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She’s well-aware of the figure she presents in Easttown: the basketball star on a twenty-five-year downward spiral. They were all so happy for her by the time the team made it to the championships, and she made that winning basket. Four years earlier, it was all “oh god, there’s Mare Lahey — did you know the family had to have a closed coffin?” The whispers, loud in the way that only small-town gossip could be.
Poor Mare — her father shot himself in the woods.
Good for Mare — she gave us that hometown glory we always knew she would.
Queen for a day.
How low do you have to sink to cheat every rule there is and plant heroin on an addict in recovery?
(No, not low. Desperate. History will not repeat this time.)
She loves the way new people look at her with no expectations. They caught her on the slow downward spiral, and so they’ll never have any reason to expect greatness from her. Just a detective sergeant with a sloppy dye job and a fondness for beer who apparently failed an old friend when it mattered most.
Of course, people expecting her to fail even their lowest expectations is its own kind of bear trap. She’d never deny that, but it’s an easier trap to live with. She’s grown used to the weight and bite of it around her limbs. If they expect nothing from her, that’s one less person to look down on her with that look she’s come to recognize, the one that screams “Mare Sheehan is the architect of every fucked-up thing in her life, so I don’t know why I’m surprised now.”
Well, at least Mare knows who she is, knows she’s a nightmare. Don’t worry about that.
Maybe that’s why, as soon as she notices the way Zabel looks at her, sees him smiling goofily at her from the corner of her eye, she does everything possible to destroy that pristine image he has of her. He’s new and has the kind of schoolboy crush that makes him say “hero detective” back at her with barely a hint of irony. They’re both better off if she leads with the uglier parts of herself.
In the dark, she kneels on the floor of Siobhan’s bedroom, her boy smiling at her from a computer screen, and in the blue light, she counts through the grief a piece at a time. One. Two. Three. Numbering her pain like she numbers the ridges of a bottle cap as she scrapes her thumbnail against it. Over and over and over again.
Father. Son. Grandson. A trinity of loss and loss-to-come which cleaves her apart. Heaven help the soul that underestimates the lengths she’d go to preserve the family she has left. Zabel… Zabel would underestimate her cruelty, she knows it. He shouldn’t. Chief… he doesn’t underestimate her; he knows her too well, but somehow, he’s still surprised every time she leaves him with a pile of shit to clean up.
(Her son, smiling up at her and running into the ocean—)
Chief gives her this look when he sees her shamefaced and defiant outside Dennis’s house. That look. Mare Sheehan, the architect of fucked-up things. I don’t know I’m surprised. He’s furious with her, and it is what it is. Anger is so much easier to bear than understanding, anyway.
Then Zabel says, “I didn’t solve that case.” And the fog clears, and she didn’t even know that understanding could feel like this — like seeing someone else’s ugliness and desperation, feeling awed that it matches your own so perfectly. And when she offers up her own sins in return, he looks at her anew, and there, there is the look she’s been craving for more years than she can count. He is stunned by her capacity for committing horrible crimes and her lack of remorse, but beside that is awe. Now he sees her ugliness in full in the light of day. They are far from the soft romantic light of Tilly’s Italian Place, and he sees her, and he doesn’t run. He doesn’t turn away in disappointment.
He’s still looking at her.
This is what she wanted on that date, what she didn’t even know to put into words: her partner by her side, nothing held back — the chance for acceptance. Hope.
Maybe he feels it, too, because there’s a light in his face that rises like bubbles in the bath, and he kisses her. She’s not expecting it, but his lips are soft and dry, and it’s sweet, and he’s just as much of a fuck-up as she is.
“What was that for?” She asks.
He doesn’t answer, and maybe she’ll never know his reasons, but does she really need him to say it out loud? She already knows.
She’s not the only one who wants to be seen for who she is.