eyes. “I can’t tell you how angry I am at that man. Just because you’re eighteen, Eileen, that doesn’t mean he shouldn’t have contacted me. That he’d go behind my back—well, I gave him a piece of my mind. I called the police, too, but all they did was ask about how we got along, and how likely it was that you three had simply run away, and—I guess I had a second epiphany then. Really, you had plenty of reasons to run. You ticked every box. And I had a pretty good idea of where you’d gone to. I came here, and the headlights caught Murphy on the beach. I thought …” Mom unfolded the fists in her lap, a helpless motion. “God, I don’t know what I thought. But you’re here. And you’re okay. Aren’t you?”
Claire was attempting to take it in: Mom being here, worried, flying back from Florida. It was so much, and when combined with everything Claire had understood from Kerry, from what she’d seen in those PI’s photographs and read in John Enright’s obituary, the questions bubbled up in a rush, like soda fizz. Claire had to hiccup at least one of them out:
“It was you, wasn’t it? You were the girlfriend who got Mark Enright off on the murder charge. Mark was Dad.”
Mom blinked at Claire, wearing a hollowed-out expression. It was answer enough.
“When you moved away from here,” said Claire, “he changed his name to John. I guess it was … a tribute?”
She looked to Mom for confirmation.
“I … ,” Mom said. “He looked up to John. And John hadn’t betrayed him the way Patrick had. That was his word: ‘betrayed.’ I think Pat was … very confused. He’d seen what had happened, when John had left the family for Boston. He’d gone against Mrs. Enright’s wishes, and she’d disinherited him. Pat was young, sixteen. I can only guess what she threatened to convince him to testify.
“Sophia, his mother, was at the root of it. I saw the way she behaved for myself plenty of times, but the stories Mark told … She wasn’t well. I just didn’t understand, when he talked about her, how serious it was.”
Mom grimaced, swatting at her face as though a fly had flown too close. Then Claire realized, she’d been wiping away a tear. Mom cleared her throat and went on:
“Mark could have left the day he turned eighteen. Should have. He’d decided to stay through the summer for Pat, though. He didn’t want to leave him alone. So he still lived here in June, when it happened. Sophia went into one of her rages, only it didn’t end like the ones before. Mark thought—he really did—that she hadn’t meant to kill his father. Had he fallen down those stairs a different way, hit his head in another place … there’s no knowing. Mr. Enright did die, though, and by the time the police arrived, Sophia had a story. I still don’t know how she could’ve done that: tried to destroy Mark, turn Pat against him. Like I said, she wasn’t well.”
As Mom spoke, Claire glanced at a saucer-eyed Murphy, and then to Eileen, whose crossed arms had slackened. These were, Claire knew, truths none of them would quickly recover from.
“John didn’t come back from Boston—not for the trial, or the funerals. Your father didn’t blame him, though. He never blamed John for anything, up to the day we found out he had died in a car crash.” Mom shook her head. “Your father used to joke there was a curse on this house, that it followed him and his brothers wherever they went. I got angry when he said that. Maybe because I believed there was truth in it. We tried to escape the scandal. Went to a town off the map, where he could get work. It didn’t matter that he’d been acquitted; by then, the university had dropped its scholarship offer. So we both worked, and we thought we’d gotten far enough away from this place. I guess we didn’t escape the curse, though. Nothing went according to plan.”
Claire was remembering the day her mother had, inexplicably, piled her and her sisters into the car and driven them to the coast. How could Claire have not seen it then? Mom had been trying to tell them. Maybe she’d meant to say everything and had lost the nerve. Maybe, as she’d said, she’d wanted them to see Rockport once, not knowing what it had