On the way home, Mike called Nancy’s cell phone and left a brief message giving the highlights of his conversation with Terry Russell, and then made a pit stop at Mackenzie’s Market. Mackenzie’s had become a hot spot ever since a local guy bought the winning lottery ticket for a $30 million jackpot about three years ago. Mackenzie’s also had a deli that made great Italian and meatball subs, and in the morning, breakfast sandwiches.
Mike ordered a fried egg and bacon sandwich on whole wheat along with a coffee and picked up the Sunday editions of the Globe and Herald. He ate his sandwich inside the truck and read the Globe sports—too much baseball coverage; then again, ’tis the season. Ten minutes later, he tossed the paper onto the passenger seat and saw a group of mostly teenage boys walking up Delaney with their whiffle-ball bats. Probably on their way to Ruggers Park. You didn’t go to the park at night, not unless you were looking to score some drugs, and most mornings you’d find condoms mixed with the cigarettes and empty booze bottles scattered on the grass and in the dugouts where hookers often took their johns.
It hadn’t always been that way. Back when he was a kid—and, when you got right down to it, it hadn’t been that long ago, right?—local bands would put on free concerts at the park during the summer. He played touch football there, and back then the worst thing you had to worry about was broken glass. One summer afternoon—the last summer with his mother, in fact—he had fallen on a jagged bottom piece of a beer bottle and cut his knee right open, the pain so bad he was sure shards of glass had made their way underneath his kneecap.
He couldn’t ride his bike home, so Bill and this wiry, buck-toothed spaz named Gerry Nitembalm helped him walk back to Mackenzie’s. Mr. Demarkis, a neighbor of Gerry’s, saw the bleeding gash on Mike’s knee and told him to get his butt in the backseat of the car, Bill hopping in along with him.
Because of his age,Mike needed a parent or legal guardian to sign a form authorizing the hospital to administer care. He called home for over half an hour and but his mother never picked up.
“She said she’d be home all day,” Mike told Bill.
“You’re going to have to call your dad.”
“Are you insane?”
“You want to sit here in pain all night?”
Bill called the garage, got Cadillac Jack on the phone and explained the situation. Lou showed up fifteen minutes later, his face flushed and getting darker by the second as he listened to Bill explain what had happened at the park, Bill stressing the word accident.
“How many times I told you not to play down there because of the glass?” Lou said. “You messed up that knee, that’s it. You won’t be playing Pop Warner in the fall.”
Bill said, “It was my fault, Mr. Sullivan. Mike didn’t want to go and I made him.”
“Get your butt on home, Billy,” Lou said.
Bill paused at the emergency room doors, turned around and mouthed the words “I’m sorry” to Mike before leaving.
Two hours later, his knee bandaged and stitched with staples, Mike leaned on his crutches and watched as Lou peeled off three one-hundred dollar bills from his money clip to settle up the hospital bill. When Mike hobbled outside the ER doors, Bill and his father were sitting on the stone stoop.
“Sully,” Mr.O’Malley said. “How’s the knee?”
Lou said, “Just some bad cuts. He’s goddamn lucky he didn’t ruin his knee.”
“Accidents happen,” Mr. O’Malley said, and then shifted his attention to Lou. “You remember those days, right, Lou? Like that summer you were horsing around in Salmon Brook Pond and you slipped and broke your wrist. You were sixteen, remember?”
Lou walked right by him without answering.
Mike sat in the backseat on the way home, Lou in the front, smoking, grinding his teeth. Mike tried to hold it together, tried to steer his mind away from what was going to happen the second they got home and felt his insides get all knotted up and turn to water.
Nothing happened—not to him, anyway. But when his mother stepped inside the door? He heard the screaming, the broken dishes and the cries for help behind his closed bedroom door, through the pillow he stuffed over his head. Lou was pissed off because his wife should have been the one down at the hospital—not him. At least that was what Mike had always believed that fight was about.
The pay phone at Mackenzie’s was still there, still near the dumpster, the phone one of those new Verizon models with a bright yellow receiver that would have gone nicely with Bill’s new Ford Escape. Mike stared at the phone, the memory from the hospital teetering in his mind, unsure of where it belonged now—that memory one of dozens.
I thought you came for the truth, Michael.
Lou’s words from their visit at the jail.
Mike got out of his truck and walked over to the pay phone, one hand reaching back for his wallet. The piece of paper with the phone numbers was wedged in against the slot holding a calling card he used for times when his cell phone crapped out. He picked up the receiver, hit zero for the operator.
“I want to make a call and charge it to my calling card,” Mike said after the operator came on.
“And the number you’d like to call, sir?”
“It’s in France,” Mike said. “Can you dial it for me?”
“Yes sir. Just provide me with the number.”
Try the home phone number first and work your way down. Mike recited the series of numbers, then his calling-card number, and the operator told him to hold on. A moment later,Mike heard the connection go through, heard the ring bring life to a phone in some house halfway around the world, Mike’s stomach clenching at the sound of it, a part of him wanting to hang up.
The phone on the other end picked up. “Allô,” the male voice said.
Mike’s breath caught in his throat.
“Allô.”
“Jean Paul Latiere.”
“C’est Jean Paul.”
“I’m sorry, I don’t speak French.”
“This is Jean Paul.”
“I’m calling you about Mary Sullivan.”
“I’m sorry, but I do not know—”
“My name is Michael Sullivan. I’m her son.”
A slight pause from the other end and Mike spoke into it, spoke quickly: “I have pictures of the two of you together in France. I know she moved out there to be with you. I know all about you, your connection to her.” The words were tripping over each other in their rush to get out. “All this time I’ve thought Lou—that was her husband. Lou Sullivan. I’m sure she talked about him. About what he did for a living.”
Trickles of silence as Mike drew in a breath, picturing Jean Paul dressed in a sharp suit and sitting in some fancy antique chair in his mansion or whatever they called them over there, Jean Paul debating whether or not he should answer the questions or find a polite way to hang up.
“I just have a few questions. Five minutes and I’ll let you get back to your life.”
“Jésus doux et merciful.”
“Look at it from my point of view,” Mike said. “You’d want to know, right?”
On the other end of the line Jean Paul sighed heavily against the receiver. “This is … I would rather not have this conversation.”
“I need to know,” Mike said, and tightened his grip on the receiver. “Please.”
It was a full minute before Jean Paul spoke.
“Francine Broux. Your mother changed her name. She was terrified of your father.”
“I know for a fact Lou flew over there and found her.”
“Yes.” A heavy sigh, then Jean Paul added, “I know all about it.”
“What happened?”
“He beat her. He broke her nose and two of her ribs.”
Mike propped his left arm against the top of the pay phone and leaned forward, rubbing his tongue against the top of his mouth, finding it dry.
“She had a very nice life here,” Jean Paul said. “I loved her very much.”
There was a hitch in Jean Paul’s voice that told Mike to hang up and run.
“It happened about a year ago,” Jean Paul said. “She woke up with chest pains. I rushed her to the hospital … I’m sorry.”
All this time his mother had been alive.
Mike felt the sting in his eyes and tried to blink it away. “I met you once, didn’t I? In Boston? I was with her, doing a Christmas tour in Beacon Hill, and she pretended to bump into you, introduced you as a friend of hers.”
A pause, then Jean Paul said, “Yes. That was me.”
“Only you didn’t plan on her showing up with me.”
Jean Paul didn’t say anything.
“So that night,” Mike said. “That was about, what, her trying to convince you to take me in?”
“Early on, I knew one thing about myself for sure: I knew I wasn’t parenting material. I’m very selfish. Very self-centered and self-absorbed.”
“She never had any intention of coming back for me, did she?”
Jean Paul didn’t answer.
“She made a point of telling me to make sure Lou didn’t find out where she was hiding,” Mike said. “Only it didn’t matter whether or not he did. She had no intention of coming back. She dropped those letters in the mail, and when she didn’t come for me, she knew I’d blame Lou.”
“I didn’t agree with your mother’s choice.”
“But you don’t regret it either.”
“We were young,” Jean Paul offered. “When you’re young, you do foolish things. You don’t stop and think about the consequences. How you’ll have to live with them.”
“She ever regret her decision?”
“I can’t speak for your mother.”
“You just did.” Mike hung up and felt the St. Anthony medal, the one his mother had given him that night at the church, bounce against his chest.