The Comfort of Lies (20 page)

“I’m sorry, Mrs. G.” Tia leaned forward and again patted Mrs. Graham’s veined hand. She wished she could hug her, whisk her off on a cruise staffed with men and women willing to treat her like a queen. “We can’t get cleaning people for you, but that would be the point of assisted living. You wouldn’t have to do everything
and
take care of Sam. He’d be bathed and . . . ”

Tia searched for ways to reference Sam’s accidents—his growing dependence on Mrs. Graham for his toileting needs—without offending her client.

“ . . . and made comfortable in every way.”

“Why does everyone jump to the conclusion that Sam and I should be put away? Why not shoot us? Push us out on an ice floe?”

Tia moved her chair closer, hating how agitated she’d made the poor woman. It wasn’t like Mrs. G to get so testy. Her mother had been right. Tia should watch her mouth. She shot off too quick.

“Believe me, I didn’t mean to imply that you’re incapable.” Mrs. Graham needed admiration, not manhandling; complaining was her right. “In fact, you’re doing a spectacular job. You put most of the people I work with to shame.”

She praised Mrs. G for a few more moments, eager to finish their hour with positive reinforcement, and her client did seem mollified when Tia gently squeezed her shoulder in place of a good-bye handshake.

At four in the afternoon, after three more appointments, a meeting with the Department of Children and Families, a visit to a client in a rehab, and a home visit, Tia was ready to steal an hour and leave early. She jammed the last of her folders and papers into her bottom drawer, shoving a bit to get it closed so Katie wouldn’t comment about Tia’s sloppy desk again.

“Oh, Tia, do you need some help? Your desk is just a mess.” That’s what Katie said the other day.

“Then don’t look!” Tia had wanted to say when Katie complained, but she was too embarrassed—her desk did look awful. Tia couldn’t defend the indefensible jumble.

 • • • 

Tia marched down Washington Street to Doyle’s. “Coffee with,” she told the bartender, the flat-faced one who barely acknowledged her existence. She didn’t care. He knew what she drank, and he poured with a heavy hand.

The initial swallow hit fine. First it warmed her throat, then her heart, and then her stomach.

After the second one, the picture in her mind of sad Mrs. Graham and all the rest of her clients receded just enough that Tia could breathe freely.

David slipped onto the stool next to her.

“How about some company?” he asked.

Tia examined David. His face held no hint of worry. Soon he’d drink, and then he’d hold forth on the evils of sales tax, or the long-range considerations of the euro, to which apparently only he was privy.

He leaned in to kiss her, which she accepted.

“Take me home?” she asked.

He touched her glass. “Mind if I finish this before we go?”

Tia smiled, ready to accept David as her due. She waved her arm, as though bestowing her favors on him. “Be my guest.”

He drained her glass and then ran his hand down her back. “Exactly what I have planned.”

In her numbed state, Tia could barely feel his hand, and at the moment, she found that level of sensitivity pretty near perfect.

CHAPTER 17

Tia

“Tia, we have a situation.”

Not today, please. How she hated the mornings when Richard popped his head in to complain about something or other before she’d even taken off her jacket. She hadn’t even drunk her coffee yet. Her head pounded from drinking with David last night.

“Are you listening?” Richard asked.

“I heard you. I heard you. We have a situation.” Did he think they worked at NASA? She pulled the lid off her coffee and took a desperate, hot gulp.

“We have a real problem.”

“Okay.” She shrugged an arm out of her jacket. “Got it. We have a real problem.”

“Leave your coat on. We have to go.”

“Go? Go where?” Tia tried to put the cover back on her coffee as she followed Richard out the door to the small hallway and then down the stairs.

“To your client’s house.”

Coffee splashed on her shirt. She tried to wipe it away while holding her cup and at the same time raised her right shoulder to keep her bag from slipping down.

“Who?” she asked Richard’s back. Dog hair covered his tweed sports coat.

“A Mrs. Graham.”

A gust of warm wind hit them when Richard opened the door to the parking lot. Tia stopped. “We’re going to Mrs. Graham’s house?”

“Let’s go, let’s go. The police are waiting.”

“The police are waiting?”

Richard turned to face her, his impatient expression emphasized by the deep red he turned whenever he became anxious or angry. “Could you please stop repeating everything I say and get in the damned car?”

 • • • 

Mrs. Graham tugged her sweater closer. Tia wanted to touch her, give her comfort, but two police officers stood by sternly.

She’d never seen Mrs. Graham without lipstick or when she wasn’t wearing clothes that were pressed and perfect. The pilled brown cardigan enveloping her looked as though she’d taken it from Sam’s side of the dresser.

“Oh, Mrs. G, are you all right?” Tia asked. “Do you need anything?”

Mrs. Graham looked up with an angry frown. She pressed her lips together and shook her head. The boulder in Tia’s chest became heavier. Debris covered the rug: baskets of laundry, newspapers, cloths with stains of indeterminate origin, unopened mail, and in the midst of it all, an ironing board with an iron set up like a soldier at the ready.

“A glass of water?” Tia needed to offer something.

“That’s not possible, ma’am.” The young policewoman’s words were without inflection. “Evidence isn’t finished in there.”

Stacks of dirty plates teetered on the coffee table. Smears of what looked to be spinach—creamed spinach, perhaps—covered the top one.

Mrs. Graham had been accused of attempted murder. That’s what Richard told Tia on the ride over. She supposedly fed her husband food laced with pills, and then panicked and called 911.

Tia fumbled at the catch on her bag and rummaged until she found a roll of Life Savers. “Want one?” she asked in Mrs. G’s direction, not sure whether to include the policewoman in the offer.

“Why didn’t you answer when I called?” Mrs. G’s face crumpled with despair.

“I . . . ” Tia’s voice faded. Oh, Jesus, she must have called after Tia left. Would things have been okay if she’d stayed till five? If she’d returned the call, could she have prevented Mrs. Graham from crushing those pills?

“There was no one else, Tia.” Mrs. G held out her hands, palms up, imploring Tia to help. “I needed you.”

“Mrs. G, I’m—” Tia stopped when Richard dug his fingers into her shoulder. She slipped the candy back in her handbag.

“Legal issues here,” he muttered into her ear.

“Why are we here if I can’t speak?” Tia asked.

“She asked for you. Said she had no other living relative. The police called. I thought we better check it out.”

“I’m not her relative.”

“She probably meant no other connection. I’ll explain to them.”

“If you’d called, everything would have been okay.” Mrs. Graham fussed at a hole in her sweater.

Tia remained mute, grateful that Richard had forbidden her to talk, choking on waves of Mrs. Graham’s grief and blame.

“Can I wash my hands?” Mrs. Graham asked the policewoman on her right.

“Sorry, ma’am, no.”

“But they’re dirty, so dirty,” Mrs. Graham told the officer on her left.

“It won’t be long,” he said.

“Tia, don’t you have a wet nap or something you can give me?”

Tia opened her bag again, frantic for some way to offer comfort.

The policewoman held up a broad hand. “Ma’am, please don’t.”

“Why are we here, Richard?” Tia whispered.

“They need information,” he said.

“Sam, he had an accident. I needed to clean him. Please,” Mrs.
Graham said, “please, let me clean my hands.” Soft sobs replaced her pleas.

Tia dug her fingers into her forearms. “I need to use the bathroom.” She stood, waiting to be stopped.

“You’ll have to go down the street. There’s a coffee shop.” The policewoman pointed as though the living room wall were invisible.

Tia ran out before Richard could stop her, before Mrs. Graham could speak again, but her words followed Tia down the hall.

“It wasn’t my fault, right?” Mrs. Graham’s thin voice pierced Tia. “What could I do? Let a stranger clean him? Sam wouldn’t like that. Sam is proud, just about the proudest man in America.”

Tia squeezed her eyes shut for a moment, then turned and walked back, stopping at the doorway so she could bear witness as Mrs. Graham spoke.

Seeing Tia return, Mrs. Graham sat straighter. Her watery blue eyes locked on Tia’s. “He managed fifty people at John Hancock. Fifty. Everyone looked up to Sam. I don’t care what any of you say. He always knew what was happening; he knew it was me feeding him, cleaning him.”

“You did a good job,” Tia said.

Richard glared at her.

“He knew when people came into the house,” Mrs. Graham said. “I couldn’t shame him, letting people see him like that.”

“You showed him love every day. He knew that.” Tears ran down Tia’s face. “I’m sorry I didn’t call.”

Tia walked away. She stopped at the kitchen entrance, seeing where Sam had lain before they took him out. An empty bottle of pills was next to the half-eaten bowl of applesauce into which Mrs. Graham had supposedly crushed tablet after tablet of Ativan tranquilizers.

The medication Tia had persuaded Mrs. G to request from her doctor.

 • • • 

Richard exploded the moment he slammed the car door shut. “What the hell, Tia? When was the last time you made a home visit?”

“Maybe he’ll live,” Tia said. “How much could she have gotten him to swallow?”

“Live, die, either way we’re fucked. When did you last go into that home?”

“Home visits weren’t mandated in her case.” Tia threw her head against the headrest and then immediately changed her position. Everything smelled like Richard’s dog. “She liked coming to the office. It got her out of the house. She’d come when Sam napped.”

“Yeah, I can imagine how she got him to take those naps.”

“She loved him.”

“She tried to kill him.”

“She did it for him.”

“She did it on our watch.” Richard started the engine. “Your watch.”

“She didn’t want me to come to the house.”

“Wasn’t that a fucking clue?” He pounded the dashboard. “Do you know how this will read in the
Globe?
”

“There was absolutely no hint of abuse in the home. None,” Tia insisted.

“Really?” He pulled out into traffic. “Did you see that house? How could you let her live like that?”

 • • • 

“It’s not your fault.” Bobby slid closer to Tia on the stone wall lining Day Boulevard. The ocean appeared calm under the inky night sky. He put an arm around her shoulders and hugged her close.

“Of course it’s my fault.” Tia reached for Bobby’s hand. “I should have seen it.”

“You said it yourself, she always looked perfect. And home visits weren’t mandated.”

“Mandated and the right thing aren’t the same.”

Tia wished she had one of the six-packs they used to bring here when they were kids. She’d asked Bobby to bring her here because she couldn’t face the crowd at Fianna’s. She couldn’t take any jokes tonight. He’d taken her to eat in a faceless diner in Dorchester, and then they’d driven here.

“I should have gone to her house,” she said.

“You couldn’t know. She worked hard to hide it.”

She leaned against him. “I should have seen through her denial.” His shoulder felt durable enough to be unbreakable. She slid her hand into his. She needed a friend.

 • • • 

Tia walked to work every day following the incident at Mrs. Graham’s house. No more Doyle’s. No more drinking. No more sleeping with David. She’d ended that with a sober face-to-face.

Tia had seen Bobby three times that week, each encounter chaste and pure. Twice they went out for dinner, once they went to the movies, and each time Bobby reassured her. Nothing was grey in Bobby’s world. You were right or wrong. Memories of awful choices didn’t complicate his moral compass.

She longed to walk around with that sort of righteousness. Sam would live, but confusion as to whether that was good or bad complicated Tia’s reaction. Certainly, for her, for the agency, it was good. Somehow, the newspapers hadn’t written about the tragedy that almost occurred.

Who was she kidding? The tragedy had damn well happened, and she hadn’t helped. What would happen to Mrs. G now? To Sam?

Bobby kept telling her to go easy on herself. She’d been Mrs. G’s friend, right? Hadn’t Tia been the one Mrs. G asked for? How could Tia save people when the entire system was so awful? He kept reminding her that Mrs. G had declined her help. Tia couldn’t do it alone, right?

His talk soothed her, but she knew better. She’d messed up. Maybe she’d obeyed the letter of the law, but she’d been lax in not probing deeper with her client.

Tia pulled out her iPod and tried to follow Bobby’s advice by walking faster and faster.
Fresh air! Exercise! Endorphins! Don’t blame yourself!

She sped up again, walking so quickly that she reached the coffee shop by work in half her usual time. The line at Fazenda Cafe didn’t
seem as daunting as usual. Without headaches and hangovers, things almost flowed.

Now if she could only find a way to find Bobby as exciting as she did comforting. She wanted the grain of his skin, the tone of his voice, and the texture of his hair between her fingers to electrify her like Nathan’s had.

She pushed away her obsessive Nathan thoughts, using a visualization technique Bobby had shared, though he hadn’t known she’d use it for this purpose. Nathan became a massive rock that she pushed off a cliff.

Adios
, Nathan.

“Two blueberry scones,” Tia said to the kid behind the counter when her turn came. “And a corn muffin.” Richard liked muffins; she and Katie were scone addicts. Tia would bring treats for all of them.