“Well, then, why are you here?” Clare asked.
“To tell the truth.”
“Well, then tell it.”
“You can’t tell the truth unless people are willing to hear it,” Lucy began. “Sebastian . . . He was the truth.”
“He was sick in the head,” Clare said. “Wasn’t he?”
“Takes one to know one, Mother,” Lucy said angrily.
“I’m just quoting what was in the papers,” Clare said, with an oversize shrug for the crowd.
The sight of her mother playing devil’s advocate for the cameras, to the audience, at Sebastian’s expense, was galling to Lucy.
“And you believe what you read?”
“I’ve found that most of what people tell you not to believe in the papers is because they actually don’t want you to believe it. Isn’t that the truth?”
“That was me,” Lucy said. “Before.”
The producers loved every minute of the family strife playing out before them.
“Some say that something mystical happened in the church. That you and the others were transformed into some kind of holy people?”
“People say a lot of things.”
“What do you say?”
Lucy thought for a moment about how best to answer her. “It wasn’t what happened inside the church that is important. It’s what happened inside of me.”
“Which was?”
“We can’t help but be changed by love,” Lucy answered. “By death. By both.”
“And you were changed?”
“Yes.”
“Did you love him?” her mother asked.
“Sorry, I don’t share intimate details with strangers.”
“I want to know.”
Lucy was silent.
“The people want to know,” Clare added.
“Have you ever met someone who knew you better than you knew yourself? Who really understood you? Loved you unconditionally?”
“You loved me,” Clare said. “When you were a baby.”
“But you didn’t love me,” Lucy said. “Not enough to stay.”
“I loved you enough to know it was best for me to go,” Clare said. “Do you know how hard that was for me?”
“I am not interested in how hard anything was for you,” Lucy said. “I don’t even know you.” Lucy paused, answering her own initial question. “Sebastian was that person for me. For us. Take it as you want to.”
“So what’s next? The way people follow you around now, it’s like some sort of cult. What is it they expect to hear from you?”
“I don’t know what they expect.”
“Are you starting a new religion, a clothing line, or . . . what?”
“I think there are enough religions,” she said. “And clothing lines.”
“Then you fancy yourself some kind of shaman or priestess?”
“I’m no prophet,” she said. “That’s for sure.”
“Well, you must have a message for them you’d like to tell all of us?”
“I just want them to open their eyes.”
“To see what? Who? You?”
“To see what a mirror can’t show them. To see someone they love with all their heart and soul. Themselves.”
“Is this Sebastian’s message or yours?”
“Sebastian put it this way,” Lucy answered. “Know yourself. Accept yourself. Be yourself. That’s all.”
“So, love yourself? Seems we’ve heard that before.”
“Yes, people have heard it. But do people listen?” Lucy asked. “The biggest haters are the voices in your head.”
“Did you learn that from Sebastian or Dr. Frey?”
Lucy’s eyes turned to angry slits. “Dr. Frey is a personality pimp, selling people more acceptable versions of themselves in ten-milligram chewables.”
“Oh, I think we’ve touched a nerve,” the interviewer said, turning directly to the camera. “You and the other girls accused him of murder, but he was cleared.”
“Of killing Sebastian, yes, he was cleared,” Lucy admitted grudgingly. “Not of killing souls. He’ll answer to a higher court someday.”
“Sounds like threats. Aren’t you worried about slandering him? He is a powerful man.”
“If you think I’m worried about him sending an attorney after me, you’ve got to be kidding. He’s done a lot worse.”
“Why should they listen to you? All this newfound self-awareness seems hypocritical coming from such a material girl.”
“They should listen to themselves, not me.”
“A simple enough pitch, I guess?”
“We’re all selling something,” Lucy answered. “I’m a high concept girl.”
“With a monthly allowance,” Clare said. “I guess it’s easy to preach when someone is paying the church bills?”
“You will not speak to me like that. You have no right.” She could see the crew reaching for their mouths to stifle their judgmental giggles.
“Your entire image has been built around flitting from one red carpet to another, one product endorsement to another, one nightclub to another,” Clare said. “On someone else’s dime.”
“Jealous?”
Clare sat there speechless and fuming.
“Anyway, I didn’t know you were keeping a running tab,” Lucy continued. “On your own daughter.”
“Someone has to,” Clare said.
“You don’t have to do anything,” Lucy quipped. “Except be my mother, which you failed miserably at.”
“You have your father to bankroll your dreams. At least you’ve got that working for you.”
“Has it worked for me?”
“Well, I think you proved to everyone today that you are a martyr.”
The producer was getting increasingly anxious as Lucy turned the tables on her mother. Exploiting the truth, but Lucy’s truth, not the truth they were hoping to get on the airwaves.
“I just wanted a mother.”
“You always had a mother.”
“You were just a gestational surrogate.”
The audience was shocked. Shocked at her vulnerability on display. They started clapping. For Lucy. For baring her soul. For telling the truth—a truth which so many of them wish they could say. Lucy didn’t even notice the standing ovation and uproarious applause. She only noticed her mother. Sitting stoically next to her.
“Well, I hope you find whatever it is you are looking for,” Clare urged.
“It’s true, I am looking for something. Something I’m desperate to find,” Lucy said to the camera before turning back to her mother. “But you, you aren’t it.”
3 “That’s him,” Hazel whispered, leaning toward Agnes’s desk.
Agnes tried to ignore her, but Hazel kept poking her in the back with the bejeweled nail of her index finger.
“Okay!” Agnes growled.
“Is there a problem you’d like to share, Miss Fremont?”
“No, sir,” she answered.
“Look!” Hazel giggled.
Agnes turned around. “You’re going to get us thrown out of class.”
“Who cares? What will they do? Make us say ten Hail Marys. You got that!”
Agnes rolled her eyes. “I said ‘okay.’”
She dropped her pen. When she bent to retrieve it, she saw a guy with dirty-blond tousled hair. He was dressed in a rumpled blue blazer, jeans, loafers, and a V-neck sweater; starched button-down shirt poking through it at the neck and the sleeves. Preppy, except that on closer inspection, his tie was loosely knotted, and one side of his shirt collar was unbuttoned. A fashion statement? Or minor act of rebellion in the conservative environment? Possibly both, she thought. He had a faraway look in his eyes as he tapped his pen against the desktop, waiting impatiently for class to end. He was somewhere else.
“Definitely hot,” Agnes said to Hazel. “Is that what you want to hear?”
“Told you,” Hazel said proudly.
“But . . .”
“Oh, c??
?mon, Agnes. No buts. Lighten up. I’m not trying to marry you off or anything.”
“You sound like my mother,” Agnes moaned.
“Hey, I thought we were friends,” Hazel joked, pretending to be slighted.
“Things are different for me. I don’t have a lot of patience for chitchat anymore.”
“Did you ever?”
Agnes was frustrated. It wasn’t just social interaction with friends and classmates that had changed for her. It was everything. The class seemed interminable. Not just because Agnes was dreading what Hazel might do when it was over. Everything was interminable now. In fact, she wasn’t even sure why she was still enrolled. The parish, the principal, and the faculty were split on whether she should be allowed to attend, and she could feel herself losing ground every day. The only kids she could relate to were the ones who’d enlisted in the military or gone to jail. She took a deep breath and tried to explain.
“It’s like someone going off to war,” Agnes said. “They’re not the same when they come back. They see the world differently, you know?”
“So Precious Blood was like boot camp for you?”
“Something like that,” Agnes explained. “Except my uniform is on the inside. You can’t see it, but I can’t take it off, either.”
Hazel paused for a second to let it sink in, but it was clear to Agnes it hadn’t.
“Like PTSD?”
“I guess,” Agnes griped, exasperated. “Should I have to be some kind of robo-saint for everyone, Hazel? A stoic?”
“Jesus, Agnes, can’t you just act your age?”
“For me, that’s what all this stuff is now—school, grades, homework, boys—an act. I don’t really expect you to get it.”
“Now I really am insulted,” Hazel moaned.
Agnes checked herself. “I’m sorry,” she said, reaching for her friend. “I just get so frustrated sometimes. Mostly with myself.”
“You’re a young girl. A human being,” Hazel argued. “You are flesh and blood.”
Agnes laughed. “Thanks for reminding me.”
“And, he . . . is very flesh and blood.”
The bell rang and the teacher finally stopped talking. Before she could scoop up her books, Hazel grabbed her and dragged her to the back of the classroom. To the new guy.
“Hi,” Hazel said effusively, extending her hand.
“Hi,” the boy said shyly.
“I’m Hazel. What’s your name?”
“Finn. Finn Blair.”
“Very nice to meet you, Finn,” Hazel continued. “This is my friend Agnes.”
Agnes was mortified. It was funny, she thought, how after all she’d been through, this kind of thing could still make her blush. “Hey.”
He smiled and then looked quickly away. “Um, I gotta go, so . . .”
She sensed the nervousness in him, but something more, too. He was broken. Wounded. Gun-shy. Like an abused animal that had just escaped and needed to be rescued. It was in his eyes, his body language, and the tone of his voice.
“That went well.” Agnes laughed.
“Oh my God! He’s totally into you!” Hazel shouted.
“He practically ran away.”
“Hook ’em, then reel ’em in,” Hazel said, making flapping fish gills with her hands behind her ears. “He won’t get far!”
“Now you really sound like my mother.”
7 Lucy and Jesse walked uphill from DUMBO through Brooklyn Heights, through Cobble Hill along Smith Street almost to the end, talking about the attack at the club and her talk show appearance.
“I told you not to do that show,” Jesse criticized.
“Please, no lectures.”
“Your mom? Really,” he continued, shaking his head, “you should have seen the look on your face.”
“It’s just like her to do something like that in public.”
“You handled it,” Jesse said.
“Yeah, but it was still humiliating.”
“Well, that was the point. A total psychological and emotional blindside.”
“I wouldn’t be surprised if Frey was a silent investor in the show.”
“Don’t kid yourself; I’m looking into it,” Jesse cracked, only half joking. “What about Cecilia’s gig?”
“What about it?” Lucy asked. “Some jerk on parole tried to take a cheap shot at CeCe. I wasn’t having it.”
“Now that sounds more like Frey,” Jesse replied. “I should have stayed. Maybe I could have helped.”
“I saw you still managed to run the story with pictures.”
“A guys’s gotta eat, Lucy,” Jesse chided. “I can’t sit around waiting for juicy gossip from you anymore.”
“True. You’d be waiting a long time.”
“It was a warning shot, you know.”
“Well, it definitely got my attention.”
“Can’t the cops protect you?”
Lucy shook her head. “Don’t trust them.”
Jesse nodded. “Hard to know who to trust right now.”
“No, it isn’t,” she said flatly, looking him straight in the eye. “We can’t trust anyone but ourselves.”
A few silent blocks later they arrived at their destination.
“This must be the place,” Jesse said to Lucy, glancing down at the address Mayfield had slipped him at the morgue.
It was an address on a Carroll Gardens side street, and not a very nice one. The smell from the Gowanus Canal was intense here, wafting over what remained of the immigrant neighborhood. The scrap heap sitting in the junkyard across the street provided the perfect visual of decay, and the clatter from the F train overhead was maddening.
“Are you sure about this?” Lucy asked.
“Mayfield doesn’t lie when there’s money involved.”
They started up the walk to the front door, past the weathered statue of the Madonna stepping on the head of a snake in the front garden, adorned with fresh, lush roses. Lucy stopped briefly to admire it.
“My grandmother had one of those in her yard,” Lucy recounted.
“Old-timers,” Jesse said, nodding his head.
“I was always afraid of it. It terrified me. But now . . . ,” Lucy began. “Now it’s terrifying and beautiful. Inspiring.”
She knocked on the heavy wooden door and waited. From the cracks that ran through it and the rusted doorknob, it was obvious it hadn’t been painted or tended to in a while.
“Maybe nobody’s home?”
“No. Somebody’s home.”
After a while a woman answered. Lucy met her gaze, surprised, yet not.
“You’re the woman from the Brooklyn Ball, and the parade,” Lucy said. “The one who helped me. Perpetua.”
“Yes,” the old woman confirmed. “I knew you’d come.”
Jesse and Lucy exchanged glances. Confused. Perpetua ushered them in, offering them a drink and something to eat. A few people, dressed in their Sunday best, hovered around a coffee table in her dining room. The mood was serious. No music playing or loud chatter. The sound of the ticking grandfather clock filled in the silent gaps. Jesse noted there was plastic on the living room furniture. “I knew it. Old-timers,” he mumbled to himself.
The whole place seemed from a different time.
“I have pastries. Cookies. Please help yourself.”
“Thank you,” Lucy said sincerely. “I feel like we’re crashing a party.”
“Or a wake,” Jesse said, nudging Lucy.
“You are welcome here,” Perpetua said sweetly. “My home is your home.”
“I think you were right about Mayfield,” Jesse whispered. “What was he thinking giving us a phony address? Of someone you know, no less.”
“Don’t be in too big a hurry for a refund, Jesse,” Lucy urged, to his surprise. “If anyone might have answers for us, it’s her.”
The group of visitors noticed Lucy in their midst and stood back. They crossed themselves.
“Awkward,” Jesse whispered.
“
Shhhh,” Lucy instructed.
Some of them looked familiar from outside her condo or from news stories about protests in front of the church. One in particular. The priest who’d told her about Sebastian’s heart. He caught her eye and smiled, raising his piece of almond biscotti in salute.
“Who is he?” Lucy inquired.
“One of us,” Perpetua said.
“One of who?” Jesse asked.
“One who believes,” Perpetua replied.
“I was so angry with him that I smacked him on the street,” Lucy admitted contritely. “He told me something awful and I just flew off the handle.”
“What did he tell you?” Perpetua asked.
“I can’t even bring myself to say it,” Lucy demurred.
The priest smiled at Lucy through his cut and swollen lip, with forgiveness in his eyes.
Lucy smiled back at him, at all of them, both in greeting and to acknowledge their respect for her. Jesse was taking it all in. Lucy wore the look of a girl who’d been elevated from the lower classes to royalty. Accepted. Comfortable in her own skin. A girl who suddenly understood her role. It was in stark contrast to the self-satisfied smirk she’d defensively worn as she climbed her way up the nightlife ladder not so long ago.
“Holly GoHeavenly,” he whispered.
Lucy reached out her hand to Perpetua. The woman took hold, the twisted bones of her arthritic fingers squeezing Lucy with surprising strength.
“You said you knew I’d come. How did you know?”
“Come with me.”
“I’m going to hang out here, okay?” Jesse said, digging into a cannoli from the pastry tray.
“Free food,” Lucy said jokingly to Perpetua. “No club kid can resist.”
“Mangia. Eat!” the old woman said in her warmest, most hospitable voice.
Perpetua walked Lucy down a short dark corridor toward the back of the house. The woman opened a door to a small austere room with a steam radiator and a tiny window facing out on a vegetable garden, marked by rows of tomatoes and a handmade pergola overrun with vines that had bunches of red grapes hanging from them. A twin bed, neatly made, with a crisp white sheet and green wool blanket, sat against the white side wall with a single closet door. It was warm and smelled of latex paint, recently redone, unlike the rest of the house. It seemed less a bedroom than a hiding place. A secret stopover on the way to somewhere else. The radiator came to life, knocking and hissing as Perpetua spoke.