This Mum, I know, is a different woman, her guilt and anger transformed into a quiet determination. But one thing is different once again.
‘Where’s your medal?’ I ask her, and she frowns. ‘Your Maria Goretti medal?’
‘Oh, I threw that away a long time ago,’ she says. ‘I threw it away the night we left Brooklyn. I’m surprised you remember I used to have one.’ She gives a shrug. ‘Maria Goretti, the girl who asked to be killed rather than raped, the girl who forgave her attacker and became a saint. It used to be a symbol of how I had failed to protect my virtue, of how I wanted to live more than please God, and now … well, now I know that God wants me to live too, and do good with my life.’
Relief floods through me, releasing the building torrent of tears. My arms are still wrapped around her waist and she holds me close to her.
‘Sweetheart, don’t cry. I know this is hard for you, perhaps most of all, but we’re together.’
‘It’s just I missed you so much.’
‘Silly girl, you saw me a few hours ago!’ Mum kisses my forehead and I hold her tight, pressing my ear against her chest to feel the beat of her heart against my cheek. ‘I know it will be difficult, but I promise you we will face it together.’
‘Face what together?’ I ask, looking up at her, my smile fading as I see the look of grave concern on her face.
‘Meeting his other victims. All those that he raped after me.’
It’s nearly impossible to tear myself away from her, but I need to decompress, get my feet on solid ground and get a sense of what I’ve done.
These others. They aren’t because of me; they can’t be.
Stephanie already told us that Delaney hadn’t died that night; that for the good of all of them, or at least that’s what she’d thought, they’d swept the whole thing under the carpet. So wherever he disappeared to, there could always have been more victims, and that’s not on me.
Stephanie said he was watched, that he was prevented from hurting anyone else, but how could she know once she went to Florida? How could anyone know? I’d heard about priests moved from parish to parish, ‘transgressions’ covered up and buried deep. Is that what happened to him? He was moved on to harm again.
And then a new memory flowers to me, and I realise Mum dealt with what happened all alone. Ran a scalding hot bath all alone, after it had happened. I remember her telling us every detail. How she knew she couldn’t stay in Bay Ridge anymore, not knowing she would see him every day, and how she had left with Henry in the pitch black night of the 13th. The only thing she could not bear to say out loud was his name, as if it still had some power over her, an invisible brand she could never be rid of.
Closing the door on the only bedroom, I fall onto the soft, white bed, shutting my eyes, and try to shut out the clamouring and competing memories in my head. I focus instead on this life, this universe that I have created. I try to remember the last days and weeks and years as they are now.
There’s Mum’s stuff all around me. Her hairbrush laced with midnight-and-silver strands. Her clothes hang neatly on the clothes rail, her dresses no longer pale silvers and white, but colours all of them, a rainbow of expression. A pair of brightly woven, gold, leather, beaded sandals are set neatly by the drawers. And in the air, mingled with the particles of sunlight and dust, her scent still lingers. To be here among her things, her living things, to lay my head next to the dent in the pillow where hers lay only a few hours ago, fills me with so much peace, an ocean of it. And yet, at its centre, a tiny black pearl of fear worries itself into formation.
If it isn’t me who is paying the price for this wondrous miracle, who is?
‘It’s time to go, Luna.’ Pia pushes open the door, and I realise at once that she is Pia here; I stopped calling her Pea a long time ago.
‘Where are we going?’ I find it almost impossible to drag myself to my feet, out of the little oasis of peace and sanctuary I have found amongst Mum’s things.
‘Mum had another reply to her ad in the paper, that’s five so far,’ Pia tells me, as if she’s reminding me, with an edge of impatience.
‘She put an ad in the paper?’ I realise that I hadn’t known this, not even in this life. ‘She’s named him? What if he sees it?’
‘She didn’t have to. There was a phrase he used with her; she thought it was probably his thing, and she was right, the sick bastard. It’s that phrase the others recognise.’
‘So where are we going now?’ I ask.
‘To meet her, we’re going to meet another victim.’
CHAPTER FORTY-FOUR
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The young woman that opens the door looks very young, and that troubles me more. I don’t know why, perhaps because her grief and pain are more likely to be raw, but more likely because I thought time would have robbed him of the power to hurt and maim. If there is one thing I know, it’s that time changes nothing if you simply let it pass by.
Perhaps she’s eighteen, maybe as much as twenty, I think. It’s hard to tell; her body is still soft-looking, as if it hasn’t fully formed, or maybe it has and yet was somehow pulled out of shape. A basket of dead flowers hangs outside the front door, yellowing desiccated petals crumble to the floor as it sways. It reminds me of the dried blood on my mother’s dress in another time. Patricia, that’s what Pia said her same was. Patricia has green eyes, fair hair, and is a little heavy set in white leggings, a long T-shirt over the top. Her fingers, laden with cheaplooking dress rings, are caught in the neckline, worrying at it.
‘Hello, Patricia,’ my mum says. ‘My name is Marissa Sinclair. These are my daughters, Pia and Luna. Thank you for agreeing to see us, it must be hard to have a load of strangers coming into your home, especially to talk about something so … difficult. But maybe it might help just a little bit to know that you’re not alone. It can be the start to finding your way back to life again.’
Patricia doesn’t move, she only watches us, trapped by indecision.
‘If you’re not ready to talk, that’s fine too,’ Mum tells her gently, her voice low and tender. She searches out each second with fingertip care, testing it before she goes on. Strong, protective and gentle all at once; I see Riss in her there. The young warrior woman in the way she stands, inclines her head. Also, I see the mother I’ve always known, in this life and the last, brimful of feelings, not only hers, but mine, my sister’s and sometimes the whole world’s, always at risk of being engulfed by her empathy, but never able to close it off entirely. Everything that Patricia is feeling now, my mother feels it too, she doesn’t just guess at it, she feels it in her gut, and it hurts her.
‘You only have to tell us what you want, and we’ll listen,’ Mum speaks again. ‘That’s it, that’s all.’
First Patricia bows her head, and then looks over her shoulder, as if she is expecting a reason for her to close the door to arrive at any moment. When it doesn’t, she steps aside and gestures us in.
We follow her down a short hallway, where she stands with her back to us on the threshold of her small living room. There is a couch, a TV in the corner, a short counter at one end dividing a few feet off into a kitchen area. Uncertainty cuts through every angle of her body; large as she is, I can see she is doing all she can to minimise her impact on the space around her.
‘I never thought I’d want to talk about it,’ she says at last, her voice quiet, girlish. ‘Then I saw the ad, and I couldn’t stop thinking about it, about the fact that it hadn’t been just me. I’d always thought it was just me.
‘I never expected to feel so relieved. All this time I thought it was my fault, something I said or did made it happen, and … he said I was special, that was the reason it was happening, because there something about me he couldn’t resist, something special.’
‘He said that to me too.’ Mum doesn’t wait to be invited to sit, and as soon as she does, Patricia takes her lead, taking a seat op
posite her. Pia and I follow, taking stools at the makeshift breakfast counter. Mum waits until Patricia is ready to meet her gaze; there’s no sense of the impatience or restlessness from her that I was once so used to. No eyes darting to the door, always looking for a way out whenever we were anywhere but at home. Marissa simply sits, and waits and, as I watch her, my heart fills with joy, knowing that in this life she has found her sense of peace again; she feels safe at last.
‘He told me that I had made him do what he did.’ Patricia tucks her palms between her thighs, her shoulders hunching around her ears. ‘That it was my fault.’ Her voice drops to a frightened whisper. ‘It was like you said in the ad, he told me not to ever say his name, to never speak it. He said if I did he would know, and he’d make sure I never said it again. I believed him. I was – am – so afraid of him, it felt like he was the devil, like it didn’t matter where I went he could always reach me and hurt me. I still … I don’t want to say his name.’
‘You don’t have to,’ Mum reassures her. ‘I don’t like to say it either. But one day soon, he – it – won’t have any power anymore.’
Patricia’s eyes are huge with fear; the hold this man maintains over her is so strong it half feels as if Delaney’s in the room with us, poised to strike.
‘This must be hard, you don’t have to tell us details.’ Mum leans a little towards her; not too much, just enough. ‘But if you can talk a little, it really helps. And once the centre is up and running you’ll have more support. Counsellors, people who can get you back to who you were meant to be.’
Patricia shakes her head.
‘There’s no going back to that person,’ she says, with dull certainty. ‘Sometimes I wonder what life would have been like if it hadn’t happened …’
She cracks open a packet of cigarettes and lights up, inhaling so deeply, her body arches to meet the inward breath.
‘I wonder if I would had done some of the things I dreamt of as a kid. I wanted to be a teacher, you know. But afterwards, after that, I never felt like I would ever be good enough to teach kids things. I mean how could I, when …’
She takes another long drag on her cigarette. Tipping her chin back to blow the smoke into the air above her head, she watches it dissipate and I get the sense that a lot of time passes around here with her simply watching it go by. The heat is so intense, outside and in, because although there is an aged-looking air conditioning unit in the corner, it looks like it hasn’t worked in a long time. Each time she draws strength from her addiction, the room fills with a little more smoke, pushing the air further and further away. A closed window beckons me, but I daren’t move, afraid that if I do I will scare her, she will stop talking.
‘Funny thing is, he was supposed to be on my side, that was the whole point. He was so kind and funny, and he said he’d help. I was in foster care, you see, had been for a long time. He said he could help find me a family.’
‘Foster care?’ I ask, the horrific answer dawning on me even more.
‘Well, I was only eleven,’ she says with a shrug.
The world drops from under my feet. I look at Mum, who closes her eyes and I know what she is thinking, because I am thinking it too. How many more lives has he ruined? How many more children?
‘I’m so sorry.’ Mum reaches out taking Patricia’s hands. ‘If I’d spoken up, then … perhaps I could have protected you.’
‘Don’t be sorry,’ she says, again, her voice flat and thin. ‘I didn’t tell anybody about it, and I wouldn’t now, except … well, you believe me, don’t you? I’d just like someone to believe me.’
‘I’m sorry,’ I say, the heat and smoke stifling me, horror rising like bile in my throat. ‘I just have to … I won’t be a moment.’
The air outside is no cooler, or fresher, but I gulp it in anyway, steadying myself against a wall, and wait for the sickness to subside. A few seconds pass before I realise that Pia is with me.
‘You look like you need a stiff drink,’ she says. ‘I don’t blame you, in fact let’s go to the bar on the way home.’
In this life, my sister Pia drinks wine like other people, a little too much sometimes, but not too much. In this reality she is no longer an addict; she is healthy and strong, together and successful. There is so much here that is good, that is wonderful. So much here to be happy with and grateful for; most of all, more than anything, it’s that I still exist to see it.
There is so very much that will be hard to let go of.
‘I’m fine, I’m just pathetic. Everything she says, it’s so hard to bear. It’s not like I have the right to feel like this, it didn’t happen to me.’
‘Well.’ Pia rubs my shoulder briskly. She doesn’t hug me so much now, I remember, not since she got the design job in London and a boyfriend called Andrew. ‘All of this is hard on you, you especially. The man that did that to her, he’s part of you.’
Pia isn’t saying anything but the truth, and yet it stings like a hard slap. Knowing he is alive somewhere, knowing I could find him and look into his eyes as his … not his child, not even his offspring, that’s too kind a word. What I am to him, I don’t know. And knowing that he is alive doesn’t make it any easier, because now he isn’t the past turned to dust; he’s a present thing, a monster, that could come around any corner any time. He frightens me.
‘How many more do you think there might be?’ I ask Pia.
‘It’s hard to know,’ she says. ‘But thirty years is a long time.’
And then I know. Everything I have discovered here, everyone that is so much better; it’s not enough to justify one more person going through what Patricia did.
All along I believed that everything that was happening to me, around me, was to save just her. I was wrong, I see it now. That man is part of me, just as Pia says. And it’s only me, me alone, who can save not just my mother, but all of his victims.
‘Luna, you can’t let every story you hear eat you up like this,’ Pia tells me. ‘Mum doesn’t. Look at how strong she is! And, besides, all we can do is try and help these women make a life now – we can’t turn the clock back.’
‘You can’t,’ I mutter.
It doesn’t take me long to find my way back to the bridge; crossing the busy road, I find the bench I sat on thirty years ago with Michael, and I look back at it, stretching out so far away into the blue, as if it could go anywhere, even to the other side of the universe.
Until this point I haven’t really known what it is I have been doing. I’ve been a hero, on a crusade. And I committed the cardinal sin of a scientist, I let my personal hopes and expectations shade the results I was getting. I let myself believe I could save Mum and simply correct the life I had. Now it has come to it, I realise that I am not ready for the truth that there is no coming back from what I must do, and there is no more time left to get ready.
I’m going to stop. I suppose there is no other way of framing it. Not die, because if I died there’d be people to mourn me and remember me. I will have never been. Everything I’ve ever thought and felt will mean nothing, will be nothing. Everything I am, everything I’ve done, won’t leave even the slightest of marks on the lives of the people I love. The idea that I can just cease to be frightens me, and I know now I have longed for some kind of salvation more that I realised. I don’t want to die; I want to live. But I cannot live and let many other women suffer.
I have less than twenty-four hours to stop Delaney.
Because, yes, maybe I did enough for Mum, enough to make her life bearable in the present, and for her to have been someone capable of loving us. I did enough to make her alive. I did enough for my family.
But I didn’t do enough to stop the man that fathered me from hurting so many more. So very many more.
It won’t be him that will pay the price of his sins, it will be me.
Because I have to go back.
And this time I have to kill him myself.
CHAPTER FORTY-FIVE
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Evening arrives very slowly, as if the sun is dawdling, and I watch it gradually sink behind the skyline, torn between wanting this day to last forever, and longing for it all to be done with, and for the quiet that will come after it is.
‘Miss Sinclair?’ A familiar voice speaks my name, and I turn to see Watkins Gillespie, his light, linen suit rumpled, but his tie still done up to the neck, even in this heat.
‘Mr Gillespie.’ I smile at him as he takes a seat next to me on the bench.
‘I hope you don’t mind me talking to you,’ he says. ‘I wasn’t sure if you’d know my name. Someone pointed you out to me.’
Of course, there should be no memory of him. This is the first time I am meeting him.
‘We walked past your practice, Mum told me she used to make your suits,’ I tell him. He looks older, more frail, than the last time I saw him. As if this reality has used up his life force faster.
Watkins Gillespie looks at me for a long time, his watery eyes traveling over and over my face on a loop, and I know he’s trying to place me. A lifetime, my lifetime, has gone by since I saw him last, but he still recognises me from somewhere.
‘I’m getting old,’ he tells me at last. ‘Either I think I know a person, and treat them as an old friend, or I treat old friends like strangers. You seem like one or the other to me, but I am not sure which.’
‘Maybe both,’ I say with a smile.
‘Is your mother well?’ he asks me. ‘I’ve recently come back into contact with your Aunt Stephanie, after she heard your mother was back in Bay Ridge. I thought it might be wise for me to … contact her, but I didn’t want it to come out of the blue; I thought perhaps you might broach the subject with her first.’
‘I’m sure when the time is right Mum will be in touch with her sister,’ I say. ‘She wants to sell up, move on as soon as she can.’
‘Is she well?’ Watkins asks me. ‘Riss, is she well?’
The Summer of Impossible Things Page 26