When Fergie said something that made Brian laugh out loud, the sudden eruption of noise startled Bridget. People turned their heads.
She looked to Julia on the far side of Natalie. They held each other’s gaze.
Julia whispered, “Well, that was unexpected.” She paused, then added, “What is Brian’s date wearing?”
Bridget thought the word date was odd, given the context.
Natalie leaned in. “She’s auditioning to be a Laker Girl after this.”
—
Throughout the afternoon, they all checked in with Nora to make sure she was holding up. They offered her tissues and cushioned chairs and glasses of water, none of which she wanted.
“I’m fine,” she kept saying. “There’s no need to make a fuss.”
As the hours wore on, the members of the family fell out of line and joined the crowd. Bridget and Natalie drifted from one set of cousins to another, then stood chatting with Maeve and Julia for a while.
“My dad punched a lamp last night,” Maeve said.
“Is that right?” Bridget said.
“Yeah. Healthy.”
“And who have you been texting all day?” Natalie asked.
Maeve looked bashful. “Nobody.”
“It’s a boy in her class,” Julia said. “Jacob Owens.”
“Mom!” Maeve said.
She was truly outraged, and yet Bridget had to smile. She thought her sister-in-law was an amazing mother. Julia knew Maeve, knew all her friends. Unlike Nora, who always gave Bridget something generic for her birthday when she was a kid—a doll or a tea set, something you might give a child you’d never met, simply because she was a girl. When Bridget was young, there was absolutely nothing fun about her mother. Nora was strict, stern, matter-of-fact. She had no interest in knowing anything about Bridget’s personal life.
Julia knew which clothing brands and TV shows and bands Maeve liked. She knew which members of the bands were considered the cutest and weighed in with her own opinion. She knew Maeve hated beets, so she simply did not make beets, whereas Nora would have served them up as something close to a punishment.
It seemed unjust that Maeve hated Julia’s guts all the same, as if it were written into the code of being thirteen, and no behavior on a mother’s part could change that.
Julia was looking at Nora, who stood talking to the priest.
“How do you think she seems?” she said.
“I don’t know,” Bridget said. “She never lets on, does she. This phantom sister of hers hasn’t shown.”
“Is it possible she made the whole thing up?” Julia said. “I’m not accusing her of anything, but just maybe, in her grief, she got her wires crossed? Sorry, is that terrible to suggest?”
“No, I was thinking the same thing. But Aunt Kitty remembers her.”
“All I ever wanted was a sister,” Maeve said. “How could Nana have one and not speak to her? Something bad must have gone down between them, that’s all I know.”
Julia smiled, shook her head. “I concur,” she said.
—
Half an hour before the wake ended, Bridget slipped into the bathroom. She peed in one of two tiny stalls, then washed her hands in a pink sink, built into a pink countertop. There were flecks of gold glitter in it. The walls were covered in the same pink tile as the floor. On the counter sat a large basket containing breath mints and tissue packets and eye makeup remover. A mourning survival kit. Chipper classical music was piped in through an overhead speaker.
She regarded her reflection in the mirror, touching the creases beneath her eyes. She looked exhausted.
The door creaked open. Her body tightened, preparing for more small talk, readying itself to be trapped with some acquaintance from her past. But when she looked over, it was her mother who had entered the room.
Nora seemed in a daze. In her hand was a stack of Mass cards people had given her, declarations of sympathy, promises that Patrick would be prayed for. She held them forth and Bridget scanned the words.
In Life and Death We Belong to the Lord.
It is in dying that we are born to eternal life.
“I don’t want these,” Nora said. “I don’t want to see them.”
Bridget took the pile and shoved them into the trash can.
“There.”
“We can’t,” Nora said. “What if someone sees?”
Bridget balled up a wad of paper towels and tossed it on top.
For a second, Nora smiled.
Bridget wondered if her mother would mention Natalie’s presence beside her in the receiving line.
But instead, Nora said, “When your father died, everyone had something to say about it. They asked so many questions. About whether the doctors had done enough, whether they could have tried one more treatment. They talked about their cousins and their friends and total strangers who died of the same thing he did. It made me very uneasy. I don’t believe in talking about such things.”
“Okay,” Bridget said, unsure where this was headed.
“But now, they don’t say a thing about what happened to Patrick,” Nora said. “Maybe they think I’m to blame. I let him get away with murder all those years. What did I expect?”
“What? No. Mom, he was fifty years old.”
She supposed this was how it worked. A mother blamed herself until the end, whatever that meant. Would Bridget feel this way about her own child in fifty years’ time? She tried not to think about how old she would be by then.
Nora lifted a soggy prayer card from the counter, where someone had left it behind.
“Oh no, will you look at this.”
The card was printed on flimsy paper, a photo of Patrick on one side and a prayer on the other. Nora had had two hundred of them made. Bridget herself always took one at a wake to be polite, but she never knew what to do with it after. She would sometimes find a prayer card at the bottom of her bag or under the seat in her van, a startling reminder of someone she hadn’t thought of in ages.
Nora had a place for everything. In her house, every object had at least one other object to contain it. A ring was never left on a table or even naked in a jewelry box, but was instead suspended over the crystal post of a Waterford ring holder, or tucked into the velvet box it had arrived in decades earlier. She kept her lipstick in a magnetized case. When they were kids, a ridiculous doll sat on the toilet lid, with an enormous crocheted skirt like Scarlett O’Hara’s. Under the skirt was a single roll of toilet paper.
A fraying blue cardboard box held Nora’s prayer cards. It had once had the words Saints for All Occasions embossed on the top in gold, but over time, bits of the foil had worn away so that only the shadow of the letters remained. Inside the box, at the bottom of the pile, were the newer cards, the ones she collected at wakes. The rest had been handed down by a long-dead relative Bridget had only ever heard about in stories. The cards were ancient and worn and fragile. Her mother kept them in a precise order and knew if even one was out of place.
When they were young, Nora never let the children touch the cards unless she was sitting with them and they had washed their hands with soap and hot water. It was a clever trick, if that’s what it was. It made the cards seem special, magical. They’d beg her to take them out. She had a prayer card for almost anything you could imagine. Bridget’s favorite as a child was the Prayer to Mary, Undoer of Knots. At some point in her teens, she realized that this had nothing to do with shoelaces or hair snarls and came to like it even more.
Nora took the limp, wet card now and held it under the hand dryer, shaking the picture of her son vigorously, as if attempting to save Patrick from drowning.
When the dryer finished whirring, Nora said, “She didn’t come.”
“I know. I’m sorry.”
“You don’t understand.”
“Yes I do,” Bridget said, irritated. She was trying to be sympathetic, she was trying not to ask questions, because she knew that’s what her mother would want. “You’re disappo
inted. You wanted her here.”
“No. I didn’t.”
“But you invited her.”
“I didn’t know she could leave. Cloistered nuns aren’t ever supposed to leave and you should know that, Bridget.”
“Jesus, you’re being impossible. You didn’t want her here and she’s not here. That’s a good thing, right?”
Nora didn’t say anything.
“So after your sister became a nun, you just never spoke again.”
“We did speak. For many years. And then we didn’t anymore.”
“Why?”
“It’s too long a story for me to tell you here. People are probably wondering where we are.”
“Why did you call her now?” Bridget said.
But her mother was already at the door, pushing it open, crossing to the other side.
—
Bridget followed Nora down a dark hallway. When they stepped back into the viewing room, there she was, standing by the fireplace: a nun in full habit—a veil and black robes that covered every bit of her besides her face.
It felt as if they had summoned her out of thin air just by talking about her in the bathroom. Somehow Bridget hadn’t fully believed she was a real person until this moment.
The nun was chatting with Aunt Kitty, just as natural as can be.
Natalie, Julia, and Maeve stood several feet away, trying not to gawk.
“Oh God,” Nora said, her voice a frantic whisper. “She’s here.”
She grabbed hold of Bridget’s hand, held it too tight. In all her life, her mother had never leaned on her in such a way.
“Let’s go say hello,” Bridget said, steadying Nora.
“I can’t.”
“Mom, come on.”
The nun didn’t see them coming. They reached her just seconds after Kitty waved Bobby Quinlan over. Uncle Bobby they had always called him, though he was not their uncle but a distant cousin of her father’s, the son of the woman who put them all up when they first came over from Ireland.
“Look who it is, Bobby,” Kitty said. “Theresa Flynn! Do you believe it?”
“My God!” he said. “We haven’t seen you in years.”
He turned and noticed Nora there.
“Nora!” he said. “I didn’t know your sister was coming.”
The nun turned her head now and saw them.
“Nora.” She smiled warmly, with love. Bridget couldn’t help but smile back. The woman’s eyes and mouth were so much like Nora’s, like her own. Why was it a shock to learn that someone related to you resembled you? Of course she would.
Nora didn’t smile. She stared straight into the woman.
Her mother was often appalled by what she saw as lapses in Bridget’s manners. Now Bridget felt a need to apologize on Nora’s behalf. Say something, she thought, attempting to beam the words to her mother’s brain.
“I’m Bridget,” she said finally, extending a hand. “Nora’s daughter. Your niece!”
“Bridget. My goodness, look at you. The last time I saw you, you were just a baby.”
Everyone waited for Nora to speak.
When she didn’t, Bridget went on. “Did you find the place okay? Where are you staying?”
“At the Ramada in Dorchester.”
An absolute shithole, right on the expressway. Bridget looked to her mother, but Nora stayed silent.
The nun looked directly at her. “I just booked the hotel closest to your house,” she said. “I didn’t realize the wake would be all the way out here.”
Nora said coolly, as if it should be obvious, “We don’t live there anymore.”
Bridget had never seen her mother be so rude to anyone, other than the members of their immediate family.
“If you’ll excuse me,” Nora said. “I need to say good-bye to Father Callahan.”
As she walked off, Bridget saw her mother’s hands roll into fists. The nun looked despondent, watching her go.
Bridget tried to imagine these two as children, or young women on the boat to America. Her mother, tough and abrasive and self-assured. The sister, a woman who would go to a convent eventually, probably shy and reserved, scared of Nora. What had happened between them?
Everyone paused, absorbing the awkwardness, then attempting to deflect it.
“So,” Bobby Quinlan said. “Your convent is—where, now? Remind me.”
“Vermont.”
“Did you just come in today?”
“Yes. I took the bus.”
“It was good of you to come,” Bobby said.
“You don’t drive?” Bridget asked, just to have something to say.
“I don’t. Unless you count a tractor.”
The nun grinned. Not shy, then. She had a brightness to her eyes, a youthfulness almost. She was a sturdy woman. Aunt Kitty seemed brittle, as if her wrist might snap off if she let her arm dangle out the window of a moving car. Nora’s body showed its age with a certain sag, as if having completed its work, it would now sink into an armchair and rest until the end. But the nun looked strong. Her face was weathered, tanned like a farmer’s.
“Actually, I can drive,” she said. “But I’ve never gone very far. Just short distances.”
“You don’t go by Theresa anymore,” Bobby said.
“No, it’s Mother Cecilia now.”
“Can I ask you something?” he said.
“Of course.”
“Why do nuns change their names anyway?”
“Well, in my case, Mother Teresa was already taken.”
They all laughed. Her mother’s sister was charming, funny. Totally unlike Nora.
“Where do you live now, Bridget?” she asked.
“I’m in New York.”
“Whereabouts?”
“Brooklyn.”
“I used to teach in Queens.”
Bridget wanted to know when, and whether Nora knew. She had barely gotten her head around the fact of the nun. She hadn’t wondered what she did before the convent. Such a strange unfolding, this day.
“I’m just going to go check on my mother,” she said. “It’s so nice to meet you.”
“So good to see you, Bridget. After all this time.”
She left the woman talking to Aunt Kitty and Bobby Quinlan.
Always, the story had gone like this: Your father was one of six. Your mother had just the one brother. A whole generation had known and said nothing.
Maybe the secret had nothing to do with her, but it cast certain memories in a different light. She considered her father’s inability to tell a story straight. She thought now of their trip to Ireland, a trip Nora never wanted to take. She was melancholy the entire time, even after she went to visit her old friend Oona, the girl she’d been talking about since Bridget was small. My best friend, Nora called her, even though they hadn’t seen each other in decades. Bridget thought her mother’s mood on that trip was down to Charlie being sick. But maybe there was more to it.
Charlie’s brother Peter and his two sons still operated the Rafferty farm at that point. Bridget had heard stories about Peter from her father and uncles. They said he was an irresponsible drunk when he was young. They expected him to run the farm into the ground. Instead, it had thrived in his care.
When they visited, they all had lunch together there, laughing with ease as if they had done it a hundred times. At some point, Peter mentioned something about how Charlie was the one who was meant to stay in Miltown Malbay, the only one in the family who truly loved the farm. But her father breezed past the comment with a joke, and Bridget assumed Peter was kidding. Despite the many times Charlie had said he wanted to return for good, she couldn’t begin to picture him in this life.
In the early evening, Peter said, “Come on. I’ll give you the grand tour.”
The whole group walked the land. Green hills in the distance, and beyond them, the sun setting over the ocean. It was such a breathtaking place. Bridget couldn’t understand how her parents had stayed away for so long.
“The boys will plant these thirty-five acres soon,” Peter said.
“Thirty-five acres?” Charlie said. “But we’ve only got twenty-three.”
Bridget noted that we.
“Not anymore,” Peter said. “We’ve expanded.”
“How?”
“For a while, the Land Commission was giving abandoned property to adjacent farmers, once a certain amount of time passed. Twenty acres went to me and fifteen to the Cullanans on the other side of it.”
Bridget saw her parents comprehend something that she herself didn’t yet understand.
“My family’s land,” Nora said.
“It was just going to waste, Nora.”
“What about the house?”
“Nothing’s happened to it. It’s still there, and in the Flynn name. Go on over and have a look.”
Nora’s people were all gone. Her only brother died in his forties. Ever since, the house stood empty.
They went inside, the front door ajar, everything coated in a veil of black dirt. There were dishes still in the sink, a calendar on the wall—April 1979. On the kitchen windowsill sat forgotten teacups, a package of cigarettes, an ashtray, and a yellowing photograph of Nora and Charlie and their children. The top half was bleached white from the sun, but Bridget recognized it as having been taken on an Easter Sunday from the shoes she was wearing and the new suede bucks on the boys.
Throughout the house, paint curled off the walls. In the living room, letters and bills were heaped in the fireplace. By a recliner sat a pair of boots with metal horseshoes nailed into their heels.
“To make them last longer,” Charlie said.
A picture of the Sacred Heart hung in the entryway, similar to the one their mother had in the kitchen back home.
Down a short hall, in a downstairs room with bright blue walls and twin beds, chunks of the ceiling had fallen to the floor.
Bridget followed her mother in.
“Was this your room?”
Nora nodded. She bit her lower lip.
“Unbelievable,” she said. “He took my family’s land and he couldn’t even be bothered to come over here and look in on our house.”
Saints for All Occasions Page 31