Ask Again, Yes

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Ask Again, Yes Page 13

by Mary Beth Keane


  “What Mrs. Stanhope said?”

  “Yes.”

  “What?”

  Lena stroked Kate’s hair, gathered it up in her hands and draped it over her daughter’s shoulder. “You’re such a pretty girl, you know that, right?”

  Kate shrugged.

  “And smart. And, I don’t know, ‘tough’ is the wrong word. You’re more like your dad than you are like me.”

  Again, something inside Kate wobbled for a second. He was tough. And yet there didn’t seem to be any future on the horizon. They were all waiting for this period to end, but maybe this was just the way it was going to be from now on, all of them watching him and reminding him to take his hands out of his pockets when he walked.

  Lena pulled Kate close. “She said she’d kill you if you went near her son. She said she shot Dad because if he died, that meant we’d have to move away, and you wouldn’t be near Peter anymore.”

  Lena let that sink in. “Before you go feeling guilty I’ll tell you the rest. She also said that she knew the Nagles had painted their house a similar shade of blue to her house just to prove that the shade they chose looked better. She said she was sick of Monsignor Repetto singling her out at Mass. She was also sick of everyone thinking she was responsible for the Challenger explosion. She mentioned an estranged sister who tried to sabotage something or other back when they were kids, and a person she worked with who was plotting to have her fired. And so on.”

  They were quiet for a few minutes.

  “She mentioned so many people and so many grievances that it sort of diluted the mention of you. But she kept coming back to you, harping on you, like you were plotting to steal her son from her. It was so nuts it sort of felt like a joke. The Challenger explosion for God’s sake. Until you consider what she did.”

  Kate remembered running down Jefferson holding Peter’s hand.

  “The point is she’s sick, Kate.”

  Kate nodded, though she wasn’t entirely sure why.

  “I’m saying that what happened is no one’s fault, really. Not even hers when you think about it. We came to a plea agreement this week. Instead of going to prison we all agreed that she should stay in the hospital for a long time. Dad agreed to that for me. Otherwise it would have gone on and on and on. I don’t want to see them anymore. I don’t want to talk about them anymore. Your poor father. Can you imagine if . . .”

  “Do you know where Peter is?” Kate asked.

  “Honey . . .”

  “I just want to know. I promise I won’t contact him.”

  “I don’t know. That’s the truth. I really don’t.”

  “Does anyone?”

  “Well, sure. Their lawyers do. His mother’s doctors know, I’d imagine. She probably has a social worker, too. I’m sure they know on the job. Brian is still working, I think.”

  Kate looked at her and hoped she wouldn’t make her say it. After a moment Lena just shook her head slowly. “Forget it,” she said, but with tenderness, like she understood that she had to ask.

  “But they’re probably still in New York,” Kate said. “Since she is.”

  Lena’s face was as blank as stone. “Kate. I’ve known Peter since the day he was born. He’s a good boy. No one thinks he isn’t. But you have to forget about him. He was your friend but now he’s gone. You might not believe this now, but one day you’ll have a friend you love as much as you love Peter. All of this is too much for a little girl to handle. Your whole life is ahead of you.”

  Kate was silent.

  “For your father, Kate. Don’t you go looking for trouble. Okay?”

  The telephone rang. Natalie. The long-distance rates dropped after 9:00 p.m.

  “Okay?”

  “Okay.”

  eight

  AND SHE DIDN’T GO looking for trouble. Sometimes she felt she deserved more credit for how completely and truly she did not go looking for trouble, or at least the trouble her mother meant.

  She made friends easily, without trying, and didn’t understand how there could be people who didn’t. All you had to say was one pretty funny thing and you made a friend. There was a crew of girls from St. Bart’s that stuck together now that they were mixed in with the public school kids, and they all went out for soccer. Kate made JV as a freshman even though there was a freshman team. She wore her uniform to school on game days and sat with a group of seven other girls for lunch and took all honors classes. She raised her hand when she felt like talking and didn’t think that was notable until Mr. Behan told her parents in the parent-teacher conference that he was glad to see a girl raising her hand. Kate’s friends agreed they’d go together to the holiday formal in December, and they all went to Marie Halladay’s house beforehand to get ready. “How fun,” her mother kept saying when she drove her over, her dress folded carefully inside a Macy’s bag. The more details Kate gave her mother the happier her mother seemed to be, so she started making them up:

  “We’ll probably trade jewelry,” she said.

  “Jeannie made a mix tape to listen to while we get ready.”

  “Marie is going to do everyone’s makeup.”

  “Makeup?” her father asked from the passenger seat. “Are you allowed to wear makeup?” He’d just had another surgery, this time to build out his jaw, and half his face was wrapped in bandages. He took pills to blur the pain but they wore off quickly, it seemed, and the doctors had warned him not to overlap doses. His words were a little muffled but Kate could still tell he was teasing by the tone of his voice. He was as delighted as her mother.

  “Kate,” her mother said, “we are so proud of you.”

  * * *

  Afternoons felt long and aimless without Peter, but a routine settled over her days. School, soccer, homework, TV, bed. Sara was the editor of the school paper, and on the weeks an issue was due, Kate walked home alone. The sky seemed bigger, emptier, since high school started, and for the first time she saw Gillam as a small place, set among other small places, and she craved to know what it would be like to walk beyond it, walk beyond the next town over, too, and the one after that, until the craving had been satisfied. She imagined a camera overhead pulling back and back like it did in movies sometimes, and Gillam lost among the twinkling lights of so many other places until it was just a speck, and then New York was just a speck, and then the United States, North America, the entire globe.

  Sometimes, she’d try to conjure up the feeling of Peter walking beside her—the shape of him, the smell. Once in a while, usually on a Friday, one of her friends would come home with her after school and they’d chatter the whole walk to Jefferson. Then at her house they’d gobble the cookies and sodas Kate’s mother put out for them and keep chattering up until the moment their mothers came to pick them up and they’d go bounding across the Gleesons’ lawn crying out that they’d see Kate on Monday. “Did you have fun?” her mother always asked, looking at her closely, and she’d assure her that she had. But as she waved and yelled her goodbyes across the twilit lawn, she always felt relieved, completely exhausted, like these departures could not have come too soon.

  When freshman year ended, Kate got a job as a camp counselor. Monday through Friday she woke up already running late, so she’d pull a bra on under whatever T-shirt she’d worn to bed, brush her teeth, and grab an apple or a banana before sprinting the ten blocks to the Central Avenue fields, where camp was held. There were bonus nights when the kids stayed nearly until dark, and Kate volunteered for those shifts, too. “Keeping busy!” her mother commented when she came in after one of these extra-long days, and her father watched her move around the kitchen. Toward the end of the summer, one of Kate’s friends who also worked at the camp, a girl named Amy who was also on Kate’s soccer team and had been over to Kate’s house plenty of times, said in front of the other counselors that Kate was like a sister to her, and looked over at Kate with a bright smile. Kate had been filling water bottles at the water station when she heard her say it, and she felt her stomach drop. She
coughed. Her face went red when she realized everyone was looking at her, waiting for her to say something.

  “But you have sisters,” Kate said, finally, the only thing she could think of.

  “It’s an expression, Kate,” Amy said, rolling her eyes. The others, embarrassed, looked away.

  “No, I know it is. I just mean you have two sisters. So do I. This isn’t what it’s like.”

  Amy’s face fell and some anger passed there. “What’s with you today?”

  Later, Kate had to say that she hadn’t really been listening, hadn’t really known what they were talking about. She’d misunderstood. “You’re one of my closest friends,” she assured Amy. “I only meant that my sisters can be so annoying.” Amy agreed that was certainly true, and for the whole walk home Kate tried to remember if Amy’s oldest sister was named Kelly or Callie.

  In the fall of sophomore year two interesting things happened at once. She made the varsity soccer team and she heard that Eddie Marik liked her. The girls were in a tizzy over it, because Eddie was a senior, and was good-looking, and had two good-looking older brothers that somehow made him even better looking than he would have been if they were just considering him alone. There was no debate about whether or not Kate should like him back. Kate thought at first that he meant Sara, who was his year, and had gotten their names confused. They didn’t look alike, but even people who didn’t know them sometimes told them that they could tell they were sisters by the way they walked. Word came down that he did not mean Sara; he meant Kate. Every day at lunch the girls leaned across the cafeteria table until their heads were almost touching, and reported on the details they’d heard: Eddie had said to Joe Cummings that Kate Gleeson was pretty. He thought she was an awesome soccer player. He was thinking of asking her out.

  “What are you going to do?” they asked her one day when this had been going on for a few weeks.

  “Nothing,” Kate said. “See what happens, I guess.”

  Eddie was one of those eighteen-year-olds who looked like he could be twenty-five. He was nice, as far as Kate knew, though she’d never spoken to him and couldn’t imagine why out of all the girls at Gillam High he’d set his sights on her. Sara, too, seemed puzzled by the whole thing. She told Kate that based on the few interactions they’d had he seemed neither smart nor dumb. He was just there. He was neither funny nor serious. He’d worked on the paper for a while but then he quit. He’d joined the yearbook but he might have quit that, too. Girls liked him, Sara granted. It was just another fact about him, same as the fact that his hair was brown.

  He waited for her after practice one day, and when her teammates saw him they fell back and urged Kate forward. Kate pretended not to see him and instead walked around the back of the school and snuck into the girls’ locker room through the custodial door. The next morning he was waiting by her locker, and the whole thing felt way too much like a movie she’d seen once.

  “Hey,” he said.

  “Hey,” she said.

  By lunch, the whole school knew they were together.

  * * *

  Eddie didn’t have a car but when they went out, he was usually able to borrow his mother’s. They went to the movies a few times, always with other kids from school, and which movie they saw didn’t matter because they spent the whole time kissing and feeling each other in the dark back row while the kids who were uncoupled chucked popcorn at them. He had to circle back to his house once after picking her up because he forgot his wallet, and when she assumed she’d just wait outside, he’d looked at her like she was crazy and insisted she come in. “Hello,” she said, tugging down the hem of her skirt when Mrs. Marik came down to the kitchen to meet her. “It’s nice to meet you. I was just—”

  “Sit down, sit down,” Mrs. Marik said. “Are you hungry? You’re Francis Gleeson’s daughter, right?” When Kate nodded, she knew that Mrs. Marik knew every single thing that had happened on Jefferson just a year and a half earlier, and wondered for the first time if Eddie did, too.

  Their game schedules mostly conflicted, but he managed to come to a few of her home games and brought friends along with him, which made the girls on her team happy. They went to the Gillam Diner one night, just the two of them, and instead of driving her straight home, he drove his mother’s hatchback to the most shadowed corner of the lot behind the post office and took her hand and slid it into his pants. “You’re so serious,” he whispered as she raised her hand up and down like he showed her. In the moonlight—full and luminous that night—she saw how handsome he was, how much he liked her, and yet sometimes, after being with him for a few hours, she felt lonelier than she had before. He reached up and pulled out her hair tie so her hair came tumbling down. He closed his eyes and inhaled.

  The only fight they had was not a real fight, just a very tense few hours. They were at Pies-on-Pizza, the Giants game blaring over their heads. Eddie kept sucking on his straw though his cup was empty. He rattled the ice inside, looked at her, and out of nowhere asked about Peter and everything that had happened at the end of eighth grade. “When you first got to school last year it was like you were famous. Everyone knew you were Sara and Natalie’s little sister, and that your dad had been shot. So that guy was really into you, I guess?” Eddie put his elbows on the table. “Made his mom crazy?”

  Kate felt something in her close up. She couldn’t account for how angry she felt that he’d asked, that he presumed to know a thing about what had happened.

  She put down her slice and pushed her plate away.

  “I heard different stories at school but I figured I’d ask you.”

  “It’s really no one’s business.”

  Eddie smirked. “Well, that’s true. But your ex-boyfriend’s mom shot your dad. Something like that will get mileage, Kate. Look at your dad’s face. You think people aren’t going to talk about that?”

  “Don’t talk about my dad,” she said, and stood up from the table.

  “I can talk about whatever I want.” He sat back and folded his arms. “Why are you acting like this?”

  “And he wasn’t my boyfriend.”

  She walked out of the pizza place. She turned onto Central Ave. and with her head down walked quickly past the dance studio, the tobacco shop, the firehouse.

  Eddie jogged up beside her. “Okay, okay, I’m sorry. The newspaper said he was your boyfriend.”

  It had never occurred to her that the whole thing had been in the newspaper. She walked faster. Her mother must have stopped the papers from coming to their house. She must have hidden them away.

  “He was my best friend.”

  “So then—”

  “I want to go home.”

  “Kate, come on.”

  “I’m walking. You can go.”

  But he couldn’t go, of course, because he’d been raised to see a girl home when he took her out. So he followed her from a few paces behind until they arrived at Jefferson. Then he jogged back to town to retrieve his mother’s car.

  At home Kate told Sara that she would never speak to him again. She told her mother that she didn’t feel well, and went to bed early. She heard the phone ringing, her mother asking Sara to see if she was awake, so she closed her eyes and pulled the covers over her head. The next morning, a Sunday, as Kate and her parents were headed out to Mass—Sara claimed she went the night before but Kate knew she spent the hour browsing lipsticks at CVS—they opened the door to find a pot of mums on their welcome mat, and a note from Eddie. “From who?” her father said as her mother elbowed him. “John Marik’s kid? Wouldn’t he be older than Kate?”

  “What am I supposed to do with a pot of mums?” Kate asked.

  “You should invite him over some night for dinner,” Lena said.

  “Oh, that would be wonderful,” Sara said.

  They made up because it was the easiest thing to do. Paul Benjamin asked Sara to the holiday formal, and for a second it looked like they’d be at the same table as Eddie and Kate. Kate looked forward to sittin
g with Sara, but Sara seemed annoyed by the idea, so it was for the best when the table got too big and had to be split in two. At the dance, once Sara went out back to smoke, Kate let Eddie kiss her on the dance floor, in full view of their teachers and chaperones. Eddie drew her close, his hand pressing the hard cage of her dress’s bodice, the reflected light from the disco ball dancing across his face and the white tuxedo shirt he’d rented, the purple cummerbund selected after his mother called Lena to ask the color of Kate’s dress. He’d left his tuxedo jacket at his seat, but he’d already sweat through the back of his shirt and kept asking Kate if she wanted something to drink. He was nervous, Kate realized, and felt a swell of real affection for him. After the dance, he told the rest of the people who’d been at their table to go ahead without them. Sara looked over her shoulder at her sister as she and Paul exited through the gym doors as if to ask if all was well. Kate waved her on.

  Alone in the parking lot, Eddie asked if Kate wanted to check out his older brother’s apartment, so Kate went. His brother had graduated from college, was commuting in to the city every morning, had renovated the garage by himself so he’d have his own space. The Mariks lived just two blocks from school so they walked, and when Kate complained that her feet hurt from the stupid heels she was wearing, he offered her a piggyback ride. “Giddyup,” he said when she climbed aboard. She swatted his butt while he galloped along the sidewalk, her dress dragging along the ground.

  When they got to the brother’s apartment, the brother was not there, and Kate understood immediately. “He’s in Boston until Sunday,” Eddie offered casually. “Visiting some of his college friends.” The lights of the main house were off and she wondered if it was only the parents of girls who waited up or just Kate’s parents in particular. Eddie unzipped her dress and she thought, Okay, this is fine. When he guided her to the pullout couch that had already been pulled out and made up, she felt a tiny bit scared. She was wearing new underwear. She’d spritzed perfume on her stomach. A person who did these things, she knew, could not then pretend to be taken by surprise. “Be careful,” her mother had said when he picked her up, another couple, a pair of seniors, in the front seat of an unfamiliar car. She’d looked at Kate as if there was something urgent she wanted to tell her but had forgotten, and now there wasn’t enough time. And though Kate didn’t mind what was happening, didn’t object, she found herself thinking of home, and how she would have been just as happy staying in that night. As Eddie reared away from her to open a condom—no doubt his brother’s—and tug it on with a look of total concentration, she thought of a mug of hot tea with honey and Sara on the couch next to her with a pile of cookies lined up on her lap and Natalie on the phone at the stroke of nine o’clock to ask what were they doing, put her on speaker, let her listen to the house for a minute.

 

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