by Liz Moore
When I wake up, it’s sunny out, and my phone is ringing.
Kacey isn’t next to me.
I sit up.
I lift the phone into my hands. It’s my father.
—Michaela? he says. Is Kacey with you?
* * *
—
I check everywhere. No Kacey. I look out a window. Her car is not in the driveway.
—Maybe she’s on her way to your place, I say.
But both of us are quiet. We know the odds of that.
—I’ll find her, I say. I think I know where she is.
Then I remember Thomas.
* * *
—
I promised him. I told him last night that I would stay with him. I think of him as Mrs. Mahon described him yesterday, running into the bathroom, running the sink, feigning illness in a misguided attempt to bring his mother home to him, and my heart nearly shatters.
Then I think of my sister—who may be at this very moment putting her life on the line—and the life of her unborn child—in the interest of protecting others. And I think of those others, countless other women on the streets of Kensington, whose lives are also at risk as long as Eddie Lafferty is at large.
Suddenly, surprisingly, I am met against my will by a strange quick sympathy for Gee, and the lengths she went to procure stable childcare for us. What must it have been like for her, I wonder, to work so hard, to constantly fear the closure of our schools?
I think. I think.
And at last I decide that what’s happening today feels bigger than just the two of us, bigger than just the needs of our small family. There are lives at stake, I tell myself, and then I steel myself and call Mrs. Mahon.
Once she’s arrived, I walk into the bedroom to say goodbye to my son.
He’s still asleep. For a while, I watch him. Then I sit down next to him. He opens his eyes. Closes them tightly again.
—Thomas, I say, and he says, Don’t leave.
—Thomas, I say again. I have to go do something. Mrs. Mahon is here with you.
He begins to cry. His eyes are still closed tightly. No, he says. He shakes his head.
—I’m sick, he says. I’m still so sick. I think I’m going to throw up.
—I’m so sorry, I say. I have to. I wouldn’t leave unless it was really important. You know that, right?
He says nothing. He’s gone still now, breathing lightly, as if he’s feigning sleep.
—I promise I’ll be back soon, I say. I promise I’ll explain someday. The reason I’ve been gone so much. When you’re grown up, all right? I’ll tell you.
He turns over. His back is to me. He won’t look at me.
I kiss him. I put my hand on his hair and leave it there a moment. Then I stand up. What if I’m wrong, I think. What if I’m making the wrong choice?
—I love you, I say.
I leave.
When I arrive in Kensington, I park on a side street not far from Connor McClatchie’s makeshift abode.
Quickly, I walk east on Madison. Then I turn down the alley that leads to the back of the house with three Bs on it.
As I round the corner, I’m greeted by a little group standing about halfway between me and the end of the alley. There are three men: two of them in construction gear, work boots and helmets. One in a long overcoat and nice jeans.
I can see the house they’re standing in front of: it’s McClatchie’s place.
I don’t know what they’re doing there, the men. I walk toward them, slightly less certain than I was a moment ago.
They notice me. They pause in their conversation and turn toward me.
—Can I help you with something? says the man in the overcoat. Friendly. He’s got a thick Philly accent, like he’s from the neighborhood. But he looks like he’s come up in the world recently.
—I was, I say. But I’m uncertain how to proceed. I’m looking for my sister, I say. I think she might be inside there.
I nod to the white house we’re standing in front of.
—No sisters in there, says the man cheerfully. He has no idea how familiar this phrase has become to me. Better not be, anyway, he says. We’re starting demolition tomorrow. Just did our last walk-through.
Sure enough, the door to the place is standing open.
—Hey, are you okay? says one of the construction workers, when I have been silent for long enough.
—Fine, I say vaguely. I turn around and face Madison Street once again, putting my hands on my hips, uncertain what to do next. Behind me, the men resume their discussion. It’s condos they’re building. Soon to be populated, perhaps, by the Lauren Sprights of the world, the kids drinking coffees at Bomber. The city is changing, unstoppably. The displaced, the addicted, shift and reorder themselves and find new places to shoot up and only sometimes get better.
* * *
—
It’s then that my phone dings.
I take it out of my pocket and inspect it.
On the screen is a message: cathedral on Ontario
The sender—the number has been saved, unused, in my phone since November, when I first met him at Mr. Wright’s—is Dock. Connor McClatchie.
The cathedral on Ontario is technically called Our Mother of Consolation. But from the time I was a child, its size and grandeur meant that everyone just called it the cathedral. I’ve only been in it once, when I was about twelve. A friend of Kacey’s took us there after a sleepover. It’s massive: materials brought over from Europe, we always heard, the high-ceilinged interior built to remind people of God. It closed several years ago. I read about it in the paper; at that time, I didn’t think anything of it. It’s one of many churches that have closed in Philadelphia in recent years.
* * *
—
The cathedral is only a short drive from where my car is parked. I get in and take off.
* * *
—
When I pull up, I look at the cathedral closely for the first time in a while. It’s technically part of the 25th, so I have little reason to go past it on my patrol. It looks nothing like it did in its prime. Most of the windows are broken now. The front doors have Condemned signs on them. A bell tower rises from the eastern side of the church, but there’s no bell inside. I wonder who salvaged it.
I park and walk up the front steps. I try all the doors, but they’re locked. I circle around the side of the building and find one of the back doors ajar, a chain ineffectively roping it off. Quietly, I duck under it and enter.
* * *
—
I hear a low murmuring as soon as I’m inside, and instinctively I stop to listen, to see if I can hear Kacey’s brassy hoarse cadence. But all of the voices I hear are unfamiliar to me. Nobody’s speaking loudly, and yet their words echo forcefully off the broken tile floor, off the walls and high ceilings. Whispered phrases float toward me through the cold.
It’s only. I said so. The other day. Until.
There are two smells here: one I recognize from years of churchgoing, the smell of the thin paper of holy books, the dusty velvet of the cushions that cover the kneelers. This is a warm smell, a good smell, the smell of a Christmas bazaar, a nativity pageant, the sign of the cross. The other is the distinct smell of a place overtaken by the transient, people with few resources and no other place to go. I know the second smell well. As neatly as pins, two sharp shafts of light from holes in the roof spear the main area of the church. The nave, it’s called. The word comes back to me quickly, along with a vision of Sister Josepha, my favorite grade school teacher, diagramming the parts of a church. Nave. Altar. Apse. Chapel. Baptistery. And my favorite: ambry. I remember them all.
The light in the church becomes diffuse, slowly. I begin to see people in the pews. They’re sitting there, patiently, as if waiting for a mass to begin. Some are sleeping. Some are mov
ing. Some are standing. Some are sitting in the throne-like chairs reserved for the choir. There must be twenty or thirty people in this church. Maybe more.
The wail of a baby cuts through the place sharply, and everyone quiets. After a moment, their murmurs resume. I am distracted, momentarily, by wanting to find and remove this child, to take it into my arms and leave and never return.
A woman brushes past me on her way someplace, startling me.
—Watch yourself, the woman says, and I say, I’m sorry.
Then I say, Excuse me. May I ask you something?
The woman stops, her back to me, and pauses there for a moment before turning around.
—Have you seen Kacey? I say. Or Connie? Or Dock?
We’re still in the darkest part of the church, and I can barely make out this woman’s face. I can see her body, though. I see how she freezes when I say these names. She looks at me, assessing.
—Check upstairs, says the woman finally. And she points in the direction of a door that’s been taken off its hinges. It’s resting against a wall to the right of a dark threshold. Beyond it, I can vaguely make out a staircase.
* * *
—
As I climb the steps, the voices in the main room of the cathedral fade. I don’t know where I’m going, but the air gets colder as I move. I take out my phone and use it to illuminate the steps in front of me. Occasionally, I see small movements to the right and left of my feet. Mice, or roaches, or perhaps it’s just four years of accumulated dust.
The staircase is covered in decaying carpet, and it lets me move in silence. I count the steps as I go. Twenty. Forty. I pass a landing. I pass a locked door. I try it several times, and give it a nudge with my shoulder for good measure, but it doesn’t give way.
After sixty steps, faint light begins to enter the stairwell. A double door to my left has two openings at the top that I assume used to contain stained glass, as that’s what’s now lying shattered at my feet. On the other side of the doors, I hear voices.
I try the doorknob. It turns.
* * *
—
When I open it, as quietly as I can, the first person I see is Kacey.
She’s leaning against a waist-high railing, and the open expanse of the cathedral is behind her. She’s standing, I see, in the choir loft: presumably, they came up here for privacy.
Connor McClatchie is speaking to her. I see his face, in profile; he doesn’t seem to notice me. There’s another figure, too, a man, I think, who also has his back to me.
I catch my sister’s eye.
I know the other man is Eddie Lafferty before he turns around. I see his bald head, his stance, his height. I remember the slight stoop he had. Bad back, he told me.
I have my hand on my weapon. Before I can think, I draw it. I hold it before me.
—Hands, I say, loudly and clearly. Let me see your hands.
I recognize that I’m using my work voice, the particular cadence I borrowed from Kacey, from Paula, from all the girls I grew up with, a toughness that served them at school, at work, in life. And it occurs to me suddenly that it might not be natural to them, either. That they, too, may have adopted it, out of a different kind of necessity.
The two men turn toward me. Lafferty and McClatchie.
I can tell that it takes Lafferty a second to place me. I’m out of uniform and out of context. I am unshowered and wild-looking, my hair pulled back into a low knot. I’m tired and strained.
—Whoa, says Lafferty. He smiles, or tries to. Obediently, he raises his hands into the air. Is that Mickey? he says.
—Get your hands up, I say to McClatchie, who finally complies.
—Move away from her, I say to McClatchie, nodding toward Kacey.
I don’t like how close he’s standing, an arm’s length from my sister, who herself is leaning against a ledge. I don’t know how far the drop is to the floor of the nave, but I know I don’t want her going over. Below us, there is still the low murmur of footsteps and coughs and voices, nonsensical now, echoing indecipherably.
—Where to, says McClatchie, dryly. He’s even skinnier than the last time I saw him.
—Against that wall, I say, gesturing, with my head, to my right.
He walks to it. He leans back against it. Puts a foot up.
Eddie Lafferty is still smiling at me, sickly, as if racking his brain for some funny explanation, a reason we all came to be standing here together.
—You undercover too? is what he comes up with.
I say nothing. I don’t want to look him in the eye. I also don’t want to look away from him for an instant. I’m not sure whom to focus on: McClatchie or Lafferty. Kacey is standing behind the latter. And I realize, suddenly, that she is mouthing something to me.
Looking past Lafferty’s right ear, I squint at her. Kacey nods toward McClatchie. Her lips are moving, forming words I can’t parse. He’s something. I.
I’m still focused on Kacey’s mouth when I notice Lafferty’s body tense in that particular manner of a police officer about to give chase. And then he charges at me and knocks me to the ground. My weapon discharges once, shattering a section of ceiling, and then it goes skittering across the carpeted floor of the choir loft.
Below us, a woman screams, and then the cathedral goes silent.
Lafferty is standing over me, one foot on either side of my torso. McClatchie leaves his post and picks the gun up.
I lie very still. I’m panting. From the ground, I study the arched ceiling of the cathedral. Dimly, I can make out where the bullet found its mark. A little cloud of plaster dust descends slowly in a shaft of light. The ceiling, once painted celestial blue, is peeling now. A bird’s nest, I notice, occupies the nearest corner.
The shot is still echoing in my ears. Otherwise, the cathedral is silent as a tomb.
I picture my son. I wonder what will become of him, if today is the end for me. I think of the choices my own mother made—and realize, painfully, that I am not so different from her after all. It’s only the nature of our respective addictions that diverged: Hers was narcotic, clear-cut, defined. Mine is amorphous, but no less unhealthy. Something to do with self-righteousness, or self-perception, or pride.
Thomas, I think, uselessly. I’m so sorry I left you.
* * *
—
When a few long seconds have passed, I glance over at McClatchie. He’s clutching my weapon, the one he retrieved from the floor, but he’s not holding it right. It occurs to me, suddenly, that he has no idea what he’s doing. I’m considering how I might use this to my advantage when he suddenly says, to Lafferty, Kneel down.
Lafferty looks at him for a moment.
—You’re joking, he says.
—I’m not, says McClatchie. Kneel down.
With a certain amount of incredulity, Lafferty does so.
—Keep your hands in the air, says McClatchie.
He glances at me where I lie on the ground.
—Is that right? he says to me.
I lift my head. My forehead got knocked pretty badly when Lafferty plowed into me, and I’m still seeing stars. My neck aches.
—You stand up, McClatchie says to me.
I glance at Kacey, who nods quickly, and I comply.
Then McClatchie does something I don’t understand: still aiming at Lafferty, he edges toward me until we’re standing shoulder to shoulder, side by side. He hands me the weapon.
—You’re better off with this, he says. I have no idea what the fuck I’m doing.
As soon as I take the gun and turn it on Lafferty, McClatchie puts his hands behind his head, takes a big breath of relief. He walks to the railing at the edge of the choir loft, leans on his elbows, and looks out at the church below.
* * *
—
I hear footsteps coming up the stairca
se behind us. For a tense moment, I aim back and forth between Lafferty and the stairs.
The door flies open. I see Mike DiPaolo and Davis Nguyen emerge, guns drawn.
—Drop your weapon, DiPaolo says to me calmly, and I put it on the ground.
I don’t understand.
I think, for a moment, that it was Lafferty who called for backup, which will make the job of explaining my case much harder.
—He’s dangerous, I say, about Lafferty, and Lafferty starts to protest, but suddenly Kacey’s raising her voice above all of us.
—Did Truman Dawes send you? she says to DiPaolo and Nguyen.
—Who’s asking? DiPaolo says. He and Nguyen are still stiff-arming their weapons, aiming them at all of us in turn. I can imagine their confusion.
—My name is Kacey Fitzpatrick, says Kacey. I’m her sister, she says, nodding at me. I’m the one who contacted Truman Dawes. And that, she says, nodding toward Eddie Lafferty, is the man you’re after.