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Stony River Page 22


  She forces herself to read on.

  Only through Morrígan’s intercession have I not been called up here. My volunteer work is all that keeps the widows and gold star mothers from having me drawn and quartered. It terrifies me to leave her alone the nights I must go house to house in white helmet and armband, checking to see the blinds are tightly drawn. I’ve gotten a guard dog. You’d approve of him, my love. I contemplated naming him Cerberus but settled on Nicholas, after the first, the one with a kind heart who nonetheless brooked no challenge to his authority.

  Miranda catches her breath at the dear creature’s name. Once she confessed to Father Shandley that she grieved more for Nicholas than she did for James. “Grief is grief ” was all he said, assigning her not a single Hail Mary. And grief must have been what James felt for Eileen as he shouldered the weight of Miranda’s welfare and, later, Cian’s.

  She chances a few more letters.The abilities to charm and heal are passed through the blood, James wrote on her eighth birthday, but they must be drawn out else lie fallow. I want her to continue the traditions of her grandmother and great-grandmother before her, to walk the same path, although (no need to point it out, dearest) I’m well aware I’m circumscribing that path. He wrote of anointing her with cinnamon oil that day and dedicating her to a life of healing. On her thirteenth birthday— Cian would have been no bigger than a pencil lead inside her—he lamented she had little passion for healing. Books are what inspire her. She’s her mother’s child in that. She’s read every English language novel and translation I’ve allowed her. The small village library has a patriotic fervor for American novelists. I’ve overcome my scorn for them for the lass’s sake. Pity she shows little aptitude for French or German.

  Miranda recalls James attempting to interest her in the plants he grew or scavenged and dried in the basement. She took his knowledge of their healing properties for granted and paid scant attention to whether it was one pinch or two of this or that. She knew only that clove set your mouth on fire, mullein was bitter and chamomile smelled like apples.

  I miss the perilous beauty of Ireland’s winter, the trees in their topcoats of fog. It’s hard not to think what I’m doing is completely mad. I need you to say something handsome to me.

  I have some French, now, she whispers. Ça ne fait rien.

  Latin, too. Filia est pars patris.

  Carolyn coughs.

  Miranda douses the light.

  SEVENTEEN

  AUGUST 16, 1957. From the day she moved into Buddy’s room nearly two months ago, Tereza swore she could hear Miranda’s money rustling around in the basement. Yesterday, as if they’d been in a dream together, she woke with the feeling of Miranda’s hand on her cheek, the weight of it like guilt.

  According to Buddy’s schedule, Tereza was supposed to work on grammar this morning. As an A&P wife she needed to stop saying stuff like “ain’t” and “I seen.” Speak more like Natalie Wood than Sal Mineo, har-dee-har-har. But instead of “conjugating” with a bunch of words Buddy’d give/gave/given her, she’d put on a Popsicle-green circle skirt and a sleeveless white blouse Natalie might wear and snuck out at ten while he and Dearie were still asleep.

  The bus ride to Stony River was slow and hot. Already her hair had exploded into frizz and the V between her tits felt wet. She arrived around noon at the stop under the shadowy railway trestle where taxis idled, pigeons crapped and a Crazy Haggerty type on a gray bench drank from a paper bag. The town felt smaller, the trestle not as high as she remembered. Had it really been two years since she and the guys ran around under that trestle shouting When I’m calling you-oo-oo-oo into the echo? Stony River felt even stranger to her knowing Richie had been gone for months. He’d left without so much as a goodbye, something that must’ve pained Buddy awful bad because he never wanted to talk about it.

  She’d had breakfast ready as usual this morning when he got home after the midnight to eight-thirty shift he’d been working since they got married. It was nice, just the two of them in the kitchen, arms on the table, leaning into each other to keep their voices low on account of Dearie still sleeping. The sun always rose behind the house and snuck into the kitchen through the back porch. The new light and Buddy’s private voice kept her looking for that magic moment when marriage would change them into something cooler than they were alone and make Buddy want to screw her. So far all that had happened was he’d gotten an A&P haircut that looked like a mowed lawn and Tereza had learned to cook oatmeal the way he liked.

  Over breakfast, Buddy would beef about how boring it was stocking shelves, making sure every can, jar and box was stamped with a price, scrubbing the floor with a machine that weighed a ton and lugging returned bottles to the basement. He was determined to learn every job because no chore was too lowly for an A&P manager. He had being a bagger down cold. Eventually he’d be a cashier, stock clerk, produce supervisor and so on. He was sure the work would get more interesting and was already dropping words like merchandise, marketing, inventory and stock on her.

  Tereza was just as fired up about becoming an actress, but Buddy wanted her to take over more and more shifts at Herman’s so that Dearie could stay home whenever she wanted without “the family” losing income.

  Thinking of them as family felt like cheating on Ma.

  The Stony River “cop shop,” as Vinnie used to call it, was five blocks from the bus stop. Tereza’s black flats scuffed the sidewalk as she hustled along. By now Dearie would have found the “went to store” note she’d left by the coffee pot. Tereza would pick up Midol and Kotex before she went back and cook up a story about why it took her so long. Buddy’d never know she was gone; he didn’t get up until after she and Dearie left for Herman’s.

  He slept days when he was on night shift. After breakfast, he’d shower before getting into bed. Tereza would crawl in with him in case he wanted to make out. He never did. But he’d stretch out beside her and hold her for a while, his Lifebuoy smell pinching her nose, before turning onto his stomach and lying frog-kneed like a Dearie miniature. Tereza would get up once his body started sleep-twitching and have a go at whatever he’d put on her schedule.

  Not today.

  She wanted to find Miranda before Buddy found the money. Every time he carried the vacuum up from the basement for Dearie, Tereza’s stomach flipped. If she’d told him right after the wedding, it might’ve been okay. The longer she kept it to herself, the harder it would be to explain. Not that he’d hurt her if he found out. He wasn’t like Jimmy. It was just that he went all funny sometimes, making her swell up with a fear she couldn’t name.

  The sun was like a hot and heavy hand on her back but Tereza kept her head up and her shoulders back, almost hoping somebody’d recognize her and say what’s up so she could say nothing-much-gotmarried-in-June and see in their eyes she wasn’t a loser anymore. She couldn’t be sent back to school now. She had a birth certificate that said she was sixteen. Nobody had to know her husband didn’t “sexually respond” to her, as the book had put it. Lately she’d been thinking a girlfriend would be a good idea. Not Linda. Somebody who knew something useful. Talking to Dearie about certain stuff would be like ratting on Buddy. Same for the women who worked at Herman’s. Miranda was the only teenager Tereza knew of who’d had sex, even if it had been with her geezer father. One guy Tereza picked up at Tony’s had wanted her to hum “The Star Spangled Banner” while she blew him. Buddy didn’t want her to do anything except look scared while he came on her leg or stomach. Maybe Miranda would say, “Oh, that’s normal,” or “That’s nothing compared to what I had to put up with.”

  The station was all bustle and dark wood, a few glassed-in offices around a room where several people slumped on wooden benches. Tereza approached a high desk and a cop about twenty-five or so. He had fat earlobes it might be fun to suck.

  She made her eyes sappy and her voice all pleading like Debra Paget’s in Love Me Tender, “Oh please Vance, please, for my sake,” the exact line Paget was saying
the first time Buddy’s hand gripped Tereza’s crotch. She introduced herself, lifting her ring hand to the desk. Asked if the cop remembered a Mister Haggerty who’d died and left a daughter. She told him she’d just happened to be near the Haggerty house the day two cops took the girl away, a girl she needed to track down.

  “You know the officers’ names, Mrs. Jukes?”

  “No.” She bet this cop wouldn’t care about mouth germs.

  “You a relative?”

  “No.”

  He leaned over the desk, checked her out. “You here to report her officially missing?”

  “No.”

  “Then I don’t think we can help you.” He laughed, flashing a gold tooth. “Chances are she’s only missing to you.”

  He probably had bad breath.

  “Any idea how I could find her?”

  “You could put an ad in the paper.”

  THE STONY RIVER RECORD sat between Dinah’s Luncheonette and the Savings Institution in a building with a big glass window, the printing press right up front where everyone could see the guy running it. He probably couldn’t goof off for a second.

  A bored-looking woman behind a typewriter, wearing glasses held together with tape, helped Tereza compose the ad. Miranda Haggerty: I have something that belongs to you. Please write to Ladonna at Stony River Record, Box 42. Tereza was glad she didn’t have to leave an address or phone number; she could call to find out if anybody answered and then come by to pick up the letter.

  “How long you want the ad to run?”

  “Don’t know.”

  “I can give you four weeks for the price of three.”

  Tereza paid in cash.

  Tereza’s ad would run for the first time in a week. Realizing she might hear from Miranda that soon gave her chills. She’d have to come clean about how she’d gotten the money.

  EIGHTEEN

  SEPTEMBER 5, 1957. Carolyn is braving her third day in kindergarten as Cian lies tummy and elbows down in front of the television. His two-year-old playmate, Mickey, naps on the floor beside him. Doris is at work.

  Miranda brews a pot of tea from a recipe in the grimoire she found in James’s desk. Its early entries are in a language she doesn’t know, possibly written by her grandmother and great-grandmother. But James entered various spells and formulas in English. For her sake, she likes to think—needs to think.

  At St. Bernadette’s he slipped away from her a little at a time, like water in a cupped hand. His letters resurrect someone alien and portray a reality to which she was oblivious. She’s read them all now, some more than once, drawn to them like a tongue to an aching tooth. She gets through each day by pretending what’s in them is of no consequence. Drawing whatever nourishment she can from the thin gruel of his few tender words about her.

  She knows the truth now about the most powerful moment in her life: when a great force overtook her and she floated like a visitor from another realm, convinced with all her being that Danú possessed her womb and was leading Cian through the birth canal. What has brought her heart to its knees is this from James when Cian was a mere three months old: I look at the lad and must concede the experiment failed. What arrogance to believe I had the power to do this, or the right.

  Not a word of the awe she saw in his face when he first held the babe.

  She pours herself a cup of tea then spreads the letters out on a square of early afternoon sun lighting the burled maple dining room table, hoping to make more sense of their meanderings. She’s tried to assess them dispassionately, as a scientist might, noting James’s progression over the years from I’m the Weaver, spinning my magic to I’m the Wanderer, leading you astray. From optimism about his grand experiment to drifting through fields of nothingness in search of meaning. Miranda knows those fields. She plunges headlong into them on the edge of sleep and stumbles across them occasionally during the day when her attention needs to be on the children. Their tall grasses whisper of annihilation. Insanity.

  James could have been wrong about Cian. By the time of that letter—Miranda was fourteen—he claimed he no longer knew what he believed, only what I experience and that is a bewildering madness . I’m addicted to the feeling of air moving through me when I leave my tortured mind and go into that dark void. It’s not just her isolation I need. It’s mine, away from the well intentioned who would seek to “cure” me.

  Miranda blows on her tea and thinks on this addiction, this yearning to enter another dimension and leave yourself behind. How powerful it must have been in James to drive him to lock her away. She tries to resist when the detective who smells like cherries and pine needles comes to call, asking her “just one more time” to enter Bill Nolan’s hat, his jacket, shoes or gun. Will she feel the sudden flush, the chill? Fall into the darkness vaster than sleep? She fears losing herself there one day, and never coming back to Cian. Yet she’s lured, as James must have been, by the deeper state of existence she senses beneath her superficial daily tasks.

  Mickey flops over on his back, still sucking his thumb, and Cian passes gas.

  Nothing James revealed about the preparations for Cian’s birth surprises her. He was forthright about what he wanted to do and how. A notion has made itself known to me, nay, a conviction that it’s possible to produce a child that is not of this world, he wrote on her eleventh birthday. I’ve been meditating on the best way to do it. It must not be out of lust. She agreed they would both walk around the house naked as eels until he could look on her without desire. She never found his body more than an intriguing counterpart to hers. He gave no hint, later, of doubting their success.

  The psychiatrist said, “When an adult in a position of trust persuades a child that what the adult wants is also what the child wants, the adult has stolen the child’s right to make her own choices.” Miranda never questioned the morality of having a divine child, much less the probability. So accepting she was, the quiet child, the good lass James wrote about to Eileen.

  She can picture him at his desk, flask in hand, growing more and more inebriated as he contemplates another lonely year with his tedious daughter and their freak of a son.

  I blame myself. I should have waited to woo you. Your grief was too raw, not even a year old, when you faced the prospect of bringing a child into a world that had taken everyone else you’d loved. I was too bloody-minded to understand you couldn’t risk another loss. With a longing that wrenches deep inside with fingers of pain I look for you on the dark winding paths of the Isle of Ghosts.

  Such dross.

  I kneel and call out to my ancestors and yours. Thank their soft Irish hearts for welcoming you. Ask them to forgive you for taking your own life and me for not preventing it.

  Miranda draws on the calming oil of bergamot in her tea. That’s it then. Eileen could not bear to live any longer for fear she’d lose James and Miranda one day as she had the rest of her family in that dreadful storm. She had not wanted a child for the same reason. She had not wanted Miranda.

  NINETEEN

  SEPTEMBER 14, 1957. “How goes it, Doris?” Police Detective Enzo Rotella stood at attention on her front step, crisp as toast in a navy blue cable-knit sweater vest, white shirt and sharply creased gray trousers. Under his hands, a book and a newspaper. He’d taken on Bill’s case the moment he heard the call on his walkie-talkie. Gone straight to the site to collect evidence and was still at it. She hoped he wasn’t here to interrogate Miranda again.

  “It goes, Enzo, that’s all I can say. What’s up?” She couldn’t recall him smelling as strongly of cologne. Bill never wore the stuff. He reeked, instead, of Frank’s cigars.

  “Miranda in?”

  “Yeah, but we’re about to take the kids down the street to the playground.”

  “Won’t keep you long. I was checking on an ad I placed and stumbled across her name in yesterday’s Record. I wondered if she’d seen it.” He handed Doris the paper and pointed to a classified he’d circled.

  She read it quickly. “I’ll be darn
ed. C’mon in.”

  He scraped his brown suede oxfords on the mat and dipped his head slightly before stepping into the tile patch that served as an entryway. His hairline was in serious retreat; what hair remained was trimmed close to the scalp.

  “She’s getting the kids ready to go out. Hear the ruckus?”

  “No.”

  “Exactly. You hardly hear a chirp when they’re with her. Like they’re under some spell, especially when she reads to them.” Which she did incessantly, wasting time that could have been spent having them scrub their hands and pick up their toys.

  He nodded. “She does seem to have stepped from an enchanted forest.”

  He should try leaving three kids with Miranda each day, not knowing if the fairy princess would be off in Neverland and forget to put the boys down for naps. Doris was as bad as Bill had been, calling a couple of times a day to check on things. She’d come home more than once lately and found Mickey curled up asleep on the floor, sucking his thumb, or both boys wandering around in their birthday suits. Miranda would emerge from the bathroom looking as if she’d been crying, but she’d assure Doris she was fine. Doris had gone back to Children’s Aid nearly three months ago, counting on escaping the ache in the house through office work, but anxiety over what might be happening at home kept her on edge.

  “Mind if I sit?”

  She’d never get rid of him now.

  She led him into what had turned into a library, with shelves scaling the living- and dining-room walls. Her father had built them for her. It had been either surrender her walls or put up with books on every available surface, including the floor. Miranda was not content to leave them in boxes in the basement. She’d taped little white labels on each spine according to the Dewey decimal system. Written out a card for every book and arranged the cards alphabetically in a recipe box. With a focus that had amazed Doris, she’d spent weeks deciding what category each book fell into, asking Doris’s opinion. Beowulf: fiction or folklore? Myths and Legends of the Celtic Race: religion or social sciences? Doris asked if there was a category for boring. She’d never been a reader. Neither had her parents, but they’d become sudden converts, borrowing a book or two when they visited, asking Miranda for recommendations. They were captivated by her history. To them she was obviously intelligent, possibly brilliant, but “not quite right,” something they attributed to the abuse she’d suffered; Doris had shared the psychiatrist’s report with them. They wanted to “encourage” her. Show how broad-minded they were.