willing to fake a little warmth if she would. Isnât that what family is all about?
âHoney, itâs your sister,â she called, her voice muffled by a hand over the receiver, as if this were something I shouldnât 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 roomâ 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.
âHappy Easter,â I said. âPlease donât make me talk to Ma.â
âYouâre safe. They didnât come.â He sounded tense, distracted, in a hurry to get off the phone.
âOn Easter? Youâre kidding. Is Dad okay?â
âFine. The same, anyway.â
âHave you heard from Art?â
âNo.â Just that one curt syllable, no elaboration. Another unsettling note.
âIâve been trying to reach him since Wednesday. No one picks up at the rectory. Iâm starting to worry.â
âHang on a second.â Fumbling on his end, his footsteps on the stairs. Mike was taking the phone down to the basementâto get away from Abby, I assumed.
âHey. Sorry.â 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.
âMom was supposed to call you,â he said.
âAbout what? Is Art okay?â
Silence on his end.
âMike, what the hell is going on?â
âFuck,â Mike said (softlyâhis wife frowns on cursing). âOkay, listen: Artâs fucked. Theyâre saying heâJesus, I canât even say it. They say he molested a kid.â
Itâs 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 wasnât much more to the conversation. The obvious questions from meâ What kid? Who says so?â and Mikeâs edgy silence. âLook,â he said finally. âI donât know anything, and I donât want to know.â Only then did I understand that he actually believed it. Without hearing Artâs side of the story, Mike believed this monstrous thing.
âHe didnât do it,â I said.
I heard a door slam, a shrill cacophony of childrenâs voices. Daddy! Daddy! My brother was needed, wanted elsewhere.
âBelieve what you want,â he said. âI got nothing more to say on this. Listen, I have to go.â
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 didnât my mother or Mike pick up the phone? A person like Danny Yeagerâa trained counselor, a member of the helping professionsâ 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 readersâthose 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
Yenthu Wentz
Aneesa Price
Suzanne Weyn
Mary Marks
Craig Johnson
Patrice Michelle
Kate McMullan
Sherryl Woods
Steven Savile
Hallie Swanson