Marlinchen surprised me when I came home that night by suggesting a glass of wine out under the magnolia tree. I was about to tell her that I didn’t think it wise that she made a habit of wine at the end of the day, but she must have seen it coming, because she corrected me. “I meant wine for you, and I’d have a ginger ale or something,” she said.
As we emerged from the French doors, I nearly collided with Aidan, who was out on the deck without the light on.
“What are you doing out here?” Marlinchen asked him.
“Just getting some air,” Aidan said.
“Oh,” Marlinchen said, accepting it. But I saw the narrow outline of his lighter in the front of his jeans, and I knew he’d been just about to sneak a cigarette. To cover his tracks, I spoke up. “You know what I was noticing yesterday?” I said, looking up at the roofline. “Your house.”
“Oh, God,” Marlinchen said, following my gaze. “Does it need some kind of expensive repairs?”
“No,” I said. “I was just thinking that whoever did the repairs, after the lightning strike, did a really good job. I’ve seen it from all angles, and I can’t even identify the spot where it was repaired. Where exactly was it hit?”
It was Aidan who spoke. “Lightning struck the house?” he asked. “When was this?”
“You must remember,” Marlinchen said, surprised. “Back when we were kids. It was really loud.”
But there was no recognition on Aidan’s face. “It was that long ago?” he said. “I mean, are you sure I was living here then?”
Marlinchen nodded. “Oh, yes. This was before Colm was born. It was that night when Mother got so upset. She was crying, remember?” When it was clear that he didn’t, she shook her head. “Boys. You can sleep through anything.”
Just then, Colm’s voice interrupted. “Marlinchen!” His disembodied voice floated through the window.
Marlinchen made a little face, as if to apologize for the interruption. “What?” she said loudly, leaning slightly toward the open window and her out-of-sight brother.
“We can’t find Donal’s, you know, his sign-up form!”
Whatever it was that Donal was registering for- a sports league or summer school- Marlinchen seemed to be familiar with it. “Duty calls,” she said to us. “I’ll be right back.”
I stopped her. “Wait,” I said. “You didn’t answer my question, about what part of the house was struck.”
Marlinchen paused, with her hand on the door. “Sorry,” she said. “After all this time, I can’t remember.”
She went in. I turned back to Aidan.
“You know,” I said, “if lightning really did strike your house, you shouldn’t have been able to sleep through it.”
“I believe you,” Aidan said. “When I was living in Georgia, lightning hit a tree about a hundred yards from where I was working. That was loud enough to put the fear of God into me, and a hundred yards was a pretty safe distance.”
“Maybe you weren’t at home that night,” I suggested. “Could it have happened during the time that you were in the hospital?”
“The hospital?” Aidan echoed.
“When you lost your finger,” I explained. “That would have been around the same time, according to what Marlinchen says.”
This did not clear up Aidan’s confusion. “I don’t think I was ever in the hospital,” he said. “I mean, it was just a finger. It’s grisly, but there’s not much you can do for an injury like that. Stop the bleeding, save the finger if you can, amputate if you can’t. It’s not like you’d need the ICU.”
“No,” I said, seeing that he was right. But hadn’t Marlinchen said that Aidan had gone away for a time?
Quick footsteps announced Marlinchen’s return, and she emerged onto the back deck. “Ready?” she said to me.
We walked down to the magnolia tree, to sit in full view of the moonlit waters of the lake. Sitting cross-legged, I opened the wine bottle and poured some into a plastic cup. The first swallow burned a warm path down my throat.
“Other than his speech difficulties,” Marlinchen said, “Dad was looking really good yesterday. Didn’t you think so?”
“Sure,” I said, although I had little basis for comparison, other than the photos I’d seen of younger, healthier Hughs.
I swallowed more wine and lay back, the dark form of the last magnolia blossom nodding above me. For a while, we didn’t speak. A bulky, graceful black shadow swept overhead, not far from the lake’s banks. An owl, hunting by night.
Then Marlinchen said, “Are you okay, Sarah?”
“Why wouldn’t I be?” I asked.
“You seemed a little”- she wavered one hand in the air-“a little off when you came in tonight.”
When I didn’t say anything, she spoke again, and this time more carefully. “You never talk about your husband,” she said. “It’s like he’s dead, instead of in prison.”
A single magnolia petal fell from the tree and lay between us, creamy white at its wide end, smudged magenta at the inner tip.
“When we talked about Shiloh,” I said, “I just said he was in Wisconsin. I don’t remember telling you he was in prison.”
Even in the dimness I saw Marlinchen’s face begin to stain its familiar pink.
“I was curious,” she said. “I ran your name through a search engine.”
“Fair enough,” I said. “But you also could have asked me. I would have told you.”
But my reference to Shiloh, that night, had been meant to deceive, I realized, and now I was ashamed of that. Unshaded, unadulterated truth was in short supply in the Hennessy household, and I hadn’t really helped matters by adding half-truths of my own. Maybe somewhere in the moral calculus it had made a difference.
“I should have been up-front with you,” I said. “I’m sorry.”
“It’s all right,” she said.
“I guess I don’t talk about him because I don’t talk with him. He hasn’t written to me for several months.”
“That’s awful,” she said. “Why not?”
I picked up the magnolia petal and stroked it with my thumb. Its texture was somewhere between velvet and candle wax. “I remind Shiloh of things he’d rather forget,” I said. “When I was looking for him, I found out something about him he didn’t want me to know, and it opened up an old wound for him.”
“What did you find out?” Marlinchen said.
“That belongs to him,” I said. “It’s not mine to share.”
“So when he gets out, what’ll you do?” she asked.
“I don’t know,” I said.
Sharp surprise registered on her features. I’d given the wrong response.
“You think adults always know the answers?” I said.
“Well, no,” she admitted. “It’s just that… you seem so certain about everything.”
“No,” I said. “Cops aren’t really encouraged to second-guess themselves, but I make missteps all the time.” I was thinking about Cicero, and the little.25 now resting in the glove compartment of my car. “You try to help people, and sometimes it seems they don’t really want to be helped.”
Marlinchen nodded as if she knew what I was saying, although I doubted she really could. “Have you ever thought about doing something else for a living?” she asked.
“No,” I said.
“Why not?”
“It’s the only thing I’m trained for,” I said.
She wasn’t satisfied. “But why?”
“Why what?”
“It wasn’t always the only thing you’re trained for. At some point you made a decision to get trained for it. That’s why you dropped out of college, right? To go into police work?”
I shook my head. “No,” I said. “When I left school, the last thing on my mind was becoming a cop.”
“What changed your mind?”
Those who go into law enforcement have a list of stock answers; generally, the same ones they give during the interview part of the application process: I want to help people, every day there’s a new challenge, I hate the thought of working at a desk. I didn’t use any of them.
“I don’t know,” I said. “Well, I do, but it’s a long story. A long, boring story.”
I must have made it sound sufficiently boring, because Marlinchen didn’t pursue it any further. After a few more minutes, by some silent agreement, we rose and headed up toward the house.
Much later, after the kids had gone to sleep and the house had quieted, I stood at Hugh Hennessy’s high window and looked down. I was still thinking about Marlinchen’s sketchy tale of lightning striking the house and Aidan’s inability to remember any such event.
Catholic by bloodline only, I had no religious training, but as a child I’d been haunted by something that the other kids had taken from their Sunday school teachings: that the world had been perfect, and then sin had entered it in a bolt of lightning. It was a metaphor, but for years I’d believed it literally.
Now I saw the Hennessy family in the same terms, unexpectedly and swiftly cursed. They’d been this Edenic little family, then lightning struck the house, then Aidan lost his finger to a brutal dog, then Elisabeth Hennessy drowned in the waters of the lake. Was it all simply bad luck?
Soon Marlinchen would be 18 and the guardian of her younger siblings, and my responsibilities here would be over. The best thing would be for me to ignore my feeling that something had gone very wrong with this family long before I was part of their lives. But I wasn’t sure I could.
Marlinchen had asked me tonight why I chose to become a cop. She was right; it wasn’t something I had drifted into. It was something I had chosen, part of what Genevieve called my headfirst impulse to help people.
Just before I slept that night, I heard the cry of a barred owl out over the lake. It sounded very like a human scream.