Retreating then to the kitchen. Where I heard a drawer being opened, and shut. A cupboard door opened, and shut. With a pounding heart I followed my mother, scarcely knowing what I was going to say. “It was Jerr and Lionel, Mom. I saw them with the baseball bat. They were trying to wash it in the garage, then they took it away to bury it. They are the ones—the police are looking for.” But Mom stood with her back to me, at the sink running water hard. She was furious, trembling. She did not turn to me. She gave no sign of having heard me or of having the faintest idea that I had followed her into the kitchen. On the wall the avocado-colored plastic phone began to ring but my mother had no more intention of answering it than I did.

Final Confession

THE GIRL WHO NEVER CRIED. NEVER COMPLAINED.

Not a little baby to be scorned by my father and brothers, or petted and fussed over by my mother and sisters.

But now I cried easily. I cried often. I cried so that my eyes leaked tears before I actually began to cry, like a leaky faucet. My skin was sensitive as sunburned skin registering pain when something brushed lightly against it. My eyelids were reddened, inflamed and swollen and itchy as if bitten by mosquitoes.

At home, and at school. At school, and at home.

Saturday morning at St. Matthew’s where Mom brought Katie and me so that we would take communion with her the next morning at mass—Just the three of us.

Already the older Kerrigan children were drifting away from the Church. Skipping mass impervious to our mother’s pleas and threats since Daddy showed no interest in church attendance, only a vague respect for religion—the Church, though not particularly God or Jesus Christ. (Daddy would have laughed in embarrassment if anyone were to ask him point-blank if he believed in either.)

In the church on Saturday morning Father Greavy heard confessions from 9:00 A.M. until noon. Inside the cage-like confessional with its grille like a small window screen the priest sat, you could see just the shadowy profile, you were not supposed to see him. He would hear your abashed whispered confession but he was not supposed to see you.

In hearing confessions the priest takes the place of Christ. It is the power of Christ to forgive sins, but only if the sinner is genuinely repentant.

I did not know if it was a sin, that I had told no one about my brothers and the baseball bat. I had promised my brothers to keep their secret without knowing what the secret was. They had demanded it of me, and I had said Yes. I promise.