Immaculate Heart (15 page)

“I don't believe it,” she said. “Tell me something. Something important. Something you'd never tell anyone else.”

The beach was at least a mile long, and we were the only people on it. The wind whistled in my ears. “I can't think of anything.”

She rolled her eyes and held out her palm. “Give me your hand.”

“Not this again.”

“No, not that again.” She held my hand as if it were an artifact, something to be handled very gently. Slowly, deliberately, she pushed back my sleeve, and her fingertip tickled like a feather across the inscription on the inside of my wrist:

MALLORY
∞

We looked at each other. “You must've noticed it the last time I was here,” I said.

Síle shook her head. “I think of her,” she said gently. “They brought us up here every summer, but when I walk this strand, I can only remember the day you and Mallory came with us.”

I gave her what I hoped she'd take for a grateful look. “Do you have any tattoos?” I asked.

“I do,” she laughed. “I've loads of them.”

I couldn't help glancing below her neck. She was wearing a rather low-cut T-shirt under her open jacket, but the skin was unmarked. “Where? I don't see any.”

She arched an eyebrow. “I don't believe in makin' 'em too easy to spot.” She went on walking, and a minute later, she pointed to the rolling green line along the northern horizon. “That's Donegal.” She indicated the high, flat hill directly ahead of us, a few miles distant. “And that's Benbulben, as you may recall.”

A mocking voice murmured in my ear:
They say you've been all the way up Benbulben to see the fairy queen!
Today it seemed like so much more than a silly insult. She had only to trade her jeans for a moss-green gown to take her rightful place in the folklore.

“It's a magical spot,” Síle was saying. “Yeats liked to write about it.” Then she aimed her finger at a rocky outcropping maybe a mile beyond the end of the beach. “And you see that castle over there? A German family bought that place not too long ago. How'd you like to live in a castle?”

“Ask me when I'm warmer.”

Síle laughed, and laughed again as the wind jostled us together.

“How well do you remember that day?” she asked.

I thought of Tess, how the color of her hair changed whenever the clouds obscured the sun. The day came back to me as if it were still happening all around us: Síle and my sister racing in their bathing suits to the far reaches of the shoreline, snatches of laughter carried back on the wind. The adults in their beach chairs, John and Gran and Paudie and the Gallaghers, passing around a thermos of tea, and then a flask. Tess and Orla in denim cutoffs, whispering between themselves. Tess looking over her shoulder, smiling, drawing me in.

And it hit me then: the woman I'd met here, when I'd wandered away from the others to dig for sand crabs. She must have been a patient at Ardmeen House.

“They told us it was a car accident,” Síle was saying. “But you weren't in the car?”

I shook my head. “She was coming home from a basketball tournament.” An elderly driver had blown through a red light and rammed the backseat passenger side. Everyone else in her friend's mom's station wagon survived.

“We were fourteen,” Síle said softly.

I felt as if something cold and hard had lodged itself in my throat. I couldn't tell her that the infinity symbol had been the tattoo artist's idea, not mine, or of how my mother clung to me and cried when she first saw the name etched on my wrist. Síle saw a lot of things, but she'd never know how false I'd been, getting that tattoo when I didn't feel everything I should have felt.

“She was different with you,” I said.

“How was she different?”

“She was happy.”

“She wasn't always?”

I hunched my shoulders as if bad posture could get me any warmer. “I don't remember her that way.”

“Then it's a good thing
I
do.” Síle paused. “When you think of her now,” she said slowly, “is she always fourteen?”

I shook my head and kicked at the sand. “She can be other ages. Grown-up. Sometimes I picture her that way.” Mallory, twenty-three, weeping on my shoulder after yet another heartbreak; Mallory, twenty-seven, a diamond glittering on her ring finger as she lifted a martini glass to her lips; Mallory, thirty-one, laughing at the horrible things we did to one another when we were small; Mallory, thirty-three, nestling a baby in the crook of a freckled elbow. Picturing her in this impossible future allowed me to forget, however temporarily, that there was precious little similarity between the brother I could have been to her, and the brother I actually was. I lay awake at night trying not to think of how good it had felt to pinch her till she bruised.

“I can see her, grown,” Síle said, looking over her shoulder at our footprints in the sand. “She has that wild curly hair—how I wanted her hair!—and she's let it grow long, sort of bohemian-like. She wears fuzzy jumpers and knee-high boots and that American cologne that smells like real smells—like woodsmoke or honeysuckle.”

That wasn't how I saw my impossible sister at all, but I wasn't about to say so.

“She lives someplace where it rains,” Síle went on. “Like Seattle. Only it isn't the real Seattle—it's a city for everyone who never got the chance to grow up.” I didn't say anything, and she asked, “Do you believe in a world beyond this one?”

“I don't know if I do,” I said. “I know
you
do.”

“I do,” she replied, “but I don't often speak of it. If you want them to tell you you're getting better, you have to admit that everything you believe in is probably wrong. Ordinary people don't have to do that,” she said, though not bitterly. “They've the luxury of believing whatever they like.”

“But people here believe in an afterlife,” I said. “Almost everybody's Catholic.”

“Sometimes I think people are only trying to convince themselves. Go to Mass, and if you look round, you can tell their hearts aren't in it. They cling to belief, but they're not believers,” she said. “Not really.”

I thought of the people at morning Mass, all of them droning through their prayers. Comfort, not belief. “You sound like you've lost your religion,” I said.

She laughed. “That isn't my religion. It never was. Even when I was small, I knew I had to find my own way to God.”

“And have you found it?”

“Sometimes I know I have,” she said softly. “And then it goes away again. But at least I know it'll come back, and maybe someday I'll get to keep it.”

I turned and found Martin standing maybe fifty yards behind us, his hands thrust in his jacket pockets, staring out at the sea. Maybe he felt my eyes on him, because he turned to look at me. He didn't return my smile, and I thought maybe I hadn't imagined that glance between them after all.

“Tell me what she looked like,” I said.

“You want to know what she was like—even if she wasn't real?”

“Tell me,” I said.

“She was lovely,” Síle said softly. “The loveliest woman I'd ever seen.” It gave me an eerie feeling, hearing her say the words I would have used for her. “I wanted to go to Her and hide my face in Her robes, to drink Her in,” she was saying, “only I couldn't. I was on my knees, rooted to the spot.”

“I read in one of the newspaper articles that you did eventually feel her touch you,” I said. “You said it felt like when your mother used to come in to kiss you good night.”

Síle smiled into the distance. “I remember that like it happened only last night. She was so lovely. Lovelier than any of the Harry Clarke windows. Lovelier than the Díseart Madonna, or the Inishmaan Madonna, though I do love the Inishmaan Madonna for the babbies peeking out from under her cloak. He came closest with the Terenure Madonna, but it's still the difference between a real woman and a model in a magazine.” She smiled again. “In a manner of speaking.”

I had no idea what she was talking about, but I was eating it up. “I don't know Harry Clarke,” I said.

Síle's eyes lit up. “Ah, he was brilliant. Harry Clarke painted with light.”

“That's very poetic, but who was he?” I asked.

“He was Ireland's greatest stained-glass artist. One of those who died young, leaving you wonderin' forever what else he might have done, had he lived.”

“I'll have to look him up,” I said.

“Silly,” she retorted. “You can see his windows all over the place. Will you spend any time in Dublin whilst you're here?”

“Probably not,” I said. “I'm flying out of Dublin, but I only have until the sixteenth.”

“That's plenty of time.”

I smiled slyly. “Maybe I prefer Sligo.”

She punched me playfully on the arm. “You should go to Dublin and see the
Eve of Saint Agnes
.”

“I'll go when you can come with me.”

“Then I'll have to paint it for you with words,” she said. “Do you want me to tell you about the eve of Saint Agnes?”

I felt that faintly familiar thrill, the anticipation of a bedtime story I'd never heard before.

“On the eve of Saint Agnes—that's the twentieth of January,” she began, “all the starry-eyed maidens of the Middle Ages would perform certain bedtime rituals so they might see their future husbands. Not just in their dreams,” she went on in a hush. “In their bedchambers. In the flesh.”

I cocked an eyebrow. “Certain bedtime rituals?”

Síle laughed. “She goes to bed without dinner.”

“Saints and witchcraft,” I said. I wanted to taste the salt on her lips.

“Not witchcraft,” she said softly. “Not the way you think of it, anyway.”

“Conjuring up a person who isn't really there—that isn't witchcraft?” Too late, I caught myself. I looked at her, afraid of her reaction, but she just gave me half a smile.

“Who said he isn't really there?” Her hair was whipping in the wind, and I watched her smile broaden as I reached to brush a lock out of her eyes. “The legend says he'll come to her,” she said. “Not a vision. Not an apparition. Just that he comes.” She arched an eyebrow. “Will I go on?”

“Please do.”

She turned and kept walking as she spoke. “We begin our tale in the house of Madeline, whose family has mounted a lavish banquet. Madeline cannot partake of it, however. She will go to bed early, for it's the eve of Saint Agnes. The bedesman's in the chapel praying for his master, and you can see his breath in the frosty gloom—”

“What's a bedesman?”

“A poor old man under the lord's protection, whose only task is to pray for his benefactor. Anyway. You see the candles flickering on his solemn face as he counts the beads on his rosary with his pale, cold fingers”—she mimed this as she spoke—“his lantern restin' on the floor at his knee.

“The bedesman prays for the sinners at the banquet, at the dance; he prays so that his master may go on feasting and continue with his merriment—so that someday, when his flesh turns to dust, the rich man will pass his penance in Purgatory instead of Hell.”

“Is that how it works?”

“They liked to think so,” she said. “I'll go on, will I?” I nodded, and she smiled as she drew her next breath. “The lord wears a suit of brilliant orange, intricately beaded, and his face is fine and cruel. He dances with ladies richly dressed in pink and crimson, with glittering baubles at their throats, as the minstrels play their instruments in the gallery above. As he leaves the chapel, the bedesman hears the sounds of the revelry, and it weighs like a stone on his heart.” Síle lifted her arms and did a dainty two-step along the wet sand, and I thought of her unmade bed.

“The noble Porphyro begins a long, cold journey by the light of the waning moon, and an elfin lantern glinting off the sword at his side.” She leaned forward, taking her next few steps as if she were bracing herself against even rougher weather, and I wondered why she'd never taken to the stage. “The wind blows the plume in his hat and the cloak on his back, but the chill can hardly touch him, so alight is he with ardor for his beloved. So in love, in fact, that it does not matter that he is the only son of her father's sworn enemy.”

“Very
Romeo and Juliet,
” I said.

“Now you know where the Bard got it. Meanwhile, fair Madeline prepares herself for bed with the help of her elderly servant, Angela, who looks more like a queen in a blue-and-silver gown with a brilliant red petticoat. Porphyro arrives at the castle gate, finds Angela, and begs her to lead him to Madeline's chamber, and the old woman says, ‘Come away from the revelry, lad, lest these stones become thy bier.'” Síle held up a finger, storyteller fashion. “Remember, Madeline's father will kill Porphyro if he sees him.
He's
the one in the dandy orange suit, with the cruel glint in his eye. Angela leads the noble youth up the stairs to Madeline's room, and conceals him there just as Madeline is falling softly to sleep, the light of the moon shining down through stained-glass windows upon her pale breast.”

I pictured Síle asleep in a room full of stained glass—saw myself climbing a secret staircase in the dark, coming inside, finding her naked body awash in tinted moonlight.

“Porphyro comes out of the darkness and, as three fairies above their heads dance inside the fair maiden's dreams, he lays out a feast for her, takes out his lute, and begins to play. She awakes to him, does fair Madeline, but believes she's still dreaming. He's come to make her his bride, says Porphyro, but they must flee the house of her father this night.” Síle stole a glance and found me looking back. “
Far o'er the southern moors I have a home for thee,
” she said softly.