Immaculate Heart (28 page)

Tess glanced at me sidewise. “She's bewitched you.”

I laughed a bit too merrily. I didn't want her thinking of that fossil on the beach. “Síle bewitches everybody, doesn't she?”

“I liked her,” she said. “I always liked her, even when Orla didn't want me to.”

At first I didn't reply—
what if she shuts down on me?
—but in the end, my curiosity won out. “She told me you used to go up to the grotto alone, without telling anyone.”

Tess looked at me. She didn't answer; she didn't have to.

The hedge had given way to a low wall, the rough stones mottled with lichen. “You never told that to Father Dowd, did you?”

“I
couldn't
tell him, because then he'd have to know what was said, and if I'd told him the truth…” She drew a shaky breath. “I've never told anyone what she said to me those days I went up alone.”

“You can tell me.”

She gave me a weary smile. “Confidin' in a journalist? Even I'm not as foolish as that.”

“I'm not a journalist right now. I even left my recorder at the B and B.” I reached out and squeezed her shoulder. “Look, Tess: I know we don't know each other as well as it maybe feels like we do, but I'm not going to spend the rest of my time here driving around looking at castles and drinking in pubs. Not if I thought I might be of some use to you.”

I watched her blush. “That's very kind of you.”

“Are you sure you're okay?”

This time she didn't answer right away, as if this were the first time she'd actually stopped to consider how she felt. “I failed him,” she said at last, and when she turned to me, her eyes were glistening with unshed tears.

“C'mere,” I said, and we stopped walking. I put my arms around her, and she laid her cheek on my chest. “It's okay, Tess. You didn't fail anybody.”

“You don't know,” she said as she wept. “You don't know.”

I could have texted you. I could have told you I'd met the kid and something wasn't right.
“That's it,” I said softly, and stroked her head through her woolen cap. Her hair smelled clean, the scent something sweet and unidentifiable. “Do you want to talk about Owen?”

She shook her head against my chest.

“Tell me,” I said. “Let me listen.”
He was definitely listening to something. But you won't tell her that, will you?

For a while Tess could only cry. “He was in so much pain,” she murmured. “It didn't matter that he'd family and friends. He was completely alone. He wasn't really, but he felt it, and it got to the point it was all he knew. I told his parents he needed to see someone, and they wouldn't have it, they didn't listen. I went to them again and again, and it did no good. Now I don't even know how to speak to them. I can't
look
at them. I'm so … I'm so…”

“You can tell me,” I said.

She broke from me, gently, and looked me in the eye. “I'm so
angry
. But it … it goes beyond anger.”

“You did everything you could. You know that, right?”
I could have told you.

Tess hesitated for a second before unzipping her jacket and pulling something out of the inside pocket: a piece of notebook paper, folded and crumpled. Silently she offered it to me, and I unfolded it to find a hasty boyish scrawl in red ink.

Dear Tess

I don't have a choice, I don't really. They tell us we always have one, that we can grow up to be whoever we like, but you know as well as I do what a lie that is.

I'm writing this not only to say I'm sorry but because She told me to. She says to say She'll go on waiting for however long you need.

When Ciara comes to see you tell her I love her and I'm sorry I never said it.

Thank you for all you've done for me, Tess. You're the best of everyone.

Owen.

Her cheeks were blotchy, her eyes desolate. “He left it on my desk.”

“Did you show this to his parents?”

She sighed. “How could I?”

“I don't know what to say,” I said, because there was no way I was going to share what I was actually thinking:
I'm off the hook
. And then:
You won't show it to his parents and you showed it to me.
“Do you think he really saw her?”

She looked down, staring through the muddy ground. “I don't know.”

“It isn't your fault, Tess. No matter what, you did your best.” It hit me then, that when people talked of her impossible goodness, it wasn't idle flattery. They called her a saint because they expected so much more of her than they could anyone else, and in turn she demanded it of herself. Or maybe it was the other way around. “Those kids know they can come to you when they've got something on their minds. Who do
you
go to?”

We walked in silence for a minute. “I don't,” she said finally. “I can't.”

“You can. You
have
to. You're no good to anyone else if you don't take care of yourself first.”

She gave me another sideways look. “Who do
you
talk to?”

I didn't answer right away. “I have a few good friends.”

“In New York?”

I nodded, but it didn't sit easy with me—having to lie to her, to leave so many things out. Andy didn't get why I wanted to write this story, I hadn't talked to my best friend from college in nearly four years, and I fully expected every friend Laurel and I had in common to side with her. Did I know
anyone
who would hear about my going for a hike with a nun—not to mention
kissing
a nun, albeit long before she became a nun—and not laugh?

“And you … tell them everything?” she asked.

“Define ‘everything,'” I said, and she smiled. A bit later, she lifted a finger to indicate the next turnoff. Tess hopped up onto a stile beside a rusty gate, sat on the old stone wall, and swung her legs over. “We're almost there,” she said as I climbed over after her. I looked behind us and saw a small parking lot at the end of a gravel track. All along we'd been closer to the main road than I'd thought.

A minute or two later, we arrived at the well, set into a hillock and flanked by thorny trees with bits of faded cloth tied to the branches. A circular ledge enclosed the well itself, and different kinds of ferns and mosses grew out of the old masonry. The water was thick with algae, and from the dimmest corner came the listless gurgling of the old spring.

“Here it is,” Tess said softly. “The water that worked the only miracle I've ever seen with my own two eyes.”

“It's a charming spot,” I replied, and we stood there quietly as if we were back in the church.

“I'm ready,” she said finally. I let her words hang between us for a minute, in case they didn't mean what I wanted them to mean. “I need this,” she murmured, almost to herself. “All along, I've needed this. And it might as well be here.”

“Okay,” I said.

Tess took a seat on the ledge and drew a deep breath as I sat down beside her. “When you hear talk of other apparitions, at Knock or Medjugorje,” she began, “the people who've seen it believe they've been blessed. We weren't blessed. I wasn't blessed. That much I know for certain.”

“I don't understand. I thought you
were
blessed. I thought that was why you became a nun.”

“No,” she said. “No.”

I don't know why it hadn't occurred to me sooner: “When you spoke of the apparition, you said
it,
not
she
.”
If you really think it was the Blessed Virgin Mary they saw up there, then you're every bit as daft as we took you for.

Tess gave me one of those eloquent looks.

“Start at the beginning,” I said. “Tell me the little things—the details. Tell me how you felt when she showed you her heart.”

When Tess regarded me then, her gaze bright and penetrating despite her sadness, I marveled that she couldn't see clear through me. “This isn't about the story anymore, is it?” she asked.

I smiled a little. “I don't know if it was ever about the story.”

She nodded, as if she'd suspected as much from the very start.

“You told Father Dowd she said it was easier for you to show compassion to people on the other side of the world than to the people you saw every day.”

Tess sighed. “And every time she came and spoke to me, aye, it was a variation on that.”

“How did you feel?” I asked. “When she came and you realized what was happening, and she spoke to you, how did she make you feel?”

“It was queer. Very queer. I've never known a feeling like it before or since. I felt weightless, almost like I was becoming a part of the light that shone out of her and through her. Almost as if there wasn't any ‘me' anymore.”

“And how did you feel then? Did you panic?”

She smiled. “Not at all. It was the loveliest feeling I'd ever known.”

“To feel like you were dissolving? Really?”

“I felt pure. For the first time in my life, I knew what that meant.”

“Wow,” I said. What she'd said was either inspiring or insane. I put off deciding which.

“In those first few weeks, it was very difficult to go back to ordinary life—what I'd begun to see as the impurity all around me. The filthy world—the filthy relations between men and women—all the filthy thoughts in my own head.”

“Tess,” I said, “I've never known anyone so hard on herself.”
You've never had a filthy thought in all your life.

She gave me a helpless look. “I don't know any other way. But I … let me go on, please. I need to tell you everything.”

“All right,” I said. “What did she say when she went away? Did she say she'd come again? And physically—did she just kind of … fade out?”

“She didn't fade, exactly. She was there and then she wasn't, and all the light winked out with her. It was very disorientating at first, but over time, we got used to it.” Tess turned in her seat and ran her hand along the ferns growing inside the well. “She did say good-bye, in a sense—she'd raise her hand in a blessing. She didn't have to tell us she'd come back. We just knew we'd see her again.”

“So that's the way it went, the first few times you saw her?”

“That's the way it went.”

“But you didn't tell Father Dowd right away.”

“Once she'd left us, we didn't know how to articulate it, even to each other. It won't surprise you to hear that Síle was the only one who felt sure of what we'd seen. We saw a difference in her right away—before the apparition she was as changeable as the weather, and no wonder it put people on edge—but afterwards there was a calm, a deep calm, I'd never seen in her before. It was obvious to me it was a change for the better, but that new serenity seemed to aggravate Orla more than ever.”

“One of the newspaper articles said you felt the experience had brought you all closer together.”

“It felt that way, at first.”

“And then?”

“Then, after Christmas, the apparition told us it was time to tell Father Dowd.” She bit her lip. “Things were never the same between any of us after that.”

“Did you like Father Dowd?”

She raised her eyebrows. “It never would've occurred to me not to.”

“But looking back on everything. Did you feel he was sympathetic?”

“Oh, sure,” she replied. “Only…”

“Only what?”

“He wanted so badly for it all to be true,” she said softly. “Sometimes I wonder if it would've been better if we'd…”

“If you'd kept it secret?”

She nodded. “It's madness to think of it, and yet I can't see that we did all that much good in the end.”

“Talking about it did a lot of good for your neighbors,” I pointed out.

“Still, that wasn't much comfort once the money dried up. The shops closed, the restaurants closed, the ladies stopped doing B and B. Then everything was the same as it was before.”

“But
you
were different,” I said. “Did you ever listen to the other interview tapes?” She shook her head. “Declan sounded as if he'd been locked inside the parish office against his will.”

Tess almost laughed. “And Orla spent all her time defending him, no doubt.”

“Whenever she wasn't saying she saw the apparition only because she didn't want to admit that her sister was sick—yes.”

“See, she never told me she was having doubts. Not even at the end. I knew she was having them, but she never said.”

“In her interview she said that you were the most honest person she knew.” Tess glanced at me then, with her pale gray eyes, and I felt suddenly unsteady—as if I were two different people inhabiting the same body and I'd only just noticed the discrepancy. “It seems to me she didn't want to disappoint you,” I said quietly.

She gave me another grim half smile. “You think you know someone.”

“Tell me exactly when things began to turn,” I said.

“
Turn,
” she echoed. “Now that's the best way to put it. It happened by degrees. I couldn't see it until it was too late.”

“That's always the way it happens,” I said. “That's the way it happens when it really matters.”

Tess nodded. “As I said, the apparition told me I needed to feel and show love to the people I
professed
to love. But over time the message began to shift. It was the same on the surface, I suppose, but with less and less love as it went along. I know that doesn't make any sense, but there it is. Every time…” Tess's voice began to shake, and she took a breath to steady herself. “Every time she grew colder and more repetitive.”