“Don’t worry about us. We’ll be out at my parents’ beach place all weekend.”
“You should stay there,” he said. “You don’t need any of this. If I ever see Craig Flynn again, I’ll clock him for pulling you into it.”
“It’s keeping me occupied,” she said and smiled weakly. She felt herself deflate a little, coming down from the intensity of the last few minutes. “Craig was right. I’ve needed this—more than he knows, even.”
Interestingly, that was something Aideen hadn’t told anyone the truth about since signing on as Joe’s counsel. Yes, the case was a nightmare, agonizing and hopeless enough without a client going through some half-assed recovery and believing he could have committed the crimes. Yes, she was consumed with damning DNA evidence, bloody crime scene photos, and now four decades of some fucked-up family’s dirty laundry.
She was occupied, though, and that was a blessing. Her bills were paid. The kids were missing their dad and processing his death in the ways they would, and she could only do so much to steer that process. Her own grief was still there, as present as the smell of Ben’s aftershave when she dared to pull it from the medicine cabinet.
Beyond that, though, there had been a hole in her days that needed filling. When it was really over—the flag-draped burial complete, the whiskey downed, the bagpipes silent, the endless casseroles eaten, the headstone in place—there was a terrible nothingness, another type of suffering she hadn’t expected. She had found it worse than grief, which she understood. This other thing had been stalking and relentless, in her head like the mocking tick of an old clock. She simply hadn’t had enough to do.
And then it had happened. Their old boss, Craig Flynn, had rung her up one day.
Hey, Aid, I’ve got an idea.
Smiling, joshing Craig Flynn, except his smile stopped under his eyes in most cases. The eyes remained deadly serious, cauldrons of conflict and calculation. Thankfully it was largely benevolent calculation. Craig was a complex man but a decent one. For whatever reason, he had calculated that Aideen and Joe needed each other. He’d had an idea.
You sure did, you son a bitch, she thought. You sure did.
CHAPTER 56
Thursday, August 31, 2017
Harbor View Rehabilitation Center
Staten Island
7:59 p.m.
The wooden door to the room at the end of the hallway was thick and closed with a sturdy chunk. On the outside hung a small whiteboard with the name “Caleb Evermore” written in dry-erase marker. It seemed a cruel irony that Evermore’s name was scrawled that way, as if he might soon be up on his feet and released, a new patient’s name written on the board. In fact, no one had taken Caleb’s place in that room in fifteen years. And he had not walked a single step on his own since birth, decades before that.
“Do you know him?” Miguel asked. They were both in the room—he and Robbie. Miguel was resting his huge hands on a mop handle, the mop swishing in a dirty yellow roller bucket. He grasped the handle like a knight with a mighty sword. Robbie scoffed.
“Oh yeah, we play cards.”
“I don’t mean nothin’ by it,” Miguel said. “I’ve seen you in here looking in on him. I just thought there was a connection. Some people take jobs in here ’cause they had people in places like this, you know?”
“Too depressing to think about.”
Robbie couldn’t stand Miguel. He was one of those always-smiling guys. Friendly but a subtle know-it-all. If you had a story, he had a better one.
“If you got depression, coma services ain’t where you need to be,” Miguel said in a low, paternal tone, like he was delivering anticipated wisdom. Robbie didn’t respond at all, so after a few seconds Miguel went back to talking. “No one comes to see him. I mean, it’s good that you’re in and out at least.”
“I’m in and out because he shits a lot.”
“It took me a while to get used to the persistent ones up here,” Miguel said with a meticulous punctuation of “persistent.” He meant the people in coma services, like Caleb Evermore, who were in a persistent vegetative state, or close to it. Robbie had seen the notes that described Mr. Evermore. He was not totally comatose, but most descriptions of him culminated with “reacts inconsistently and nonpurposefully to stimuli in a nonspecific manner.”
“It beats the screaming I hear in other parts of this place.”
“You know,” Miguel said, lowering his voice and glancing toward the man in the bed, “he was a Willowbrook kid.” And there it was. The story Miguel knew that so few others knew. He was like that one local tour guide all the websites tell you to ask for when you visit some place.