The Mystery of Hollow Places(44)
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 . . .”
“The Malachais used to live over on River Street. I think Sidonie and Todd were little school friends. And they went to church together. They were Protestants, too, you know.”
The candy is a sharp-edged, sickly sweet disk between my teeth. “So Sidonie’s here now? Staying with Todd?”
“I didn’t say that,” she answers, clearly having a fantastic time. “You know Margie’s son-in-law is a janitor at New Hope, and he says Todd dropped Sidonie off for all her appointments. And Todd was living over by the bowling alley then, so that was all the way across town.”
“What’s New Hope?” Chad asks for me.
“The Thorndyke Center for New Hope is the whole name. There was a vote in the town hall, when they wanted to put it up, and it nearly didn’t pass because no one wanted . . . We were all just worried what kind of people it might attract into town. Do you know I’ve lived here since I was born? Not in this house the whole time; I grew up in the part of town they called Tar Hill. Now they put up New Hope over there, so who knows what’s become of it?” She leans forward again, presses her thin orange-pink lips together. “It’s a place for the mentally unfirm.”
I can’t get the words “troubled waters” out of my head. “It’s a mental hospital?”
“I don’t know what you call it. More like . . .” Her old forehead crinkles in thought. “What are those places, where the drunks meet up to talk about being drunks?”