Kiss Her Goodbye

by Wendy Corsi Staub

  What the hell are you doing? she asks herself, even as her feet propel her directly to the desk sergeant.

  He looks up promptly.

  Too late to back out now.

  He even recognizes her—thanks, no doubt, to all the media coverage last month. “Mrs. Gattinski? Can I help you?”

  “Yes. Is Detective Brodowiaz here?”

  The sargent looks at his watch. “He stepped out for lunch, but he should be back in about twenty minutes. Why don’t you sit down and wait for him?”

  Stella hesitates.

  Okay, so it isn’t too late to leave after all.

  She can turn around and walk out the door—go back to school, back to her life, back to telling herself that her husband is nothing more than a selfish, cheating SOB.

  Or she can have a seat and confide her suspicions in Detective Brodowiaz when he returns.

  “Mrs. Gattinski?”

  She looks up to see the desk sergeant gesturing at the row of chairs beneath a plate glass window.

  She hesitates only another moment.

  Then, slowly, she walks toward the window and sinks into the nearest seat.

  “Don’t worry about me, Mom,” Jen says for the third time, forgetting to be sullen. “I’ll be fine. Really.”

  “Are you sure?” Her mother, wearing her coat and boots, hovers nervously beside her bed. “Because I hate to leave you.”

  “Mom, the nurse said it was urgent. You have to go. What if Grandpa is . . .”

  She trails off, not wanting to say it. But she knows what her mother is thinking. Why else would the nursing home ask her to come right over?

  Either Grandpa is dead, or he’s about to die.

  Whatever the case, Mom needs to be there with him.

  And Jen needs to be here for Mom. For the first time in weeks, touched by her mother’s vulnerability, Jen has allowed the wall of ice she erected between them to thaw.

  “Let me try to call Daddy one more time.” Mom flips her cell phone open in shaking hands. “I keep getting his voice mail.”

  “Did you leave him a message?”

  “I left two. It’s been less than five minutes, but . . .”

  Jen watches her mother dial, sees the veins in her neck tensing as she waits for the line to ring a few times.

  “Matt, it’s me again. Listen, when you get this message, just come right home. I’ve got to leave Jen and I don’t know how long I’m going to be gone. Somebody has to keep an eye on her and meet the boys at the bus stop. I’ll call as soon as I can.”

  “Nobody has to keep an eye on me, Mom.” Jen scowls as her mother tucks the phone into the pocket of her coat. “I’m old enough to take care of myself for a few hours.”

  “Not when you can’t even get out of bed.”

  “Why would I have to get out of bed? I’ll be fine.”

  Her mother just looks at her, shaking her head.

  Jen knows what she’s thinking.

  About that night.

  If only she could remember what happened that night.

  Apples.

  Something about apples.

  She shakes her head, unable to grasp the thought that flits teasingly at the edge of her consciousness.

  “You’d better go, Mom.”

  “I know. I’d better.” There are tears in her mother’s eyes.

  “I’m sorry about Grandpa.”

  “Maybe it’s not that. Maybe he just . . . I don’t know . . . maybe he ran away again. Or maybe he’s all out of underwear.” Her mother’s laugh is choked.

  Jen smiles sadly. “I hope that’s what it is.”

  “So do I. Do you need anything before I go? Do you want me to help you to the bathroom?”

  She shakes her head. “I don’t have to go.”

  Outside, there’s a sudden rumbling, crashing sound.

  Both Jen and her mother jump.

  “It’s just snow,” her mother tells her. “Falling off the roof.”

  “I know.”

  “You looked worried for a second.”

  “So did you.”

  Mom shakes her head. “What if you have to go to the bathroom while I’m gone? You can’t get there by yourself.”

  “I can if I crawl.”

  “Jen—”

  “Don’t worry about me, Mom. I don’t have to go. I’ll be fine.”

  “Well, Daddy will get my message and be here soon, anyway.”

  “Yeah. Just . . . will you turn on my radio before you go?”

  “Sure.”

  Mom walks over to her desk, flips the switch on Jen’s portable stereo. “Do you want a CD or the radio?”

  “Radio,” Jen says, knowing a CD would end and she’d be left in silence, knowing that a silent house would be scary.

  Mom finds the FM station Jen likes. The familiar strains of her favorite Dave Matthews song fill the air reassuringly as her mother heads for the door. “If I don’t get home for dinner, tell Daddy there’s stew in the Crock-Pot. It’ll be done by around six.”

  “I will.”

  Jen sighs, leaning back against the pillows again.

  Stew in the Crock-Pot.

  Daddy.

  Her mother makes it sound as if everything is the way it used to be.

  A lump rises in Jen’s throat at the thought of the cozy family dinners they used to share, back when she thought they really were her family.

  Maybe they can be again, she thinks, remembering that today was supposed to be her fresh start. Now that she’s allowed the ice to melt a little, she can’t help thinking that maybe what her parents did wasn’t so awful. Maybe she can forgive them after all. Maybe they were just trying to protect her.

  She jumps, seeing a shadow looming in her doorway, then breathes a sigh of relief when she realizes who it is.

  “Mom. I thought you left.”

  “I started to, but I forgot something.”

  “What?”

  Her mother leans over the bed, brushing her lips across Jen’s cheek. “To kiss you goodbye.”

  Jen forces a confident smile. “Bye, Mom. And don’t worry. Everything is going to be fine.”

  Her mother looks doubtful, but she says, “You’re right. It is, isn’t it?”

  Jen nods, but inside, she isn’t so sure.

  “All right, Mrs. Gattinski. Why don’t you tell me why you’re really here?” Detective Brodowiaz says, steepling his fingers on the table that sits between them.

  “I told you . . . I just wanted to thank you for all you did.”

  “People send notes when they want to say thank you. They send fruit baskets. And before you get any ideas, I hate fruit.”

  Stella laughs. It’s a hollow sound. She tries, and fails, to break eye contact with the detective.

  “You came down here to talk to me about what happened that night, didn’t you.” It’s a statement, not a question.

  Reluctantly, Stella nods.

  “Did you remember something you forgot to tell me?” he asks, his tone surprisingly gentle.

  She nods again.

  “Why don’t you tell me now, then? Since you’re here, and I’m here, and all,” he says, his head tilted in wry invitation.

  “All right.”

  Stella takes a deep breath, wonders how to begin.

  The detective leans back and folds his arms as though he has all the time in the world. As though this conversation is utterly casual, as though whatever she’s about to say is almost incidental.

  But his posture belies the shrewd intensity of his gaze.

  He knows, she realizes. He knows I lied that night. He knows my conscience is eating away at me. He knows that whatever I say is going to be a bombshell, and he’s just waiting to pounce on it.

  Realizing she’s still holding her breath, Stella exhales shakily, clenches her hands together to to steady them. She gazes down at the fourth finger of her left hand at the faint red mark where her wedding right used to be.

  She had to soap it to get it off last ni
ght. Her ring finger, like the rest of her, is a few sizes bigger than it was when she got married.

  She looks up at the detective and sees that he, too, was gazing down at her fingers.

  He must have noticed her ring is gone.

  Maybe not.

  Oh, come on, Stella. He’s a detective. Detectives notice everything.

  So he knows her ring is gone, has obviously deduced that her marriage is in trouble. He’s probably already put two and two together.

  She might as well tell him what she came here to tell him. Right?

  Still, she hesitates. She closes her eyes.

  Once again, she’s standing at the top of that treacherous trail at Holiday Valley, with Kurt at her side.

  What’s the matter? Are you scared?

  Yes. She’s no longer young, or naive, or stupid. But she is scared.

  Scared of what will happen if she takes the plunge—but perhaps even more scared of what will happen if she doesn’t.

  Her mind made up, Stella opens her eyes.

  She clears her throat nervously, takes a deep breath, and tells Detective Brodowiaz, “It’s about my husband . . .”

  Kathleen talks aloud to her mother as she drives to Erasmus, just as she did in the cemetery that night fourteen years ago.

  “Just let him live until I get there, Mommy,” she begs, tears streaming down her face as she clutches the wheel, easing her way toward the bottle-necked toll booths. The traffic ahead seems to move with painstaking sluggishness.

  “I just want a chance to tell him how much I love him. Please . . .”

  Does he know?

  Does her father even know that she loves him?

  The car in front of her moves.

  Kathleen takes her foot off the brake.

  She and her father never resolved what happened when she was pregnant, when he told her to get out. He simply showed up at her wedding, met her husband and daughter, and they moved on.

  Rolling forward toward the toll booth, she nearly rear-ends the car in front of her. She jams on the brakes just in time, trembling.

  She shouldn’t be driving. She’s a basket case.

  It’s all too much. All of it. Jen, Matt, Erin, and now her father . . .

  It’s too, too much.

  What if her father is already dead?

  “He’ll never know,” she whispers, eyes fastened to the brake lights in front of her as she clenches the wheel with both hands. “He’ll never know how sorry I am . . .”

  Sorry? a disdainful voice echoes in her head. Sorry for what? Why are you sorry? He’s the one who should be sorry. He turned his back on his only child when you needed him most.

  “He is sorry.” Kathleen speaks aloud in the empty car, speaks with ragged conviction. “He just doesn’t know how to say it.”

  Still . . .

  How could he have done it? How could he have told her to get out? How could he have sent her, alone and frightened and pregnant, out into the night?

  She hated him for it then; she hated him even more for it once she was a parent herself. She would never turn her back on her own child. Never. She would never . . .

  Everybody makes mistakes, Kathleen.

  Even parents. Even parents who love their children so much that they would die for them.

  Everybody makes mistakes.

  Even me.

  She’s crying now, fumbling for the button on the door to lower the window, fumbling in the ashtray for change to pay the toll.

  She thrusts it into the toll taker’s outstretched hand, barely noticing the young man’s startled expression as he glimpses her tear-soaked face.

  The ramp ahead is clear.

  Kathleen presses down on the gas at last, roaring onto the thruway.

  John’s home, like the man himself, has taken on a faded, tired appearance after all these years.

  This is a working-class neighborhood not far from where Saint Brigid’s used to stand. The homes here are humble but generally well cared for. John’s two-story frame house sits in the middle of a row of others just like it, all of them fronted by three or four concrete steps with wrought iron rails, and glassed-in porches.

  But the shrubs in front of John’s house are overgrown, the neglected flowerbeds filled with brown stalks nobody bothered to cut back after they bloomed months ago. The clapboards need a paint job. One second-story shutter hangs crookedly on a single hinge.The obviously leaking gutter beneath the eaves is rimmed by jagged, dripping icicles that ominously resemble drooling fangs.

  Buoyed by unexpected courage from an inner well she had assumed was long dry, Lucy mounts the recently shoveled front steps, presses the bell, hears it ring somewhere inside.

  A neighbor’s dog instantly begins to bark.

  Lucy waits, shivering in the cold, wondering what she’ll say if Deirdre comes to the door.

  Maybe I should have just gone to talk to the Carmodys alone, she thinks, shifting her weight nervously from one foot to the other.

  But that didn’t seem right. In the long wait for Henry to leave for work, she concluded that she owes it to John to include him in the decision to confront Margaret’s parents.

  Her real parents.

  The ones who are raising her, loving her, responsible for keeping her safe.

  The dog is still barking in the adjacent yard, and nobody has answered the door.

  Lucy presses the bell again.

  The dog grows more frenzied, hurtling itself against the chain link fence next door.

  She hears a door opening over there, hears a man’s voice snap, “Shut up, Ribs!”

  “I’m sorry,” Lucy calls across the fence to the dog’s disgruntled-looking gray-haired owner.

  The man shrugs. “I don’t think they’re home.”

  “I guess not.”

  Lucy turns away.

  A thought occurs to her then, and she calls out to the man again just before he closes his door.

  “John and Deirdre still live here, right?”

  The man hesitates.

  He lied, Lucy realizes. John lied when he told me he still lives here. Why did I trust him?

  “John does,” the man tells her. “With his daughter.”

  “What about his wife?”

  The man shakes his head. “She’s been dead for years.”

  Heading toward the nursing home at breakneck speed, Kathleen alternates between praying and talking to herself. Or maybe it’s the same thing.

  “Oh, please. Please, I have to get there in time . . .”

  In time for what?

  In time to tell her father that she loves him.

  That she’s sorry.

  That she forgives him.

  That everybody makes mistakes.

  Everybody deserves to be forgiven. Even Daddy.

  Even me.

  “Please forgive me. Please.” Kathleen chokes out the words, not sure whether she’s talking to her father, or to God . . . or to herself.

  Begging herself for forgiveness.

  “I didn’t know,” she whispers, swerving to avoid a slow-moving delivery van in the right lane. “I didn’t know I was pregnant.”

  If she had known, she would have stopped.

  She did stop, the minute she realized.

  From the moment she found out she was expecting a baby, she quit cold turkey. Quit drinking, quit smoking, quit drugs. She never even took an aspirin, never drank a cup of coffee, so conscious of the fragile fetus growing inside of her.

  But it was too late.

  Her baby girl was so tiny . . . but not too tiny, the nurses said. Not dangerously tiny. Despite Kathleen’s nagging fears, little Genevieve was born seemingly healthy. She had ten fingers and ten toes, and a thatch of reddish-blond hair that reminded Kathleen of her mother.

  See, Mom? she used to say, looking heavenward as she proudly cradled her newborn daughter. See? She looks just like you.

  How she wished her mother could see her grandchild.

  How she wished her f
ather could.

  She convinced herself that if he took one look at the baby, he would fall in love with her. He would take Kathleen in again, both her and the baby.

  A few weeks after giving birth, Kathleen boarded a train back to Buffalo, the tiny pink bundle cradled on her lap.

  “We’re going home, Jen,” she whispered to her daughter every so often, kissing the downy fuzz on her head. “We’re going home.”

  She got there on All Saints Day and went right to the church to see Father Joseph. She showed him the child she’d named after his mother, and she saw the tears in his eyes as he made the sign of the cross on the baby’s forehead.

  He invited Kathleen to stay at the rectory that night, but she told him she had made other arrangements. He had already done too much for her. For both of them.

  She brought her baby to a small motel not far from her father’s house. She had worked part time near the home for unwed mothers and had saved enough money to get through a few days on her own. She was going to work up her courage to face Drew Gallagher.

  “We’re going home, Jen.”

  But she wasn’t ready.

  Not yet.

  “Soon,” she promised her baby girl as she nursed her to sleep. “Soon you’ll meet your grandfather, and you know what he’ll say? He’ll say welcome home.”

  Would he have said it?

  Kathleen will never know.

  She fell asleep that night to pleasant dreams, her baby’s warm, soft body cradled in her arms.

  She woke in the morning to a mother’s worst nightmare, her baby’s cold, stiff body cradled in her arms.

  SIDs.

  That’s what it was. She knows that now. Back then, all that mattered was that she woke up and her little girl was dead.

  What happened after that is a blur. Everything until the cemetery is a blur.

  She remembers only the guilt—the terrible, crippling guilt.

  All those months before she realized she was pregnant . . . all that liquor and drugs; she was barely eating, barely sleeping. Then the certainty that when the baby came there would be something horribly wrong with her . . .

  And when there wasn’t, I felt as though I’d been spared. As though we’d both been spared.