FICTION

Someone Else’s Wish

By Julie Pecoraro     VOLUME 58 No. 3

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On Mondays and Fridays, Mara went to the supermarket. On Tuesdays and Thursdays, to the library. Daily, she walked the dogs, twice.

That was enough of a routine, she thought.

“It’s a start,” her therapist said.

“Don’t let him ruin this for you,” he also said, at the beginning. “Otherwise, you’re only hurting yourself.”

“Otherwise, I’ll have to get rid of that piano,” she’d said. “I mean, do you know how hard it is to get rid of a piano?”

She laughed; her therapist didn’t.

So, on Saturdays, she climbed the long concrete steps to the back door of the convent, where she pressed the bell and heard its old-fashioned ring through the door. Every week at almost 11 A.M., she would force herself to walk through the kitchen and up the narrow staircase to the room where Sister Adele was waiting to teach her, at forty-three, how to play.



“Not so heavy now, lighter, lighter,” said Sister Adele, on a stool next to hers, showing her during the first lesson how to hold her hands above the keys, as if holding a ball. But Mara’s hands wanted to sink.

“Up.” She tapped the underside of Mara’s wrist with two fingers. “Up. No dead fingers.”

Dead fingers! Mara wanted to laugh and tell Sister Adele about her last day of work five months earlier at the financial firm, though she hadn’t known then that it would be her last. She’d been running around the office after having come in from the cold. It had been October; the weather was turning, the tips of her fingers white and bloodless. She was used to it: the colorless flesh, the pain under the tap. It happened most in the in-between months, like now in March, though she’d be mortified if it happened in front of Sister Adele. But that morning, in the fall, it had been unbearably funny, how a part of her could go dead, just like that. She’d gone around to cubicle after cubicle, showing them off.

Dead fingers, she said in a gruesome voice, with a bad English accent, waving them under her coworkers’ faces. My fingers are dead! Let’s have a funeral for my fingers! It was hilarious.



Of course, the firing hadn’t really been about her fingers. It had been about her name. That was Mara’s theory. There were only so many of them with that last name in that town. It was getting in the way of business. All those rich people coming in to consult about their richness. They couldn’t stand to be so close to such obvious wrongdoing. They preferred their crimes hidden, galloping invisibly through loopholes.

“Is that . . .  ?” She overheard a client walking away.

“Yep.”

“Oh. Geez.”

“I know.”



At the end of October, her termination papers read INEFFICIENCY. Sure, she would sit and proofread the same reports over and over, in case something had changed. And, yes, some of them had not made it out on time. But could anyone guarantee that the numbers hadn’t transposed themselves overnight, that some digit hadn’t snuck in to change the meaning of everything? No one could guarantee that. Not to her. Not anymore.



“Why now?” Sister Adele asked on the second lesson, her hands sedately in the lap of her black skirt. Mara’s went everywhere—smoothing her hair, rubbing her nose, pushing up and down the sleeves of her T-shirt, hiding and emerging from under her thighs. “Not that it’s ever too late. It’s like learning a new language.”

Mara smiled because she couldn’t help but smile at pudgy Sister Adele, who still wore a habit even though she didn’t think nuns had to anymore. It emphasized her features, the tiny brown eyes and the thin nose, whose bulb at the end grew red with her cheeks when she smiled. But her skin was flawless. Maybe it was holiness.

“Music has always been important to me, and when my mom died a couple years ago, I got the piano. Now I finally have time, so here I am.” It was the answer she had rehearsed.

Sister Adele sat silent for a pause, as if she was waiting for the real one. Did nuns Google?

“How lovely,” she said.

Mara wasn’t going to give it to her, nun or not.



“It’s kind of fucked up, isn’t it?” said Jeremy, her ex-husband, when she told him she had started her lessons. They had divorced three years earlier, but he had walked back into her life last summer to see how she was holding up. She couldn’t believe it, the nerve. Now he was sitting right in her recliner, balancing a beer bottle on its arm, like he had never left it, the dogs back at his feet. Not that she would kick him out of it. He was the only human being other than her brother that she spoke to with any regularity since she had been fired.

“Why?” She crossed her arms and leaned back on the couch.

“Because of everything. A convent, really? And the piano. Could you get any more Freudian? Maybe you’re having a massive Freudian slip.”

She rolled her eyes. He still told horrible jokes.

“There’s something to be said for confronting things head-on, you know. There are theories about it.”

He rolled his eyes. She still had theories.

She rolled her eyes too, a little. As if she had confronted anything lately.

“I’ll probably quit soon, anyway,” she said, standing up with her empty glass. “Do you want another drink?”



Mara and her brother had been warned before it made the news. The attorney general sent them both a letter last July. Their father’s name was to be part of a report. A credible accusation had been made over thirty years ago when he was a piano teacher at St. James, and the diocese had kept it quiet for decades. It wasn’t going to be quiet anymore.

Though the attorney general’s office hadn’t called it a warning. They called it a courtesy.

When it broke on the local news, her father’s picture took up the whole television screen. They’d used a picture from the eighties, when he had coached her brother’s little league team. He was posing with a player, face pixelated to protect the innocent, as if that child had met some awful fate. Her father had a mustache in the picture, and even Mara admitted he looked like a creep. Everyone looked like a creep in the eighties. But this was the man into whose arms she had run every evening when he came home from work, who would swoop her up and dance her around humming Beethoven before he even changed out of his suit.

Even those memories she had to shut down and quick. Every time her father surfaced, she pounced, like a game of whack-a-mole. It was exhausting.

All those years, this thing about her father had sat in the darkness of a filing cabinet somewhere in the city, this other version of him slim in a manila folder, waiting to be sprung.

Her hands shook so much she could barely hold the phone.

“Did you give them that picture?” she had screamed into the tiny holes of the receiver.

“No, of course not,” said her brother.

“Then where did they get it? Where the fuck did they get that picture?” She could tell, from outside of herself, that she was hysterical. She sounded like her mother that night over a decade earlier when she had called to say that she had found their father’s body in the bathroom, a heart attack, she’d screamed, and what in holy God’s name was she supposed to do. In that moment, Mara had inherited the same shrieking terror.

“I don’t know, Mar. Probably from one of the kids.”

“Oh god, not—”

“No, that’s not what they said.”

“They couldn’t have picked a worse picture.” She wrapped her hair in her fist and pulled.

“They probably wanted something from when it—”

“When it what? When it what?”

“When they say it happened, that’s all. When the claim was made.”

“Yeah, sure, I have to go.”

She didn’t speak to her brother for three weeks. She broke down after the letter arrived wishing upon her the vilest violation she had never imagined and called him to confirm that, yes, he had been getting the missives too.

Jeremy joke: “Bet you wish you’d changed your last name now.”



Mara still hadn’t gotten a new job, so she was trying to create order in her days. Her therapist thought it would be useful. Her therapist thought she should “get back out there.” But how could she possibly send out resumes, go on interviews? She didn’t have to anyway. Her parents had invested well so the securities she’d inherited were enough to pay for the basics, to which she had gladly stripped her life. No cable. Certainly no internet. Jeremy put her on his cell phone plan. He was nicer to his friends than to his wives. In exchange, she’d buy him beer for their happy hours.

Somehow people got through. She knew better than to answer unknown numbers but still not enough to delete the voicemails unheard.

You’re fucking disgusting.

I hope you all burn in hell.

She’s not sure who she hoped the voicemails would be from. Jeremy, maybe. As if he had gotten a new number and become a new person.



“You’re progressing nicely,” Sister Adele said, a month in. Once Mara completed a piece, Sister Adele and her mothy scent would lean over toward the exercise book and, with a pencil, complete the half-star she had started the week before, confirming Mara’s mastery of it. It was something she did for her kid students, and when she asked if Mara would rather she use some other, more adult method to track her progress, Mara immediately said no, she would like the star, please. She loved the scratchy sound of it.

Sometimes, when she was home, she would sit with her exercise books and her dogs and her glass of gin, and she would page through, marveling at all of her full stars as if she were collecting a sky.

“You’re gifted,” Sister Adele said. “You have it in you. You have it here.” She poked herself in her chest where her heart would be, and Mara’s face burned for having glanced at the breast of a nun.

“If you put your mind to it, you could be quite good,” she said.

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JULIE PECORARO lives in western Pennsylvania. Her writing has appeared in Indiana Review, Michigan Quarterly Review, and elsewhere.


VOLUME 58 No. 3