I nod.
“Even though you weren’t romantically involved? Even though, according to everything you’ve just told us, there was absolutely nothing at stake for him—or for you—to make such an admission?” The district attorney is a tall man with a squarish face and large, wide hands. When he talks, he thrusts both of them forward, as if such movements are necessary to get the words out.
I look down at the surface of the table, study the swirled patterns of maple and caramel beneath the glass veneer.
“He left a note, you know.”
I look up.
“Well, not a note exactly,” the DA says. “More of a . . . I don’t know what you would call it, really. One of our men found it inside the organ, where he managed to get himself inside as our men were coming up.” He watches me carefully while sliding a torn piece of paper across the table. “Doesn’t mean anything to us right now, but maybe it might ring a bell for you?”
Everything still feels foggy; the note itself looks like a raft of some kind, afloat in a body of very dark water. I can see the faint marks of words printed inside, the swoop and scrawl of ink. I reach for it with trembling hands, open it slowly. There in shaky script are James’s last words:
Fact #346: The heart will continue to beat even when separated from the body as long as it has an adequate supply of oxygen.
I read the words once quickly, and then again, more slowly. Something in my chest fills like water. Had he heard noises? Voices? The slow ascent of footsteps on that terrible, circular staircase? Had he known he wouldn’t make it out of there alive and, in his last moments, reached for a piece of paper, a pen? Where had he found a pen? Had I brought him one? Or had he seen one in my bag, slid it out while I wasn’t looking? Oh, James.
James, James, James.
I close my eyes, thankful to be sitting. If I was on my feet, my legs would give out from under me. When had he found this particular fact? How had he known exactly the right moment to use it? And what does it mean when someone you love knows more about you than you do?
“Miss Connolly?” The district attorney clears his throat. “Does it mean anything?”
I shake my head.
The two men exchange a look. “How about this, then? Do you have any idea why James Rittenhouse beat that man in the bar?”
“Does it really matter now?” I run a fingertip over the word “Fact.” The ink is smeared along the capital F, blurring the top line. “He’s dead.”
Another glance exchanges between the two men. “We’d still like to know what he told you.” The district attorney runs his fingers over the point of his chin.
I end up telling them the story about James’s family. I tell them how awful James’s father was to him growing up, how James read the fact book at his father’s bedside for two years, waiting for the man to extend a single shred of humanity to him before he died. And I tell them how James went on a bender afterward, how he got drunk and ended up in a fight with a mouthy guy who insulted him. “It was just a perfect storm,” I hear myself finishing. “All those things coming together at the same time . . .” I shrug, my shoulders like anvils. “He just went a little crazy, I guess.”
The district attorney looks at the tape recorder guy again. He sighs deeply, loosening a button on his suit jacket. “Well, then, I guess that’s about all we need from you right now.”
I stare down at James’s note, watch as the letters swirl before my eyes. “Are you going to press charges against me?”
“The fact that this guy is dead doesn’t negate your actions.” The district attorney rubs an eyebrow. He has a map of red veins threaded across the top of his nose, a few gray hairs in his eyebrows. “Do you realize that what you’ve done is a felony?”
I nod without looking at him.
“Our police force wasted innumerable hours over these past three days because of the assistance you provided to James Rittenhouse. I had people working overtime—double, triple shifts—to get this guy behind bars. Do you know how much money it costs to keep a system going during a crisis like that? Do you have any idea?”
The y in the word “oxygen” is long and narrow; the g has a little dip at the top of it, like a lopsided apple. I’d never seen his handwriting before; nothing we’d ever shared had been written. Now it seems like something miraculous, a singular trait all its own, just like one of his factoids, a small perfect thing, right there on the page.
The district attorney is waiting for me to answer. I look up, shake my head again.
“A lot,” he says. “It costs a lot of money, young lady, and a lot of manpower.”
“So you are going to press charges, then?”
“We still haven’t decided. But I’ll tell you what.” He stops here, lifts a thick finger to point at me. “The fact that you’re already on probation isn’t going to do you any favors.”
I swallow, look back down at the note.
All I see this time is the word “heart.”
Chapter 37
If there is ever a time to be thankful that Angus can’t read yet, it’s now. The two local newspapers continue to run a front page piece about James and me for the next week. It’s sordid stuff, too, with the kind of gossipy headlines people love. “Escaped Con Assisted by Woman,” and “Church a Hideout for Former Lovers?” Awful stuff that makes me scowl and Ma cringe. The TV people are all over the place, too. Or at least they try to be. Someone got a shot of me as I was walking into the probation office, but Ma and I haven’t been outside since, especially since they started parking across the street from our house. Neither of us has been back to work yet, and Angus hasn’t gone to preschool. When he asked me why, I told him he just didn’t have to, that we all just needed a little break. “Okay,” he said, looking around the room. “You wanna play Connect Four?”
The district attorney decided to go ahead and press charges after all. Now I will be facing two charges when I stand in front of the judge again: violating my original parole by being in possession of illegal drugs (whether or not they can prove I stole them) and harboring a fugitive. According to Mrs. Ross, there is no telling what is going to happen at the hearing. Each count will be charged separately, dealt with according to its own set of circumstances. The worst possible scenario will be an extended jail sentence; I could get six months just for violating my parole, thirty days for the Vicodin, and then two or more years on top of that for helping James. The best-case scenario would involve having my probation revoked and getting resentenced only according to the crimes I have committed. It would mean probation for a long time, maybe even house arrest, but at least I wouldn’t go to jail. I wouldn’t be taken away from Angus. I can deal with losing the house on the lake. I can come to terms with the fact that Angus will have to go a little while longer without a tire swing. I just can’t lose him. No matter what.
It’s a limbo period, this part of things, a hell all its own as we wait for the press to leave and, more importantly, for word from Mrs. Ross, who will call to let me know when my appearance in court will be. But then, my whole life up to this point has been a limbo period, hasn’t it? Waiting and waiting, and waiting some more. For what, I don’t even know anymore. All I do know is that it hasn’t worked. I’m tired of it. It’s time to try something else.
Ma and I barely speak at all, if we even look at one another, and I stay in my room most of the day anyway, playing board games with Angus. Ma’s been making coconut cookies, which are Father Delaney’s favorite, and which she will probably bring over to him in person when all of this dies down as some kind of humble peace offering. She’s called all her clients and told them she’ll be back next week, which I know has been humiliating for her, but I think the thing that pains her the most is not being able to go to Mass every morning. Saint Augustine’s is still shut down because of the investigation and no one knows when it will reopen. I snatch sightings of her moving from room to room, clutching her rosary, mumbling the words under her breath, but I know it’s not the same thing. It
’s not Father Delaney and her morning novena crew. It’s not the Holy Eucharist.
Missing James is the hardest of all. Now that the shock has worn off, it hurts to breathe. When his face flits across my mind’s eye, I have to press my knuckles against my lips so that the sound behind them doesn’t escape, and I cry so many times during our fourth game of Candy Land that Angus finally closes the board and crawls into my lap. Holding him is the only thing that eases some of the ache; feeling his warmth against me is like a salve.
Nights, though, are the worst. I lay in bed and replay the time in the loft—every minute, every second—until I have to get up, and flick on the lights so that I don’t start screaming. Sometimes I go into the bathroom, undress, and then sit under the shower, letting the hot water pummel my skin, leak into my ears. It’s the only thing that will stop the shaking, the only thing that will drown out my cries. Sleep comes, but only in spurts, and when I wake up again, it is James I think about first, the memory like a sledgehammer coming out of the darkness and smashing me to pieces all over again.
WHEN THE PHONE rings on Friday morning, exactly one week after James has died, Ma and I lunge for it at the same time. We are in the kitchen, silently preparing our separate breakfasts: coffee and half a grapefruit for her, peanut butter toast and orange juice for me. She gets to the phone first and drops her eyes as she presses it to her ear. “Oh, hello, Mrs. Ross. Yes, she’s right here.”
I grab the phone. “Hello?”
“Hi, hon,” Mrs. Ross says. “I have some good news.”
A heart flip-flop. “What?”
“I went to talk to Jane Livingston yesterday. And she told me she wanted to drop the theft charges against you.”
“Oh my God, really?” Pause. “Do you know why?”
“Apparently, her husband was the real motivator behind the charges, not her. She said he pushed her into doing all of it.”
“Wow. And she . . . she knows about James and everything?”
“Yeah,” Mrs. Ross says. “She does. So that’s really good news, Bird. We’ll be able to put that on the record, and tell the judge when we go for your sentencing hearing. He’ll take that into consideration when it comes to deciding everything else.”
“Okay. All right. Well, thanks.”
“You doing okay?” Mrs. Ross asks. “Hanging in there?”
“Um, yeah.”
“Back to work yet?”
“Monday.”
“Okay. Hang tight, hon. I should be getting a hearing date any day now. I’ll call you as soon as I do.”
Ma’s waiting for me by the counter when I hang up, sipping cautiously from her coffee.
“Jane dropped the Vicodin charges,” I say.
She raises one eyebrow, presses her fingertips against the mug until they turn white. “Why?”
“She told Mrs. Ross her husband kind of forced her into it.” I shrug. “I guess it wasn’t something she wanted to do herself.”
“Really.” It’s a statement, not a question.
“Yes, Ma. Really.”
She shrugs, looks down into her mug.
“It’s a good thing, Ma. Mrs. Ross said that they’ll tell the judge at my sentencing hearing, and that it might help him take things into consideration.”
She nods, runs her thumb along the curve of the handle.
“Do you want me to go to jail?”
“Of course not, Bernadette. And don’t shout, please.”
I shove my hands inside my pockets, as if that might somehow prevent the rage from rising inside of me. “Then why’re you acting like you’re disappointed that Jane’s not going to press charges against me?”
She looks up. “I just want you to take responsibility for what you’ve done.”
“Oh, Ma,” I groan, letting my head fall back between my shoulders. “Come on. I’m not standing in front of the pearly gates here. It’s not heaven or hell, okay? Besides, don’t you think I’m trying?”
“I don’t know what you’re doing anymore. I really, honestly don’t. Has it even occurred to you to pick up the phone and call Father Delaney?”
“Father Delaney? What would I call him for? Guidance?”
“For what you did to his church!” Ma bellows. “Desecrating it like that!”
“Desecrating it? How did I—”
“You vandalized a holy place, Bird! Letting that . . . that . . . person stay up there. Harboring evil like that. Changing his underwear!”
“Oh, Ma.” I drop my eyes, shake my head. “He wasn’t just a person.” I start to tell her and then pull back again. What good will it do?
“Don’t you ‘oh, Ma’ me.”
“Just stop it.” I push by her. “Leave it alone, for God’s sake. Let me go.”
“I let you go a long time ago, Bernadette.” Her voice has that steely quality to it. “You’re the one who’s still hanging around, if you hadn’t noticed.”
I stop in my tracks. Catch my breath in the back of my throat. That one stings. Deeply. But I toss my head, inhale through my nose. “Does that mean you’re finally giving up on the whole Monica and Augustine routine, then?”
Ma looks mortally wounded. “It was never a routine, Bernadette,” she says. “Not once.”
LATER THAT NIGHT, after Ma has fallen asleep, I head upstairs to the attic. It’s the farthest I can get away from everything, since I’m not allowed to leave the house, and the only room that doesn’t smell like Ma’s coconut cookies. The rafters overhead are splintering with age; the scent of mildew and cedar hovers lightly in the background. I sit for a long time next to Dad’s box of clothes, but I don’t open it. Behind it is a stack of old Easter baskets, a few leftover tufts of plastic grass. When I was little, Ma used to fill my Easter basket until it overflowed—solid chocolate bunnies, pink-and-yellow marshmallow chicks, piles of jelly beans, and peanut butter eggs. She did it after Dad died, too, at least for another year or two. One year, when I was sixteen and had started smoking pot pretty regularly, she tucked in a gigantic bag of ranch-flavored Doritos, which, she said, I’d started eating “like a crazy person.”
A few feet past the Easter stuff is another box, a smaller one, the top taped shut. I glance over at it, and then look again as Ma’s writing jumps out at me: BERNADETTE—SCHOOL. I pull the box out, peel the tape off impatiently. My Wonder Woman lunch box with the pink handle is on top. Ma bought it for me at the beginning of third grade, back when I loved Wonder Woman more than anything. It still has the dent on the left side from the time I cracked it over Donna Lewis’s head after she called me a beast. Wonder Woman’s boots are scuffed at the toes, her lasso nearly rubbed off completely, but she still looks as invincible as she looked back then.
Beneath the lunch box is a stack of papers—some thick, some thin, a few lined, mostly unlined. The majority of them are drawings I did at one time—several boats floating on small, cresting waves, brightly colored fish weaving in and out of finger-shaped pieces of seaweed, even a pirate ship, complete with a skull and crossbones flag, a gigantic cannon on deck. All of the pictures have my name at the bottom, written in my large, scrawling handwriting: BIRDIE CONNOLLY. I haven’t been Birdie Connolly in forever, I think, running my fingers over the letters. That’s what Dad used to call me, when I was first born. He said I’d had eyes like an owl’s, a voice like a song. Little Birdie. She is someone I will never be again.
Under the drawings is another piece of paper, this one worn around the edges, a faint circular stain in one corner. It’s written again in my handwriting, titled My Family, Birdie Connolly, Grade 2-B:
My family is the best. My dad goes to work. He plays hide-and-seek with me when he comes home. My ma makes me peanut butter pancakes. She loves me, even if I do gross things. Like pick my nose. My family is special. My family is the best!
The words unravel me completely. Who was this little girl who used to be so confident, who used to believe in something bigger than herself? Who used to believe at all? What was it that James had said that
night in the choir loft: Wouldn’t it be better to believe in something than to go through your life not believing at all? Well, I had believed. Back then, I had. I’d believed in my family, the circle the three of us made. I’d believed in the love in the middle. Had it made me any happier? Had it made any difference?
I cry harder, already knowing the answer.
Maybe all those days James spent next to his father’s bed, believing that something might happen, was what made them bearable. Maybe it gave him something to live for the next day, kept him coming back. Could it really be that despite all our differences and bickering and downright loathing for one another Ma and I have managed to forge ahead simply because we still believe in what we used to have? Was Mrs. Ross right? Have I needed Ma so much—still, after all this time—that I have unconsciously thwarted every outward effort of mine to leave?
And if so, what does that make me? A child, still?
Or perhaps only this: a woman in constant conflict, pushing and pulling at the same time, trying with all her strength to someday burn bright as a star?
Chapter 38
Jane calls the next day, completely out of the blue. It’s Saturday morning around ten. Thankfully, since Ma is in the bathroom, I get to the phone first this time, and then nearly drop it when I realize who it is.
“Bird?” She says my name cautiously, as if it might pop like a balloon. “It’s Jane. Jane Livingston?”
My face flushes hot at the sound of her voice, humiliated and horrified at the same time. “Yeah. Hi.”
“Listen, I was wondering if you would have time to meet with me . . . maybe for some coffee? Or tea?”
“Today?”
“Well, yes. I was thinking maybe in an hour or so?”
I pull one of the curtains back and lean in, looking down the street both ways. No news cars in sight.
“There are some things I was hoping we could talk about,” Jane says quickly, as if sensing my hesitation. “And maybe clear up.”
The Odds of You and Me Page 29