Page 36 of Coram House

FR:Well, shit. You should be having these little chats outside, then.

AS:If you’d like a break—

FR:I don’t need a damn break. I’m not here to cry on your shoulder. I’m still waiting for you to ask a goddamn question.

AS:All right, do you remember going to the beach when you were at Coram House?

FR:The beach?

AS:Yes. With the other children. Or perhaps the nuns.

FR:Why do you care about that?

AS:I told you. Just to get a sense of the rhythms of daily life. What it was like.

FR:That’s pretty fucking specific.

AS:All right. Let’s get specific, then. What do you remember about Sister Cecile?

FR:What are they saying about her? Those sad fucks out there, I mean.

AS:There are a number of accusations of abuse against Sister Cecile, if that’s what you’re referring to.

FR:They don’t know anything.

AS:Who doesn’t know anything?

FR:Them—all them out there. She saved half of them and they don’t even know it.

AS:Who saved them?

FR:My turn for a question. When am I going to get my money?

AS:Are you referring to a settlement?

FR:I tell my story with all the dirty details and you go get the money. Am I missing something?

AS:Mr. Rooney, settling a case—if that is the direction things go—is a long—

FR:Oh, that’s the direction things are gonna go. Trust me.

AS:Do you have something you’d like to share?

FR:Not a blessed fucking thing.

PART 3

11

My sleep hadbeen deep and dreamless. If the orange Crocs weren’t sitting there by the door, I might have thought I imagined everything that happened yesterday. But when I sit down at my table, master binder open in front of me, I keep seeing the woman’s face. Her eyes wide and staring. The mask of blood. Like my mind saved my nightmares for morning. I try to push the image into my mental box, but find I can’t.

What are the chances that I’d be the one to find her, in that spot, so close to where Tommy drowned? It’s as if, in searching for Tommy, I found the woman’s body instead. Like I caused her to be there somehow. It’s a crazy thought. And yet, there it is.

I take out the black-and-white photo of the children standing beside the boat. The nun’s face is indistinct, as if I’m looking through thick fog, but her thin white fingers are in perfect focus, clasped together in front of her. I know exactly the place they’re standing now. I recognize the wooden clapboards of the boathouse I saw from the window of Coram House. That places them a few hundred yards from the cove where I found the body yesterday. So much death hiding in those waters. But it’s a melodramatic thought—people die everywhere all the time.

The living room’s beige walls press in on me, pulsing a little, like they’re breathing. I need to get out. I put the photo back in the box and get dressed.

The day is cold, but not bitter. Now that I know the feeling of my eyeballs freezing in their sockets, I can recognize the difference. A graysheen covers the brick sidewalks, moisture frozen to a slippery skin. Still, in my ridiculous sleeping bag parka and furry boots, I move through downtown as if I’m wrapped in a warm cocoon.

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