Small Mercies: A Novel

by Eddie Joyce

  “Not really. He’s helping Bobby get a scholarship. That man at the game was an assistant coach, he thinks Bobby could play at Sacred Heart in Connecticut.”

  Tina laughed.

  “Bobby’s not going to Sacred Heart,” she said, with a sarcastic certainty out of step with her usual politeness. She looked out the passenger window, her face turned away from Gail.

  “Well, there are other schools interested as well. Mr. McGinty”—she nearly called him Danny—“says he could get a scholarship to a number of Division Two schools, maybe even a low-end Division One school.”

  Tina laughed again.

  “Bobby won’t go away to school. No way.”

  “How do you know?” Gail asked, a little annoyed at Tina’s presumptuousness.

  “He’ll never leave Staten Island. He loves it here. All he cares about is the Staten Island tournament. That’s why he wasn’t that upset today.”

  The car behind them honked. Gail pulled up in line. She didn’t need this. She didn’t need traffic. Or a chat about Bobby. She needed a straight line. No distractions. She needed not to lose momentum. Of all the fucking nights.

  “What do you mean?”

  “All Bobby wants is to become a fireman, like his dad. Be a firefighter, live on Staten Island, coach CYO.”

  She’d managed to banish Michael from her thoughts. She opened her eyes wide, tried to suck all the moisture of out her eyeballs.

  I will not cry. Gail will not cry. She will sleep with Danny. Gail will sleep with Danny.

  “He’ll go to CSI, play on the team there, join the FDNY as soon as he can.” She laughed again, nervous to be playing the expert. “That’s what he tells me, anyway.”

  Gail cracked the window to pay the toll. Cold air spilled into the car, stinging her eyes. She rolled the window up and, with her thumbs, pushed the tears into the tight flesh beneath her eyes. She laughed to disguise her agitation.

  “You may be right, Tina. What do I know? I’m only his mom.”

  Tina flushed with embarrassment.

  “No, Mrs. Amendola, I didn’t mean that.”

  Gail turned to her. Tears meandered down her cheeks. She saw Tina’s embarrassment turn to confusion.

  “Are you okay, Mrs. A?”

  “I’m fine. Please call me Gail.”

  Behind them, a few horns honked.

  “Jesus, all right, take it easy!” Gail yelled, startling Tina. She pressed down on the gas and the car raced forward. She glanced at Tina.

  “Anyway, Mr. McGinty is only trying to help.”

  A long pause. When Tina spoke, her voice had returned to the peppy, polite tone Gail was accustomed to.

  “I’m sure you’re right. I think he helped Jack Kelly get onto the SUNY-Potsdam team last year.”

  The name sounded vaguely familiar.

  “Jack Kelly?”

  “He was on the team last year. Blond hair. Kinda short,” Tina offered.

  Gail remembered him now. Scrawny thing, never saw the floor. He barely played in high school. How could Danny have helped him get onto a college team?

  Then she remembered the laugh.

  The year before, during one of the games, someone had been laughing like a loon in the stands behind her and Michael. An obscenely loud laugh, sounded fake. She’d glanced over her shoulder and saw where the laughs were coming from: Jack Kelly’s mother, Terri, a recent divorcée with bottle-blond hair, wearing skintight, leopard-print leggings. She’d forgotten, but someone was sitting beside Teresa, whispering crisp, mint-scented jokes in her ear.

  The cause of the high-pitched cackles. A helper of boys, companion to their lonely mothers.

  Danny.

  * * *

  When Gail gets home, Michael is in the living room. Not the Michael she didn’t speak to for six months. Not the Michael she nearly cheated on. Not the Michael who wanted to bartend.

  No.

  This Michael served his penance: he attended Bobby’s last few high school basketball games after Gail threatened to divorce him if he didn’t. This Michael went to his father to claim his inheritance only to find it was too late, that Enzo had already sold the business to the other Enzo. This Michael watched that other Enzo turn one store into four and make a small fortune with his father’s business. This Michael is humble and heartbroken and watching basketball with a glum, disinterested look on his face.

  “Hey, back from the Leaf?”

  “Yeah, I think maybe I’m spending too much time at that place.”

  “You don’t say.”

  She laughs. He giggles. He’s a little tipsy.

  “Franky called.”

  “I assume you didn’t tell him.”

  Michael’s smile slackens into a frown.

  “No, I didn’t. I was thinking, Gail. Maybe we should just ask him not to come. None of us needs a scene.”

  “He’s little Bobby’s godfather, Michael.”

  “I know, but maybe it’s better if he’s not here.”

  Gail lifts a finger, starts chewing on a nail. “You gonna call him back?” he asks.

  “Tomorrow. I’m too tired tonight.”

  She holds up the bag to change the subject.

  “You hungry?”

  “Actually, yeah.”

  She tosses the bag to him.

  “Half a hero left. Chicken cutlet.”

  He doesn’t ask where it’s from. He doesn’t have to. This is part of his penance too; he has to spend the rest of his life eating sandwiches from a store he could have owned.

  She fetches a plate from the kitchen, hands it to him, sits down next to him on the couch. She puts her head on his shoulder, pulls an afghan over her legs. He eats the sandwich with his right hand, puts his left on her back.

  “Who’s playing?” she asks.

  “I don’t even know,” he says, between bites.

  * * *

  He took her to Ireland the fall after Bobby’s senior year. They hit the tourist spots in the west: the Cliffs of Moher, the Lakes of Killarney, the Burren. In Galway, Gail bought each of her boys a cable-knit fisherman’s sweater. Outside of Cork, they leaned over and kissed the Blarney Stone, even though someone told them that the locals liked to piss on it. They enjoyed the people, enjoyed the pints. Michael said it was the most beautiful place he’d ever seen.

  For years, friends had told her that Ireland felt like home even if your family had left two centuries ago. And she always thought it was nonsense, a bit of nostalgia and a lot of advertising, but when she was actually there, with the misty rain and the stereotypical shades of green and the beyond-friendly people, she did feel something. Not that it was home. She knew where home was. More like some small part of her still belonged there, and that part’s joy at its long-overdue homecoming was as pure and clean as anything she’d ever felt.

  They stayed a few extra days so they could drive up to Donegal, see the nowhere town where Gail’s great grandparents had emigrated from. They spent a night in a harbor town named Killybegs, got drunk with some locals, staggered back to their B and B in the wee hours of the morning, laughing.

  When they got into bed, Gail listened as Michael’s giggles eased down into heavy breathing. He lay there, not sleeping, building up his courage. She knew what he would ask. Seven months had passed since she’d bitten Danny McGinty’s lip behind a bleacher in Brooklyn. Things had mended but not completely. Every moment between them since had held the absence of an answer to the question he couldn’t bear to ask. She wasn’t even sure how he knew about Danny, but he did. He coughed.

  “Gail,” he said. She listened as the sound of her name died down. The room returned to silence. He couldn’t bring himself to ask. She answered anyway.

  “No,” she said. “Almost, but no.”

  They lay there for a moment, in the moist, cool air
, an ocean away from their lives, and then Michael started to sob. He turned to her and cried on her stomach. He begged for her forgiveness and though she had largely forgiven him already, she forgave him again, completely this time. She forgave herself too for what had happened and what almost happened. She forgave the both of them, turned the page on the shop, Danny McGinty, the whole thing.

  * * *

  She didn’t know. Apologies were pointless, forgiveness unnecessary. Soon enough, absolution would be plentiful, incomplete, haunting, useless.

  All would be forgiven in the shadow of the atrocity that loomed.

  Chapter 8

  THROUGH THE MIRROR

  In the wincing half moment between awake and asleep, Franky Amendola’s mind is pure, unified by interlaced desires: he wishes that he were dead and his brother alive. This will be the best moment of his day, because in this moment, he knows he would do it. He would sacrifice his life for Bobby’s. In a heartbeat. Without hesitation. No questions asked. He has no doubt, no misgivings or second thoughts. He would do it. Were it that simple, he would do it.

  And then, with merciless alacrity, he is reminded of the impossibility of the proposed exchange: his own death would not restore his brother. He controls only one half of the equation. Knowing that his own death would be useless removes most of death’s allure, and the thought of his mother standing over a grave removes nearly all of the rest. But the tiniest sliver of suicidal impulse lingers, impaling itself into some dark corner of his consciousness, a splinter he cannot remove.

  He is awake now, shaking off the dewy futility of a well-crafted and oft-visited fantasy and confronting a multitude of unfortunate realities, each stemming from one central, indisputable fact: he is severely hung over. He pissed himself in the night, soaking the jeans he fell asleep in, as well as the sheets and the bed; the room smells like the bathroom at a brewery. His head is a tender piece of meat that an angry ironworker spent the night driving a stake into. The skin on his face feels too tight for his skull, as though a tiny, ill-tempered goblin were pulling on his ears in an attempt to have them meet in the back of his head. He suspects that while he was sleeping, someone lodged razors at various points in his throat. His stomach, perhaps sensing the discontentments of its brethren, is mercifully quiet.

  But complaints are on the way.

  He coaxes his torso into an upright position. He coughs into his hand and wipes it on an unsoiled portion of the sheets. He reaches over and cracks the window. On the windowsill, his personal effects are arranged in a neat little row: his keys, his cell phone, his wallet, an untidy wad of mixed bills, a pack of Marlboros. He must have emptied his pockets before passing out.

  He can’t remember how he got home last night; a vague but unrelenting anxiety makes him think he would probably regret some of his actions if he could remember them. He tries to isolate his last clear memory. He was at Kelly’s with Denny Hogan and Tommy Acevo, watching one of the tournament games, Marquette versus Purdue. He was feeling good, not too hammered, when Hogan started with the shots. The game was at halftime. He got off his stool to walk to the bathroom. Hogan was in the bathroom too. They were laughing about something. In a good mood.

  And then, nothing. A little slice of death. A dip in the black river.

  “Fuck,” he says to an empty room. He remembers that Purdue was getting four and a half. They were winning at halftime. That’s what they were laughing about. But he can’t remember how the game ended. He picks up his cell phone tentatively, checks his dialed calls. Fuck. Lot of calls to one number and he doesn’t remember making all of them. He dials it again.

  “Sports,” says the Hispanic female voice on the other end.

  “TR three, three, three.”

  “Password?”

  “FA.”

  “How can I help you, FA?”

  “Balance?”

  “FA, your figure is minus six hundred ninety.”

  “Six ninety?” he says, incredulous.

  “Yes. Anything else, FA?”

  “No.”

  “No action on this call. Thanks, FA.”

  Fuck. He was up six hundred after Thursday and flat yesterday after the afternoon games. Now he’s seven hundred in the fucking hole and he can’t even remember how he got there. He closes his eyes, slides down to a lying position. He wishes a gorgeous, big-titted nurse would come into his room, give him a few Vicodin, wrap him in clean, nice-smelling sheets, put him to bed on a sea of pillows, and then suck him off while he drifted back into oblivion.

  He waits a few pained beats and when it’s apparent that no nurse is on the way, he rouses himself and staggers to the bathroom. He takes a long piss—how could his bladder still be holding this much?—and throws back a handful of Advil with some tap water. He looks at himself in the stained mirror above the sink. His eyelids are puffy, his eyes tiny slits of bruised gray. He looks like something that has been dragged from the sea and left to rot on the beach.

  He retreats to his bedroom, slides his piss-soaked jeans and underwear onto the floor, takes an unsoiled pillow from his bed, picks an afghan off the floor of the living room, and lies down on his couch, which isn’t terribly comfortable but is dry.

  He doesn’t want the buxom nurse anymore. He wants to be lying next to Tina, like he did one night, eight years ago, in what Franky assumed was a prelude to something but which never went anywhere. She needed a night out, that was all, and who better for a night out than Franky? They went to Denino’s for a pie, had a few pitchers of beer at the bar afterward. They ended up back here, half trashed, giggling. He put her on the couch and she asked him to lie with her and he slid in behind her, a platonic cuddle. She was tiny, the littlest thing, and his body nearly engulfed her.

  When they woke, his standard morning erection was full and flush against her rear and his right hand was touching her breast and he kissed her neck softly because why shouldn’t that be the way, why shouldn’t he step in for his brother? Isn’t that what they used to do, back when? But she said, “No, Franky, no.”

  And then she stood and was gone before another word was spoken and it was never discussed again. She had asked him to lie with her, not the other way around, but it didn’t matter because he felt awful, worse even than usual. Tina had always liked him and he’d fucked that up too, like everything else he’d fucked up, and he knew then that they would never end up lying on his couch together again. Which is all he wants now. To lie on the couch with Tina and shroud her with his body.

  He can’t have the things he wants so he’ll take sleep instead. A few hours of it, to escape this brutal stitch of sobriety.

  * * *

  When Franky wakes up a few hours later, he feels better. His head is still throbbing but less insistently, as though the ironworker has wrapped his head in layers of soft cloth to make up for the all-night spiking. The tiny goblin has abandoned his efforts to relocate Franky’s ears; only the corners of his eyes feel stretched. And most important, the funereal thoughts of his first waking have downshifted to the usual, post-binge blues.

  He sits up on the couch and yawns.

  He doesn’t understand why he tortures himself by reliving that one stupid night with Tina every time he wakes up lonely and hung over. He woke up with a hard-on. It happens. But nothing happened. That’s the important thing. He’s not a scumbag. He doesn’t even think about Tina in that way the vast majority of the time. She’s great, she’s like a sister, and yeah, if pushed to an answer on the crucial question, that answer would be yes. But that doesn’t mean anything. She’s got a trim, tight ass and cute face and perky tits. Bobby had good taste, can’t fault him for that, but you can’t fault Franky for noticing either.

  He shouldn’t be thinking about this, about Tina’s ass or tits. He shouldn’t be thinking about Tina in that way at all. He’s just so goddamn horny, he can’t help it. His thoughts are like this sometimes after a big night
and he’s had a few big nights in a row. He needs to clear his head.

  There’s only one way. Rub one out. Clean the pipes, cleanse the system. Then shit, shower, and shave. Then get some food into his stomach. He goes into the bedroom to get the moisturizer and returns to the couch. His stomach rumbles as he lies down. Maybe he should eat first? That’s the problem with a hangover: it leaves several body parts in need of immediate attention but renders the head useless in deciding which should be first.

  He squeezes some of the white lotion onto his right hand and brings it down to his flaccid penis. He closes his eyes and starts stroking. He fiddles around for a bit, hoping the physical stimulation will spark something in his head, but he can’t think of anything; the constant availability of free porn on the Internet has destroyed his once vivid erotic imagination.

  Is there literally no one in his present life who he can envision fucking in some semiplausible manner? He looks down at his unresponsive penis, its drooping head quivering slightly as if to say yes.

  Christ, he thinks, this is beyond pathetic.

  He reaches into his memory bank for something reliable, a fully conceived scenario already cooked up and ready to go. The Amy Landini bikini fantasy.

  He goes to visit Joe, but Joe isn’t home and neither are his parents. Amy’s like seventeen and he’s fourteen. She invites him in and gives him a glass of lemonade. She’s just broken up with her boyfriend. They’re sitting on her couch, the plaid one in the basement. Her black hair is pulled back in a ponytail. He’s wearing swimming trunks and she’s wearing a pink and black bikini, the top of which can barely contain her enormous tits. An erection starts tenting his trunks.

  The well-worn fantasy produces the desired effect. His penis thickens and elongates, but the hangover prevents him from reaching a satisfactory stiffness; all he can muster is a droopy facsimile of a proper hard-on. He increases the pace of his strokes but to little effect; he remains stuck at half-mast.

  He gets off the couch and walks into the bathroom, bringing the lotion. He splashes some cold water on his face.