This made him feel worse, though it was a simple fact. He and Patrick had never gotten along, not since John was a kid. Patrick and Maeve only saw each other a few times a year, at the holidays, when each of them had other people around whose company they preferred. Patrick might ask her how school was going, what she had planned for summer vacation. The generic questions you asked a child you didn’t know very well.
When Bridget and Nora talked to John about what had happened, he sensed that beneath their words was an accusation: Of course you’re not sad. You didn’t even like him.
It was true that he didn’t feel sad. Instead, anger radiated through him. Shock. John’s first thought had been for his mother. His second was about his big meeting in Chicago. He would have to cancel. My brother passed away, he said into the phone.
Oh my God, I’m so sorry.
He felt as if the sympathy was unearned, as if he should explain further.
Only later did he think of Patrick himself.
Around three a.m., John gave up on trying to sleep. He decided to catch up on work emails, but when he opened his laptop, blue screen glowing like a beacon in the darkened bedroom, his fingers wandered to Facebook instead. Patrick wasn’t on it, but the bar had a public page. A few dozen people, most of whom John didn’t know, had commented already.
Brian and Fergie, I am so sorry for your loss. Hang in there.
Sorry for your loss!!! RIP Pat.
Last night’s rager proved that you are gone but not forgotten. We will never forget. xoxoxoxox
Buddy, I will see you on the other side. I’ll bet you’re up there right now, doing shots of Jameson with Hendrix and Sinatra. Save me a seat. [Forty-two people like this.]
John closed the laptop.
After that, he walked the halls of the house. When his toe caught on the cord of a lamp that sat on a desk in the hall, he felt rage. He punched the lamp, the base landing on its side, a chunk of porcelain breaking off, falling to the floor. He didn’t pick it up.
He would prefer to be sad in a straightforward way, like he had been when his father died. But for most of his life, John had hated Patrick. He was forty-five years old and there were events from childhood that he was still not over and probably never would be.
The oldest set the tone. Patrick had caused their mother heartache, so John decided early on to be the good boy, the perfect one. It wasn’t easy. He was so often seen in relation to his older brother. In school, they expected him to be bad. Even in adulthood, whatever idiotic thing Patrick did left its traces on him.
Nora asked him to give the eulogy, because he always did it. John said yes. There was no one else. He was the only responsible one of them all. He’d like to be shit-faced, hanging out in some bar, like Brian. Or several states away, coming up in the morning, like Bridget. But instead he was in his mother’s kitchen two hours after hearing the news, watching her pick at a turkey sub he’d brought over. He was there to support her, even as her face reflected pure heartbreak back at him, never the son she wanted most.
Maeve hadn’t wanted to go to her grandmother’s after they took her out of school. She acted pissy the whole ride over. When Nora opened the door to them, she extended her arms wide, and John’s pathetic heart leapt to get in there. But Nora was reaching for Maeve, not him. His daughter jumped into his mother’s arms and smiled, transformed into an angel, making him crazed and relieved in equal parts.
—
As he navigated through the traffic on 93 South, John looked back at Maeve in the rearview mirror. He thought about the meeting they had intended to have last night. He would just as soon pretend Julia had never seen that stupid website. So Maeve was looking. It didn’t mean she actually thought they had kidnapped her. They had always known that one day, most likely, she would want to seek out her birth mother.
Julia was excited about the idea, at least in theory. She said they would go back to China when the time came. They owed Maeve that, and they owed it to the birth mother, to show her how well Maeve had turned out. But that was when they believed it would be difficult, if not impossible, to find her. Before the Internet came along and made the world a smaller place.
He knew they would discuss it once the dust settled. A death did that. Made the most important things you had to do in a day feel inconsequential. It turned out almost everything could wait.
He wondered if Julia would mention the website to his mother and figured she probably wouldn’t.
Back in the beginning, they hadn’t told either set of parents that they couldn’t get pregnant, that they had tried everything. Bridget was the only one in the family who knew the extent of it. When they announced that they had decided to adopt from China, the reactions were predictable. Julia’s parents sent a gorgeous coffee table book with black-and-white pictures of Tibet, and dozens of peonies, apparently China’s national flower. His mother acted out.
Julia described the situation to Nora over dinner—the one-child policy, mothers forced to leave their babies in parks, or on the side of the road, girls abandoned in droves. Nora seemed to be listening with compassion, but then she said, “A child belongs with his real family. No one can ever love him as much.”
Julia’s voice faded. “I’m sure the mothers there love them as much as they can. But it’s systemic. These women are under so much pressure. They’ll have their homes destroyed if they don’t comply.”
“Then these babies are being taken from them,” Nora said. “You’d be stealing someone’s child. When I was young, they did it to the Catholic girls. They were teenagers. They had no idea what they were agreeing to.”
Julia wept and John felt like strangling his mother for being so closed off, so insular, so stupid. She hadn’t understood that they were telling her, not asking. No doubt, part of her reluctance had to do with them bringing home a child who didn’t look like the family. He thought it was maddening, and yet that same night he told Julia that he’d like for the baby to have an Irish name.
When they arrived home from Beijing, Nora had the whole family waiting to greet them at Logan Airport. She had asked Bridget to drive up from New York and convinced Brian and Patrick to wear collared shirts for the photos.
Julia approached Nora first, the baby in her arms.
“Meet your granddaughter, Maeve,” she said.
“She’s enormous,” Nora said. “There’s no way she’s only one year old.”
But that was her final protest. Then she took hold of the child and was in love.
Weeks later, underslept, Julia became distraught, crying over her inability to soothe Maeve. Nora came to their house to help and Julia said, “You were right. She can sense that I have no idea what I’m doing. I didn’t give birth to her and she knows it.”
Nora took Julia’s chin in her hand, held it firm. She said, “Giving birth has nothing to do with it.”
John knew that had meant more to Julia than all the flowers her own mother could ever send.
—
He pulled into the CVS parking lot without signaling. He wanted to buy cigarettes, but Julia had made him quit years ago, before Maeve, theorizing that his smoking might be why she couldn’t get pregnant. (For the same reason, they had sworn off booze for a year, they had stopped taking hot showers. She had made him change from briefs to boxers, one size too big.)
“I’m gonna get some mints,” he said. “I’ll be out in a minute.”
Julia pointed at Maeve. “She needs maxi pads.”
“Now?”
“You need them when you need them, John. Do you want me to do it?”
He shook his head, walked inside.
Every CVS on the planet smelled the same. There was something reassuring in that. He went straight to aisle three. Not his first rodeo. Maeve preferred the Always brand, ultrathin, with wings. John put a hand on the dark green package, then made his way toward the register.
His father never would have been in this position in a million years. Whenever Charlie called to order a piz
za, he’d offer the delivery guy five bucks to pick him up a six-pack and whatever else he wanted from the store. John once opened the door to a kid holding two large pepperonis, a toothbrush, and a bottle of Tums.
Once, his mother had gone to the supermarket and his father had her paged because he’d forgotten to tell her to get potato chips. Nora, who might have been fifty at the time, didn’t hear the page, but she saw a girl who worked there approach a ninety-year-old woman, saying, “Excuse me, ma’am. Are you Nora Rafferty?” So she said, “I’m Nora Rafferty. What’s going on?” and the girl said, “Your husband said to look for a little old Irish lady.”
Maxi pads. His father would have flipped out just hearing the words.
Julia hadn’t been raised to cater to men. John had to fall in line. They took turns emptying the dishwasher. They paid someone to clean the bathrooms and vacuum the floors because she didn’t want to do it. The one and only time he’d made the mistake of telling his mother he was babysitting for Maeve on a Saturday night while Julia went out with friends, he got a lecture in four parts about how it was impossible to babysit one’s own child.
John took his place in line behind a woman whose toddler was trying to convince her to buy him a candy bar. Ahead of them was a teenage couple, probably skipping school, buying God knows what. Just another afternoon. He wanted to shout, My brother is dead! But instead he paid the cashier and gave her a smile.
“You have a good day now,” she said.
John nodded. “You too.”
Back in the car, Maeve said, “I’m texting with Aunt Bridget, Daddy. She said to tell you she and Natalie and Rocco will be at Nana’s in an hour.”
More words than she had said to him in a week. Daddy. Pathetic how much it meant to him. Like he was a nerd and Maeve was the most popular girl in school.
“That’s good,” he said. “Wait, Rocco is with them? She’s bringing a pit bull to a wake and funeral. Seems appropriate.”
“Dad. He’s her child.”
“I doubt she’ll bring him to the wake,” Julia said.
His daughter had her own thing with Nora, and with Bridget, separate and apart from him. John got a kick out of this. He liked that Maeve loved Natalie too. He was happy for his sister. Before, he and Julia had worried that Bridget was lonely. “Bridget’s married to her job,” Nora liked to say. He wondered if she actually believed it.
Natalie was the first girlfriend she’d ever introduced them to. John had imagined the girls Bridget dated would look like she did, but Natalie was a knockout. The kind of girl he would bring home. She seemed completely smitten by Bridget, the two of them so blatantly in love. Though Bridget shut it off when their mother was present. In Nora’s company, you might have thought they were just friends. For this reason, he didn’t think Nora could necessarily be blamed for referring to them that way, though Julia thought it was appalling.
Last summer, down the Cape, John and Maeve sat on the front lawn waiting for the two of them to arrive for the weekend. He thought that maybe he ought to explain. Bridget and Natalie lived together. And Maeve was old enough.
Aunt Bridget and Natalie are more than friends, he said, picking at the grass. Special friends, I guess you would call them.
You mean they’re a couple, she said.
Yeah. That’s it. Sometimes women love other women, men love other men. It’s sort of about the person, if that makes sense. You fall in love with a person. I know it probably sounds weird to you, but it’s not weird. It’s a good thing. Do you want to ask me anything about it?
She looked at him like he was nuts. No.
It’s okay if you do. I know it’s kind of weird.
Dad, there are three lesbians in my class.
Really. In the seventh grade.
Well, one of them’s bi if I had to guess.
—
When they reached the Dorchester exit, Maeve leaned forward and said, “Take us by your old house, where you had to share the room.”
The way she said it made sharing a room sound like a fate so cruel it might only befall an orphan out of Dickens. This annoyed him slightly, but then he had made her into the girl she was. A house teeming with people was exotic to her. They had four bedrooms they didn’t even use. Maeve liked knowing that some summers it was John and Patrick and six cousins from Ireland, all crowded into the front bedroom. Her favorite thing was when John said he had never been alone, outside of the bathroom, until the fifth grade.
He didn’t much feel like driving his brand-new SUV into the old neighborhood, even as he loathed himself for thinking it. There was the car itself. Three weeks old, and not a scratch on it. And then there was the bumper sticker he’d gotten, which he liked at first but now felt embarrassed about. Just three letters in an oval: OFD.
Originally from Dorchester.
When one of his clients saw the sticker, he said, My parents grew up there too. Everyone loves being from Dorchester as long as they don’t actually have to live there anymore, am I right?
That had stuck in his craw, although it was true. John didn’t want to live there. He had scrubbed every bit of Dorchester from the way he spoke. He cringed now when he heard anyone—his brothers, his cousins—pronounce potatoes bah-day-das or say irregardless or so don’t I, when they meant regardless, so do I.
He could turn the language on and off. In some circles, the dropped R’s of his childhood were a plus. But this was not the case, for the most part, in the company he kept now. He considered the sound of every syllable before it left his mouth.
John had a gift for modulating his personality to suit whomever he was talking to. It seemed to him that Patrick was the same guy no matter where he went. Himself, always. He envied that. John was a shape-shifter, a pathetic pleaser, though it suited him to be this way sometimes. He owed his career to it.
He turned right onto Crescent Avenue.
“There it is,” he said, slowing down.
They had painted the outside, changed it from blue to white.
John looked up at the corner window. He could almost see his brother beside him there, the two of them shoulder to shoulder as boys, watching a lightning storm, before things went wrong between them. A few years later, Patrick crawling out that window, tapping on it just before dawn, John sleepily crossing the room to let him in, so happy to be in on the secret.
He felt wistful as they drove off. Maybe Julia could sense it. She reached over, took his hand.
“Look!” Maeve said.
John and Julia turned to see a RORY McCLAIN FOR STATE SENATE sign secured to someone’s front porch, left over from the election two months ago.
“That’s your guy, right?” Maeve said.
“Yup. That’s my guy.”
“Cool.”
Maeve nodded approvingly, and then retreated back into her music. John allowed himself a moment of pride with the comment. It might be months before he got such an enthusiastic response from her over anything again.
Two minutes later, they were flying down Morrissey Boulevard. When the sign for Saint Ignatius Prep came into view, Julia met his eye and he nodded. He had told her the story so many times.
John was eight years old when Patrick got in. From then on, it was his dream to attend. Maybe it was petty that he still cared so much. What happened hadn’t altered the shape of his life. But it was one of those memories that stung every time, even all these years later.
As a freshman, Patrick got kicked out of Saint Ignatius.
The next day, they sat around the breakfast table in silence until Nora said, “We didn’t cross the Atlantic for this.”
It was a line their parents had uttered so many times, meant to shame the Rafferty children into good behavior. They who in their unremarkable lives had gone no farther than New Hampshire, and then only to stay in a motel for their second cousin’s wedding.
“In fact,” Charlie said, “maybe it’s time for us all to go back to Ireland for good.”
John could never tell whether
his father was joking when he said such things.
“We’re not going to Ireland,” Nora said. “Honestly. It’s that Michael Ferguson. He’s a bad influence. I’ve said it from the start. I don’t want you hanging around him anymore.”
Patrick rolled his eyes. “Fergie wasn’t even there, Ma.”
“He didn’t have to be.”
Patrick was enrolled in public school after that. Southie High. And though John might have expected him to get involved in the fray that came along with busing, Patrick seemed to behave himself. Until the end of his sophomore year, when there were two policemen at the door one morning. There must have been a family party that day. John remembered he was wearing a suit. His mother sent him and Bridget outside.
Soon after, Nora announced that they were moving. Not to a familiar suburb—Quincy or Weymouth—but to Hull, where people they knew might go to rent a house for a week in August, but not to live. John knew the move must have something to do with Patrick, with those policemen, though he wasn’t sure what.
Everyone they knew lived in Dorchester. Their relatives were packed into three-deckers, piled one on top of another. They got together every weekend for parties and ran into one another on the sidewalk while out buying a quart of milk. John didn’t know a single person in Hull. His older brother had ruined his life.
Nora said they would adapt, they would get used to it. And they did, more or less. Soon enough.
John’s parents seemed surprised when eighth grade came around and he reminded them that he’d be applying to Saint Ignatius Prep for the fall. Whenever he’d mention the school, Patrick would make fun of him—Why the hell would you want to go there? So John just stopped talking about it.
His application was ready to go three months before the deadline. John was determined to deliver it by hand. But his mother kept putting off driving him to Dorchester. Finally, she agreed to take him, the day before it was due. He had chosen the clothes he would wear and everything. Shined his shoes. But at the last minute, he got a stomach bug. Pat was going into town anyway. Nora said he could drop the application off to the secretary in the front office.
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