Immaculate Heart

by Camille DeAngelis

  “One of the newspaper articles said you felt the experience had brought you all closer together.”

  “It felt that way, at first.”

  “And then?”

  “Then, after Christmas, the apparition told us it was time to tell Father Dowd.” She bit her lip. “Things were never the same between any of us after that.”

  “Did you like Father Dowd?”

  She raised her eyebrows. “It never would’ve occurred to me not to.”

  “But looking back on everything. Did you feel he was sympathetic?”

  “Oh, sure,” she replied. “Only…”

  “Only what?”

  “He wanted so badly for it all to be true,” she said softly. “Sometimes I wonder if it would’ve been better if we’d…”

  “If you’d kept it secret?”

  She nodded. “It’s madness to think of it, and yet I can’t see that we did all that much good in the end.”

  “Talking about it did a lot of good for your neighbors,” I pointed out.

  “Still, that wasn’t much comfort once the money dried up. The shops closed, the restaurants closed, the ladies stopped doing B and B. Then everything was the same as it was before.”

  “But you were different,” I said. “Did you ever listen to the other interview tapes?” She shook her head. “Declan sounded as if he’d been locked inside the parish office against his will.”

  Tess almost laughed. “And Orla spent all her time defending him, no doubt.”

  “Whenever she wasn’t saying she saw the apparition only because she didn’t want to admit that her sister was sick—yes.”

  “See, she never told me she was having doubts. Not even at the end. I knew she was having them, but she never said.”

  “In her interview she said that you were the most honest person she knew.” Tess glanced at me then, with her pale gray eyes, and I felt suddenly unsteady—as if I were two different people inhabiting the same body and I’d only just noticed the discrepancy. “It seems to me she didn’t want to disappoint you,” I said quietly.

  She gave me another grim half smile. “You think you know someone.”

  “Tell me exactly when things began to turn,” I said.

  “Turn,” she echoed. “Now that’s the best way to put it. It happened by degrees. I couldn’t see it until it was too late.”

  “That’s always the way it happens,” I said. “That’s the way it happens when it really matters.”

  Tess nodded. “As I said, the apparition told me I needed to feel and show love to the people I professed to love. But over time the message began to shift. It was the same on the surface, I suppose, but with less and less love as it went along. I know that doesn’t make any sense, but there it is. Every time…” Tess’s voice began to shake, and she took a breath to steady herself. “Every time she grew colder and more repetitive.”

  “How so?”

  She halted as if listening to another old recording, this one only in her head. “I remember her saying, I see no love in your heart, Teresa. I look into your heart, and I see no love there. And she’d go on like that until she went away.”

  I stared at her. I didn’t know how to respond. “That—” I stopped short. “Forgive me, but that doesn’t sound like something the Virgin Mary would say.” Those layabouts down at the pub—how had they known? Tess said she’d never spoken of it, and I believed her.

  “There’s nothin’ to forgive,” she said quietly. “Not when I’ve wondered the same thing a thousand times.”

  “So that was when you began to doubt?”

  She nodded.

  “Did you tell the others what she was saying to you? If you were each getting different messages, wouldn’t they have heard something just as disturbing?”

  A rough wind swept down the muddy lane, and Tess brought her reddened hands to her mouth to blow some warmth into them. “None of us admitted it. I don’t know, maybe if I’d come out with the truth, they would have told me something similar, but I never got up the nerve.”

  “What do you think she was saying to Orla?”

  “It’s better for me not to think on that,” she replied. “In time we began to dread going up to the hill—no one else ever said so, but I could see it—and yet we always found ourselves up there at least two or three afternoons a week, so long as it wasn’t raining. Some days nothing happened, and we talked of film stars and exams and walking the Great Wall of China as if she’d never come to us at all. We’d take out our beads, say a few decades, and go down again for dinner.

  “When she did come, though, Síle always saw her first. I wouldn’t have minded, except for people whispering about her always embellishing the story, cravin’ the attention. I didn’t see her that way, but it still mattered.” She paused. “I always liked her, but it made me uneasy.”

  “At what point did you start going up by yourself?”

  “It was a few weeks into the new year,” she said. “On the wet days, when the others went straight home from school.”

  “You didn’t tell them you were going?”

  “I didn’t, no.”

  “Was it because of Síle?”

  “Partly because of Síle. But I couldn’t seem to keep myself from going. I felt drawn there, like I couldn’t have stayed away no matter how much I wanted to.”

  “You kept going, even though she only said the same thing over and over.”

  She drew an unsteady breath. “Then one day, she said something new, and I wished with my whole heart I’d never come.”

  “Tell me,” I said gently. “But only if you want to.”

  Tess nodded. “She said, Orla has been hiding things. And I said, ‘What sort of things?’

  “She laughed then, and it made me shiver. Can’t you guess? ‘Orla is allowed to have her own life.’

  “She’s afraid of what you’ll say. She’s afraid you’ll think she’s a hoor. ‘I wouldn’t say that. I wouldn’t think it.’ You may as well speak the truth, Teresa. You can’t ever hide it from me. You do think it. You can think a thought without putting words to it.

  “‘Why are you saying all this? Orla is my best friend.’

  “If it was between you and Declan, you know she’d give you up. She’s already beginning to.

  “‘You told me there was no love in my heart—you told me to love my friends—and now this?’

  “Orla is a liar and a hoor. She doesn’t deserve your love.

  “‘You’re testing me,’ I said. ‘You must be.’ But she was gone, and I found myself talking to the statue.” She drew up her jacket collar and shivered. What little sun we’d had was gone. “For days I struggled with what the apparition had told me, and in time I began to believe it. The things she’d said … none of it surprised me, in a sense. Most of the time, I thought I loved Orla like a sister, that I’d do anything for her; but even when we were small, sometimes I would feel a tiny spark of delight when something unfortunate happened to her—if she fell off her bicycle or failed an exam. And when good things came to her, there was always that tiny part of me that felt as if she didn’t entirely deserve it.” Tess drew a shuddering breath and turned to me with wide eyes. “I never wanted to feel this. I thought I could hide it and it would all be as if I’d never felt it in the first place.”

  You and me both, I thought. “Would you say you were jealous of her?”

  She stopped to consider this. “Perhaps I was. In any event, it was plain to me that I needed to put some distance between us. I wanted to shrug her off before she could shrug me. Oh, it’s horrible to look back and see it now, see how I treated her. I’d convinced myself of her falseness when I was the false one, through and through.”

  “Don’t say that, Tess. We all have stories like this.” I suppressed the urge to scratch at the name written on my arm. “We all have regrets.” And as soon as I said it, I felt something even stranger creeping over me: as if someone had begun to pick apart the seams that held me together.

  �
�No,” Tess said. “I thought I was better than that.”

  I laid my arm across her shoulders. “Looking back on it, knowing you’d do it differently—that’s the only thing you can do.”

  “Why did you come back here, really?” she said, stepping out from under my arm to face me. “First it was for Johnny’s funeral. Then you wanted to write the article. You’re past that now, and yet you’re still here.”

  It hit me then, the absurdity of saying you’re sorry for something you did—or didn’t do—a quarter of a century ago, but it wouldn’t have felt right to leave it. “I’ve been wanting to apologize for the way I treated you that day,” I said. “In the car, on the way back.” I watched my words transform her face. “I don’t know what got into me.”

  For a second, just a second, I could read everything she was feeling—the hope, the elation—but a second later, she was striving to master herself, to suppress whatever it was I’d dredged up. “I thought I’d done something—said something—”

  “You didn’t,” I said. “I was a jerk, that’s all.”

  Tess took a deep breath and sighed it out. “Sure, we’re all of us impossible to manage at that age.”

  “You would know,” I replied. She made a small sound, not quite a chuckle, and for a minute or two, neither of us said anything more.

  “I’ve gone back to that day in my mind so many times over the years,” she said slowly. “We had everything going for us then. Things were still easy between Orla and me. Declan—we saw him at school, but none of us had ever spoken to him. There was no confusion among us, we saw what was real and no more. My mam was sick, but I could see how she gave my dad a real sense of himself—that he cared for her not out of duty, but love. That it gave him pleasure to look after her while Paudie and Joan brought me on the beach outing.” She closed her eyes, smiling a little. “Síle was happier with your sister than I’ve ever seen her. And you,” she said. “You gave me something that day, too, even if it’s taken me all these years to see it.”

  Right then I finally had to admit to myself that I found her attractive—tearstained face, cross pendant, dowdy sweater, and all—but her reciprocal feeling was all the more reason not to speak of what had happened in the dunes.

  But I couldn’t not ask. “What do you mean?”

  “You gave me a sense of the world,” Tess replied. “A sense of myself beyond this gloomy little town, this gloomy little country. That was the day I first knew I would leave.”

  How could it be that I hadn’t thought of that day in years, yet she believed it had changed her? She doesn’t know, I thought. She’ll never know this isn’t the thing I should regret most. “You go to confession, right? Every week?”

  She nodded.

  “Isn’t that awkward? Telling your innermost thoughts to Father Lynch when you have to see him all the time in the course of your work?”

  Tess gave me a small brief smile. “It isn’t like that, really. Or if he does think of the things I’ve confided to him, he does a sound job of hiding it.”

  I wanted to ask, but I couldn’t bring myself to it: Is there any way to be forgiven for the things you can’t confess? Instead I said, “I’d like to hear the rest of your story. About Orla. If you still want to talk about it.”

  Tess pulled a handkerchief out of her pocket to wipe her nose and nodded. “I was telling you how it all came apart between us. I found little ways of doing it. I was busy with family outings whenever she wanted to make plans for the weekend; I led her to a new table in the caf, and let her eat in silence as I made friends with the other girls; and when we saw the apparition, I wouldn’t tell her what had been said to me. She was hurt, of course, but she tried not to show it. She and Declan were closer than ever. I heard from someone at school that she was planning to join him in Australia after the leaving cert, that she was going through with it. Then he left without her, and I changed my mind and wanted to mend things, but it was too late. We’ve hardly spoken from that day to this.”

  We looked at each other. “I told Orla she should talk to you,” I said finally. “Twenty years is long enough, don’t you think?”

  Tess folded her hands. “She said no, did she?”

  “I’m hoping she’ll change her mind,” I said. “I hope you will, too.”

  “Why?” she asked. “Why does it matter so much to you?” She studied my face. “It isn’t to do with me,” she said softly. “It’s partly to do with Síle, but that’s not the whole of it, either.”

  We looked at each other. “It’s Mallory,” I said at last, and it was like I’d opened my mouth and waited to hear what would come out. “You say you want to go back to that day at the beach, and I do, too, only it’s for a different reason.” Her name in that notebook—her name under my skin. It was happening now, stitch by stitch.

  Tess gazed at me with that sweet look of compassion I remembered from the night of the vigil. It was a relief to see she’d misunderstood me.

  * * *

  “You sure you want to go up there?” I asked. We looked at each other, both of us thinking of the suicide note.

  “We’ll go,” Tess said finally, and we continued up the hill. “He was a good boy, but he was troubled. I won’t be haunted by it.”

  I gave her a look.

  “Not anymore,” she said.

  As usual, the little white tchotchke truck was the only vehicle in the parking lot. Mag let out a warm greeting, as if she’d been expecting us. “Cuppa tea?” she called. We came closer, and by the look on Mag’s face, I saw she’d taken me for someone else.

  Tess reacted with a different kind of surprise. “You’ve a kettle in there?”

  Mag tucked away the wary look she’d been giving me and chuckled. “Oh, aye, I’ve a power point.”

  Tess laughed. “You’ve been holding out on me, Mag!”

  The old woman flashed her an impish smile. “Will you have a cuppa?”

  “No, thanks. I won’t bother you.”

  “Sure, it’s no bother a’tall!”

  They went back and forth a few more times, with Tess finally acquiescing as the button popped on the electric kettle. Mag poured water into three brown seventies-era mugs and added the milk before taking out the tea bags.

  As Tess and Mag chatted over their tea, I turned back to the parking lot and noticed something odd. There was nothing in the water-stained niche besides a couple of empty cider cans. “What happened to the statue?” I asked.

  “The statue of the Blessed Virgin?” Mag stuck a wizened finger in her mouth to readjust her teeth. “’Twas taken down years ago.”

  “That can’t be right,” I said. “It’s been there whenever I’ve come up here. Just like in the old newspaper photos.” Owen had seen it too; I’d seen him looking at her.

  “No one can say who it ’twas that took it,” the old woman went on, and I realized she was trying not to look at me. “’Twas thieves in the night!”

  I opened my mouth again to protest, and Tess regarded me curiously. “Mag’s right,” she said. “The statue hasn’t been there going on ten years now. You must’ve imagined it.”

  I carried my tea to the edge of the parking lot and sat down on the scarred green bench overlooking the town, hoping to clear my head. Tess had told the priest she hadn’t seen the statue when the apparition came—that the statue had gone away, leaving bright white light and a flesh-and-blood woman in its place.

  A minute or two later, Tess came over and sat down on the other side of the bench, and we looked out over Ballymorris in silence. Then she turned to me with a sad smile. “There,” she said, pointing to a set of initials scratched into the seat: OG + DK. “I remember the day he carved it. It was one of the days when the pilgrims came up here to wait, but she never came.”

  “You know what you said to Father Dowd in that interview?” I asked. “About everything else in the world falling away whenever she came to you? And there being no more time?”

  Tess shivered. “Aye. I remember.”
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  “It reminded me of something. Did you ever hear that thing they say, about time happening all at once?”

  She shot me a curious look. “Who’s ‘they’?”

  Johnny’s phone beeped before I could come up with a reply. It was a message from Brona. Leo having chest pains, in hospital now. Let us know if you’d like to come along once he’s able for visitors.

  Tess’s phone vibrated as I was reading Brona’s text. “It’s probably from Paudie,” I said. “Leo’s having heart trouble. They’ve taken him to the hospital.”

  * * *

  Late that afternoon, Brona drove Paudie and me to the county hospital, one endless corridor of gray linoleum and fluorescent lights. Leo was asleep when we arrived, and we took seats around the bed and waited for him to wake up. I hadn’t spent much time in hospitals, but I knew that a visit only counted if your friend in the bed knew you were there. “This is the last place I expected to find you, Leo,” I said when he opened his eyes. “We’ve been waiting for you at Napper Tandy’s for hours.”

  He gave me a weak smile. “It’s a lie,” he said. “You haven’t the smell of the pub on you.”

  “How’re ya now, old man?” Paudie asked.

  Leo struggled to sit up, giving the IV drip an impatient tug. “Not too sure I’m long for this world, to be honest wit’cha. Just look at the job they did on me arm.” He pointed to a dark ugly bruise on the inside of his elbow. “Man or pincushion, she couldn’t tell which.”

  “Have they given you anything to eat?” Brona asked.

  “Ehh, they brought me a bit o’ soup. I can’t even think to be hungry with all the squeezin’ in me chest.”

  Brona took his hand in hers and stroked the rough dry skin on the back of his palm. “It’ll get better,” she soothed. “Just do as they tell you, and you’ll be out of here in no time.”