by Luanne Rice
She tried not to think about what Bernie and Tom must be imagining. If she could turn the clock back, she would never have left Bernie’s letter under the placemat, for Regis to find. There were so many ways to lose a child, none of them possible to recover from. Honor thought of the Christmas crèche—installed outside the chapel each Advent by Bernie and the nuns. Bernie had always been so kind, to let the girls join in. But Bernie herself was always the one to place the Christ child in his crib. Even when Regis had begged and pleaded—and Bernie was notorious for being unable to say no to her goddaughter—this was one duty Bernie considered hers alone. And Honor had never been able to watch her do it without starting to cry. Bernie herself never had dry eyes when she installed the crèche.
So, now Regis knew the truth about her aunt—from her mother’s own words. If Regis had ever guessed at the story of Bernie and Tom, she had never said—and Honor, no matter how honest she tried to be with her daughters, had never discussed it. Not even with Regis, her most straightforward and demanding-of-the-truth-the-whole-truth-and-nothing-but-the-truth daughter.
Still leaning on the door of the beach house, Honor opened her eyes. Why was it so dark in here? John kept the shutters closed—which seemed so unlike him. He lived for light, the brighter and more scalding the better. His photographs were a study in light, and like the Tonalists and early American Impressionists, he celebrated Black Hall for its river-and ocean-washed light.
But the room was pitch-dark. The photo-processing smell made her think he’d been working here—which made her even sadder, considering he had a perfectly good darkroom in the studio attached to their house.
Honor felt her way to the bed. She sat down, and as her eyes became accustomed to the darkness, she saw that John kept his camera on his pillow. His old, predigital Leica. She smiled, because that was so like him. He lived to get the right shot, the picture that would define the moment, the day, his feelings. She also saw that he kept the box—the box—on his makeshift night table, a driftwood stump set beside the bed. Tom must have given it back to John.
Lifting the lid, she peered inside. There was Cormac Sullivan’s death certificate, old and crumbling. It pierced her heart—with love for John’s great-grandfather, the man who had been brave enough to come to America. In all his hunger and longing for home, Cormac had built the beautiful walls that defined this land. He had started a family, putting down Sullivan roots for John and Honor and their children. The ring was there, too: the gold ring with the red stone.
Her attention was suddenly drawn to a paper and pen beside the bed. Lifting it, squinting in the dim light slanting through the cracks of the shutters, she saw that John had been making notes. Lifting the notepad, she read: “train—Montrealer—bus to Quebec—8 a.m./12 noon/3 p.m.??—or Tom drive?—Hotel St. Jacques—inquire weekly rates.”
He was planning to leave.
This morning when she’d come to him, to apologize for last night, he’d told her that he wasn’t staying—and now she saw that he meant it. She had known it then. She sat still, feeling her heart pound in her chest.
She couldn’t lose him again.
Standing up, feeling shaky, she went to the window and pushed the shutters open. The salt breeze blew back her hair, and she blinked into the sunlight. When she turned around, she gasped in shock.
Daylight revealed what had previously been hidden: pictures hanging on strings bisecting the room; it was a wonder Honor hadn’t walked straight into them. He must have decided to process what he had in his camera before he left, and when she saw what he’d been photographing, her eyes blurred with tears.
The pictures were all of her.
Honor at her easel, in the garden, walking through the vineyard; Honor sitting on a driftwood log beside Sisela, holding Agnes’s hand, laughing with Cece; Honor standing in the darkness, looking up at the sky as if she were wishing on a star; Honor with her arm draped over Regis’s shoulder—and the last one…Honor walking along the tide line, gathering moonstones.
She remembered that moment—it was the day John’s letter had arrived, letting them all know that he was coming home. So he hadn’t been in Canada still, as Tom had said. He had been here all along. He had chiseled the verses into the grotto wall….
Her heart had ached for years, but this was something different. Surrounded by the pictures her husband had taken of her, holding his notes for departure in her hand, feeling the loss of Regis, Honor knew her heart was breaking.
She did the only thing she could think to do: sat down hard on John’s bed, reached into the box they had pulled from the wall all those years ago. Removing the gold ring with the red stone, she slipped it on her finger.
The room had been dark, and now it was filled with light. The ring had once been forbidden pirate gold, and now it was family treasure. John had been gone, and now he was home. Bernie had hidden from her own truth for too long, and she knew it—Honor had felt it in the grotto. Things could change: they could.
But first they had to find Regis.
“It’s him,” Tom said. The grotto was shot through with shadow and light.
Bernie looked anywhere but at him. “It can’t be. How would he have gotten all the way from Dublin?” she said.
“I don’t know, Bernie. His age, though—he’d be the right age. And that bright red hair—exactly like yours. Your hair is just as red now, isn’t it? Under the veil?”
“A lot of people have red hair.”
“You heard Agnes say he was adopted!”
“Tom—listen to yourself! He’s not the only adopted boy in the state of Connecticut! And Connecticut is a long, long way from Ireland!”
“Why are you doing this?” Tom asked her, grabbing her by the shoulders. “Why won’t you at least listen to me, consider the possibility?”
“Because I can’t, and you can’t either. For one thing, you’re dreaming, and for another, he has a life. And we can’t get in the way of it!” Bernie was shaking, as if from the cold, but it was eighty degrees, even in the shade of the grotto. She didn’t want to tell Tom about her dreams, or about the voice she’d heard calling lately: a young boy, riding on the back of a sea monster, straight out of the Kelly family crest, laughing as he traversed the waves.
It was a pagan dream, unbefitting a nun. Sisters of Notre Dame didn’t believe in sea monsters, not even the legendary one said to have watched over the fallen body of Tadhg Mor O’Kelly, after the battle of Clontarf.
“He has your hair color,” Tom said now. “And he has my eyes.”
“You’re flattering both of us,” she said.
“Have you looked in the mirror lately?” he asked. “Do you even have mirrors in the convent?”
“None of your business,” she said.
“Jesus Christ, Bernie—don’t you know a miracle when you see it? You think it’s him, too. I know you.”
Bernie walked away. She prayed he wouldn’t follow her, but of course he did. She heard his footsteps behind her, on the stone path from the Blue Grotto toward the parking lot. Her route to the convent would take her right past the boy’s car—his lovely, mysteriously painted old Volvo. Bernie had noticed it on his visits to Agnes. One night she had come out after vespers, just to read the messages in his images.
The white cat, gazing at the moon: that was her favorite. Brendan had somehow captured the very essence of Sisela—her yearning mystery and nameless desire. Bernie wondered whether Brendan knew the story of the white kitten, homeless and motherless, adopted by the Sullivans.
“Here’s his car,” Tom said, over her shoulder.
“Well, he’ll come back and pick it up soon,” Bernie said, feeling a jolt of guilt—knowing she should have spoken up for Brendan to the police, saying he couldn’t possibly have carved those words into the wall, or have had anything to do with Regis’s disappearance.
“That’s not my point,” Tom said. “Have you looked at what’s painted here?”
“Yes,” she said, tensing.
/> “You’ve seen this?” he asked, gesturing with his right hand.
Bernie stared at the images: a young red-haired boy riding on the back of a sea monster, slipping across the waves, cliffs rising on two sides of the same ocean. Ireland and Connecticut, she had thought when she’d first seen it.
“What about it?” she asked.
“For the love of God, Bernie,” he said. “It’s the Kelly family crest!”
“And what?” she asked. “Brendan is supposed to know that? He’s somehow figured out that he’s a Kelly? He somehow sailed across the Atlantic—how, by the way? On the back of a real sea monster? One that he’s immortalizing along with cats and foxes and white whales?”
“Why else do you think he’s hanging around here?” Tom asked. “He must have gone to Catholic Charities and petitioned to see his file. The hospital in Dublin never promised the baby would stay in Ireland—Catholic adoptions can happen anywhere, as long as the parents promise to raise the child in the Church. Jesus, Bernie—he’s looking for his birth parents!”
“I think you’re wrong,” she said. “I think it’s simple. He’s in love with Agnes. He met her after her accident, and he’s fallen in love with her.”
“How do you explain this picture of the cat?” Tom asked, pricking Bernie with one of the doubts she kept trying to chase away. How would Brendan have known about the tiny white kitten, saved from the wilds by the Sullivans, unless he’d been hanging around for a while, doing research into the families of Star of the Sea?
“The cat’s an archetype,” Bernie said. “She represents his longing.”
“That’s bull. It’s Sisela. He’s been here looking for his family.”
“He has a family,” Bernie said. “He was adopted, and they are his parents now.”
Tom shook his head. He narrowed his blue eyes, and Bernie felt his disappointment in her. She kept up her stern expression, honed to perfection after ten years as Superior here at the convent—she could issue disapproval to any novice with just the slightest glance. But Tom saw through it, and she knew that she had about twenty seconds before she fell apart.
“Archetypes, huh?” he asked.
“Yes.” She babbled on, anything to keep from talking about the red-haired boy with the calm blue eyes. “Artists have been known to use them as inspiration. Like John, the way he’s building a labyrinth. And the installation at Ballincastle, echoes of the ruins. Another of his sandcastles, like his most famous shot, the one at Devil’s Hole—”
“Sandcastles?”
“Yes,” Bernie said. “Symbolic of how fleeting life is, how things fall away. The need to appreciate beauty—love, connection—while it is there, but then to let it go. Something you should consider right now.”
“Bernie,” Tom said. “Are you serious? Ever notice the irony in John calling them sandcastles? He builds them of stone, and tree trunks, and fallen branches. Big stuff, Bernie. Anything but sand. Has that ever occurred to you?”
Bernie didn’t reply, didn’t let on that she had often thought the same thing.
“Things that last, Bernie.”
“Stop, Tom,” Bernie said.
“The joke is, John can’t stand to build anything of sand,” Tom said. “Because he wants to hold on. Anything he’s ever tried to let go of has his claw marks all over it. He does it eventually, but only if he has to. Even that goddamn rock he smashed. He couldn’t just let it go; he had to haul the pieces out of the sea, swirl them around the beach in that goddamn maze.”
“We’ve said enough.”
“Brendan is using our families for his inspiration. That’s because he knows…”
Bernie shook her head. She couldn’t stand to listen. She grabbed Tom’s left hand, raised it so he could look straight at his crest ring, the one that had belonged to Francis X. Kelly, the one with the Kelly family insignia on it.
“That’s a sea monster,” she said. “That’s your family crest. Does it bear any—any resemblance to this picture on this car?”
She watched him gaze from his ring to the left rear fender. The two images had so little in common. But as Bernie stared herself, the sea monster might very well have just disappeared, swum into the deepest valleys of the sea beneath. Because all she could see—and she knew that all Tom was looking at—was the smiling image of the little boy on the creature’s back.
The red-haired, blue-eyed little boy, looking just the way a child, if there was such a child, of Thomas Kelly and Bernadette Sullivan might look.
“You’re thinking the same thing I am, Sister Bernadette,” Tom said. “I know you are.”
“You don’t know at all,” Bernie said. “Now, excuse me. I have to get inside.”
“Got praying to do?”
“I have a convent to run.”
“You know? We’re just like Casablanca. Ingrid Bergman and Humphrey Bogart had nothing on us….”
“I’m not in the mood, Tom,” she said.
“Well, neither am I,” he said. “But don’t worry. We’ll always have Dublin.”
Her heart scathed by the thought of what Dublin had meant to them, she walked quickly away.
Twenty-five
The Black Hall police station was located in a small brick building on Shore Road, just before the turnoff for Hubbard’s Point. It had a well-tended front lawn, and there was a Black Hall town flag, depicting marsh grass, a lighthouse, and a blue heron, flying from the flagpole on the peaked roof. John and Brendan were led into a small room and told to wait.
They weren’t restrained; they weren’t separated, or told not to speak to each other. The officers were polite and respectful, if not exactly friendly. Officer Kossoy handed Brendan an icepack for his nose.
Moments after John and Brendan first sat down, an alarm rang, and all but two officers on duty scrambled—there was a brawl down at Deacon’s Reef, the seaside bar where bikers gathered on hot summer days.
John glanced over at Brendan to see how the boy was holding up. He sat still, erect, as if he were on high alert. John had seen young men his age imprisoned at Portlaoise for violent crimes, some politically motivated, kids who were hardened by oppression and hopelessness, and by their time in jail.
Brendan was the opposite; to John, he looked like just about the least hardened person he’d seen in a long time. Even his own wife and children seemed so wounded by life, by what he had put them through. Brendan, in comparison, looked to be at ease and at peace; even holding the ice to his bloody nose, he had bright eyes and a mouth ready to smile.
“Everything’s going to be okay,” John said to him.
“I know,” Brendan said.
Even that reply shook John: what kid in police custody knew, without seeming to doubt, that everything would be okay?
“They’re going to ask you if you carved up the grotto,” John said.
“I figured that.”
John paused, waiting to hear what the kid would say next. But when Brendan just lowered the ice, checked to see if the bleeding had stopped—yes, it had—he remained silent. John refrained from asking again whether Brendan had done it or not. The question hung in the air, left over from before. So John went on.
“And they’re going to ask you what you meant about Regis.” Just saying the words made John’s pulse start to race. Brendan might as well have seen his heart beating right under his skin, because he turned his head and looked into John’s eyes.
“You want to know, too,” Brendan said. “Right?”
“Of course I do,” John said. “I want to know anything that might help her. Did she talk to you?”
Brendan nodded. For the first time since being brought into the station, he looked nervous. He seemed paler, and he licked his lips as if he was thirsty. A bubbler sat in the corner of the room; John glanced around. It didn’t come naturally, to move freely in a police station, but for Brendan’s sake he steeled himself, walked over, and filled a paper cup.
“Did she talk to you?” John asked again, handing him th
e water.
Brendan nodded, downing the water in one gulp. “Last night,” he said. “After we left the beach movies at Hubbard’s Point, and we all went back to the Academy, Regis was…well, pretty unsettled. Upset, because she thought Mrs. Sullivan was mad at you.”
“She was just tired of it all,” John said. “Rightly so.”
“Regis didn’t think it was fair. She did what she did on her own.”
“Our family has a long history,” John said, “of being divided into two categories: the cautious and the daredevils. Regis seems to have followed me into the daredevil group.”
Brendan smiled. “You can’t always choose who you take after.”
“Well,” John said. “You might be right about that.” He looked at Brendan, saw sorrow behind his smile, remembered Cece saying that his brother had died, and that he was adopted. He wanted to ask Brendan about his family, but first he had to find out about Regis.
“What else did she say?”
“It was after Cece and Mrs. Sullivan went to bed, and Agnes was getting tired. I said good night, and started out to my car. Regis came after me. First, she asked me for a ride back to Hubbard’s Point…. I asked her if she was going to see Peter, and she said no—she wanted to find you.”
“She was worried about me,” John said.
Brendan nodded. “I told her you had probably walked back along the beaches by then.”
“You were right,” John said, wondering how he knew.
“Well, then she told me she wanted me to look after Agnes again—both of them actually, Cece too, not just Agnes. She sounded funny, as if she had something planned. I asked her what was going on….”
“What did she say?”
Brendan took a deep breath. “She said she’d been having really bad dreams. Ever since you came home. She’s been dreaming that the wrong person went to jail; that it should have been her instead of you.”
John’s stomach was in a knot. He felt sweat running down his back, between his shoulder blades. “Dreams are just dreams,” he said. “They’re not reality.”