Woman of God

by James Patterson

  Sometimes He was. Sometimes I carried on, on my own.

  Chapter 69

  A CAB was waiting for the light to change on DeWolfe Street, right outside the church. I grabbed the opportunity, threw myself into the backseat, and asked the driver to take me to the Dinsmore Motor Lodge, right off Route 2.

  I knew of the Dinsmore, but I’d never been there.

  The driver was a reed-thin man of indeterminate age wearing a knitted cap pulled down to his eyes and a Fitbit on his right wrist. He checked me out in the mirror, then he started the meter.

  I watched without seeing as he drove us up Memorial Drive, along the Charles River, through North Cambridge, but I came back to the present when we closed in on my chosen destination, a skeevy motel in the worst part of the city, planted on the verge of a rumbling highway.

  My driver stopped his cab in the motel’s forecourt, beside the cracked plastic sign reading Vacancies WiFi Coffee Shop. Happy B’day Sean.

  I asked my cabbie to wait, then bolted out of the cab before he could say no and fast-walked to the office.

  I asked the towering teenage boy behind the desk if room 209 was available, and he nodded while staring at me.

  I was getting a lot of strange looks these days, and I knew why. My black hooded coat looked like a storm cloud, and I was in the center of it, with my shaven head, my pale skin, and my generally deathlike appearance.

  Never mind deathlike. I looked like the real thing.

  I said, “May I see the room?”

  Giant Teen unhooked the key from a board behind him and slapped it on the counter.

  “You mind if I ask why 209?”

  “Yes,” I said.

  I snatched the key.

  The parking area around the Dinsmore Motor Lodge looked like a dumping ground for all the drug-addicted, jobless, homeless, hopeless people in Cambridge.

  I said to my driver, “I’ll be back in a few minutes.”

  “I can’t wait more than five. I need to get back to the garage.”

  “Ten minutes, that’s all. I’ll give you a good tip.”

  He sighed, then shrugged. I took that to be a yes.

  I jogged up the stairs to the second floor, found 209 three doors down from the landing, and opened the door to the room where my mother had died.

  I’d seen police photos of the room and expected it to be a hellhole, but it was far worse than that. The windows were opaque with dirt. The bed was covered with a stained spread, the hard surfaces were grimy, and insects scurried when I turned on the bathroom light. The stink of smoke and fifty years of unwashed human beings clung to the carpets and curtains.

  I stared at the revolting bedspread and thought of my mother lying there, half-naked, her heart exploding from a heroin overdose. And I saw my father lying next to her, watching her die.

  The day after Dorothy Fitzgerald died at the age of forty-five, G.S.F. was arrested and charged with negligent homicide.

  The prosecutor was young and determined, but this case was thin on facts, based on circumstantial evidence.

  George S. Fitzgerald had signed for room 209 and charged it to his card, and the police had found him in this bed stoned out of his mind. A drug dealer admitted to selling him drugs, but said drug dealer was a very sketchy witness. And, even if he had been a font of truth, that G.S.F. had shared his H with my mother didn’t make her death a homicide.

  The case against G.S.F. came down to his statement to me the day before my mother died. He had been sitting on the stoop outside our house when I came home with take-out pizza.

  “Your mother,” he had said, “is a waste of oxygen. I wish to hell she was dead. I think I’m going to kill her.”

  I’d testified to that, but it was my word against his, and his attorney tore me into small pieces on the stand. Even if the jurors believed me, the proof against G.S.F. never rose above the level of reasonable doubt.

  As soon as the case was dismissed, I fled to Baltimore, got my MD, and kept running.

  Until now.

  My driver was honking his horn, and there was nothing more for me to see. I slammed the door and left room 209 behind me. I had a moment of fright when I couldn’t find my cab in the parking lot, but then I saw it parked on the street.

  Giant Teen was trotting toward me.

  I shouted, “I changed my mind!” and tossed him the key.

  I got into the cab.

  My driver said, “I was about to go. Where to now?”

  “Portman House,” I said. It was a small and decent boutique hotel about five miles from this spot and near the MIT campus. Parents of college kids stayed there.

  “Good choice,” said my driver. He turned the cab around, and as we headed back into the better parts of Cambridge, I wondered what I was going to do, where I was going to live, what my life was going to be like now and from this point forward.

  I wondered if God was going to let me in on any plan He might have for me. Or if it was all up to me.

  I knew the answer. Up to me.

  Chapter 70

  THE FRESH images of my mother’s death, combined with the excruciating losses of Karl and Tre, washed over me like a tsunami, overwhelming me and leaving me gasping for meaning that just wasn’t there.

  I asked the driver to stop at the closest liquor store and wait for me. He gave me a look that told me he deeply regretted letting me into his cab, but he pulled up to Liquor World on White Street and kept the motor running.

  I said, “Anything I can get you while I’m shopping?”

  “Just hurry up.”

  I did that, and fifteen minutes later, I checked into Portman House. My room was clean. It faced the rear. It suited me perfectly.

  I wanted to drink myself into oblivion, and I had a right to do it. I hung the Do Not Disturb sign on the doorknob and closed the curtains. I drank. I slept, and I wrote letters to Karl and to Tre in my digital journal. I spoke out loud to Karl as I wrote, and, of course, he didn’t answer back.

  After I’d saved my new pages, I unloaded my anger at my parents and held nothing back. There was a lot to unpack, spanning the first twenty years of my life, and the writing was exhausting. I drank and slept some more.

  Three days after checking into Portman House, when I had nothing left to say or drink, I made arrangements for an evening out.

  My new girlfriend and I agreed to meet on the corner of Lansdowne and Brookline Avenue in Boston, not far from Fenway Park.

  “Let me reimburse you for my ticket,” said Katharine Dunlop, the shrink I had met on the plane.

  “No way,” I said. “My treat. I’m so glad you could come.”

  It was a great night to go to a ballgame.

  The sky was cloud-free. The stands were almost full, and the hotel’s concierge had gotten me two of the best seats in the State Street Pavilion Club, behind home plate, near the press boxes, and with a great view of the game and the ballpark.

  I’d never had such good seats in my life.

  Katharine and I passed on the fine dining in the clubhouse and each put down two fully loaded hot dogs. I managed to get down a third. Heaven on a bun.

  The game itself was a laugher. Despite playing barely .500 ball for most of the season, the Red Sox crushed the second-place Orioles 16­–2. Third baseman Francisco Burgos and rookie shortstop Ted Lightwell both homered, while lefty Aaron Jenkins pitched a six-hit complete game, striking out nine. As I’d done at games as a kid, I kept score, which allowed me to stay focused on the action while I chatted with Katharine.

  Night games always feel otherworldly, and tonight it was all that and more. The lights blazing down on Fenway Park encapsulated the game, separating it from the blackness of night and everything that had happened before the first ball was thrown.

  The game was a great escape, a magnificent emotional release.

  When I got back to my room that night, I emptied a bottle and a half of scotch down the sink and started a new journal entry about my mother.

  D
ear Mom, I wrote.

  I wish you had told me about my real father. I guess you had your reasons. Maybe you were protecting me from G.S.F. or from the man you’d been with. Maybe you thought that I’d never find out, but I have found out. And now I have a lifetime of questions that will never be answered.

  I will never know if I look like my father, if he was good or bad, if he knew that he had a daughter, and if he would have loved me. I wonder if I have half siblings and a whole other family right here in Cambridge. That hurts, Mom, very badly.

  I continued writing, but the secret of my conception made it very hard to close the book on my past. Still, I wanted to forgive my mother for her many poor choices.

  I knew that she had loved me.

  I had proof.

  I made a list of the good stuff: the birthday parties with helium balloons tied to the shrubs in the backyard, and frosted carrot cupcakes, my favorite treat. I added racing skates to the list, the ones I had pined for that my mom gave me for Christmas when I was ten. Sometimes I had even slept with them. I wrote that one of her choices had been to live with a man who hated her. Maybe she had thought she was doing that for me.

  I balanced off her high anxiety, inattention, sugar mania, and long zombie absences with the coziness of watching The Late Show under a blanket with her on Friday nights, falling asleep in a hug. And I loved when she braided my hair, as she did before we went to St. Paul’s on Sunday mornings.

  All those years of Sunday Mass with my mother had instilled in me the love of God.

  I would always be grateful to her for that.

  Chapter 71

  PRISM WAS a drug-and-alcohol rehab center on Putnam Avenue, only two blocks from St. Paul’s. The director, Dr. Robert Dweck, had run a help-wanted ad for a part-time doctor, and I made an appointment to meet with him.

  Prism’s storefront had a rainbow painted on the plate-glass window, and bells chimed when I opened the door.

  A psychiatrist, Dr. Robert Dweck was a tall, bearded man in his mid-fifties, with thick glasses and a generous smile. He offered me a seat in his small office, read my résumé, whistled, then asked me, “You sure you want to work for a low-rent, city-funded operation like this?”

  “Absolutely. I’m putting down new roots.”

  Dr. Dweck said, “You should know what you’d be getting into. Many of our clients are triple-whammied: physical disabilities, mental disorders, and drug or alcohol dependencies. You want to feel needed, Dr. Fitzgerald? This is the job for you. But I need you to know you’d make more money flipping burgers.”

  “Not a problem,” I told him.

  He said, “Okay, Dr. Fitzgerald. If your references check out, you’ve got yourself a job. Can you start on Monday?”

  We shook hands, and I filled out some forms.

  When I handed them back, Dr. Dweck smiled. “Is it Monday yet?”

  “I’ll see you then,” I said.

  After leaving the clinic, I called ahead to the real-estate company that had lined up a few properties for me to see. The agent said, “I don’t know if you’d be interested in a handyman special. It’s a good, old house, very cheap and in a great location. It needs tons of TLC.”

  The agent showed me the house, a narrow, two-story redbrick town house, built in the late eighteen hundreds. It hadn’t been cared for in many years. The ceilings in the bathroom and kitchen were falling down. The doors were askew, and the floors sloped toward the street. But the bones were good, and the mechanicals were good enough.

  It was equidistant between my church and new workplace. It honestly felt as though the house was calling to me.

  I opened a bank account, and while I was still standing in the cool, marble lobby of Boston Private Bank and Trust, I phoned Heinrich Schmidt, Karl’s lawyer in Berlin, and arranged for a fairly hefty wire transfer.

  By the end of that week, I was a home owner.

  It felt good. I was truly home.

  The next three months went by fast.

  I ran Prism’s in-house clinic along with Louise Lindenmeyr, a top-notch nurse practitioner who had just returned from a stint of emergency care in hurricane-ravaged Haiti.

  It was immediately clear to me that the staff at Prism did whatever was needed, no matter what their job titles. Dr. Dweck, “Call me Rob,” was also a clinical psychologist. He ran group therapy sessions and also refilled the copier’s paper tray and took out the trash. I became proficient at fund-raising, administration, and making soup-and-sandwich lunches for forty people at a time.

  When I told Rob about the falling plaster ceilings and iffy wiring in my house, he recruited skilled labor from among the clients at Prism. After that, my weekends were often spent making pasta lunches for the pickup painters and carpenters who buttoned up my little house.

  I bought furniture. I hung photos of Karl and Tre in my bedroom and put a miniature one inside a locket that I wore on a chain around my neck. As I worked and feathered my nest, summer became fall.

  My hair grew out with renewed vigor, and short curls flattered me. I cut way back on my alcohol consumption and didn’t miss drinking at all. Rob gave me high fives for that.

  I gave away my black hooded coat, bought new clothes. Louise said, “Let’s go get your nails done. Maybe splurge for a pedi, too, while we’re at it.” Seeing hot-pink lacquer on the ends of my fingers and toes was unexpectedly hilarious.

  I socialized with new friends and wrote to my old, far-flung ones, Sabeena, Tori, Zach. And I went to church every Sunday.

  Occasionally, I went during the week at lunchtime.

  That particular Wednesday, the church was almost as empty as it was when I stumbled into St. Paul’s on my first day back in Cambridge. I went to “my” end of the first pew and had a one-way, silent conversation with God, and when I opened my eyes, I expected to see Father Aubrey.

  I was disappointed that he wasn’t there.

  I crossed myself and left the church and almost walked right into him as he was coming out of the rectory.

  “I’m heading out for a burger and beer,” James said. “Care to join me?”

  So far, I’d only had coffee that day, and I gladly accepted his offer.

  Chapter 72

  THE PICKLED Hedgehog was an Irish-style pub on Massachusetts Avenue, less than a ten-minute walk from the church. The interior was hunter green, and strip lighting sparkled around the ceiling’s perimeter. Father James Aubrey and I sat down at a table with a view of the street.

  James said to the waiter, “Heineken from the tap. Brigid?”

  “Same for me.”

  When the waiter returned with beer, I told James about my new patient, a man who’d been living in his car until he found his way to Prism.

  “Turns out he’s my age,” I said. “We went to middle school together.”

  “Meth user?” James asked.

  “Yes, sorry to say.”

  The burger was perfect. The fries kind of sent me to the moon, and I was enjoying the company.

  But James was distracted.

  He kept his phone on the table, and when it buzzed, he said, “Excuse me,” and walked outside. I saw him through the glass, looking agitated, and then he got angry. When he returned to our table, he apologized and said, “I have a confession to make.”

  “You’re confessing to me? Maybe we should have another beer first?”

  “Maybe an IV from the tap.”

  “That bad?” I asked.

  “The absolute worst,” he said.

  The last time a priest had made a confession to me, I had been holding his hand when he died. I looked into James’s sad eyes and said, “Talk to me.”

  “I’m about to go on trial for something I didn’t do.”

  “What are you charged with?”

  “I am seriously afraid of shocking you, Brigid.”

  “My shock threshold is pretty high.”

  “I’m accused of sexually abusing a boy ten years ago, when he was fifteen.”

  “Oh, no.�
��

  Father Aubrey slugged down some beer, then gave me a wry look. “I’m not a pedophile. My accuser is lying. My lawyer is good, but he says we don’t have a bulletproof defense, and priests tend to lose child-abuse cases ninety-nine point eight percent of the time.

  “He wants me to settle out of court. Save myself the stress of losing at trial. There’s only so much money my accuser can get from me, but to settle is to admit I’d done something to him. Which I did not do. And if I settle to get this done with, very likely he’ll go after the school and the archdiocese. I did nothing to him, and I can’t let him get away with saying that I did.”

  I was shocked, after all.

  In 2002, the Boston Globe uncovered a pattern of sexual abuse of minors by Catholic priests, which was followed by a nationwide scandal encompassing accusations in the thousands. The Globe revealed that the archdiocese had protected hundreds of priests, paying off potential litigants, passing the priests on to other parishes. When cases had gone to trial, the Church lost, and it was common knowledge that the Boston Archdiocese had paid out more than a $100 million in damages in the last twenty years.

  “The man who is accusing me,” said James Aubrey, “was in one of my classes when I taught history at Mount St. Joseph. He might have had a learning disability. I worked with him after school a few days a week. It was nothing but class work.

  “He flunked high school, and when I was charged with sexual assault, I didn’t actually remember him. I hadn’t even thought of him in ten years.

  “I called him. I asked him, what the hell? He said, ‘You shouldn’t have done it, Father.’ He lied to me. To me.”

  “He may have been taping the call.”

  “Probably. These past months have been awful, Brigid. I say, ‘I didn’t do it,’ and people I’ve known for years look at me like I’m filth. That kills me. This whole thing is really testing my faith.”

  James paid the check and asked, “Mind coming back to St. Paul’s? I want to show you something.”