Small Mercies (7 page)

A daybed sits against the wall opposite the window; a solitary box leans precariously, one corner off the edge, frames of pictures jutting above the rim. Tina walks over and sits on the daybed. She lifts the open cardboard box onto her lap. It’s filled with pictures of Wade’s dead wife, Morgan. Tina’s seen Morgan before—she and Wade had shown each other pictures of their deceased spouses on their third date—but these pictures are more intimate.

Here’s Morgan and Wade at a fancy ball of some sort: Wade next to her in a tuxedo, she in a stunning red dress. Here they are in a restaurant: she’s hoisting a glass of red wine in a jokey toast and Wade is rolling his eyes. She’s beautiful, an athletic blond girl from Northern California with a touch of mischief in her eyes. A Stanford grad, an architect.

Tina looks through the pictures and each one summons the same question: How could the same man love this woman and love me?

One particular photo draws Tina in. Morgan is alone in this one, wearing hiking gear: thick socks and clunky boots, an oppressive backpack, a sweat-stained tank top. Her hair is pulled back in a ponytail and her lips are pursed in a tight smile under sunglasses. She’s sitting on a large stone and behind her, Tina can see the white trunks of trees.

The Morgans in the other pictures are unaware, anchored to the moment of the photo, but this one
knows
somehow. Knows that another woman will be looking at this very picture one day. The look on this Morgan’s face is one of reluctant acceptance. It unsettles Tina, but after she stares at it for a minute, it’s oddly comforting.

Some part of Wade will always belong to Morgan in the way that some part of her will always belong to Bobby. That’s the way it has to be. It’s not even a sadness. It couldn’t be any other way; their losses bind them to each other. Sure, it’s other things as well, but without their losses, there’s little chance they would have found each other in a thousand years. It’s okay to admit that. Their losses were the most important events in their lives. There’s no shame in loving each other for the way they carried them.

Tina thinks back to earlier in the night on the BQE. She was so consumed by her own emotions, it didn’t sink in that they were almost in a car accident. He reached his hand across like he could actually prevent her from going through the windshield. Morgan died in a car accident on the Cross Bronx Expressway, driving up to look at a house for sale in Rye. They wanted a yard and a family to fill it. She was thirty-four, having trouble getting pregnant. The coroner said death was instantaneous, she didn’t suffer.

Small mercies.

She lifts the photo to her mouth, kisses the sunglass-ed image of Morgan.

“I’m sorry,” she says. She puts the photo back in the box and sets the box on the bed.

She wants to punctuate this moment, singe the night into her memory. She remembers the pack of cigarettes that Stephanie left in her purse. She goes back to the kitchen, finds her purse, and fishes a cigarette from the pack. She lights it on the stove top and then goes back to the office. She opens the sliding door and steps onto the terrace.

It’s cold outside. The rain has stopped, but the cement on the terrace is still wet beneath her bare feet. The terrace extends around the corner, back around to where Wade is still sleeping in the master bedroom. A covered gas grill and a few throaty pigeons are her only companions.

Tina can hear the city below. She walks to the corner of the terrace. Even at this hour, thousands of tiny lights illuminate the city. She can see the harbor through other buildings. She can see Brooklyn, the Verrazano, the ferry terminal, the hilly North Shore of Staten Island, the last-century industries of the Jersey waterfront. She feels the flesh on her legs ripple with goose pimples. She takes a drag of the cigarette.

She’s never felt smaller than she does at this moment. The enormity of the city, the space and significance of it, overwhelm her. She sees herself from a mile away, a fleck of nothing on one terrace on one floor in one tall building of thousands.

She lowers the lit end of her cigarette into a puddle on the railing. She flicks the stub out into the cold air and watches it plummet into the cradled space between buildings.

The color of the night is shifting from black to deepest blue. Dawn is coming. The daylight will break over Long Island first, make its way over the boroughs, illuminate Staten Island last. Her gaze fixes on Staten Island and its low, whispering darkness. The only place she’s ever called home. She wishes she could hold back the dawn, prevent the light from crossing the Verrazano, hold back the day and its inevitable sadnesses for all those she loves.

But her wishes are useless. The dawn’s march is steady, executed without mercy or cruelty, and even this colossus of a city is powerless against it. In mere minutes, the dawn has passed and left the pristine blueness of a perfect day in its wake.

G
ail is already awake when first light reaches the house. She skimmed through sleep, like a stone skipping over water. Strange dreams skittered away when she woke, the retreat of their dark tendrils leaving her anxious. She shifts to a sitting position, massages her closed eyes with the palms of her hands.

She puts on an oversized FDNY sweater and a pair of gray sweatpants, walks across the hall to Bobby’s room. She lies on his bed, hoping to cajole her body into another half hour of shut-eye, but it’s useless: she’s up. Nothing short of a case of Chianti will remedy that.

She goes downstairs to the kitchen, takes a Tupperware container out of the fridge, grabs a fork, and sits at the table. She uses the side of the fork like a knife, carves off a sliver of meatball. She goes back to the fridge, finds a container of sauce, and pours some in with the meatballs. She stares, bleary-eyed, out at the street. It rained in the night; she could hear it from bed. The street is still slick with it and the air smells thick and lush.

They didn’t go into the city last night. She told Michael she was too tired. She didn’t tell him about Tina’s new fella. Soon enough.

A pocket of drizzle descends on Wirra Lane. Across the street, one of their new neighbors, Dmitri, runs out from the old Grasso house to his car. He is thin, tall, Russian. The wife, Ava, seems nice; her face always carries a smile, but she speaks very little English. They have two young kids, a boy and a girl, with dirty-blond hair and the pinched faces of the frequently disciplined. The family moved in two years ago, after the Grassos moved to a retirement home in New Jersey.

“The last stop,” Sal Grasso told them on the day they moved out. Michael laughed. Gail bit her lip so she wouldn’t. Sal’s wife, Carla, punched Sal’s shoulder.

“Stop saying that.”

“What?” he said, as one beefy hand rubbed his enormous gut and the other brought a cigarette to his mouth. “How long you think I got anyway, babe?”

It was hard to argue with Sal. He was an obese, two-pack-a-day smoker charging hard on seventy, with two heart attacks in his rearview, possessed of a complete unwillingness to make any lifestyle changes at “this stage of the game,” as he put it.

But the joke was on him after all. Three months after they moved, Carla was dead. A massive stroke. The one thing Sal had never counted on was outliving his wife, who was a decade younger and infinitely healthier. The last Gail had heard was that he’d moved out to Vegas to work as a blackjack dealer, something he always wanted to do. Go figure.

The Grassos had been good neighbors: friendly, not too nosy, helped you in a pinch. Invited Gail and Michael over for drinks every year sometime around the holidays. They reciprocated with a barbecue once a summer. Close, but not too close.

The Russians aren’t as friendly. Michael gave up after inviting Dmitri to the Leaf one night. Dmitri said he didn’t drink, didn’t even thank Michael for the offer. A little brusque in his decline. That was enough for Michael.

“Even the fucking kids are unfriendly.”

Gail feels differently. These things take time. She was a stranger here once. A newcomer in a place with a distaste for newcomers. That newcomer sat at this same table, waiting for Maria.

She runs her free hand over the surface of the table. They’ve had the table since they moved in: a gift from Maria and Enzo. The oak bears the nicks, bruises, and stains of forty years. So many words—angry, joyous, sad, hopeful—have passed over it. This table has heard more secrets than a confessional box. So much news. Even Tina’s nugget from yesterday.

What was it that Maria used to say?

The news of the world passes between women in kitchens.

Gail can’t remember the Italian words, only the lilt of Maria’s voice, the hand gestures and pauses, the wooden spoon used to punctuate the point. The real news of the world: births, deaths, sicknesses, affairs. Whenever Gail had a bit of news, she told Maria here in this kitchen. And vice versa. Gail had no daughters of her own, no special confidante to pass news along to. There were friends, of course, but it never felt the way it did with Maria.

Until Tina. They’ve spent a good bit of the past ten years at this table: talking, crying, commiserating. Tina sat with her at this table on the night Franky was arrested. Two days after Christmas. No one had seen him since Thanksgiving, when he showed up drunk to Peter’s house. They didn’t have any details but Gail knew it was bad. Franky had called Michael and Michael had called the only lawyer he knew: Peter. There was nothing to do but wait. So Tina waited with Gail. Had a friend stay over to watch her own kids, sat here through a long, eerie night, holding Gail’s hand, both of them sneaking glances at the phone. It finally rang a little after six in the morning.

Peter said that Franky was being held in the Tombs, would be arraigned later that morning, would probably be released later that day, but they might need to line up some money for bail. Peter had already hired a good criminal lawyer, someone who knew state courts, handled street crime.

“What did he do, Peter?”

“He beat the shit out of a cabby outside the ferry terminal in Manhattan. Broke his nose.”

“Why? Why would he do that?”

“He says the guy said something about you.”

“About me?”

Her stomach churned. Bile climbed into her mouth.

“About his mother. Like, ‘fuck your mother,’ something like that. Who the hell knows, Mom. He’s not making a ton of sense.”

After Gail hung up with Peter, Tina heard her confession. She was responsible for Franky getting arrested. What she’d said to him at Thanksgiving had precipitated this incident. But it was more than that. She blamed herself for everything that was wrong with Franky. She’d failed him from the start, had never known how to be the mother he needed. She’d cut him too much slack except on the few occasions when he really needed it. She dismissed Tina’s protestations to the contrary.

“I’m a horrible mother, Tina. Don’t ask my advice on raising kids anymore.”

Tina didn’t listen. She came to the table again and again, seeking Gail’s counsel. When Alyssa was being teased at school, beyond the usual adolescent girl nonsense. When Bobby was having trouble reading. When Alyssa was driving her nuts with her moodiness, which was pretty much all the time. Nothing terrible, thank God. Just the everyday trials and tribulations of motherhood, complicated by the absence of a father. Gail’s advice was simple, reassuring.

Be patient. This will pass. All kids go through an awkward phase. Bobby was a late bloomer too. Let them make their own mistakes. You’re doing a great job. You’re a great mother.

It wasn’t always about the kids. One day, Tina was in a nasty mood, had even snapped at Gail a few times. When the kids were out of the way, Gail sat her down, asked her if something was wrong. Tina’s face tensed for a moment, but then she started to laugh.

“How can I say this, Gail? I’m . . . frustrated.”

“About what?”

Tina raised an eyebrow, coughed suggestively.

“It’s, uhh, it’s been a while.”

The news of the world passes between women in kitchens.

That’s what Maria said, one of the things she used to say anyway. She said other things too, mostly advice on how to raise kids, the advice that Gail passed along to Tina years later. Gail listened to every word, soaked in every suggestion. She’d gotten no guidance from her own mother. Constance had only ever said one thing on the subject.

“Don’t have kids, Gail.”

Inside a diner on Third Avenue. A lit cigarette in one hand and a spoon in the other, alternating sips of tomato soup with drags from the cigarette.

“What?” Gail asked.

“Don’t have children. They’ll bring you nothing but unhappiness.”

Gail flinched. She searched her mother’s eyes for knowledge. Was this a sick joke? Did she already know somehow?

No. Her face was earnest, the advice as sincere as it was impossible to follow. Gail was already pregnant and about to move to Staten Island and sitting there, miserable and nauseated, for the express purpose of telling her mother those two things. She’d told her about the move first, which was a mistake, because it prompted her mother’s remark. She didn’t know about the pregnancy; she was referring to the move. Of course she was. Everything that was done in the world was done for the purpose of hurting her mother.

Gail bit her lip. She should tell her mother about the pregnancy. It would explain things. This was not abandonment. They were seeking a better life for their child, something so fundamental it could explain the history of human movements on the planet. Her mother should have understood that.

But something held her back: fear. Not for herself, but for the child she carried. Her first maternal instinct. Protecting her unborn child from the words of its grandmother. Gail and her mother finished their meals in silence. When they stepped out of the diner together, Constance would not take her arm. A warm September night, the last gasp of summer. The streets of Bay Ridge were bustling, people out and about. The sun had slipped from sight, but the clouds above glowed an apocalyptic red. Men stood outside bars, hoping for a last glimpse of skin before the weather turned. Excitement, bordering on panic, in the air.

The men in the street stared at Gail as she passed, as if she were some rare beauty, which she knew she wasn’t. Her looks fell somewhere between plain and pretty. Reddish hair, but not the luxuriant fire of a movie star, just a dull auburn that most people mistook for brown. A smattering of freckles haphazardly strewn across her face. A lack of curves generally, highlighted by the near absence of breasts. In high school, the boys used to tease her, call her a pirate.

Like a pirate, Gail.

With your sunken chest.

Get it? Ha ha.

Her eyes have always been her saving grace, capable of conveying emotion with a bracing intensity. A watery blue, cool and pure. Some girls spun and their skirts lifted ever so slightly; others leaned and left a button loose. Gail stared.

Once, when her tormentors called her a pirate, she fixed her eyes on the their ringleader, Andy Tormey, whose confidence flagged in the ferocity of her stare. A few weeks later, Andy stuck his tongue in her mouth behind the brick outhouse on the playground on Ridge Boulevard. When he moved his hand up toward the tit that he’d joked wasn’t there, Gail laughed but absorbed the lesson: play to your strengths. After that, she did all that she could to draw attention to her eyes. She was never as popular as the girls with big chests or the girls who let the boys fiddle under their skirts, but she got her fair share of attention. And the jokes about her chest ended, especially after she dumped Andy before he could get his hands up her shirt.

No beauty queen, but she’s okay with that.

The men stared anyway. They ignored the ring on her finger, the old woman at her side. They will disregard a stroller too. Michael was right; there were better places to raise a family.

She stared back at the men, hoping to embarrass the more brazen oglers. They laughed but looked away.

The remainder of the walk was slow and silent. Constance shuffled along and Gail followed a pace behind her. They reached her mother’s building. Her parents lived on the third floor and she usually helped her mother up the stairs, but Constance turned to her at the building’s entrance. They hadn’t spoken a word since the diner. Through her mother’s glasses, Gail saw her own eyes, the one gift her mother had given her without condition.

Constance’s eyes were older, but held the same power as Gail’s. She found Gail’s gaze and held it.

My husband is a drunk. One of your brothers is in Vietnam, another is a junkie, and I don’t know where the third is. Probably dead. I lost a child, your sister, when she was two. You are my youngest child. You are all I have.

Gail nearly faltered.

“Mom, I . . .”

“Yes, Gail?”

She smelled the soup on her mother’s breath, mixed with cigarettes. Another wave of nausea hit her. She found a reserve of strength somewhere.

“Do you need help getting up the stairs?”

Constance didn’t answer. She walked inside and closed the door behind her.

* * *

Three weeks pass. They haven’t spoken. No calls. No visits. Two nights before the move, her father calls.

“Everything all right, Goodness?”

“Everything’s great, Dad.”

“We haven’t seen you. Everything all right?”

“Grand.”

“Okay then. Maybe I’ll see you Saturday before mass?”

She hadn’t told him.

“Sure, Dad. See you Saturday.”

If she had, he would have asked Gail to meet him at Kelly’s or Leggett’s or whatever shit hole he was still welcome in. He would have tapped the stool beside him and picked a quarter from his pile of change on the bar. A smile. Always charming, never belligerent. “Feckless,” that’s what her mother said, a “feckless man.” Feckless, like it was the worst thing someone could be.

And maybe it was.

“Okay, Goodness,” he would have said, “we’ll spin this twenty-five-cent piece here and if it comes up heads, you leave for that godforsaken place. But if it’s tails, you stay here, among the good Christian souls of Bay Ridge.”

Because that’s what he did when she was a kid, whenever Gail was sent to fetch him at this or that saloon.

“Okay, Goodness, heads we leave. Tails, we stay for one more.”

And then he’d spin it. It would take a few tries sometimes, but then he’d send it roaring and it would shoot down the bar, ricochet off the mug of some startled inebriate, fly off the wood, and come to rest in some dark patch of the floor.

“Go look, Gail, which is it?”

She would lean down, her back blocking his view of her inspection.

“It’s tails, Daddy.”

“’Course it is.”

Then he’d push his empty mug across the bar for a refill. He’d hand Gail a Coke in a small glass bottle. She lied because it was better to sit there with him happy than to walk home with him sullen. Better to put off the shouting for as long as possible. Better to get a Coke than not get a Coke. So it was always tails until her mother got wise and started sending her brother Tom instead of Gail. Tom was simple. He reported the results of the coin flip honestly, without consideration for what might be best for himself or his siblings.