Good Eggs

by Rebecca Hardiman

  To the door he says, “Give me one second, Aideen.”

  He accepts the call and whispers, “Hello?” Kevin has the sense that if his daughter knows it’s her mother on the line, some unspoken trust will have been violated.

  “Hello? I can’t hear you. Kevin?”

  He moves through the room, past the table tennis and a backgammon set clearly interrupted midgame, no one to ever know what the next move will be.

  “I’m at the school,” he says quietly.

  “What?”

  He steps into the hall and says, “I’m at the school.”

  “Which school? I’ve just got off a three-hour panel and there are five missed calls from you!”

  “I’m at the school,” he says a third time. “Millburn. There’s been an incident with the head of Fair—”

  “Wait, hang on.”

  He hears muffled, echoey chat from her end; his best guess is she’s in a soul-deadening corporate hotel convention room with a bunch of yahoos.

  “I’m just coming now,” she says, and Kevin listens to an indecipherable back-and-forth. Then, into the phone, his wife says, “Shit, they’re calling me back in already. I have to go. Let me ring you in an hour? Aideen is OK, right?”

  Kevin says nothing, but feels much. He hangs up, stuffs his mobile into his back pocket, and, head down, shuffles back into the common room only to find that what he’s wanted so desperately has, indeed, happened: the closet door’s open. But when he steps toward the little room, his daughter isn’t in it.

  42

  A bus to Westmoreland Street; a Dart from Pearse Street Station; the short walk from the village and, finally, Aideen is home, where the still and empty rooms feel alien. What she wouldn’t give for a humdrum morning of the recent past, to just thump Nemesis on the head and scream “I’m off!” to no one in particular and bang closed the front door, a slice of buttered toast in one hand as she makes her way to school.

  Immediately, she googles “Dublin hospitals” and finds the closest one to Millburn. Adopting as formal a diction as she can muster, she rings through to the main desk.

  “I wanted to check on a patient? Miss Bleekland?”

  “Which ward?”

  “Uh… emergency?”

  Aideen is placed on hold for an interminable period during which she feels crucial minutes—when she should be planning and packing—pass.

  Finally, a different woman comes on the line. “This is Nicola. How may I help?”

  “I wanted to check on Miss Bleekland? She was brought in this morning.”

  “Who am I speaking with?”

  “I’m her niece, Justine.”

  “Justine…?”

  “… Bleekland.”

  “Ah, I see. We don’t give out information on our patients over the phone, Miss Bleekland.” Miss Bleekland! She winces. “If you come to the admissions hall here, you’ll—”

  “But I can’t! I live far away. Please, it’s really important. I just want to make sure she’s OK. Please, can you just tell me?”

  A pause, and then, “She’s your aunt, you said?”

  “Yes.”

  “Can I have the patient’s Christian name?”

  During the countless smoke-filled afternoons spent dallying down by the river, the midnight tête-à-têtes on adjacent bunks, the discussions over lunch tables and tea breaks, Aideen and Brigid and the other Fair girls have vilified—eviscerated, really—the head of Fair House with scathing nicknames, cruel limericks (Aideen), and ferocious imitations of exaggerated old-lady limping (Brigid). But it did not occur to Aideen (or, presumably, her ex-friend) to ever wonder about the woman’s name, or, for that matter, any real-life detail, in terms of her being an actual human being, one whom Aideen is now responsible for having seriously injured. Or killed.

  “I don’t know!” she says wildly. “Anne?”

  “Who is this?”

  “I call her Auntie Bleekland. Please, I’m very worried about her.”

  “I’m sorry, I can’t—”

  “Is she going to die?” Aideen blurts this out with great anguish.

  “I’m not at liberty—”

  “Fuck!”

  She crashes the phone into its cradle and lets herself slump down to the floor and gives in to an overwhelming surge of feeling, the undeniable fact that everything—everything—is totally fucked, and it’s her doing.

  “Please don’t let her die,” she finds herself saying aloud, again and again, a pleading mantra. When her breathing calms, she gets up from the floor and wipes her face with her sleeve. She needs to move quickly. Where is she going exactly? She hasn’t a whisper. Just away. She heads to the basement. Forbidding herself even a peripheral glance lest a madman lurks nearby, she finds her mother’s rolly with its olive-hued shell and wheels it to the staircase, bumping it up to the main floor, debris and tiny clouds of dust coughing onto each step. Nuala and Ciaran will be home from school eventually and then, later, Mum—Mum will be livid. Worse: disappointed, ashamed. And poor Dad, for all she knows, may still be wandering around Millburn calling her name.

  She scans each room for the most critical items a fugitive would need: phone, charger, earbuds, crisps. Of course, what she really needs is money, the one thing that eludes her. In Dad’s office, she rifles through the desk but comes up with only a handful of coins, barely enough for bus fare. Her grandmother might be a possibility if Gran hadn’t recently, in fact, asked her for a loan. Anyway, Gran’s at Rossdale. Which means Gran’s house is empty. Aideen could go to Margate, at least for a bit, stop there and regroup, spend the night even, though it’s a creepy prospect.

  She slips the coins into her pocket and, sifting through the last drawer, happens upon a file which contains the family pile of passports: six slim burgundy volumes, hers with a scowling visage within that brings her back to the day they went to the camera shop for the photos, how she’d been uncooperative and mute, a right pain.

  She shoves her passport into the suitcase. Maybe she’ll go to America and track down Sean? This fantasy quickly gains traction; she has often imagined Sean and herself holding hands at his bedside. She could move to Florida and become an American student, attend a dramatic arts school in a brick building where students spontaneously burst into song, where a teacher might notice her poetry, with wide hallways and thousands of lockers and gorgeous, horrible cheerleaders, with pom-poms, leaning in doorways, every one of them parting to let Sean and herself, deeply in love, pass through.

  Of course, the fact that she’s penniless and underage is prohibitive enough; even if she were to take such a bold step, Dad would only follow her over and drag her back. At the bottom of the pile, she finds her father’s passport. He looks younger in the photo, his features sharper, the left corner of his mouth slightly raised, conveying a sort of silly self-consciousness.

  A thought crystallizes. Dad couldn’t follow her anywhere, were she to go anywhere, without a passport.

  Dare she?

  Rationalizing that it would be wrong and criminal to steal the thing, Aideen decides, instead, to place it somewhere out of the way, a little stalling technique, just in case. She can always put the passport back in its place, so. She turns to his crammed bookshelves and slips Dad’s little book between the Roget’s (still her favorite) and a badly worn copy of Dubliners and, to thwart potential eyewitnesses, takes the back roads to Dún Laoghaire.

  43

  Sergeant O’Connor has grown a scrubby blanket of facial hair, like every second young fella in Dublin, since Millie last found herself sitting in this grotty interrogation room in Dún Laoghaire Garda Station. Same cheap chairs; same nicked-up slab table. But this time, the private room was at her request, in case Kevin should happen to pull up and witness his distraught mother through the window—an unlikely but not impossible scenario. Kevin will not be pleased when he discovers she’s checked herself out of Rossdale and he’ll think her a right fool once he’s learned she’s been duped, not by drugged-up teens or a ba
nd of gypsies, but a scheming American with a sleek ponytail and a house key.

  Maybe her being targeted by a swindler should not come as such a surprise. She’s further on in years than many of her fellow Dubliners and she lives alone, with only the occasional visitor. Nearly all of her peers are long in the grave, a grim list to which she can now add Mrs. Jameson’s name. It’s not that Millie is lonesome so much as desolate, parched. It’s not that Margate is quiet, it’s that, beyond witnessing from her window perch the tides drawing toward and away from her, the house shows so few signs of life. How easily she can remember her Peter coming through the door and tossing his hat to the hall table, or Kevin counting out push-ups in the garden, or her pals walking toward her up the drive laden with lemon cakes and gin for their weekly bridge game. Sylvia had made Margate feel something akin to that again, upping the bar of potential, as if good things might once more happen.

  Millie hadn’t realized just how the circumstances of her life made her vulnerable, nor that her need for company was so blatant, so exposed. This is her own bloody fault, the steep price for her naivete and foolishness, her embarrassing needs, her silly ego, her sense that if she didn’t have a party trick, the party would end. She’d even voluntarily bragged to Sylvia about how well she’d hidden the key to her safe!

  When Millie had rung up the guards earlier, a woman on the other end had said she’d have to come in, reports must be made in person. Unable to locate her car keys, Millie had been reduced to “borrowing” her neighbor’s bike (every downstairs light was blazing, a solid indication that the Fitzgeralds were out of town, so no harm). She’d teetered her way on two wheels wearing her floppy hat and a teal silken scarf, which she felt confident went some distance toward disguising her. She was pressingly aware that at any turn in the road, the wind, which was fierce, might blow her right off and into the ancient wall dividing road from seafront, or she might crack her knee or pull a muscle or unwittingly hit a rock and find herself akimbo, flashing half the town an unprecedented glimpse of her faded knickers. The image kept her focused and on she pedaled, relieved when the station appeared on the horizon.

  Such a mission might be viewed, by a less reckless soul, as high-risk, given her Rossdale breakout only a few hours prior, and the very little time she now has to cement a plan before her son discovers she’s on the lam (the ticking by of time, as ever, hounds and haunts her). But if Millie is to get to the bottom of all this without Kevin’s knowledge—and she means to—Sergeant O’Connor looks to be her only lead.

  He makes his slow, casual way over, bearing a takeaway coffee, which steams from its cardboard cup. O’Connor offers this to Millie, who shakes her head no—she hasn’t time for such trivialities. He drags a chair to the table and sips from the cup himself. For some reason, it looks to Millie as if he’s fighting a smile.

  “Tell me, what brings you in today, Mrs. Gogarty?”

  “Absolutely appalling circumstances the likes of which I’ve never known in all my years in Dublin, that’s what brings me in.”

  “Oh dear. I’m sorry to hear that. Why don’t you tell me what’s happened?”

  He clasps his hands together and settles back into his seat as much as a person can settle into a folding metal chair.

  “Do I have your word that what’s said here stays here?”

  “If that’s what you’d like, yes, but—”

  “I don’t want anyone to know about this. My son has his own motives,” she adds. “Let’s just leave it at that.”

  “I see.” O’Connor removes from a cleverly hidden shoulder pocket a small black notebook and clicks open a Biro.

  Millie gathers her thoughts, trying to organize a factual, linear narrative. If Millie is going to outsmart a con artist, for the love of Jesus, she’s going to have to get smart herself.

  “I would like to see the records from when I was…” Her cheeks boil instantly. “From when I was arrested.” Millie has never made aloud any reference to her petty theft bust, never mind admitting the truth of it. But there, now that’s done. And isn’t she still breathing?

  “You weren’t actually arrested.”

  “That’s right, we made our… arrangement… and the terms of that—the home helper coming to me during the week, well, she turned out to be a very bad egg.”

  “Home helper?” His head tips softly to one side.

  “Now where he found her, I’ve no idea.”

  “He?”

  “My son. I’d venture to say under a rock. A slippery one.” She gives a bitter chuckle. “Probably on the computer, through a service? I don’t think I ever was told the details. He just showed up with her one day. And so that’s why I’m here—I want to file an official gobbledygook for the robbery, of course, but I’d also like the contact information for Sylvia.”

  “Robbery?”

  “I think she got in with my spare key.”

  “Who?”

  “Sylvia Phenning, the woman Kevin hired to assist me. Does that name not ring a bell?”

  “And you told Mrs. Cantowell on the phone that she’s an American citizen?”

  Millie nods. O’Connor scratches words into his notebook. “Hang on, Mrs. Gogarty. Let’s backtrack just so I’m clear. You’re saying that when you were last here, some kind of deal was negotiated—”

  “Yes, back in December, do you not remember?”

  “I do, yes, but you’re saying that instead of having charges brought up against you, is that it, you agreed to a home—”

  “And I was forced to postpone my trip to New York. With Jolly Jessica.”

  “Jolly…?”

  “But as it turns out, my home helper was not very helpful. She robbed me. Well, not right away. At first she wined and dined me. Then she robbed me.”

  “How do you mean wined and dined?”

  “Well she didn’t ply me with pinot grigio,” says Millie, with an exasperated laugh and wonders if he isn’t a bit thick. “I meant metaphorically.”

  “Ah. Let’s—what was this woman’s schedule? She was in your house every day?”

  “Nearly. And she’d tidy up, do up meals. Made an absolutely gorgeous carbonara actually. Though it was a bit on the creamy side. But she’d add peas. You wouldn’t be caught dead in Rome with peas!”

  “I myself am not averse to peas.” He smiles. “So the suspect was very kind, attentive, yes?”

  Despite her exciting wave of self-determination, it feels briefly like a betrayal to label her friend this way. “Suspect, yes.”

  “What exactly did she steal from you?”

  “What didn’t she!” Millie cries. “She’s after withdrawing thousands from my checking in the Bank of Ireland, every last half penny.”

  O’Connor whistles. “How did she manage that? Did she have access to your bank card?”

  “Well yes, but not at first. Part of her job was to run errands with me, you see, and there came a day the two of us were in my Renault. I couldn’t find a parking spot and you know yourself the parking situation here is atrocious. In fact, if I had more time, I’d have half a mind to lodge a formal complaint about it.”

  “So you were looking for a parking spot?”

  “And we were looping round and finally she said why didn’t I stay with the car so as not to get a ticket? And I thought, that’s grand, and so I handed over my card.”

  “And told her your PIN?”

  Millie winces and he says, “You’re not the first person to be conned, Mrs. Gogarty. This is a very common crime. These are skilled professionals—they know exactly how to prey on all sorts of innocents.”

  “She was nearly like a daughter.”

  From a different hidden pocket, O’Connor retrieves a folded wad of tissues and hands one to Millie. What’ll he come out with next, a rope of colorful handkerchiefs pulled endlessly from his gob? But he’s a darling, especially for a copper, really, she couldn’t ask for a nicer policeman.

  “And on that particular day,” he says, “do you remember i
f she gave you a receipt?”

  “That’s just it! Yes. Hadn’t taken a penny more than I asked.”

  “Hmm. And so you began to trust her after that?”

  “Sergeant O’Connor, I don’t believe I ever looked at another receipt from that moment on… I know, I know.”

  “Not at’all. OK, and can you tell me about the home burglary? When did that happen?”

  “I don’t know. I just discovered it this morning. I’ve been in Rossdale Home due to the fire—did you know I’d a fire in my house?”

  “I had heard that, yes.”

  “You should see my kitchen. Black as your hat. And my arm caught alight.” She begins to unbutton her cuff.

  “You’re grand there,” he says, blocking her from the unveiling. “Exactly what was taken? Laptops? Phones? That sort of thing?”

  “Everything. Electronics. I can’t even find my curling iron.”

  “I see.” He clears his throat and begins to shift away from the table. “And was there anything else? Credit cards? Cash in the house?”

  Millie looks at a tiny speck of dirt on the ground and, with a hanging head, says, “I did give her a loan,” and explains about Sean and the phony surgery.

  O’Connor listens intently, pulling an almost tender face—mouth sheepishly squared. “It’s a terrible crime, Mrs. Gogarty,” he says gently. “How much money did you loan her?”

  “Thirty thousand euros.”

  “Jaysus.” O’Connor looks with genuine pity on her. “And you say she’s left the country?”

  “Yes. She phoned me from New York just after.”

  “How do you know she wasn’t still here, in Ireland?”

  “I don’t. But she said she was calling from America. And she often mentioned returning there but she didn’t have enough saved.”

  He drums his fingers on the table. “Look, I’m very sorry this has happened, and we’ll be looking into all of this. I’ll need you to make an official statement, all that you’ve told me here. And we’ll take down an inventory of what’s missing. That’s where we start.” He gets up. “But to be honest, Mrs. Gogarty, if she’s left the country, I’m not sure there’s an awful lot we can do.”