Bridget worshipped her as a kid. Kitty was the opposite of her mother. Carefree, living alone off her dead husband’s money, not having to worry about children. Kitty retired early from nursing. She took expensive trips and wore nice clothes. Her home was furnished in such a feminine manner that every time Bridget stepped inside, she felt as if she had entered a gingerbread house. There were ruffles on the curtains. Pink wallpaper, and silk flowers in glass vases. Throw pillows, a mirrored coffee table, a crystal chandelier. In the tiny garden out back stood an honest-to-God birdbath, gurgling water at all times.
Taking in the smell of her aunt’s perfume now, Bridget had a recollection of Kitty as a young woman, sitting in her mother’s kitchen in a black dress, a highball glass in hand, auburn hair falling past her shoulders. Everyone laughing at the story she told.
It had occurred to Bridget on the drive over that Kitty, having grown up next to her mother in Ireland, must already know. Telling her wouldn’t be a betrayal.
“Aunt Kitty, can I ask you something, just between us?”
“Of course,” Kitty said.
“My mother told me she has a sister.”
Kitty pulled her head back in surprise. “She told you.”
“Yes. I assume you knew?”
“I knew Theresa. I shared a room in that house on Edison Green with her and your mother, when they were new in town.”
Bridget looked at her. It was all so strange and suspicious. And maybe it was childish to feel this way, but it stung a little that Kitty had kept this from her. Why this, when for all of Bridget’s life, Kitty had been the one to fill in the gaps in the family story? She was the one who told Bridget that Uncle Lawrence had once been a wild drunk, that he didn’t stop drinking until he fell asleep behind the wheel of a bus. The kids knew him as a teetotaler. They only ever saw him drink tonic, though he was a fiend for the stuff. He could wash a sandwich down with a two-liter bottle of Coke like it was a glass of water.
Something awful must have happened. This woman must have hurt her mother in a way that left no room for forgiveness.
“What was she like?” Bridget asked.
“A real hot ticket,” Kitty said. “Beautiful girl. She looked like a film star.”
Her Irish aunts said any woman who was halfway pretty looked like a film star, the generous words tumbling out of them, one syllable stretched into two. Fil-um.
“What else?” Bridget said. She felt far freer to ask Kitty about it than she did Nora. For a certain kind of girl, with a certain kind of mother, an aunt would always be the preferred confidante. An aunt could see you as you were. A mother could only see you as she wished you were, or once imagined you would be.
“It was quite a scandal when Theresa ran off the way she did,” Kitty said.
“Ran off?”
“We were all shocked when we found out she had become a nun, I can tell you that. Your mother included, I’d say, though we never discussed it. Your aunt Theresa certainly wasn’t the type. Clearly.”
Your aunt Theresa. Another aunt. Bridget hadn’t thought of it in those terms. Who knew how they might have connected if given the chance? Probably not very well. She couldn’t picture herself as close with a nun as she was with Kitty. But still.
“My mother says we kids met her once.”
Kitty frowned. “No. I don’t think so.”
“I don’t either. I’m confused. Why did we never hear about this person until today?”
“I never thought it was right for Nora to keep it a secret. But of course I didn’t say anything.”
“Why not?”
“Oh, Bridget. You can only control what goes on in your own house and sometimes not even that. But if you ask me, Patrick deserved to know.”
“Why Patrick?”
She saw something change in Kitty’s expression.
“All of you did, I mean. Well, what did your mother tell you about it?”
“She just said she has a sister, and that she called her and she’s coming to the wake.”
“No. What’s Nora thinking? She can’t come. They don’t let them leave places like that.”
There was a long silence while she waited for Kitty to say more. Usually Kitty was thrilled when a secret got told. Then she could reveal all the other secrets that went along with it. To her, a secret was like a diamond—long buried, kept under pressure, then dug up and made into something so much more valuable than the thing it was to begin with.
But for once, Kitty didn’t elaborate.
“I don’t understand,” Bridget said, finally. “Why did they stop speaking?”
Kitty shook her head, as if she couldn’t quite remember. “It was such a long time ago now.”
Bridget noticed a blonde walking toward them across the funeral home parking lot. The girl looked about nineteen. She gave them a wave. She wore a black minidress with a plunging neckline and super-high heels. No coat, even though it was freezing.
Bridget was positive she had never seen her before.
At that moment, Brian turned into the lot. When the blonde saw him, she smiled huge. A smile that hurt your jaw just looking at it.
Brian got out of his car and walked toward the three of them, hunched down in his jacket, hands pressed into his pockets.
When he reached them, he said, “So. I see you’ve met.”
“No, actually,” Bridget said. “Hi, I’m Bridget. His sister.”
“This is Ashley,” Brian said.
“His girlfriend,” Ashley said.
Kitty tossed her cigarette and they all filed inside. Brian held the door. Bridget was the first one through, providing a chance for her to raise her eyebrows at him.
She made her way toward Natalie.
“I was just talking to Kitty about the nun,” she said.
Natalie nodded.
Nora stood whispering with Mr. O’Dell at the center of the enormous viewing room, even though there was no one there to take issue with their volume. John and Julia were with her. Maeve was arranging photographs on a table while also typing away on her phone. Bridget wondered what she thought of all this. She wished desperately, suddenly, that John and Patrick had been closer, so that Maeve might have known Patrick better, the parts of him that were easy to love.
The open casket had been positioned in its usual place against the far wall. There were flowers arranged all around it. Enormous baskets of lilies, roses, tulips, and orchids, all white. A potted white hydrangea, which would eventually be planted at the grave. Her mother needed things to be just so. Everywhere, but especially here. As if she could change the fact of death itself if she exerted enough control over the situation.
Bridget hated this place, the forced hush that covered over all the anguish. The pale pink walls, like the inside of a shell, a color that was probably meant to soothe but had the opposite effect on her. She felt a strong desire to punch a hole through the inspirational psalm scrawled in calligraphy on one wall: Cast your cares on the Lord and He will sustain you. He will never let the righteous be shaken.
She thought to herself, not for the first time, that she would never put the rest of them through this. She wouldn’t be waked, all of them standing here weighted down by numb sorrow, forced to look at her corpse, or not look. Of course, it might not be up to her. Pat wouldn’t have wanted any of this. She would make it clear to Natalie the minute they got home that were she to die, Nora could have nothing to do with it. Natalie was to tell her that Bridget’s body had vanished.
Julia came over to the two of them.
“Nora just told us the craziest thing in the car on the way here,” she whispered.
“We know. She told me too,” Bridget said. “Insane.”
Before they could say more, the priest walked in.
“Let’s talk about it later?” Julia said.
“Yes. At great length.”
They went toward the casket as a group, following the priest across the room as if he were the Pied Piper. The sweetness of the lili
es made Bridget want to gag as she got close. She had long associated the smell of lilies with death. She avoided them at the bodega, or on a table in a restaurant. They belonged nowhere but here.
“Is this everyone?” the priest said. He had his back to the casket, while the rest of them were made to face it.
“Yes,” Nora said. She paused, as if to count them. “This is the whole family.”
“Used to be a lot more of us,” Kitty said.
Aunt Kitty’s favorite pastime was to tell you over a cup of tea how each of her brothers had died. The next day, she’d run through it all again if you let her. It seemed to hurt her feelings that she had outlived them all, as if God had snubbed her somehow.
Bridget wondered if her mother was expecting her sister to be here by now. She imagined what they would do when they saw each other. Embrace, maybe. Or start weeping. Explain to the rest of them why the hell they hadn’t spoken in so long.
She let her eyes land on Patrick’s face, felt a jab to the heart, then looked away. Just above his head inside the casket, leaning against the raised silk-covered lid, was a framed picture of him. In it, Pat was sunburned and smiling, sitting on the front porch in shorts and T-shirt, the breeze in his hair. Bridget focused on that.
She didn’t face him again until it was time for them each to take a turn with the body. The family members lined up. From the corner of her eye, she saw Natalie go to the back of the room to give them space.
Bridget knelt before him first, crossing herself for her mother’s benefit. The tears were automatic.
Patrick held a crystal rosary in his hand. In this way, she knew for certain that he was dead. Bridget half wanted to grab the thing, stuff it in her pocket. It had nothing to do with him.
For some time, Patrick had been wearing a mustache. Nora moaned about it every time Patrick was in her presence. Now the mustache was gone. Bridget assumed Nora had requested this for the viewing. She wondered whose job it was to outfit the dead in so intimate a manner. Would Mr. O’Dell, that moonfaced man, be the last person ever to see Patrick’s scarred-up knees, his freakishly long white toes?
The Hail Mary was a muscle memory that came to her in moments like this, even though she hadn’t been one to pray in years. She had tried once to attend a Unitarian Universalist church service, but she couldn’t locate God there, in that place of rainbows and kindness. She found it all suspect somehow. In times of distress, she returned to the God of her childhood, vengeful yet dependable.
She said every prayer she knew, just to have more time with Patrick. The moments you spent with the dead were like going under water. The sounds of the room went away, and there was nothing but you and the person lying before you.
When she finally stood, Bridget felt disoriented. She looked around at the others. Her family. What remained of her family.
When it was Nora’s turn to say good-bye, she knelt before Patrick and though she did not make a sound, Bridget watched from behind as her body heaved up and down, the silent sobs rolling through her. She stayed too long. Eventually, John went to her, rubbed her back, as if drawing her out of a trance.
“It’s almost time,” he said. “People will start coming in a minute.”
Brian went last.
The girlfriend went right along with him. She knelt beside Brian, putting a bare arm around him, rubbing his back, as if the two of them might just go at it right there on the velvet kneeler. John gave Bridget a baffled look.
Here was Brian, putting front and center a girl they would probably never see again after today. Bridget caught Natalie’s eye. Off to the side, keeping a respectful distance. The woman who would be the mother of her child. It was no one’s fault but Bridget’s. She was more like her mother than she cared to admit. Nora was closed off, unable to show herself to them, and this had seeped down to Bridget, cost her enormously.
A few minutes later, when the priest said, “Immediate family members should take their places,” Natalie said, “I’ll keep Aunt Kitty company.”
“No,” Bridget said. “Stay with me.”
Natalie nodded, and Bridget took her hand, led her to their position. The two of them stood beside John and Julia and Maeve, Nora and Brian on the other side. Bridget didn’t look to see her mother’s expression.
The seven of them formed an L with the casket, as erect as soldiers or Rockettes. There was a row of tall stools behind them, but none of them sat. Poor Brian’s eyes and nose were red with tears that he refused to release. It looked as if they might burst through his pores at any moment.
They accepted condolences from a long line of relatives and friends, strangers and near strangers. Hundreds of people showed up. Bridget’s cousins Matty and Sean and Conor were first, plus Conor’s wife, Marie, and their kids. They looked like a family from a catalogue. His three sisters, Peggy, Patricia, and Jane, all of them nurses, followed behind—two of them wore scrubs beneath their winter coats, only on an hour’s break. Bridget’s parents had presumed once that she too would be a nurse someday.
There was a pair of twins, third cousins of Bridget’s, a woman and a man, ten years younger than she was. She still remembered their christening party, though she could never remember their names. Each of them had two children of their own now.
Everyone they knew from Dorchester was there, and the neighbors from Hull. Guys who hadn’t seen Patrick since high school came, and all the regulars from his bar. If you never had a wedding, your family never got to see the people who loved you in all the different parts of your life, together in one place. There was something beautiful about it. She wished Patrick were here to see. Oh, the women who poured into his wake. She wondered now whether he ever would have settled down with one of them.
Aunt Kitty had taken a seat by the fireplace. Every so often, she gave Bridget a regretful wave.
Nora’s eyes were on the door.
An hour passed. The room hummed with low conversation. Dozens of people stood talking in small groups. Fifty or more waited in line to pay their respects. Eileen Delaney, queen of the neighborhood busybodies, was there with Betty Joyce, who lived next door to her. When they reached the coffin, they knelt together, their hips and shoulders touching.
Then they came to Bridget and Natalie, who were first in the receiving line.
“Honey, how are you?” Eileen said.
Her voice dripped with the sad enthusiasm of a tragedy junkie. Eileen could go on for hours talking gleefully about someone else’s divorce or heart attack or house fire. She lived for days like this one.
Betty embraced Bridget, the smell of her perfume making Bridget want to cough. When they kissed, she felt Betty’s prickly whiskers on her cheek.
“Didn’t he get a crowd,” Eileen said. “The back lot was already full when I pulled in. There’s an actual line of cars just waiting to park.”
Natalie looked slightly taken aback by the remark, but Bridget understood. They had all been in this room so many times. You couldn’t help but compare it to wakes past. An untimely death drew the biggest turnout—the younger, the bigger. Every few years, it seemed, some teenager in town got in a wreck or broke his neck jumping drunk into the shallow end of a swimming pool. There’d be a line that stretched for blocks. Usually, when they were young, there was memorabilia that hinted at a hobby of some kind—a track jacket draped over the coffin or an electric guitar propped among the flower arrangements. This told you how the child would be remembered: He was the captain of the team, they’d say for years to come, even if he spent all his time warming the bench. He was going to be the next Clapton.
Patrick was fifty. Certainly not a child, not even a young man anymore, and yet still too young to die. A few in the room were just beginning to feel the crush of grief that would last for years. But many didn’t even know him. They had come for the spectacle, or because they knew one of the Rafferty kids from school, or because they wanted something from John. They were thinking about where they’d go to eat after, they were establishing themse
lves as important to the story or not. Bridget wished she could trade places with any one of them.
“Patrick looks so handsome,” Betty said.
“He does,” Eileen said. “Very peaceful.” She lowered her voice. “Though Digger O’Dell always makes the hair too big. It’s like he thinks the dead might have a gig at the Grand Ole Opry later. Well. We’ll see you back at your mother’s after.”
There wasn’t anything more to say, but some old biddy had created a backup in the line, holding John’s hand, probably telling him a story he wouldn’t remember an hour from now. Eileen smiled at Bridget, holding eye contact for an uncomfortably long moment.
When Brian was born, Nora and Charlie had to go to the hospital in the middle of the night. Eileen came up the hill in her nightgown and slept over so the others wouldn’t be alone. She was there when they woke up, to tell them the news. She made pancakes, and afterward, they decorated the porch with blue balloons. It was the summer they moved to Hull, when Patrick was in such a bad way. When Bridget saw Eileen in the kitchen that morning, her first thought was that something horrible had happened to him.
“Oh!” Eileen exclaimed now. She flapped her arms. “There’s my Tommy!”
Tommy Delaney shuffled toward them, dragging his feet, flashing apologetic smiles at all the people he was cutting in line. He got to his mother’s side and kissed her cheek. He had gotten fat. His gut hung over the top of his pants so that his suit jacket wouldn’t close.
“Hi, Ma,” he said. “Mrs. Joyce. Bridget, hi. God, I’m so sorry for your loss.”
“Thanks, Tommy,” she said. “Thanks for coming.”
After the three of them had moved along, Natalie whispered, “My competition, I presume?”
“Yup,” Bridget said. “I can tell you’re shaking in your boots.”
Patrick’s best friend, Fergie, had arrived, bleary-eyed and drunk. He took his place in line. Bridget kept an eye on him. When he reached her, they made small talk for a while. She didn’t want him to move along to the others. She worried how Nora might feel, seeing him like this. Her mother had never liked Fergie. It was always easier to blame someone else for your kid’s bad behavior. But finally, Bridget couldn’t think of anything more to say. She watched him move through each family member, on the way to Nora at the end of the line.
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