John saw the driver make a move to get out and open the door for him. He gestured for the guy to stay where he was.
“I’ve got it,” he said.
He slid into the warm backseat. “How’s it going, buddy?”
The driver just nodded in reply.
John saw himself through this guy’s eyes and felt the need to say something. Whenever he hired anyone to do some menial job, he had a pathological desire to let that person know that the two of them weren’t so different, that John was well aware of it. My uncle Lawrence used to drive a bus, he thought of saying. Then later, he became a chauffeur. Did he ever have crazy stories. I bet you’ve had some colorful characters sitting back here, am I right?
There were two small bottles of water tucked into the seat-back pocket. He took hold of one instead of speaking, unscrewed the cap.
His phone rang again.
“My mother,” he said to the driver.
John picked up, prepared for her to say that she had seen his name in the paper, prepared to downplay his own pride now that he had hers.
“Where have you been?” Nora said. She sounded frazzled. “I’ve been trying and trying, you and Bridget both. And Julia. It just rings. There’s been an accident, John.”
“Oh God. Are you okay?”
“Not me,” she said. “Patrick.”
He stiffened. “Is he okay?”
“John. He’s dead.”
“Go back,” John said to the driver before he replied. “Turn the car around.”
8
BRIDGET DIDN’T NOTICE THAT her mother had called that morning because she was in bed with Natalie, and then walking the dog with Natalie, stopping for coffee along the way. She brushed her teeth at the sink while Natalie showered and lingered in the bathroom as it filled with steam, carrying on a conversation about Natalie’s boss, taking in the clean soapy scent of her shampoo, pulling back the curtain for a kiss. They ate Greek yogurt and strawberries in the kitchen. In the background, a BBC reporter’s silvery accent told of atrocities in faraway places they might or might not be able to locate on a map.
Bridget was dressed for the day in jeans, sneakers, a navy blue crew-neck sweater. The same uniform she’d been wearing since the second grade. Natalie wore black high-heeled boots that ended just below the knee, a fitted grey dress, and a long black coat open over the top. Red lipstick, a gauzy silk scarf. Her red hair hung to her shoulders.
They looked always like characters in two different plays. When they went out on a Saturday night, Bridget spent ten, fifteen minutes max ironing a shirt, running a comb through her short brown hair. She would be dressed and on the couch with enough time to watch four innings of baseball before Natalie was ready to go.
They said their good-byes at the door now.
“Love you.”
“See you tonight.”
After Natalie was gone, Bridget drank one more cup of coffee alone. Sunlight flooded the windows and the hardwood floors, giving the illusion that it wasn’t bone cold outside. The apartment had been Natalie’s first. She went with the place. Bridget saw her in the careful details. Framed abstract watercolors on the walls, purchased from a friend with a gallery in Williamsburg. Different ceramic bowls in the cupboards for pasta, yogurt, cereal. A larger bowl at the center of the kitchen table with nothing in it, strictly decorative. A pair of antique brass bookends shaped like hound dogs sat on the mantel, a gift from Natalie to Bridget on the occasion of the shelter’s tenth anniversary.
Until she moved in three years ago, Bridget had lived like a bachelor. Her brothers joked that she had taken a vow of poverty. She didn’t care much about things. She had nicer-than-expected mismatched furniture, passed along whenever her sister-in-law redecorated. But her prized possessions were an old Trek bicycle, two milk crates full of records, and every Celtics game of the 1986 season recorded on VHS.
Her life then had consisted of a date here and there, a short-lived love affair once in a while. Visits to her mother in Boston at the holidays. Work, mostly. At home, it was just Bridget and Rocco, an aging pit bull, together in a dim apartment. Content to be a couple of old grumps forever, until Natalie came along and let in the light.
She tried now to picture a high chair at the end of the table, a baby’s toys strewn across the rug. A time when leisurely mornings like this one would be a thing of the past.
In advance of her thirty-fifth birthday, Natalie had announced that the gift she wanted most was not jewelry or tickets to a Broadway show, but a baby.
Bridget had never thought of herself as particularly maternal. She couldn’t muster much enthusiasm for baby pictures, or for the fact that one more human being had learned to correctly identify the letter D. When she thought about motherhood, she thought of her own mother and her aunts, who, when she was young, liked to sit around on someone’s front porch on summer nights, playing cards, smoking, and drinking Canadian Club. They had always seemed a bit bored, dissatisfied by their children, yet later, all they spoke about was the desire for grandkids. They had sacrificed everything. The least their daughters could do to pay them back was to suffer in a similar fashion.
Bridget still wasn’t entirely convinced. But she believed that Natalie deserved to be a mother, if that’s what she wanted. And, to her surprise, at forty-four, she found that the idea of having a baby with Natalie excited her at least as much as it terrified her.
A year had passed since Natalie first raised the issue. It sometimes felt like since then, they had spoken of nothing else.
Bridget thought they might consider adopting, like her brother John had. But Natalie had given it far more thought. She explained to Bridget that gay couples were banned from adopting from most foreign countries and several states. And anyway, she wanted a child who shared her blood. She wanted to give birth, for reasons Bridget could not fathom.
Natalie knew which baby names she liked, and she had found a top-rated clinic where she would be inseminated. They had chosen a donor, though they had yet to actually purchase his sperm. They called him by his official profile name: International Archeologist. He was five foot eleven, 175 pounds, with blond hair and blue eyes.
Hobbies: The Brazilian martial art of capoeira, running twenty-two miles per week
Ancestry: Swedish
Donor look-alike: Paul Bettany, Paul Newman (“But those two look nothing alike,” Bridget said.)
Personality: His positive outlook is contagious!
Bridget wondered what was to stop the sperm bank from telling them all this when in fact the guy was a short, depressive high school dropout who worked at Burger King. She kept the thought to herself.
It had taken them months to decide. Night after night they lay in bed, scrolling through profiles. You could go by any attribute. Eye color, blood type, even the sound of a man’s voice, recorded in short audio clips, or the age of his oldest living relative. They grew drunk with choosiness.
“He has to have gotten at least a fourteen-eighty on the SATs,” Natalie said once.
“You realize if you’d used that criterion to find a partner, I’d be out,” Bridget said. “By a lot.”
“Good golfer!” Natalie declared at some point. And at another: “Disqualified! His favorite animal is the cat.”
Bridget refused to short-list anyone with a sleazy profile name. There was a So Smooth. A Dr. Feelgood. One was called I’ll Just Have Water (“Translation: alcoholic,” she said).
She wondered what compelled a young man to take this particular route to making extra cash. How many of them would think about it differently in ten or fifteen years? One night, she lay awake thinking about her youngest brother, Brian. All the debt he’d racked up in his twenties, following a dream that didn’t pan out, living on the road for so much of every year, and now living at home with their mother because, she assumed, he was broke. She texted him: If you ever need a few extra bucks, ask me, okay? Don’t do anything stupid.
Brian just replied: ?
When they
finally settled on a donor, Natalie’s credit card in her hand, fingers poised over the keyboard to make the purchase, Bridget panicked. Though it should have been obvious much sooner, that was the first time she realized she would have to tell her mother.
Her brain tried to find a way around it. She pictured herself arriving home at Christmas with an infant in a carrier.
Whose baby is that, Bridget?
Who? Him? Oh, never mind.
“Before we buy the sperm, I feel like I should warn my mother that this is coming,” she said.
Natalie, whose parents had known for ages, blinked. “Oh. Okay.”
Three months had gone by, and still Bridget had not done it. A few weeks ago, when they were home for Christmas, she tried. Natalie and Julia planned a lunch at the Four Seasons, making the whole thing seem like Bridget’s idea. But it was their kind of place, not hers.
When Bridget invited her mother, Nora seemed skeptical. “Just the two of us? Why on earth would we go there?”
“I want to do something nice for you, that’s all.”
Neither of them was comfortable. Bridget wore an old pair of black dress pants and a black silk blouse. She looked like an aging cocktail waitress. She could barely breathe. The food was too precious, the room too stuffy. When the waiter brought out a bottle of champagne after the plates had been cleared, Nora looked around as if the place were bugged.
“What in God’s name?” she said.
—
The first time Bridget brought Natalie home, her mother said, “Natalie, you have such style. You should take our Bridget shopping.”
It occurred to her then that Natalie was the daughter her mother was praying for all those nights when they were kids, the whole family kneeling in front of the sofa, saying the rosary as they listened to Cardinal Cushing on the radio.
Nora was forever trying to improve upon Bridget, her criticisms most often wrapped up in what she considered compliments.
You’ve such a nice face. Why won’t you do anything with it?
To leave those cheekbones bare is a sin against God.
Do you know how pretty you’d look if—
If you’d just tweeze your eyebrows. Grow out your hair. Put on some lipstick, Bridget, it won’t kill you.
At the party she threw every year on Christmas Eve, Nora introduced Natalie to cousins and neighbors as “Bridget’s friend from New York” or else, on a few unfortunate occasions, “Bridget’s roommate.”
“Your mother cannot possibly think that at your age, you just decided to get a roommate for the hell of it,” Natalie had said on one of those nights, tucked into Bridget’s childhood bed beside her, an air mattress made up and untouched on the floor.
“I think that’s what she wants to believe,” Bridget said.
“So she doesn’t know you’re gay.”
“Maybe it has nothing to do with gay. Maybe she just thinks you’re way out of my league and can’t imagine why you’d live with me other than to go halfsies on the rent.”
She pulled Natalie into her arms, hoping the joke would smooth over the pain in it. Sometimes Bridget thought Nora knew and chose to ignore it. Her mother had a knack for blocking out what she didn’t want to be true. Other times, she thought Nora truly didn’t know, even though Bridget had told her.
Her sophomore year at UMass, she had sex with a woman for the first time. It happened the night before she went home for Thanksgiving, and it was all Bridget could think about—reliving those moments as she passed the cranberry sauce and watched the Macy’s parade on TV and talked about football with her father.
She had determined to come out to her mother on that trip. After dinner, while everyone else was napping, and Nora scooped the leftover vegetables into a giant serving tray so that they looked like the Irish flag—a thick stripe of green beans, then mashed potatoes, then squash—Bridget said, “Mom, I have to tell you something. I don’t want you to be upset.” Nora looked up at her, a spoonful of potatoes suspended midair.
“I’m mostly seeing women these days. I think that’s where I’m headed.”
Bridget bit the inside of her cheek as she waited for her mother to react, but Nora’s expression was unreadable.
“Do you understand?” Bridget asked after a long silence.
“Yes,” her mother said.
“You do?”
“Yes.”
Nora didn’t add I love you, but she never said that.
Bridget couldn’t believe it had been so easy. She felt a huge weight lifted from her shoulders until Christmas a month later, when Nora said, “Bridget, Tommy Delaney’s home! You should go down the hill and see him. Eileen says he still has a thing for you.”
When she was a freshman in high school, she had tried to date one guy, the only guy who asked. A kid from the neighborhood. The son of her mother’s friend. They went out for maybe a month. Nora had never let it go.
Bridget looked at her mother with wide eyes.
“What?” Nora said. “I’m not saying you should marry him. Just—a winter romance might be nice.”
—
The morning rushed by, like every morning at the shelter, a haze of routine and surprise. Bridget let in the three kids who were scheduled to volunteer, hosing down crates, filling water bowls, walking dogs. She only ever hired boys who were scrappy and strong, but sweet. Boys who reminded her of her brothers when they were young.
She and her assistant director, Michelle, traded off early mornings. Michelle had already been here at six and was off now to meet with a prospective donor, the kind of thing Bridget hated to do. They made an ideal pair—Michelle was good at talking to people who loved animals. Bridget was good at talking to the animals themselves.
A cacophonous chorus of barks and cries swelled when she opened the door into the back. She greeted all eighteen dogs, nine cats, two lizards by name. This afternoon, she would take three Cane Corsos to the vet to be fixed. She regarded them now, feeling sorry for them, for what they didn’t know about their own fate. She made a mental note to buy them some sliced turkey from the bodega at the corner, a small consolation.
At nine-thirty, she got a call from a buddy at the police department. A hoarding situation in the Bronx, thirty-nine guinea pigs. Would she take them? Yes, she would take them. She had never turned an animal away if she had the room. He knew this, they all did. That’s why they called her first.
It wasn’t until she was alone in her office, just before ten, that Bridget dug her cell phone out of her coat pocket and saw that her mother had called seven times. John had texted too: Call me ASAP.
“Oh,” she said. “Shit.”
Bridget held her breath as she dialed. She knew how this went. She had nineteen first cousins. Ten aunts and uncles. There were so many of them in the family that when tragedy occurred, instead of being shocked by it, the bigger shock was that somehow all of them managed to make it through so many days and years unscathed. Then you got a phone call, and the world took on a different shape.
She braced herself to hear Nora say that some elderly relative had died in her sleep, though she held out hope that this was one of those calls from her mother that had the whiff of somber urgency but was in fact just a heads-up that Macy’s was having a white sale.
From Nora’s hello, the weariness in it, Bridget could tell the news was bad.
“Is it Aunt Kitty?” she said, wanting her mother to spit it out, whatever it was.
“It’s Patrick,” Nora said.
Patrick. Bridget’s chest felt like it would burst.
Never in a million years.
Nora was speaking, but to Bridget, the words came through in a blur. He swerved into a wall. He died on impact. He didn’t suffer.
Already, the consolations.
Her legs shook. She leaned against a chair to steady herself, then decided just to let her body slip to the floor.
Even as her mother said that the wake would be tomorrow afternoon, with the funeral to follow on Wednesda
y morning, Bridget’s mind grasped for a loophole. It had to be a mistake, a joke. It couldn’t be true that there was nothing they could do to save him.
Her teeth chattered. Her body was in revolt.
“I’ll be there in a few hours,” she said.
“Why don’t you come in the morning?” Nora said. “It’s not a good idea to drive so far after you’ve had a shock to the system like this.”
Her voice was cool, calm, as if she weren’t part of the tragedy, just a helpful travel advisor.
“Are you sure you want to do the wake so soon?” Bridget said. “You could wait a day or two. Give yourself a chance to—”
“I need to get it behind me,” Nora said.
“I understand. How can I help? What do you need?”
“I need to hang up now. I have to go to Patrick’s and find his suit.”
“By yourself?”
“Of course.”
Bridget hesitated, wanting to ask if that was a good idea.
“It’s nothing,” Nora said, before she could get the words out.
She always acted like an emotion expressed was the most dangerous thing in the world. When Bridget fell down as a child, her mother would pull her to her feet and tell her she was fine. Willing it to be so. Ignoring whatever pain she might be in, as if not mentioning it would make it just dissolve. In adulthood, the same impulse took on different forms.
Her father’s death too had come out of nowhere. A fast-moving cancer, the reality of which had yet to sink in for any of them by the time Charlie died. Bridget remembered Nora, calmly walking arm in arm with Brian and Patrick into the funeral home, instructing them all not to cry.
—
At home, Bridget tried to pack. But she couldn’t seem to remember how. She found herself pulling one item of clothing after another from the drawers, an indiscriminate pile forming on the bed. She wanted to call John, and yet somehow she knew that once she heard his voice, this would be real. So she went and sat on the sofa and stared at the wall instead, the dog lying at her feet. After a while, she got up and made tea because it was what her people did at times like this. At the last second, she added bourbon instead of milk.
Saints for All Occasions Page 11