I shook my head. “You and Fluffy parking in front of the Dutch House.”
“In a manner of speaking. Danny, it was the most amazing thing. When she got in the car, we were as close as you and I are now, and the way I felt—I was so incredibly happy, like my heart was going to break open. She was wearing this old blue cardigan and it was almost like I remembered it. I could have leaned over and kissed her. I’ve always had it my mind that I hated Fluffy, that she had hit you and she had slept with Dad, but it turns out I don’t hate her at all. It’s like I’m incapable of hating anyone or anything in my life that came before Andrea, and those were the Fluffy days. She still has that pretty face, even now. I don’t know if you remember her face but it was soft, very Irish. All of her freckles are gone now but she still has those big green eyes.”
I said I remembered her eyes.
“I did a lot of talking at first. I told her about Dad getting married and Dad dying and Andrea throwing you out, and you know what she says?”
“What?”
“She says, ‘What a cunt.’ ”
“Fluffy!”
Maeve laughed until her cheeks darkened and she started to cough. “I’ll tell you what, she cut right to it,” she said, and I handed her a tissue. “She wanted to know all about you. She was impressed that you were a doctor. She kept saying how wild you were, that she couldn’t imagine you holding still long enough to read a book much less study medicine.”
“She’s trying to cover her tracks. I wasn’t that wild.”
“Yes you were.”
“Where has she been all this time?”
“She used to live in Manhattan. She said she had no idea what to do that day Dad threw her out. She said she just stood there at the end of the driveway bawling her eyes out and finally Sandy walked out and told her she’d call her husband to come and get her. Sandy and her husband took her in.”
“Good old Sandy.”
“She said they brainstormed for a few days and finally decided to go to Immaculate Conception and talk to the priest. Old Father Crutcher helped Fluffy find a job as a nanny with some rich people in Manhattan.”
“The Catholic Church helps a woman who was fired for hitting a kid to get a job looking after kids. That’s beautiful.”
“Seriously, you have got to stop interrupting me. You’re throwing the story off. She gets a good job as a nanny, and while the children were still young she marries the doorman in the building where she works. She said they kept it a secret until she got pregnant, so she wouldn’t lose her job. She said the first baby they had was a girl and that girl is at Rutgers now. She was on her way to see her and she decided to swing by the old house.”
“No one takes geography anymore. The Dutch House isn’t on her way to Rutgers from the city.”
“She lives in the Bronx now,” Maeve said, ignoring me, “she and her husband. They had three children in all, the girl and then two boys.”
It took everything in me not to point out that the Dutch House was not on the way to Rutgers from the Bronx either.
“Fluffy said she checked on the place every now and then, that she couldn’t help it. It had been her job before we ever moved there. It had been her job to keep an eye on things after Mrs. VanHoebeek died. She said she’d been afraid to go and knock because she didn’t know what Dad would say when he saw her, but that she’d always hoped she’d run into one of us there.”
I shook my head. Why did I miss the VanHoebeeks after all these years?
“She asked me if I still had diabetes, and I told her of course, and then she got upset all over again. I remember Fluffy as being very tough when we were children but who knows? Maybe she wasn’t.”
“She was.”
“She wants to see you.”
“Me?”
“You don’t live that far from her.”
“Why does she want to see me?”
Maeve gave me a look as if to say that surely I was smart enough to get this one myself, but I had no idea. “She wants to make amends.”
“Tell her no amends are in order.”
“Listen to me. This is important, and it’s not like you’re busy.” Maeve didn’t count the work I was doing on the building as a job. In this way she and Celeste were in agreement.
“I don’t need to reconnect with someone I haven’t seen since I was four years old.” I’ll admit, the story held a certain lurid fascination when it was about Maeve seeing Fluffy, but I had no interest in pursuing a relationship myself.
“Well, I gave her your number. I told her you’d meet her at the Hungarian Pastry Shop. That’s not going to be any trouble for you.”
“It’s not a matter of trouble, I just don’t want to do it.”
My sister yawned extravagantly and pushed her face deeper into the pillow. “I’m tired now.”
“You’re not getting out of this.”
When she looked up at me, her blue eyes rimmed in red, I remembered where we were and why we were there. The overwhelming need to sleep had hit her suddenly, and she closed her eyes as if she had no choice in the matter.
I stayed in the chair and watched her. I wondered if I needed to be closer to home. Now that my residency was finished, I didn’t have to live in New York. I owned three buildings but knew for a fact that perfectly good real estate empires had been made outside of the city.
When the doctor came in later to check on Maeve I stood up and shook his hand.
“Dr. Lamb,” he said. He wasn’t much older than me. He might have even been my age.
“Dr. Conroy,” I said. “I’m Maeve’s brother.”
Maeve didn’t stir when he lifted her arm to run his fingers down the track that disappeared into the sleeve of her gown. At first I thought she must be faking it, that she wanted to avoid the questions, but then I realized she really was asleep. I didn’t know how long Otterson had been there before me. I’d kept her up too long.
“She should have gotten here two days ago,” Dr. Lamb said, looking at me.
I shook my head. “I was the last to know.”
“Well, don’t let her snow you.” He spoke as if we were alone in the room. “This is serious business.” She rested her arm at her side and pulled the sheet up to cover it again. Then he made his mark on the chart and left us there.
CHAPTER 12
The completion of my brief medical career had filled me with an unexpected lightness. After I finished my residency, I went through a period in which I was able to see the good in everything, especially the much-maligned north end of Manhattan. For the first time in my adult life I could waste an hour talking to a guy in the hardware store about sealant. I could make a mistake fixing something, a toilet say, without mortal repercussions. I sanded the floors and painted the walls in one of the empty apartments in my building, and when I was finished, I moved in. By the standards of all the dorm rooms and efficiencies I’d lived in since my extravagant youth, the apartment was generous in size—sunny and noisy and my own. Owning the place where I lived, or having the bank own it in my name, plugged up a hole that had been whistling in me for years. Celeste made the curtains in Rydal on her mother’s Singer and brought them in on the train. She got a job at an elementary school near Columbia and started teaching reading and what they called Language Arts while I went to work on the other units in the building and then the brownstones. I had no reason to think she’d made peace with my decision, but she had the sense to stop asking me about it. We had stepped into the river that takes you forward. The building, the apartment, her job, our relationship, all came together with irrefutable logic. Celeste loved to tell a softened version of our story, how we had gone separate ways after she graduated from college, victims of timing and circumstance, and then how we had found each other again, at a funeral of all places. “It was meant to be,” she would say, leaning into me.