Lies That Bind (36 page)

Maeve thought of Jack and how, in the end, he had made sure that Evelyn had a good life, even if she wasn’t in Maeve’s. He didn’t know that Maeve had longed for her sister and would never know that now she was here.

In the driveway at the side of the Victorian, a fine mist collecting on the windshield of the Prius, she watched as an older man, his profile flattened from an unknown number of nose breakings, lumbered toward his own car, a classic but sporty BMW. She had seen him go into the house with a gift bag, which she later learned held a new iPod filled with Evelyn’s favorite songs—she loved Frank Sinatra—and multiple bottles of red nail polish.

“Jimmy Moriarty loves cars,” Jack used to say. “Helped him when he did Auto Crime in the PD. Guy can tell you any year, any make, any model. He’s amazing.”

Maeve got out of the Prius and hurried across the long driveway. “Jimmy!” she called. He pretended not to hear her but it was too late; she had caught up to him and he was going to tell her everything he knew but especially, why he hadn’t told her anything at all.

He sagged visibly. Whether it was under the weight of his heavy overcoat or the knowledge of his deception, she wasn’t sure. “Maeve.”

“You knew,” she said, the lack of accusation in her voice surprising her. She hadn’t expected to see him and this needed to be said. Out loud. He was an old man with not that much time left; that was clear from his sallow complexion, from the way his breath rattled out of his chest. He was sick. How she knew that for sure, she didn’t know, but the once hale guy who used to shuttle her father around was weakening, almost before her eyes. “Jimmy, that was so cruel.” Her voice broke on the last word. “You knew and you didn’t tell me.” She thought about what she had planned on doing, the mayhem she was prepared to unleash on Regina Hartwell. Jimmy Moriarty had no idea what she was capable of, how his deception could have wrought a chain reaction of violence and even death.

“I was going to tell you.” He looked around. “Eventually.” His mouth was set in a grim line. “I would have had to at some point soon.”

They could have avoided so much had he only acted on his intention. “But you didn’t.” Do you know what I’ve been through? Do you know how much pain this has caused? She didn’t say anything, though, because doing so would make him cry even harder than he was crying now and she didn’t think she could take that. “Would you have told me before…” She paused. She didn’t want to say it.

“Before I died?” he asked. Ironically, speaking those words seemed to calm him. “Yes.” He reached out and grabbed her hands in his. They were rough, like Jack’s used to be, with short, stubby fingers, a smattering of gray hair across the knuckles of his fingers. Working-man’s hands. He squeezed her own small hands, her fingers. “I’m sorry, Maeve. I’ll never be able to explain it to you. I’ll never be able to tell you why I did this for him and have it make sense.” He let go of one of her hands and reached into his pocket. “I don’t know what to say to help you understand, but he thought he was doing the right thing.” He looked over at the house. “Poor kid didn’t get enough oxygen at birth or something like that. But she does well. She’s happy.”

He handed her a small jewel case with a DVD inside. Maeve took it and slid it into her pocket, not knowing what it was or why he had it on his person but knowing that she would find out soon enough. She wouldn’t see him again; she knew that. There was nothing left to tell.

He looked off into the distance, over Maeve’s head at the house. “He saved my life, your father did.”

She knew that but wasn’t sure why it meant that he had to lie.

“When I moved into that place, I thought it was the end for me. Old people. Lots of old people! And me.” He chuckled at the memory. “And then I find this old brother from the Job, a little wacky, kind of forgetful, but a guy who became my best friend in the world.” He looked back at Maeve. “I didn’t know I could have a new best friend at my age. We should have been best friends all along.”

Her hair was wet and so were her cheeks, but it was only the rain.

“He asked me to never tell unless I knew I was going to die,” he said. “He didn’t want her to be a burden, something else for you to deal with. So, that’s what I did. I lied.”

Maeve closed her eyes and took a deep breath. “I’m not sure I’ll ever understand that, Jimmy. I’m not sure I’ll ever understand why you didn’t tell me the day he died.” A little ember, anger, flared in her chest. She was trying to forgive him, be true to her word, but it was hard.

“I was only respecting your father’s wishes.”

She got that. But he had waited an awfully long time after Jack’s death to let the truth be known, and only because she had found out first.

He started to cry in earnest and her heart broke a little bit. She wrapped her arms around his broad, squat body and let him cry into her shoulder. Behind him, one of Evelyn’s roommates was taking out the trash. She didn’t know Maeve but she gave her a hearty wave that Maeve returned. Her smile said it all: she was happy here.

He finally pulled away and took out a handkerchief, blowing his nose loudly. “I’m so, so sorry, Maeve,” he said. “I know the last few years have been hard on you.”

You have no idea, she thought.

“Him, too,” he said. The rain started falling harder, making it difficult to see him. “He was forgetting. He was forgetting her. He knew he should remember, but he couldn’t. That’s why he kept leaving.”

Maeve brushed her wet hair from her eyes even though she was afraid to move, afraid to interrupt his train of thought. “Kept leaving? Buena del Sol?” she asked. It was one of his nightly jaunts to the outside world that had left Jack wandering around in the dark, only to be hit by a car and left even more broken than he had been before.

“Yes.” Moriarty looked at her. “He was looking for her or something. He couldn’t remember sometimes why he left. But wanted to say good-bye. To tell her he loved her.”

She looked at this sad man in front of her, one who was so sick, who didn’t have much time left.

A tear slipped down the old man’s cheek. “He wanted to say good-bye before he forgot to.”

CHAPTER 59

Maeve settled into the couch with a glass of wine so big that she was glad she was alone and that no one would ever know that she had poured almost half a bottle into this novelty goblet, which said, appropriately,
It’s wine o’clock!
Heather was babysitting for Devon; it was “date night” for Cal and Gabriela, something that had never transpired with any kind of regularity during her marriage to Cal.

Cal, despite his serious “wound,” as he called it—his oft-talked-about forehead stitches—claimed to have finally “fixed” the powder room doorknob even though she still got locked in there from time to time. The box of ornaments still sat in the kitchen and Heather still complained that there was never any food to eat. Life, as Maeve knew it, had returned to normal.

Heather had gotten a job and was paying her sister and her father back, week by week. She hated working at the local grocery store, particularly on Senior Day, but she wisely kept her mouth shut about her unhappiness.

And gave her mother the senior discount.

Tommy Brantley had gone away to a school far, far away in Plattsburgh, near the Canadian border where it was winter for nine months a year. Maeve hoped he was freezing his other nine fingers off.

Maeve hadn’t seen Billy or DuClos and that’s the way she liked it. She wondered who would take over the landlord duties now that DuClos was in the wind. Chris said that they were still looking for him but that he felt confident the odiferous building owner would surface again, dead or alive, his Mob connections in the hunt, too.

Because, as Chris said more than once when they talked about everything that had happened, a twinkle in his eyes, “Criminals are stupid. They always turn up.”

Maeve turned on her laptop and slipped the DVD into the drive. In seconds, Jack’s face filled the screen; his look of confusion, prevalent in his last days, was there but fainter, almost imperceptible. This had been a long time ago, obviously.

“Is this thing on?” he asked.

Jimmy Moriarty’s Bronx-hewn accent was heard in the background. “Yeah! Start talkin’.”

Jack turned toward the camera. “Hiya, Mavy. How’s my beautiful girl?”

She burst into tears. She had cried more in the last few weeks than she had in her entire life.

“Don’t cry, honey,” he said. And then softly, he repeated, “Don’t cry.” He reached out toward the screen and Moriarty reprimanded him for almost smudging the lens. “Okay. If you’re watching this,” he said, “then I’m gone. But with the way things have been going,” at this he paused and pointed to his head, “it’s probably better this way.”

Maeve looked up at the ceiling, trying to stem the tide of tears.

“So, I’m seventy-two years old…”

“Seventy-five!” Moriarty called from off-camera. So the recording had been made six years earlier.

“Seventy-five. And I hope I lived a little bit longer so I could be with you. You were … are … the best daughter a guy could have, Maeve. Sure, I hate it here…”

Moriarty chimed in. “Me, too!”

“But I know it’s for the best. Some days are great and I remember everything but others…” He drifted off. “Anyway. I have some things to tell you.”

She wondered why he waited until after he died to reveal his motivations.

“I bet you’re wondering why I’m waiting to tell you this.” He drew a hand across his eyes. “I don’t think I ever want you to know but that’s Jimmy’s call after I go. I just didn’t think that right now, the way I feel, I could look you in the eye and tell you the whole truth. It’s a lot and it’s painful.” He drew in a shaky breath. “Turn it off, Jimmy.”

When they came back, Jack was wearing a different shirt; it was another day. “I’m back. Let me tell you what happened.” He tried to appear strong, make it seem like telling her this story was the most normal thing in the world. But his first admission—“she wasn’t mine”—made his voice crack in a way that she wasn’t sure that he could go on. “I loved your mother, Mavy. More than life itself. So that’s why, even though she was pregnant with someone else’s child, I married her.”

Maeve stared at the television, wondering if she had heard him right.

“Because I couldn’t live without her.”

It was not easy having a developmentally challenged child back then, she imagined. Add to that that the child wasn’t yours, belonged to someone else, and sending her away and then never speaking of her to your biological daughter may have seemed the only answer. She couldn’t understand it, as hard as she tried, but it was what it was, as Jo often said. He didn’t want her to know, to tarnish Claire Conlon’s memory, so he kept the secret their entire lives, visiting the girl at the group home, having taken her out of Mansfield as soon as he had seen the first hint of impropriety at the place, the news story. That was her only guess.

“Time passed, Mavy, and I never told you. And then more time passed, and I was raising you alone, and there was this burden I never wanted you to share. Your sister. Your mother being pregnant when we married.” He looked down at his hands. “I think you would have loved her, your sister, but I don’t know. You might have treated her like she was the most special sister in the world. But there was never the right time. You had your own children. You got divorced. You had me to worry about.” He looked at Jimmy, still off-camera. “It was never the right time,” he said, as if to convince himself. “And something’s been wrong with you lately. You’re preoccupied. A little sad. It’s not the right time now either.”

She stared back at the screen.

“And I didn’t want to see the look in your eyes that you probably have now. The look that says I did wrong by you and her.”

Her reflection was etched around his face, backlit by the windows facing the porch. He was right: she did look disappointed. She did feel wronged.

“I hope you’ll forgive me when you do find out, because when I’m gone and when Jimmy’s gone, there is no one else.” He looked down, contemplating a time when he and Moriarty wouldn’t walk the halls of Buena del Sol. “You don’t know her father, Maeve, and he didn’t know he had a daughter, so don’t worry about that.” He looked back at the screen. “I hope you’ll forgive me.”

She did.

“It’s different now, Maeve. I never wanted you to feel the burden of her,” he said, repeating the words that Jimmy Moriarty had said to her in the parking lot.

But she wasn’t a burden, she wanted to say.

She’s a gift.

CHAPTER 60

When the sun shines and the air is clear, there is nothing better than sitting riverside and enjoying a barbecue. Mr. and Mrs. Deckman were on board when Maeve told them that she was going to rent the gazebo on the Saturday of Memorial Day weekend and host a little party for Evelyn and her roommates. Rebecca came home and Heather had cleared her active social schedule, neither protesting in the least when Maeve gave them a shopping list filled with items for the barbecue and making the holiday-weekend trek to Shoprite, where Heather now got a discount because she had been a part-time employee for over three months.

Jimmy Moriarty had passed away the month before and Maeve had wept in the back of the church in a way she hadn’t when Jack died, her mind after her father’s death too taken up with the store and pictures of a baby who belonged to her parents, trips to Goodwill. He was with Jack now; she was sure of that. And they were telling stories about their time on the Job, most of it made up, to other cops at whatever bar they had appropriated wherever they were.

Their time with Evelyn was still marked by a little confusion, some trepidation. Maeve sometimes wasn’t sure what to say, how to act, but Evelyn made it easy. She was happy and chatty and told Maeve everything about her day when they spoke. With each passing day and each joy-filled phone call, Maeve got more comfortable, putting the past—and Jack’s secret—behind her. She had a sister.

Evelyn’s social interactions were different than Maeve was used to, but she was kindhearted and loved seeing the girls, telling them about her latest adventures at Café Americano, and bringing them little gifts whenever Maeve brought her to the house for a short visit: the all-natural lip gloss that Heather liked, the body wash that Rebecca seemed to go through with alarming alacrity. The girls did her nails, every one a different color, her toes, too. They were becoming a family, one visit at a time.