Mercy Street(73)

“The church?”

“Effective immediately. They want us all to go to Sacred Heart. In Dunster.”

“It happens,” his father said.

Anthony was dumbstruck. His father had been baptized at St. Dymphna’s, made his First Communion there. He seemed not to remember or care.

“What do you mean, ‘it happens’?”

The old man looked disgusted, or maybe he didn’t. Maybe that was just his face.

“Jesus, Antny. I mean it happens for a reason. They’re selling off the churches to settle the lawsuits. The kids who were abused.”

THERE WAS NOWHERE LEFT TO PUT THE SNOW.

Five nor’easters in five weeks. Boston was up to here with this shit.

Life had ground to a halt and would stay ground. Until further notice, everything was suspended: deliveries, trash pickup, mail service, bus service. Animation, judgment, disbelief.

Six feet in thirty days. The volume was unimaginable. At undisclosed locations around the City of Boston, snow farms were established. Fourteen hundred truckloads were dumped at a vacant lot in Southie. The snow was compacted dense as cement, twenty-five thousand cubic yards of snow. At city hall a plan was floated: load it into dump trucks, to be emptied into the Boston Harbor. Environmental activists cried foul. It was rumored that the snow was flammable. Spontaneous combustion was considered a danger. A hazmat team was dispatched.

Freak accidents were reported, the season’s morbid fascinations. The elderly frozen in their beds, the children speared by icicles. The doomed family sedan, crushed by a falling tree.

Anthony read of these developments on his computer screen, courtesy of a satellite signal that came all the way from space. It was easier than putting on his boots and parka and trudging out to investigate; quicker, in point of fact, than stepping out onto the porch.

Because what was out there, really? Where did people actually go?

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.