by Jodi Compton
The oldest Hennessy did nothing that troubled me; he also did nothing that particularly reassured me. He was unusually quiet for a teenage boy of his size; I rarely heard him enter a room, or leave it. He sneaked cigarettes sometimes behind the freestanding garage; other times I’d see him smoking under the magnolia tree. Once or twice I saw him looking at me, but what he was thinking, I couldn’t tell. The second time I said, “What?” but he merely shook his head and said, “Nothing.”
On the job, my week was equally uneventful. The stocking-mask bandits knocked over their fourth business, this time a liquor store in St. Paul. I didn’t have to do any investigating, but I got a heads-up call from a St. Paul detective, and I faxed my notes on the prior cases over to him.
Saturday dawned hot, and was expected to break temperature records. I slept until we were well into the heat, when there was a knock at the door and Marlinchen stuck her head in.
“Are you hungry?” she said. “We’re making waffles downstairs,” she said.
“I could eat,” I said.
Marlinchen nodded. “I wanted to ask you for a favor, later in the day.”
I rolled onto my side. “You want to ask later, or the favor is for later?” I asked.
“Dad’s getting a lot better,” she said, ignoring my teasing, “and I wanted to take everyone to see him. In the hospital.”
“Everyone?” I said. “You guys won’t all fit in my car.”
“I know,” Marlinchen said, “but there’s Dad’s ride.”
The Suburban in the garage. I shook my head. “No,” I said. “I shouldn’t be driving your father’s SUV.”
“It’ll be okay,” she said. “It’s insured through the end of August.”
“Well, if it’s insured,” I said.
Marlinchen, missing the sarcasm, seemed happy. She came to sit on the end of the bed.
“It probably needs to be started up anyway,” I said, “or pretty soon you won’t be able to.” I thought of Cicero, the van he told me about that he sent the neighbor boys down to start up, and that thought led to another. “Hey,” I said, “what’s the story with the BMW out in the detached garage?”
“Oh, that,” she said. “It was Mom and Dad’s a long time ago. It stopped running, and Dad put it away. He said he was going to fix it up someday, but he never did. I guess it has sentimental value. He absolutely will not sell it.”
“He was going to fix it up?” I said. “I thought your father was worthless with tools.”
Marlinchen looked rueful. “He is,” she said. “But you know guys and their cars. It’s a love thing.” She extended a hand to me. “Anyway, get up, lazybones. The guys are downstairs burning all the waffles.”
I let her pull me up. “Tell you what,” I said. “I’ll go to the hospital, but you can do the driving honors. You need to keep practicing.”
Typically, she hedged. “I don’t know,” she said. “I’ve never driven the Suburban before.”
“You’d never driven my Nova before, either,” I pointed out. “There’s a first time for everything.”
***
“He’s made a lot of progress in his physical therapy. Speech, not as much.”
Freddy, the serene male nurse I remembered from my first visit to the convalescent hospital, was leading us back to a visiting room in the rehab facility.
“He can hear you fine, so don’t talk too loud. But it’s best if you keep your statements open-ended and don’t ask him any questions he’d feel obligated to try to answer. We’re keeping the pressure off.”
The visiting room was pleasantly crowded with green plants and lit by wide glass windows. Near them, in a padded rocking chair with a quad cane at his side, was Hugh Hennessy.
Only Marlinchen seemed truly comfortable in this environment. She entered first, the rest of us following her. Freddy pulled up a chair by Hugh’s rocker; Marlinchen stood on its other side. Colm, Liam, and Donal took a nearby couch, and Aidan and I stood, just beside the couch.
Moments earlier, in the parking lot of the hospital, the twins had shared a quick, quiet conversation.
“You can stay out here,” Marlinchen had told Aidan. She was holding a potted ivy grown along a frame in the shape of a heart; we’d stopped for it on the way over. “Everyone will understand.”
The same thing had occurred to me; I’d thought it odd that the son who called his father Hugh was intent on accompanying his sister and brothers on this charitable visit.
“It’s okay,” Aidan said. “I’ll go in.”
“Are you sure?” Marlinchen said, wanting, as always, to avoid unpleasantness of any kind.
“I’m not afraid to see him, Linch,” Aidan said, and the note of iron did a lot to explain his determination to be here, not to shy away from the man who’d exiled him years ago.
“That’s not what I meant,” she’d said, looking down, sunlight flashing off one of her earrings. But they’d discussed it no further.
“Hi, Dad,” Marlinchen said now, brightly. “We’re all here. It’s not just a visit, it’s an invasion.”
Hugh, in his rocker, looked improved from the last time I’d seen him. His color was better, as was his posture. Marlinchen set the ivy at his side, and leaned over. “Can you give me a kiss?”
Hugh leaned close to her, one hand steadying himself on the arm of the rocker, and obeyed. The doctors were right; he did understand what those around him were saying.
But he didn’t, or couldn’t, speak. Marlinchen carried the conversation, with Colm and Liam adding their comments sporadically. Hugh was clearly listening, but his voice came out as an unsteady rumble, or telegramlike half sentences that didn’t make immediate sense. He seemed to understand he wasn’t making sense, either, embarrassment lighting his blue eyes.
Something else: Hugh seemed focused only on Marlinchen and the three boys on the couch. After about five minutes, Freddy leaned over to speak to him. “Mr. Hennessy, remember what we’ve been talking about, turning your head to scan the whole room?”
He was coaching his patient to compensate for the neglect, the tendency of some stroke patients to ignore stimuli from the side affected by the stroke. Hugh did as instructed. He turned his head, looking past the boys on the couch, and stopped. For the first time, he saw Aidan. A muscle jumped under his left eye. There was nothing impaired about his vision or his memory.
Marlinchen’s smile became even more set. She seemed to realize what had happened, but said nothing to acknowledge Aidan’s presence.
“I’ve been saving The New York Review of Books for you,” she told her father. “I didn’t throw any of them out. I’ll read the better articles to you.”
Hugh’s attention had not shifted. The muscles of his face were working, and a small bubble of saliva had appeared at the corner of his mouth. The sound he was making took shape. “What is,” he said. “What is. What is she. She is…”
Marlinchen shot me a nervous glance. “Oh,” she said. “Dad, this is Sarah Pribek. A friend of ours.”
But Hugh clearly wasn’t looking at me. He was staring at Aidan, and I remembered what Marlinchen said, that Hugh was confusing his pronouns. Hugh didn’t mean to say she; he meant he. Hugh’s blue eyes were narrow, and trained on his oldest son.
Beside me, Aidan shifted on his feet. “Maybe I should take a little walk,” he said.
Marlinchen, forced to acknowledge what was happening, looked pained. “I don’t know,” she said.
On the couch, Colm seemed to have recused himself psychologically from the situation, examining a small callus on one of his weightlifter’s hands. Liam looked from his father to his sister. His eyes were intent, but he said nothing.
I took the decision from Marlinchen’s hands. “Yeah, that might be a good idea,” I said. It was probably best that Hugh didn’t have another stroke at the sight of his long-lost son.
Aidan slipped from the visiting room. After he left, Marlinchen carried on with her open-ended conversation, with Liam and Colm still helpi
ng at irregular intervals. Increasingly, I felt like an interloper, and after a moment I left the room, as Aidan had.
It was around one o’clock, with the iron heat of a June midday in full effect, but I wandered outside. The exit door was conveniently just beyond the visiting room, and I’d somehow wanted relief from the atmosphere of the nursing home: aseptic, yet cheerful; verdant with plants, yet somehow stale.
Once outside, I saw that Aidan had made the same decision. He was at a distance on the grounds, walking, and had drifted toward the only shade available, where willows overhung the shallow, reedy pond. The Canada geese that had been bathing there rose up and flew off at Aidan’s approach. All but one, which was flopping awkwardly.
Aidan still hadn’t noticed me following him. His attention was on the straggler goose. As it flailed forward into the sunlight, I saw a tiny flash of metal in its beak, and I realized what had happened. At one of the small lakes nearby, the bird had gotten a fishhook caught in its beak. It had flown here before settling down in this safe haven and trying to dislodge the hook, probably making things worse in the attempt.
Aidan, surprising me with his reflexes, snatched up the goose by its neck. The bird squalled with surprise. Its outstretched wings worked wildly, the tip of one scraping at Aidan’s cheekbone and forehead while he worked at the goose’s beak with his free hand. Aidan pulled his head back, out of reach of the bird’s thrashing wings, and spoke to the goose, not loud enough for me to overhear. Then he withdrew his hand, and I saw light glint off the small crook of metal.
Aidan released the bird, which shook itself indignantly, then took to the air. It flew low at first, only a few feet over the turf, as if making a test flight to see that all systems were go. Then it banked higher and was out of sight. Aidan, after watching it disappear, moved toward the pond’s edge. He cocked his arm and threw the fishhook out into the waters of the pond.
In a field full of cool, analytical thinkers, I’d always worked from instinct. In that moment, I made up my mind about Aidan Hennessy.
It was such a small thing Aidan had done, removing the fishhook from the goose’s beak, yet it spoke volumes. I didn’t believe that Aidan had known that anyone was within view of him. He had acted naturally and without forethought to ease an animal’s pain. I couldn’t reconcile that image with the idea of him ripping up Marlinchen’s cat.
Other people had tried to tell me. Marlinchen had been his staunchest defender, of course, but Liam had said it as well: he’s our brother. And Mrs. Hansen, the grade-school teacher, had called Aidan a fighter but not a bully. I just hadn’t been able to hear any of it. Gray Diaz’s investigation, Prewitt’s suspicion… it had all set me on edge, and the resulting paranoia had spread throughout my life, coloring how I’d viewed Aidan, making his unexpected return seem sinister.
When Aidan sat down in the shade of the willow, I went to join him.
“Hey,” I said, sitting with my knees drawn up, resting my forearms on them.
“Hey,” he said.
“Look,” I said, “I should say something. I think we might have gotten off on the wrong foot.” Come on, Sarah, you can do better than that. “I was too hard on you, the night you came home.”
Aidan looked over at me.
“Suspicion is a cop virtue,” I explained. “It’s my fallback position when I don’t know what to think.”
“It’s okay,” he said, taking out a pack of cigarettes and starting to remove one. I suspected that he, like most smokers, fell back on cigarettes at awkward moments, not necessarily for the nicotine but just for the distraction of a simple physical activity. “I mean, I can see how it might have looked to you.”
I nodded but said nothing else.
“I guess I should say, too…” He paused, thinking. “Well, Marlinchen says you’ve been looking out for them, since Hugh had his stroke.”
I shrugged. “Mostly, it was my job.” I wasn’t sure that was true, but it sounded good.
“Well, anyway, it’s…” Aidan tore up a handful of grass. “I’m glad someone was there.” He slid the cigarette back in its pack.
“Quitting?” I asked him.
He shrugged. “Marlinchen’s on my case about it.”
That was Marlinchen, nothing if not forceful in her opinions. I plucked a dandelion globe. “Can I ask you a question?” I said. “It’s another cop habit.”
“Go ahead,” he said.
“I know you don’t have a criminal record,” I told him. “That’s kind of hard for a runaway to do, to survive without breaking the law. I don’t mean to get in your business, but were you really law-abiding, or just lucky?”
“Mostly law-abiding,” Aidan said. “There’s always work off the books, if you know where to look for it. When I couldn’t find jobs, I raided garbage bins behind stores. Panhandled. Made up stories about having a bus ticket stolen. That kind of thing,” he said.
“You never thought about contacting your dad for money?”
Aidan’s eyes flicked toward the building, where Hugh was secreted behind the glare off the big plate-glass window. “I didn’t want anything from him,” he said. He didn’t elaborate, not sure what I knew.
“It’s okay,” I said carefully, knowing it was a sensitive area. “Marlinchen told me about Hugh. About how things were before you were sent away.”
“It was a long time ago,” Aidan said, looking out at the waters of the pond. “I try not to think about it.”
We were silent a moment. I decided not to push things further than we’d already gone, but Aidan surprised me by speaking again. “You wanted to know, the other night, about why I decided to come home.” It was half a statement, half a question.
“Yeah,” I said, half responding, half prompting.
“There was no big thing that made me leave the farm in Georgia,” he said. “Pete was okay, but he wasn’t my family, and we never really warmed up to each other. I finally decided that the farm was his problem, not mine. So I split.”
“And you didn’t want to come home, because of Hugh,” I said.
“Yeah,” Aidan said. “I thought I’d go to California and start over. So I did. I made some friends, guys who’d watch my back if I watched theirs. Met some girls, had some times. But I didn’t stay there, I came home because”- Aidan hesitated-“it’s not that easy to explain.”
“You don’t have to tell me,” I said.
“It was just something that happened on the beach one night.” A wisp of dandelion fluff landed on Aidan’s arm, and he brushed it away. “When I said before that I was ‘mostly’ law-abiding, well, I was, but I did some drugs.” He looked at me, making sure I was okay with that before moving on. “So one night, I was wired on crystal and sitting up smoking, because I knew I was never going to get to sleep. I don’t know why, but at some point I started thinking about Minnesota, and all of a sudden I realized I didn’t even remember what Donal looked like.” He shrugged. “I don’t know why it bothered me so much, but it did. And I realized that I’d been trying to tell myself that the people I’d met out in Cali were my new brothers and sisters, but that was bullshit. They weren’t and never would be. Some people in your life you just can’t substitute for. They aren’t replaceable.”
In its low-key way, it was a story of extraordinary emotional largesse, but my radar for bullshit was quiet. I sensed he meant everything he said.
Then Aidan focused on something beyond me. I turned too, to see what it was. Marlinchen and her brothers were approaching. They were done visiting.
“Dad’s making a lot of progress,” Marlinchen said, sounding pleased, when she reached us. “He said my name. Well, the short version.”
Aidan said nothing.
“That’s great,” I managed, a second or two belatedly.
25
“I talked to Gray Diaz,” Genevieve said, over the long-distance wires.
It was Sunday, and I had taken a little time for myself, going home to clean out the mailbox and check my messages. The hous
e had that stillness that you feel after an absence, the once-wet dishrag hardened to a stiff fossil over the faucet, papers lying museumlike where I’d left them. Also awaiting me was a bag of tomatoes on the back step, the gift of my neighbor Mrs. Muzio, and a message on the machine. From Genevieve.
“Well, we knew he’d want to talk to you,” I told her. “You’re my ex-partner and the person I went to visit after my alleged crime.”
“That’s not the point,” Genevieve said. “Sarah, this guy really thinks you did it.”
“We knew that too, didn’t we?”
“This is different,” she said. “I was a cop for nearly twenty years. I spent those years listening to cops talk about their cases, their suspects, and their gut feelings. I know when they’re just trying on theories for size, and I know when they’ve got religion. This guy has got religion, Sarah. He believes you killed Stewart.”
I hadn’t told her about the Nova and the tests the BCA was running for Diaz. Certainly I couldn’t say anything now; she’d only worry more.
“There’s nothing you can do about it,” I said.
“I could come back.”
“No,” I said firmly. She meant come back and confess. This was exactly what I didn’t want. “Think about what you’re offering to do. There’d be no turning back from it.”
She was quiet on the other end, and I knew she was internalizing the possibility of a life sentence. I pressed my advantage. “We’ve come this far, Gen. Too far to panic and tear it all down with our own hands.”
My neighbor’s scrawny Siamese cat stalked past the back door, looking for a handout. I stayed silent, letting my words sink in. Genevieve would see the logic in it. She’d always been logical, just as I’d always been intuitive.
Finally, Genevieve said, “When all this is over, you’re coming to see me, right?”
“Absolutely,” I said, relieved.
* * *