Small Mercies

6

She doesn’t sleep more than three hours all night, and none of that sleep strings together but arrives instead in fifteen-minute blocks followed by alert anguish, staring into the black, fidgety and hopeless, followed by another fifteen-minute spurt of sleep two hours later, followed by staring into the black.

Lying in bed, staring up at the dark, she feels seen but not heard by whatever looks down upon her. Eventually, its eyes leave her, and she is alone in the universe.

At work she’s a zombie, stumbling through her shift, hoping no patient codes on her because she won’t be up to the task. Again Dreamy takes a personal day, so again they’re shorthanded. Gossip flies up and down the corridors — Auggie Williamson committed suicide. No, he OD’d and fell in front of a train. There are witnesses, but they haven’t come forward. He was chased onto the platform. It was a drug deal gone bad and he tried to run, slipped on the platform, and fell in front of a train. Ker-runch.

But none of the rumors addresses how it is that the train conductor never noticed the impact. Maybe he hadn’t seen Auggie, but he must have felt the impact. It was in all the papers that Auggie died somewhere between midnight and one, but his body wasn’t found until the morning commute, tucked under the platform. So, what’s it like to get off your shift, go home and sleep eight hours, then wake to the news that you drove your subway car into someone’s head? The poor guy, someone says, he has to live with that the rest of his life.

After work, Mary Pat changes out of her uniform in the locker room and puts on the clothes she arrived in, and then she does something she doesn’t even admit to herself she’s doing until she’s crossing over the Charles River on the Red Line — she takes the subway to Cambridge.

Getting out at Harvard Station, she enters Harvard Square, and it’s as bad as she suspected it would be — fucking hippies are everywhere, the air smells like pot and B.O., every twenty feet or so someone’s playing a guitar and crooning about either love, man, or Richard Nixon, man. Nixon helicoptered off the White House lawn almost three weeks ago, but he’s still their bogeyman, these pampered, overeducated, draft-dodging pussies. She loses count of how many of them are barefoot, tromping around dirty streets in their frayed bell-bottoms and their multicolored shirts with their beads and long hair, the girls without bras and their ass cheeks spilling out of their cutoff shorts, filling the air with cigarette smoke and clove cigarette smoke and pot smoke and every one of them a fucking embarrassment to their parents, who spent an ungodly amount of money to send them to the best school in the world — a school no poor person could ever get into, that’s for fucking certain — and they return the favor by walking around with dirty feet and singing shitty folk music about love, man, love.

When she steps onto campus, the ratio of hippies to normal-looking college students drops to about one in three, which is somewhat comforting. The rest of the students look like the college students in movies — square jaws and square haircuts, the girls in dresses or skirts and blouses, hair straightened and shiny, the boys wearing oxfords and chinos and walking with the assured posture of the upper class.

What both groups have in common, though, is a deep-seated confusion about what she could be doing on their campus.

She’s not dressed like a slob from the projects. She’s dressed like many a housewife walking around South Boston (or Dorchester or Rozzie or Hyde Park) at this very moment — red polyester shirt, tan slacks, and a plaid shirt jacket in defiance of the heat. She wore the outfit to work this morning because she wanted to say to anyone who cared to look — I am in control. I have my shit together. Ignore the cuts and bruises on my knuckles and see only the classy lady your eyes behold. But some part of her must have also known that she might not be heading straight home after work, that she might be making a trip across the river into a world so alien she’d feel more at home in another country. Ireland, for sure. Canada, maybe. She’d thought she looked smart, put together, but judging by the sidelong stares she’s getting from the snot-noses and the hippies in Harvard Yard, she sticks out for exactly who she is — a working-class broad from the other side of the river who came into their world in her laughable Sears-catalog best. They presume she took the wrong subway car, ended up wandering the Harvard campus like a child lost in a supermarket, before she’ll return to her grimy world to tell her grimy kids about all the shiny things she’s seen but was never allowed to touch.

She’s visited here once with Ken Fen, just before Christmas two years back, the day after he officially got the job working in the mail room. It was a Saturday in the dead of winter, so there were only a few bundled-up students in the Yard, and no hippies loitered in the square on a 15-degree day. They’d met his boss, whose face she could no longer remember, and he’d given Ken Fen the keys to the room and the master key to the mailboxes and explained the duties of his shift, which would go from noon to eight-thirty every weekday. Then he left them to roam the room themselves.

The mail room was housed in the basement under Memorial Hall, a building so grand and imposing that it’s hard to imagine someone like Ken Fen could work here, day in and day out, without some part of him trembling at the sheer majesty of it.

Kenny Fennessy grew up in the D Street projects, a place so fierce it made Commonwealth and Old Colony look like Back Bay and Beacon Hill by comparison. Huge guy. Six-three. Hands that turned into coiled rebar when he clenched them into fists. If you fucked with him, you better bring three of you because he would not stop fighting until a coroner called it. But if you didn’t fuck with him, Ken Fen would never lay a hand on you. Never bully you or poke at you. He’d much rather listen to your story, hang out with you, find out what you liked to do, and do it with you. Since birth, Ken Fen had no choice but to buy into the violence. He just never bought into the hate.

When she met him, he was recently divorced, paying a king’s ransom in alimony to an ex-wife who’d told him once with bitter pride that she wasn’t capable of love, and if she were, she wouldn’t waste it on him. He and Mary Pat dated for a year before getting married. Ken Fen never had a nickel for himself until he got a job working the mail room at Harvard, which made it look like maybe, in a couple years, once he’d caught up on all his debt, he could move them out of public housing.

As an added benefit of his job, he could attend Harvard lectures for free. Couldn’t get credit, but he could sit in. That’s where the trouble started. Suddenly, he’s coming home with books (Siddhartha is one she remembers, The Tin Drum another), suddenly, he’s quoting people she’s never heard of. Not that she’s heard of a lot of people, but suddenly, he’s quoting, and Kenny was never a quoter.

She finds him sitting alone at a table in the middle of the mail room. She’s timed it so she’ll arrive at his lunch hour, but he doesn’t have any food in front of him, is just sitting there reading (of course). He looks up with a beam of a smile when she enters. The smile dies fast, as if snatched from his face by the quickest of hands, and she realizes in that moment that he was expecting to see someone else.

“Hi,” she says.

He rises from the table. “What’re you doing here?”

“Have you seen Jules?”

He shakes his head. “Why would I have seen Jules?”

“I thought she mighta come to you. I can’t find her.”

“Since when?”

“Night before last.”

“Jesus, Mary Pat.” He comes to her. Takes her by the elbow. “Come sit down.”

Even though he hadn’t wanted to see her, even though he’s still mad at her (or are his feelings for her worse than anger somehow?), even though he had been so irritated and impatient the last time they spoke — in her moment of need, he comes right to her. He’s a rock, Kenny. Always has been. First one to give support, last one to ask for it.

She sags a bit as he leads her to the table and pulls out a chair. Her eyes fill. The fear she’s kept tightly wrapped bursts through its wrapping, and a small moan escapes her lips as he helps her into the chair and pulls up another across from her.

It takes her a few seconds to catch her breath, and when she starts speaking, it’s like she can’t stop. It all just spills.

“I haven’t seen her since the other night, and I have this feeling? I have this feeling, Kenny, and it’s the worst feeling, it’s worse than any I had that whole year Noel was in Vietnam, and worse than the one I had the day Dukie, God rest him, left the house and I never saw him again. It’s like a part of her never left my womb, you know? It stayed in there and became something else, became, like... molded... to my body. The inside of it, with the blood and the organs and all the other shit you can’t survive without? That’s where part of her has always lived. But, but, but I can’t feel her there for the first time since she was born.” She thumps her own chest harder than she intended. “She’s not in here anymore.”

He hands her tissues he found somewhere, and she uses them, is surprised that they come back sopping in her hand. He takes the wet clump from her and hands her a couple of fresh ones and then a couple more after that until her face is dry and her nose is clear.

“So you haven’t seen her or heard from her?” she asks.

His eyes are sorrowful. “No.”

“She’d reach out to you if she was in some kinda trouble she didn’t want me to know about.”

“Probably, yeah.”

“She loves you.”

“I know.”

“She has your number?”

“Yup.”

That stings a bit. She doesn’t have his number, but her daughter does.

“So, okay,” he says, “let’s back up. Tell me what you know.”

It takes her five minutes.

“So,” he says in that analytical voice he uses sometimes when he’s explaining a play in a football game she didn’t understand or, later in their marriage, when he was explaining what one of his quotes actually meant. “She’s with the kids at the park until midnight. Then she’s at Carson another forty-five minutes. She walks toward home. That’s their story.”

She nods. “And they’re sticking to it.”

“Sounds like horseshit.”

“Why?”

“They’re fucked up, right? Drinking and getting high and shit?”

“Yeah.”

“But they all know the time.”

“To the minute,” she says. “That bothered me too.”

He thinks for a bit, his eyes, as always, brimming with an intelligence he could never fully hide no matter how hard he tried, the thing she loved about him only a little less than she loved his kindness.

“Wait a minute,” he says. “All this mystery — whatever we’re calling it — went down between midnight and one Saturday night, right?”

“Yeah.”

“Well, what’s right across from Columbia Park, Mary Pat?”

She shrugs. “A lot of things.”

“Columbia Station,” he says. “Where that black kid got killed.”

She’s not quite following. “Yeah...”

“Between midnight and one,” he says. “That’s what the papers say.”

“But what does one have to do with the other?”

“I don’t know, maybe these kids saw something.”

She tries to work that around in her head.

“Or,” Ken Fen says, “maybe they were involved somehow.”

She narrows her eyes at him, and in that moment, a black girl with an Afro the size of a toddler walks in the room carrying a bag of food. Mary Pat can smell the food — there’s something fried in there — and she notices two bottles of Coke dangling from the fingers of the black girl’s other hand. Sees the warmth in her smile as her eyes fall on Kenny.

So, Mary Pat thinks with a shock of disgust and embarrassment, this is her.

This is who you left me for.

This nigger.

The girl — goddamn, she’s gorgeous, Mary Pat thinks before she can stop herself — is smiling uncertainly now at Mary Pat, and for some reason the first thing Mary Pat thinks to say is, “How old are you?”

“Jesus Christ.” Ken Fen pushes his chair back from Mary Pat.

The girl is coming toward them now with a small private smile on her face. “I’m twenty-nine.” She places the food down on the table and stands behind Kenny. “You?”

Mary Pat can’t help but chuckle inside, but she doesn’t let it show.

An odd silence settles into the room. The longer it goes on, the more uncomfortable it grows. And yet none of them breaks it for the longest time.

Until Mary Pat stands and says to Kenny, “Let me know if you hear from Jules.”

Kenny grimaces. He indicates the black girl-woman, who has moved around to his hip. “Mary Pat, this is—”

“I don’t want to know her fuckin’ name.”

The black girl-woman lets out a startled hoot of a laugh, and her eyes widen.

Mary Pat can feel the rage pulsing behind her eyes. She can feel them redden. She has an image of these two crossing the Broadway bridge, her small black hand in his big white one. It’s almost unbearable to imagine — the looks they’d get! The humiliation that would crest like a wave and crash down on Mary Pat and Jules and even stain the memory of Noel, God rest his soul.

Kenny Fennessy of the D Street projects returns to Southie a race traitor, a fucking jungle-bunny lover.

Whether Ken Fen and Afro Girl lived or died on their little walk — and Mary Pat doubted they’d make it to C Street alive, definitely no farther than E — the shame that would follow Mary Pat and Jules, as long as they held on to the Fennessy name and probably for decades after, would be impossible to surmount.

But it’s Kenny and the black girl-woman staring at her with contempt. How’d that happen?

“How you live with yourself,” she hisses at Kenny, “is anyone’s guess.”

“How I live with myself?” Kenny says as the woman grabs at his arm, but he walks right through it to reach Mary Pat.

She feels suddenly at sea. She didn’t want this. For a moment she can’t think of anything to say, she just wants to slink out of here, she just wants to go back to searching for Jules. But it’s been building up for so long, ever since Kenny left her, and the words just fall out of her mouth.

“We were happy.”

He says, “We were happy?”

It hits her — they weren’t. She was. But he never seemed to be.

“We hit a few bumps.”

He says, “Those weren’t bumps, Mary Pat. They were our fucking lives shriveling. From the time I could walk, all I ever saw was hate and rage and people pounding booze so they wouldn’t feel it. Then they’d get up the next day and do the same fucking thing all over again. For fucking decades. I spent my whole life dying. Whatever time I got left, I’m living it. I’m sick of drowning.”

The beautiful black girl is looking at them with a calm Mary Pat finds both admirable and insulting.

Mary Pat looks back at Kenny and can see past his anger (and her own) to the hope in his eyes — teeny-tiny but flaring — as if it’s saying, Live this new life with me.

And some part of her almost says, Yes, let’s go. Some part of her almost grabs his face and crushes her lips against his and says through gritted teeth: “Let’s fucking go.”

But somehow the words that leave her mouth are, “Oh, so you’re too good for us?”

A desperate pop escapes his lips. A sound caught somewhere between a soft scream and a loud sigh. Whatever micro-sliver of hope lived in his eyes hops the bus out of town, and now he’s looking at her with dead pupils, dead irises, dead everything.

“Get the fuck outta here,” he says softly. “If Jules shows up, I’ll send her your way.”