Martin Sloane (29 page)

“I need to sit here for a while.” She settled back against her seat and lay her hands in her lap. I finally turned to her and saw her face was mottled white and red. “I won’t talk to you if you cry.”

“I’m not crying.”

“What’s wrong, then?”

“I don’t feel well.”

“Is it any wonder? Carrying this kind of poison around?”

“I’m here to
do
something about it, Jolene!”

I was furious at her. It was as if she’d dug a hole through the floor of my memory and inserted herself in everything that had happened to me. “Did you kill my mother too? At the age of six, did you introduce her to the guy she was fucking?”

“Don’t say things like that, Jolene.”

“I want you to know about that night you visited us. After you’d gone, do you know what happened?”

“No.”

“Nothing. We went into the house and we had a night like any other night. We had a bath together. He said that he’d enjoyed meeting you. We were tired and we went to bed. There was nothing going on.”

“He must have already made his mind up.”

“You’re right,” I said. “But it was long before you got there.”

“And yet he didn’t do anything until that night.”

“He was passing through, Molly.” The windshield was steaming up and I rolled the window down to let some of the sour air out of the car. “He wasn’t waiting for a sign, and he wasn’t going to be pushed over the edge. What he did was something that was
in
him to do and that had
been
there all along.”

“Maybe there were little increments, though,” she said. “Like something growing inside you that you don’t know about until it starts pushing up against a nerve.”

“And you think telling him that maybe I didn’t
appreciate
him enough was going to do it? What makes you think in eight hours you could have become that important?”

She evaded my eyes, setting her mouth in a hard line. “I’ve spent ten years worrying about what I did to you, Jolene. And now that I have a chance to take back what I said, I’m going to do it, whether or not it matters to you.”

She went on; she wanted me to understand that it was impossible to do something for me without doing something for herself. She was sorry about the inevitability of her selfishness. I heard this, but I wasn’t listening. I was watching the man in the second-floor window. I remained completely still, as if I were waiting for him to approach a box propped up by a stick. He held a small watering can, and with his other hand, he braced himself against the windowframe and leaned forward to water a row of plants against the sill. He lifted his face and gazed out of the window. Martin’s black eyes looking out over the street.

My reaction to this spectre surprised me. I was utterly relieved. I, who had lived without an answer for so many years, lived completely without hope of an answer, now knew everything. It was not what I’d come to expect from this life. A calm overtook me, like a wave rolling back out to sea. I watched the window. I’d always imagined him as a man in the middle of his life, with traces of his youth still inscribed on his features, always carried him with me like that, still strong, his back unbent, his hair flecked with black. Now he’d emerged from the other side of my imaginings as a thin, elderly man. I still knew the nose, the mouth, which was as familiar to me as the taste of a red berry from my mother’s garden. But it was a pale mouth I saw now, and the skin around it sallow. His hair was white. He leaned in with difficulty among the fronds and green, pouring the water down in a thin rill.

Molly was saying, “It will be a good thing to know, even if we’re both wrong.”

“Yes,” I said. She kept her eyes down, frightened now to look at me. In the window, he was wiping his palms along the light blue sweater he was wearing. A slow, deliberate movement, like he was checking to see if he was all there. He looked out over the rooftops of the houses we were parked beside, then he turned back into the cool dark of the house. He’d done something in his life that he would never be able to take back. I realized that now; he must have lived with it every day. It had marked everyone who loved him, and while there had still been time to fix what he’d done, not fixing it had been unforgivable. I felt a deep electric sensation. It was almost exactly as Molly had said: now that it was almost too late, he simply wanted to see the people he loved again. That’s why he’d made the boxes.

But I knew now I could not take Molly into that house.

“I’m sorry,” I said. “I shouldn’t have yelled at you.”

“This is hard for both of us.”

I put the car in gear. “Let’s get a room for tonight and come back tomorrow.”

At the Holymount cemetery, my grandmother had held Dale, and my father stood over the hollow ground, rocking on his heels. It was the nicest, highest day of summer, the kind of day, one of the relations said, that you can hear the corn growing. There were jackdaws circling over us, making sounds like creaking doors in the hollow blue. My father kept me from the room my mother had been laid out in over the weekend; he thought I was too fragile to handle the rough surgery they’d done to make her presentable, but I had gone in there once when he was saying goodbye to visitors. Her face was almost orange, but her eyelids were still pink and warm looking, and they were as translucent as silk, showing her eyes peaceful underneath. I touched her cheeks, which were cold, and put my hand on her chest to feel for her heart. There was a row of bumps there between her breasts, and I undid her blouse and looked at the Y-shaped incision that had been closed with stitches as thick as the leather lacing in my baseball glove. This was the mediating image I held in my mind, her dead form held somewhere in my imagination between the memory of her reaching up to kiss me goodbye in the garden and this other vision, of a red-stained pine box juddering against straps as it descended into the ground. The priest unfolded his Bible against his palm. “The Lord giveth, and the Lord taketh away,” he said, and then he looked up at us. I heard the casket come to rest at the bottom of the hole. “It is not ours to question why.” I couldn’t hear what he was saying (I was greatly distracted) but some of the other mourners dabbed at their eyes and nodded. I looked over at my father and saw the grief shrunken on his face, and that was the first moment I knew it was possible to have something inside you at the same time that it was gone forever.

I found us a room at Avalon House, a little B & B up near the university. We’d driven over the bridge at Nun’s Island to get there. From the single window in the room, you could see the forest from Martin’s childhood.

Molly slumped in a chair and looked half-dead.

“You really don’t look that good, Molly. Have you slept at all since I got here?”

“I’ll sleep when this is all over,” she said.

“We still have a lot to do,” I said. “Why don’t you lie down and I’ll go find somewhere we can have dinner.”

“No,” she said, firmly. “You’ll go to the house without me.”

That stung me. “I won’t. I’ll just go for a walk. I want you to rest. I’m worried about you.” She looked up at me and smiled wanly. “Just lie down for an hour.”

“You’ll come back and get me.”

“Yes,” I said.

She didn’t move for a moment, but then she leaned forward in the chair and began stripping off her jacket.

“I’ll come back in an hour.” I started toward the door, but Molly was reaching out toward me from the chair, needing help to get up. I put my arms around her shoulders and started to lift her.

“No,” she said, gently pulling me down until our cheeks were touching. I leaned into her, and I held her.

“It’ll be fine,” I said. I didn’t know what else I could say.

Outside on the streets, I joined the growing evening crowds. I walked the short distance into town, trying to go slow, admiring the bridges, the fact of the river, so much smaller, so much more intimate than the Liffey, rushing through town. It seemed like a sane place to live, not detestable at all. But I had nothing to compare to. Not living in Dublin, not, really, ever living anywhere at all. Each place in my life had seemed temporary. It was a wandering, never-settling sort of life. I did not think of where I might live and call home, but always hoped that everything around me would come to stillness, that perhaps I would eventually be immobilized by undergrowth.

I went to the train station, bought a ticket there, and then ambled back through town. I stopped and had a coffee and a slice of gooseberry pie in a homestyle restaurant near the main park in town, and read the local newspaper, with its warm memorializing of daily life. A dog rescued from a well. Some school-age children from all over the country gathered in town for a chess play-off. A picture of a man turning ninety, his family standing behind him. Candles tipped with light.

I realized that my mind was finally awake; the jetlag of only three days ago was gone. My body thought it was day when it really
was
day, night when it was night. The reassurance of being in the present soothed the thought I normally have, the one I live with, that all of the somatic clues to the past disappear eventually. Every wave of intense feeling is replaced by something more immediate, until we live the physical memory of the past only in words. I touched, we’ll say, I was touched. For so many years, living as a child, the things around me, what was in me, seemed immutable. That child’s body, those trees, my old, old friends — who I would not recognize now — the bodies of my parents, no longer material in their deaths, not even in the raw fact of their bones in their burial places. That I held my mother’s body! That I sat on my father’s shoulders! That I loved, with the naive immanence of love. And I had finally unlearned that kind of love, had had it torn from me, and I’d come to feel safer in the world, the everpresent world.

I paid my bill and returned the smile of the owner. I’d never eaten gooseberries before, although my mother had tried to grow them. The yellow berries attracted birds faster than anything else, and in their first fruiting season, she’d lost the whole crop and decided against them. So I had waited almost thirty years to try them. They were bright in the mouth, tart and then sweet.

I walked out of the centre of town and crossed the river going north. I felt anxious with what was to come, my mouth dry, my back sweating. But I pushed the feeling back. I was now between the university and the ocean and directly opposite where we’d entered the city a couple of hours earlier. The houses got larger here, the streets farther apart. I found Taylor’s Hill Road easily, and St. Mary’s Terrace at the mouth of it, a stretch of a dozen or so connected houses, basalt-coloured, crouching in the dim light. Number 22 behind an oak, the tree casting shadow on the windows. A woman of about twenty came out of the house, pulling a bicycle with her. “Are you looking for someone?” she asked me. I recognized her accent.

“No,” I said. “I just used to know someone who lived here.”

“Mm. There’s probably a picture of her in the upstairs hall. The resident does a group shot of everyone when they graduate. There’re pictures going back to the sixties. Do you want to see?”

I shook my head. The girl had short brown hair and wore a blue and green tartan skirt. “It was before then,” I said. She nodded. “What’s it like inside?”

“Dark as hell. Except for moonlight, which gets into two of the rooms in the back. You have to be a third-year before you get one, though. If you want to look, you can come back tonight. We’re having a potluck.”

“Thank you,” I said. She slipped her helmet on and when she tilted her head up to clip the strap, I saw a long scar running along the underside of her jaw. She stood over her bike and looked back at me.

“I’m guessing we grew up in the same part of New York state.”

“Ovid,” I said.

She smiled broadly at me and offered her hand. “Watkin’s Glen. You can’t get away from where you’re from.”

I took her hand in mine and held it. “That might be true,” I said.

I’d been back to where I was from, finally, after years of staying away. I’d returned by myself, driving down seven or so months before I met Daniel. I thought in the muted days of February I wouldn’t have to smell the fields and the orchards, or see the colours of things I’d once known so well.

Even so, coming into town, I found it hard to breathe. I watched Main Street slide past. It was dead now, the woollen mill had closed, the army base at Sampson was gone. People had left. When we’d come back to bury my father, Dale’s had still been there; now it was a sporting goods store, the white pillars over the entranceway shaggy with old paint.

I pulled over in the middle of the strip and got out. I stood with my hands in my sleeves, my arms over my chest, looking at the empty storefronts and trying to remember what the names used to be. Vonda’s Fine Clothing. Emory Bank. Millises’ Diner. Bullcroft, Stationer and Art Supplier. Hart Melvin’s butcher shop still stood on the corner of Water Street and Main and I went in. The man who owned the shop had bought it from the man who’d bought it from Hart Melvin. He didn’t know any of the names I knew and he was leaving town himself.

I left the car up on the main drag and walked back down through town and at the bottom of the street, the churchbells rang in two o’clock. That sound had presided over my days and nights, the deep sonorous brass of it, its seriousness. But I had forgotten it. In all my memories of that time since that time, I had not remembered the dailiness of that sound, nor its utter presence, nor the pleasure it gave me as a girl.

I went down Chapman Street across from the church. Near the end of the road, before the fields began again, my house stood and looked just as it always had. The four oaks scattered on the lawn, the clapboard as bright as if my father had whitewashed it the day before. And at the very bottom of the street, the Claytons’ house still stood in the middle of a small stand of trees — what had seemed a forest to me then — and it was denuded and empty, bits of machinery and children’s play cars scattered among the trunks.

I went up to the windows of my old house. It was dark inside and it seemed that there was no one on the street at all, not even anyone working or eating or going from one place to another anywhere in the town. It made me shiver. How was it possible that this was the epicentre of my life? That this little house at the edge of a town in the middle of fields between two lakes was the place where everything radiated outwards. With my mother’s berry patch a circle within the circle of her love affair. Which in turn, my young life contained, and later my life with Martin.