Well, I thought. You’ve certainly lived it.
* * *
Outside the rain had stopped, and the air was cold and fresh. Leo stumbled out the door of the pub, and Paudie held out a hand to steady him.
Of all the money that e’er I had, Leo sang in an astonishingly decent baritone, I spent it in good company. And all the harm I’ve ever done, alas! it was to none but me.…
For an awkward pause, Tess and I waited behind them, until they began to lumber together down the rain-slicked street. “You’ll see her home, won’t you?” Paudie called to me over his shoulder. “Good night, and God be with ye both.”
Tess began walking in the other direction, and I fell into step beside her. “Where do you live, anyway?”
“Just around the corner from the youth center,” she said. “We’ve a house in Ravens Row.”
The walk passed much more quickly than I wanted it to. She stopped outside another whitewashed row house and reached into her bag for her keys. “So this is where you live,” I said.
Tess nodded. “You’d better leave me here,” she said. “It’s late. Otherwise I’d invite you in for tea.” She saw me looking up at the darkened windows and said, “The others will have gone to bed long before now.”
“Did they come to the vigil?”
She was sorry I’d reminded her. “Everyone came,” she said as she turned the key in the lock and the door swung open. “Thank you for seeing me home. What if I ring you tomorrow and we’ll make a plan?”
“That would be great,” I said, and I watched her weary smile recede into the darkness of the hallway before the door clicked shut.
On the walk back to the B and B, I forgot all about the dead boy, the dying blackbird, the name in Mrs. Keaveney’s notebook. I saw Tess taking off her boots and arranging them neatly on a shoe rack beside the radiator, mounting the stairs and treading softly down the hall past the rooms of her sleeping housemates, the other Sisters of Compassion. I saw her closing her bedroom door behind her, taking off that shapeless gray sweater and folding it for another wear. I thought of her shrugging off her bra, her breasts round and lovely in the lamplight, and what a pity it was no one had ever touched them.
9
NOVEMBER 13
Dr. Kiely greeted me with a tight-lipped I’ve-got-your-number sort of look on her face. I’d been right to think this was the last time Síle and I would meet. Martin showed me to her room and shot me a wary look as he closed the door behind us.
Síle was standing at the window looking out at the rain. “I love it when it’s squallin’ like this,” she said without turning around. “I wish we were out in it.”
“Why would you want to be outside right now?” I asked as I propped my umbrella against the radiator and shrugged off my jacket. “I’ve just come out of it. It’s awful.”
She turned from the window then and smiled. “You didn’t get wet enough. If you’re out a while, there comes a point where it doesn’t matter anymore how wet you are. You’re soaked to your knickers and you’re squelchin’ in your boots and you turn your face up to the sky and you laugh and laugh because for once you feel at home in the world. Then you come in again, peel off all your sodden clothes, and put the kettle on. That’s the most satisfying moment of the day, even better than the first sip of tea.” She moved to the sink. “Speaking of which?”
I was looking around at the walls. She’d pinned a fresh series of drawings over the older ones. “Yes, please.”
She dipped a spoon into a rusty tin of loose tea. We didn’t speak as the kettle came to a boil. Síle just stood there looking at me, smiling that smile, as if she had something wonderful to surprise me with and she was holding out as long as she could. I thought back to our conversation on the beach, of the diary and everything she’d said. I didn’t care if she was certifiably insane. I wanted her either way.
“What?” I said finally.
She reached for the kettle and poured the water into the teapot. “Have you ever been to India?”
I shook my head.
“You really should go.”
“I will someday, if you think I’d like it.” I took a seat on the unmade bed. “It just feels like such a cliché, going to India to do yoga and ‘find yourself’ and all that stuff.”
“‘Finding yourself,’” she said pensively. “I never understood that. Losing yourself, now, that’s much more sensible.”
“What do you mean?”
“Everything you think you are,” she replied. “All your trappings. I went to India to forget all that.”
“You sound like a guru.” I laughed.
She glanced at me as she reached for the sugar bowl. “But I suppose you haven’t come to that part in the diary yet.”
“I haven’t, no.” I cleared my throat. “I wanted to ask you about those … passages … in between the actual entries.”
She arched a brow, waiting for me to go on.
“Do you still believe the apparition told you those things? About other people?”
She sighed. “We can talk about all that once you’ve read it through.”
I opened my mouth to tell her I probably wouldn’t finish it in time, and to ask if I should mail it back, but something kept me from it. I wanted to give it back to her in person. I took the first sip of tea. “Is this from India?”
“It’s chai,” she said as she sat down beside me and brought the steaming mug to her lips. “The last of the stash I brought home with me.”
“You’ll just have to go back and get more.”
Again we didn’t speak. I inched closer, and she ran the back of her hand along the outside of my thigh. “Oh,” she said, turning away from me, “I wanted to show you something.” She picked up a heavy black book from her bedside table. “Do you remember how I was telling you about the Eve of Saint Agnes?”
I wanted to say how could I forget?, but I nodded.
“There’s another window of Harry Clarke’s I’d like to see someday. It’s in Florida, believe it or not.” Síle flipped toward the back of the book and pointed to the picture. “It’s called the Geneva Window. It was meant to go into the International Labor Building at the League of Nations, but the Irish government decided not to send it.” I breathed her in as she pointed to an illustration of a naked blonde dancing for a repulsive older man slobbing in an armchair. “The window reminded them that their parents had been obliged to fuck each other in order for them to be born, and no one was having that.” She handed me the book so I could take a closer look at the pictures. “All the beautiful things we ever make,” she sighed. “All that we make, they take it away from us.”
“Who are you talking about?” I asked. “Your country, or yourself?”
She sighed as she took another sip of tea. “Both, maybe.”
“You’ve got all your art around you here.”
“Not for much longer, I’m afraid.” She rose from the bed and paced toward her easel, as if she might have to physically defend it. “I told you I’ve been selling it, but I shouldn’t be holding on to the money when Mam and Dad can’t afford to keep me here.”
“They don’t have to keep you here,” I said. “It’s their choice to spend the money.”
“Look.” She pointed to the windows, where the sky was shifting like a sheet of mercury. “It’s passing.”
A shaft of sunlight cut a bright line along the dusty hardwood floor. “There’s a girl here, Áine, who makes a game of swallowing things,” she said. “Dr. Kiely doesn’t know she still does it. She thinks Áine’s given it up.”
“What kind of things?”
“Buttons. Safety pins. Bits of blue yarn—always blue. She’ll measure them before she swallows.” Síle stood in the center of the room, looking pensively into her mug as if she were reading the dregs. “Nothing too sharp, of course. She isn’t as mad as that,” Síle said softly. “We’re none of us here mad as that.”
I put down my tea and went to her. “I wish you wouldn’t talk a
bout yourself that way.”
“I heard of a girl once who chewed on glass,” she said.
I laid my hands on her arms, my arms like a set of parentheses, making her the exception. You’d think I’d want someone “normal,” someone who offered everything expected of her, but I’d had that. I’d had it and left it more times than I could count. “I don’t believe it,” I said.
“You’d believe a lot of things, if you’d seen some of what I’ve seen,” she answered, and we just looked at each other. A thought surfaced, of her and Declan, and I brushed it aside. I would never ask her about that.
In another minute, the whole room was flooded with light. That dreaminess came over her again, and I watched her lie down on the floor, close her eyes against the sunshine, and hold out her hand to me.
I got down beside her, brushing away a few dust bunnies before I let my head rest on the scuffed old floorboards.
“Now,” she said, “tell me all that you’ve been up to in Ballymorris.”
I folded my arm behind my head and looked at a crack in the ceiling. “Not a whole lot.”
“Whom have you met?”
“Well, Tess, of course. And I’ve been spending most evenings with Paudie and Leo.”
“Ah, they’re right auld gents. Who else?”
“Do you remember the old woman who owns the truck of religious knickknacks up on the hill? I saw her again yesterday.”
“Mag O’Grady?” Síle laughed. “She’s the best crack you’ll find in Ballymorris. She bought that truck whilst we were still havin’ the visions. She must be near on a hundred by now. I remember people talking years ago about what she was like when she was young. They said she was the prettiest girl in the county.”
“Who’s ‘they’? I can’t imagine she has any contemporaries left.”
“You’d still find one or two. They said if we’d a pageant like they have down in Kerry, she’d have won it.”
“There’s something else,” I said. “A boy committed suicide the other day. They held a vigil in the park last night.”
“A boy Tess knew?”
“Yes. She worked with him. And I … I met him, briefly, up on the hill.”
She gave me a sideways look. “What was he doing up there, did he say?”
“He didn’t, no.” I cleared my throat. “Something wasn’t right, but what could I do?” It only hit me then: I should have said something to Tess. The boy was obviously troubled, and even sending her a short text message would’ve been more useful than brushing it off. How many people had I ever known who were better off for knowing me?
No one. Certainly not Mallory.
“I’m sorry,” Síle said after a while, like she was giving me time again to let my thoughts play out. “Will you tell Tess I was askin’ for her?”
“I’ll tell her.” I paused. “Síle? Can I ask you something?”
She smiled as if her name in my mouth gave her physical pleasure. “Course you can.”
“You said you saw her—the apparition—in a dream, and that you heard her voice in your head other times, telling you things you couldn’t have known otherwise.” Something in me didn’t want to ask, but I knew I had to. “Did you ever see her—actually see her, I mean, not like that time you dreamed about walking down to the holy well—did you see her anywhere else apart from the grotto?” What if you ran into the Blessed Virgin Mary somewhere—like trying on a blue silk scarf at a department store, or giving her seat to a white-haired man with a cane on a crowded subway car—and she was dressed like an ordinary woman, and you never knew it was her?
“I did see Her other places,” she said quietly, and I couldn’t tell what she was feeling. “You’ll come to that part.”
I didn’t know what more to say. I watched Síle’s eyes trace that crack in the ceiling as if she’d never seen it before. “How long before you leave?” she asked.
I tried to laugh. “Do you want to get rid of me?”
She closed her eyes and smiled. The light was still perfect. “I never want to be rid of you,” she said, and when I felt the thrill, I couldn’t give in to it.
“You don’t know me,” I said quietly.
She glanced at me. “You haven’t killed anybody, have you?”
I looked back at the ceiling. “No.”
“Then it isn’t as bad as you think.”
I believed her. I wanted her to be right.
Afterward I couldn’t say if I’d reached for her hand, or she’d reached for mine, but we lay like that for what felt like an hour, until a cloud came along and blotted out the light again. She ran her forefinger up and down the inside of my arm and murmured, “This will be the last time I see you.”
“It won’t be. I promise.”
“Aren’t you going home soon?”
“I can stay longer.”
“They won’t let you come again. You know they won’t.”
“Síle,” I said gently, “you can leave. You just have to tell them what they want to hear—pretend to be their idea of ‘normal.’ You said so yourself.”
She shook her head, but she spoke breathlessly and her eyes were shining. “It isn’t as easy as that.”
I propped myself up on my elbow. “Says who?”
I watched her smile fade by degrees. “You don’t really want me,” she said. “You’d see soon enough, if you could see me out of here.”
I sat up and reached for her. “That’s not true, Síle!” I should have kept talking, said something reassuring, but I’d never been any good at that sort of thing.
She didn’t respond to my touch, and I could tell from how she stared at the ceiling that she was somewhere else. “The drugs they put me on left me so sleepy, and one day I remember waking up to their voices down in the sitting room. My sister was there. I went to the head of the stairs and listened. ‘You haven’t a choice,’ Orla said. ‘She hasn’t left you any choice.’
“‘Ah, now,’ our dad said to her. ‘She can’t help it, poor lamb.’
“‘You always say that, Dad,’ she said. No one said anything for a minute, and then she went on: ‘You say it, and she feeds on it. You won’t admit it to yourselves, but you know she does. She’s even sicker than you think.’ They didn’t say anything to that, but I knew that if they’d thought she was only bein’ hurtful, they’d have told her so.” Síle closed her eyes. This was the saddest I’d ever seen her. “She said one thing more. She said, ‘It’s us who’ve had to suffer through this all these years. Not her.’”
“You aren’t sick,” I told her, and she gave me a wan smile in place of an answer.
We were interrupted by a timid tapping from the hallway. I rose from the floor with a grunt. “You’re wrong, in what you said before,” I said as Martin opened the door. “You’re right about a lot of things, Síle—but you’re wrong about that.”
She sprang to her feet, lithe as a cat, but we didn’t touch or speak. The attendant stood in the doorway, silent and awkward, as I shrugged on my jacket and stepped into my boots.
“Careful, now,” Síle said, smiling again, as the attendant drew the door shut between us. “I’ll make you prove it.”
* * *
I was almost out the front door when the girl appeared, and I recognized her from the charcoal sketches as soon as I saw her eyes. Síle hadn’t accentuated their prominence, she’d captured it, and I thought again of how unfair was Orla’s assessment of her talent.
“Now, Áine,” Martin said in a firm and mildly patronizing tone I hadn’t heard him use before, “you know you’re not to be out wandering the halls at this time of the afternoon.”
The girl didn’t acknowledge Martin in any way; she just kept looking at me with her pale frog eyes, and though I tried not to look, I couldn’t help noticing her nipples poking through the thin fabric of her blouse. The top buttons were undone past the point of decency, and she definitely wasn’t wearing a bra. There was a strange smell about her, too, floral but stale, like a bowl of potpourri left t
o gather dust.
“Áine?” Martin was saying. “What have you got there?” He reached for her fist and pried gently at her fingers. “Sorry, but it’d be better if you left now,” he said over his shoulder. “She forgets what she’s meant to be doing if someone new happens to be about. Isn’t that so, Áine?”
I turned to go, but the girl opened her hand and offered me what she’d been hiding. It was a tiny ball of turquoise-colored yarn, the end trailing between her long white fingers. A smile spread slowly across her face, soft and sinister at the same time, and when she spoke her voice was low and honeyed. “You liked it, didn’t you?”
I stiffened. “What is she talking about?”
Martin sighed as he tucked the yarn in the pocket of his scrubs. “Even she couldn’t tell you what she’s on about most of the time.” He opened the door wide and waved me out. “Safe travels, mate.”
You’d hardly notice from one visit to the next, but when I think back on it now I see how Her looks have changed. When She’d first appeared to us there’d never be any mistaking Her for an ordinary woman. There wasn’t the mark of any earthly care about Her, and the glow on Her would’ve lit up the night for miles.
Then, slowly, She became real to me. When She took my hand I could feel it was chapped, there were faint lines around Her eyes and when She took off Her mantle I saw Her long dark hair was lightly threaded with grey.
Finally I said,—You look different, Mother, and She smiled as if She’d been expecting me to say so.
—As we’ve listened and shared with one another over these past months, I have become a friend to you, have I not?
—Aye, Mother. You’ve been a truer friend to me than anyone else ever has.
She smiled.—Someday you will have friends who will see you for all that you are. Shall I answer your question?
—Please, Mother.
—My Son did not come into this world to be worshipped as a god, She said.—That is the old way. He came to bring pure love and joy to the world, and to show the people a path to peace even if they chose at first not to follow it. This is My work here, Síle—to correct the mistakes and misapprehensions of the men who have called themselves Christians. At other times, in other places, be it near to here or on the far side of the world, I have walked among the people. I have seen their greed, watched them rage at their Creator when the consequences were made manifest. I have trod their streets, cold and hungry and alone, and I have begged for aid. I heard all of their prayers but they gave Me nothing in return.
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