Archive of Our Own

When Jenny Reilly was ten, she sat on the stairs and fixed the awful look on Tommy Donnelly's face.

Years later she would remember what it felt like to be the important one, the bearer of good news. She remembered the warm pride thrumming in her chest as she hurried down the hospital steps, her stiff school shoes slipping on the concrete as she squeezed in beside him to speak the words that she was sure, so sure, would fix the wrongness that was Tommy looking so broken.

“The doctor said Jimmy's gonna walk.”

The smile that creased and dimpled Tommy's freckled face kindled the warmth in her chest to a raging inferno, and in that moment, Jenny found her home.

She didn't know then what had happened to her, but later—much later—she would look back on that moment as the one that defined all her others. That was the moment when Jenny knew that home would always be at Tommy's side, warm in the light of his smile.

The problem was, there were so goddamn many stairs in New York. You couldn't always be ten years old and sitting on the step, shoulder to shoulder with a boy whose smile made you feel like sunbeams. Sometime, sooner or later, if you wanted to keep on being around the Donnellys, you ended up kneeling on the stairs and cleaning up the blood that one Donnelly—did it even really matter which one? She cursed them all with equal fervour as she scrubbed—had smeared all down the length of them.

So much blood.

The water ran pink for hours, and Jenny scraped her knuckles raw. As she worked she thought of Sean, battered and broken in his hospital bed, and how Tommy's eyes had been so hollow and soulless upon his return from Fixing Things that it frightened her to look at him.

She thought of Helen, delicately tucking Kevin's blood-spattered cuff into the sleeve of his coat, a mother tidying up her son as though she did this every day.

Maybe she did.

Maybe that's what it meant to be a Donnelly. Surely Helen would know, if anyone did.

Jenny sloshed another bucket of soapy water down the stairs. Where did they keep the bleach?

There'd need to be bleach, if she wanted to do this right.

How the hell did she even know that? Maybe that was the kind of thing you just picked up, if you spent a lot of time with the Donnellys; if you called them home.

Even then, on her knees cleaning up his mess, Jenny knew that Tommy was home. Tommy, damn him, would always be her home.

That was what made everything that happened with Samson a thousand times worse than it would ordinarily have been: he wasn't Tommy.

Sure, she'd gone home with him for that very reason. He wasn't Tommy, and she needed somebody to help her hurt Tommy. Samson hadn't known she was using him for that; hadn't known she'd needed something to scrub Tommy from her, to bleach herself raw, like knuckles dashed on concrete steps, to clean Tommy from her body. That was why she had gone with Samson, but he hadn't wanted to know that, and suddenly the ugly of it all wasn't cleansing anymore. Suddenly it was dark and looming, like blood on stairs, and this mess, she wasn't sure how to clean it up right. There wasn't enough bleach in the world to fix Samson . . . but real Donnellys didn't use bleach.

Helen wasn't a real Donnelly. She'd married in. She tucked and tidied and sorted and yelled, but that was just Helen. All front and no foundation.

That wasn't what real Donnellys did.

Real Donnellys did what Jenny Reilly did. They waited at the top of the stairs with a lead pipe in hand.

Donnellys stood in the shadows like they were a part of them, like the shadows came as much from everything dark and looming within them as they came from without. And when the mess they had to fix climbed the stairs, they raised their arms and they brought the pipe down square on top of it.

Then, when the mess looked up, dazed and confused, like maybe he wasn't quite sure what had just hit him, a real Donnelly would say “hey,” all quiet-like, and kind of mean too, and hit him again, and again, and yes, God damn him, thinking he could get away with that, with saying those things to her, about her, and thinking her body was his to take, again, and again, and again.

Donnellys made a hell of a lot of messes. Jenny knew that. She also knew they looked out for their own. Hadn't she seen that, since she was too little to even know what it was that she was seeing? They cleaned up after one another; they did for each other.

Jenny knew because she'd been there from the start, a scrape-kneed gap-toothed little girl in a ballcap and tennis shoes. She'd been on the stairs when Tommy wept and rocked and prayed, she'd been on her knees on stairs that had been smeared with another man's blood, cleaning up a mess for the sake of a man who was everything to her. And she stood at the top of those stairs and bashed in the skull of the sick sonofabitch who thought he could be to her what only one man had ever been; what only one man could ever be.

Jenny knew Tommy was home, her home, because at heart, where it counted, deep inside a part of her she never, ever wanted to admit was there, she knew she'd been one of them from the start.

Her dad could say what he liked, but Jenny had been a Donnelly all along.