I feel Shadow’s wiry coat beneath my fingers; he rests his head in my lap as I read further in Susannah’s daybook. It has evolved from a quotidian recording of accomplishments and accounting to what one might consider a proper journal, used to record thoughts and impressions, fears and hopes. When I was in the early days of my incarceration, the prison psychologist had suggested that I jot down my thoughts in a journal, telling me that it might help me figure out why I was there. Maybe even alleviate the depression. I tried for a while. It was something to do.
“Goody Mallory’s dog has followed me home,” Susannah wrote.
I get a little chill at those words. I put my hand on my dog’s head.
I was called to attend Mrs. Dalton’s lying-in. When I returned home, having not been offered the courtesy of a ride, I walked the quickest way, through Dogtown, past Goody’s now-empty house. I did not see the dog, but I felt as though I was no longer alone. Seeing no one, I took it that my tiredness was playing tricks on me. Upon arrival at my own door, the cur made his presence known. I tried to chase him off, but he was obdurate. I shut my door on him, hoping that he’d haunt someone else.
Mrs. Dalton’s lying-in did not go well. I am growing too old to endure the long wait for a babe to make its appearance. When her labor did not progress, Mr. Dalton sent for Dr. Bellingham. Bellingham will have my fee. I am sent home with only a meat pie as payment. Perhaps that is what attracted that beast to my door, the scent of it. I cannot pay my rent in stale meat pies. I still have no settled accommodation. I do not wish to become another widow’s lodger.
I shared the meat pie with the dog. He was very grateful. I will allow him to stay.
I love that she’s kept him. I read between the lines and see that her dog, like mine, is filling an empty space.
I bump into Tucker again, this time at a place in Rockport, Roy Moore’s Fish Shack. It is jammed, and I am waiting for a table when Tucker walks in. Seems like the right thing to do, so I ask him to join me. Funny, it’s quicker to get a table for two than a single. Fish cakes and beans. Yum. We share an appetizer of fried calamari. Naturally, the talk centers on our common project, the Homestead, which leads me to bring up the journal we found. “I’ve been curious about something. Susannah mentioned a Dr. Bellingham. Any relation?”
“Our most illustrious ancestor. Elijah Bellingham. His father was a fisherman, but he inculcated a love of learning in his one and only son. Sent him to Harvard. Couldn’t keep him off the Cape, though, and he came back to practice medicine.”
“That’s cool. And you’re a direct descendant?”
“He was my fifth-great-grandfather. My dad was named Elijah. Fortunately, they went with a different tradition when they named me and my brother.”
“What was that?”
Tucker points to himself. “Mother’s maiden name, also a longtime Cape Ann family, and my brother was given her favorite boy’s name, Steve. Stephen.”
“Are you the elder?”
“I was.”
I note the past tense. I wonder if I should ask about it, but our desserts have arrived.
Tucker licks the last of his blueberry pie off the end of his fork. “So, what did this Susannah woman say about my ancestor?”
Dr. Bellingham’s name had come up in several entries, always in relation to a patient she either was attending or thought she would attend. Apparently, from what I can gather from the arcane style of her writing, women, mothers-to-be especially, were turning more and more often to the doctor instead of to Susannah, who had been a local midwife. I tell Tucker this, then add, “I think she was in trouble. She asked this Baxter guy if she could stay on, but he wouldn’t barter anymore. He wanted cash and she was cash-poor.”
“Because this Doc Bellingham was horning in on her territory?”
“Maybe.” I push the remainder of my pie aside. “Do you think she ended up in Dogtown?”
“I suppose so. Although I think that Dogtown was pretty much defunct by her time.”
I start rooting around in my purse for my wallet. “You know, she had a dog.” I pull out my share of the tab. “She wrote that he followed her home as she walked through Dogtown. She said that he belonged to one of the old ladies—somebody she called Goody Mallory.”
“You seem to have gotten really caught up in Susannah’s story.”
“Do I?” I laugh. “Well, I have gotten kind of attached to her. Imagine, here’s somebody who lived in the same house I’m in. Who had a good life, and then trouble, and, well, then a dog.”
“Like you?”
For the first time I wonder what, if anything, Tucker has been told about me.
“Yeah. Like me.”
I thought that the only thing that might mitigate Charles’s anger at me and Tilley was to act on his wishes about my parents’ house, now just my mother’s house. I would become complicit with Charles in persuading my grieving mother that she had no choice but to give up the house where she and my father had lived for forty years, where she’d raised her six children. Where she had lodged memories in every nook and cranny. Yes, I chose the wrong battle. I knew that I couldn’t talk to her, so I approached it in another way. I went to Paulie.
On the face of it, what Wright, Melrose & Foster was doing wasn’t altogether unreasonable. One last house on a block destined for improvement was an obstacle but not terminal to the project.
“Paulie, they’ll get it in the end. You have to help her see that she can get so much more if she just asks for it.” I was in Charles’s study, a place that felt more appropriate to this conversation. Tilley played at my feet. I wanted to make this call when he wasn’t around, to talk without being cued as to what to say. To do this in my own way. I picked the puppy up and put her in my lap, fully aware that what I was doing was bargaining for her continued presence in my life.
“It’ll kill Teddy.”
“Paul. Teddy is a grown man. He won’t die from leaving his childhood home. He might even benefit from it.” I believed my own rhetoric. I felt like I’d stumbled upon a truth, and I pressed the issue. “Isn’t it just possible that Mom has, well, enabled Teddy?”
“Enabled, how? By caring for him? How do you enable someone so physically disabled? You make it sound like he had a choice.”
The cell phone in my hand began to feel hot to the touch. Tilley was still on my lap and I realized that I was clutching her neck skin in my fingers to the point where she wriggled to get free of me. “That’s not what I mean. I mean that if he had a place to live where he could be better accommodated, he might develop some independence. She might get a break.” I put the puppy down.
“Rosie. Isn’t it enough that she’s lost her husband? Does she have to lose her home, too?” Paulie sounded tired, weary of my badgering. “I swear to you, if your boyfriend’s company pulls this eviction off, we will never forgive you.”
“It’s eminent domain, not eviction. They will pay fair-market once. If she negotiates with them now, she’ll get a better deal.”
“Listen very carefully, Mary Rose Collins. You will never be forgiven. You will have chosen the wrong side. Are you willing to chance that? Do we mean so much less to you than Pretty Boy? You like the money; you like the high living. We represent your upbringing, Rosie. And that’s why you’re on his side, pretending to be something you’re not.”
I was shocked, to say the least, that my eldest brother, the most adult of all of us, could resort to this kind of threat. “I’m just trying to get Mom the best option. I’m looking out for her, and you all have your heads in the sand. You can’t prevent it. Don’t you get that?”
“Perhaps not. But that still puts you on the wrong side. That still makes you a traitor.”
“That’s harsh, Paulie. For just wanting to do the right thing.”
“That ship sailed, Rosie. The right thing would have been to keep your mouth shut when you were here, when Mom was so vulnerable and we had more important things on our minds.” I heard my brother suck in a deep breath and I thought that he was trying to calm himself down. “Your moral compass is screwed up, Rosie. Frankie was right, you’ve swallowed whatever high-priced Kool-Aid that bastard is feeding you. You ran away that day. Don’t you get it? You should have come back. You should have shut your trap and sat there like a good daughter and been with us when Dad passed. Not run back to your cushy life in New York, showing up at the funeral all decked out in fancy high-priced clothes, never letting go of that man’s arm for fear you’d show some freakin’ emotion.”
I was beyond words. So much hate spewing from my eldest brother’s mouth.
“Do you all feel this way?”
“Yes.”
I flung my phone across the room. It landed softly on the Aubusson carpet.
I left the study to throw myself down across our bed in a fit of weeping. Charles wasn’t home, and for all the fantasy about greeting him with good news from my conversation with Paulie, I was about to fail in his eyes once again. Maybe it was grief, maybe frustration, maybe fear, but the tears flowed until I was gasping for breath and crumpled up on the floor. How could my eldest brother, almost a surrogate father to me when I was growing up, talk to me like he had? Where was the love, the kindness, the care that had informed our relationship from the time I was born? By the time it was over, tears had gone from hurt to anger. And then I realized that Charles was home and Tilley was, once again, loose in the house.
I scrambled to my feet. Charles had come in and gone straight to his study, which usually suggested that he wasn’t in a good mood. I heard the tink of decanter against glass and I knew right then that my failure to convince Paulie to help would be incendiary. I washed my face, reapplied foundation and blush, and ran a hand through my hair. Shoulders straight, chin up. I was going to pretend that I hadn’t made that call. I went into the kitchen, made it look like I’d thought about dinner.
“Rose.” Charles’s voice was flat.
“In the kitchen.” Mine was cheery. “Do you want to order out or shall I pull out steaks?”
“Get in here.” Beyond flat now, his voice was steely, and I almost knew without seeing that Tilley’s latest infraction was the worst yet.
The puppy had, in the short time I’d been wailing into my hands, taken her tiny needle-sharp teeth to the corner of Charles’s revered grandfather’s leather club chair, chewing off a great strip of leather, peeling it away from the frame, leaving a gaping hole and masticated ancient leather. “Oh my God, Charles, I am so sorry.”
Fury had drained all the color out of his face. His mouth was fixed, a fleck of spittle in one corner. His eyes narrowed and his fists clenched. His body was rigid and I was helpless to soften it. I was afraid for myself in that moment. I had no idea of the kind of violence he was capable of.
“Where is Tilley?”
Shadow, who has been waiting patiently for me in the car, nudges me from the backseat. These memories rise from time to time, like a recurring illness. I don’t go so much into submission against these thoughts, as I have learned to push them away when they come. But, sometimes, I haven’t the strength. I fit the key into the ignition.