My name was Susan O’Malley. You probably don’t remember me.
2
Mags doesn’t know I drink. Not the social turning of the wrist, a whiskey served neat with colleagues after hours or pints with my childhood friends at the local. Of those, she’s keenly aware and even, on occasion, encourages. It’s the others, on the nights when sleep eludes me – most nights – when the curling finger coaxes me into the snare. The little drinks, three fingers of warm gin after Mags heads off to bed to count sheep or the rum straight from the bottle on a weekend morning before the day’s chores – those are the troubling ones. But that’s all in the past.
The house is quiet these days save the settling of the floorboards and occasional drone of voices leaking from the unwatched television. Our daughter, Lily, married and moved out, and Margaret and I have little left to say. It’s not an uncomfortable quiet, just quiet. The house itself is too large for the two of us and in need of a growing family to fill it, to give it purpose again. I don’t like being alone with my thoughts.
I’m sitting on the front porch on a lazy Sunday morning watching the world. The ceiling of the porch is water-stained, yellow and brown, and needs repair, and the white support columns beg for a fresh coat of paint. The morning air is thick and warm and smells like an approaching thunderstorm. Summer in Massachusetts. My coffee has gone cold. I thought I wanted it, but it sat untouched as my mind wandered. I attempt to stretch my back, twisting, turning in the seat. My spine no longer cracks like a young man’s, but rather shifts into a new position with a hellish scrape like two ocean-polished rocks being rubbed together. What was I thinking about? No one. Nothing. Everything.
“Good morning.”
There’s a man on my front porch.
“Good morning,” I reply with little attempt to hide my irritation. “Can I help you?”
He’s dressed well enough: blue-collared button down shirt and khaki pants, brown English shoes. His hair, mostly reddish-brown with flecks of grey, was recently cut tight with care. His hands are empty, no supplies ready for quick distribution, no pamphlets espousing the benefits of alternate interpretations of ancient books, nothing that would cause suspicion except whatever he’s carrying under his arm.
“This is 1750 Crescent Street, correct?”
“Yes.”
“Are you Tom Burns?”
“I’m sorry, who are you?”
It’s easy to say now that he was somehow familiar, the air about him, the way he stood, very straight, confident, like he owned the room. I didn’t want to like him immediately, but I did.
“I’m Patrick O’Malley,” he says and smiles. “Susan’s brother.”
Margaret is standing behind the screen door, watching us from the shadows, two ghosts shaking hands.
“This is Susan’s brother,” I say.
“Patrick,” he offers and bows his head like he’d been sent to finishing school.
“Yes,” she says through the screen. “I heard.”
Yes, it’s him, matinee idol handsome, yet still a boyish grin—I’d last seen him at Susan’s funeral, nine, maybe ten years old, his face pale, stoic against the day, unable to comprehend his older sister had met such an end. And after forty years, on a late June lazy Sunday morning at 10am, the curse has arrived on our doorstep.
***
Such a plain, ordinary name, “Patrick”, yet he makes things… complicated. He brings old family photographs stuffed into a shoebox he carries under his arm like a football and places it in the center of the coffee table then sighs, like he’s returned something we didn’t know we’d lost. Margaret and I look at each other out of the corners of our eyes.
“I found these in my parent’s attic after my mother passed. They’re mostly of Susan, of course,” he says in a windy, rehearsed voice before lifting the lid of the box with a magician’s flair. The only thing missing from the performance is a half-hearted “ta-da!” and a spindly white rabbit pulled from the box by his ears.
Susan. I haven’t thought of her since our time at Stevens College—since those four lawless years of purgatory before adult life begins. These were supposed to be the best years of our lives, a time to fall in love, question ancient philosophers and protest foreign wars. The memories of my college days are, not surprisingly, marred by Susan’s death, though I look back warmly upon the short time we had together. I owe that to Susan—to recall her with fondness and compassion, dignity. She was my first love, my only love if you must know. I’ve learned time wants to mitigate the painful and highlight the mirthful. There’s a word: mirthful. That’s Margaret’s word, “a fifty cent-er,” she’d say.
How does one begin a game of pain roulette? Pick a photo from the box, any photo, and see where memory takes you. Margaret, always the brave one, reaches her hand into the unknown, gently fingering through the pile of photos like they’re rusty fishhooks.
The first photo was taken on a shimmering summer day on a Plum Island, Massachusetts beach. Susan, maybe eight, was wearing a hand-me-down, lime green bathing suit a size too big and barely adhering to her freckled, sunburned shoulders. Her smile is crooked and devious, oversized with gapped front teeth bursting through despite her efforts to tuck them behind reddened lips.
Another, her First Communion. Smile of an angel, her proud father leaning in with his shiny, oily skin, uncomfortable in his church costume, a short, misshapen necktie listing to the left. In another, Susan and Patrick, Christmas morning pajamas, red and green plaids and too tight, probably an aunt’s poor estimation as to how much they’d grown in a year. A holiday evergreen looms in the background, the undecorated peak too tall for the room, green branches vining over a length of ceiling like a serpent in wait. Then one where she’s in her late teens, close in time to when I met her, beautiful, and already her smile—the one that could melt men’s souls—was growing elusive. Patrick, ten years younger and a puff of red curls, stands close to her, unaware a monster lurks in the shadows.
By her late teens, Susan was already sex and curves. Men fawned over her. Women wanted to trade places with her, at least for a moment, just to feel what it was like to command a room without uttering a word. Yet this sway, this ungentle and overwhelming ability to influence others, did not bring her joy. It’s this aspect of mental illness that’s most confounding to me. How could someone with so many God-given gifts and so many successes not think themselves worthy?
Margaret examines each photo, running her fingertips along the still sharp edges and pointed corners, making little grunts of satisfaction (“hmmmm”) before handing them to me. She too is measuring up Patrick, watching the small lines at the edges of his eyes to see if they twitch, attempting to gauge the significance of each photo, each moment the shutter clicked open and shut. Patrick peers out of the corner of his eyes, a gumshoe, never looking directly at us, feigning a study of our modest wall coverings, the dust collected in one corner of the hardwood floor, the low drawl of our neighbor’s restless poodle announcing his displeasure with being left outside in the elements. He is almost an apparition, seated with us in our living room but not at the same moment in time, observing from a few feet away, but out of reach. Patrick makes me uncomfortable.
He is different than I remembered, though the last time I’d seen him he was still a child. His red hair has darkened considerably; bits of gray surfaces here and there, like the rest of us. What’s his purpose? Forty years on, what is he hoping to uncover under the guise of filling in the gaps of his memory of his beloved sister? Is there something more sinister at work? He’s holding something back.
“My only memories of her are when she was sad,” Patrick offers while touching two fingers to his lower lip. “I was hoping you could provide something happier, or at least, maybe… less sad.”
I can hear Susan in his voice, sultry and rhythmic, yet thoroughly defeated before the day even commenced.
“I’ve had lots of treatment over the years,” he says. “I don’t mind telling you. My parents too, though they weren’t as severe, well… now, it’s just me.”
Margaret studies him, her eyes barely slits, chewing her bottom lip. “Hmmmm,” she offers, ever the politician.
“I suffer from many of the same demons, you could say, but there are medications now which help, at least somewhat,” he continues. “They don’t just throw you in a cage anymore.”
I take his commentary on cages as an awkward attempt at humor, a self-deprecating endeavor to break the ice, and smile like an idiot. Margaret shoots me a look I can’t hope to describe, something from the depths of Hell. I sink deep into the couch, trying to burrow through the velvety, flower print covering to the shoddy foam and springs. I want to strip—shoes, socks, pants, shirt, underwear—and run across the room, leaping smile first through the nearest window, and make my getaway.
“Maybe just anymemories of Susan,” he says after some consideration. He puts on a pair of reading glasses, hipster type—black plastic rims, too small for his face and circular in a John Lennon manner. And his composed demeanor, it’s… rehearsed and disingenuous. I wonder what Margaret thinks of him—his smug glasses and Nantucket button down shirt with paisley swirls. She shoots me another glare that makes me shiver.
I have to admit, Patrick has a calming manner and impeccable delivery. He summons your attention while you believe it’s your own free will to listen to each carefully honed sentence. Suave would be the right word if forced to choose. Another wasted O’Malley family gift. Such a beautiful and talented family of loonies.
“I’m not sure what I’m searching for, really, everything and nothing. Even little things could be relevant.” He laughs at his own words. “Sorry I’m being so vague, I want to paint a picture of Susan, a more complete picture than the one I have now.”
He’s a liar. And I should know, I’ve already lied to you. There’s not a day goes by that I don’t think of Susan. It’s just after 10am and I’m stone drunk.
The air in the room grows stale, like the oxygen has been sucked out by a warm, dry wind. The remnants of last night’s dinner—rotting broccoli and some kind of fish—escape from the refrigerator and waft into the living room. I think I might puke. In my gin-induced haze, Susan speaks to me. Her voice is soft and inviting, her loving self before the irrational fits and starts. It is the Susan I knew and loved freshman year, before the troubles.
“She called you ‘Paddy’.” I found my voice. “I just remembered that.”
