Fire & Water Read online

  Dad shook his head and spoke softly to me. “I’m afraid Tully’s pretty deep in his cups tonight,” he sighed.

  “What got Tully drinking?”

  “Oh, today’s the anniversary of Maggie’s death. Always a hard day for him, poor lad.” Maggie had been Tully’s wife. They were expecting a baby when she’d discovered her leukemia. He had lost her and their unborn child the year before I was born. I’d been the recipient of Tully’s adoration my whole life, inheriting all of the love he’d had for his own wife and child. Tully’s tender heart, it seemed, had never completely healed. Dad and Alice had long ago refused to serve Tully anything but coffee, but the other bars in the neighborhood did not have the same arrangement.

  Dad clicked his tongue. “Came in tonight with a snootful, hiding a bottle in one of those big pockets of his. Won’t give it up. Better he should tie it on here than be out in the streets.”

  “We didn’t have the heart to send him home,” Alice added. “He’d feel too bad tomorrow if he missed your celebration.”

  Mary K stood up and stepped toward Tully at the bar. She pulled a twenty from her pocket, setting it on the bar. “Here you go. I’m feeling pretty good tonight, so the cussing is on me. Knock yourself out.”

  “Oh Lord,” Alice moaned. “No telling what he’ll say when it’s paid for. I’ll put a fresh pot of coffee on, and a Glenfiddich for you, Katie?”

  “Sounds great. But only one, then it’s coffee for me. I’ve got a double shift in the ER tomorrow.”

  Mary K and I sat at the family table while various friends and regulars came by to congratulate us. Dad slid in beside me, Dr. Schwartz across from him.

  Tully sloshed his way over to the table and plopped limply in beside Mary K. His eyelids were at half-mast. “Sorry about the dyke comment, there. Alice told me that was inna—innapro—Well, it was rude, now, wasn’t it?”

  “No harm done,” Mary K said. “Say something bad about my Mets and I’ll have to slug you, though.”

  Tully’s head swayed on top of his skinny neck. “I just don’t get it though. Pretty girl like you. Could have any fella you want.”

  Mary K grinned at me and patted Tully’s shoulder. “That’s pretty much what my dad said. Difference is he said it with his boot planted against my butt while he kicked me out.”

  “Such a pity,” Dr. Schwartz said. “It’s his loss and our gain, darling.”

  Mary K gazed across the table to my dad. Her eyes glistened. “Thank you for including me tonight, Mr. Murphy.”

  Dad blushed. “Oh, go on then. You’ve become like a second daughter to me, Mary Louise Kowalski.”

  “Anybody but you called me that, they’d be saying good-bye to their teeth.”

  Dad pulled his hanky from his pocket and blew his nose with a great honk.

  “Train’s in,” Tully said, raising his coffee mug.

  “All aboard!” came the chorus from the bar.

  Dad smiled and put his hanky back in his pocket. “Ah, what we won’t put up with from family. This here is a patchwork family made of orphans and misfits of all sorts. You’re one of us by now, I suppose.” Dad nodded toward Tully. “We’re a little like the mafia, though. Once you’re in, we never let you go.”

  “Good to know,” Mary K said, then sipped her club soda.

  Tully lifted his head though his eyes remained closed. “I just don’t get it. How is it a pretty girl like you don’t like boys?”

  Alice stepped to our table carrying a coffee pot. “Ah, shut yer yap, will you? The way you smelly brutes behave sometimes, it’s amazing that the species has survived at all. Mary K, I might just have been better off if I was more like you. None of my four husbands was worth his weight in kitty litter.”

  Tully’s head seemed suddenly too heavy to hold up, and it fell to the table with a thud. Alice placed a folded towel under his head. Soon his gravelly snore prompted chuckles. Alice patted his back. “They’re so adorable when they’re sleeping.”

  Everyone coaxed stories from Mary K and me about our upcoming positions. They delighted in the details of the kinds of surgeries I’d get to perform, gasped at stories of children with injuries and birth defects. Mary K talked of the newest innovations in liver transplants, to everyone’s stunned amazement—none more than Dr. Schwartz. He held up his gnarled, trembling hands. “Oh, what I wouldn’t give to be starting out today.”

  Alice filled my coffee cup. “So when do you girls start your new jobs?”

  I took in the rich coffee aroma and looked over at Mary K. “I’ve got a few more days in my last rotation in the ER,” I said. “I’m taking a few weeks off before I start in pediatrics. Never had a vacation.”

  The conversation meandered until Dr. Schwartz started to make moves toward leaving. He stood between Mary K and me, his curved body hunched over his cane. “Your mother would be so proud, Katherine.”

  Tully lifted his head and took a slow glance around the table. “Yup, that’s the truest words you ever spoke, Ivan.” Soon Tully’s face scrunched, looking like a crumpled brown bag. He tried to fight tears, but they squeezed from the corners of his wrinkled eyes. “Poor Elyse. Poor Elyse,” he wailed hoarsely. He wiped his nose on his sleeve.

  “All right then, sad sack,” Alice said, helping Tully up. “Doesn’t a weepy drunk just break your heart?” She appeared like Dorothy, trying to help a limp scarecrow to his feet. “Let’s let him sleep it off, shall we?”

  My dad scooted out of the booth and tucked his shoulder under Tully’s arm. “Come along. There’s a cot in the storage room with your name on it.”

  Suddenly, Tully broke away from Dad and leaned in toward me. His breath reeked of whiskey. Tears streamed down his weathered cheeks. “If Elyse woulda known how great you’d turn out, being a doctor and all, I’m just sure she wouldn’ta taken all of them pills. It’s a sorry shame.” Tully crumbled and went to his knees, sobbing.

  Alice’s hand flew to her mouth and her eyes got wide.

  “Tully!” Dad nearly yelled, his nostrils flaring, “Just shut your drunken mouth. We’ve had enough of your palaver for tonight.” With a newfound force, Dad took Tully’s entire weight and began to drag him away from the table.

  Tully shouted over Dad’s shoulder. “No, Katie. Elyse shouldn’ta done it. All them pills. She shouldn’ta—”

  The stunned faces around the table made me feel hollow inside.

  “Never mind Tully,” Alice said to me with panic in her eyes. “You know how he is when he’s been drinking.”

  As my dad dragged him away, Tully continued his lament. “Poor Elyse. Poor little Elyse. She shouldn’ta done it, Angus.”

  Alice and Dr. Schwartz’s stunned faces showed that Tully’s words were more than drunken blubbering. Mary K’s face wore every question that ran through my mind.

  When Dad reappeared beside the family table he looked exhausted and defeated. “Kitten,” he whispered. I looked up into his soft face, his gray eyes reddened with tears.

  My heart turned to lead in my chest, weighted down by the twenty-year-old secret.

  “A weak heart,” I said. “Mother died of a weak heart. She was fragile. That’s what I’ve always been told.” I stared into my dad’s eyes, then looked to Alice, who sat with her fingers over her lips. Dr. Schwartz shook his head. Mary K sat in rare stunned silence. “So, is that the truth, Dad? Was it her heart? Or is Tully telling a family secret that everyone but me seems to know?”

  Every muscle in my dad’s face went slack, and if I hadn’t known better, I’d have thought he’d had a stroke. He wiped his lips. I could hear his tight swallow. “Katie, we never meant to—”

  The scientist in me wanted to pummel him with questions, probe for details of my mother’s death. How did she do it? Why? And I wanted to know about the lie—the conspiracy of lies that had taken place my whole life—that wove a tapestry of myth around all I knew about my mother. But something else took over, overpowering my body, clouding my mind. All I could think of in that instant
was escaping. “Let me out of here. I can’t breathe,” I said, trying to push my way out of the booth.

  My dad reached to grab my arm. “Sit down. Let’s talk this out.”

  I jerked my arm away. “You lied to me! Twenty years you lied.” The words felt like bullets shooting from my mouth.

  Without looking back, I rammed my way through the front door, leaving it swinging in my wake. A cold wind pressed me down as I pounded up the hill, my breaths becoming foggy gusts in front of me. Before I was a block away, Mary K was beside me, her short legs keeping stride with mine. Saying nothing, she walked with me until we reached the front porch of our apartment building twelve blocks up the hill. A friendly bark came from inside, followed by the shrill ringing of the telephone.

  Mary K pulled her keys from her pocket and opened the door. I stood on the street below our steps, feeling like a statue—lifeless and stiff. Icy wind whipped my hair around my face and I realized for the first time that I’d left without my coat. My stomach clenched with each ring of the telephone.

  “I’m not answering that,” I growled.

  “Nobody says you have to.”

  I stared down the hill at the street I’d walked my whole life. Lights glowed from the windows of familiar houses. The N-Judah streetcar snaked its way up Irving Street. But none of it appeared as it usually did. I looked up at Mary K. “Nothing. We’re saying nothing about this outside this house.”

  “Sure, Murphy. Whatever you say.”

  I felt I was no longer solid, but porous and permeable to the wind. I looked up from the street to Mary K and then down at my watch.

  Mary K lifted her hand, Girl Scout-style. “Let’s go inside. I’m freezing my ass off here on the stoop and I kind of like my ass the way it is. I’ve got a beautiful sociology student coming over, and she likes it there, too.” Mary K jerked her head in the direction of the door.

  I looked down at my watch. “I’m meeting Nigel for drinks,” I lied.

  “Thought you weren’t drinking. Double shift tomorrow?”

  I glared up at her. Hot anger was beginning to thaw me. “Just go worry about your coed. I’m a big girl.”

  “It’s your hangover,” she said, stepping into the door. She pulled a bulky jacket from the hook just inside and tossed it down. The phone resumed its relentless shrill. I turned and walked toward the streetcar, not sure where I’d let it take me.

  Anatomical Distractions

  By the time I rose and moved toward the kitchen, Mary K was sitting on the back deck smoking a cigarette. She was not yet wearing her contacts, and the lenses of her glasses were so thick that it seemed impossible that her turned-up nose could support them. The words on her favorite sleeping shirt had faded but remained legible: IT’S A BLACK THANG. YOU JUST WOULDN’T UNDERSTAND.

  Watching her, I recalled the first time we met. Dad, Alice, and Tully had just left me alone after I’d insisted I didn’t need them to set up my dorm room. I sat in the middle of the room surrounded by boxes, trying it all on, grateful for my fresh start. I wouldn’t be little Katie Murphy, the dutiful daughter everybody knew from Murphy’s Pub. I was a Stanford pre-med student, a future physician, on a full academic scholarship. I’d be seen as just myself, not narrowed by people seeing me as little Katie Murphy.

  I set my boxes in the middle of the dorm room, figuring I should probably wait for my roommate so we could discuss our preferences.

  Her sandaled foot entered first, kicking the dorm room door open. A box covered her face and she wore an army surplus rucksack that probably outweighed her. The door flew open too hard and swung back, trapping her freckled, clean-shaven calf. “Fuck! Fuck! Fuck!” she ranted. I instantly calculated six dollars for the cussing jar.

  I jumped and held the door.

  “Fuck me sideways, that hurt,” she said, swooping a strand of strawberry blonde hair behind her ear. Her hair was sleek and shiny—Breck Girl hair. Her eyes were robin’s egg blue: one pure color, without flecks or shadows.

  “Hey,” she said. “I’m Mary K—not like the fucking cosmetics lady with the pink Cadillacs. K is for Kowalski. I guess we’re roommates.” She looked around the room and stared at my stack of liquor boxes, poised exactly dead center in the room. A knowing grin crossed her face. After dropping the box and letting the rucksack slide to the floor, she extended a hand toward me. I’d never shaken hands with someone my own age, so I froze. She thrust her hand a little closer. “Mary K—and you are?”

  “Katie. I mean, Kate Murphy.”

  “Murphy.” She delivered a hearty handshake. Her eyes were rimmed with thick but nearly transparent eyelashes that gave her pretty face an otherworldly look. She wore no makeup, and every visible portion of her was splattered with constellations of golden freckles. She stood not quite five feet and her body swam in oversized overalls, the cuffs rolled up to her calves.

  “So,” she said, “we’ve got to get one thing straight before we unpack. I’m going to ask you a question, and depending on the answer, one of us might have to go to the RA for a room change.”

  Did she already dislike me? How could she know already that I was such a foreigner to this life? That I’d never flown in an airplane or seen a rock concert. That I was too nerdy and peculiar to have friends in school, that I’d never eaten at a restaurant with linen tablecloths until Dr. Schwartz took me to Alioto’s on Fisherman’s Wharf for a graduation present. That I’d never kissed a guy.

  Her stare was cool steel. “Pre-med or pre-law?” She tapped her foot with impatience.

  “Uh, pre-med.”

  “Thank God,” she said, her body softening. Mary K spoke with flattened vowels. The toughness of New York had stomped hard on all of her a’s and o’s. She unzipped her rucksack, pulled out a pack of Marlboros, shook the pack, and held it toward me, retracting it with my decline. She hoisted her petite frame up and sat on the windowsill, her feet resting on what would become her desk. She twisted her lips to the side and blew smoke toward the open window.

  Without my willing them to, my eyes found their way to the ABSOLUTELY NO SMOKING IN THE DORMS sign on the back of the door.

  A sly grin crossed Mary K’s lips. “No way I could bunk with the enemy. Christ, in New York you can’t swing a fucking dead cat without hitting a lawyer in the ass. Didn’t come three thousand miles to share a room with a lawyer fetus.”

  As I hung my clothes, I tried to sound casual as I tried to get to know her. “Do you come from a big family?”

  She talked about her four brothers, her dad, a garbageman, and her mom, a housewife.

  “Are you close?” I asked.

  Mary K’s head tilted as she selected her words. “I was not exactly a good match for Lila and Henry Kowalski of Queens. Queer doesn’t play so well in a Polish Catholic family. They got the priest to try and fix me. I didn’t fix so easy, I guess. They pretty much don’t want to know anything about me or my life. Unless I come to my senses and decide to love dick.”

  Her candor both intrigued and unnerved me.

  “Babies should be conceived in petri dishes and raised under laboratory conditions until they’re eighteen. Then parents and kids would have a mutual say in who they’ll share holidays with for the rest of their lives. It’d put shrinks out of business.”

  “And eliminate stretch marks,” I said.

  Mary K let out the first bark of the raspy laugh I would come to love. She blew a smoke ring, then pierced it with a stream of straight-blown smoke. “Murphy, you and I will get along just fine.”

  From the only box she brought, Mary K unpacked a Mets pennant, a transistor radio, a large black ashtray that read THE BUTTS STOP HERE, ATLANTIC CITY, and one framed picture. She planted a kiss onto the glass of the picture. “The man in my life,” she said, and then turned it so I could see the photo of a salt-and-pepper-furred dog with legs so long they could have been transplanted from a donor moose onto a dog’s body. “Ben Casey,” she said, “Some crazy cross between a mastiff and a wolfhound. Shits bigger than y
ou do. Smarter than any dog I’ve ever known, which is saying a lot. More devoted than any human I know, which doesn’t say much at all. You got a dog?”

  “No, just a series of stray cats my dad adopts.”

  “I favor dogs, but cats are cool, too. Any creature that doesn’t have the capacity for speech.”

  I opened my small box of framed pictures. Staring at me from the stack was my mother’s shining face and body swollen in late pregnancy—a picture I’d always loved. Alice had also framed a photo that had been taken at high school graduation: Dad with his arm around me, Alice, Tully, and Dr. Schwartz circling us, pride beaming from all of their faces. My childhood collection of birds’ eggs took its place on my shelf.

  “Hey, Murphy, feel like getting around town a little? It’s my first night in California and all I’ve seen is the San Jose Airport. I’ll split the cab fare with you.”

  “Sure,” I said, “but I’ve got a car.” Cussing jar money had bought me a ’66 Volkswagen Bug. Tully had painted it baby blue for me, and Alice had sewn slipcovers for the tattered front seats.

  “Lucky me, a roommate with wheels. You cart my ass, I’ll spring for gas.” Mary K sat on her windowsill and reached into her knapsack. She unbuckled her overalls and slipped the bib down, then tugged the loose waistline down just below her hip, revealing a small patch of the unfreckled flesh of her thigh below her plaid boys’ boxer shorts. I averted my eyes, trying to pay attention to making my bed, but at the edge of my vision I could see the syringe Mary K had pulled from her bag.

  “Don’t worry. I’m not chipping. It’s only insulin.”

  “You’re diabetic?”

  “You’re going to be top of the class, Murphy.”