Immaculate Heart (2 page)

Then I turned to my right, and found a newspaper article in a dusty metal frame:
More Visions for the Ballymorris Four.
In the accompanying photograph four teenagers stood beneath a statue of the Madonna in a grotto thick with ivy, and to the side I could make out a cement ledge lined with pillar candles.
The Blessed Virgin has appeared to local children with a message of love and repentance: Orla Gallagher (16), Declan Keaveney (17), Síle Gallagher (14), and Teresa McGowan (16).

Each of the girls wore a school uniform with a pleated skirt, but the boy had on an old leather bomber that, coupled with a surly turn of the lip, made me dislike him right away. Guys like that hadn't shoved me around in high school, but they'd
smirked
at me, and that was worse. I studied their faces, and it hit me: I'd seen this photograph before.

The clipping had arrived in the mail one day while I was at my grandmother's house after school. It was two months after Mallory's accident, and even the scent of the shepherd's pie baking in the oven seemed horribly wrong. Gran sipped her tea as she read the letter from her brother, and then she'd slid the folded bit of newspaper across the kitchen table for me to read. She passed no comment on the miraculous happenings. All she said was, “You remember those girls, don't you?”

I did. I knew Tess, with her freckled face and her long red hair, and I knew her friend Orla, though none but the youngest—Síle—seemed particularly happy to be photographed that day.
Sheila.
That's how I'd seen her name in my head, back when we'd known each other.

“Is it for real?” I'd asked my grandmother, and she'd pursed her lips as she tucked the letter and newspaper clipping back into the envelope. “Who can say?” she'd sighed. “Ah, but I do worry for them.”

Now I studied Síle's face in the article framed and hanging on the wall. Her dark hair fell loose and gleaming over her shoulders, and it was remarkable how her eyes could shine out of a pattern of tiny black dots. She and Mallory had played together on the beach that day, and because of her, apart from the sheep's bone anyway, my sister had acted like a completely different person. She'd been happier than I'd ever seen her, happier than I would ever see her again.

I glanced up at the header—
28 March 1988
—and felt something cold slither deep in my gut. That was the day of the accident. If I'd felt I needed to come back here, to finish something I couldn't quite remember starting, well … didn't that just clinch it?

The funeral crowd was filing out the door now. I shook my head to dislodge the memory of the bird convulsing in the road, the gleam of an eye in the backseat. Paudie leaned over and pointed to the last girl in the photograph. “That's Tess, my brother Eamonn's daughter.” He gave me a sideways look. “D'you remember her?”

I squinted at her face as if I hadn't already recognized her. “Yeah,” I said slowly. “She has red hair, right?”

Paudie seemed like a nice guy, but I couldn't help feeling as if I'd passed some sort of test. “She does, indeed,” he replied.

I tapped on the glass inside the frame. “So there was really a … what do you call it … a ‘Mary sighting' here?” At the time, of course, I'd been far too preoccupied with Mallory's absence to wonder much about any of it.
Visions of the Blessed Virgin.
Was it like one of those statues weeping in a church?

“The apparition happened a few years after you were here,” Brona replied. “It went on for months.”

“Turned all of Ballymorris on its head,” Leo went on. “I was on my holidays that spring, so I can tell you. First there were the reporters from RTÉ, then the pilgrims poured in from all over. The old hotel reopened, and there were new restaurants, new shops. 'Twas the best thing to happen to this place in a hundred years.”

Brona shot Leo a look. “'Twas a good thing for Ballymorris, in
some
ways,” she amended.

“The apparition,” I said. “Where was it?”

“Just outside town, at the grotto above the Sligo road,” Brona replied. “The young ones used to go up there after school, if the day was clear.”

“Hardly anyone goes there now, though,” Leo put in. “Not even to pray.”

I didn't think my grandmother had ever taken us up there; I guess there hadn't been much of a reason to before this thing happened. “Was it recognized? By the pope, I mean. That's the way it works, right?”

Paudie cleared his throat. “It wasn't, no.”

“Most of them aren't,” Brona said. “They're reported, and someone says they'll be looked into, and then they quietly fade away, to everyone but those who've seen her.”

Seeing as Paudie was related to one of the people involved, I couldn't come out with the most obvious question: did they actually believe in it?

“How are Tess and the others?” I asked him. “What are they up to now?”

“Well, Tess is with the Sisters of Compassion here in town…”

I felt an unpleasant little jolt of surprise, as if someone had opened the bathroom door on me. “She's a nun?”

“A lay sister,” Paudie said. “She's the director of the youth center over in Milk Lane.”

Again I thought of her hip and thigh pressed against mine in the car that day. It was impossible to picture her grown up and given over to God. “And the others?”

“Orla is married and livin' up the road with her three young ones,” Paudie replied, while Leo added in a stage whisper, “You'll know her from a mile away. She's gone permanently orange with all the self-tanner.” Brona clucked her tongue and smacked him on the wrist.

“As for Declan,” Paudie went on, “he left for Australia years ago, and I don't know that anyone's seen or heard much of him since.”

“And what about Síle?”

“Síle?” Paudie hesitated. “Aye, she's still here.”

“She lives nearby?”

“She's living in Sligo. North of town, past Rosses Point.”

There was a silence here that felt awkward, though I didn't see why it should have. The three exchanged a look. “She's in a place,” Leo said. “A home, like.”

“A home?”

“She's not quite right, if you know what I mean. She's a lovely girl, you'd never see a lovelier girl in all your life, but—”

“She's troubled,” Brona broke in gently.

“How so?”

“She was always different, Síle.” Paudie tilted his pint so the final mouthful sloshed around the bottom of the glass. “Like some wild thing out of a fairy story.”

Leo was nodding. “Like a selkie, aye. She didn't belong.”

“She charmed everyone she met,” Brona went on, “and yet she hadn't a friend in the world growing up. No one ever knew what to make of her, you see.”

“She and my sister got along very well,” I said. “I do remember that.”

Brona regarded me sadly. “If only you hadn't lived so far away.”

I looked back at the newspaper article on the wall. Fourteen-year-old Síle Gallagher smiled at me out of 1988, and I felt something whisper,
You let them think you came back here for a funeral, but that's not why.

“I'd like to know more about this whole thing,” I said. “Do you think I might be able to speak with the priest?”

Paudie shot me a squinty look. “Would you be thinking of writing about the apparition?”

I finished my Guinness and licked my lips. “Maybe.”

Maybe
meant
yes,
of course. Writing about the weird things that might have happened to them gave me a reason to see them again—Tess and Orla and Síle. Síle, too young to flirt, and she did it anyway.

There was another pause around the table before Paudie said, “You might want to talk to Tess first. I'll ring her in the morning and see can she speak to you.” He made a valiant attempt at a smile. “Sure, you'll be wanting to see her again regardless. The two of ye were great friends that time you were here.”

They didn't seem disapproving, exactly, but I caught their uneasiness flickering like a subliminal message on a movie screen. Leo glanced at me as he lifted his glass, and quickly looked away.

Then they fell into talking of other things, and I got up to buy another round. At one time the pub had done double duty as a grocery, and a shelf behind the bar was lined with tins of “coffee whitener” that looked older than Paudie and Brona and Leo put together. Napper Tandy's was their local, through and through—I gathered they never drank anywhere else.

I shouldn't have ordered that last pint. Sometimes I caught an anecdote and chuckled along, and other times I almost forgot where I was. I was too tired to be good company, but they forgave me.

*   *   *

Brona set me up in her spare room, but even with a space heater there was a dankness and a mildewy smell clinging to the bedding and towels. I almost felt as if I were entombed in this little room where the brown floral bedspread matched the draperies, and yet I was as unencumbered by my own life as I could possibly be: the uncertainty of my position at the magazine, the certainty of Laurel. The light had never gone out of her eyes, not even on that last night when I'd left to sleep on a friend's couch. Maybe she was still hoping I could be the man she'd mistaken me for.

I got into bed and turned out the lamp, but I was too restless to sleep. There were basic things about that childhood visit I genuinely couldn't remember. Had we stayed here or at John's house, and what had we eaten besides Turkish delight, and had John played any card games with us? Had we seen any ring forts or castles? How had we occupied ourselves when it rained?

And yet the most ordinary moments had never lost their clarity: Mallory throwing a pebble at me on the beach, Mallory asking our grandmother if our parents were getting a divorce, Mallory crawling behind a sofa in search of Gran's gaudy fake-gold clip-on earring. Maybe the memories of Mallory were clearest only because there would never be any more of them.

The silence weighed on me in that damp little room. I was alone, and yet there was a weird air of expectancy, the way it is when you're in the midst of a difficult conversation and you're just sitting there, fool that you are, waiting on the other person to speak.

 

2

NOVEMBER 6

The mattress was worn, the springs digging into my ribs whenever I surfaced out of a dream, but I told Brona I'd slept well. The narrow bathroom still smelled of her husband's aftershave, and the electric shower yielded little more than a trickle.

After breakfast I drove out to “Apparition Hill,” where a brown sign marked
GROTTO
led up a gravel track from the main road. The level ground at the top was punctuated by a crag wreathed in thorny brush, into which the shrine was set. It hadn't changed much since the newspaper photograph: in her niche the Virgin clasped her hands, eyes rolled heavenward in that signature expression of vacant serenity, and bouquets of faded synthetic flowers and pillar candles brimming with rainwater lined the cement ledges on either side. There was even a crutch propped against the ledge—but only one, as if the Mother of God had started on a miracle before changing her mind. I was pretty sure my grandmother hadn't brought us up here.

I parked my rented Micra behind a bench scored with the testimony of ancient teenage romances. From here you could see the little town laid out like a forgotten game of checkers, beyond it a muted green patchwork receding into hills and fog. The grass was strewn with potato chip bags, crumpled cider cans, and empty packs of cigarettes.

On the far end of the lot, I found a little white truck with a counter along one side, facing the grotto to keep the wind out. Rosaries and prayer cards spilled out of the window on hooks and display racks. I came a few steps closer and saw someone hunched inside—closer still, and I found a gaunt little lady I guessed to be nearly ninety, if not past it. Her skin was crinkled like twice-used tissue paper, and her jutting chin gave her the air of a witch in a fairy tale. I could tell before she opened her mouth that she had dentures, and also that she wasn't wearing them.

“Good morning,” I said.

She stared at me, then remembering herself, fumbled for a jar on a shelf by her elbow. “Beg pardon,” she said as she plucked her teeth out of the container and fitted them in. “I'd a pain in me jaw.”

“Toothache?”

She rolled her eyes and clucked her tongue. “If you live long enough, you'll have none of yours, either.”

I replied with a smile as I looked around at her inventory. A fluorescent light buzzed and flickered overhead. The old woman drummed her yellow fingernails on the counter, inspecting my face through her dusty bifocals. “Now, what is it that brings a nice lad like you up here on such a filthy morning?”

I picked up a prayer card, gave it a glance without reading any of it, and put it back. “Fresh air,” I replied. “You get much business up here?”

She shrugged. “Enough.”

I looked at her, and she parted her lips in a gummy grin. She knew I knew she was lying. “You've heard the stories?” she asked.

“About the apparition?”

The old woman nodded, and leaned forward on her stool as if she were about to divulge something juicy. “Did they tell you about the miracle?”

“What miracle? I thought the church decided the apparition wasn't real.”

“Oh, aye, they always do. Doesn't mean it wasn't.”

“You think it
was
real?”

“If it was or it wasn't, what
I
think makes no difference a'tall.”

I laughed. “There's a slippery answer.”

The lady gave me a sideways look as she pointed to a rack of cross pendants and religious medals in what passed for gold and silver. “Now, you'll be wanting a souvenir from your time here. Something for your gran?”