The Daughter She Used To Be

by Rosalind Noonan

Genres: Women's Fiction; Literary Fiction

Synopsis

A woman from an NYPD family must find her own sense of justice when tragedy strikes close to home in this novel of grief and courage.

The daughter of a career cop, Bernadette Sullivan grew up with blue uniforms hanging in the laundry room and cops laughing around the dinner table. Her brother joined New York's finest, her sisters married cops, and Bernie is an assistant District Attorney. Collaring criminals, putting them away—it's what they do. And though lately Bernie feels a growing desire for a family of her own, she's never questioned her choices. Then a shooter targets a local coffee shop, and tragedy strikes the Sullivan family.

Anger follows grief—and Bernie realizes that her father's idea of retribution is very different from her own. All her life, she's inhabited a clear-cut world of right and wrong, of morality and corruption. As Bernie struggles to protect the people she loves, she must also decide what it means to see justice served. And in her darkest hour, she will find out just what it means to be her father's daughter.

Release date: May 26, 2011

Publisher: Kensington Books

Print pages: 384

Sample

On a gray Sunday in the end of February Bernie Sullivan leaned into the steam of a large pot in her parents’ kitchen and jabbed at a field of potatoes with the masher. Once upon a time Bernie had loved mashed potatoes. The earthy smell, the smooth texture, the heavy burden of butter that was mandatory in the Sullivan household. But love was lost as, over the years, mashing the spuds had become her job; back in the day when her mother had five kids to feed, everyone in the family had become responsible for contributing a dish to dinner. Well, every female. The role of the males was to eat so they’d have the strength to get out and make New York City a safer place.

Tonight Bernie’s side dish was behind schedule. The roast was carved and sitting in its own juice on the platter. Buttered carrots and string beans sat under plates to keep them warm, and now the rolls were done, too.

“You shoulda started mashing earlier,” her mother said. Peg didn’t look up as she moved rolls from the baking tray to a bowl lined with a napkin. “Didn’t you hear me calling you?”

“I know, Ma.” Bernie had been engrossed in her brother’s story of how he’d come upon two children who had suffered abuse. Told over chips and dip, while the little ones were playing in the back room and the respectable women were in the kitchen preparing the meal, the story was unusual because it had transpired over a few weeks, and patrol cops like Brendan rarely dealt with situations that lasted longer than their eight-hour tour.

“I met them back in November,” Brendan had said. “I remember telling Sarah about it. Two little girls alone in an apartment in the projects by the seven train. Both of them had those enormous waif eyes.” He made two circles with his fingers and peered through them. “They looked up at me like I was God or something. The older one, she must have been schooled by someone because she trusted me and she was very polite. Called me officer. ‘You got to help us, officer.’” Brendan stared down at his can of beer as if he could read the future there. “That’s the kind of thing that breaks your heart.”

Staring into the pot as she mashed, Bernie could see the two little girls peering up at Brendan in his dark blue uniform, twenty pounds of gun and flashlight and equipment hanging from his belt. The Superman Suit, Dad used to call it. It was a wonder the little girls weren’t intimidated. God bless them.

“The job came in as a noise complaint, and we found these two kids alone. We called family services, but while we were waiting for the social worker the older girl started opening up to us. Destiny, that’s her name. Nine years old and she starts dropping her pants. I started to leave, but Indigo takes a look and she sees burn marks on the girl’s butt. Turns out the father burned her. Scars, too. She said she’d been putting up with it, but that night was the first time he went after the younger sister. That’s when Destiny put up a fight, and the screaming got one of the neighbors to call nine-one-one.”

“Oh, man.” Bernie pressed a hand to her chest, indignant on the little girls’ behalf. The dead air in the rest of the room wasn’t unusual; cops did not shock easily.

On the other side of the chip bowl, her father and oldest brother, James, barely seemed fazed. They’d both been street cops for years, seen it all. James was now a sergeant at the Police Academy, and Sully had retired six years ago.

“Said she could have put up with the father hitting her, but was worried he’d kill her little sister. Destiny is already deaf in one ear, they think from the old man beating on her. A nine-year-old.”

“That’s a crying shame.” James shook his head. “A lot of sick bastards out there.”

“And the mother’s into the wind?” Sully asked.

“They say she’s an addict. The girls haven’t seen her for more than two years.” Brendan explained that he and his partner, Indigo, had testified in a hearing that week at Family Court on Jamaica Avenue. “And we won, but it’s frustrating. Makes you wonder.”

“You did good, son,” Sully said with a heavy nod.

“Yeah, but it’s a bittersweet victory, Dad. The judge removed the kids from their father’s custody, but it’s no picnic. What are they going to get in foster care? A bed and a couple of meals at somebody else’s house. I’m not sure we’re doing these kids any favors.”

Sully nodded, a glimmer of regret in the blue eyes Bernie always wished she had inherited. “That’s a tough one.”

“Still ... it’s better than what they had.” James rose from the easy chair and craned his neck to the side, trying to address the chronic back pain that always made him seem distant to Bernie.

“It is better,” Bernie agreed, catching Brendan’s eye. “You may have saved their lives, Bren.”

He shook his head. “It’s a sad alternative. Sad-ass, sorry foster care.”

“Dinner!” Peg called through the house. “Let’s go.”

“You can’t let it get to you, son.” Sully stood up. His six-foot-plus frame was softer now, as if the muscles and taut strength had been passed on to his sons, along with the hair. Her father’s gray hair grew mostly around the sides now, and he kept it clipped so short that his bald head now shone on the top. “It’ll eat you away if you let it.”

“Everything’s done but the potatoes.” Peg’s voice prickled with irritation. “Bernadette ...”

Bernie had snapped to attention at the firm tone. Twenty-seven years old, and her mother’s voice still had that power over her.

“Are you mashing these potatoes, or are we having them boiled?”

“Coming ...”

On a bus rocketing through the night, Peyton Curtis sank into the darkness that had closed in hours ago. He was really lost now.

Going nowhere. That was what his prison counselor had said. Jeff, the new Angel. “You need a plan for when you get out of prison, Peyton. A place to live. A job. That’s the only way you’ll stay off drugs and out of trouble.”

But Peyton never did any drugs. Didn’t drink, either. And that just proved to him that Jeff didn’t even look at that fat file they had on Peyton. Jeff was in it for a paycheck. Jeff didn’t give a rat’s ass about Peyton or any of the other inmates he logged time with.

Jeff had just laughed when Peyton said he didn’t want to leave Lakeview Shock, that he wanted to stay and keep working in the library there. Steady meals and a warm, dry place to sleep and nobody beating up on him. Five years of Lakeview Shock, and he knew how to do it now. No reason to give that up for the darkness ahead.

“You’re getting your freedom back, man.” Jeff had puffed up real big, the way Curtis saw the rats grow bigger when their body hair stood on end. Trying to look big and bad, laughing at him. Peyton was used to that. The snickers and laughs. It didn’t bother him. “You’ll be on parole, but you’re free to get a job,” Jeff said. “See your family. Hang with your friends—as long as they’re not using.”

Jeff had one of those patches of hair on his chin, shaped like a triangle. Made him look like the devil.

Or maybe he thought of that because Jeff was the opposite of Angel. If she was still his counselor, she would have listened. Angel would have helped him stay.

But the devil man, he wanted Peyton gone. One less prisoner to talk to, write all his doctor’s notes about. One less case to handle. And not long after Jeff took over, Lakeview, the home Curtis had come to know over the best five years of his life, turned cold on him. They gave him a suit of clothes, told him to get a job and see his parole officer once a week.

And now he was on that bus, trying to ignore his stomach growling over the smell of pizza some woman got at a rest stop and the other inmate, a rangy white man in the back of the bus, who kept mouthing off about how canned peaches were the secret to his good health.

Strange people in a stranger world. Peyton gripped the handle of his walking stick, letting his thumb stroke the dark grooves cut into the carving. “Faux scrimshaw,” Angel had called it. Scrimshaw was the carvings sailors made in whale bones and teeth, but faux meant it wasn’t real. Probably just plastic, but that was even better. What was the sense of killing a whale to get a walking stick? Peyton was fine with faux.

The animal carved on the handle had the face of a mouse, the elongated body of a rat, and the back end of a horse. “The man at the thrift shop said it was a running horse,” Angel had told him, but they’d spent a few minutes talking about how the sculptor had screwed up. In his own head, Peyton decided it was a deformed rat, and it gave him comfort to stroke the worn surface.

He kept his face turned toward the window so people didn’t see him twitching, but with the lights on inside, the dark glass was like a mirror. Mirrors everywhere on this bus showing a whole lot of ugly nobody wanted to see.

What was the sense of it when they lock you up for five years and you doing time and when they finally let you out you get dumped in the armpit of New York City in the middle of the night. What was the sense in that?

No parole officer going to see you at night, and your family, if they goin’ to let you in, don’t want you to come knocking at two in the morning. What was the sense in that?

But Lakeview Shock Incarceration Correctional Facility didn’t care where you going and what time you got there. Just as long as you got on the bus and got the hell out of their facility, they happy.

At least the bus had headlights. He could see out there when he stood up, lights burning air, turning part of the highway to day. Good thing the driver had lights to see by, ’cause Peyton himself couldn’t see ahead. He pulled the lid on his numb eye shut, hunched toward the window on his right, and gnawed on his worries, like a rat working a dry bone. How was he going to see the parole man when he was getting to the city at two or three in the morning? And where would he go? His mama wouldn’t be quick to unlock her door in the middle of the night, even for her own son.

He could see his mother, peering through the crack of the triple-chained door. “What kind of person comes knocking at a door at three in the morning when he ain’t been around for more than five years? Go on back to prison, Peyton. Get on out of here, before you wake up half the neighborhood.”

But Mama, it’s me. It’s your son, Peyton, he would call out.

And the door would slam in his face.

And then he’d be stuck out in Queens. He’d be a black man moving through Asian Invasion Flushing, a place where black men weren’t so invisible as they were in other parts of the city.

He rocked in his seat, thinking about the skells that’d be messing with him in the city this time of night. They’d be pulling into the Port Authority any minute, and some smelly lump would scurry up to him, try to steal his walking stick, or beg some change. He would have to get out of there. Get to someplace warm. Maybe the subway, if he could hop a turnstile.

“What you want to go and do that for?” Darnell would say. “You just a few hours out of prison and you gonna throw the dice on something that easy? You’re just as stupid as I remember.”

He could see the flame of hatred in his brother’s eyes, the flare of his nostrils. Darnell was always spitting mad about something.

Peyton had once seen a male rat come along to a pack of newborn rats. Pups. And damned if that full-grown rat didn’t kill the weakest baby, drag it off, and eat it. Wasn’t even his baby to kill, but he took it.

That rat was Darnell.

I just might bust through the subway gate, Peyton thought. And bust up Darnell’s face.

As she spooned the creamy potatoes into a deep casserole dish, Bernie wondered what would become of the two little girls Brendan and his partner had come upon ... Destiny and her little sister. In cases like that, other family members were usually called on to take the children in, but Brendan had mentioned foster care.

Bernie appreciated her brother’s desire to help them. She and Brendan were the soft hearts of the family. Brendan was a helper, and she had the curse of seeing injustice all around her and feeling personally obliged to right it.

In second grade she reported the teacher for picking on Juan Arechiga every blessed day until he cried. At Cardoza High School she founded the Multicultural Club to encourage tolerance and celebrate diversity. She once got in the grill of an irate vendor at a subway newspaper kiosk when the guy yelled at two veiled women that he didn’t do business with “Ay-rabs.” When she graduated from law school nearly three years ago, Bernie joined the Manhattan District Attorney’s office to do her part in maintaining justice. Bernie wanted to “get the bad guys,” just as her father and brothers had done for decades. She’d once toyed with the notion of joining the NYPD herself, but in her heart she knew that would have been a bad move. Bernie lacked muscle, and she knew she was a wimp. Some nights she was afraid to peek behind the closed shower curtain before bed.

But wimp or not, she couldn’t resist a good cop story, and on Sunday nights in the Sullivan house, the air was thick with it.

Heavy dish in hand, she tromped into the dining room, the space hot and noisy and crowded with extra chairs squeezed in to accommodate eleven people. Well, ten plus the empty spot for Mary Kate’s husband, Tony, who showed up late when he bothered to show up at all. Food was being dished out, but no one would dare begin eating before grace was said.

“Potatoes!” Brendan growled heartily. “Send them down my way.” He tucked the bowl in the crook of his elbow, pretending they were all for him, which made his daughters, Grace and Maisey, giggle.

“Share, Daddy,” Grace said, wise for her nine years.

As Bernie headed to the empty seat at the back of the dining room, she caught her own image in the china cabinet mirror. The tawny hair that she tied back for work was wild from the humidity in the kitchen, the ends curled, the top frizzy. The reflection was cloudy, but there was no missing her smaller version of the Sullivan pug nose and her mucky brown eyes. Her eyeglasses were smart, but glasses nonetheless. They masked the big, soulful eyes that made her look like a teenaged runaway. “Jailbait” her friend Keesh called her back in law school.

She took a seat next to her father, who always sat at the head of the table in the patriarch’s seat. The opposite end was up for grabs, as Mom always sat near the kitchen so she could hop up and heat the gravy, get more bread, or spoon out more potatoes from the pot.

Across from Bernie, James Jr. passed the roast to his wife, Deb. Now that their two kids were older—Keaton studying at Cornell, Kelly a forensics expert in San Francisco—the two of them never missed a Sunday dinner in Bayside. James and Deb were empty-nesters, while Bernie didn’t even have a nest of her own yet. She’d even noticed a little gray in the front of James’s hair, but Deb didn’t seem to mind. Late forties and they still seemed to like each other. That was sweet.

“Who wants to say grace?” Sully asked. He smiled with pride, lording over the family table. “Grace?” He nodded at his nine-year-old granddaughter.

“Grace will say grace. That has a nice ring to it.” Brendan grinned at his daughter, who giggled as if she hadn’t heard the joke a million times.

The smiles and laughter gave way to bowed heads as Grace began. “Bless us, O Lord, and these thy gifts ...”

After a chorus of amens, conversation tapered off as everyone dug in. Sully asked how Keaton and Kelly were doing, and Deb responded with anecdotes about the price of a college education and the dearth of affordable housing in San Francisco. Peg inquired about Mary Kate’s middle boy, Conner, who dropped out of SUNY Buffalo and was back at home, attending community college.

“Why doesn’t he come to Sunday dinner?” Peg’s cajoling didn’t cover her disappointment. “Did he forget where we live?”

“He’s got friends, Ma.” Mary Kate chewed rapidly, reminding Bernie of a rabbit. “There’s school papers and he works at the cinema now. Conner has a lot of things to do.”

“We’ve all got friends and plenty of things to do.” Peg put a dollop of potatoes into her mouth, then paused. “Mmm. There’s lumps in the potatoes. Did you heat the milk?”

“Some people like a little texture,” Bernie said. Was it too much to hope that her mother would take the task away from her because she’d failed?

“That’s why you heat the milk,” Peg said. “It smooths things out. I like creamy potatoes. And I’d like to see my grandson, too.”

“I’ll tell him you guys missed him.” Mary Kate leaned onto the empty chair beside her, as if she could extract herself from family scrutiny. “You know how college kids are. They eat dinner at midnight instead of two in the afternoon.”

“Dinner at midnight!” Maisey rolled her eyes, holding her fork of impaled carrots upright like a flag. “That’s crazy.”

“It sure is.” Peg grinned with satisfaction as she cut a piece of beef.

“Eat your carrots,” Sarah said. “You’ve got a busy week ahead. The school show on Tuesday, and then your birthday Friday.”

“That’s right,” Peg said. “I’ve got the show on my calendar. You’re coming here for dessert afterward.”

“We are?” Grace’s eyes went wide. “Thank you, Nana.”

“You’re welcome.” Peg nodded approvingly at Brendan and Sarah. “Such good girls.”

“And you’re all invited.” Sarah grinned as her blue eyes scanned the faces at the table. “The show starts at six-thirty. ‘Songs of Winter.’ I know you can’t resist.”

“I have to work,” James said, “but I’m sorry to miss it.”

Bernie smiled at Grace, who seemed to soak up the conversation like a sponge. “I’ll be there,” Bernie said. “I love to see you guys perform.”

Maisey looked around the table. “Is the ’nother aunt going to come to the show?”

Everyone looked at Mary Kate, who blinked. “Oh, I could probably make the end.”

“Not you; the ’nother aunt.”

Sarah’s mouth opened in a wide O. “Lucy?”

Maisey nodded.

“Aunt Lucy lives in Delaware,” Sarah explained. “And that’s a long way to drive in the middle of the week, with traffic and everything.”

A lame excuse, but no one seemed to hold the true explanation for Lucy’s departure from the family. She had pursued a scholarly profession, converted to Judaism, married a doctor, and emerged from her Queens cocoon “a very cultured lady,” as Ma would say. None of those things alone were a problem, but they all added up to detachment.

Lucy had left, and she didn’t seem to care if she ever saw her family again.

“I’m surprised you remember her, pumpkin. When was the last time she visited?”

“She came for my First Communion last year,” Grace said.

“That’s right; she did.” Brendan rubbed his jaw. “Now if you’re done, you can take your plates into the kitchen and help Nana clean up.”

As if on cue, Sarah and Deb rose and began to clear away dishes.

“Excellent meal, Peg.” Dad lifted his squat juice glass of red wine in salute. “Roast was good as ever. Nice and tender.”

“Yeah, well, I hope you saved room for dessert. Sarah baked those mini cherry tarts, and Bernie brought cookies from Marietta.”

Since Bernie refused to bake, she chiseled away at her guilt by contributing sweets from the local businesses her parents had frequented for the last forty years, most of them merchants on nearby Bell Boulevard.

“Can I have a cookie?” Maisey asked.

“Go have a cookie,” Peg said, shooing the girl toward the kitchen, “but we don’t set dessert out until after the dishes are done.”

Eyes on her plate, Bernie lingered, poking her fork at the round disks of carrots on her plate so that she could stay at the table with the men and engage in more of the conversation she loved.

Cop stories.

The good stories, uncensored and full of color, didn’t come out until after the women and children left the table. Bernie was raised on war stories, just as the Horak twins next door were raised on frozen dinners with little compartments to separate peas and mashed potatoes—the envy of Bernie and her sibs back in the day.

With three bottles of salad dressing in one hand, Ma reached for the beef platter with the other.

“I was going to leave that for Tony.” Mary Kate nodded to the empty chair where the unused china and silverware still sparkled. “He should be here any minute.”

Nothing registered on the faces of the men at the table; from their bland expressions one would never know that this scene was replayed nearly every Sunday evening.

“We’ll make him a plate in the kitchen.” Ma’s grip on the platter was strong, unrelenting, and Bernie felt grateful for her mother’s backbone. Thank God Peggy Sullivan was not one to sit around and let good food spoil or delusions grow.

“He can’t help it if he’s got to work miserable midnights,” Mary Kate muttered as a fork thunked to the wood floor.

“We all know how that is, darlin’.” Sully’s blue eyes sparkled for his oldest daughter.

Mary Kate’s face was expressionless as she hugged her load of plates and escaped to the kitchen.

Sully sat back in his chair at the head of the table and linked his hands in the prayer position on the edge of the gold tablecloth. Just like Father Tillman in the confessional booth, Bernie thought. “I used to hate midnights.”

Brendan and Jimmy agreed. Although Bernie was tempted to point out that she was stuck working night shifts right now, and yet she managed to get here for dinner, she restrained herself. She didn’t want to be the one who pushed Mary Kate over the edge.

Bernie used to feel sorry for her frazzled sister, who was clearly in denial over whatever was or was not going on in her marriage. She had trusted her sister to figure things out. But now that she dealt with Tony Marino professionally—he was always trying to shove some arrest down the DA’s throat—she had lost patience. Why her sister kept covering for Tony, who was “quite a swordsman” according to the office rumor mill, she had no idea. But she was done feeding the delusion.

“Peggy, where do you keep the decaf?” Sarah called from the kitchen. Long before she married Brendan, Sarah was a part of the kitchen klatch, coordinating meals, tidying up afterward.

“We’re outta decaf.” Peggy’s lips pursed in that grin-and-bear-it frown as she headed into the kitchen. “Your father forgot to bring it home from the shop.”

The shop was a small coffee shop across the street from the 109th Precinct, Sully’s home precinct for years. After retirement he’d bought the shop, a favorite hangout spot for cops, and renamed it “Sully’s Cup.”

“The memory is shot,” Sully said. “Looks like you guys are stuck with leaded tonight.”

“Fine with me.” Bernie pushed her glasses onto her head to rub her eyes. “When I work Lobster Shift, I always hit that wall around four in the morning.” For some reason lawyers called the shift from one to nine in the morning the Lobster Shift, and Bernie was still a green enough prosecutor to rotate into the weird hours from time to time. Secretly, she didn’t mind because she and Keesh worked the same schedule, but she didn’t talk about her relationship with Keesh at the family table. Sully didn’t approve of his daughter having a relationship with “some potential terrorist from the Middle East.” Keesh was Rashid Kerobyan, son of an Armenian brain surgeon who hailed from Ohio. In Bernie’s opinion, you couldn’t get much more American than Ohio, but there was no arguing with her father.

Brendan bumped her playfully on the shoulder. “You need to get off those night shifts, Peanut.”

“One of these days. But I don’t have the Lobster Shift all the time,” she said, softened by the endearment. When was the last time Brendan called her Peanut? Of all her siblings, she was most simpatico with Bren, who was closest in age. That was no surprise, considering that Jimmy Jr. was nearly twenty and out of the house when Bernie was born. “She was my ‘oops’ baby,” Peggy liked to say of Bernadette, “but she kept Sully and me on our toes.”

“And Dad ...” James’s brows arched over his eyes in an earnest expression as he turned to their father at the head of the table. “How can a man like yourself, who serves coffee to hundreds of people a week, have no decaf in the house?”

The guys chuckled, and Sully pointed a finger at his oldest son. “Watch it, Jimbo, or we’ll cut you off without a drop of French Roast.”

James clutched his chest. “You’re breaking my heart.”

Over the laughter and cawing no one heard the side door open, but from the kitchen came Gracie’s animated voice. “Uncle Tony! Where were you?”

After the hellos Tony appeared at the kitchen door. “Hey, sports fans.” He extended a hand to Bernie’s father, the only man in the room afforded the courtesy. Tony knew how to work a room. “How’s it going, Sully?”

“I can’t complain. You want a beer?”

“I’d love one, but I’m working tonight.”

Brendan pointed a thumb toward Bernie. “She is, too. Sarah’s making coffee.”

“And here’s your dinner.” Mary Kate’s voice was thick with pride as she placed a steaming plate of food in front of her husband. “I nuked it for you.”

“Thanks, sweetheart,” he said.

Bernie turned away from the spectacle: fawning wife, philandering husband. Did Mary Kate know that he called every female in the DA’s office “sweetheart”?

“Let me know if you want seconds.” Mary Kate backed toward the kitchen. “There’s plenty more.”

“I’m good.” Tony unfolded Ma’s cloth napkin and tucked it into the top of his button-down shirt. A shirt no doubt pressed with love by Mary Kate.

“Do you two ever cross paths at work?” Sully asked from the head of the table.

“I wish,” Tony said. “Somehow I always get stuck with those ADAs who think they know it all.” Tony gestured with a fork. He was one of those guys who could pull off eating in front of a group. It wasn’t just his high self-esteem; he never seemed to end up with seeds stuck between his teeth or grease shining on his lips. Bernie saw it as part of his natural charm, an ornate façade for an architecturally unsound building.

“Sometimes we run into each other in the office.” Bernie didn’t mention that she tried to dodge any cases that came into the Complaint Room with “Marino” listed as the arresting officer.

Sully leaned back in his chair, palms on the table. “I’ll tell you, I sleep well at night knowing that this city is in good hands. My sons out there on the streets. My daughter prosecuting the scum of the earth. I’m proud of you all.” James Sullivan Sr. had joined the New York City Police Department in the early sixties at the age of eighteen. Sometimes Bernie had trouble wrapping her brain around the image of her father, a teenager in the sixties, getting a buzz cut and saluting the establishment while, all around him, the hip generation was espousing free love. Sully stayed on the job until he reached the limit—his sixty-third birthday—and loved every minute in between.

Pride flickered in Bernie’s chest. “You set us all on the path, Dad.”

Sully swatted off her comment. “You guys are the new heroes. The new generation.”

“Yeah, and sometimes I wonder about the next generation,” James said. He explained how half a dozen recruits had to be cut from the academy because they couldn’t pass the physical exam. “These guys, and a girl, they couldn’t run at all. Fat pales, all of them.” Now that Jimmy taught at the Police Academy, his stories tended more toward comedy than heartbreak, but at times his eyes were shad. . .