She admitted to her sister that she often found Charlie irritating. He was a good father, but he got carried away. Years and years ago, she wrote to Theresa and told her how he brought home baby chicks at Easter without asking her first. The children, being children, were elated. Nora calmly explained to him that they lived in an apartment, and adorable chicks would one day grow into chickens.
For a few weeks, she let the baby birds live on the cramped back porch.
One morning, when the children were at school, she looked out the kitchen window and couldn’t see the birds in their box. She opened the door, stepped out. The box was empty. Nora somehow knew what had happened before she knew it. She looked over the railing to see the squashed yellow splotches on the pavement three stories down. She braced herself for the inevitable long conversation with Mr. Fallon downstairs. When she told him what had happened, he kept her there, talking about his bad tooth and the rain they sorely needed, before opening the back door and saying, “I’ll leave you to it then.”
Nora wore blue rubber gloves printed with daisies. She tried to focus on the pattern as she lifted the limp little bodies and placed them in a garbage bag.
She told the children she had given the chicks to a farmer. They’d be so much happier on the farm, eating grass and roaming in the sunshine.
“What was the farmer’s name?” Bridget asked.
“Farmer Jones.”
“Can we go visit the chicks sometime?”
“Of course.”
Her daughter seemed satisfied with that, but then, every few months for the next three years, Bridget would ask over dinner, “When are we going to visit the chicks?” Nora would look at her husband, give him a tight smile.
Theresa thought the story was gruesome. Oh, you poor thing, she wrote. And Nora felt that she had done her job.
There were things she did not tell her sister about marriage. How the only place she and Charlie connected, always, was in the bedroom. That it was lovely. Early on, they were bashful. They had only ever made love to one another. But in time, they grew to understand each other’s bodies as they might never understand each other’s minds, each other’s natures.
She didn’t tell Theresa that despite all that was bad in him, Nora could never forget what Charlie had done for her. When she was young and thought of marriage in the abstract, she believed it was about two individuals, each living a mostly independent existence. Now she saw that marriage was like being in a three-legged race with the same person for the rest of your life. Your hopes, your happiness, your luck, your moods, all yoked to his.
—
Babs was still talking at a quarter to ten.
Nora was half listening, pulling her shopping list from her coat pocket, adding a couple of things she had forgotten—butter (3), brown sugar.
At this rate, she could have gone to the Legion after all.
“Conor was up studying all night for the big test,” Babs said. “Patrick too, I’ll bet.”
“Mmmhmm,” Nora said, though of course he hadn’t mentioned it.
She thought she heard someone enter the apartment.
She held her breath a second. But then she told herself not to be silly. It was probably just the wind. When she heard footsteps, Nora decided it must be Mr. Fallon. She put on a smile, though it annoyed her that he thought he could walk right in. She stretched the phone cord as far as it would go across the kitchen, just able to stick her head out into the hall.
Patrick stood there, covered in blood.
“Babs,” she said. “I have to go.”
She hung up the phone.
“I didn’t think you’d be home,” he said.
Patrick looked at the doorway he had just come through as if considering whether he ought to run right out again. It wasn’t even the blood that scared her. It was the expression on his face.
“What happened?” she asked, rushing toward him.
When Nora got closer, she saw that he wasn’t hurt. The blood wasn’t his.
“Oh God, what happened?”
He confessed it all at once. He had skipped school, gone to meet Michael Ferguson at his apartment. A group of boys were in the process of beating Michael when Patrick arrived.
“I didn’t know what to do,” he said. “I panicked. I grabbed the first thing I could find. A broomstick, with one of those metal points at the end. I hurt someone, Ma. There was so much blood. I got them off Fergie, but they chased me.”
Nora felt unsteady. She walked into the living room, sat on the arm of the sofa, and bent her head down.
He followed behind.
“They’ll kill me,” he kept saying. “They’ll come for me, and they’ll kill me.”
“I’m calling the police,” Nora said.
“No! Please. That will only make them more angry. It’ll make things more dangerous for me.”
“I don’t believe it,” she said.
His voice turned to a near whisper. “I hurt him bad. He could be dead for all I know.”
“Patrick!” she said. “How could you do this?”
He cried in her arms. “I was trying to be good. I didn’t mean for it to happen. But there was nothing else I could do. Was I supposed to stand there and let them kill my best friend? After everything Fergie’s done for me?”
Nora hated the sound of his name. Michael Ferguson had seemed like trouble to her since the day she first saw him, when the boys were all of six years old. He was dirty, his skin tinged brown, his hair greasy. His mother was a bad drunk. Nora knew she ought to have compassion for him. But instead she just felt fear. She wished she could go back and forbid the childhood version of her son from spending time with him. Now it was too late.
“What has that boy ever done for you?” she said.
“You don’t want to know.”
“Tell me.”
And so Patrick told her that since grade school, the same group of boys had taunted him, teased him, saying Charlie wasn’t his father. Only Fergie had ever stood up in his defense.
“And just who do they say your father is?” Nora asked, trying not to let him see that she was shaking.
“They don’t,” he said. “They just say—never mind.”
“No,” she said. “Tell me.”
His face went red. “They say you were pregnant when you married Dad. And that I don’t look like the others. I don’t look like him.”
“Nonsense,” Nora said. “I’ve told you. You look like my side. My brother. Those boys only wanted to get a rise out of you.”
This stupid place. The way a story moved through it because no one had anything better to do. The petty gossip, the vicious things people said just to entertain themselves. It was no less provincial than the village where she was raised. This hadn’t started with children.
She made him say who the boys were.
“Pete O’Shea was the one who got hurt.”
“And the others?”
“Matty McGinness. Owen Breen. Tom Cleary. Rory McClain.”
Walter McClain’s son.
Whether the boy knew the truth about his father, or just sensed something in some strange, sideways manner, she couldn’t say.
“There’s one more thing,” he said. “But I know you won’t believe it.”
“What?”
“When Father McDonald said I spat in his face.”
“Yes.”
“I didn’t.”
She shook her head. “I don’t want to hear it. Not now.”
“He got wind of what the boys were saying about me, and he started saying it too, when we were alone. He’d find me in the bathroom, or at my locker, and he’d say, ‘You’re a little bastard.’ He did way worse to Fergie.”
“Oh, Patrick.”
“I swear. He’s a weirdo. He tries to be pals with the kids. It’s pathetic.”
Nora didn’t know whether to believe him.
Sometimes she thought that all her son’s problems could be traced back to the fact that she hadn’
t loved him right away. Of course I don’t want him, she had said. He was right there in the room, in her sister’s arms.
“Just promise me you won’t send John to Saint Ignatius,” Patrick said. “He’s already obsessed with going there and he’s only eleven. Don’t let him go, Ma. I’m telling you. He’s just the type that priest would—”
“Patrick,” she said. “Don’t try to change the subject.”
She knew that she should go to the police, that Charlie would demand it if he knew. But she could feel the remorse in him. She told Patrick to take a shower, to go into his room and close the door. Not to tell anyone else what he had told her, even his father. She washed the blood from his clothes, folded them, and left them in a neat pile on top of his dresser.
She went to the market and bought every last item on her list.
—
The police arrived the morning of the christening, as Nora was trying to get the family out the door to church.
She didn’t hear them knocking at first. She was yelling at Bridget to hurry up. It had always been a battle to get that child into a dress. Nora bought her barrettes and ballet slippers, luxuries she would have adored when she was that age. Bridget left them all in the packaging. She preferred jeans and her dirty old tennis shoes.
Some part of this was Nora’s fault. She had let her only daughter play like a boy, with the boys, until she had no femininity about her. She shouldn’t have allowed Bridget to go out with Charlie, helping to paint houses with the rest of them in summertime. She should have put her foot down about Bridget taking in all those strays. She was obsessed with rabbits and dogs and lizards and worms. She showed no sign of growing out of it, even though she had reached an age where she ought to.
Each of Nora’s children had arrived on this earth as him- or herself. The more she knew them, the more she felt it to be true. They were so different from one another, and from her.
Charlie was shouting something. She tilted her head to hear him.
“What?”
“I’ll get it,” he said.
She walked out into the hall and saw him leading two officers in uniform toward the kitchen.
At least they hadn’t come a few hours later, when the apartment would be full of people.
One of them was tall and handsome, with a dimple in his cheek. The other, short and stocky. She watched them take note of her in her dress and hat, her white gloves. They looked at the table, piled high with cakes and muffins, fruit salad, five pounds of bacon layered between sheets of paper towel.
“Can I get you fellas a cup of coffee?” Charlie said, his voice calm, though she thought she sensed concern in it.
“No thank you. Looks like you’ve got company coming. We’ll be quick. We’re looking for your son Patrick.”
“He’s not here,” Nora said lightly, as if her heart weren’t thumping hard in her chest. “He went out early to do some errands for me.”
“Are you aware that he didn’t show up to school on Tuesday?”
“No,” Charlie said.
Nora looked at John and Bridget in the doorway, the pair of them pretending not to listen.
“You two, wait for us outside.”
They did as she said.
The officer waited until they were gone before he continued. “A boy was badly injured in a robbery that day. They think he could be blind for the rest of his life.”
“Jesus,” Charlie said.
“We just want to talk to everyone who was involved.”
“You think Patrick was involved?” Charlie said.
The officer shrugged. “The boy who was hurt isn’t giving up any names. We’re working backward to try to sort out who was there, starting with the truants.”
“Patrick was home with me all day on Tuesday,” Nora said. “He had the flu.”
The policemen looked surprised. “Oh. All right, then. Sorry to waste your time.”
Nora let them out.
Back in the kitchen, Charlie said, “Patrick had the flu?”
“Yes. A twenty-four-hour thing, you know.”
“You didn’t mention it. Is there anything you want to tell me, Nora?”
He had been good to Patrick, but even Charlie must have his limits. She didn’t want him to stop loving the boy.
“Bad enough for them to accuse him. Not you too,” she said.
“I wasn’t accusing anyone,” Charlie said. “Accusing him of what?”
In church an hour later, she realized that the policeman had said the boy, Pete O’Shea, might have ended up blind. He hadn’t died. Her son was no murderer. For that, in spite of everything, Nora thanked God.
She watched as the priest sprinkled holy water onto the twins, brand-new to this world. She considered what Patrick had told her about Father McDonald. For the first time in years, she thought of the priest in Ireland, sliding his hand down the front of her sister’s dress, and her best friend Oona’s, and who knew how many other girls. She never would have dared tell her father. The priest would have been sure of that.
This, then, was the hardest part of being a parent. Your children had their private worlds, where you could never protect them. They were yours and yet not yours.
—
The morning after the christening, Nora woke Patrick early.
“We’re going for a drive,” she said. “Come on.”
He protested, but not for as long as he usually might.
The city streets were quiet. They got onto the expressway, then took the exit for Route 1, where all the stores and buildings eventually gave way to nothing but towering pine trees, the sameness of it all almost hypnotizing her as she drove along. When they reached the second hour in the car, he asked where she was taking him.
“You’ll see,” she said.
“Vermont?” he said, reading a road sign a while later. “What the hell is going on?”
“Language, Patrick,” she said.
She left him in the small town square. It was a sweet, old-fashioned place, a town young lovers might run off to for a long weekend in the fall. Nora pointed at a five and dime. A neon sign in the window advertised a soda fountain. She gave Patrick some money, told him to go get a milkshake. She would meet him in an hour.
Then she turned down a long country road and followed it for miles.
At the abbey gates, Nora slowed to let two young nuns cross the path. With them were a pair of teenage girls in short skirts, their long hair hanging to their waists.
Nora parked by the main building and entered a room made of stained glass. The sun shone through the panels—bright red and green and yellow. The space was full of flowers.
A nun answered the door inside and said something in Latin.
“I’m here to see Mother Cecilia,” Nora said.
“Have you booked a parlor with her?”
“No.”
“Then I’m afraid she can’t see you.”
“Tell her Nora Rafferty is here, please.”
“She’ll be with other guests for at least an hour, I’m afraid.”
“I’ll wait.”
“There is no guarantee she can see you today, ma’am. She’s busier than ever since she was elected prioress.”
Nora made her tone stronger. “I will wait.”
She sat in the vestibule in silence for forty-five minutes, until she heard a conversation on the other side of the door. She couldn’t make out the words, but she swore she could hear Theresa’s voice. She expected her sister to appear, but instead the other nun returned.
“Mother Cecilia says she can see you for a parlor now. Just go back out the way you came and enter the third door on the left. It will say Saint Barnabas. She will meet you inside.”
When she thought of the word parlor, Nora pictured a dusty living room crowded full of Victorian furniture. But the room was more like a large confessional, the size of a kitchen pantry. Just enough space for two wooden chairs. There was a counter, with a wooden grate on the top that stretched to the ceili
ng. On the other side, a larger room, a single chair.
Nora sat for some time.
Finally, Theresa entered the room on the other side.
“Nora,” she said. “My goodness. What a surprise. I’m so happy to see you.”
She smiled at Nora’s belly. “Look at you! How are you feeling?”
“Oh, all right. A little tired, but fine.”
So odd to see her in person for the first time in this many years, and to have to do it through a fence. No touching, no hug hello. When they were children, Nora had cleaned the dirt from beneath her sister’s fingernails, had coaxed the soft, honeyed wax from her ears.
She got right to it, thinking of the time. Patrick would be waiting. Nora said he was in trouble, she told her sister everything. She said she remembered Theresa telling her in a letter that the abbey invited young people to stay for the summer, helping on the farm.
“I thought you could keep him here for a few months until I can figure out what to do next.”
“Now?”
“Yes. Right away. I have a bag packed in the trunk. It’s not safe for him at home.”
“Right now there’s no room in the men’s guesthouse. Not until the end of summer.”
Her sister was silent for a long time. Finally, she said, “I’m happy you came. I am. I’ve been trying to find a way to tell you something. I’ve been praying hard over what to do about Patrick. Nora, I think it’s time we told him the truth. Your coming here like this makes me think it all the more. I will take him. I’ll find the space. But let me tell him while he’s here, all that you did for us.”
“Us?”
“Me and him. Or we can tell him together if you want.”
“That’s not for you to decide.”
“It’s for both of us to decide.”
Nora stood up. Anger coursed through her.
“This was a mistake.”
“Nora, please.”
Saints for All Occasions Page 26