by Shirley Jump
Nora leaned over her shoulder. “When we went to Easter at Gramma’s house. I was…five? So you must have been nine. Dad must have been behind the camera.”
“Oh yeah, I remember. That was the year you got cranberry juice on your skirt and spent the whole day crying.” Bridget laughed and handed the photo to Aunt Mary. “Look at you and Ma. You can really see the resemblance in your eyes and smile.”
Mary gave the picture a passing glance. “We always did look alike. I’m just a little taller.” She took a long sip of wine.
Bridget flipped a couple pages and tugged out another picture of a tall, lanky, dark-haired teenage boy with an attitude and a leather jacket. “Oh my God, it’s Charlie Phillips!” Her old boyfriend, who had dumped her just before prom, a heartbreak her teenage heart was sure would never heal.
Nora let out a squeal. “God, he was hot back then. I wonder if he still is.”
“Only one way to find out.” Bridget scrambled to her feet and retrieved Jim’s laptop from the kitchen. Hers was upstairs, charging, and with a couple glasses of wine in her, she didn’t feel like going up there to get it. For a second, she hesitated—Jim’s laptop—but the feeling of invading his world had disappeared, and she saw the computer as just that—a computer. The laptop powered on, Windows chimed to life, and she opened up his browser, directing it to Facebook.
Bridget logged in with her name and password, and her page popped onto the screen. She hadn’t posted anything since Jim’s death, and the page was still filled with condolence messages. Bridget ignored them for now and clicked on the search bar. “Charles Phillips, Dorchester, Class of 2004.”
“Oh my God, is that him?” Nora pointed at the first result. “He got bald!”
That made the three of them break into gales of laughter. Bridget clicked on the profile and they all spent a couple minutes determining that Charlie hadn’t aged well, which served him right for breaking up with her in eleventh grade.
“Oh, I have an idea,” Bridget said, and clicked on the search bar again. She typed in “William Donnelly, Dorchester.” She turned to Aunt Mary. “What year did he graduate?”
“Oh, I don’t think—”
“1958!” Nora crowed. “Man, I can’t believe I can do complicated math after a couple glasses of wine.”
Bridget added the year and clicked the magnifying glass. Facebook thought for a second, and then spit back three possibilities. “Look, Aunt Mary, I think this might be him.”
Aunt Mary sat stiff-legged beside her, clutching her wine. “We don’t need to look him up, Bridget. I’m sure he’s just fine.”
“Don’t you want to see if he got fat and bald?” Nora said. “Come on. It’s sweet justice for dumping you all those years ago.”
Bridget clicked. The profile filled the screen, but it was the cover image that her eyes went to first. A group of people arranged in staggered seating on the steps of a beach house. A family photo. Ironically reminiscent of the Easter one she’d just seen of her own family.
The hairs on the back of Bridget’s neck tingled. She leaned in closer. “Oh my God. That woman looks just like Ma.”
“Let me see.” Nora zoomed in on the cover image and let out a low whistle. “No lie, they could be twins, just a few years apart. Isn’t that weird, Aunt Mary? They’re like eerily similar. Why would Billy’s kid look like Ma?”
The girls glanced over at their aunt. She opened her mouth and closed it again. Her skin was flushed, her eyes wide.
“Aunt Mary? Are you feeling all right?” Bridget reached for her aunt, but before she could touch her, Mary braced herself on the arm of the couch and got to her feet. She swayed a bit, and her hand trembled when she pressed it to her heart.
“I…I need a glass of water.” She sank into an armchair. Sweat beaded on her forehead.
Oh God, was Aunt Mary having another heart attack? She looked pale and trembly and not at all like the calm, happy woman Bridget knew. Did Bridget even know what to do if it was a heart attack? Nora had her phone out, her finger on the call button, a mirror image of Bridget’s worry. “Aunt Mary?” Nora said. “Are you okay?”
“I just need…some water. Please.” She started to rise, but Bridget waved her back into the chair.
“Sit, sit. I’ll go get you the water.” Bridget dashed into the kitchen and returned with a glass. She pressed it into her aunt’s hands. “Here. Drink this.”
Aunt Mary held the glass with both hands, steadying the tremors a little. She took a long sip, then stared at the image on the computer that was still sitting on the floor by her feet. The color returned to her face and she nodded toward Jim’s laptop. “Can I…can I see that?”
“Sure, sure.” Bridget got the laptop and put it on her aunt’s lap. She stepped back and shared a glance with Nora. Her sister shrugged.
Aunt Mary bent toward the screen. “Can you make the picture bigger?”
Bridget clicked on the zoom and expanded it until just the faces filled the screen. Again, that sense of this moment being something more than just looking up an old love tickled at Bridget’s mind. “Is that good?”
“Yes. Thank you.” A long moment passed, and then Aunt Mary reached out and touched the image, her finger sliding along the face of the woman who looked like their mother and then along the photograph of the man she had once loved. Melancholy filled her eyes, and when she spoke, her words held a soft, sad note. “I never thought he’d do it.”
“Do what, Aunt Mary?” Bridget lowered herself onto the arm of the sofa.
“Settle down and have kids.” Aunt Mary studied the picture for a while longer. Then she set the laptop on the side table and turned the screen away. The sadness had disappeared, replaced with a hard, cold edge in her eyes. “And never ask about the one he already had.”
* * *
Aunt Mary went to bed a few minutes later, without saying anything more. “What do you think that was about?” Bridget asked Nora.
“I don’t know. But I’d like to find out.” The whole thing had been really weird, yet clearly a subject Aunt Mary didn’t want to discuss. It made Bridget think of all the whispers in the family, the sense that there was something hidden under all those secretive adult conversations.
“Yeah, I’d like to find out too.” Bridget started to close the lid of Jim’s laptop but stopped. She was holding the one piece of electronics that could deliver the answers she needed about her marriage. About the money that had been spent, the bills that hadn’t been paid, the things that Jim had kept to himself. Lies and secrets—it seemed to be a part of her family heritage.
Maybe now was the time to find out some of those answers, emboldened by some wine and Nora’s presence. The last thing Bridget wanted was one more surprise from Jim’s legacy. If he’d been gambling or something, there’d surely be evidence on his laptop, right?
She clicked on Windows Explorer, running the mouse over the different folders, first in Documents—where she didn’t see anything unexpected—and then in Pictures.
“What are you doing?” Nora asked.
“Looking for…something. I don’t really know what.” She scrolled down, past pictures of the house, of his parents, of them together. There was a folder labeled Honeymoon, another labeled Wedding, and then right after the W, close to the bottom of the list, one labeled simply X.
“X? That’s weird. Maybe it’s a typo.” Nora handed Bridget a refilled glass of wine.
“Maybe.” But when Bridget clicked the folder and watched it open, blooming into thumbnails of color photographs, her chest tightened. She opened the first photo, enlarging it on the screen. A tall, thin blond woman, with her arm around Jim. A younger Jim—she could tell by the length of his hair and the goatee he had thought was a good idea when they first met—but still Jim.
Her Jim.
Abby’s words on the day of the wedding came back to her. How she’d seen him having lunch with another woman. A friend from work, Jim had called her.
But given the posses
sive hand on Jim’s chest, the woman was something more than a friend. Bridget clicked the next picture, another, all of them taken at the same time, the dates saying it was a few months before she met Jim. Most of the photos were labeled with the default of numbers and letters the camera generated, but one was named Jennelle at Beach.
“That’s his ex-wife,” Bridget said. So, not a big secret after all, she told herself. Though why he wouldn’t have told her he’d been having lunch with Jennelle, she didn’t know. Maybe he’d thought she would be jealous.
“Jim had an ex? You never told me.”
“He said it was just one of those crazy mistakes. Over almost as fast as it began. I think they were married for maybe six months total. He was already divorced when I met him. I just figured he’d been young and stupid.” Bridget shrugged. “I didn’t ask much about it.”
“Then why does he still have her pictures?”
“Maybe he just never got around to deleting them.” Except the folder was filled with dozens of pictures, arranged chronologically, and she’d only made it through the first few, which meant he had stored an awful lot of memories for something that hadn’t mattered much to him. Why?
Bridget clicked the arrow to go to the next one, and a new, unexpected image filled the screen, and she gasped.
An image of a baby, hours, maybe days, old, in Jennelle’s arms. Jim posing behind her, a tight smile on his face, his body not touching his ex-wife’s.
Jim. With his ex-wife. With a baby.
“Is that…,” Nora said, “his kid?”
Jim didn’t want children. He’d made that clear, over and over. If he already had one, he’d have mentioned it, she was sure. “I don’t think so. He would have told me, right? Maybe he was just visiting her.” But the explanation didn’t ring true.
She checked the date. Three months after her wedding. They had been living in a tiny apartment, looking for the house where they would start their lives. And Jim hadn’t said a word, not about seeing his ex, not about her having a baby, not about saving these photos.
She could count on one hand the number of conversations they’d had about Jennelle. He’d never mentioned a child. In fact, he’d never mentioned his ex again after he’d married Bridget.
Bridget clicked again. The baby, a little older now, smiling for the camera. Then one of the same baby, crawling. Then the baby, standing, clearly a girl, dressed in a dark blue dress with a pink ribbon in her dark brown hair, so like Jim’s. Eyes the same color as her husband’s staring into the lens.
“For a kid that isn’t his”—Nora leaned in—“it sure looks a lot like him.”
Bridget stared, her emotions flat. If Nora hadn’t been sitting beside her, she would think she had imagined the whole thing. “He said he never wanted to have kids. He said he didn’t want to be tied down.”
“Wait, what? I thought you guys were going to try to have a baby.”
“When I told him I wanted to start trying, he told me he never really wanted kids. That he hoped someday I’d come around and feel the same. But this…” She clicked again, and there was a second family picture, Jennelle holding a party-hat-wearing one-year-old, Jim standing to the side, that same forced smile on his face. “He had a child with her?”
The betrayal sliced through Bridget. Her throat closed, and tears burned her eyes. Her stomach turned, and her every cell wanted to escape to the bedroom, burying her head in the sheets and Netflix and pretending she’d never seen any of this.
“Is that…is that where the money went?”
Nora’s question sent dominoes tumbling in Bridget’s mind. The cash withdrawals, twice a month. The extra money he’d taken out of the retirement account. Just enough money for…
A down payment on a house. The next picture showed it, a tidy Cape on a tree-filled street, with Jennelle and their toddler standing on the stoop.
Bridget opened his email program, frantic now, clicking and typing as fast as her fingers could move. She ran a search for Jennelle and came across dozens and dozens of sent emails. Jennelle’s to him, in caps, telling him he needed to step up and be a father, that he couldn’t ignore his responsibilities. Jim’s replies, measured and distant, telling her he provided financially for his child and that was all he would ever do.
He had a child. With Jennelle. How could he? And how could he hide it?
“He never told me. Never said a word.”
“Maybe because he thought you’d leave him?” Nora asked.
Bridget shook her head. All these months, she’d kept feeding herself a fiction about her marriage. Trying to convince herself it hadn’t been as bad as she thought. That if they’d had more time, maybe they could have somehow salvaged something. “No, Nora. Jim never told me because he knew, if he did, he wouldn’t have had a reason to deny me the one thing I wanted.” Tears filled her eyes and blurred the image of Jim’s child. “A child of my own.”
TWENTY-SIX
The darkness of early morning wrapped around Abby like an old friend. The July morning was warm enough not to need a hoodie, but she slipped into one anyway. Something about the anonymity and shield the fleece offered made her feel protected.
A second later, she saw a familiar bike coming down the road. A newspaper hit a stoop, then another, then Joey stopped. He held up a folded bundle. “Got your paper, Ms. O.”
“Throw it.”
Joey arched his arm back and made a quick, hard, overhand pitch. She caught it in one hand. He let out a low whistle. “Wow, I’m impressed.”
“Four years of high school softball. Guess I haven’t lost my touch.” Abby lowered the paper to the stoop and came down the sidewalk. “I’m sorry, Joey. I don’t have any cookies for you this morning.”
“Whoa. No cookies? I think that’s the first sign of the Apocalypse.” Joey leaned over his bike, his brown eyes wide and shiny in the glow of the streetlamp. “You feeling okay?”
“Yeah.” She blew out a breath. Why bother pretending? “No.”
“Wanna talk about it?”
She snorted. “Don’t tell me you’re now a part-time therapist too.”
He laughed. “Nah. Just someone who observes a lot. I’m out here, before the sun rises, while the rest of the world is just starting to wake up. People are…vulnerable then, you know? And I don’t mean that in the creepy Ted Bundy way. I mean, they’re more themselves, grumpy or happy or sad, as they start to wake up and ease into the day.”
Abby thought of all the lives she glimpsed on her early morning walks, the snippets of life she spied through the frames of windows and doors. “And what do you see about these people?”
Joey propped a foot on the center tube of his bike and rested his elbow on his knee. “That most people are sad, when they have no reason to be. The mom standing by the window with a cup of coffee, looking lonely and depressed, not even realizing that her husband is standing behind her, looking like he hit the lottery when he married her. Or the little kid who wakes up from a bad dream and runs into his dad’s arms, and suddenly everything’s okay.” He thumbed behind him. “There’s a little old lady one block over who sits alone in her kitchen every single morning and never realizes that two of her neighbors are doing the same thing, all of them needing some company. I told her one day, and now, when I go by, I see them all having coffee together in her kitchen. If people just looked around, they’d see their lives are a lot richer than they realize.”
For being so young, Joey really was a smart guy. Simple but kind, and more thoughtful than most people twice his age. “How’d you get so wise?”
“Watching The Walking Dead.” When Abby laughed, Joey shook his head. “No, I’m serious. That’s a show about life and death, you know? How you never know when your ticket is going to get punched. How you need to look around you, at the people and the stuff you have, and use all that to survive. How the petty crap that we let eat up our minds—fighting about who said what and when and with what tone—doesn’t matter there. They care about the fami
ly they have created and about appreciating life for as long as they have it.” He shrugged again. “Or at least, that’s what it seems to mean after I’ve smoked a bowl and binged on Netflix.”
Abby laughed again. Despite everything, she felt lighter, maybe a tiny bit hopeful—and all from hanging around the paperboy. “I’ll bring you some cookies tomorrow.”
“Double the amount.” He wagged a finger at her. “No, make that two and half times as many.”
“Are you charging me interest on my tip? I thought you were all about the experiences, not the money.”
“Cookies aren’t money, Ms. O. They’re life.” He tipped the brim of his ball cap and rode off. Every few seconds, she heard the thud of another paper hitting its target.
Abby started walking, taking the same route she took every morning and paying more attention to the people she passed. She rounded the corner and faced Maistranos’ bakery, expecting to see Mrs. Maistrano, her hair piled atop her head, working magic with dough.
The bakery was dark.
Abby checked her watch. They should have opened a half hour ago. In all the years she had been coming here, she’d never known Maistranos to be closed, except for during one blizzard when the entire city of Boston had shut down. She jogged across the street and noticed a sign tacked to the front door.
CLOSED INDEFINITELY. DEATH IN THE FAMILY.
Abby swayed on the sidewalk. One of the Maistranos? She couldn’t imagine either of them being gone. Of rounding this corner and not seeing the wizened Mr. Maistrano or his perpetually smiling wife behind the counter. Her heart seized.
Death in the Family.
Abby traced over the letters on the note and knew, with a heartbreaking certainty, that she had just lost something very important. Then she turned on her heel and started to run.