe chooses a jelly donut and a cruller. Donuts and beer. He pats his protruding belly and sighs. He’s going to have to start watching his figure if he wants to live to be an old man.

  He takes in the ordinary scene at their modest table, at his grown children and wife, everyone happy and healthy and here together on a Sunday afternoon despite all their quirks and faults, and a wave of gratitude swells inside him so suddenly, he doesn’t have time to brace himself. He feels the full magnitude of it pressing against the inner wall of his chest, and he exhales hard through clenched teeth to relieve some of the pressure. Underneath his tough-cop, macho exterior, he’s soft as a jelly donut. As he turns his head and wipes the wet corners of his eyes with the heel of his hand before anyone can see, he thanks God for all that he has and knows that he is truly blessed.

  CHAPTER 4

  Joe’s been patrolling the hilly streets of Charlestown, riding alone in his cruiser for a few hours now. It’s a typical day tour, which of course is an oxymoron, and Joe knows it. There’s no such thing as a typical tour. It’s one of the things he loves and hates about his job.

  He loves it because it means he’s never bored. Not that every minute of every shift is enthralling. Most shifts crawl through hours of mind-numbing tedium, beginning with roll call and the ridiculous daily song and dance of locating the damn four-digit number on his assigned car among a sea of identical parked cruisers, then driving the same familiar streets, nothing at all happening. And then, invariably, something does.

  A call will come in. Someone is breaking into a home on Green Street, some husband is beating the crap out of his beloved wife, there’s a pileup involving a tanker trailer hauling jet fuel on the northbound expressway, another bank robbery, several purses were stolen from an office in the Schrafft Center, there’s a bar fight outside the Warren Tavern, there’s a gang fight outside the high school, there’s a sunken car in the harbor with a body in it, someone jumped off the Tobin Bridge. It can be anything, and it’s never the same. Every burglary, every assault, every domestic is different, and different means never boring. It means that with every call, there’s the chance Joe will be summoned to use any and all of his training and skills.

  Responding to a call also gives him the rare chance to experience what he loves most about his job—when he really helps someone out, when swift and decisive action results in a win for the good guys, when they take the bad guys off the street and keep this corner of the planet just a little bit safer. If that sounds like a corny after-school special, so be it. It’s why Joe keeps showing up for roll call, and he’d bet box seats behind home plate at Fenway that every officer worth his salt feels the same way.

  But it’s a double-edged sword, because each call also brings the greater possibility of steering Joe directly into the mouth of what he hates most about his job. Every day, police officers see the hairy, smelly underbelly of humanity, the most depraved and evil shit human beings are capable of, shit civilians thankfully can’t imagine. A call comes in. A man in Roxbury strangled his wife, stuffed her in a trash bag, and then threw her off the roof of his apartment building. A mother in Dorchester drowned her three-year-old twin boys in the bathtub. Two bombs on Marathon Monday.

  He has his training and the stress unit to help him deal with whatever it is, and as have all his fellow officers, Joe’s made a fine art out of telling crude jokes and acting callous, a standard and fairly transparent arsenal of self-defense mechanisms aimed at keeping the vile carnage he’s witnessed from penetrating him. But it does. And it changes him. It changes all of them.

  The trick is not to let it affect Rosie and the kids. He remembers the body of a teenage girl, shot twice in the head, left rotting in a Dumpster in Chinatown. Even lifeless and discolored and covered in flies, the girl looked so much like Meghan, Joe couldn’t take it. He had to use every ounce of willpower he possessed to suppress the urge to puke right there in front of everyone. He did what he had to do, holding it together, stuffing the revulsion down, moving through his duties on auto
pilot. Hours later, alone in his cruiser, he noticed his hands gripped around the steering wheel, shaking so violently that the entire car shimmied.

  When Joe got home that night, Rosie asked, “How was your day, sweetie?” Probably the most innocent and banal question in most marriages, it’s a can of fuckin’ vipers for Joe, and he ain’t opening it. That night, like so many others, he gave Rosie a kiss and a vague “Good” and went to bed.

  He had nightmares about that young girl in the Dumpster for months but never mentioned a word of any of it to Rosie. She often complains about his silence and wishes he’d share more with her. He knows that good communication is important for a healthy relationship, and officers suffer a higher-than-normal rate of divorce, but he’d never burden her with the horrors he’s seen. Once you can imagine these things, you can’t unimagine them.

  So no shift is typical and no call routine, but so far today, nothing’s happened. He slows down in front of his house on Cook Street. No sign of anyone. Even though it’s almost noon, Patrick is probably still sleeping. Meghan was up and out earlier than Joe. He checks the time. Katie is teaching a yoga class at Town Yoga in a few minutes, the noon Hour of Power. He’ll drive by her next. JJ may or may not be on duty now, Joe can’t remember. Colleen is at work. She’s a physical therapist at Spaulding. And Rosie is working today. She’s a part-time receptionist for a dermatologist practice in the Schrafft building. He smiles, imagining his family doing what they should be doing. All is well.

  He hasn’t seen the other cruisers here since earlier in the morning. Only four officers cover Charlestown—one two-man car, the rapid, and two one-man service cars. Joe’s grateful he’s alone in a service car and wasn’t assigned to a rapid today. He’s not in the mood for conversation, and a lot of the guys, especially the young rookies, are real Chatty Cathys and never shut the fuck up. Maybe he’s just turning into a crotchety old man of forty-three, but Joe finds more and more that he prefers the solitude and quiet of a service or tango car to the chitchat of a rapid.

  Joe drives by the Bunker Hill Monument and slows to study the makeshift memorial where a nineteen-year-old boy was shot to death last week—a wooden cross, red, white, and blue balloons, a baseball glove, a teddy bear, his school picture. Joe sighs. Such a waste.