1 Once Upon a Lie

by Maggie Barbieri

  As they reached the parking lot, Jack had a question for her. “Who do you think killed Sean, Maeve?” he asked.

  “Like you, Dad, I don’t care,” she said. She punched the keypad and opened the doors. “Hop in.”

  Back at Buena del Sol, he escorted her in past Doreen—today, “dumber than a box of rocks,” according to Jack—to his apartment on the second level of the facility. It had been a few weeks since Maeve had been in the apartment, and she was happy to see that it was clean and that Jack had enough of the food items that he liked—cheese, some diet soda, and a couple of cartons of yogurt—so that she didn’t have to make a trip to the grocery store. When he excused himself to use the bathroom that was attached to his bedroom, she looked around the apartment to see the best place to stick the ticket stub so that it would be alternately noticed and unnoticed. She decided to stick it under a magnet that held an image of Rebecca on the soccer field, one of the “extras” that Maeve had purchased when team pictures had been ordered. She stuck it under the powerful magnet and stepped back, admiring her handiwork. It was now right there, proof that Jack had been at the Yankees game and not in Van Cortlandt Park the night that Sean had been killed.

  When Jack came out, she gave him a kiss. “You look tired. No more marathon walks for a while, okay?”

  He gave her his usual snappy salute. “Yes, sir.”

  “I’m not kidding, Dad,” she said.

  “I’m not either,” he said. “I am kind of tired,” he admitted. She was nearly out the door when he called her name. “What am I going to do if the police call me again?”

  “I have a feeling they’re done with you, Dad,” she said. “I wouldn’t worry about it.”

  He looked around the apartment as if he were memorizing every knickknack, the placement of all the furniture. “Because I’m not really sure I didn’t murder him,” he said. “It’s not like I didn’t think about it once or twice.”

  “Why did you think about it, Dad?”

  He looked at her, but he had already forgotten. “About what, honey?”

  “About Sean. Hurting him.”

  “Bad seed, that kid. Didn’t you think so?” He shook his head. “I feel like I wanted to hurt him.”

  She rubbed her arm instinctively, the one that had been shattered and which had required that she be taken by one of Jack’s cronies to the emergency room, Jack not wanting to waste the time waiting for an ambulance. “I think we all thought about it, Dad.” She rubbed the arm until the skin was hot. “At least once or twice.”

  Maybe more.

  CHAPTER 22

  Jo’s doctor was thrilled with the progress she had made and impressed with his handiwork. Jo was not quite as enamored with the way her head looked and let him know.

  “Is my hair going to grow back? Will I have a scar? Should I stay home from work longer? Are you single?” she asked, the last question slipping out amid the other, more salient concerns that she had regarding her accident and the overall well-being of her head.

  The guy was game, answering each question in the order it had been asked. “Yes. Probably. Soon. Yes.”

  A smile spread across Jo’s face as she realized that she had gotten the answers she wanted, the scar notwithstanding; the hair would probably cover that. “Okay!” she said, brighter and lighter than she had been in a week.

  “And you can return to work,” he added.

  At that news, she didn’t look quite so thrilled, but she went with it. “But no heavy lifting, right?”

  DR. NEWMAN—Maeve finally got a look at the name tag that had been hidden under his lab coat—smiled. “You can do all the heavy lifting you want.”

  “But I shouldn’t work quite so many hours as I usually do, right?” she asked.

  “That depends,” he said, writing a few notes down on his chart. “How many hours do you normally work in a week?”

  “Fifty,” she said at the same time that Maeve said:

  “Twenty-five.”

  He looked confused. “You can work anywhere between twenty-five and fifty hours a week. You’re fine, Ms. Weinstein. Go about your daily life and put this little bump in the road behind you. Okay?”

  Jo looked disappointed, clearly not ready or willing to resume her role as Maeve’s halfhearted helpmate in the store. According to Dr. Newman, she was definitely able. “Okay,” she finally said, relenting. She pointed to Maeve. “She’s my boss, so what she says goes, anyway.”

  Maeve resisted the urge to laugh. That was never the case, and she had the extra logged hours to prove it.

  “Take care, Ms. Weinstein,” Dr. Newman said, sending them on their way. When Maeve turned around, he was holding his clipboard at his side, a smile spreading across his face.

  They walked down the hall toward the front door, passing the nurses’ station, where a man in a baseball hat, his back turned, was filling out paperwork while a nurse helped him find the proper spaces to fill out his personal information. Next to the nurses’ station was another section of the emergency room, and from inside one of the bays came the sound of a child crying, a woman’s voice uttering soothing words. As Maeve passed the man, almost in slow motion, he turned and looked at her, the look on his face causing her to suppress a gasp and force herself to keep walking.

  “Mr. Lorenzo?” the nurse at the station said. “We need your insurance card. We need an X-ray of your daughter’s arm.”

  But he was fixated on Maeve, and as she watched the color creep up from the collar of his T-shirt and onto his stubbly jowls, she grabbed hold of Jo’s arm and moved her forward quickly. Jo was too busy taking inventory of every sick person in every slot of the ER, noting who had someone accompanying them and who was alone, chattering away to Maeve about the state of health care in the United States and why she was voting for some fringe candidate in the next presidential election.

  “Mr. Lorenzo?” the nurse called, trying to get his attention.

  Maeve dragged her eyes away and fixated on the tiled floor in front of them. In the slot where the child had been crying was Tina Lorenzo, begging her daughter to be quiet so as not to disturb the other patients. The little girl was in too much pain, though, and Maeve could hear it in her voice as a low, moaning sob that was replaced by a high-pitched cry that even got Jo’s attention.

  “Poor kid,” Jo said. “Wonder what happened to her.”

  He finally broke her arm, Maeve thought. That’s what happened to her.

  CHAPTER 23

  When things had gotten bad, just before the end had come, Maeve had told Cal that they needed to remember why they had once loved each other. All he had done was stare back at her blankly; it was then that she knew he had already forgotten and would never remember.

  Maybe that’s why Jack’s slow decline into complete dementia was presenting such an emotional challenge for her. At some point, he too would forget why he had once loved her, seeing in front of him a petite, trim woman with a mess of blond waves, concern and unconditional love etched forever on her face. Beyond the fact that he would forget her sooner or later, some things that he had forgotten he would never remember, no matter how hard he tried.

  Like the details of her mother’s death.

  The shoebox that sat between her legs on the floor was filled with reminders of when things were good, with a few pieces of memorabilia from when things weren’t. A photo of her as a baby, reaching out to someone, maybe the person with the camera, while sitting on her mother’s knee. A grainy photograph of Jack and Claire on the steps of St. Augustine’s on their wedding day, Jack in a white dinner jacket and her mother in a dress that was shorter in the front than in the back, the bodice covered with a delicate organza that was probably yellowed and moth-eaten now, the dress in a box in Maeve’s attic for safekeeping. A ticket stub from Maeve’s first Broadway show—Cats—and the playbook, the front page ripped slightly but otherwise in good shape.

  Her mother’s obituary was also in there, copied from the original that Jack kept in a boo
k on a shelf in his apartment, along with another copy of the page from the Daily News that had reported the hit-and-run of a young mother in the Bronx, on her way to the grocery store for a quart of milk and a pack of cigarettes for her husband, a faded picture of her mother’s beautiful face alongside a story that said the police had no leads on who may have hit Claire Conlon but that they would keep investigating.

  It hadn’t done any good. Maeve had never heard anything to suggest that they had found the person who had killed her mother, spilling the contents of her purse along the avenue, people returning things that had blown away for weeks to come. The first was a lipstick, the second was a prayer missal. The last, as Maeve remembered it, was her kindergarten picture, her tiny teeth all still intact, a light in her eyes that she lost soon after. They were all in the box.

  Her mother had died, in the street, alone. That was what happened when you told, Sean had said to her a few years later, right after he had put his hands on her in that way for the first time.

  That was what happened when you told.

  She said she was never going to tell, but he didn’t believe her. That’s what made her mother’s death even more tragic to her, her brain not fully realizing the impact of what had happened at the time.

  She carried it with her, though, and thought that the moment, etched in her memory, of her mother leaving the house, was the one that stayed with her and reappeared the most, more than anything else that had happened, the accidents, the tears, the suppressed memories, the silent indictments. She wondered how much of her life had been dictated by that one moment.

  “Be back soon,” Claire had said, something she had no idea would turn out to be false, a lie she never intended to tell. She did what she always did before they parted, kissing her daughter’s head, forehead, nose, and cheek before going out the front door, the screen making its usual racket when it slammed shut behind her. “Be back soon,” her mother would always say.

  Maeve was watching Soupy Sales. She wouldn’t move until her mother came back; that was their deal. She sat in that same position for a long, long time until her legs ached and her feet got sweaty in her Keds. When someone had finally come for her, it was Claire’s brother, Declan, Sean’s father. He had lifted her up and her legs were still crossed, cramped into a position that told what a good girl she had been. She had never moved, just as her mother had asked.

  The officer who had investigated the case had been a guy named Pollizzi; his first name was Peter, but everyone called him “Pepe.” Back in those days, a lot of cops worked in the same precinct as their neighborhood, so Pepe was both a neighbor and a guy who patrolled their safe streets. At one time, he and Jack had been partnered, but while Jack wanted to stay on the beat, Pepe had higher aspirations, becoming a detective in the squad. To Maeve, he was like a big, burly bear, but a kind one. Kind of like Winnie-the-Pooh grown up and in human form. Soft, but obviously very strong, his hands were rough, the nails big and square. He always wore a gold watch and a pinkie ring, something that Maeve found fascinating, even at a young age. His aftershave lingered in her nose long after he left. When she thought about him now, the word dandy popped into her head.

  He had come by the house a lot after Claire died, and not just to ask questions. He sat with Jack, he drank with Jack, he brought Maeve toys. He insisted that she call him Pepe, because that was his nickname and that’s what Jack called him. Maeve had never been allowed to call adults by their given names or their nicknames, so she felt that Jack allowing her to address Pepe as such was the beginning of a new chapter in their lives, one where things would be looser, more casual. Everything had changed, and nothing that she knew would ever be the same. Claire’s death had seen to that. So had Sean Donovan.

  She wondered what had happened to Pepe Pollizzi. After a few years, he stopped coming around. Jack told her that he had moved to the Jersey Shore, a place that Jack would never drive to, even if it was to “see the pope,” as he had said at the time. Too far. Too much traffic in the summer, too dead in the winter. But Maeve wondered if there was more to it than that. She wondered if seeing Pepe opened the wound all over again, the wound in which Claire was still dead, her killer still out there somewhere driving a red car, according to witnesses, and living a full life.

  Several times before he moved and they never saw him again, Maeve had tried to speak the words to Pepe, the ones that got stuck in her throat every time. “You know who has a red car?” she would start but never finish. “My cousin Sean.” Why could no one see that but her? She would never tell because she knew what happened to people who told. They ended up with their body laid out on the avenue, the contents of their purse blowing across the street and into the alleys behind the stores, dead because a little girl wanted someone—anyone—to know that every day she got hurt and died a little bit inside.

  When Maeve was done going through the box and picking at wounds that had never fully healed, she went to the computer and searched for information on how to report child abuse cases in her county. An 800 number was listed on the page she found. The woman at the other end of the phone sounded tired, phones ringing incessantly in the background. Maeve wondered if the agency took calls only on suspected child abuse or if where this woman worked housed other agencies that dealt with other types of problems.

  “I suspect a person in my town is mistreating his daughter,” she said, feeling better about things now that she was actually making the call. But her feeling of doing something important, something to help the little girl who loved her cupcakes, was short-lived.

  “What makes you think this child is being abused?” the woman asked.

  “I just saw her at the hospital and I think she broke her arm.” She wasn’t sure that that was even the injury, and the question in her tone was enough to lose the interest of the woman at the other end of the phone.

  “And you know that this situation is a result of child abuse?”

  “Well, not for certain, but I think it is.”

  The woman paused, and in that pause resided an unuttered sigh. “Why is that?”

  “Because he beats his wife, too.”

  The sigh burst forth over the line. Either this woman was having a really bad day or Maeve was sounding like a crazy person with delusions. Wasn’t it this agency’s job to take these kinds of accusations seriously? What was it about the way Maeve was delivering this information that made her sound less than credible? She thought the best course of action would be to start again. “I saw his wife and she had a black eye. She looks like she is being battered. The little girl, she’s four, was just in the hospital and I think her arm was broken. Don’t ask me how or why I know, but I just do. And I’m worried about her.”

  The woman responded better this time; Maeve didn’t know why. “If the child is in the hospital with a suspicious injury, she will be questioned first by medical staff and then by a caseworker from our agency if the medical staff thinks there is reason to suspect abuse.” She delivered this information in a matter-of-fact voice, one that softened when she asked the next question. “Why are you so sure about this?”

  Maeve considered beating around the bush a little bit more but realized that it wouldn’t help her help Tiffany or Tina. “I was abused.” After it was out, she thought that while the chance existed that it may give her credibility, it might also have the reverse effect, making it seem as though she saw abuse around every corner. She wanted to reassure the woman that it didn’t but that she did have a honed sense of when someone was being mistreated. Or had survived the same, her mind flashing on Rodney Poole for some reason, although she wasn’t sure why.

  “Ma’am, I wish I could send a caseworker out based on your feelings, but without an incident to go on, I’m afraid that that’s just not possible. Let’s hope that you’re wrong, but if you’re not, that someone at the hospital felt the need to investigate further. I’m sorry. That’s the best I can do.”

  Maeve opened her mouth to speak, but begging this woman to beli
eve her didn’t seem like a viable option. Besides, the woman, the product of an overworked, underfunded, and ill-staffed agency that had too many children to protect and not enough resources, was gone. She looked at the phone for a few seconds, wondering what she would do next.

  She got up and put on her sweater, getting ready to go out. It was one of those days that had been warm while the sun was out but had turned cold now that it was dark. She didn’t need much beyond her still ugly, still gun-toting purse and a little determination.

  Cal had been right: she had needed a hobby. Now she had one and it felt good.

  CHAPTER 24

  That night, she sat in front of the Lorenzos, waiting to see what he would do, if anything. Like her, was he restless? Did he need to go out? Did he have someone to meet? As she sat there, in the dark cocoon that was the Prius, she watched.

  And waited.

  Eventually, he did leave. The only wrinkle was that she wasn’t sure where he was going on the nights he pulled out of his driveway, if he was headed to another assignation with the mouthy and ethically challenged Julie Morelli or somewhere else. The other problem was that she never knew when he’d leave, so that made for a lot of boring nights, but she took the opportunity to catch up on the papers she hadn’t read, the magazines that contained recipes she wanted to try. She was nothing if not a multitasker. Too bad she hadn’t been paying attention to Rebecca when she had tried to teach her mother to knit; by now, Maeve would have been able to knit an afghan to cover most of the top floor of her house.

  She prided herself on being relatively smart, but that night, after some soul-searching in the dark at home in her bed, she realized that what she had done earlier that evening had been beyond stupid. Following Michael Lorenzo to the bar on the corner, a place she had never seen him go, and pulling up a bar stool next to him was not her style or a testament to her sharp intelligence. While she was there, though, the sights and sounds of Mookie’s offering enough cover for their conversation, it seemed like the best idea she had ever had, if only to see the look of shock on his face as she ordered a glass of cheap Chardonnay and a plate of wings.