Jan Burke - Liar

This front room was a parlor of sorts, a room that could be closed off from the rest of the apartment by pulling two sliding wooden doors shut. The carpet was a faded floral pattern of large, pale roses on a beige background. On one wall, there was a framed print of the Sacred Heart. On top of a set of built-in bookcases, Briana had made up a small shrine to the Blessed Virgin: a little plaster statuette surrounded by five blue-glass candle holders. A pink-glass rosary lay to one side, on top of a holy card with the prayer “Hail Holy Queen” printed on it. One shelf of the bookcase held a dog-eared, leather-bound Bible and a worn St. Joseph’s Sunday Missal, as well as Butler’s Lives of the Saints. There were no other books, only two solemn ceramic angels, one with its guiding hand on a small boy’s shoulder, the other like it, but guiding a little girl. The lower shelves held a few seashells.

If Briana was this religious a couple of decades ago, when we were closer, I didn’t remember it. Devout Catholics though Briana and my mother had been, that devotion hadn’t overwhelmed the decor of their homes.

Rachel had already moved to the rear of the apartment. I continued to walk through rooms, but more slowly. I moved from the front room into a larger room that contained a small dining table and a set of built-in cupboards. The cupboards contained a few pieces of mismatched crockery. On the table, facing the single chair, was a small, black-and-white TV with a crack in its case; a bent hanger did duty as an antennae. In front of the TV was a plastic placemat-a photograph of a meadow blooming with small yellow flowers. Although it was clean, there was an indentation where hot cups of tea had been placed. I caught myself making this supposition of tea and stood remembering that unlike her sister, Briana had never acquired a taste for coffee; that on Sundays after Mass, Briana would come to the house and my mother-who had shopped at special stores to find the type of tea her sister liked to drink-would bake scones. Tea and scones to make Briana feel welcomed in our home. I ran my fingers across the indentation in the plastic mat and wondered if Briana ever thought of those long-ago Sunday mornings.

I went into the small, bright kitchen at the back of the apartment. I opened cupboards, found a can of peaches, two cans of chicken noodle soup, a tin of Hershey’s cocoa, a box of powdered milk, a box of baking soda, a small box of sugar and half a bag of flour. Nothing more. The refrigerator was empty, but Mary had warned me that the landlord was going to clean it out-it belonged to him, along with the stove. In a drawer next to the stove, I found a box of generic-brand tea bags. I felt my throat tighten.

I shut the drawer and moved through another door, which led to a bathroom. Here there was a sink, toilet and claw-foot tub; a small mirror that was losing its silvering; a pink toothbrush in a water-stained glass; three hairpins near the faucet; cracked linoleum; a set of thin towels neatly folded over a single towel rack. I moved on.

I found Rachel sitting at a small rolltop desk in the bedroom, lost in thought. It didn’t look as if she had been searching the contents of the desk, which surprised me-we’re both curious by nature.

“You doing okay?” she asked as I walked in.

“Yes. Sorry to take so long-I guess I’ve been looking for-well, it’s hard to explain.”

“Something to tell you who she was?”

“Yes.”

“This is the room you’ve been looking for.”

As I glanced around the bedroom, I saw that she was right. There were a number of photographs on display on top of a plain wooden dresser. The small bookcase in the room was not filled with religious books but with two types of paperbacks: westerns and Georgette Heyer romances. Near the end of the neatly made twin bed was a rocking chair; a basket of knitting-blue and gray yarn to make an afghan, it seemed-lay on the seat.

There were a crucifix and a rosary on a nightstand next to the bed, and above it, a print known to any Catholic school child. An angel with flowing blond tresses and a white star above her head hovers serenely behind two barefoot children, a little boy in a straw hat and his sister, who carries a basket over one arm and comforts her brother with the other. Dark woods rise in the background as the children cross a dilapidated bridge over a treacherous river, but we fear not-their guardian angel will see them to safety.

The nightstand also held a plastic statue of the Blessed Virgin Mary that was about ten inches high, the type that has a little night-light bulb in the base and glows from within when plugged in, although this one wasn’t. But even with these items, the bedroom had less the feel of a religious articles store display than the front room.

“Is this you?” Rachel asked, holding out a small, framed snapshot.

I took a look. “Yes, with Barbara. Judging from the missing front teeth, I was probably about seven, so Barbara was about twelve.”

Barbara and I were a study in contrasts-she, a redhead with green eyes, was looking at the camera with a bored, half-pouting regard: how awful to be asked to pose with her little sister. I, with dark hair and blue eyes, looking more like the Kellys-my father’s side of the family. In the photo I was grinning up at the lens with my goofy gap-toothed smile, oblivious to Barbara’s sullenness.

I began studying the other photographs. One was of a thin, gray-haired woman with a cane, standing next to a priest, in front of a church. I saw the family resemblance and thought perhaps this was a photograph of my grandmother, in Kansas, until I noticed a palm tree in the background. A closer look made me realize-with a shock-that this must be Briana herself. In that instant it was brought home to me that she had not stopped aging when my mother died; that while my mother would forever be fixed in my mind as a woman in her early forties, Briana had gone on, had become a woman in her sixties. She was my mother’s younger sister by a number of years, but I could not remember exactly how many, and now, looking at the photo, I wondered what my mother might have looked like at a similar age, had she lived.

Even taking a high estimate of Briana’s age, she could not have been past her early sixties. The years, I was sad to see, had not been kind.

Another photo showed her when she was younger, looking much as I remembered her-probably in her late thirties or early forties-holding a toddler. Travis, most likely. There were several photos of Travis at various ages, sometimes with other adults and children, other times alone. None showed Travis with his father, Arthur. There were no photos of Arthur.

I looked for the most recent of Travis, which seemed to be a senior yearbook portrait. I picked this one up and studied it, trying to be objective. With dark hair and light-green eyes, Travis resembled Arthur to a great degree-but some of the Maguire looks were also in his features. Perhaps he had not grown up to be quite as handsome as his father, but he wasn’t hard to look at.

“Your cousin?” Rachel asked.

“Yes. This must be from high school. He’s in his mid-twenties now.”

“He looks like his dad?”

“For the most part. You’re wondering if Arthur was the man who was trying to pick the locks on the front door?”

“Yes. Do you think it could have been him?”

“It’s possible. Allowing for a few changes since I last saw him, he’d probably fit the description-but so could any number of other men.

The age would be about right. If it was Arthur, why wouldn’t he just knock on the door?“

“He could have been looking for something she didn’t want to give him.”

“What? A copy of Butler’s Lives of the Saints? A pink rosary? An old tin of cocoa?”