When he looks at me and bites his lip, I feel my pulse in my ears, and I think this is what it feels like to really want a boy.
Whether he would’ve picked the past or the future, I’ll never find out, because a beige car pulls up the driveway of the little brown house. Tilly Donahue and her home aide, I presume. The aide slides out, waddles to the other side of the car, and gently pries the old woman out by the elbow. She guides her across the icy-slick flagstones along the front walk. All I can see of Tilly is a cloud of permed white hair above the collar of her fur coat. Who wears a fur coat to water aerobics?
Quickly they duck inside, out of the weather.
“Ready?” Chad asks.
“Yeah,” I whisper, then louder, “yes.”
When we’re shivering and blinking frozen water out of our eyes on the sidewalk, he offers me his hand. “In case I slip,” he says, and smiles.
I take it this time and even though I’m out of the beautiful red dress that made all my weird curves look like they were supposed to be there, back in my hoodie with the chewed drawstrings and jeans with Swiss-cheese knees, I could almost dance up the driveway and onto the porch. I ring the doorbell, and with his free hand Chad palms back his hair, wet and peaked with rain.
The narrow young face of the home aide floats in the window. “Hello?” She answers the door, still hung with a glittery Valentine’s Day wreath of pink hearts speared with arrows. Without her own coat on, I can see she’s hugely pregnant under a tent of a sweater.
“Hi!” I chirp, and repeat the story of the school project, the long-lost aunt. I’m getting pretty slick at lying my way into people’s homes. Which I don’t think is wrong. Maybe just . . . Machiavellian. “So Tilly’s neighbor said she might be the best person to help us. Since she knows a lot of what happens in town.”
The aide laughs. “He’s not wrong. Just hold on while I ask Tilly? She might be tired out.”
Ten minutes later and with glasses of lime seltzer in our hands and a bowl of licorice hard candies in front of us, Chad and I are sitting down on the couch in Tilly’s living room. There’s a definite theme going on—framed embroideries of shamrocks and saints and those little hand-heart-crown combos all over. On the shelf above the fireplace are dozens of little ceramic leprechauns. In an armchair under a big stained-glass wall hanging of the green, white, and orange Irish flag sits Tilly Donahue: a hawk-nosed, coral-lipped, bird-boned woman in a caramel velour tracksuit. There are a dozen rings at least on her bent fingers, big, polished hunks of pink and blue and green and tiger-eye stone. As she fiddles with the cellophane wrapper on licorice after licorice, she’s only too happy to talk. She’s already complained to us about the weather, her sore hip, her nasal congestion, and her cataracts with the same pride in her cloudy eyes as a collector showing off her prized postage stamps. The aide retreated to the kitchen after settling Tilly in. Probably she’s heard all of this three times today already.
When I tell Tilly I’m looking for one of the Fayes—“the Protestants down the street,” she calls them—she really gets revved up.
“The mother, she ran off early. When the girl was, oh, eight or nine. Siobhan was a strange fruit. And that poor Sidonie, she never had much chance at normal. Do you know she used to knock on my door and ask for things like milk? Because her father used to forget to buy it. Imagine, a little girl in the house and you don’t buy milk. And the milkman hadn’t been coming around for fifteen years! The father always offered to shovel my driveway after a big one, before he was taken and they shipped the girl across town. But he went away on business a lot, and anyway, a little girl needs a mother. Or else they don’t learn how to act. I think it must be why all these girls on TV are going to jail and showing around their privates. They show their privates in the streets like parade floats!”
Chad splutters around a sip of seltzer. I have zero percent desire to hear Tilly Donahue’s theories on why motherless girls like me grow up to show around their privates, but she seems to be waiting for my answer. For something to do, I peel the wrapper off a licorice and pop it into my mouth. It tastes like the bottom of a 1950s-style candy man’s pocket. “Huh,” I gargle, tucking the sugary rock into my cheek. “So, do you know what happened to Sidonie when she grew up? My mom . . . Lil . . . she thought her cousin might’ve come back to Fitchburg about five years ago.”
“She did.” Tilly bobs her head on her thin neck, and this seed of excitement sprouts in me. “And that was something. Twenty years, the Faye girl disappears. No one knows where she went, then one day Margie Goldberg says she saw her in the Stop and Shop with Todd Malachai.” She lowers her voice and leans in. “And one week Todd came in and bought ladies’ unmentionables.”
“Uh-huh . . .”