Small Mercies

by Dennis Lehane

“Mary Pat,” Joyce says, breathing shallow, “I will discipline my child as I see fit.” Again Mary Pat shakes her head. “Get out of her fucking way!” Hannah Spotchnicki screams. “No one touches this girl,” Mary Pat says. Joyce charges and immediately comes up short when Mary Pat buries her fist in her solar plexus. Joyce hits the ground on her hip, lies there with her mouth open and gasping desperately for breath that’s still a good ten seconds away. Three of the five remaining SWAB Sisters—Hannah, Carol, and Patty—attack as one. They must think they’re tough, Mary Pat reasons, because they’re from Southie and they’ve waged reigns of terror over their husbands and children for years. But being from Southie is one thing; being from Commonwealth Housing Development is quite another.

She loses some hair, gets her face and ears all scratched up, but pretty soon three more bitches are on the ground moaning, and Mary Pat is still standing—no one even got her off her feet—wiping at the blood in her eyes.

She reaches behind her and turns on the radio, and the DJ, just coming out of commercial, welcomes her to settle in and listen to some Mozart, a boy genius who started composing at five. “The Piano Sonata Number Eleven,” the DJ says in a voice as smooth as toffee, “is also known as the Rondo Alla Turca. Composed as a trifle, it has, over time, become one of his most popular pieces the world over.”

Mary Pat, since as long as she can remember, has been getting slapped, sometimes lightly, sometimes hard. She’s been punched, tripped, hit with hangers, hit with broomsticks, Wiffle-ball bats, those wooden spoons, her mother’s shoes, her father’s belt. Donnie once threw a bar of brown soap at the back of her head and knocked her completely off her feet. On the streets, she fought girls, boys, and packs of both. Anytime one person attacked her, she fought back against all of them, throughout her history, who’d ever hit her or twisted her hair or ear or nipple, anyone who’d ever screamed at her or snapped at her, hit her with a belt or a shoe. Everyone who had ever made her feel like a frightened little girl wondering what kind of fucked-up fire she’d been born into. She can’t remember that girl, but she can feel her. She can feel her bafflement and terror. At the noise and the fury. At the storm of rage that swirled around her and spun her in place until she was so fucking dizzy from it, she had to learn to walk in it without falling down for the rest of her life. And she learned well. She’s happiest when she’s opposed, most ecstatic when she’s been wronged. She’s lost the last four days of her life to mourning. Okay. The mourning is not over—not by a long shot—but she decides, as she rises and tosses the ice into the sink, that it can be paused for a bit.

He eyes her cuts, her bruises and bandages. “Happened to you?” She shrugs. “You should see the other girls.” “Plural?” She nods. “Never could respect bitches who forget that if you start a fight you should damn well fucking know how to finish one.”

“Mrs. Fennessy, please go home.” “And do what?” “Whatever you do when you’re home.” “And then what?” “Get up the next day and do it again.” She shakes her head. “That’s not living.” “It is if you can find the small blessings.” She smiles, but her eyes shine with agony. “All my small blessings are gone.” “Are you sure?” “Oh, I’m sure.” “Then find new ones.” She shakes her head. “There aren’t any left to find.” Bobby is struck by the notion that something both irretrievably broken and wholly unbreakable lives at the core of this woman. And those two qualities cannot coexist. A broken person can’t be unbreakable. An unbreakable person can’t be broken. And yet here sits Mary Pat Fennessy, broken but unbreakable. The paradox scares the shit out of Bobby. He’s met people over the course of his life who he truly believes existed as the ancient shamans did, with one foot in each world: this one and the one beyond. When you meet these people, it’s best to give them breadth the length of a football field, or else they may suck you right into that next world with them when they go. Because they’re going. Make no mistake. They are fucking going.

“She’s . . .” He thinks about it. How to describe Mary Pat Fennessy? “Nobody ever told this woman how to quit. Probably nobody ever told her it was okay.” “To quit?” “To ease up. To, I dunno, cry? Feel?” He thinks about it. “Feel something besides anger, anyway. Every time I see my son? I hug him so tight he complains. I smell his hair and his skin. I put my heart to his back sometimes, just so I can hear his blood and the beat of his heart. I mean, he’s of the age he’s gonna get sick of it soon, so I’m just getting it in while I can.” She nods, her eyes gone soft, her thumb even softer against his palm.

“I’ll bet you money,” he says, “Mary Pat Fennessy was never held like that in her life.” “I suspect you’re a good father,” she says. “Call no man a good father until after he is dead.” She rolls her eyes. “That’s not the quote.” He smiles at her. “You know ancient Greek?” “I know my classics,” she says. “The nuns made sure of it.” “I don’t like nuns,” he blurts out. “I don’t like ’em either,” she says. “Though they’ve got a raw gig. The priests get all the booze and all the credit, the nuns get, what? A convent?”

“Does this woman have other kids?” “She had a son, but he died.” “Husband?” “She’s had two. Both left her, one by getting legally declared dead.” She removes a hand to take another sip of wine. “So, if something terrible did happen to her daughter, what does she have to live for?” In that moment, a ghost walks straight through Bobby. It’s perfectly sized to his body and touches every inch of him from the crown of his head to the soles of his feet before exiting through his chest. “I don’t have an answer for that,” he tells Carmen.

When he got back stateside, he stuck to strippers and barmaids for his first few years on the force. Then he met Shannon, a woman he was pretty sure, in hindsight, he’d never loved. Shannon was cold and imperious and noticeably unfond of humanity, and Bobby mistook the shine she took to him with his being a person of value—if someone who doesn’t like anyone likes you, doesn’t that render you peerless? It gave him pride, but no pleasure, to have a woman that beautiful and heartless on his arm. To be fair to Shannon, it wasn’t long into the marriage before she grasped that he didn’t love her. Problem was, she loved him (insofar as Shannon could love anyone), and the realization that he’d never really loved her back turned her already selfish heart into a granite nugget.

“You’re gonna call the police. And you’re gonna tell them what you told me. If you don’t, Rum, you listening? Say you’re listening.” “I’m listening.” “If you don’t, I’ll come back for you. Nothing will stop me. Nothing will save you. No matter what happens, Rum, no matter who you think you know or who you think can protect you, they can’t. Not against me. I’ll get to you just like I got to you tonight.

This moron can fucking vote, Bobby despairs. And breed.

Rum’s eyes zip in the sockets like marbles flung into a bowl. “I’m not here to talk about fucking Frankie.” “Yet here we are, talking about him.” “You want his ‘groove’? He’s death. That’s his fucking groove. He’s the coldest, scariest motherfucker I ever met.” Rum holds up his hands. “I’m not saying nothing about Frankie Toomey.”

spuckie

A sub

“If you don’t care about any of it, George, why’d you pick a fight with Auggie Williamson?” He lowers his hand and looks at her, and the sun bathes the side of his face in harsh yellow that bounces and refracts as she drives. “He was weak,” he says. “You could see it in his eyes.” “Maybe he was just scared.” “Fear’s a weakness.” He holds his hand back up to the sun. “I don’t like weakness.” “Maybe it’s not weakness. Maybe it’s just a kind heart.”

“My dad,” Bobby tells her eventually, “was the best housepainter you ever saw. Inside, outside, didn’t matter. He was a magician with a brush or a roller. People would ask him questions, though, about wood rot and load-bearing walls, even the electrical. My father would say, ‘I do one thing better than anybody by not concerning myself with anything else.’” “Sounds like a cool guy,” Mary Pat says. “When he was sober, yeah, he was.” Bobby realizes how much he misses the old bastard in that moment. “I’m a homicide investigator. I don’t investigate arson. That’s what arson investigators are for. I don’t investigate assault and battery. I don’t concern myself with someone, say, who claims he was forced at gunpoint to shoot heroin into his veins.”

“My life,” she says, “was my daughter. They took my life when they took hers. I’m not a person anymore, Bobby. I’m a testament.” “What?” “That’s what ghosts are—they’re testaments to what never should have happened and must be fixed before their spirits leave this world.”

She walks naked into the kitchen. When she returns with two glasses of water, he notices that one of her breasts is slightly larger than the other, and her green eyes carry a shimmer in the half dark. She sits on the bed and hands him his water, and they look at each other for a bit, saying nothing. “I like how considerate you are,” she says. “When?” “In general,” she says, “but in bed too. You listened to my body. A lot of guys don’t do that.” “You’ve had a lot of guys?” “For sure,” she says easily. “You?” “Guys? No. But women, yeah.” “So we won’t judge each other’s histories.” “Nothing good ever comes of that.”

If Jules had come to her just two weeks ago and said she was converting to Christian Scientology, or whatever they call it, Mary Pat would have disowned her. Fennessys and Flanagans were Roman Catholics. Always had been, always would be, end of story. But now Mary Pat finds the whole idea—of disowning someone for choosing to believe in a different interpretation of God—ridiculous. If Jules lies right now in the embrace of the Christian Scientist God or the Buddhist God or whatever the Episcopalians believe in, Mary Pat cares only that it’s an embrace. And that her daughter no longer knows anything of fear. Or hate.

An embrace

New law enforcement philosophies coming out of L.A. and New York have begun to advocate for special teams of combat-ready police cells. In L.A., the first of these has been given a name, SWAT, and they took on the Black Panthers and the SLA in sustained firefights that armchair John Waynes love to believe put the order back in law and order. In reality, Bobby knows, those gunfights led to limited results, a shitload of property damage, and a new micro-generation of substandard cops who think they can compensate for bad instincts, poor people skills, and limited intelligence with high-powered weaponry. One day, Bobby knows, the Vincents of the department will get a chance to prove their theories correct or not. Whether they’re proved right or wrong, the genie will be out of the bottle, and it will be probably hard, if not impossible, to put it back in.

“You all right there, Frank?” Marty asks. “Pretty far from that, Marty,” Frank says. “We’ll get you patched right up.” “I know you will, Marty. Thanks.” “You sure about that?” Mary Pat pulls the trigger and blows a tunnel from one side of Frank Toomey’s neck to the other. For men used to casual violence, none of them seems to have prepared for this moment. Larry and Weeds just look shocked, mouths agape. Marty screams, “Noooooooo!” as if his heart is breaking for the first time in his life.

Frank drops to the ground, his body nothing but a bag for nonfunctioning organs, his soul already halfway to hell.

“Dad?” His son is staring at him. Bobby looks up the cast to his son’s sleepy face. “Yeah, bud?” “It’s just a leg.” “I know.” “So why do you have tears in your eyes?” “Allergies?” “You’re not allergic to anything.” “Shut up.” “Real mature.” Bobby smiles but says nothing. After a bit, he moves his chair closer to the bed, takes his son’s hand in his. He raises it to his lips, gives the knuckles a kiss.

As time goes on, he falls into the habit of talking to Julia Fennessy most afternoons. He tells her about his son, who works for a company paves road out in California, and his two daughters who are raising families of their own not far from where they grew up, and his wife’s cooking, which won’t win any prizes but tastes like home and that’s good enough for him. He tells Julia about his father, who he’s certain never loved him, and his mother, who loved him twice as hard to make up for it, tells Julia Fennessey most of what he can remember about his life in all its highs and lows, all its dashed dreams and surprising joys, its little tragedies and minor miracles.