Stony River (50 page)

They took their ritual places at the dining table and bowed their heads. “We thank you for our daily bread and for keeping our precious
daughter safe today,” Daddy said. The same grace every night, guaranteed to make Linda tear up.

Mom said, “A-men!”

Daddy smiled at Linda. “Split any atoms today, Einstein?”

She made cross-eyes at him. “No, I was too busy recalculating the fulcrum for the George Washington Bridge.”

She'd enrolled in remedial algebra and physics in September. Her goal was to attend Angela Brohm's alma mater in Ohio. The sole female social worker assigned to the Home for Delinquent Boys, Angela handled the littlest ones. She called them her “clients.” Linda liked how respectful that was, the way it made you think the boys had value and a choice as to how they behaved. Angela usually showed up at the Home at some point during Linda's volunteer shift. She took time to answer Linda's questions about social work and life in general.

Linda took one piece of chicken and filled the rest of her plate with salad.

“As I walked home tonight,” Daddy said, “it occurred to me that there are similarities between teaching and social work, especially if you want a career in helping children.”

Here it comes, Linda thought: the next volley in his assault against her plans.

“It's not the same,” she said.

“How so?”

“It just isn't.” A teacher's job was to cram a kid's brain with information. A social worker tried to make sense of what was inside that brain already, maybe stop the kid from turning into a Georgie Porgie. Or a Tereza.

“I'm not keen on your going off to Ohio,” Daddy said. “It would be better if you weren't more than a few hours' drive in case of emergency.”

“I don't want you living away period,” Mom said. “From what I've heard, most campuses aren't safe for women, especially after dark.”

Linda suspected they didn't want to be left alone with each other.

“You could live at home if you went to Douglass,” Daddy said. “I could get you there in a half-hour or so. Pick you up after work.”

When her father drove Linda to work or to the Home, he waited until she entered the building before driving away. He'd be outside when her shift was over, often leaning against the car with his arms crossed, looking left and right like a bodyguard. She'd take her time leaving, refusing to be intimidated by his martyr-like presence.

“Can I get a BSW there?”

“Translation, please.”

“Bachelor of Social Work.”

“I'd like you to rethink this whole idea,” Daddy said. “You might get assigned to Harlem and be murdered. Or end up homeless after giving all your money away. Let's face it: you're gullible, a soft touch.” He set his knife and fork down noisily on his plate and looked at her with a hard expression. “I still can't understand why you were so concerned about hurting a stranger's feelings that you got into a car with him.”

Mom let out a noisy breath. The Wises had gotten better at discussing some matters, but the assault was still off limits, their individual fortresses of guilt over it impenetrable.

Eldon Jukes's death by his own hand had restored Linda's faith in divine justice. But she'd struggled to forgive him for attacking her and Tereza for lying on the witness stand. Not to mention the jury for not believing her. She struggled to understand why it had happened to her. Punishment for her heedless acts, the times she'd lied to her parents and defied their wishes?

No percentage in playing the what-if game, Angela claimed; some things happened for no reason at all. But after a sermon in which Reverend Judge said all was part of God's plan, it had come to her: Eldon, Tereza, the jury and even Miranda Haggerty had been instruments of God, sent to heal Linda's blindness toward her obesity
and her mother's suffering. Angela said that was an interesting theory to which she wasn't inclined to subscribe. But Linda felt sure God had made her suffer so that the scales would fall from her eyes as they had from Saul's.

“I've explained all I'm going to about that day.”

Daddy reached over and squeezed her hand. “I know, I forgot.

I'm sorry.”

“And
Angela
wasn't assigned to Harlem. She isn't homeless, either.”

“She's no doubt a fortunate exception.” He took a swallow of coffee and put his cup down with a clatter. “You could do worse than working your way up at Quill and Page. With your language skills, you could be a full proofreader before you know it, even an editor someday.”

“Saving the world from misplaced commas,” Linda said.

“Yes, well we can't all be Flash Gordon or Wonder Woman. Saving Bartz Chemicals from accounting errors has fed this family pretty well, I'd say.” He tore off a piece of bread and forcefully rubbed it around the sauce on his plate.

Linda sighed, ready to surrender. She didn't want the rest of the evening to be unpleasant. She had nowhere else to go. Back when she was a kid pretending to have been shipwrecked, Tereza had been so much braver and smarter; she knew there wouldn't be enough on The Island to sustain her. If Tereza were an East German, she'd be tunneling or swimming to freedom. Linda would be one of the others, yearning for deliverance but loath to leave a warm bed.

The rest of the meal passed with little conversation.

“Shall we all do the dishes together?” Mom asked as she did every night.

She became anxious if Linda spent too much time in her room. So, after the dishes, Linda did homework or played solitaire at the kitchen table while her parents watched TV in the living room, taking
turns coming into the kitchen on the pretense of needing drinks of water. Before bed, she'd review Mom's daily pain diary with her. It had been crazy Miranda Haggerty's suggestion that Linda's mother record the location, intensity and duration of pains she experienced each day, what she was doing at the time, what she'd eaten, how she'd slept the night before. She gave Mom meditation exercises to “rise above the pain” and little packets of tea leaves to brew if it was especially bad. Supposedly Miranda was studying nights to become a legitimate pharmacist, but she put more store in plant medicine than Linda thought appropriate. Linda was frustrated that a brainstorm hadn't arisen yet out of the data her mother recorded. Mom said it was enough not to feel so alone with her misery. Although Miranda hadn't yet charged for her “consultations,” Linda wondered if she wasn't taking Mom for a ride.

October was Halloween month. When Linda was twelve, the first full moon on a Halloween in thirty years had appeared, confirming her deep sense that she'd been born in a special time for a unique purpose. She hoped that was still true. Angela said it was never too late to be what you wanted, to pretend you'd seen into the future and come back to live differently. The application to Ohio State waited in Linda's room, needing only a heaping plate of courage.

THIRTY - ONE

OCTOBER 10, 1962
. Miranda stands in a cemetery in Milford, Massachusetts, in the section reserved for suicides. Above her stretches a bellflower-blue sky. Her mother's grave is in sight of a granite tower at the end of the pond: a replica of the stone towers some say Irish monks built as protection from the Vikings and a memorial to the thousands of Irish immigrants buried here. She peers up at its narrow windows and pictures magnificent hair, as long as a summer vine, cascading down through a window at the top. Rapunzel's hair was said to be the color of sunlight, but Miranda always imagined it her own reddish gold.

She places the cushion she's brought on the grass, kneels and studies the engraved words on the polished red-granite marker:
EILEEN AGNES REAGAN HAGGERTY, OCTOBER 10, 1918 – JANUARY 7,
1943, AS FLEETING AND DARING AS A THUNDERCLAP
. Eileen would have been forty-four today, eleven years older than Doris.

Miranda has taken a train, a bus and a taxi to this spot, imagining this moment ever since Enzo located Eileen's gravesite, wondering whether she'd be overcome with grief or, worse, feel nothing.
She suffers still from the loss of you,
James wrote in the letter on Miranda's fourth birthday.
I say this not to add to your grief but so you'll know how much you're missed.

She's decided to mark this day with more than her pilgrimage.
She's come looking for her home in the past. “Your entire family may be dead,” Sister Celine once said, “but they're still your family.” Miranda feels the loving weight of those words and, more keenly, the lack of history to pass on to Cian. James claimed that Miranda's grandmother and great-grandmother had spiritual gifts of healing Mother Alfreda would call “charism.” Were they channels of the power that shines light on darkness, brings knowledge to ignorance? Does such power even exist? Miranda is grateful for whatever abilities allow her to intuit the fear and pain at the core of another's illness, but she wants something more transporting. She wants to kneel once more in ecstasy and believe she's been touched by the same magic as her ancestors.

In the
grimoire,
James wrote:
If mystical abilities are to endure, they must be seen to on a regular basis like plants and children. Otherwise they die
.

She's brought a leather satchel containing a white candle in a holder; a metal dish; a small plastic bag with a mixture of aloe, pepper, musk, verbena and saffron; matches; the pewter chalice; the necklace Ladonna Jukes returned; the photograph of the woman in white; a small thermos of red wine; one large envelope with the ashes of James's letters and another with those of her own journal—words as dead as butterflies pinned to velvet in a museum box.

She begins with the spell James used more than once, attempting to contact Eileen's spirit. As far as Miranda knows, it never worked— perhaps because, as James wrote in the
grimoire,
it's meant to be cast in a cemetery on an anniversary of the departed's birthday. Craning to make sure the taxi is still at the gates—too far away for the driver to see her clearly—Miranda places the necklace under the collar of her camel-hair coat. She removes her brown wool gloves and, with her finger, draws an invisible circle around her. She sets the photograph against the headstone. Into the metal dish she pours the contents of the small plastic bag. Striking a match, she sets them alight and says, “Gatekeeper of the Other Life, harken to my plea. When the
shrouded sky with crows is rife, bring my mother and father to me. With reason and will summon them both, trailing power and mystery from the Isle of Ghosts.” She's had to adapt the spell to accommodate more than one person.

The instructions in the
grimoire
include reciting the incantation three times, then waiting quietly for sign of a presence. She keeps her eyes open in case the sign is visual. Pulls her coat tightly around her. It is nearly noon, yet the sun above emits no more heat than a light bulb. The dark half of the year begins soon, when the dead are supposed to find it easier to walk among the living. Should James or Eileen caress her hair, how will she know it isn't a breeze? She sniffs the air for tangerine but smells only sweet, damp earth beneath grass going dormant.

The next spell, more of a ceremony, is her creation. She sets the candleholder on the ground, lights it and says, “With this candle I honor the flame of my mother's life.” She pours the wine into the chalice, takes a sip and says, “With this cup, I honor my mother's blood”—the blood that James in a vision once exhorted her to drink. She stands, opens one envelope and sprinkles the ashes of James's letters atop Eileen's grave while saying, “Dear god of Mother Alfreda, angel of Doris, gods and goddesses of James and all beings of the Other Life, invisible and not, with these ashes unite my mother and father in holy death with an aye, there was a lass and an aye, there was a lad, as it was in the beginning, is now and ever shall be, world without end, amen.”

There, she thinks, that ought to do it.