Shadowkiller

by Wendy Corsi Staub

  Right now, on a blind date, she wasn’t interested in getting into any of it: her cultural background, her parents, her past.

  She changed the subject, asking, “What do you think? Are you going with the chicken and salsa verde or the stuffed jalapeños? A big salad? Or perhaps just some broccoli?”

  “I know it seems like I’m not in the spirit of the holiday—maybe if they were playing something from Riverdance instead of mariachi music—but I was thinking I might order something that isn’t even green.”

  “Party pooper.”

  “I don’t know if my cousin told you, but I’m a lab scientist, and I’m kind of shy, and for fun, I like to read. I’m not usually the life of the party.”

  She returned his grin across the table, noticing that he was actually more handsome than she’d initially thought. Catching sight of him waiting by the hostess stand when she walked in, her first impression had been that he looked like a nerdy scientist: ears that stuck out a little, glasses, earnest expression, tall and a little gawky.

  But he had a cute smile, his brown eyes were kind, and he was wearing a distressed leather jacket that she could see, close up, was vintage, with an impressive designer label. When she complimented him on it, he said, “I knew you worked in fashion, so I didn’t want to show up dressed like some schlub.”

  “Is that what you’d usually do on a date?” she asked, and he grinned.

  “Probably.”

  “You’re not supposed to admit that, you know.”

  “Really? Then forget I said it. I’m always a snazzy dresser. Ask anyone. Except my cousin. Or her friend who set us up.”

  “It was actually a friend of your cousin’s friend.”

  “Don’t ask her, either,” he said without missing a beat, she laughed, and the ice was broken.

  Now, as she asked him about his work, she realized she was actually glad she’d come. Maybe he wouldn’t turn out to be the love of her life, but at least she wasn’t sitting at home, staring into space, thinking about her father.

  Besides, who knew? Maybe Justin would turn out to be the love of her life. Maybe they’d fall head over heels and get married and have babies and live happily ever after.

  That’s all that really matters in this world, isn’t it? she thought, sipping her second margarita, feeling as though the first one had already gone to her head. A husband, children. Loving, and being loved. Knowing where you belong—and to whom.

  As for the career—sure, she still wanted that, too. A nicely furnished apartment and a closet full of gorgeous clothes wouldn’t hurt, either. But tonight, thanks to tequila and the emotionally grueling week she’d just endured, those things didn’t seem to matter as much as they usually would.

  Tonight, she was convinced that if she just had someone to count on, a family of her own, she’d be perfectly content. She’d never again look back, wishing things had been different, longing for something—someone—she’d never had, and never would.

  This was a big mistake.

  Mack had known it from the moment he met Carrie in the PATH station after work. He saw her before she caught sight of him. She was standing stiffly at the entrance to the Hoboken track, wearing a dark wool coat and sensible pumps, looking preoccupied. He wondered if, by chance, she might have on a green skirt and sweater beneath her coat, but somehow, he doubted it.

  He found out when they reached his parents’ house that he was right about that; she had on a businesslike brown suit. He was pretty sure, by that time, that she wouldn’t be tossing the jacket aside, hiking up the skirt, kicking off her shoes, and dancing a jig with his aunt Fiona, either.

  When she spotted him at the station, she’d pasted a smile on her face, greeted him with a hug, and told him she’d been looking forward to tonight. But then she asked, as they boarded the train, “How long do you think we’ll be there?”

  That was not a good sign.

  “It goes pretty late,” he told her. “Are you sure you want to go?”

  “Of course,” she said, not very convincingly. “I want to meet your parents. And your sister will be there, too, you said?”

  “Everyone will be there. Remember? I told you the other night on the phone—it gets kind of crazy.”

  She frowned, as though she were hearing that for the first time. “Crazy in what way?”

  “Don’t worry—just in a party kind of way. You know—drinking, singing, dancing . . . that sort of thing.”

  “Dancing?” she echoed, as if that were the worst kind of crazy imaginable.

  “ ’Fraid so,” he said with a wry smile, and gave her another out. “Look, if you want to skip it, I’ll completely understand.”

  “I thought you said you were obligated to go.”

  “I am—but you’re not.”

  “Oh. So you would still go, alone . . . ?”

  “I have to. My mom—well, you know. It’s a big deal, like I said the other night. If you’d rather not come with me, we can get together another time.”

  But that wasn’t really an option. He knew, and he could see by her expression that she knew, too, that if she backed out now, they wouldn’t be seeing each other again.

  “No, I’ll come. I’m sure it’ll be fun.” The resolute set of her jaw conveyed that she thought exactly the opposite.

  So they took the PATH train to Hoboken and walked the few blocks to his parents’ house. A felt leprechaun banner he’d made in Cub Scouts twenty-odd years ago hung on the front door; beyond it, the foyer was so jammed with friends and relatives that they could barely get past the threshold. Seeing Carrie shrink back, wide-eyed, Mack grabbed her hand and began shouldering his way through, pulling her into the fray with Champ and Bruiser barking underfoot.

  The overheated air was heavily scented with beer and cigarette smoke, corned beef and cabbage, and Aunt Fiona’s Jean Naté perfume. His cousin Mary Beth was futilely trying to shush raucous conversations so that everyone could hear her seven-year-old banging out a halting, discordant version of “Danny Boy” on the old upright piano, which only made people raise their voices; all of that competed with a vintage vinyl version of the Chieftains’ “The Rocky Road to Dublin” blasting from the stereo.

  Mack’s father had crossed paths with the band back in the sixties, when they were up and coming and he was a record industry executive. Once in a while, hearing familiar music seemed to jar Brian MacKenna from his twilight world. Mack fervently hoped that would be the case tonight.

  “Hey, Mack’s here!” someone shouted, and somehow, he lost his grip on Carrie’s hand as he was swept into one warm embrace after another. Everyone, particularly his aunts and older female cousins, seemed eager to give him a loving squeeze, as if to reassure him that everything was going to be okay somehow, despite his mother’s illness. But they weren’t fooling him or themselves.

  They were all so somber, he noticed. Gone were the usual teasing questions and quips; gone, even, was the innate black humor that had seen this clan through some pretty tough times from nineteenth-century Galway to twenty-first-century New Jersey.

  He was grateful when his brother-in-law, Dan—married, albeit shakily at the moment, to Mack’s sister, Lynn—put a beer into his hand and asked about the upcoming Knicks-Lakers game.

  “I heard you have courtside seats. How’d you score those?”

  “Client.”

  “I’m in the wrong business or on the wrong side of the Hudson River,” said Dan, a dentist down in Middletown.

  “You mean your patients don’t reward you with courtside seats?”

  “I’m lucky if they pay their bills. You’re a lucky SOB, Mack.”

  “Want to come?”

  “Oh, yeah, sure, I’d love to come.”

  “I’m serious, Dan. I’ve got an extra ticket.”

  “And you want to waste it on your sister’s husband? Don’t you have some hot babe to impress?”

  Uh-oh. Suddenly remembering Carrie, he looked around and realized he’d not only lost his grip
on her, he’d lost sight of her, too.

  Rather than explain to Dan that she wasn’t exactly a hot babe, nor was she impressed by courtside Knicks-Lakers seats, he said hurriedly, “Listen, the extra ticket is yours if you want it, and I actually am seeing someone and she’s here with me, and I’d better find her before Uncle Paddy does.”

  “Good idea. Count me in for the game, Mack.”

  He nodded and turned away, looking around for Carrie but instead finding his aunt Nita making a beeline for him with a red-lipstick-stained coffee mug in one hand and a bouquet of green carnations in the other.

  “How are you, honey?” she asked, giving him another one of those long, hard hugs and sad, searching looks. “Hanging in there?”

  “I am, but I have to go find—”

  “Wait, wait, your corsage.” Aunt Nita set down her cup, pulled a pair of nail scissors from her pocket, snipped the stem off one of her carnations, and deftly pinned the flower to his lapel.

  Back when he was a perpetually mortified adolescent, Mack would have protested that boys didn’t wear corsages—even though his mother told him they did, but they were called boutonnières—then discarded it the first chance he got.

  But he had long since learned to deal with Aunt Nita—with his entire crazy family, in fact. So he just thanked her and smiled when she admired the way it matched his shamrock-printed tie and his eyes—“And your sister’s, too,” she added before stepping away to add another shot of whiskey to her coffee. “You got them from our side of the family, you know.”

  Aunt Nita was a fair-haired, green-eyed O’Hara, like Mack’s mother, in sharp contrast to the blue-eyed MacKennas—some of whom were heavily freckled redheads, while the rest were “Black Irish” like Mack.

  “What was that about me?”

  He turned to see that Lynn had come up beside him.

  “You have green eyes.”

  “Oh. I thought maybe you were badmouthing me or something.”

  “Me? Never.”

  “That’s why I love you.” She clinked her own beer bottle against his. “Hey, I thought you were bringing your new girlfriend.”

  “I did, but she’s . . . she’s not . . .”

  Never one to wait patiently for a reply, Lynn tossed out her next question. “Have you seen Mom yet?”

  “No, I just got here. Why?”

  Lynn shrugged and said nothing, which was rare for her. Not a good sign.

  “Where is she?”

  “Upstairs.”

  “Upstairs?” Mack’s heart sank. “What is she doing upstairs?”

  “Lying down. She said she wasn’t feeling up to a big party. Go see her.”

  “I will.” Mack turned away abruptly and started pushing his way toward the stairs, then remembered again—Carrie.

  He looked around, afraid he was going to find her cornered by his uncle Paddy, but it was worse than that. Still wearing her coat, now with a green carnation pinned to it, she was utterly disengaged from the festivities—not an easy accomplishment in this boisterous, welcoming crowd. She stood completely alone by the front door, looking as though she was preparing to open it and slip out into the night.

  He made his way over to her. “Carrie. I’m so sorry. I didn’t mean to leave you. I sort of got dragged away.”

  “It’s okay.”

  He set down his beer and took her arm. “Let’s go someplace quiet, away from all this. I know it’s probably a little overwhelming.”

  At that moment, Mack’s cousin Colin stuck his curly red head through the kitchen doorway and bellowed, “Who wants Jell-O shots?”

  “A little overwhelming?” Carrie said to Mack with a faint smile.

  He gestured at the carnation pinned to her coat. “I see you met Aunt Nita. Thanks for being a good sport. Come on.”

  He led her upstairs, past a gallery of framed family pictures that Maggie had hung, one by one, throughout his lifetime: baby portraits and school photos of him and Lynn, First Communion and cap-and-gown shots, a family portrait done at his parents’ twenty-fifth anniversary party, then Lynn’s wedding, his niece and nephews as babies, and now their school portraits . . .

  Mack had walked up and down these stairs thousands of times without paying much attention to the photographs. Now it hit him: his own wedding picture would never hang on this wall, nor would pictures of his babies. His mother wouldn’t be alive to meet his wife and children, and even if his father was around for that, he’d most likely have to be reintroduced every time he saw them.

  Engulfed by a ferocious wave of sorrow, Mack halted at the top of the steps, still gripping the railing with one hand and Carrie’s arm with the other.

  This is the end of an era. I’m losing both my parents, and it’s happening too soon, too fast . . .

  “Are you okay?” Carrie asked.

  He tried to blink tears from his eyes and succeeded only in allowing them to roll down his cheeks.

  “Yeah,” he said, surreptitiously wiping his eyes on his sleeve. “I’m good. Come on—I’ll take you in to meet my mother.”

  “Meet your mother?” she echoed.

  “She’s lying down in there.” He gestured at the closed door to the master bedroom.

  “I’m sure she doesn’t feel like meeting a total stranger.”

  Carrie was the one who didn’t feel like meeting a total stranger, Mack realized—then, to be fair, reminded himself that she’d just been bombarded with dozens of total strangers downstairs. Could he really blame her for not taking all of that—and now a terminally ill mother—in stride?

  “Never mind. Come on,” he said, leading her down the hall to his boyhood room. He opened the door and stuck his head in to make sure the room was vacant and presentable.

  His twin bed was still covered in the denim quilt his mother had bought on sale at Caldor years ago, to replace the “little boy” one printed with fire trucks. Matching denim curtains hung at the lone window, and dangling from the rod was another old Cub Scout project: the Native American dream catcher he’d made from a twig, twine, beads, and feathers. Somehow—no doubt courtesy of too-sentimental-to-throw-it-away Maggie—it had recently found its way back to his room, along with a couple of other crafts he’d made back in his school days.

  The bookcase was lined with childhood favorites: the Hardy Boys and Narnia sharing space with Tom Wolfe and V.C. Andrews’s entire Flowers in the Attic series, which he’d borrowed from his sister, Lynn, and later wished he’d hidden away so his friends wouldn’t see it.

  The shelf beneath his old stereo—complete with a cassette deck—was crammed with stacks of tapes that revealed an equally eclectic taste in music: Foreigner, Warren Zevon, Culture Club. His father used to bring albums home from work, saying, “Here, Mack, give this a listen and tell me what you think.”

  How could he possibly reconcile the memory of that sharp-eyed, sharp-eared businessman with the fog-shrouded senior citizen his father had become?

  Mack cleared his throat and told Carrie to wait for him in the bedroom. “I won’t be long,” he said. “I just want to go see her.”

  “Take your time.” Carrie unpinned the carnation from her coat as she sat on the bed, but she didn’t unbutton it.

  “Do you want to take off your coat? It’s a little warm in here.”

  He waited for her to say, “A little warm?” The house, which had always been drafty, was uncomfortably toasty tonight, between all those bodies downstairs and the thermostat being raised for his mother, who was always cold now.

  But Carrie just tucked the carnation into her bag and said, in her quiet way, “No, I’ll be fine. Wait—do you have a cigarette?”

  “I do, but . . . you really can’t smoke here.”

  She just looked at him, probably waiting for an explanation, given the fact that at least half the people downstairs were puffing away.

  “It’s just . . . my parents don’t really know that I smoke.”

  “How old did you say you were?” The words themselves m
ight have been meant in a teasing way, but her expression and tone weren’t the least bit lighthearted. “Everyone is smoking down there.”

  “Well, it’s not allowed up here. My rule. Not theirs.” Jaw set, he headed for the master bedroom.

  He knocked, heard his mother’s voice, and opened the door. “Mom?”

  “Hi, Mack.”

  The room was dim, and it smelled funny. Stale, medicinal.

  He closed the door, shutting out the sounds of laughter and music from below, and crossed over to the bed.

  “You can turn on a lamp,” his mother said, and he did. She winced and blinked her lashless eyes.

  “Sorry—do you want me to turn it off again?”

  “It’s okay, I’ll be fine.”

  No. Unlike Carrie, his mother wouldn’t be fine.

  She was dying.

  It still seemed surreal. Emotion clogged Mack’s throat again, and he tried to think of something to say, wondering if he could even push words past the lump of grief.

  It was so hard to look at her, lying there wearing one of her cancer turbans. She had wigs, but she said they scratched her scalp and anyway, they looked stiff and fake. The turbans were soft and kept her head warm, and this one was green, Mack noticed with a pang, wondering if he should compliment her on it.

  “Did you eat?” she asked.

  “Not yet. I just got here.”

  “Go eat. I made corned beef in the Crock-Pot. Daddy helped.”

  “You’re kidding, right?” His father didn’t cook.

  “No, I wanted to teach him how to make it, because . . . because.”

  Because she wasn’t going to be around next Saint Patrick’s Day.

  Mack forced a smile. “How’d he do?”

  “You know your father. It took him forever to chop the cabbage and he wanted all the pieces to be exactly the same size. Like it matters.” His mother tried to laugh, but it morphed into a coughing fit.