The Innocent Sleep

by Karen Perry

  “Whatever you say.”

  He could have asked me for anything right then and I would gladly have given it. Anything to get Dillon back. Nothing was too high a price.

  We sat in silence then. In the corner of the room, a TV was on, tuned to a news report. A man was driving a cherry picker into the gates of the Irish parliament as a protest against the government. The high-reaching crane had all sorts of slogans on it. I couldn’t make them all out. But one of them read, ANGLO TOXIC BANK, and another had something to say about Bertie Ahern’s pension plan. One more I caught out of the corner of my eye: ALL POLITICIANS SHOULD BE SACKED.

  “Apparently,” Spencer said to me, nodding his head at the cherry picker, “he was a property developer.”

  We parted company then. I stood on the slushy sidewalk, watching Spencer’s hulking form as he ambled down Pearse Street, his overcoat pulled tight against the cutting wind coming in off the quays. I had done what I had intended to. Tapped Spencer for his contacts in the Guards. Set in motion my plan to track the license plate of that car. I should have been filled with a sense of accomplishment, but instead I just felt deflated. Some remnants of nervous energy still whisked around inside me. I knew I should go home, try to patch things up with Robin. I wasn’t exactly sure how I would explain it—my willful refusal to take her calls or reply to her messages. How could I justify that? This strange urge to focus all of my being on this one slippery goal, finding my son—this urge demanded that I turn my back on my other responsibilities, so afraid was I that I would become distracted and lose my nerve. So I didn’t call her. I didn’t return home. Instead, I went to Mary Street to see Javier.

  Javier is a fortune-teller. He runs his operation out of a basement beneath a hair salon. He’s well known. He reads tarot cards and palms and does charts and all that kind of thing. He’s nothing like a crystal-ball reader in a tent. He is one of the few people to have given me hope over the years. I rang, and his assistant said he could fit me in for a half-hour reading.

  The steps down to his place always give me goose bumps. A woman sat in his waiting room, ahead of me. She had traveled from County Clare, she told me. “He’s the best.” She looked distraught, and I wondered what she was hoping to learn in this basement, what supernatural knowledge was about to be imparted to her and whether it would change her life.

  I had promised Robin I wouldn’t waste money on Javier again, after our last wedding anniversary. She was sensible like that. But that was before I had seen Dillon.

  Javier welcomed me into the back room. It was dimly lit, with a table and two chairs, the table draped with a red velvet cloth. I could smell the odor of a rich, dark tobacco. Javier had a calming presence. His hair was graying, and he spoke with a heavy Spanish accent. He asked me what sort of reading I would like. Years ago, I had become fearful of the tarot cards. As well as a sizable occult section in the bookstore, Cozimo had kept a deck of tarot cards in our apartment above it; he sometimes dabbled. But whenever I went near them, they scared me. I’m not sure why. I remember him playing with them on our kitchen table one morning. “Don’t worry,” he said, “I am not going to tell you your future. I don’t need the cards to do that.”

  When was it he said that to me? Our first year? Robin was pregnant, and our futures lay ahead of us. “These beautiful cards were given to me by a wise old man in the old quarter,” Cozimo said. “We were playing poker and he ran out of money, so he gave me these. Said they’re hundreds of years old. From up where the Taro river runs in northern Italy. ‘Pathways’ is what he said the word ‘tarot’ meant in Arabic. Pathways.”

  But Cozimo did try some form of divination with them in the months to come, and he taught me to use them, too, though I always resisted. That morning, he held my hands in his and said, “They are not a toy; it is not a game.”

  I looked at him, a little surprised. His earnestness seemed sincere. “I would gift you this pack, but I’d be afraid what you would see.”

  I asked him to explain.

  “They are a special and peculiarly honest and insightful deck.”

  I laughed and reached for the cards.

  “They will tell you things you do not want to know. They have told me things I did not want to know.”

  My hand retreated. “Like what?” I whispered.

  “Can you ever imagine me back in London?”

  We both laughed then, but in Cozimo’s laughter there was a knowingness. I could see it in his eyes, too. He kept on smiling and picked up the cards and slipped them quickly into his breast pocket, as if to say, Safer here.

  Somehow, in Javier’s hands the tarot looked more trustworthy, less severe, and so I succumbed to something inside me, some need, some indefinable pull, and asked for a card reading, and without any small talk, Javier took the cards into his hands and shuffled them languorously. Now, there are several readings you can get with a tarot pack: a twelve-card spread, a horseshoe spread, a full spread, and so on. But this time, Javier said, “It will be a one-card reading.”

  He held the deck out to me. I hesitated, then chose. I had picked the Sun card, one of the Major Arcana. On it was an image of an infant riding a white horse under the sun, with sunflowers in the background. In the child’s hand was a red flag. The sun looked down with a human face.

  I caught my breath and nearly told Javier everything—about Dillon, about the child mummy, about Tangier. It seemed as if images of children were all around me, as if they were trying to tell me something, to help me. But I held my tongue, and Javier started his forecast.

  “The Sun card,” he said, “is considered by many to be the best card in the tarot. It is associated with attained knowledge. The conscious mind prevails over the fears and illusions of the unconscious. Innocence is renewed through discovery, bringing hope for the future.”

  Javier didn’t so much tell you your future; he interpreted the cards for you. He had insight, a sense of things. Ultimately, he left it up to you to make out of the reading what you would. But he gave you clues and indicators to suggest ways of interpreting decisions that had to be made. Some things were more specific. He told me there was a strong pull from a foreign land. He said I was still working something out. That it remained unresolved. That it would come to a head soon. But that I must have an open heart. He said the sun was a positive symbol. I don’t recall what else he said. He didn’t say, You’re going to find your son. But he did say, “There is a child, and it is no longer yours.” That hurt. I think he saw that. I was sweating, trying to stop my hands from shaking. Jesus, I don’t know what was happening to me right then.

  Before I left, Javier gave me a green amulet. “For luck,” he said. I nearly hugged him, I was so far gone. He saw me blinking at a copy of a book on his table. It was The Book of the Dead. “Take it,” he said, and I did, thanking him. I walked through Dublin in a daze, my fingers worrying the stone. All these people out? How did they get here? How did they make it through the snow? I stopped to listen to a man sing “On Raglan Road.” When the fellow sang, “I loved too much and by such, by such is happiness thrown away,” I felt a lump in my throat. Fuck, I felt like I was falling to pieces. Had anybody touched me right then, I would have disintegrated.

  I don’t know why, but I didn’t think I could go home right away. Even though I knew Robin wanted me to. In a quiet basement bar off Grafton Street I ordered a drink, took the postcard of the child mummy out of my pocket, and looked for information about it online on my phone. What I came across was something about how green magic protected a child mummy: the discovery of a rare mummified child with a bright green amulet stone, once thought to hold magical powers, had led archaeologists to believe that the ancient Egyptians thought that the color green would protect children from unwanted influence and ensure their health in the afterlife.

  Was that, I wondered, why Javier gave me the amulet? Maybe it was a gesture; it was to protect me, to protect Dillon because he was still alive. That was how I saw it. That was how it made sens
e to me. You know, I’d never believed Dillon had died in the earthquake, though Robin had tried for months, for years to persuade me that he had. Eventually I had to pretend that I accepted that he had in fact died, but not before I had filed missing persons reports both in Tangier and in Ireland. I made calls, wrote letters and e-mails, contacted my local politicians, joined survivors’ and victims’ support groups online, and listened to and read whatever news I could in the months that followed the earthquake, seeking survivors’ stories and information about bodies found, alive or dead.

  I contacted Interpol, the Moroccan police force, the Guards. The best I got, the only thing I got, was “Your son died tragically in an earthquake. The building was destroyed. It was swallowed by the earth. It was an act of God.”

  Robin left Tangier three weeks after the earthquake. I don’t think I ever forgave her for that. I stayed for another few weeks. “He could have survived,” I said.

  Robin shook her head. “Harry, don’t.”

  “I’m not leaving him,” I said.

  But Robin was having none of it. She said, “It’s the grief, Harry. The grief is unbalancing you.” The grief had ravaged me, I’ll admit that. But her protestations were not enough to assuage my doubts. How could she know he had not, by some strange circumstance, survived the earthquake?

  “Hundreds died,” she said, as if statistics were somehow the answer.

  Then she told me she wanted to have a service for Dillon when I got back to Ireland.

  “What kind of service?” I asked.

  “A service,” she said.

  “A funeral?”

  She said nothing.

  “Because we can’t have a funeral if he is not dead.”

  “Harry.”

  “Or if we do not know…”

  I was ordering another drink when my phone lit up. It was a message from Diane. She must have rung right through to my voice mail. “I know you were in London. Word travels. Harry, call me. I miss you.” I ignored the message and turned my phone off. I watched the snow start to fall again. The Met Office’s forecasting skills were weak. It fell heavier that day than they had predicted. It fell and fell, heavy, luxurious, and effacing snow. Their equipment was unsound or their interpretations too narrow. I knew Javier’s readings of what was to come had a vagueness about them. I’m not a fool. But they suggested rather than dictated; they imagined rather than declaimed. And that postman from Donegal had as much accuracy, if not more, in his predictions of the snow. I remember him saying that when the sun shines onto the Blue Stack Mountains and down to the lowlands and it turns a reddish-brown color, that’s a sign of snow. He’d said something about the sheep and the cattle going mad too, shaking themselves, coming down from the mountains. That, too, was a sign.

  The signs were there. What mattered was how you interpreted them. Suddenly, involuntarily, a memory came back to me as I sat there watching the snow: We are in Tangier. I am lying in bed with Dillon. We have the television on. It is a newscast. “Is she speaking to us?” says Dillon about the newscaster. I tell him she is talking about a political party. “They can come to my party,” he says. He will be three next week. “That’s very good of you,” I say. He strokes my face. From one cheek to the other. Intimately, lovingly. He says, “Daddy, I love your beard.” He says, “Daddy, I love you.”

  I finished my drink and walked up the stairs from an alcoholic underworld and wondered about where the license plate would lead; what pathway would it take me on? Was the sun to shine? And the boy on the horse, was that Dillon?

  CHAPTER TEN

  ROBIN

  In the end, Harry was gone for four days. When he finally got home, he appeared in the doorway dark-eyed and bleary, several days’ worth of stubble shadowing his face. He looked like someone troubled, someone who was letting himself go, a shadow of the man he’d once been. And I thought back to how he had been in Tangier—so vibrant and alive, full of bright color, awake and instinctive, inquisitive and hungry. Not this tired, worn-out, beaten-down person with a hollow stare. Part of me strained toward him with a terrible pity for all he had become.

  After I told him what had happened—the bleeding, the hospital, the threatened miscarriage—he sat down heavily on the couch beside me and stared blankly ahead. He didn’t say a word. And then he lowered his head into his hands and started to cry. Silent tears. I didn’t see his face, only his body shuddering and his hands shaking.

  “Harry.”

  “I’m sorry, Robin.”

  “Baby, don’t say that. Come here. Show me your face.”

  I felt the pull of his resistance, but slowly he yielded to me, letting me take his hands in mine, looking down shyly, unable to meet my gaze.

  “I can’t believe you went through all that on your own.”

  He looked at me then, and I felt I had a chance in that one moment to make things right between us.

  “I have been so angry with you, Harry,” I began tentatively. “All that time you were away, I kept trying to call you. Last night I left messages, sent texts, and yet there was no response from you. I couldn’t believe you would be so callous—so cold. And after the way we left things, well … you can imagine what I was thinking. Things have not been good between us lately, not really. Ever since you moved your studio. Ever since I told you about the baby.”

  He shook his head and stared at the floor. I saw the movement of muscle along his jaw as he clenched his teeth, but still I went on.

  “I had the impression that you viewed your London trip as a welcome escape from me.”

  “That’s not true, Robin.”

  “Isn’t it? In these last days, I’ve felt that I’ve been losing you.”

  He didn’t say anything, or try to deny it.

  “You’ve felt it, too?” I asked, and he nodded slowly. I found my lip starting to tremble, the tears coming unbidden, but I swallowed them away.

  “We can’t lose each other, Harry. Not now. Not after everything we’ve been through.”

  “I don’t want to lose you, Robin. It’s just that…”

  He stopped, and I had the notion that he was on the verge of telling me something, confessing something to me, and I thought again of the drawings of Dillon and all the secret pain he kept hidden from me. I took his face in my hands and looked into his eyes.

  “This is a new start for us, Harry. A new beginning. This baby is real. It is happening. When I saw that ultrasound, that little heartbeat, it made me realize—all the other shit doesn’t matter. This is what matters. So I’m not going to ask you about London. I’m not going to demand an explanation as to why you didn’t return my calls or why you’ve been so distant lately. We need to put all of that behind us. Because this is our future.” I reached for his hand and placed it on my belly, still flat, and yet I thought of the child embedded deep within me, the little bean nestling into the soft layers of my body, silently growing in the darkness. “I know you weren’t happy about the pregnancy— no, please, let me finish. I know you weren’t. But if you had been there, Harry. If you had seen what I saw, I know you would feel differently. This child isn’t Dillon. No one will ever take his place. But we can still have this baby and love him or her as much as we loved Dillon.”

  “I know. I know.”

  “Listen to me now, Harry. No more lies. No more deceits. I don’t want us to keep things hidden from each other. We used to be so open with each other. We used to be able to tell each other anything. Do you remember?”

  “I remember. I just can’t seem to remember when that stopped.”

  He looked up at me then, his eyes so plaintive and forlorn, and I experienced a rush of guilt so strong, it almost made me tell him.

  The moment passed. We sat together. I felt his hand moving over my tummy. I heard the logs in the open fire cracking and spitting.

  “A new start, Harry.”

  “Yes,” he said. And then he fell silent.

  * * *

  It snowed again—heavier and softer than t
he earlier fall of snow. For the first time in many years, we would have a white Christmas. I watched it come down, heavy and thick, filling up the garden, easing a soft blanket over every surface, every shrub and bush, clinging to the crooks of branches and the tiles of the roof, frosting the windowpanes. We had the fires lit all the time. We tried to keep the house warm and our spirits light, and yet still the cold air crept in through crumbling window frames, whistling through the cavities in the brickwork. The tide of Christmas parties swept us along, and I felt an attendant tiredness, irritability I put down to pregnancy hormones and the pressures of work. The office had grown more stressful. A project we had successfully bid for had fallen through, and there was talk of coming pay cuts.

  On a cold Thursday evening, Harry and I put on our hiking boots and trudged down through the snow to Blackrock College, where they were selling Christmas trees for the Society of St. Vincent de Paul. We picked one out—a large, bushy thing—and half-carried, half-dragged it home. There was a silence between us that day that I couldn’t account for. I was tired and anxious. Our office Christmas party had taken place the previous night. Usually a lavish affair, this year it had consisted of a few drinks and some sandwiches in our local pub. I had felt like the only sober person there. At one point in the night, one of my colleagues, the worse for drink, had passed on a rumor he had heard that there would be layoffs in the New Year. When I’d pressed him on the issue, he had given a hollow laugh and said, “CAD monkeys like me and you, I suppose.” And then he saw the anxiety on my face and instantly changed the subject. I thought of mentioning it to Harry, and yet I didn’t want to worry him. He seemed caught up in his own thoughts that day, and I couldn’t quite muster the effort required to dispel the weight that was between us.

  Back home, I sliced oranges and studded the slices with cloves, then baked them in the oven. The dried-out wheels I strung with twine and hung from the tree. The whole house seemed to smell of Christmas—the pine needles, the spices, the sweet orange tang—and my spirits lifted a little. Harry went up to the attic and brought down the lights for the tree and the box of decorations, and then he sat on the floor and drank coffee laced with whiskey and watched me untangling the strings of lights.