Tuesday Night Miracles (6 page)

Sincerely, Dr. Bayer
.

Seriously? Grace looks around to make certain there isn’t a hidden camera somewhere. This Dr. Bayer must be an impostor! In all her years of working in the medical field, Grace has never heard of anything like this. She’s thinking maybe she should Google this cotton-wearing woman and see if she’s for real.

But what puzzles her even more than the strange assignment is that she can’t think of one thing to do that doesn’t include another human being for three solid hours in a row. And yet, for the first time in weeks, she’s almost glad she was angry.

8

The Green Dot

L
ess than a mile away, Kit is sitting alone at her kitchen table tossing the envelope from hand to hand as if it were a hot potato. During the past six weeks, since she returned from her mother’s and from the mess she created there, she has spent a lot of time sitting alone at the kitchen table.

The old wooden table that came from her uncle Joe’s estate is her land of exile. Tonight it’s especially lonely because Peter won’t be home, not that he would offer her any solace. He’s been gone more and more lately and has switched shifts at the firehouse more often in the past two months than in the past twenty years. Anything, she imagines, to be away from his wife.

Damn it to hell!

Kit pushes herself away from the table and lets the envelope slip out of her hands. She needs to think for a moment before she finds out what happens next. Those women and that chick dipped in cotton who belongs on some kind of commune in California, a car assault, and disgusting high heels—those things make a broken wine bottle seem like a popgun, don’t they?

She’s mostly angry about having to reveal her real name. Shit, shit, and more shit. When was the last time she said it out loud? How many years has it been since one of those asshole brothers held her down and drew her name all over her face and arms with Magic Marker? Was it really that long ago when one of the nuns at Holy Name made her stand up and read from
Lives of the Saints
in front of the class because she said she hated her name?

“Agnes my ass,” Kit says, raising her voice. “My parents must have been out of their minds.”

It has been so long since Kit has thought of herself as Agnes that her head hurts. The brave and brilliant day when she erased the dowdy, small, baby Agnes from her life was the day she told the world she was Kit. Kit was strong and tough, not the patron saint of chastity and gardeners. No one would ever push Kit around the way they had pushed Agnes around. What kind of mother would let her daughter be called Agnes? What kind of mother would never intercede? Who cares if that was her great-grandmother’s name? An Agnes at a Catholic school was like a moving target.

“Your name is an old lady’s name,” the kids on the playground would remind her. “Agnes-Pagnes is an old lad-iee,” they would chant.

Remembering anything about Catholic school makes Kit roll her shoulders, while an invisible but totally physical shudder rolls through her body like a wave on Lake Michigan. I’ve worked so hard to forget all those horrible experiences—the way I was treated, my brothers, one horrid brother especially, she thinks. There are some things I refuse to remember.

And now this. A secret envelope? No way was she going to open it in front of strangers.

Kit finally takes off her coat and throws it on the counter, grabs a beer out of the refrigerator, and walks through the house to make certain the doors are locked. There is no reason to leave the porch light on because Peter won’t be home until morning, maybe later if he does another shift.

Thoughts of Peter still make her heart thump. He’s been a wonderful husband, and the kind of father who still has a relationship with his grown daughter. When he’s not home, Kit misses his energy bouncing off every wall in the house.

The house. Their house. For so many years the mid-size two-story Colonial had mostly been hers. From the outside the black shutters, low bushes, and the gorgeous towering evergreen trees made the house look like a suburban postcard.

Kit had inherited tons of beautiful antique furniture from a variety of aunts and uncles, and somehow through the raising of one daughter, various family functions, and a parade of teenagers most of it was still half-beautiful. Underneath the throw rugs it was obvious that the wooden floors needed to be redone, and the last time a new appliance came through the front door her daughter was in middle school.

An interior decorator would have a heart attack up there on the second floor, where Kit refuses to empty her daughter’s room. It’s as if Sarah has just walked out to get a glass of milk. The bed is half-made, old shoes are all over the place, the desk is littered with papers. Kit can’t bring herself to change a thing, even though her daughter has graduated from college and has a job halfway across the country. The other bedroom was supposed to be for the brother Sarah never had. Kit is the lone female in the history of the Ferranti family who could only have one child. Who has a hysterectomy with the first baby? As if that was her fault. No one on her mother’s or her father’s side of the family will ever own up to throwing out a bad reproductive gene.

The room Kit shares with her husband actually makes her laugh every time she walks through the bedroom door. Both she and Peter were sticklers for neatness when Sarah was growing up, and now their room looks like it belongs to a college freshman who has just figured out Mom isn’t going to make her put away discarded clothes.

“Underwear on the floor. Check. Bed never made. Check. Mismatched socks lying in all four corners. Check. Platters with food on them all over the place. Check.” That was the last conversation she had with Peter the one night last week when they managed to go to bed at the same time.

His work schedule is a mess, but Kit sometimes feels like no one really wants to be in the same room with her anyway. She’s thinking maybe they would all like her again if she did change her name back to Agnes. Her birth family has all but disowned her since she went after Mark with the wine bottle.

Thinking about it still makes her a little crazy.
That son of a bitch. He can get angry and say things, but I can’t
. Kit knows that words can be bigger and better weapons than broken bottles, but she lashed out with the bottle. Her tongue, and the cascade of words and truths that would pour out if she could be honest, would make her wounded brother bleed to death on the spot.

Six months. That’s how long Kit sat with their mother. One hundred and eighty-five nights of hell. The tubes and the medicine and her mother crying in her sleep, what little sleep she had, and Kate lying on an old camping air mattress on the floor with her hand tucked under the blankets so that she could feel a pulse, touch her mother’s skin, make certain she was there when her mother needed her the most.

She is the only daughter, so there was no question that it would be her. It was
always
her. Kit suspended her life, while her brothers, always the heroes, came and went, and it was as if she had stepped back in time.

She cooked and cleaned and handed them drinks, and then Kit rolled her mother on her side and cleaned the sheets and emptied the bedpan. The boys arrived like glorious gods and then drove off to their nice beds and families every night, and that son of a bitch Mark—was she doing enough, was she there when Ma took her last breath, did she have her pain meds, did she really do everything she could? Who the hell wouldn’t snap?

Now there is this ridiculous court-mandated anger crap. Anger is like the middle name of her entire family. Agnes Anger Ferranti. Mark Anger Ferranti. John Anger Ferranti. Luke Anger Ferranti. Matthew Anger Ferranti. All the sweet apostles and one saint. Why she ever kept her last name when she married is now a mystery to Kit.

Girls weren’t allowed to get angry the way boys did. Boys could swear and hit things, and girls would have to go into their room like their mother, rock on a chair, dig their fingernails into the palms of their hands until there was blood, and then sometimes take the white pills that made everything go away.

Kit has spent half her life asking herself if it was possible that she could end up like her mother and her grandmother—crouched in a bedroom, taking pills, swatting away anger and evil thoughts in the dark while the men chopped wood and kicked one another.

The idea terrifies her.

Since the bottle incident, Kit has developed a weird compulsion to move her left leg up and down whenever she’s sitting. It makes her entire body move, and she looks as if she needs new medication. She wants to change. She has to change, otherwise her leg might come off.

Kit closes her eyes and sees her mother curled on her side, looking at her with her eyes wide. Near the end, her mother kept pointing to her old wooden jewelry box. Kit was desperate to understand what her mother wanted. Finally, she grabbed the box and walked it across the room to her mother’s bed.

“This? You want this?” she asked, straining to decipher what her now voiceless mother wanted.

Her mother nodded.

“You want me to open this now?”

Her mother shook her head back and forth, as if to say no.

“You want me to have this?”

Yes, her mother nodded.

“Now? Should I open it now?”

There was a long pause, and Kit saw tears pooling in her mother’s eyes that finally spilled over. Kit set the box down and rushed to her mother, wiping the tears. But her mother kept pointing at the box. It was her small treasure chest. Kit knew this. It was her mother’s private stash, the one place she could keep whatever treasures she might have accumulated in her lifetime. In spite of what her brothers might think, Kit respected her mother’s privacy and had never looked inside the small wooden lacquered box. But how she had wondered.

Kit could clearly see her mother mouth the word
no
.

“Later? I should take it and open it later?”

Her mother nodded again, and the tiniest smile crossed her face. It was the last time the two of them had anything close to a conversation.

Kit is standing by the foot of the stairs when she thinks about the jewelry box. She set it in the closet behind her boxes of old summer clothes and has yet to open it. What’s the point now? Her mother is gone. All the conversations she wanted to have will never happen. All the questions she had will never be answered. All the chances to empty her heart have been abolished. Or have they?

She shakes her head, turns, and stands for a moment by the front door. When she turns, there is no way to avoid the photographs of her daughter hanging in the entry hall.

My baby
.

Kit starts with the first photos, raises her left hand to them, and runs her fingers on the glass that is covering her daughter’s face. Beautiful Sarah. Another name of a saint, but a lovely name that wouldn’t get her harassed on the playground. Grade-school photos. Soccer-team photos. High school. Graduation. Sarah with her Kit-like dark hair trimmed to her shoulders after years of letting it grow to her waist. The gallery goes all the way down the hall, and she follows the photos as if she were dancing, touching each one, closing her eyes to remember the moment Sarah caught the ball, got an award. The house was full of life and laughter and, especially, love.

Gone now.

Sarah is on some island off the coast of Canada. Is it because of me that you’re so far away? Kit thinks. Why does everyone leave? Should I have kept my anger in the bedroom like my mother did? Was I too protective? Too quick to make sure you were okay and whole and centered and safe?

“I miss you so much,” she whispers, as she lays her forehead on the last photo.

She closes her eyes, and just then her cellphone vibrates in her pocket. She prays that it’s Sarah, but it isn’t. Kit takes a deep breath and answers the phone moments before it goes into her voice mail.

“This is Kit. Can I help you?” she says in the sweetest possible voice.

“Yes, Kit. It’s Michael Corrigan. I took care of your mother’s estate. You might remember me from when your father died. We are set to do a reading of the will but …”

He hesitates, and Kit’s stomach rises right into her throat.

“But what?” she asks, raising her voice and pushing herself away from the wall.

“There is one small complication.”

“How small?”

The bright and respected Michael Corrigan hesitates yet again.

“What?” Kit asks, impatience flooding her voice. “Man up here, Mr. Corrigan. I assure you I can take it.”

“Your brothers have asked that you not attend.”

Kit remains poised. She takes a breath, turns around to face the last photograph of her daughter, and then glances up the stairs leading to her bedroom closet and the as yet unopened wooden box.

“Am I in the will?”

“Yes, you are.”

Before she decides what to say next, Kit imagines sitting across a long oak table from her brothers. They would all be dressed up in the nice dark suits their wives had just had dry-cleaned for the big meeting. One brother would not be able to look her in the eye. They would all be politely silent, eager, wondering how much money the folks had squirreled away while they were off running around the neighborhood and terrorizing everyone smaller than them, including their own sister.

The attorney finally clears his throat.

“I’m still here,” Kit says, much louder.

“So your brothers have asked to have Peter, your husband, represent you.”

“I know who Peter is, for God’s sake.”

Isn’t this just perfect? Isn’t it just like them? Isn’t this the Good Ol’ Boys’ Club personified? Isn’t this the frosting on the cake, the top of the mountain, the day before the fat lady sings?