Freckles, scars, babies

Author: Rory Doherty

Crafting fiction that moves the reader is Rory’s passion. In addition to being a writer, Rory is and has been many things: son, brother, student, athlete, soldier, bartender, teacher, husband, father, business owner, pet lover, etc. Through all past lives and including this iteration, he feels mostly like a thief trying to not get caught.

​Quiver

A quivering chin, a priceless quivering chin before she cries, a precious infant chin quivering from fright, an innocent and fresh fright and quiver that made Linda and Pete and the older six O’Malley children – Rusty, Colleen, Kelli, David, Sheila and Kennedy – laugh long and hard and beg their mother to frighten the six-month-old baby, the newest O’Malley, baby Kathleen, again and again and again.

.Don’t blame the dog

“Look at her face! My God, look at her face!” Linda O’Malley was first through the screen door. Her six-year-old, her youngest, her baby girl Kathleen’s face was shredded. Kathleen’s ear was detached and hung down beside her cheek bone. The entire right side of her face was torn. Linda saw her daughter’s molars through the open wound. Uncle Mike had followed Linda through the back-porch screen door with a pale face and blue towel. He caught the running Kathleen who was not crying but was going into shock. Uncle Mike scooped Kathleen up in his arms and pressed the blue towel to the side of his niece’s mauled face. Pete O’Malley, Kathleen’s dad, and her Aunt Joan flew last through the screen door. They saw blood and Kathleen’s limp body in Uncle Mike’s arms and heard Linda’s screams, so they knew it was bad, but neither saw Kathleen’s face. Uncle Mike, cradling Kathleen in his blood-covered arms, sidled into the passenger seat of the O’Malley’s sky-blue station wagon. “Pete, drive,” he said.

As luck would have it, a renowned plastic surgeon was on staff at Rockville General Hospital, the closest hospital to Uncle Mike and Aunt Joan’s house in Uncasville, Connecticut. Despite how bad it looked, Kathleen’s face was basically still there. The surgeon was able to reattach her ear and repair her torn cheek with deep, dissolvable, subcuticular stitches that would minimize scarring. Kathleen stayed overnight in Rockville Hospital for much needed sedation, oxygen and antibiotics. Linda and Pete O’Malley stayed the night at Uncle Mike and Aunt Joan’s smoking cigarettes and drinking highballs and discussing whether to put down the family dog, a beagle-looking mutt with droopy brown eyes. It was agreed that the dog, who had never shown aggressive behavior in his five years, was not to blame. It had been extremely hot that day and the unfamiliar Kathleen must have spooked Snoopy, who, thank God, was up-to-date on his shots and, everyone agreed, deeply repentant. The poor thing.


Freckle Face

Freckles. Freckles here, there and everywhere. Freckles spritzed across the bridge of her nose. Freckles dotting her cheeks, chin and forehead. Freckles on her shoulders, arms and sternum. Her entire body bespattered with freckles, some separate and perfectly circular, others jagged and conjoined in splotches of brown. Freckles exacerbated by a summer of day-long beach trips with no sunscreen, no umbrella, no shade, no shirt, no escape from the beaming sun other than covering one’s head with a wet, sandy, beach towel, no way to convince her mother that it was way past time to go. Kathleen O’Malley, a strawberry blond with fair Irish skin, loathed her freckles. She knew no other little girl with so many freckles. Classmates teased her endlessly, mercilessly about her freckles.

One night toward the end of summer after a long and scorching day at Nantasket beach, Kathleen’s sunburn bubbled and peeled. Her brothers and sisters took turns seeing who could peel off the largest unbroken swath of Kathleen’s sunburnt skin. Despite being burnt to the point of nausea and shivers, burnt beyond anything aloe could sooth, Kathleen allowed the peeling to continue, her eight-year-old mind convinced the skin beneath her burnt skin would be fresh and freckle-less and she would surprise her classmates on the first day back from summer break with her new, shiny, freckle-free face.


Whimper

What fourteen-year-old brother throws his tightest spiral into his ten-year-old sister’s stomach on a two-dollar bet with that Raftery boy Steven from next door who would do the same to his ten-year-old brother Greg?

Two conditions won the bet – sibling made the catch AND did not cry.

Kathleen locked eyes with her brother. She whispered a poem by Rilke, a poem assigned to David in school that he made her memorize: “Catch only what you have thrown yourself. All is mere skill and little gain. Until suddenly you are the catcher of a ball thrown by an eternal partner, to you, to your center, on an arch from the great bridgebuilding of God. Catching then becomes a power, not yours, the world’s.”

David gripped the over-inflated football as best he could and nodded affirmation across Clark Street to his little sister who had finished her Rilke and let David know she was ready to receive his throw by holding her hands up and open before her chest. This was the moment, Kathleen believed, when brother and sister rose in glory to the great bridgebuilding of God. She banished fear and doubt, slowed her breathing, and committed herself to making the catch, no matter what. Kathleen chanted “catch, catch, catch” as she waited on her brother’s hardest throw.

The best chance his little sister had of catching his hardest throw, David was certain, was if he delivered a tight spiral on a line to her stomach, her flat and pale ten-year-old stomach, a laser that struck the instant Kathleen breathed out, a throw that folded her around the ball, that cleaved her, a straight perfect throw that stuck his sister good.

The controversy came over a perceived whimper. Kathleen made the catch and did not shed a tear, but the grunt and moan and face she made at having had the wind knocked out of her by her brother's hardest throw, Steven argued, technically constituted a whimper, a subspecies of crying, which meant she forfeited the catch and the win. David countered with, bullshit! Fucking bullshit! Steven considered David’s rage and reconsidered his position. His ten-year-old brother Greg howled and writhed on the sidewalk in front of 67 Clark Street, flopping and gasping and trying mightily to breathe. Steven paid David the two dollars. Kathleen did not get nor was she promised a share of the two-dollar bet. Kathleen was in it for David’s approval, and David knew it.


Darts

Mac’s diddle for the middle struck dead-center bull with a meaty thwack. He would throw first against David in game seven of a best-of-seven series. David’s thirteen-year-old sister Kathleen liked to pull darts from the board. Mac scooped Kathleen up in his burley arms and lifted her eye level to the dart board. She squealed and squirmed and writhed and wriggled. She wrapped her arms around Mac’s thick neck and her legs around his hard waist to better enable him to carry her to the board. Once there, she plucked the two darts, jumped down from Mac’s embrace, handed David his dart but played a game of keep away with Mac’s dart, a game that ended in Mac tickling Kathleen until she shrieked in submission. Kathleen always found a reason to be around whenever Mac came over. The impossible crush Kathleen had on David’s best friend Mac, a former Green Beret with ironed t-shirts and no girlfriend to speak of, was obvious to everyone but especially to David.


Spleen

Come now. They think it’s a ruptured spleen. They hope it is a ruptured spleen. She is losing blood. They don’t know, exactly, where the internal bleeding is coming from. They are taking the spleen now. Get here as fast as you can.

David O’Malley put down his drink and picked up his phone, put down his phone and picked up his drink. Two thousand miles away in the intensive care unit of a California hospital, fourteen-year-old soccer phenom Kathleen O’Malley’s chin quivered as much from blood loss as from disappointment. She had not made the save and had taken a fierce kick to the stomach for her effort. Her team would not advance to the championship game. As they rushed Kathleen to surgery, she wished her brother David was there to tell her to suck it up.


See Spot run!

Ma Riva’s in Dedham Square made the best, most greasy and flavorful steak and cheese sandwich in town, overflowing with onions and mushrooms and grizzle. Sixteen-year-old Kathleen O’Malley was returning home to 67 Clark Street with two hot steak and cheese subs for her mother and father when a drunk driver pissing down the breakdown lane of Route One in his red corvette slammed into her and her one-year-old Dalmatian Spot, launching Kathleen up over the hood and into the windshield which she concaved with her hips and legs. Corvettes ride low, and Spot did not go under the front wheels but hit the grill with a sickening crunch before bolting into rush-hour traffic speeding north and south on Route One.

Kathleen’s spiraled femur required emergency surgery and put her in a body cast for three months. Her less serious injuries, mostly cuts scrapes and bruises, required no more than twenty total stitches. Spot, miraculously not hit by another car, suffered neurological damage and lost his sight and balance and had to be put down after a week when he did not recover. Through the entire ordeal, from the instant of impact until the EMTs arrived, Kathleen, a natural athlete, never dropped the white paper bag containing two greasy steak and cheese submarine sandwiches for her mom and dad from Ma Riva’s.


M-16 Laugh

David’s favorite thing was to make his youngest sister Kathleen laugh. Her laugh sounded like a semi-automatic weapon firing short, punchy, six-to-nine round peals. Genuine and spontaneous and heartfelt, her laugh got louder as she heard herself, then culminated in a series of erratic uncontrollable snorts, doubling in hilarity whatever triggered the laugh and spawning a fresh wave of laughter that played itself out only when Kathleen had wiped the tears from her eyes.


Catch in Maine

Catch. Catch in the wind. Catch in the waves. Catch in the hair. Catch in the boat. Catch in the tube. Catch on the swing. Catch on skis. Catch across the table. Catch without looking. Catch in a convertible flying down Route 95, Mac’s reflexive grab of a foot miraculously keeping sixteen-year-old Kathleen O’Malley in the car that was jumping lanes and topping one-twenty with music blaring.


Giveaway

Five years separated brother and sister David and Kathleen O’Malley, but that was about it. They were kindred spirits and lived to impress and outdo each other. David, the middle of seven surviving O’Malley kids, and Kathleen, the youngest and last O’Malley, had great love and genuinely liked each other yet brother and sister competed fiercely over everything: school rankings and standardized test scores, cracking each other up at the most inappropriate times, sporting accolades, impromptu contests of finesse and luck, catch with anything throwable, and how best to protect their sisters from their parent’s extremes and life’s cruel hurts. But when pregnant twenty-two-year-old Kathleen O’Malley asked David to give her away because their dad would not to a man so unworthy of her it made his stomach turn, David found himself between a rock and a hard place. He had never so much in his life not wanted to do something. If he said no, he would lose his favorite sister; if he said yes, his parents. David chose his baby sister and braced for his parent’s wrath.