Stony River Page 2

  “You say you have news?”

  “Yes.”

  She hears him inhale deeply, hears his belt jangle as he shifts weight from one foot to the other. “Mr. Haggerty died on the three-forty-two from Penn Station yesterday,” he says.

  “What’s a three-forty-two?”

  “You serious?” When she doesn’t answer, he says, “A train.”

  “Did he jump?”

  “Why would you even think that?” He jangles again.

  “Anna Karenina did.”

  “Who?”

  “A woman in a book.” The longest she’s ever read, one James challenged her to get through, hoping to seduce her from the youthful fantasies she prefers. “But truly, truly, it’s not my fault, or only my fault a little bit,” she says aloud, trying to say it daintily like Anna.

  Nolan releases a short, tuneless whistle and says, “Jeez, it’s stifling in here. How can you breathe?” His shoes squeak behind her as he goes to the window and pulls back the drapes. He grunts with the effort of hoisting a sash that’s not been lifted since the lad was born for fear his cries would be heard. Panic rises in her throat, a reflex. She tenses, ready to flee upstairs with Cian, until she remembers it’s too late to avoid detection.

  “Okay if I take a seat?” He’s at the chair on her left.

  She nods and he sits, his face in profile, his gaze averted. She runs an imaginary finger over the small bump on his long nose as he hangs his hat on one knee. World scents cling to him, as they do to James when he’s been out. She likes to guess at them, surprising James with her accuracy. Nolan smells of leather and smoke.

  “Several passengers witnessed him collapse and die. The coroner determined it was a heart attack. He won’t order an autopsy unless the family insists.”

  Miranda focuses on the far wall near the fireplace where the floral wallpaper is peeling. She envisions an angry heart with arms and legs leaping from James’s chest and stabbing him with a fork. Her own chest begins to ache. Pain is an illusion, James says; float above it. She stares at the dangling wallpaper strip and floats as far as the anchor of Cian’s rhythmic sucking on her nipple allows.

  Nolan glances at her then quickly looks down. “You okay?”

  “Aye.”

  It will storm tonight. She can tell from the weight of the air pressing in through the open window. Thunder will prowl the sky and Nicholas, the house. Lightning will crackle outside the room she shares with Cian and they’ll both cry out for James.

  Later, Bill Nolan will tell his wife that the girl’s composure was unnerving. No sign of grief as she sat brazenly nursing that naked, emaciated, shrunken-headed child on a couch with lion-clawed feet. He will file a report that says Miranda Haggerty is disturbingly detached and possibly slow-witted.

  “Has he started walking yet?”

  “Oh, aye.”

  “I ask because he seems weak.”

  She unhooks Cian from her breast and sits him up on the couch. “Will you walk for the man, then?” The lad widens his hazel eyes at the officer then hides his face in Miranda’s shoulder. “He’s not seen the likes of you before,” she says.

  “The uniform, I suppose. You take him out, right? The park, the doctor’s?”

  Why doesn’t the officer leave, now that he’s delivered his news? She pulls the strap back over her shoulder, tucks in her breast and lifts her hair from her perspiring neck. She doesn’t lie but she’s learned to remain silent when it suits her.

  Nolan stares at her straight on, his cheeks flushing, his Nicholasbrown eyes intense. “I’ve got a three-year-old daughter and my wife’s expecting again. We’re hoping for a boy.”

  “Why is that, now?”

  “I don’t know.” He laughs self-consciously and rubs the back of his neck. “Don’t most men want sons to carry on their names?” He clears his throat and straightens his spine. “Who’s your boy’s father?”

  Some mysteries cannot be expressed in words to the unready, James says, for they will not be understood. She is sworn to secrecy for the child’s sake. She peers down at Cian clinging to her and softly sings his favorite song: “There was an old man called Michael Finnigan, he grew whiskers on his chinnigan.”

  Cian lays a finger on her mouth and says, “Mandy.”

  She sucks in the finger and he laughs, a deep chuckle that threatens to loosen her fragile hold on the tears pooling behind her eyes. Without James, who will guide Cian to his calling? Who will brush her hair?

  Nolan pulls his notepad from his shirt pocket. “That your name? Mandy?”

  “Only to the lad.”

  He slaps the notepad on his open palm, an angry sound that jolts her. “I’m trying not to push you but I need more to go on here, Miss Whoever You Are, more than you’re giving me.”

  James flashed with impatience, too, yesterday morning when she asked would he bring back strawberries. “I cannot cover the sun with my finger, can I?” he said.

  Well, she too can be stroppy. “How are you knowing the dead man is James?”

  “He had a library card with him.” Nolan glances at the bookshelves lining two walls. “Seems he liked to read.”

  The card was for her benefit. Most books on the shelves were published before Miranda was born; they don’t hold all James wants her to learn.

  “I mean to see him,” she says. The dead man might have stolen that card. James could be in a public house right now, performing card tricks for drinks.

  “I can arrange that, provided you’re next of kin.”

  Nolan’s words call up a line from a book forgotten until now: It is understood that the next of kin is Mr. Henry Baskerville.

  “James is my father,” she says, thinking how deficient a word is father. “My mother passed over years ago and there’s no one else.” She thinks on her mother’s parents, brothers and sisters all perishing in their summer cottage when it was swept out to sea by a fierce storm two years before Miranda was born. James spoke of it only once because Miranda trembled and cried for days afterward, imagining herself tossed about and pelted by flying crockery. If there be family alive in Ireland she doesn’t know of them.

  Nolan is quiet for a moment. Then, “That’s rough. I’m sorry.” He reaches over and pats her knee, sending a shiver of longing through her. “There a priest or minister I can call for you?”

  She shakes her head. James says a soul’s journey needs no priest, no mediator.

  “An unusual name, that—Key-uhn. How’s it spelled?”

  She tells him and, sensing the need to offer more, adds, “It means ancient one.”

  “You and the boy can’t stay here by yourself,” he says, putting words to the terrible truth creeping into her mind: only James knows where the money tree grows, how to find food, bless the well, chop wood.

  “And where shall we go?”

  “Children’s Aid will find you a family, might take a day or so.” He spins his hat around in his long-fingered hands. “You can stay at my house tonight, at least.”

  She cannot recall being anywhere but here.

  “I don’t suppose you have a telephone,” he says.

  “We do not.” Or anything else that would allow a tradesman access to the house.

  “Did your father have an employer we should contact?”

  “He did not.”

  “Will you be okay if I leave you a few minutes to radio the station? I should let my wife know you’re coming.”

  She nods and stands with him. She follows him to the door and watches it close behind him. With both men outside now, she considers locking it. The family they found for Jane Eyre treated her badly: You ought to beg, and not to live here with gentlemen’s children like us.

  She’s never tried to leave their house before, though she could have easily. James locked the back from the outside when he made his forays into the World, but he always left the key inside the front door. Finding her gone would have shattered him after all he’d forfeited for her: a professorship, old mates, his mother�
��s wake. She could never be that ungrateful.

  Her mind flies through each room of the house. The windows facing the back are shuttered from the outside. The small window on the back door at the bottom of the kitchen stairs isn’t. She’d have to smash it, drag a chair down the stairs to the landing, stand on it and crawl out. Push Cian through first and drop him to the ground. Would the officers hear? Would Cian get hurt? And Nicholas, how could she leave Nicholas? Her mind is surveying the upstairs when Cian lets out a high-pitched cry. She turns to see him toddling toward her, clutching his groin and dribbling urine. His face twists in pain. She scoops him up, rocks him in her arms and softly finishes the verse: “The wind blew up and blew them in again. Poor old Michael Finnigan.” He smiles up at her with such love and trust she can no longer dam her tears. She carries him into the kitchen and crumples to the floor next to Nicholas who licks her salty face.

  There’s naught to deliberate. She must accept Nolan’s help.

  He and Dunn return with two sweaty-faced men and contraptions for which she has no words. To catch and contain Nicholas, they explain, so they can transport him by truck. He can’t ride with her and the child, they say in response to her question. Not enough room. No, the cage isn’t cruel. It will prevent him from being thrown about the truck and getting hurt. Miranda doesn’t know how else to resist.

  The net isn’t needed. Head down, tail drooping, Nicholas meekly enters the cage when Miranda directs him to. “Anon,” she tells this creature she has loved from the time they stood nose to nose. He refuses to meet her gaze.

  Nolan suggests she dress the child and clothe herself in something “more suitable.” She remembers a worn valise in James’s room and tiptoes in to get it, half expecting him to be there and scold her for entering his private space. She chooses a dress her mother once wore and packs two others, along with rags and cotton drawers for her bleeding times, the petticoat, three handkerchiefs, heavy stockings, flannel pajamas, a woolen jumper, clean nappies and the clothing bits James has managed to acquire for Cian. She dresses the lad for the heat, in a white cotton singlet and nappy.

  “Sure we never needed them,” she explains, when Nolan inquires about coats. He frowns and scribbles in his notebook. The lad has no shoes but she manages to squeeze into the open-toed high heels of her mother’s she wore when she was smaller to play glass slipper.

  Dunn asks about birth and death certificates, wills, the deed to the house and other “relevant documents.” If any exist, they’re in the locked desk in James’s room, a possibility Miranda doesn’t mention, partly because Dunn is gruff and presumptuous but also because she doesn’t know what else might be there that James wouldn’t want them seeing.

  No room for the books, the phonograph and records, they tell her. Someone will collect them for her later. After having lived in this house so long with the days stretched out before her, she’s rushed now into leaving. She packs Cian’s Peter Rabbit bowl and the small flannel blanket he sucks on at night, her most recent journal, a pencil, a lump of moonstone, a white candle and matches, her hairbrush and a drawing James made of the goddess Ethleen holding the moon—a milky-skinned, dark-haired woman wearing a gown of starlight. For as long as Miranda can remember, the drawing has hung over her bed as proxy for her mother. She says anon to the walls, floors and ceilings and all who lodge within them, wondering who will hear their scratches and whispers in the night until she returns.

  TEREZA’S ASS was sweating. She’d rather have been puffing cigs with the guys who hung out at the corner store in her building, but they weren’t around. She was stuck with a kid who looked like Tiny Tears with those blonde curls and chubby gut. The only cool thing about Linda—sandals with laces that crisscrossed her ankles like a Roman soldier’s—was also the only cool thing about a Jesus movie Tereza had gotten rooked into seeing by a dumb girl the last place she’d lived. When Tereza became a star, she’d say uh-uh to movies that made you feel like you had to be “saved” from yourself. She liked sci-fithrillers where the entire Earth had to be saved from total destruction. She wasn’t keen on most girls, either. They didn’t know as much as guys about things that mattered. Take Linda: she didn’t know shit about the river even though she’d lived only blocks from it her whole life. And she was scared of too much to be any fun.

  Tereza would have split by now if the cop car hadn’t shown up. She’d almost crapped her pants when it did, thinking Jimmy had gotten home early and sicced the cops on her for leaving her eight-year-old brother Allen alone while Ma was out looking for work. Then it occurred to her that the last person Jimmy would want to see was a cop.

  A Charlie Chan mystery was going on at Crazy Haggerty’s. Two cops had clomped into the house, come out one at a time and parked themselves in their car for a while. Then dogcatchers showed up in a white truck, went in with the cops and came out with a black German shepherd. Tereza would’ve liked that dog. Jimmy wouldn’t be so fast to smack her with Rin Tin Tin at her side.

  It was ages before the short cop waddled out the front door carrying a small tan suitcase. The tall one followed, holding the elbow of a girl with cocker spaniel hair down to her waist. The girl wore high heels and a navy blue dress with white polka dots. On her hip she held a puny kid with a freak-show-small head. The girl looked like she might know a thing or two.

  “Who’s that?” Tereza asked real low.

  “Somebody visiting Crazy Haggerty, I guess,” Linda whispered.

  “What’s wrong with the kid?”

  “How would I know?”

  The girl turned and stared straight out to where Tereza and Linda were hiding. It made Tereza shudder. The kid looked starved. Maybe the cops were taking the girl to jail because of that. Jimmy used to threaten her with jail before she figured out she could scare him worse with it. He told her the cops would pull her fingernails out with pliers and parade her around naked.

  A sudden dread for the girl brought her to her feet. “I’m gonna find out what’s going on.”

  “No!” Linda yanked the back of Tereza’s pants and pulled her back down. “They might tell on us. I’ll get in trouble.”

  “With the cops?”

  “No. My folks.”

  “What’s the worst they can do to you?”

  “You can’t imagine.”

  Tereza hadn’t spotted a single scab or bruise on those rubber doll arms and legs, but maybe Linda’s old man and lady weren’t as harmless as they looked.

  Tereza dropped back to the ground. “My brother’s a big chicken, too.”

  Linda’s face collapsed like a squashed Dixie cup. Tough gazzobbies. Tereza couldn’t babysit everybody’s feelings.

  FOR TWELVE YEARS Miranda has viewed the World through the attic’s streaky half-moon window, seeing half a tree, half a street and only the birds and clouds that passed by her scrap of sky. Being at one with nature is our birthright, James said. Depriving her of that pained him. Daylight makes her eyes water. And the smells! She feels dizzy. Focus, James would say. Imagine yourself the circus tightrope walker he described seeing as a child—taking slow, deliberate steps, placing one foot carefully before the other.

  She wants to touch the tree whose branches scratch the roof. She wants to hug the earth. But Nolan leads her steadily to a black car with two white doors. Car is from the Celtic word for wagon, James says, but then James believes you can trace anything to the Celts. Believed. James believed.

  Miranda balks as Nolan opens a door for her. Is the car any less a cage than that holding Nicholas? Then she recalls the professor’s nephew who was afraid to enter the volcano at first, nearly missing out on that incredible journey to Earth’s core. She ducks her head inside. Cian squeals when the engine erupts but bounces excitedly on her lap as they pull away. Twisting to see through the rear window, Miranda watches the home she hasn’t seen from the outside since she was three shrink and grow faint.

  TEREZA HACKED OFF two more punks and handed one to Linda. “If you smoke it down to the end,” she sa
id, “sap will fizz up into your mouth.”

  Linda screwed up her nose as if Tereza had farted. “Revolting,” she said.

  Tereza turned away and studied the old house with new eyes. No sign of Crazy Haggerty. Plus the dog was gone. If the house turned out vacant for sure she’d come back and prop a window open in case she needed to get in someday. She was feeling better and better about Stony River. One of the first things she always did in a new town was suss out possible hidey-holes. Bordering the neighborhood were the river, a farm and the highway her family had taken all the way from their last place in Florida. In the middle were houses, empty lots and trees. The farm had a haystack big enough to hide a girl, but a vacant house would be better when the weather turned cold. Across the highway were a zillion other possibilities. Right now, though, Crazy Haggerty’s house was boss. She’d sneak back to it after dark.

  TWO

  AS THE CAR GATHERS SPEED, a hot breeze from the open windows lifts the ends of Miranda’s hair and slides under her dress. Curious wonders pass by so quickly they become blurs of color: so many shades of green, yellow, brown, blue and red. Cian, frightened and delighted at once, clings to her neck with one arm. He points with the other and babbles, attempting to name all he sees. Each dog is “Nicko.” Closing her eyes when sights overwhelm her makes Miranda queasy. Fixing her gaze on the back of Nolan’s head helps, but even so she’s nauseated and disoriented by the time they arrive at a building Nolan informs her is the hospital.

  Dunn deposits them at the entrance. Carrying Miranda’s valise, Nolan leads them through a door made of glass (imagine!) into a large room with sofas, chairs and illuminated ceilings. Someone approaches them. A woman, Miranda realizes with a thrill. A woman who rises on the toes of her flat black shoes and kisses Nolan on the cheek.