Small Mercies

16

Bobby comes out the back of the BPD headquarters to find Mary Pat Fennessy sitting on the hood of the ugliest fucking car he’s ever seen, just past the back of the parking lot. Bobby takes the T to and from work, and the exit of the parking lot leads to an alley that unwinds in a lazy curve to the rear of the subway station. Mary Pat and her “car” are parked right at the mouth of the alley, clearly waiting on him.

Bobby stops by the car and lights a cigarette. “Is this thing street-legal?”

“Hundred percent,” Mary Pat says.

Bobby walks once around the car. It has the look of something that if you blow on it, even slightly, it’ll come apart like in a cartoon. He smiles at the tailpipe — cooking twine is definitely not legal to secure a tailpipe — and marvels at the complete lack of tread on the tires. A baby’s ass was never so smooth. He bends, looks under the chassis, can’t see any engine parts or brake pads dangling down there. So, that’s something. He returns to the front and Mary Pat. “Hundred percent, huh?”

She gives him a tiny smile. “Maybe ninety.”

“Try sixty,” he says.

As he gets closer, he sees her face looks like she was attacked by live trees in a fairy tale. They just whacked at her with their thin branches until she reached the other side of the haunted forest. She sports a large flesh-colored bandage that almost blends in with her neck. Her hands are bruised, the knuckles swollen. She wears a sleeveless white-and-yellow-checked blouse over blue jeans rolled up at the cuffs and low-top canvas Converse sneakers. When she looks back at him, her eyes are a little too bright for Bobby’s taste. It’s a brightness he’s seen before in the eyes of people who can’t be reached.

He eyes her cuts, her bruises and bandages. “Happened to you?”

She shrugs. “You should see the other girls.”

“Plural?”

She nods. “Never could respect bitches who forget that if you start a fight you should damn well fucking know how to finish one.”

He feels the smile find his face a second before he thinks to pull it back. “What can I do for you, Mrs. Fennessy?”

“Call me Mary Pat.”

“What can I do for you, Mary Pat?”

“I was wondering if you were still looking for my daughter.”

“You betcha. Happen to know where she is?”

Something dislodges in the brightness of her eyes for a moment, a flash of uncertainty and pain, but then it disappears, and the brightness returns.

“I don’t,” she says.

“So why are you here?”

“It might help me find her if I knew — really knew — why you were looking for her.”

He cocks his head at her, waits her out.

“What?” she asks.

“You know why I’m looking for her.”

“Because you think she was on the platform when Auggie Williamson died.”

“It’s gone a little beyond ‘think.’”

“Okay,” she says. “So how come no one has been arrested?”

“Because there are laws against just arresting people willy-nilly without hard evidence.”

“But you can bring them in for questioning.”

“Who says we haven’t?”

“If you had, you would have gotten some evidence.”

“Is that how it works?” He chuckles as he flicks his cigarette into the alley. “Wasn’t your first husband Dukie Shefton?”

She cocks her head at him. “Someone’s been doing his homework.”

“And Dukie was in the Life. I mean, man was a legend among thieves.”

Mary Pat feels a small flush of ancient pride well up in her at the memory of her first husband and his street rep. “He was.”

“And he was an independent, correct?” Bobby says. “Wasn’t affiliated with a crew.”

“He was independent, all right.” Mary Pat lights her own cigarette.

“But,” Bobby says, hitting the word for emphasis, “he still kicked up a percentage of his take to Marty Butler.”

She shrugs. “That’s the way it is in Southie.”

“‘That’s the way it is in Southie.’ We’re in agreement then, Mary Pat. So, if I bring people in for questioning but can’t get any evidence at all out of them because they don’t even get to talk to me for five minutes before a lawyer raps on the door, what does that tell you?”

She looks at him for a long while, rolling the cigarette up and down between her fingers. “Tells me those people are a lot less afraid of you than they are of someone else.”

“Yup.”

She takes a thoughtful drag, exhales a series of smoke rings that drift toward the alley before dissipating one by one. “So you’re saying the crime will go unsolved?”

“Hell, no,” he tells her. “No one’s letting this one drop.”

“Because a black kid died?”

“Because a black kid died on the dividing line between Southie and Dorchester on the eve of busing. It makes for the kinda story line newspapers tend to squeeze a lot of mileage out of.”

“Yet no one’s in jail.”

“Because we haven’t broken the logjam. But we will. And when we do, the dominoes will fall.”

“Or the bodies will.”

“Excuse me?”

She shifts on the hood, pulls one leg up there with her, grips the ankle. “You know as well as me that if any of this leads back to Marty Butler, all the kids on that platform that night are as dead as Auggie Williamson.”

“Why’d you say it that way?”

“What way?”

“You said ‘all’ the kids like some of them are gonna be dead regardless.”

“If Marty Butler doesn’t have success paying your legal bills,” she says eventually, “he’ll cut bait and pay for your funeral.”

“Which could be why we’re not turning up the heat too quickly.”

“But if you wait too long, they’ll get their stories straight, Marty will pay off people to be their alibis, and you’ll get nowhere at all.”

“That’s the risk.” He puts a foot on the fender.

“You think my daughter was involved, and I know she wasn’t. If we can prove what happened, I can prove her innocence.”

“And then maybe she’ll come out of hiding?”

She drifts on him for a moment. Like she just — poof — leaves her body, and he’s left staring at a statue perched on the hood of a car.

Then she comes back, but her voice is small and thin. “Yes. Then she’ll come out of hiding.”

He’s been watching her face as close as he can. “She is in hiding? Yes?”

She plucks at one of her sneaker laces. “She’s in hiding for sure.”

“Then,” he says, “you’ll just have to be patient, Mrs. Fennessy.”

“Mary Pat.”

“You’ll have to be patient, Mary Pat. If I want this to stick, I have to do it right.”

He can tell from the look on her face that she thinks he’s not only lying to her, he’s lying to himself.

“What if I talked to them?” she says.

“To who?”

“The people who don’t want to talk.”

“No,” he says. “Bad idea.”

“Why?”

He indicates her hand and face. “Your type of negotiation is called coercion under duress. It doesn’t stand up in court.”

“Only if” — she strikes the air with her cigarette — “an officer of the law had prior knowledge of it.”

“What’d you read a law book?”

“I was married to Dukie. He managed to stay out of prison most of his life and rob everything of fucking value that wasn’t nailed down in this city at one time or another. He was a law book.”

“What ever happened to Dukie?” Bobby asks.

“He didn’t take a knee.”

“To who?”

“The person you’re supposed to take a knee to.”

Standing there, taking her in, he gets a sudden whiff of her utter solitude. Of the series of traumas, big and small, that’s passed for her life.

“Mrs. Fennessy, please go home.”

“And do what?”

“Whatever you do when you’re home.”

“And then what?”

“Get up the next day and do it again.”

She shakes her head. “That’s not living.”

“It is if you can find the small blessings.”

She smiles, but her eyes shine with agony. “All my small blessings are gone.”

“Are you sure?”

“Oh, I’m sure.”

“Then find new ones.”

She shakes her head. “There aren’t any left to find.”

Bobby is struck by the notion that something both irretrievably broken and wholly unbreakable lives at the core of this woman. And those two qualities cannot coexist. A broken person can’t be unbreakable. An unbreakable person can’t be broken. And yet here sits Mary Pat Fennessy, broken but unbreakable. The paradox scares the shit out of Bobby. He’s met people over the course of his life who he truly believes existed as the ancient shamans did, with one foot in each world: this one and the one beyond. When you meet these people, it’s best to give them breadth the length of a football field, or else they may suck you right into that next world with them when they go.

Because they’re going. Make no mistake. They are fucking going.

“Mary Pat,” he says gently, and she looks up at him, “do you have someone you can talk to?”

“About what?”

“About whatever you’re going through right now?”

“I’m talking to you.”

Fair enough.

“And I’m listening.”

Mary Pat studies his face for a bit. “But you’re not hearing.”

“What am I not hearing?”

Sitting on the hood of that ugly car, her eyes still far too bright for Bobby’s liking, she points a finger at the sky, twirls it, and answers him. “The silence.”

Bobby tries to formulate some kind of response, but nothing occurs to him.

Mary Pat comes off the hood, walks to door of her heap, and gets behind the wheel. She backs up, then pulls forward, and gives no indication she even sees him as she drives away.