Small Mercies

17

A few hours later, Bobby has dinner with Carmen Davenport at Jacob Wirth, a German restaurant in the theater district. Bobby picks it because it’s just upscale enough to feel special for two civil servants, but not so upscale he’ll have to go to a loan shark to cover the tab. His mind keeps drifting, though; he can’t shake his odd encounter with Mary Pat. This is not where he wants his head to be on the first date he’s managed to get in ten months. But he can’t quit thinking of that finger of hers, twirling, as she pointed it at the sky and spoke of “the silence.”

What fucking silence?

“So, out with it,” Carmen says.

“What?”

“Whatever’s got you distracted.”

“Maybe I’m just nervous.”

“Mmmm, nah.” She places her napkin on her lap, settles her chair in relation to the table. “You’re not here. In this restaurant. With me. And I look kinda nice, in case you overlooked it.”

She wears a white peasant blouse over a denim skirt and knee-high boots the same mahogany color as the bar. Her hair is combed a little different than the night they met, falling a bit more into a curve over her eyes, and she’s wearing more jewelry — a silver choker that matches the bracelet on her left wrist, thin white-gold hoop earrings. The green of her eyes is so pale it’s almost translucent; it gives Bobby the impression she can see straight through the back of him.

Bobby tells her she looks beautiful.

“About time,” she says. “Okay, you can stop squirming — what’s on your mind?”

“You.”

She chuckles and shoots him the bird. “I would rather you tell me what’s preoccupying you than you stay preoccupied and eventually piss me off.”

Their drinks come — red wine for her, a draft for Bobby — and they pause to toast their first date before they drink.

Bobby tells her about Auggie Williamson and all the witnesses who saw the four kids chase him near the train. And how Auggie ended up being found dead on the tracks the next morning. And how some of the witnesses corroborated who those kids could have been — four kids from Southie, two girls and two boys. And how, just when they had two of them in their hands, lawyers associated with Marty Butler showed up and bailed them out.

“What about the other two kids?” she asks.

“One’s a hard case. The hardest case of the four, actually, and he’s got a personal connection to Marty, so he’s not gonna say shit.”

“And the other one, the girl?”

“No one knows where she is.”

“Is she dead?”

“Rumor is she’s in Florida.”

“You don’t sound like you believe it.”

“I’m wavering on the theory,” he admits. “Of the four kids, I don’t see why she would be singled out as a threat. That’s what I keep bumping against.”

Carmen thinks on that as she takes a sip of wine, staring at him with a calm intensity that he finds so attractive he immediately wants to duck from it. It’s a Coyne family trait — if you feel happiness, duck. Because the only thing that could possibly follow happiness is pain. Thanks, Mom, Bobby thinks. Thanks, Dad. What an outlook you gave your children. What a pair of fucking pips you were.

Carmen says, “You have this girl who may have witnessed a murder.”

“May have been involved in it.”

“Or not.” Her pale eyes widen to emphasize the idea. “She’s just with them when they do it. Then maybe she got an inconvenient attack of conscience.”

“That would do it,” he agrees. Bobby flashes on Mary Pat today. That too-bright light in her eyes, those sudden micro-bursts of despair and agony.

The silence.

“You got kids?” he asks Carmen.

She nods. “I got one. He’s in college now. One thing I didn’t fuck up. I got him all the way through high school before the wheels came off.”

Bobby reappraises her. “Did you have him when you were in high school?”

She smiles. “Such a silver-tongued devil, you are. No, Bobby, I didn’t have him in high school. I was nineteen. And now he’s nineteen, so do the math.”

Bobby opens his mouth in mock horror. “You’re four years older than me.”

“Yeah, but I’ve clearly taken far better care of myself.”

Bobby laughs. Can’t remember the last time he did that so freely. After a second, Carmen laughs too. She takes his hand in hers, runs her thumb down the center of his palm.

“Should we order?” she says.

“Sure.”

But they don’t for a bit. They just sit there, taking each other’s measure.

“Do you have kids?” she asks.

“One. He’s nine. Lives with his mom weekdays.”

“Well, let me ask you — what would you do if someone hurt your child and the police refused to do anything about it?”

Bobby can see Brendan and his hopeful eyes and hopeful smile, his kind demeanor and clear desire for everyone around him to be happy, a desire that frightens Bobby as much as it moves him. If the world hurt him — really hurt him — would there be anything left of Bobby to pick up and put back together?

He says to Carmen, “I’m not sure what I’d do. I mean, I’ll be honest — I know what I’d want to do — but I’m a man who obviously believes in law and order. If we were, I dunno, out in the wild, part of the wagon-trail west a hundred years ago, and someone hurt my son? Then, yeah, they’d be fucking deader than Abe Lincoln.”

She nods. “I think the same thing most days — how easy it is to say you’d kill someone who hurt your child. But there are laws. And consequences. You kill someone, you go to prison. Your kid grows up without you.”

“The rule of law is all that separates us from the animal kingdom.”

“Do the parents of this girl feel that way?”

“It’s just her mother.”

“And what’s she like?”

Bobby chuckles. “She’s a piece of work. If I’d had half a dozen of her in my platoon at the beginning of Vietnam, we probably would have staved off the whole fucking war.”

“This is a woman we’re talking about?”

“Project chick from Southie. They breed them a little different there.”

“You like her.”

“I do,” he admits. Then, seeing her eyes, “No, no, no. Not like that. Not like I like you.”

“So how?”

“She’s...” He thinks about it. How to describe Mary Pat Fennessy? “Nobody ever told this woman how to quit. Probably nobody ever told her it was okay.”

“To quit?”

“To ease up. To, I dunno, cry? Feel?” He thinks about it. “Feel something besides anger, anyway. Every time I see my son? I hug him so tight he complains. I smell his hair and his skin. I put my heart to his back sometimes, just so I can hear his blood and the beat of his heart. I mean, he’s of the age he’s gonna get sick of it soon, so I’m just getting it in while I can.”

She nods, her eyes gone soft, her thumb even softer against his palm.

“I’ll bet you money,” he says, “Mary Pat Fennessy was never held like that in her life.”

“I suspect you’re a good father,” she says.

“Call no man a good father until after he is dead.”

She rolls her eyes. “That’s not the quote.”

He smiles at her. “You know ancient Greek?”

“I know my classics,” she says. “The nuns made sure of it.”

“I don’t like nuns,” he blurts out.

“I don’t like ’em either,” she says. “Though they’ve got a raw gig. The priests get all the booze and all the credit, the nuns get, what? A convent?”

The waitress appears and they withdraw their hands so they can look at their menus and order.

After the waitress leaves, Carmen puts her hand back on the table and raises an eyebrow at him. He gives her his hand, and she places her other hand over it.

“Does this woman have other kids?”

“She had a son, but he died.”

“Husband?”

“She’s had two. Both left her, one by getting legally declared dead.”

She removes a hand to take another sip of wine. “So, if something terrible did happen to her daughter, what does she have to live for?”

In that moment, a ghost walks straight through Bobby. It’s perfectly sized to his body and touches every inch of him from the crown of his head to the soles of his feet before exiting through his chest.

“I don’t have an answer for that,” he tells Carmen.

After dinner, he walks her home. She doesn’t live far — about a ten-minute walk — but they stroll, drawing it out. They walk under trees thick with leaves that smell of the day’s heat, and after they pass through Park Square, the streets spread out before them in canyons of light and dark.

Over dinner, he learned more about her work running a halfway house in Roxbury for battered wives fleeing their spouses, often with kids in tow. Now, walking through the city on a still summer night, he asks why she does what she does.

She tells Bobby she dreamed of being a lawyer as a little girl, she even remembers dreaming of becoming a cop at one point, but when she reached college on a full academic scholarship, she still had to make ends meet for room and board. Someone hooked her up with a job at a shelter for runaways. And there, she tells Bobby, she discovered she had a knack for convincing people — some people, not all by a long shot — that they had the ability to change the course of their lives.

“And you were hooked,” Bobby says.

She slaps his arm in agreement. “I was hooked.”

“Gotta be a lot of pain in that job,” he says. “Battered women? Shit.”

“Look who’s talking.”

“Nah nah nah,” he says. “I see a lot of crap, of course, but my job is mostly clear-cut. Someone dies, I go find who was responsible. Sometimes I get them, sometimes I don’t, but I don’t live with the hope that someone’s life could get better because of me. You, you gotta put your faith in these women who half the time go back to these assholes willingly or get chased down by them and talked into going back. How many times does one of those outcomes happen?”

“More than fifty percent of the time,” she admits. “It gets dark, I won’t lie. For a while, I searched for the light in the needle. But that eventually killed all the light.”

“Where do you find it now?”

“Faith.”

“In God?” he asks.

“People,” she says.

“Oooh.” He winces. “That’s a bad bet.”

“You don’t believe people can change?”

“I do not.”

She cocks her head at that and strolls a few steps ahead of him. “How will you ever get me into bed with a shit attitude like that, Bobby Whose Real Name Is Michael?”

“I’m just not sure where hope gets anyone,” he manages.

She walks back to him. “You don’t believe that. You had enough hope in me to bring me to rehab instead of jail. I still have my career because of that. You have enough hope in this mother from Southie that you obsessed about her all night on a date with me. And I look spec-tac-u-lar.”

“You do,” he admits.

She steps close and pulls him by his lapels toward her and kisses him for the first time — a light, slightly chaste/slightly moist kiss on the lips. “You wish you weren’t hopeful, but you are. That’s why I like you.”

She drops his lapels and is on the move again.

“You like me?” he says.

Another look over her shoulder. “Tell no one.”

They stop in front of her building on Chandler Street, a brownstone halfway down a block full of brownstones in a neighborhood that’s not one Bobby would characterize as high-crime but not one he’d call low-crime either. Like the rest of the city right now, it’s riven by tectonic shifts, caught between what it once was and what it hasn’t yet become and might never be. Carmen points out a light on the third floor, tells Bobby that’s her living room.

Their first kiss aside, it’s understood, without ever being said, that he won’t be coming up tonight, and he’s okay with that. His time in Vietnam scrambled his brain when it came to women — all he’d known were bar girls and taxi dancers and the hookers who walked the broad sidewalks outside the Imperial City in Hué and shouted their come-ons in a nearly indecipherable mix of Vietnamese, French, and the hard-boiled English they’d learned from American gangster movies. When he got back stateside, he stuck to strippers and barmaids for his first few years on the force. Then he met Shannon, a woman he was pretty sure, in hindsight, he’d never loved. Shannon was cold and imperious and noticeably unfond of humanity, and Bobby mistook the shine she took to him with his being a person of value — if someone who doesn’t like anyone likes you, doesn’t that render you peerless? It gave him pride, but no pleasure, to have a woman that beautiful and heartless on his arm. To be fair to Shannon, it wasn’t long into the marriage before she grasped that he didn’t love her. Problem was, she loved him (insofar as Shannon could love anyone), and the realization that he’d never really loved her back turned her already selfish heart into a granite nugget. Only Brendan could get in there (and Bobby wondered if that would hold once he started talking back). After Shannon, Bobby went back to wholly meaningless sex. Not with hookers, necessarily, but with women who expected sex to be just as transactional as he did.

When he got clean, he stayed away from anything that triggered his twin predilections for self-destruction and self-loathing, and for a long time that meant steering clear of the kind of women with whom he’d most often kept company.

Now, standing in front of Carmen Davenport’s building, holding both her hands by the fingers as she tells him she had a nice night and he agrees that he did too and they both smile goofily and wonder if they should try another kiss, he realizes that what scares him about her is what scares him about all intelligent women — that she’s smart enough to see, very quickly, how completely full of shit he is. He doesn’t know what he’s doing; never did. Doesn’t know where he’s going; never had a clue. He feels, at his essence, that he is a baby who was dropped by a stork and is still falling toward a chimney. Everything else he shows to the world is costume.

They try another kiss, deeper this time, longer. Bobby is embarrassed to feel a slight tremor rippling through his body and hopes Carmen can’t feel it too. What is he, fucking twelve?

When she breaks the kiss, her eyes are still closed. He watches them open, and the pale green looks back at him with that calm intelligence that scares the fuck out of him.

“Call me tomorrow.” She heads up the steps.

“When?”

“Surprise me.”

He waits for a bit after she gets inside before he heads to the subway.

At home, he’s barely through the door when his sister Erin, the actuary, comes down the hall wanting to know where he’s been.

“I been out. Why?”

“Work called, like, five times.”

“They leave messages?”

“Yeah.”

He waits, but Erin just stares at him.

“What did the messages say?”

More staring. Erin’s never forgiven Bobby for introducing her to her ex-husband. Or for staying friends with the poor guy after she left him.

She walks away. “Said to call them back.”

He goes to the phone table by the stairs and squeezes into the little seat as he dials. When he gets through to Pritchard, he says, “What’s up?”

“You know that kid, Rum Collins, we brought in the other day?”

“Yeah.”

“He’s here.”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean he limped in here, blood all over his pants, and said he wants to tell us what happened to Auggie Williamson.”

“So take his statement.”

“He’ll only talk to you.”

“I’m on my way.”

“Hey, Bobby.”

“Yeah?”

“This kid’s pissed his pants. I mean, literally. He says the one thing we gotta promise him is we won’t send him back out on the street.”

“Okay. He say why?”

“Yeah. Because she’s out there.”