Small Mercies

Coyne points at the card. “If she pops her head up, you call that number and have them put you through to that extension. Or you just ask for me by name.”

“Detective Michael Coyne.”

“Bobby,” he says. “Everyone calls me Bobby.”

“Why?”

He shrugs.

“What’s your middle name?”

“David,” he says.

“But everyone calls you Bobby?”

He shrugs. “This life. You know? Try and make sense of it.”

“Okay, Bobby.” She pockets the card.

He stands and brushes at the wrinkles in his trousers. Pritchard flips his notepad closed.

“If you see your daughter,” Coyne says, “do the smart thing, Mrs. Fennessy.”

“And what would that be?”

“Have her call us first thing.”

She nods.

“Is that a yes?”

“It’s a nod.”

“As in you’ll think about it?”

“As in I heard the words that left your mouth.”

She scoops up her cigarettes and walks back to her building, lets herself in.

9

She falls asleep in the La-Z-Boy and wakes an hour later when someone pounds a fist against her door. She runs to the door and opens it without checking who’s on the other side, her body throbbing with the scream of a hope that it’s her, it’s Jules, it’s her.

But it’s not Jules. It’s not anyone. No one’s there. She looks up and down the hall. Still no one. She looks back in at her apartment. It’s empty in a way it was never empty after Dukie or Ken Fen or even Noel left. It’s empty the way graveyards are empty — filled to bursting with the remains of what can never be again.

Back in seventh grade, Sister Loretta used to say that even if hell was not the firepit with the horned demons and the pitchforks that the medievalists supposed, it was, make no mistake, a void.

It was an eternal separation from love.

What love?

God’s love.

Anyone’s love.

All love.

The pain from a pitchfork or even from an eternal flame cannot compare to the pain of that void.

“Everlasting exile,” Sister Loretta said, “the heart forever untouched and forsaken.”

Mary Pat steps back inside long enough to grab her smokes and her lighter.

When she reaches the Fields, the sign is still up — Closed for Private Function — and the lights behind the single high window are dim, but she starts knocking and she doesn’t stop. She uses her left hand because the right is still barking from the contact with Rum’s woodchuck head. She’s been pounding a solid minute when someone throws the locks on the other side of the door. Three of them. One after the other. And then nothing. It’s her last warning — if you want in, you open the door. Final chance to walk away.

The fear is not small. Suddenly, it’s the only thing she can feel. A full-bodied presence. As real and substantial as another human being standing on the sidewalk beside her. Other people have gone through this door, she knows, and never come back out. This door is not just the door to a building; it’s a border between worlds.

She flashes on Jules dancing around the kitchen in her bathrobe the other morning, pretending to box, smiling that lopsided toothy smile of hers, and Mary Pat pushes the door open.

The guy standing behind the bar has a lit cigarette between his lips and squints at the smoke floating into his right eye as he pours himself a shot of rum. He’s a guy everyone calls Weeds because he’s skinny and unpleasant to look at. Has a harelip, a left eye that floats in the socket, and is rumored to have pushed his little brother off a roof when they were kids just to hear the sound of the poor bastard landing. He’s not wearing his Baracuta jacket tonight, just a T-shirt that looks soiled in the dim light.

Larry Foyle sits at a table along the wall. Larry’s body looks like a set of tires stacked atop one another, and his neck isn’t much smaller. His head is enormous, like the head of a statue. His hands could cup a moose in one palm. He still lives with his parents and can often be found pushing his grandfather in his wheelchair along Day Boulevard. Larry is usually affable, a sly cutup, but tonight he looks at his beer and not once at Mary Pat. Like Weeds, he’s stripped down to a T-shirt. She can’t make out the state of it, or even the color, but she can smell his body odor from twenty feet.

They’re the only two men in the room. Down at the end of the bar, the back door is open; she looks at Weeds. His eyes pulse once in the poor light, an indication she’s to head to that back door. Then he downs his shot and pours himself another.

During the walk down the bar, she waits to hear the scrape of chair legs, the rustle of limbs, footsteps rushing up behind her. A vein pulses in a part of her throat she never knew a vein to exist. The bar area gives way to a thin dark corridor that leads to the bathrooms and the back door. It smells of Lysol and urinal cakes. The night breeze feels damp and warm on her face.