Lies That Bind (3 page)

Dolores pulled Maeve close, attempting to tell a story about Jack that Maeve wasn’t sure cast him in the best light. “So, he got our tree and then lit a cigarette and the whole thing went up in flames,” she said, holding Maeve’s gaze even though Maeve wasn’t really following the story. “My father put it out with his hands. His bare hands.”

Maeve tuned out, studied her plate of food.

Dolores shook her head at the memory, at Jack’s supposed carelessness. “Almost burned our house down.”

“Well, all’s well that ends well, right, Dolores?” Maeve said. The Haggerty house remained standing, after all.

Dolores pulled on the sleeve of Maeve’s black turtleneck. “Do you know what you should do now?” she asked, her wine-soaked breath wafting up to Maeve’s nose.

Next to her, Maeve felt Margie freeze. She couldn’t imagine how she could make restitution for a thirty-year-old Christmas tree, but she’d be interested in what Dolores had in mind. “No, Dolores. What should I do?”

“You should find the other one,” she said, slurring so that all the words ran into each other.

Maeve was confused. “There was another tree?”

Margie reached out and grabbed Dolores’s arm. “We should go.”

“The other what?” Maeve asked. The food that she had pushed away looked gray and unappetizing; she put a napkin over it, giving it a peaceful death. Having Dolores Donovan around would be great for the diet she would start immediately following today’s feast.

“The other one,” Dolores said, finishing off her drink in one long swallow. The outside of the glass was coated with food and greasy fingerprints.

Maeve waited. “The other what, Dolores?” she said, her voice getting louder, her impatience growing.

Margie leaned across Maeve and took her sister’s face in her hands. “Enough, Dolores.” She turned to Maeve. “We’re very sorry for your father’s passing. We’ll talk soon.”

No, we won’t, Maeve thought. We won’t talk soon and we’ll resume the lives that we want to live. Mine is absent of yours, in case you’re wondering. She hoped she wasn’t wrong about that. This had to be the last time she would see them.

“The other one,” Dolores said, not to be deterred. She picked up a glass of beer from the place beside her; Mr. Moriarty, Jack’s best friend at Buena del Sol, had been sitting there just seconds earlier but had beaten a hasty departure to parts unknown when it was clear that things were going to unravel. In his place remained an unfinished beverage; Dolores took a noisy slurp.

Margie pulled two coats off the hook behind the table and dropped a Mass card on the table. “We’re very sorry for your loss, Maeve,” she said. She threw her sister’s coat over her shoulders. “Your father was a nice man.” She turned to her sister. “Dolores. Now.”

Dolores stood on unsteady feet, catching herself with a hand to the edge of the table. “You need to find her.”

“Who?” Maeve said, aware that she was yelling. The other guests were staring. Whatever was happening needed to stop; maybe a raised voice was the only way to get Dolores’s pickled brain to pay attention. After all, raised voices were the Haggertys’ stock-in-trade. Maybe Dolores didn’t know how to respond to anything else. Maeve’s daughters, Rebecca and Heather, still sitting with their concerned father, turned and looked at her. “Who?”

Dolores smiled. “Your sister.”

CHAPTER 4

Maeve raced into the street, stopping on the double yellow line, a car coming so close that her hair whipped in its wake. The Haggertys were out of the parking spot before she had hit the sidewalk, Margie’s old Honda speeding away under the threatening storm clouds, her sister in the backseat, her face the last thing Maeve saw before she felt the touch of her oldest daughter’s hand on her arm.

Rebecca put an arm around her. “Mom. It’s cold. Come inside.”

Maeve waited until they were out of sight, standing in a misty rain that should have felt colder when it hit her skin, but her face was hot; she was burning up. The words “your sister” rang in her ears, Dolores’s voice not unlike the screeching sound that the neighborhood women’s grocery carts—and their voices—made outside the bedroom window of her childhood home on a tree-lined street in the Bronx. “The butcher had pork on sale, Mrs. McDermott. Fifty-nine cents a pound.” “Thank you, Mrs. Blaine. Don’t forget to get your church raffle tickets.” If Maeve closed her eyes, she could imagine she was back there, sitting on her bed, her chenille bedspread lumpy clumps of cotton beneath her, the sound of neighborhood business being attended to, children’s voices wafting up as they played in the streets. You could do that then, play in the streets. Those thoughts, jumbled up with the unpleasantness of her encounter with the Haggertys, roiled around in her brain.

She had been an anomaly then, an only child, motherless, the neighborhood women clucking around her, making sure her hair was cut the proper way, her knee socks cuffed at just the right place. Her father adored her and she adored him because it was just the two of them, making them the smallest family on the block. More than one woman had criticized Jack for the way he was raising her, a “ragamuffin” among good, holy little girls, someone for whom baking had become a respite, albeit a solitary one. He never cared about what they said. To him, she was perfect. She was his. He told her so every day.

She wouldn’t go back inside. Couldn’t. Standing there, frozen to the spot on the street, watching cars pass in front of her, she thought of one memory that would stay with her and resurrect itself every time she heard their names: Dolores and Margie. Margie and Dolores. The Haggerty sisters. Fidelma and Marty’s girls.

Her mind went back decades, the world now fading from her consciousness.

“Big step,” Jack had said when he handed over the key to the house, a
Partridge Family
key chain holding the key that opened their front door. She was nine. “Now, do you remember what to do?” he had asked.

“Come straight home. Lock the door behind me. Do my homework. Don’t use the oven,” she had said, having memorized the routine so that she wouldn’t let him down. She knew her father worried about her, worried that she wouldn’t be able to execute those few steps with any kind of accuracy, and that bugged her. She was smart and responsible. She begged him for the chance to prove that.

That first day when she arrived home, she searched her book bag but the key was missing. Even though she had touched it throughout the day and made sure it was still there, it was gone. Her heart sank as she pulled every book out of the bag and searched the pages, hoping against hope that it had gotten stuck, that she had really not lost it. It had to be there.

When the rain started to fall, light at first but eventually turning heavy and unrelenting, she went next door to the Haggertys’, a place she never wanted to go. Mr. Haggerty drank. Mrs. Haggerty was mean. And the girls? Well, they were their own set of problems. Dolores had answered the door, a sullen teenager with a mouth set in a perpetual sneer.

“I lost my key,” Maeve had said, her knee socks ending a few inches below her plaid uniform skirt and not providing any protection against the chill that accompanied the rain. She was so cold that she couldn’t get the next sentence—“Can I come in?”—out.

“Too bad,” Dolores had said. “What do you want me to do about it?” Her already developed and ample chest strained against a St. Barnabas volleyball sweatshirt, Dolores’s heft coming in handy on the court, Maeve imagined years later.

“Who is it?” Maeve heard Fidelma Haggerty call from the kitchen.

“It’s no one,” Dolores had called back, turning her attention back to Maeve. “No one at all.”

Behind her on the table in the front hallway was Maeve’s key, the
Partridge Family
key chain a dead giveaway. “That’s my key, Dolores,” she said as a guilty Margie slithered by, slipping the key and key chain into the pocket of her jeans.

Dolores turned. “I don’t see anything,” she said before slamming the door shut in Maeve’s face.

Jack got home at ten o’clock that night and found her sitting at the picnic table in the backyard, soaked to the skin but not crying. She had cried all afternoon; no tears left. He had carried her inside and dried her off, making her a cup of scalding-hot tea that burned her tongue and singed her throat when she sipped it, but she didn’t really feel anything at all at that point.

She never told him about the girls’ cruelty. She had gotten good at keep secrets from a young age.

“I’m sorry, Daddy. I lost the key,” she said, because she knew that if she did tell what she saw and what she knew, her life would become ten times worse than it already was. He would go to the Haggertys. He would fight with Mr. Haggerty. Dolores would make her life more of a hell than it already was. She was smart enough to figure that out.

When Jack did call his sister-in-law to find out if her cousin Sean was available after school to take care of Maeve, he asked her why she didn’t go to the Donovans’ first, why she didn’t find someone at home so that she could sit in a warm house rather than on a picnic table in the rain.

At nine, her first inclination was to lie. “They weren’t home.” They were home, and if she had gone there, there would have been more pain from Sean, her abuser, more than she had already endured. So, she lied to her father and she could see on his face that he didn’t believe her, the first crack in the trust that was between them.

He had wondered about that; she could see it on his face. He wanted to believe her but couldn’t. But one thing he never wondered about later is why his little girl never cried even when she was hurt or sad. That question never came out of his mouth. And she never really cried again, the ability to show fear or sadness something that had been tortured out of her all those years ago.

CHAPTER 5

Eventually, she did go back inside, said good-bye to her guests, put the memories of the Haggerty sisters from her mind, the thing Dolores had said. She and the girls left Mickey’s after the last mourners had departed and got into her Prius, Maeve gripping the steering wheel to steady her shaking hands; she willed herself to calm down. She drove to the train station, Rebecca’s questions to her going unanswered. Who were those women? What did they say? Would she be all right even after Rebecca left, the few weeks until she came home for Christmas break?

By the time they reached the station, Rebecca was ready to hop out of the car before it even stopped moving. Before they left Mickey’s, the girls had been in deep conversation at their table for two, their father and stepmother having left right after the scene with the Haggertys, Heather’s head bent in such a way that her long, thick hair covered each side of her face like the curtain Maeve used to pull aside to use the confessional at St. Margaret’s. Back then, Maeve confessed the made-up sins of an eight-year-old who had picked up pointers from some magazine called
True Confessions.
Turned out that the magazine had stories that weren’t about the kind of sin she was thinking about at her young age but she didn’t know that.

“Aren’t you forgetting something?” Maeve asked as Rebecca prepared to make her exit.

Rebecca leaned over and kissed her mother’s cheek. She threw in a hug for good measure. “Are you okay, Mom?” she asked. “I’ll be home on the twenty-first. Not too long from now.”

“I’ll be fine, honey,” she said, pushing Rebecca’s hair back from her forehead and holding her hand there. “Are you sick?” she said. “You feel warm.” Being a mother was what she knew. Being an orphan, not as much.

Rebecca smiled. “I’m fine,” she said. “You worry too much. I love you,” she said, and then was out of the car, leaping up the stairs to the station, two at a time, like a lithe gazelle.

I do worry too much, Maeve thought. That’s my job. And I love you, too, she thought but didn’t say because Rebecca was almost out of sight. She opened the window. “Dad will pick you up at school on the twenty-first!” she called after her, but Rebecca was gone, lost in the throng of afternoon commuters, on their way to see the tree at Rockefeller Center or the decorated windows along Madison Avenue.

Maeve waited until the train pulled out of the station, willing her heart to slow its beating, her hands to stop shaking. In the backseat, Heather was wearing noise-canceling headphones and crying softly, wiping her nose on the sleeve of her pea coat. Two years younger than her sister, she was Maeve’s “little gypsy,” as her grandfather used to call her, dark, brooding, and prone to long bouts of silence. Maeve caught Heather’s eye in the rearview mirror but knew better than to go any further than reach back and squeeze the kid’s knee.

She drove back through town, pulling up in front of the house. She wasn’t ready to go home and she wasn’t ready to go back to work, but she knew that baking would calm her nerves, keep her from thinking about the absence, her deceased father. She gritted her teeth, willing the tears away, and waited until Heather went back into the house before driving off down the street.

Baking had gotten her through many a tough time. It was after her mother died, and after watching a show on public access television, that she had become interested in food, sweets in particular. She had baked for Jack, making him cinnamon buns and coffee cakes that he could eat before he went to work and cookies and brownies that she stuffed inside the bag he carried to the precinct where he worked most of his years on the NYPD. She baked when she was happy and she baked when she wasn’t, the bad days outnumbering the good for many years but her prowess growing along with her iron will.

She went into the kitchen and punched the security code into the keypad, taking off her coat and donning a Comfort Zone apron over her soiled funeral clothes. She’d make donuts, even though they were Jack’s least favorite of everything she made, a thick, cakelike donut and a cup of coffee all she wanted after the hours spent in church, next to the Haggerty girls. She pulled a big silver mixing bowl from the shelf next to the sink and assembled a few ingredients, going to the locked pantry that Billy, DuClos’s “assistant,” had tried to get into a few days before, and opening the door with the key on her key ring. She moved a few items around, looking for the new large bottle of vanilla extract that she knew she had bought a week earlier but which now seemed to be missing.