Martin Sloane (25 page)

“No, I’m —”

“I’d be crushed, Jo, what do you think? I’d rather be told I was an asshole and never hear from you again than think something bad happened to you.”

“Yes,” I said.

“What?”

“Yes. That’s how I’d feel too.”

He was silent a moment, perhaps anxious he’d bulldozed an important moment. “Is there something wrong with Molly?” he said. “Is that what this is about?”

“I still don’t really know what this is about, Daniel. One moment I have a hunch, and then I think I must be wrong —” “You don’t make any sense.”

“I know. She’s kind of … robust and devastated all at once. We used to be very close, and something happened …”

“What?”

“I can’t explain it all now. I’m just … it was in the past, all of this, for the longest time. And now I’m in the middle of it again. Maybe a little deeper than I should be.”

“That seems to be happening a lot to you these days. Bad planning?”

“Maybe it’s good luck,” I said. “In some cases.”

“The tin-woman gets her heart.”

I turned back to the street, where medical supplicants roved in and out of the offices behind me. “Daniel, do you remember, about six weeks ago, I woke you up in the middle of the night? And you said something about no one remembering what we were like as kids?”

“It was just a dumb thought.”

“No, I don’t think it was. It made me very sad. I think, without knowing it, you put your finger on why I’m here.”

“That’s wonderfully vague.”

“I know.”

“Okay.” I heard him groan as he stretched. “Jolene, almost everything you say goes right over my head and it excites me tremendously. When will you be back here to confuse me in person, do you think?”

“Soon. A few days.”

“Will you call again?”

“I might,” I said.

“I’ll stay awake just in case.”

“Daniel.”

“Oh no.”

“Can I say something heavy?”

“Will I understand it?”

“I love you. You know? I’m sorry I haven’t said it before now. I love you.”

There was silence on his end for a moment and I felt fearful. “What was the heavy part?” he said, and we both laughed. “Are you okay?”

“
No-oo
. I’m fucked! I’m with someone I used to love looking for someone else I used to love, okay? That’s the truth. That’s what I can tell you of it right now.” I fell silent, and heard, down the telephone line, the hum of the distance between us. “I’m afraid to find anything else out.”

“Find out,” he said. “It’s important, or you wouldn’t have gone. Okay? Do what you need to do there and don’t worry. Nothing’s changing where I am.”

“Thank you,” I said.

“I have your picture here. I’m looking at it a lot.”

“I’ll see you soon. Don’t forget what I just said.”

When we met back at the car, Molly was excited about something she’d seen in the town. I had to pull myself out of the intimate place I was in.

“There’s a sign to Clonmacnoise,” she said, breathless. “It’s back a ways on the highway, but it’s just a few miles from here.”

“What’s Clonmacnoise?”

“The Bible, Jo. The story Martin told us. The other half is down there. They have it on display.”

I remembered the story now. The petrified Bible. One beautiful half gone forever. “It’s probably not open,” I said.

“I already asked,” She waved the keys. She opened the door and leaned across to unlock my side. “And I even have directions.”

“You think of everything,” I said.

She drove. She was the same as she’d been before we stopped, bright and focused. We went round and dipped through traffic at the edge of town to get out. Molly navigated the roundabout, then went south.

“Did you clear your head?” she asked.

“I called Daniel.”

“Great.” She kept her eyes forward. “So everything is okay at home?”

“Everything’s fine. He misses me.”

“Of course he does,” she said, looking over.

“Watch the road, okay?”

“He’s still off-limits, huh?”

“No,” I said, “Go ahead and ask me whatever you want.”

“Really? Okay.” She thought for a moment. “Well, I guess I have a picture of your life now. New boyfriend. You don’t really know where things are going. Is this the first guy since …?”

“Uh-huh.”

“Well, good. I’m glad for you, Jo. It’s a good sign.”

“I wasn’t much of a catch before now. It took a while.” She didn’t say anything, so I just let myself speak. “I went to Toronto because I couldn’t think of where else to go. I left my job behind, and the few people I knew, and I just got on a bus. First thing I did when I got there was I broke into Martin’s apartment. I didn’t know what I was expecting to find there. It was empty. Some bills and circulars, layers of dust on everything. There were books on his bedside table that I’d recommended to him. That was hard to see.”

“I’m sure.”

“It was an awful place. Badly lit, with a crumbling parquet floor. I spent all of five minutes in it before I had to leave, gagging, and I never went back. I wrote an anonymous letter to the police and I expect they dealt with it the same way the Bloomington police did. There’s a file somewhere with his name on it.”

She listened, driving the thin road carefully. “And you just found a place and started living.”

“Yes.”

“That was brave of you. I don’t think I would have been able to do it.”

“You don’t know what you can do until you have to do it, Molly.” I shifted uncomfortably in my seat. “Anyway. What about your life? All I know is that you’re still a lawyer. You still live in New York, right?”

“Do you really want to know?”

“Yes.”

“I work six-day weeks. I live in an apartment on Central Park West. I have a fish.”

“One fish.”

“It’s good to have something around that’s more pathetic than you are.”

“Do you still know your ex?”

“No,” she said, and the way she said it, I knew not to go there. “I date a little. But I don’t take it seriously anymore.”

“That doesn’t sound like a formula for success.”

“I have to clean up my life before I move on to anything new. Just like you did.”

“Okay,” I said.

“There’s an old me as well, and I’m trying to get away from it.”

“There was nothing wrong with the old you. The old you was my best friend, Molly.”

“You still think of me like that, even after what happened?”

“Well, I don’t really know what happened, except that you took a gift the wrong way. But until that point, yes. You were my friend.”

“I was,” she said, almost to herself. She drove partway up a grassy verge to give room to a small car coming the opposite direction.

“Pretty easy to get killed on these roads,” I said.

She came back down to the flat grade. “It’s not really safe to love other people, is it?”

“I guess not.”

“They never really tell you that.”

“No,” I said. “That part you get to find out on your own.”

In about half an hour, at a bend in the road, we came upon it. It lay against the river Shannon, a black and grey jumble of crosses and crumbling churches. We parked in the empty lot and I looked over at Molly, and I sighed involuntarily. She smiled at me like a child.

I’d never seen anything as bereft and beautiful as Clonmacnoise. It was a square of buildings and graves enclosed in a crumbled wall with nothing beyond it all but fields and river. A worn path at the far edge of the site faded under grass only twenty feet out; a sign there said the path once went all the way to Dublin Bay. Half a dozen or so churches had been raised in the distant past; they were all gone now, blackened stone lying half-buried in the ground and worn smooth by hands. The roofless walls and earthen floors, no sense at all of where people did the things they do in churches, the transepts gone, the altars gone. Just half-walls and rooms open to sun and rain. It was history of people, their faith transubstantiated into granite and slate: pure grief, pure cold, a place for an absent God so far away from everything, including life, that it oozed holiness.

We wandered among the gravestones, most blank from wind and rain, all the names of the dead eroded. Their stories, with their scandals, their love affairs, their unexpected kindnesses, all of it gone. Molly hooked her arm in mine. There was nothing to say. The sign in the interpretation centre’s door said the building was closed until one for lunch—we could see three people sitting at the top of a hill at the base of the remnants of a castle. We walked through a little field of cows and saw them waving at us. “People are so friendly here,” I said. We mounted the hill and joined them.

“Are you crazy?” one of the wavers said when we got to them. “There’re four bulls in that field. The way up is from the road.” They pointed to a path with a fence on either side. I looked back down into the field and saw the bulls: they were the ones mounting the cows. We gratefully sat with the people when they invited us, and we sat beside one of the broken corners of the castle: a massive block of stone leaning against the rest of the structure. Behind us, a stone staircase spiralled up past arrow slits and into thin air. The interpretation guides had been there all morning and we were the first visitors. We shared some cheese with them and Molly had some wine. I tried to think of what all of this would look like from high up. Just a plangent green with a perfect square of grey in the middle like it was a door to somewhere. We asked them when they were going to reopen, and they said anytime now, and so we walked back with them, along the path to the road, and the road into the monastery.

Inside the interpretation centre, they gave us pamphlets and postcards. Molly asked to see the Clonmacnoise Bible. The three looked at each other. Perhaps you know it under a different name, she said. She described it, and one of them went and got a postcard of an old hymnal that had turned up in someone’s attic in the nearby village of Ballynahown. It dated to the 1860s, they told us, and Molly shook her head and said, Older than that, and they all said, No, there was no such thing. She stood there completely still. I asked for the name of the long-tailed bird. Pied wagtail, said one. Just a magpie, said another. Someone here should get their facts straight, Molly shouted and she ran out. I followed her into the parking lot and found her standing beside the passenger door. She was staring out at the wind-washed stone of Clonmacnoise, shaking with anger. I watched her from the driver’s side, unsure of what to say or do. A cooler wind was coming up now; it blew my hair into my mouth.

“He lied,” she said, not looking away from the stones. “He made it up.”

I smiled uncomfortably. “I was worried he had.”

She brought her face around. Her eyes were livid with hurt. “Did he lie a lot?” The wind tore the words away from her face.

“I wouldn’t say it was lying, but obviously he was leaving a lot out, wasn’t he?” I walked around the front of the car. Stood a foot or so from her, feeling the intensity of her emotion as a force holding me at bay. “Listen, Molly. I’m ready now. I know you haven’t told me everything. I want to know why we’re here.” I held a hand up to keep her from interrupting me. “You said you wanted to help me. So help me then.”

She stepped away from me to open the passenger door, then stood behind it, a barrier between us. “Let’s get back in the car,” she said. She left the door open and walked around to get in behind the wheel. I got in too and closed the door. She’d already put the keys into the ignition, but I pulled them back out and gripped them in my fist. She didn’t so much as turn her body toward me. She said, “I’m here to take something back.”

“Like what, Molly? Please don’t tell me this is about that fucking honeycomb.”

“No.”

“Then what? Did you steal something from us? He vanished and I left it all behind, so I can’t imagine what it is you’d want to give back that either of us would want.”

“Not give back,” she said. “Take back.” She breathed in deeply. “It was my fault, Jolene. It was something I did.”

“What the hell are you talking about?”

She reached over and pulled the keys out of my hand. My fingers just slipped open and she slid the key into the ignition without a sound.

X.

EVERYBODY’S, 1957. 13" X 16" X 3". WOOD AND GLASS WITH PAPER, CONSTRUCTED MINIATURES, AND FOUND OBJECTS. THE MENIL COLLECTION, HOUSTON, TEXAS. A STORE WINDOW, CIRCA 1938, FULL OF MINIATURE TOYS, A TRAIN SET, AND THE MONTH’S CHILDREN’S MAGAZINES. SIDES AND BACKGROUND OF BOX A PHOTOGRAPH OF THE SURFACE OF THE MOON.

CRAMPED, SALT-REEKING GALWAY WAS MORE UNPLEASANT
than Martin had feared, and later it got worse. It was a fake city, like the painted booths of a county fair, the shop windows displaying dusty magazines ajumble with creaky toys and faded corsets, the druggist’s shelves thinly stocked, although bile beans and bullet-shaped suppositories were available everywhere, as if the main activity in Galway were egestion. That seemed right: this was life in the form of an aftermath, and all the colourless days and nights to come seemed very much the product of a nourishment now mulched to fetidness.

At the beginning, they’d lived with the Hannahs, old friends of their mother’s who lived in an apartment above Donnellan’s, a furnishing shop where the sounds of dowels being whacked into holes could be heard at all hours. The four of them slept like stowaways in a room separated by a curtain from the rest of the Hannahs (there were the parents, the eldest boy, Malcolm, the girl, Sheila, and Gabriel, the youngest at eight). Never in his life had Martin felt such remorse; so much that despite his fear of darkness and eternity, he wanted to die and set his parents and even his sister free. If his continuing life had pulled them clear across the country, then only his death would release them back to where they belonged. But he believed he was too much a coward ever to set them free that way. The only saving graces were the gas lamps that cast an orange light in brilliant cones up to the night sky, and the horses beneath them, those noble animals, running their carriage errands.

Don’t stare at them too hard, Theresa said, or they’ll blow up.

This reproach stung him as she knew it would. It had been a terrible thing to dynamite King George on the very day of the London coronation. Their mother had been very upset about it, but their father muttered bitterly as they passed through Maynooth: Art criticism. He should have been sitting on an ass. There’d been a period of silence after that.