They’re selling off the churches to settle the lawsuits. The kids who were abused.
A week passed, then two. One morning, for no good reason he could think of, he made his old morning trek to St Dymphna’s. The parking lot was empty, the windows dark. For a moment he contemplated driving to Dunster, the morning Mass at Sacred Heart. He was technically still licensed to drive by the state of Massachusetts. His mother’s car waited in the garage, an Oldsmobile sedan from the last millennium. All he had to do was dig it out.
The garage door was blocked by a knee-high wall of drifted snow. When he took a shovel to it, it would not give; it had melted and refrozen so many times that a carapace had formed, an icy shell hard as glass.
He went back into the house and sheltered in place.
More days passed. How many days was impossible to determine and frankly, not worth the effort. Periodically he shuffled upstairs for a bowl of Lucky Charms. When the milk turned, he ate the cereal dry from the box.
He ran out of weed.
Excelsior11: Where are my PIX???
Without weed, his sleep was shallow. Tim Flynn was only a boat ride away, but the thought of getting on a boat made his stomach lurch.
He dreamed fitfully, distractedly, brief snippets of dreams that seemed to go on for hours. In dreams he lost his shoes, his scapular, his Disability check. In an online forum he appealed to St. Anthony, the patron saint of lost objects. From the saint’s profile pic, Anthony learned that he was in fact Pat Morita, the old Japanese coot who’d mentored the Karate Kid.
I have lost important objects, his dream self wrote. Need your intercession asap.
The saint responded with a string of emojis Anthony could not decode.
In the worst of the dreams, he was locked out of his house. Snow was flying, a monster nor’easter. The snow rose to his ankles, his knees, his hips. He was being buried alive in snow.
In desperation he messaged St. Anthony and received an autoreply:
On vacay in Florida with Dymphna ?
Your call will be answered in the order received.
When the milk turned, he contemplated walking to Tedeschi’s. Boots over his slippers, a parka over his robe. He was halfway out the door when a thought occurred to him: If he were locked out of the house, what exactly would he do? Call a locksmith? Maybe his father had a key, or maybe he didn’t. It was a coin toss. Either way, Anthony would have to spend agonizing minutes in his father’s company as they searched his sad apartment above Grandma Blanchard’s garage. In his delicate state, the prospect was exhausting. It seemed a soul-crushing amount of effort just to get back to where he was at that very minute, inside the house.
He sat in a dark room holding his head.
Supplies dwindled. When the cereal was gone, he applied cream cheese to oyster crackers, which was difficult to do since each cracker was the size of a nickel. When the cream cheese was gone, he ate the crackers dry. When the oyster crackers were gone, he ordered more from Amazon.
He wished that Amazon delivered weed.
20
The conference room was packed with women—the entire full-time staff, plus thirty or forty of the volunteers. At the front of the room a projector screen had been lowered from the ceiling. Florine stood beside it, staring at a laptop. The room smelled faintly of her jasmine perfume.
She scanned the room, her lips moving slightly as she took a head count. She was dressed for battle, in a sleek dark suit and fine stilettos that could take your eye out. The rest of the staff were dressed in scrubs or blue jeans. Florine, as always, was the adult in the room.
“Thanks for being here, everyone,” she said. As though they’d had a choice: an all-staff memo had informed them that the clinic would be closed to patients, the morning appointments rescheduled. This had happened before, but not recently. Even during a monster nor’easter, Mercy Street opened on time.
“As some of you may have heard, we have an ongoing security situation at the clinic.” Florine spoke deliberately, choosing her words. “I know how rumors get started—I’ve heard some pretty outlandish ones already—so I wanted you to hear it straight from me.
“It has come to our attention that someone has been taking photos of our patients outside the clinic. We don’t know who this person is, but we know it’s happening because we’ve got him on video. The quality isn’t great, so I’m going to turn down the lights to help you see.”
The lights dimmed. Florine bent over her laptop and tapped briefly at the keyboard until an image appeared on the screen. It was the same footage Claudia had watched with Luis, the wide-angle view of the clinic entrance.
She’d watched it so many times that she could anticipate each frame: the protestors shifting and shuffling, Shannon F.’s jerky marionette steps as she made her way to the door, the guy in the Sox cap approaching from the edge of the screen like a hunter moving in for the kill. She felt a terrible anticipation as he raised the cell phone to his chest.
Florine paused the recording.
“This guy, whoever he is, has been uploading photos of our patients to a website. We have no reason to believe anyone is in physical danger, but our patients’ privacy is a serious matter. We’ve been in touch with law enforcement for guidance on how to proceed.”
Whispers in the room, a low hum of conversation. Florine turned up the lights.
“I know you have questions,” she said. “Hit me.”
A half dozen hands shot into the air. Good girls they were, polite and mannerly. They raised their hands and waited to be recognized, to be granted the right to speak.
“What about the website?” said Mary Fahey. “Do we know who built it?”
“The police are working on that,” Florine said.
Another show of hands.
“This can’t be legal,” said Heather Chen. “Posting people’s photos without permission. What about HIPAA?”
“I knew someone was going to ask that.” Florine looked very alert, her sole mode of expression. “Here’s the situation. According to our attorney, HIPAA is no help to us here. Health-care workers are legally bound to protect patient confidentiality, but the rest of the world isn’t required to do so. And in Massachusetts, anyway, there don’t seem to be any state laws that apply.”
“Well, what about the site that hosts it?” Mitch called from the back of the room. “Can’t we make them take it down?”
“It isn’t that simple. There are First Amendment issues. I know,” Florine said, at the groan of protest in the room.
Immediately ten conversations started at once. Florine knocked on the tabletop to get the group’s attention, her silver ring loud as a gavel.
“People, people! Stay with me. This is important: we aren’t the only clinic that’s been targeted. The photos on the website were taken in multiple locations, probably in several different states. So there may be other state laws to consider.”