“She was arrested in 1991 and charged with attempted murder. The man she shot was a neighbor, an NYPD lieutenant, off duty. She pleaded not guilty by reason of mental disease or defect. The case settled. Correct?”
Peter remained silent while his heart pounded.
“I was fourteen. I wasn’t privy to most of the details.”
“It was your father’s off-duty weapon that she used, correct?”
“Yes, I believe so.”
“You believe so.” The investigator pushed his notes aside. “You aced the written test. You aced the physical. Your college transcript is solid.”
Peter waited for the other shoe to drop.
“But the psych exam raised a flag. I’m talking about your psych exam, Peter. Not your mother’s. Not your father’s. Yours.”
Peter knew he might be testing him. The psych exam consisted of a thousand questions over the course of six hours. At one point he was asked to draw a house, a tree, himself. After, he remembered he’d forgotten to draw a doorknob on the front door of the house. How would he get in through a door without a knob? As for the self-portrait, he’d drawn himself in shorts and a racing singlet and afterward thought he should have drawn a suit and tie.
“And your father’s record with us is troubling. He has a citation for drinking on the job. January 1989.”
“I’m not my father. I don’t even know him anymore.”
“And Uncle George has a sheet. Minor stuff but worth mentioning.”
Peter looked toward the narrow window and tried to gather his scattering thoughts.
“I’ve never done a single thing wrong. I’m the one who’s applying. Not my mother. Not my father. Not my uncle. So their histories don’t matter, only mine matters.”
“Maybe,” the investigator said. “That might be true. Depends.”
* * *
He waited two weeks. A month. Six weeks. He’d heard there was a new academy class starting up soon and if his name didn’t get added to the list of eligible recruits, he wouldn’t be able to join. Kate was enjoying her job despite the odd hours, despite the things she had to see when she was called out to crime scenes, down on her hands and knees with her black light, searching for fluid and blood.
“What’s with you?” Kate asked. They’d gone to see a movie but the few times Kate looked over at him in the flickering dark, Peter wasn’t looking at the screen. The movie wasn’t even halfway through when he took her hand and pulled her down the aisle, out to the lobby, and then to the frigid air of the sidewalk outside.
“When are we going to live together, Kate? When are we going to get married? When are our lives going to be the way we agreed they were going to be instead of just getting together two or three nights a week? I don’t like it.”
Kate laughed. They were standing six feet apart on a gum-flocked sidewalk. The woman sitting in the ticket booth was behind glass, reading a book.
“I’m serious, don’t you want to get married?”
“Well, I think you’re supposed to ask me if I’m up for it.”
“I did, didn’t I? About ten years ago?”
“No, you told me it was going to happen. I don’t think you asked. Plus I was thirteen.”
“Well? Are you up for it?”
“Of course I am,” she said, “but I hope you know this doesn’t count as a proposal.” And then, “Peter, what in the world is wrong with you?”
He paced back and forth as he told her everything, starting with the night he decided to become a cop, all the way up to the formal interview and the long weeks he’d been waiting, wondering if he was going to get in. He was sorry he didn’t tell her, but he wanted it to be a surprise. Kate watched and listened as she shivered and hugged herself tight.
Because what would he do otherwise, was the question he kept coming back to. Now that he knew what he wanted to be, he was sure of it. There were so many different ways to be a cop, so many different trajectories, no two careers looked alike, it was insane that they could hold against him something that had happened so long ago, something that truly had nothing to do with him. He thought of calling up that investigator and asking for another interview. What did Kate think of that idea?
“Did he say anything more about whatever flags were raised in the psych exam? Did he give you details?”
“No. He probably made that up.”
Kate nodded and Peter could almost see all the information he’d just given her get sorted into compartments in her brain.
“If I don’t get in I was thinking we could move. I could try Boston or somewhere in Connecticut. Hartford. Stamford. They probably don’t have so many applicants. Plus . . .”
“Peter,” Kate said, unwrapping her arms from around herself and approaching him. He felt her body’s warmth through her thick down coat. “You’re sure?” she asked. “You’re certain this is what you want?”
“Yes,” he said. He’d be a better cop than his father had been. He’d be more like Francis Gleeson, before he got shot. He’d get to the place Francis would have landed, had his career not been derailed. He’d be respectful and he’d follow the rules and he’d climb the ranks. He could see it already.
“Let me try one thing. Can you hang on a little while longer? What’s the guy’s name? The investigator, I mean.”
* * *
Kate took the early bus to Gillam that Sunday, and walked home without calling for a pickup. She stopped walking when she was halfway down Jefferson and saw the windows of her childhood home were decorated with her and her sisters’ old heart cutouts for Valentine’s Day. The thought of her mother unfolding the stairs to the attic and getting down the old decorations while her father held the stairs steady and said, as he always did, “Be careful up there, Lena,” made Kate want to drop to her knees and cry. She remembered her father coming home from a midnight tour one Valentine’s Day and presenting each of them with heart-shaped erasers for their pencils. For Lena he had a dozen roses, and as she trimmed the ends and fussed about finding a vase, she said he should have waited until late February, when the markup wasn’t so steep, she wasn’t the kind of wife who would mind.
Kate knocked softly at the front door, and when no one answered, she went around the side of the house, the frost-stiffened grass crunching under her sneakers, and got the hide-a-key from under the false rock. When she pushed open the back door, her father was already opening the cabinet to remove a second mug.
“I saw you coming,” he said.
“Where’s Mom?”
“Sleeping.” It was not quite eight o’clock. Lena’s hair had grown back, curls as full as ever, only she didn’t bother coloring it anymore, so it was threaded with steel and white. Her cancer had been in remission for several years. She never discussed what had happened between Francis and Joan Kavanagh, but Kate was with her once, about a year after her surgery, her hair still impish and short, when they were walking through the parking lot of an Italian restaurant back to Lena’s car, and Lena stopped all of a sudden, turned back to the restaurant. “I forgot something,” she called over her shoulder. Kate almost laughed at the abruptness of it until she saw Joan Kavanagh walking through the parking lot across the street. Only when Joan had entered a shop on the other side did Lena reemerge.
“Mom,” Kate had said, once they were seated in the car.
“I just don’t like seeing her,” Lena said. “I feel embarrassed for some reason.”
“You have no reason to feel embarrassed. She should be embarrassed.”
“Still.” She shrugged.
“Mom sleeps later than she did when you girls were young,” Francis said now. All of Kate’s life, he seemed to always know when there was something on her mind. She put her bag down by the door and took the mug he offered. He passed the milk in silence.
“Just felt like a visit?” he said. He folded his newspaper into quarters. He was already dressed, had been to the deli. He had an empty sheet of wax paper in front of him, another wrapped around a buttered rol
l on the counter, waiting for Lena.
“Yeah, haven’t been home in a little while.”
“Well, you’re busy. How’s work?”
He knew, she realized. She didn’t know how, but he did. She listened for her mother’s footsteps on the stairs but the house was silent. The space heater hummed lightly in the corner by the stove.
“I need to ask you a favor,” she said.
“Oh?”
“Peter is applying to the police academy.”
Francis was silent for a beat. “Peter Stanhope.”
“Yes. That Peter.”
Francis studied her with a blank expression.
“Anyway. He hasn’t heard whether he’s eligible yet, but it’s been longer than usual, and a few things came up in his interview.”
“And in his psych exam,” Francis said.
Kate felt every part of her body go still.
“Did he tell you that?”
“Yes, of course he told me, but they may have only said that to rattle him.”
“No, it’s true. A few little things. Minor. But combined with his family history it’s troubling.”
“How do you know all this?”
“I have a friend. He called to let me know, asked what I thought.”
Kate stared at him over her tea.
“What did you say?”
“Is that the favor? To put a good word in for him?”
“Yes.”
“Why?”
“Because he wants to be a police officer and he’d be a very good one. And because I love him and one day probably pretty soon we’re going to get married.”
Finally, Francis sighed, pushed back from the table. “You’re throwing your life away,” he said.
She put down her mug just as neatly as he had, and pointed out that it was her life. Besides, was he in a position to lecture about throwing one’s life away? It was only because of Lena’s forgiving nature that he was even sitting there right now, in front of her.
Francis let that pass over him.
“You think a person comes out of a house like that undamaged? You don’t see it now, Kate, but it’s there. I promise you. Marriage is long. All the seams get tested.”
“Well, you would know, right?” Kate said,
Francis gave her a warning look. She looked right back.
“Why him?”
“Because I love him.”
“Love isn’t enough. Not even close.”
“It is for me. Him, too.”
Francis smiled but there was no light in it. “You don’t have the first clue what you’re talking about.”
Kate stayed exactly where she was and tried not to react. How dare he of all people tell her what love was. Along the windowsill was a row of jam jars stuffed with dirt and seedlings. Francis stood and Kate saw that his jeans hung from his hips. Even his shoulders seemed narrower than they used to. He had crumbs down the front of his shirt. She wondered, as she did once in a great while, why he’d never returned to Ireland, why he’d never brought them there, how it was possible he’d lived a whole life before she was even born. She’d always felt sort of sad for him, leaving his parents forever when he was still so young, but now she saw how much freedom that had given him, with no one hovering on the sidelines telling him what to do.
“You can be against it, Dad, but it’s happening. I love him. You can be a part of our lives or not, it’s up to you. He can stay on with the ironworkers, or he can go to law school, or he can do something else. He wants to be a cop, but the truth is that I don’t care if he ends up digging ditches.”
Francis sighed. He got the ice tray out of the fridge and cracked it by twisting. One by one he removed cubes and dropped them into the jam jars. When he finished he remained facing the window.
“I told them to go ahead and put him on the list for the next class. I told them he was a good boy, a good student, though his parents were trouble. I told them I had no problem with it.”
Kate stood so quickly that her chair tipped backward and clattered to the floor.
“I told them none of it was his fault, what happened that night. I told them that he’d gone on to do well in school and all that. What you told me that time, when Mom was in surgery. Running and getting a scholarship. They already knew that, of course.”
“So you forgive him then? You don’t blame him?” She wanted to throw her arms around him like she was ten again. “You don’t blame me?”
Francis turned. “I never blamed him. He was fourteen years old. Why would I blame him? And why in the world would I blame you? You’re not understanding the problem here. You’re not even near understanding it.”
But it was he who wasn’t understanding, Kate knew. All would be well now. They had gone through a bad time—the Gleesons, the Stanhopes—but now look at them. Look at the funny way life could go. Immediately, Kate pictured Peter on Jefferson Street for Thanksgiving, Christmas, all the holidays, sitting between her sisters on the couch, getting up to make them another pot of coffee, pulling gifts from under the tree and calling out the names. George, too, maybe. Rosaleen. Look at the happy ending that could come out of a terrible thing. Theirs was a story for the ages, star-crossed, but without the tragic ending, without the fatalities.
“I still worry about her,” Francis said. “Your mother does, too. Now that she’s living on her own we don’t get updates.”
“You mean Peter’s mother? He doesn’t even see her. He never talks about her. She doesn’t matter anymore.”
“Doesn’t matter? Katie. Love. She’s the person who made him. She’s always going to matter.”
At that, Kate turned away from the memory of the woman framed in the door of the Dunkin’ Donuts restroom on Halloween, her face pale and gaunt, the expression in her eyes wild. She turned away from the other glimpses she’d had since then—Anne Stanhope sitting in a car on 103rd Street, engine off, a cup of pistachio shells on her lap. Kate had pulled up her hood as she passed, and walked quickly by Peter’s building, calling instead from the Thai restaurant two blocks away, asking him to meet her there. Another time in Riverside Park, where Peter liked to run, standing next to a tree in a bulky coat that was far too broad in the shoulders for her. Kate had noticed her just before Peter arrived at their appointed spot, his sweaty skin steaming lightly in the cold air. “You okay?” he’d asked that day.
“I’m fine,” Kate had said, glancing over her shoulder and then taking hold of his arm, leading him down to the river to point out the faint Christmas lights all the way over in New Jersey. Here was a woman who’d wanted to hurt her, a woman who had hurt her father so badly that the father Kate remembered from when she was a little girl had disappeared, and in his place came a new father, a man she often struggled to recognize. And he’d never returned, that first father. She waited and waited but he never came back after that, not completely, and that was Anne Stanhope’s fault. Kate should be afraid of the woman. She knew she should be, and yet she wasn’t, at least not the way her father meant.
And the most recent time, near Kate’s apartment, Peter all the way across town. Anne was sitting on a bench outside the Hungarian bakery, scowling at the passersby. Her eyes lifted when Kate arrived at the opposite corner, as if sensing her there. Kate was beginning to turn back, beginning to flee, but she decided, No, I will not flee, and instead felt something like rage rise up in her throat. Four lanes of traffic divided them—two northbound, two south—and Kate began to cross before the light turned. She held up her arms to stop traffic and knew what Moses felt like when he stopped the waves from crashing over him.
When Anne stood from her bench, Kate felt her courage falter but she jutted out her jaw and kept moving. She stretched her body as tall as she could to make herself seem bigger, just like her father had done that night when he strode up to their door. The sunshine was bitter cold, and trapped in the gutter ice were cigarette butts, candy wrappers, a pen.
“What do you want?” Kate asked when she was close enough
for Anne to hear. The subway entrance was just a few paces away. Whenever she needed to she could disappear down there, reemerge somewhere far downtown, pretend to herself and to Peter that this encounter had never taken place. She’d take a cab back home and she’d avoid this corner for a week.
“I want to talk with Peter,” Anne said. “I thought you could help me.”
“Me? You want me to help you?” Kate laughed, but it came out clotted and choked. “You have some nerve. You know that?” Kate took a step closer to Anne.
“Stay away from him,” Kate said, her voice a low growl. “And stay away from me. He doesn’t want to see you.”
Anne took a breath as if to speak, but Kate was already gone, crossing traffic against the light once again.
fifteen
WHAT HAD BEEN DONE to Anne at twelve by their neighbor, Mr. Kilcoyne, kept being done until she turned sixteen and left for England. He’d show up with a fistful of ribbons, or a dress that needed mending, and ask if she could come help with the little girls. He was hopeless with bows and plaits, he said. Mrs. Kilcoyne had died of a stomach ailment the same year Anne’s own mother had walked into the rough water at Killiney Beach with all her clothes on, her shoes, three days before Christmas in the year 1964. She left a mother-of-pearl brooch and a few pound notes on the mantel. That first time Mr. Kilcoyne came for her, once they got just past the stone that marked Kilcoyne land, Mr. Kilcoyne said, “Wait there just a minute, Anne,” and then clutched her by the shoulder and by the hip, pulling her up against him, hard. It was a bit like a hug except Anne didn’t hug back and he was trembling, clutching her tighter and tighter as the trembling became more violent. Something was happening to him under his clothes.
“The girls will be waiting for us,” Anne said when he finally let her go, and in her bewilderment—she felt dazed, light-headed, though what had happened? Maybe nothing—she strode through a thicket of nettles and her shins went afire.
When she got to England she made a friend called Bridget and after a while told her about Mr. Kilcoyne, how it had begun and how he’d graduated from clutching her over her clothes to asking her to follow him into the hayshed.
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