Immaculate Heart (16 page)

I swallowed. “That's what he says to her?”

“That's what he says.”

An ordinary girl looks at you, and you look
good—
you can see it in her face—but when Síle looked at me, even if she seemed to be teasing or flirting, I couldn't see what she was thinking underneath. I couldn't tell who I was.

She'd stopped, as if she were waiting for me to finish thinking my thought before resuming the story. “For the last time, Madeline rises from the bed of her childhood and dresses herself by moonlight. Next we see the lovers tiptoeing down the turret stairs, dressed in blue robes studded with stars, the anxiety and the ecstasy plain to see upon their comely faces. Down in the hall, praise God, the watchman and his dog have fallen asleep.
The key turns, and the door upon its hinges groans,
and away they flee into the winter storm.”

“Happily ever after?” I asked.

She smiled as she turned to face me and walked backward for a few steps, moving as gracefully as if she had eyes in the back of her head. “You know, when my mam used to read us the fairy tales, that ending never made sense to me. Madeline and Porphyro could freeze to death, and would it still be a happy end?”

“You can't be too literal about these things, or else you ruin the whole story,” I pointed out.

“But I'm askin' ya. Is it a happy ending even if they die in the snow?”

I shrugged. “They're going to die eventually anyway.”

“Aye,” she said, with a sparkle in her eyes. “But they haven't consummated the marriage, have they?”

How long had it been since she'd been with a man? Probably not as long as I supposed. I felt Martin's eyes on my back. “You must've spent hours staring at that window,” I said.

“Maybe an hour,” she said with a shrug. “Some pictures stay with you.” She glanced over my shoulder, and when I followed her gaze, I found Martin closer than I'd expected. Síle nodded to him, and we turned to walk back. “We haven't much time. There's something I've got to give you.” She took my hand, lacing my fingers with hers, and with her other hand, she drew a small leather-bound notebook out of her pocket. “That's it,” she said, placing it in my open palm. “That's everything. I've left nothing out.”

“You told Father Dowd you were keeping a diary,” I said, and she nodded. Again I tried to read her face, to see if this meant as much as it seemed to me, but her eyes were too serene.

I shook my head. “I can't take it, Síle.”

“Why not?”

“It's too…”

She stood in the wet sand, the bitter wind whipping her dark hair over her eyes, but this time I couldn't reach out and touch her. “Say whatever it is you're going to,” she said.

“It's too much,” I finished lamely.

She looked up at me with no expression on her face. “It isn't,” she said. “I wrote it for you.”

I turned away from her, shaking my head. “That doesn't make sense,” I said.

“It does. You just don't see it yet. She said you would come back someday, and that you would ask me all about Her.”

When my skin broke into gooseflesh, it had nothing to do with the November weather: it was as if someone besides Martin were watching us. I crossed my arms tight across my chest, resisting the urge to look over my shoulder. “I don't get it,” I said. “We spent one day together—
one day,
twenty-five years ago. Why do I matter?”

Síle just looked at me, smiling as if she'd never tell me, and I felt the full force of Hennessey's words. Maybe it
was
something else—something that had fooled all four of them.

Again she nodded, and we resumed the walk back to Ardmeen House.

“Read to the end of it.” Her manner was earnest, even plaintive—there was no trace of teasing now. “You're there. She
told
me.”

I looked at Síle and saw my picture of her slipping. Nothing was clear now. Her face shimmered in the cold air like something I'd traveled thousands of miles to find, something precious that might vanish if I blinked.

I stopped walking and faced her again. “Can you hear yourself?” I asked. “Do you know what you're saying?” She gave me a sad smile and didn't answer. I took her gently by the shoulders. “All this time I thought you didn't belong here,” I murmured.

“Ah, but in fairness—I never agreed with you.” She averted her eyes, and I released her. “Tell me something. Up to this point, when you read about the visitation or listened to Father Dowd's tapes, did you believe us?”

“I don't know.”

“You do know. It's only now you're doubting.”

“I was willing to entertain the possibility,” I said.

“Why? Why would you, when it all sounds so mad?”

I took a deep breath. “I wanted to know you,” I said. “That's the only reason.”

*   *   *

This time Síle didn't ask if I'd come again. Martin saw me to the front door, and I stood at the edge of the parking lot looking down at the shoreline. There were no showers or snack stands like we had at American beaches, but one of the grown-ups had set up a tent for us in the dunes so there'd be a place to change into and out of our suits. They called swimsuits “togs,” and that confused me.

It was late in the afternoon, after Orla had pulled Tess away, and my sister's giggling drew me to the right place between the dunes. The door was fully unzipped, and I could see Síle and my sister leaning forward as they peeled off their suits. Síle spotted me through the doorway of the tent, threw her wet bathing suit at me and laughed. So I must have seen her naked once, before she'd had much of anything to show.

I unlocked the door, hurried inside, and opened the diary. The wind buffeted the car as I ran my hand over the Celtic design embossed into the leather, opening to the first page and shutting it again before my brain could resolve her teenage scrawl into words. I knew there might be things inside I wouldn't want to know, things that might make me want her less, and once I'd read them, there could be no unknowing any of it.

Still, I began to read. I had to.

First She says I must write about what happened those nights when I was small. Orla and I have always shared the room looking out over St. John's Road, and it's true the room and the house are no different to any other room or any other house anywhere in Ballymorris. Still, this room with its grey gloomy walls, black painted headboards, and plaid duvets will always be special for the world it revealed to me in the middle of the night.

It happened maybe a dozen times across two or three years. I would be fast asleep, and I would wake to the sound of my name in the mouth of someone I'd never seen before, though there was no one else in the room but Orla, who was sleeping still. For a time I rested there, sweetly drowsy. It never occurred to me to fear, not even when I heard my name called a second and third time. Man or woman or child, I couldn't have said who it was; when someone whispers your name it might be anybody. Who is it? I asked. Who's there? And I never did have an answer, only it was as if the air and the stillness and the silence were smiling down at me where I lay. I knew then that there were people there in the darkness, watching me without eyes, and still I didn't fear because I knew they loved me.

Then came a whispering rush of air, the same as when a summer breeze blows through the bluebell wood, though it was usually winter when the people came in the night. From the front window-corner the ceiling curled up and away, like the lid on a tin of tiny salted fish, and then I could see the sky, black as pitch and crusted with stars. I forgot everything then, and looked up and wondered and my heart clutched with the joy and the thankfulness of it. I even forgot Orla sleeping away in her bed beside me.

I never could have described the feeling, I was too young then, but I suppose it seemed that the world was mine, it would give me anything I asked of it. I still feel that way. Maybe that's why all these marvelous things are happening to me … to
us
. Because I believe.

When John's cell phone rang late that afternoon, it was Paudie inviting me over for a spaghetti dinner. “Nothing fancy,” he said. “They've ready-made garlic bread at the SuperValu, you've only to put it in the oven. Brona has some sort of a do on at the parish hall tonight, but Leo will be here.”

The stairs leading up to Paudie's apartment were pretty much an extension of the shop itself, stacks of paperbacks on either side of the steps leaving a narrower space to walk. “I'm glad ye could come,” Paudie said over his shoulder as Leo and I followed him up. “After all, you can't go to the pub seven nights out of the week.”

“Some do,” Leo put in.

“Aye,” Paudie replied crisply, “and them's the sort who should avoid it altogether.”

As we came into the apartment, I spotted the full bed spartanly made with a brown blanket in the back room and, on the left side as we turned toward the front of the house, a tiny kitchen making the sixties-era yellow-enamel range seem even more enormous. The scent of the lazy-man's garlic bread baking in the oven made the whole place feel warm and cozy. Paudie ushered us into a sitting room overlooking the street, the walls lined floor to ceiling with gold-stamped cloth- and leather-bound editions. “These ones have never been for sale,” he said with a smile as I surveyed the shelves.

Leo and I sat down on an old leather sofa as Paudie went to stir the sauce. He came back with tumblerfuls of red wine, and as I thanked him, I spotted an old studio portrait of his wife on an end table. With my free hand, I picked it up to admire her. “She was a good-looking woman,” I said, and he sighed.

“You said you remembered her? From the last time?”

“I wish I could remember her more clearly.” It only occurred to me then that Paudie might know about me and Tess, that one of the adults might have seen us together that day; but if he knew, he hadn't let on.

Paudie took the picture from my hand, kissed the glass, and pressed it to his chest. “She was the best of all women.”

“
One
of the best,” Leo agreed. At first I thought Paudie might be offended, but one glance satisfied me he wasn't. Your oldest friend should have license to say whatever he's thinking.

We slotted ourselves into chairs around the little kitchen table, and Paudie doled out too-generous platefuls of spaghetti. As we ate, we fell into talking about the bookshop. “It's such a quiet town,” I said. “It can't have been easy, staying in business all these years.”

“I'd have lost it, surely, if they'd opened an Eason's,” Paudie replied. “And thank heaven for the Internet!”

The old men twirled the spaghetti on their forks. “I've no use for it meself,” Leo said merrily, “but sure, I'd be buyin' all me own pints without it.”

Paudie rolled his eyes. “When you pass from this earth, Leo Canavan, we'll discover every last pence of your pension money stuffed in the wall behind the stove.”

It felt good to laugh. I took another sip of cheap wine.

“These days I post books all over the world, that's true,” Paudie went on. “America, mostly, though last week I did send
The Demi-Gods
all the way to New Zealand. You'd think no one would care about first editions anymore when they've everything at their fingertips online, but some still do.” Paudie sipped at his wine with an earnestly satisfied look on his face. “Enough still do.”

“I'd love to own a bookstore,” I said. I have no idea what brought me to say it. I'd never once considered it before, having met enough people working in independent bookshops to know how difficult it was to stay in the black.

“Ah,” Paudie said. “You're better off writing books than sellin' 'em.”

Leo leaned in. “I'll tell you what you can write about, lad. They'll want to hear all about it when you go back to America.”

“What's that?” I asked.

Leo grinned as he drew a glass bottle out of his jacket pocket. “I brought ye something you'll never find at the pub.”

“Now, that's something else I haven't seen in ten years,” Paudie said. “Poteen.”

“Moonshine, that's what you Yanks call it,” Leo said. “Made by me da's da, in a still hidden up in the Irons, in the year of our Lord nineteen-oh-three.”

“Jesus,” I said. “It's still drinkable after more than a hundred years?”

“Sure, 'twasn't drinkable to begin with,” said Paudie, and the two men doubled over with laughter.

“That old drum's still up there, so far as we know,” Leo said. “Tucked among the rocks and stones up by the bluff overlooking Lough Allen, and my grandda would ride up there on his old mule in the middle of the night to tend the fires. My father, God rest his unhappy soul, told me once where I could find it, but 'twasn't where he'd said; and when I came down again and told him the way I'd gone, he said I'd got it wrong, 'twas somewhere else entirely. I'd gone up in the car, you see, and where it's hidden, there isn't any road.”

“Couldn't he draw you a map?” I asked.

“'Twas too late, by that point,” Leo replied. “He'd the Parkinson's. And then he passed, and the secret died with him.”

“You'll never find it now, sure you won't,” Paudie said.

“Ah, the poteen he made was mighty,” Leo sighed. “And here's the very last of it.”

“Are you sure you want to waste it on me?” I asked, and they chuckled.

“We won't finish it tonight, lad,” Paudie replied. “You'll only take a little. Powerful stuff, that poteen.”

Leo rose heavily and toddled to the kitchen counter, found a little glass pitcher in the cabinet above the sink, and filled it from the faucet. “We'll cut it with water, so.”