The Town: A Novel (55 page)

He looked back at her. “Where is this coming from?”

“I’m ready to go away too. I’ve decided. I need the change, like you. Away from the Town, I think I can be a different person. Away from
him
.” She glanced at the mayhem on TV, people running out of a burning building. “You know he’s pissed at you leaving. Thinks you’re hiding from him here. I said you’re hiding from me.” She looked back at Doug. “Which one of us are you hiding from?”

“I’m not hiding.”

“He smoked tonight. He’s dusted. Thought you’d want to know that.”

Doug rocked on his feet, squeezing his fists.

“You know what’s going to happen to him after you leave. Without you here, he’s going to fuck up, and they’re gonna come after his half of the house, and then where am I?”

“They can’t take the house.”

“Like hell they can’t. Where’s my security? Why am I still asking guys for rides, and washing Jem’s frigging underwear?”

“That’s between you and—”

“It’s not because of him that I’ve waited. That I’ve been so fucking patient
all these years. I took Jem’s shit only because I always believed my time was coming. My time with you. My whole
life
I’ve lived in terms of you, Duggy. What—have I not been
loyal
?”

“What does loyalty got to do with—”

“It has to do with
fairness
. It has to do with me being treated the way I
deserve
. I have been here since the beginning—before Dez, and
waaay
before Joanie. I’ve been loyal and I’ve been patient. But I will not be left behind. I
deserve
not to be left behind.”

“Kris—” he said, but had nothing to follow it up with, having no idea where all this was coming from. “Fuck is going on here? You want to go? Then go, same as me. There is no chain on any of us, holding us to the Town. Just the same, there’s no chain holding us to each other, either.”

“You’re wrong there.” Her smile was out of place.

“You’re wrong.”

“You gotta give this up. Every day of your life, living in that same house, walking those same streets, looking up and always seeing the same patch of sky—this is the result. Hanging on too tight, thinking that things can stay the same forever.”

“Just because we’ve been having some trouble, and you’ve been going through this thing—”

“It’s not a
thing,
” Doug said, needing to end this. “I am leaving. Leaving with someone else.”

He felt like shit saying it because he wanted so hard to believe it himself. Not because it hurt Krista. Krista had come there to be hurt. To make him hurt her, then use his pity to make him stay. That was why she came toting Shyne.

“Kris,” said Doug, glancing again at the mute phone. “We grew up together, you and me. Like brother and sister—”

“Don’t fucking sugar me off.”

“—and it should have stayed that way. I wish it had. We were too close. It wasn’t right.”

She stood and came to him. She reached out to his bare stomach, and his gut rippled, but he was backed up against the window. Her hands crept around his sides and she leaned into him, holding him. There was no way out of this clinch without getting rough. He let her hold him but did not return the embrace. He felt nothing for her. He watched Shyne flashing blue-green in the light of the TV, her body casting a small, flickering shadow. Then he looked at the door that Claire was going to knock on, knowing that Krista would ruin him if she had the chance.

She released him, her earlier smugness returned to her face. “You can’t wait for me to leave, can you?”

“You picked up on that.”

“Why isn’t she here now? If she’s going with you.” Krista looked at the room. “And such a trashy little fuck pad. After a Tiffany necklace, I’d’ve thought a room at the Ritz or something.”

“What did you say?” Doug went to her, fast. “Who told you about that?”

She was smiling now, having drawn him to her. “A little bird.”

Doug grabbed her arms. “Who told you?”

She smiled more fiercely in his grip. He shook her but he couldn’t shake away the smile. “You always did like it rough.”

“What do you know about a necklace?”

“I know I don’t see one around my neck. I know you’d rather see a rope there than jewels.”

“You don’t know what you’re talking about,” he said, pushing her away to keep from smacking her.

“You better be more careful. Pushing around a pregnant woman like that.”

Doug froze. She looked down at her flat belly, regarding it as though it were some new part of her body, laying a proud hand over it the way pregnant women do.

“It’s Dez’s,” she said.

Doug’s hands came up to his forehead. He mashed his eyes with the heels.

“Ah,” she said. “So broken up for a friend. Most people offer congratulations.”

Doug raised his face to the ceiling, eyes still covered, elbows pointing at the corners of the room. He pressed until he saw stars.
Dez.

“You think the Monsignor will do the right thing?”

“Make an honest woman of you?” Doug said. Then he dropped his hands, his vision clearing around her defiant face. “You Coughlins.”

Her eyes were fierce, teasing. “I don’t think his mother likes me.”

“What do you want? What is this? If I agree to stay, you’ll set Dez free?”

She stepped before him, her hands resting against his pecs, fingertips light as flies. “Take me with you. I’ll get an abortion—I’ll go to hell for you, Duggy.” Her palm settled over his heart. “But do not leave me behind.”

Doug stared at her with the disgust he normally reserved for his morning mirror. “Probably we deserve each other,” he said, pulling her hands off his chest and throwing them back at her. “But I’m not doing this anymore. No more fixing things, me smoothing it over for everybody. Babysitting Jem. I told Dez to stay away, I
warned
him.”

He moved past Krista, scooping up Shyne and her bubba, the girl’s eyes still glued to the set as he carried her away.

“The fucking problem here,” he went on, “is me. I’m the enabler. I’m the
guy helping everything hold together, when it’s all screaming to break apart.” He marched to the door with Shyne under his arm, opened it, turned. “Everybody will be better off once I’m gone.”

Krista followed him only as far as the corner of the bed. “Duggy. Do not do this.”

“Or what? You’ll have the kid? Just like you had this one?” Sad Shyne sagged under his arm, hanging from his side. “Who’s her father, Krista? Huh? Since we’re letting in a little truth here. Who was it? Was it Jem?”

She recoiled in disgust.
“Jem?”

“Who, then?”

Her “Fuck you, Duggy” seemed heartfelt, but he couldn’t trust anything she said now. And anyway the point was moot.

“You know what?” he said. “If I was going to take anyone with me, it would be her.” Doug set Shyne gently down on the floor of the empty hall, then stepped back into the room.

Krista was not budging. “We’re coming with you.”

“You’re getting out of here. Now.”

“Duggy. Don’t you say no to me. You
think
about this, Douglas MacRay. I want you to
think
about what you’re doing—”

He grabbed her arm. She fought him—
“No!”
—pounding his chest, pushing up at his chin, digging her nails into his windpipe, while inexorably he maneuvered her toward the door. With a final kicking yell, she shook herself free, then walking the few remaining steps into the hallway, as though she had some last shred of pride to preserve.

Outside, she turned, alternately cool and smiling furiously. “You don’t know what you just—”

Doug closed the door, threw the lock. He expected banging, screaming, and knew that she could outlast him, this woman without shame, and that he would be forced to readmit her before guests complained and police were called.

But there was nothing. When he looked through the spyglass later, fully expecting to see her still standing there with Shyne, she was gone.

F
RAWLEY’S TELEPHONE RANG
AS he was sprinkling shredded cheese over his scrambled eggs. Ocean-driven rain whipped his window overlooking the toll bridge. His microwave clock read 7:45.

A Sergeant Somebody, calling from the emergency room at Mass General. “Yeah, Agent Frawley? Hey, we got a DWI here, banged up in a one-car in the Charlestown Navy Yard? Kissed a big anchor on display in front of one of the dry docks.”

Frawley’s first thought was Claire Keesey. “I need a name.”

“Coughlin, Kristina. Got that off the auto reg. A white Caprice Classic. Had a kid with her. Little girl’s fine, but the mother is banged up and belligerent. Claims she’s working with you, which seems specious, but she did have your card, this phone number written on the back. DSS came already and took away the little girl. Ms. Coughlin is under arrest, but she says we need to get you involved first.”

Frawley dumped his hot eggs into the garbage. “I’m leaving now.”

The walk to his car, the rain, the rush hour cost him thirty minutes. He walked the halls of Mass General in wet shoes, his creds getting him thumbed inside the ER to a wide room like a voting hall under morgue light, rimmed with curtained bays.

“Hi,” he said, stopping at the nurses’ station, “I’m looking for…”

Then he heard her voice cutting across the room—“How ’bout you put on that assless smock first, Denzel, then I will”—and started in that direction. A good-looking, flustered black doctor shrugged aside a pale yellow curtain.

“Coughlin?” said Frawley, heading past him.

But the harried doctor slowed him up. “Listen. She needs to be seen by our plastic surgeon. If you have any influence over her, please stress that. Laceration’s too deep for simple stitching, s he’ll be scarred for life.”

“Yeah—okay.” Frawley tried to get past, but the doctor had a hand on his arm now.

“She claims she was pregnant,” he said. “But the blood test was negative, and no signs of miscarriage.”

Frawley took his arm back. “Hey, I’m not family or anything, I don’t need to know.” He walked to her bay, pushed the curtain aside.

Krista was sitting in the padded visitor’s chair, a gauze wrap around her forehead with a bright red bloom over her left eye, blood spatter on her sweatshirt and her jeans. “Here’s handsome,” she said.

Frawley nodded to Sergeant Somebody, the older cop rolling his eyes at her and moving to the break in the curtain. “Five minutes,” Frawley told him.

Krista called after him, “I take mine milk, three sugars!” She smiled over tightly folded arms as Frawley closed the curtain. His card rested on the bed, on top of the folded johnny she had refused to wear. She flicked her fingernails and bobbed her crossed foot—a black shoe with a broken heel—restlessly. “I was on my way to see you.”

“That’s interesting,” said Frawley. “Considering you don’t have my address.”

“You’re in the yard.” She shrugged. “I would of found you.”

One look at her eyes told Frawley she was good and dusted. Recognizing this slowed him down a bit. “What happened?”

“I don’t know. Guess someone left an anchor in the middle of the road.” She shrugged the grin of someone for whom life was such a daily absurdity in and of itself that a car accident made for a welcome start to the week. In that grin Frawley discerned the bullying contempt of her brother.

He saw the empty car seat in the corner—blue plaid fabric crumb-dusted and milk-stained—its vacancy like a mouth opened to scream.

Krista saw him looking, sucked in her smile, swallowed it down. “She wasn’t hurt,” she said proudly. “Not a scratch.”

“Then you could be looking at Mother of the Year here,” he said, unable to help himself.

“What do you know, what I go through? Look at you.” She broke the knot of her arms. “People make mistakes sometimes—and who are you, Mr. Tsk-Tsk college boy? The mistake catcher? A fucking hall monitor with a badge, what do you know about someone like me? I am a
real
person. I am a
single mother
.”

“Your daughter is in the backseat of a state van, being driven by a stranger to the Department of Social Services. How long do you want to talk here?”

Krista stared, eyes dampening. Frawley was being hard, but it was working.

“What were you coming to see me about? You needed a babysitter? I tried to call you twice, you hung up both times.”

She glowered at the waxy curtain, keeping her dusted emotions in check.
“DSS only holds her for a while. There’s an evaluation. Nothing happens until the evaluation.”

“So maybe you want a lawyer here, then. Not the FBI.”

She looked at him again, nearly amazed. “Why is it I’m always the one who gets used? Every man I know.”

“Who’s using you here? Who called who? Who’s asking for help—me? I’m pretty sure I’m here because you want your daughter back. Because you can use me to get her.”

“Real people make
real
mistakes—”

He talked over her. “This is not about you anymore, this is about your daughter.
Look
at this empty car seat.”

She did, her eyes blinking wet.

Frawley went on, “You’re going to need some sort of plea agreement on these charges now, in order to retain custody.”