Faith by Jennifer Haigh

willing to fake a little warmth if she would. Isn’t that what family is all about?
    â€œHoney, it’s your sister,” she called, her voice muffled by a hand over the receiver, as if this were something I shouldn’t hear.
    As always Mike came to the phone out of breath, fresh from some feat of athletic fatherhood. When the boys were toddlers, he had enjoyed throwing them around the living room— dwarf tossing , he called it, a game that delighted all four of them. Now I imagined him in the backyard pitching Wiffle balls, the three boys taking turns swinging with an oversized plastic bat.
    â€œHappy Easter,” I said. “Please don’t make me talk to Ma.”
    â€œYou’re safe. They didn’t come.” He sounded tense, distracted, in a hurry to get off the phone.
    â€œOn Easter? You’re kidding. Is Dad okay?”
    â€œFine. The same, anyway.”
    â€œHave you heard from Art?”
    â€œNo.” Just that one curt syllable, no elaboration. Another unsettling note.
    â€œI’ve been trying to reach him since Wednesday. No one picks up at the rectory. I’m starting to worry.”
    â€œHang on a second.” Fumbling on his end, his footsteps on the stairs. Mike was taking the phone down to the basement—to get away from Abby, I assumed.
    â€œHey. Sorry.” I heard the refrigerator open and close, the pop and hiss of a fresh beer can. This, too, was unusual: Mike drinking on a Sunday night. At one time it would have been automatic, but that was before marriage and fatherhood, a long time ago.
    â€œMom was supposed to call you,” he said.
    â€œAbout what? Is Art okay?”
    Silence on his end.
    â€œMike, what the hell is going on?”
    â€œFuck,” Mike said (softly—his wife frowns on cursing). “Okay, listen: Art’s fucked. They’re saying he—Jesus, I can’t even say it. They say he molested a kid.”
    It’s hard to explain what went through my mind at that moment. The name: Aidan. And then a feeling like wind tearing through me, as through a bombed-out building; a great rush of air.
    There wasn’t much more to the conversation. The obvious questions from me— What kid? Who says so?— and Mike’s edgy silence. “Look,” he said finally. “I don’t know anything, and I don’t want to know.” Only then did I understand that he actually believed it. Without hearing Art’s side of the story, Mike believed this monstrous thing.
    â€œHe didn’t do it,” I said.
    I heard a door slam, a shrill cacophony of children’s voices. Daddy! Daddy! My brother was needed, wanted elsewhere.
    â€œBelieve what you want,” he said. “I got nothing more to say on this. Listen, I have to go.”
    T HIS EXCHANGE with Mike demands some clarification, a brief explanation as to how word travels in my family. I have said that Art and I were close, so how could he have withheld news of this magnitude? Why didn’t my mother or Mike pick up the phone? A person like Danny Yeager—a trained counselor, a member of the helping professions— might go a step further, and wonder: was I hurt or angry, or at least surprised, to be kept in the dark?
    These questions will plague certain readers—those raised, I suspect, in a different style of family. Evasion comes naturally in my tribe, this loose jumble of McGann, Devine and Breen. The reasons for this are not so mysterious. My father is a man of shameful habits. My mother is lace-curtain Irish. She will settle for correctness, or the appearance of it; but in her heart she wants only to be good. The space between them is crisscrossed with silent bridges, built of half-truths and suppressions. The chasm beneath is deep and wide.
    Those same bridges exist across the generations: my mother and her parents, my father and his. On both sides, we are a family of open secrets. When I was a child they enclosed my