The Wolves of Fairmount Park Read Free

hand like a rosary and thought again that she had always expected this night, the emergency room vigil, the tense faces of the cops, the practiced concern of the Captain, but in her mind it had always been for Brendan. She had spent so much time and imagination on warding off the image of Brendan shot down on some North Philly street, she felt blindsided by the news that it was Michael. She had wanted to argue with the cop who had called the house, say, no, it was Brendan found unconscious on the curb on Roxborough Avenue, surrounded by broken glass and cellophane wrappers, like something thrown away. No, not her son, Michael.
You mean Brendan, my husband,
she told the kid who had called. That’s what she had been preparing herself for all these years. Then it was Brendan ringing through, and when she heard his voice she screamed.
    They had had to get someone to unlock the chapel, which wasn’t usually open unless the priest from St. Josaphat was there to say Mass. Brendan’s partner, Luis, had looked at the Dominican janitor when he’d said that, and said to him in Spanish that he could get the goddamn keys or pack for fucking Santo Domingo, forgetting as he always did that Kathleen spoke Spanish, too.
    Wedged into the narrow pew now, she looked over at Francine Parkman, the mother of the other boy shot down on the curb on Roxborough Avenue. She was small and dark, with a brownline for a mouth and eyes with shadowed lines under them. Italian, or Puerto Rican, Kathleen thought. She had a trim waist, an expensive sweater that looked like cashmere. She looked, Kathleen thought, like money. Did that matter now, in the weak green light of the chapel? Were they supposed to be sisters now their two boys were shot down on the same street corner in the middle of the night? Already she had seen the way George Parkman had looked at them when the Parkmans had come in, their faces white, their eyes wild. Something ungenerous in the line of his mouth. Suspicion that Michael had gotten George Jr. into some kind of trouble?
    The door opened and they both turned to look, their bodies as tense as if they were condemned prisoners, wondering which of them would be the first to be taken out to some bullet-pocked courtyard. There was the doctor, his hair prematurely gray, his eyes infinitely tired, and behind him George Parkman, his expression blasted and empty. Kathleen turned to look at Francine Parkman, who threw up a hand in self-defense as they got closer. That’s what she would remember later, that small hand, sprinkled with minute brown freckles, the nails dark as blood, shuddering with the effort of holding back the terrible thing coming.
    Kathleen watched them go, their wracked bodies bent, their shoulders heaving, and wanted to ask,
Is he your only child?
It was insane, she guessed, but it was in her mind that they should have had more children, she and Brendan. That having one child had been a mistake. That to have one child was a kind of bet with God about the goodness of the world, a hope too fragile to hang so much happiness on. Hadn’t Brendan come home everynight, his eyes full of the ways that people let each other down, slid backward into darkness? Their terrible needs and endless rage and desperation imprinted on his face, a terrible bone-deep knowing that soured his expression, rearranged his features so that when he walked in the door at the end of his shift, sometimes for a moment she didn’t know who he was.
    Brendan Donovan couldn’t find any place to be. He couldn’t stand to be in the room with Michael, hearing the buzz and clack of the machines and wanting to touch his son’s swollen face and trying to keep from breaking down. The place was full of cops, his friends and guys he didn’t even know, and there was comfort in that, but already there were questions about what Michael and the Parkman kid were doing in front of a dope house, and if there was one thing Brendan did not