Bridget called Natalie twice but couldn’t get through. She didn’t leave a message. It wasn’t the sort of thing you could say on someone’s voice mail. And if she was being honest, she wanted to be alone. She would hate for Natalie to come in now and hug her, say that everything would be all right. She was her mother’s daughter, she supposed. Prickly when she was most in need of love.
She pictured Patrick’s body on a gurney somewhere. She could not get the image from her mind.
Her brother had been a drinker. But then, so were half the people they knew. They were supposed to accept that what he did when he was drinking didn’t count. It wasn’t real behavior. When he was young, Pat made stupid mistakes all the time. He got into fights. He drove like a maniac. But, for the most part, she had thought all that was behind him.
Bridget petted Rocco’s neck. His white fur was gone in patches, his eyes clouded over with a milky glaze, close to blind. Once, he was so strong he could pull her to the ground if she wasn’t careful. Now sometimes Bridget had to carry him up the three flights to the apartment.
When John and Julia’s daughter, Maeve, was six, she was terrified of him. Bridget brought the dog home to Boston one weekend. During a cookout in her parents’ backyard, she held Maeve’s tiny hand and had her stroke Rocco’s back. “People sometimes do bad things to dogs like him, but he’s sweet, see? It’s not his fault.”
Maeve nodded earnestly. Nora stood by, with a wide-eyed expression that said perhaps this was true, but every so often you read about one of these dogs eating a child’s face off, and if it happened to her only granddaughter, she would have Bridget killed.
Patrick was there, a beer in hand. He laughed. “Calm down, Ma,” he said.
No one else would dare talk to Nora like that. But Patrick could do no wrong in her eyes.
The four Rafferty children had their roles. Patrick, the wild one, their mother’s favorite. John, the overachiever, their father’s favorite. Bridget, the girl (a girl being its own thing, no additional personality traits needed or noticed, except that she was never quite girly enough). Brian, the baby.
When he was born, Bridget was ten. Everyone assumed she’d want nothing more than to push Brian around in a stroller all day, pretending he was hers. But Bridget would rather be off, playing at the beach, riding her bike. She was forever bringing wounded animals home—pregnant cats and garter snakes and birds with broken wings.
It was Patrick, at sixteen, who loved Brian most.
Bridget imagined herself, John, and Brian in the front pew at Saint Ann’s in two days’ time. Heads bowed as a priest sprinkled holy water on a wooden box. Patrick inside, when he should be there beside them.
Patrick hated priests. When they were younger and went to Mass as a family, Charlie gave them each a dollar for the collection plate. Pat pretended to drop his in the basket while actually crumpling it into his palm and up his sleeve. He said the priests didn’t deserve the money.
“They spend it all on booze,” he said. “And their beach house. Father Riordan drives a Cadillac. Vow of poverty, my ass. That’s what Fergie says.”
Years later, Patrick told Bridget more. About what a priest had done to his friend when he was a kid. They were at Patrick’s bar, commiserating about the church, the two of them the family’s only defectors. Pat gestured to his buddy pouring a beer from the tap.
“Fergie went through hell,” he said. “His mother didn’t do a thing about it. The kid can do no wrong after that as far as I’m concerned.”
Pat wouldn’t say which priest it was. Fergie had sworn him to secrecy. But Bridget thought she knew. Her brother was kicked out of Saint Ignatius Prep at the end of his freshman year for spitting in the face of the principal, Father McDonald. An episode so astonishing that they were forbidden from ever mentioning it at home.
He never went back to church as an adult. But now that he was gone, it was all in Nora’s hands. And so a priest would be the one to usher Patrick from this world.
—
John called just after two.
“Jesus fucking Christ,” he said, instead of hello.
“I can’t understand it,” Bridget said. “I just cannot comprehend. He drove into a wall and that’s it, he’s gone? What happened? Is it possible there was something wrong with the car? Has anyone looked into that?”
“Bridget. He was drinking. He died doing what he loved.”
“That’s not funny,” she said.
“I’m serious. That asshole never cared what he put Mom through. Or any of us for that matter. Now we get to pick up the pieces.”
“You can’t call a dead person an asshole.”
She knew he didn’t mean it. This was just how he got. Mad first, and then sad. He would only say it to her. Not to Julia. Never to Nora.
“How are we supposed to explain this to Maeve?” he said. “We’re having a family meeting tonight. Well, we were going to have one anyway but not on this topic. I’m supposed to be in Chicago right now, and instead I’m dealing with the fact that Mom wants me to give a eulogy for a guy I couldn’t stand.”
He would do it. John was the one who did things like give eulogies, because Bridget was too awkward and Brian, much as he worshipped Patrick, would sooner jump in the coffin with him than address a crowd.
Bridget and John were born a year apart. They had always gone together, even though they were as different as two people could be. As kids, their conversations could turn from light and meaningless into something charged in an instant. Before anyone noticed what had happened, they’d be down on the kitchen floor wrestling, rolling around, kicking each other until they cried or laughed or Nora started hitting them with a broom, as if she could sweep away the whole ugly mess.
Bridget knew John in a way no one else did. He was rich as Croesus now, with a new McMansion in Weston and a new personality to match. But she could still call him out the same as ever.
When they were kids and any of the local politicians shook hands at a parade, John wasn’t at all afraid to say, “I want to be like you one day, sir.” The eyes on Billy Bulger or Joe Moakley, even the mayor, Kevin White, would just light up. “Is that right?” they’d say.
In this manner, he’d gotten himself tours of the State House, hundreds of buttons and personal letters, visits to his third grade class. He grew addicted to the attention.
Bridget wondered what all those good Irish Democrats thought when John made a fortune helping the other side.
She was shocked when he told her over dinner seven years back that after a decade and a half spent toiling for Democrats, he had taken a great job, a killer job, working for a Republican.
“Honestly, they’re all the same,” John said. “The older I get, the more I see that. I want to work for the guy who respects me, who will put my talents to use.”
Bridget didn’t say anything. She was thinking that she had read somewhere once that when a person began a sentence with the word honestly, it usually meant he was lying.
“It doesn’t mean I’m a Republican,” John went on. “If you work at a shoe store, does it mean you’re a shoe?”
Bridget nearly choked on her beer. “You did not just make that comparison.”
His business was booming now, conservative clients full of optimism, overpaying him, as if the recent election had never occurred. She wondered if, seeing history made, her brother regretted his choice. She wondered what it was about John that allowed him to make it in the first place.
“What am I supposed to say about Patrick?” John said now. “We haven’t even spoken in eight months.”
Sometimes Bridget forgot. Her two older brothers were often at war, but they were oddly fine in each other’s company. You didn’t notice that they never addressed each other directly unless you looked closely. At family gatherings, everyone was speaking so fast, talking over one another, finishing stories someone else had started, contradicting the endings every time: “That wasn’t it! What he said was—” They all laughed befo
re the teller could finish, knowing what was to come. In a good-natured way, almost as terms of endearment, they called each other moron, idiot, simpleton, homo. Words were nothing to them.
“How’s Brian handling all this?” she said. “I need to call him.”
“Don’t know. He went AWOL after Mom told him. Just ran straight out of the house, apparently.”
“Jesus. He must have been with Patrick last night, right? They were probably both working at the bar.”
“And Brian’s probably back there now,” John said. “I wouldn’t worry. Though Mom is freaking out about it, of course.”
“Have you seen her?”
“Yeah, we’re at her house now. Julia and I brought Maeve over. We brought her some lunch. Just subs from Victoria’s. She doesn’t want to eat.”
Bridget pictured Nora, despondent at her kitchen table.
“Talk about when we were young,” she said. Nora would like that best.
“What?”
“The eulogy. Tell the old stories. Tell the one about the lobsters.”
During the Blizzard of ’78, when all the stores were shut and the power was out, Patrick had walked in out of the snow with an armful of lobsters that had washed up on the beach, his boots dripping water onto the kitchen floor. His handsome face, his black hair, that smile. The whole family applauded. They had a feast that night and the next, keeping the lobsters cold out in a snowdrift by the porch.
—
When Natalie finally called her back, she sounded distracted, busy. “Sorry, sweetie, I’ve been in meetings and I had that lunch with my boss. What’s up?”
It was like she was calling from some other realm. Meetings and lunches still meant something. Ordinary time hadn’t stopped. Part of Bridget wanted to protect her, let her stay there.
When she told her what had happened, Natalie said, “I’m coming straight home.”
As soon as she walked in the door, she pulled Bridget to her, the smell of the cold still in her hair. Bridget collapsed in her arms, wishing now that she had gotten Natalie there sooner.
Natalie rushed into the bedroom without taking off her coat, then popped her head out.
“It will take me five minutes to pack a bag. Just give me five minutes and we’ll go.”
Bridget followed her.
“My mother said to drive up in the morning.”
“But shouldn’t we be doing something? Doesn’t she need help?”
“You know my mother.”
Nora never trusted anyone but herself to do anything domestic, as if it would dim her power somehow. If she died tomorrow, none of them would have the slightest idea how to cook a roast or where she kept the vacuum.
At Christmas a few weeks earlier, Bridget sat at the kitchen table drinking a mimosa as Nora made the gravy. She had thought to herself, Pay attention. You might need to know how to do this someday. But she hadn’t watched. Instead, she wandered into the living room, where her brothers were watching football. She sank down into the quicksand of the couch cushions and ate cheese and crackers and onion dip until she felt too full to go near the actual meal and had to be pulled up by Brian and Patrick when Nora called, “Dinner!”
Bridget realized now that that was the last time she would ever see Patrick alive.
—
Natalie packed for them both. She ordered Thai food from Bridget’s favorite spot, but neither of them ate.
They put the TV on, just for background noise, and huddled together on the couch. Over and over again, Bridget had the feeling of forgetting for a moment and then the terrible recollection of what had happened, where they were.
While they sat there, noodles growing cold on the coffee table, her eye kept landing on their bags in the corner. A thought crept in.
“I know I promised I’d tell my mother about the baby thing the next time I saw her, but you know I can’t tell her now, right?” Bridget said. “Now isn’t the time to break the news.”
“Sure,” Natalie said. But then she added, “It’s not cancer, you know. It’s good news, a baby. It might actually make your mother happy once she has time to get used to the idea. She must want you to be happy. I’m sure when all is said and done, she’d rather you just be honest.”
Happiness was not a state to which Nora had ever aspired. She had always tried to impress upon her children that she and her cohort had never worried about anything so trivial as whether or not they were happy.
And honesty. Bridget wanted to say that this was Nora they were talking about. Nora, who, when the conversation arose about how to talk to Maeve about her adoption, had said to John and Julia, “Why do you have to tell her at all? I had a friend from church with two adopted sons and they never had an inkling.”
“Well, Maeve is from China, Mom, so I think she’ll have an inkling,” John had said.
Natalie looked prepared to dig in further now, but then she said, “I get it. I understand.”
“You do?”
“Yes. Take all the time you need. Although—we could just order the sperm so we know we have it.”
“No,” Bridget said. “I should tell her first.”
Natalie tried to hide her annoyance. “Why?”
“I don’t know. I just feel like I should.”
“And you’re sure this isn’t your way of giving yourself an escape hatch?”
“Of course not!” Bridget said, when in fact she wasn’t sure of it at all.
Natalie was her family now, the person she most needed to protect. But Nora. Bridget worried about her too. She was seventy-three, which wasn’t that old anymore. But Nora seemed old. Bridget had friends whose parents went on bicycle tours of Europe and posted their photos online. Nora refused even to email. She said she was past the point where any of that would make sense to her. A foreign language. What would she make of a baby shared by two women, the father a stranger whose face they had only ever seen in an old childhood photograph posted online?
This wasn’t a reality Bridget had imagined for herself. She hadn’t prepared her mother for it.
Natalie didn’t understand that Nora’s love came with strings. That her faith told her someone like Bridget, like Natalie, was less than, just by virtue of who she was. Their child? What would Nora say about that? In the eyes of the Catholic Church, birth could be a miracle or a sin, depending.
Bridget and Natalie were almost a decade apart. It made a difference. Natalie was born into an age of acceptance. She hadn’t quite processed that when it came to being gay, Bridget’s memories were not those of a gentle sexual awakening at an indulgent women’s college, fuzzy heart-to-hearts with one’s understanding parents. Repression was the order of the day in her house growing up. Nora and Charlie slept in separate beds. Privately, Bridget and John referred to them as Bert and Ernie. She believed it was entirely possible that they had only had sex four times, each encounter resulting in a child.
Every year on her mother’s birthday, her father gave her a drugstore greeting card with two words written on it—her name at the top and his at the bottom. They had never been the type to argue, but Bridget’s parents existed in separate worlds. She was certain they had never gazed into each other’s eyes discussing their fears and dreams. Nora—Happy Birthday!—Charlie.
Bridget remembered how, for a few years while she was in grade school, there were two women living together in a house at the end of Sydney Street. They kept the lawn up beautifully, planted peonies, and sat on the porch on summer nights like everyone else in the neighborhood. Her parents were friendly with them, said hello. But once, passing by in the car, Charlie said under his breath, “Lesbians.” Bridget hadn’t heard the word before. She could tell it was something shameful, disgusting.
“I thought they were sisters,” Nora said, and Charlie threw his head back and laughed.
Bridget was seven at the time, and in love with her best friend, Molly Quinn, though she didn’t think of it as romantic love, particularly. She was just infatuated with Molly—the long b
rown hair that she let Bridget brush after school, the smell of Ivory soap on her skin. When Bridget said once that she was going to marry Molly, Nora looked at her, stricken, and then turned away, pretending it hadn’t happened.
Two decades later, on Saint Patrick’s Day 1992, Bridget was visiting Boston for the parade and the annual party thrown by her aunt Babs and uncle Lawrence, as she did every year. She was twenty-eight years old. That year, a group of out gay people wanted to march. It had caused an uproar, gone all the way to the state supreme court. The group was granted access in the end. When they went by, people hurled beer cans and smoke bombs. A huge guy in a white Irish knit sweater held a child, wearing a smaller version. Minutes earlier, the guy had been tearing up as he sang “The Unicorn” to his son. Now he screamed, “Quarantine the queers!” Others joined in. An old lady with a green carnation corsage pinned to her coat held a sign that read AIDS CURES GAYS.
Bridget’s relatives weren’t the people shouting or throwing rocks. They were the ones standing across the street from them, doing nothing about it.
As a child, Bridget loved the Catholic Church. She was jealous that John got to be an altar boy. That he sometimes got to skip school to work a funeral. Funerals were better than weddings, he said. You got the best tips. Bridget idolized the priests and imagined that she herself might become one someday, though she couldn’t say how. But in time, this had changed.
When a priest on the news that night said that to allow gays to march was to condone immorality, she couldn’t shake her bitterness—that this institution that had ruled their lives, these men with all their perversions stood in judgment of her. That after so many years in their presence, she stood in judgment of herself.
Her mother was nodding at the TV.
There and then, Bridget vowed that she would never force the issue with her. She wasn’t a rebel. Deep down she wanted to please Nora. She wanted to be known by her too, but that mattered less.
Now Bridget’s life was different, and soon this would have to change. She couldn’t lose Natalie. That was a fear she wouldn’t even entertain. But with Patrick gone, her mother shattered, how would she find the words?
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