The Book of Illumination (14 page)

“Red and
yellow?”
she said disapprovingly.

Nona would never use two sweet peppers in a braise. Red and green, yellow and green, orange and green—all fine. But red and yellow? Much too similar, sweet and mild; the dish would lack depth. A variation like this was as unimaginable to my grandmother as my making lasagna “English” style, with béchamel sauce, an experiment I tried when I was fifteen. I guess I was rebelling. She still brings it up occasionally.

“Was it tough?”

“The rabbit? No.”

“Gamy?” Another reason to lean on green peppers. “Not really, no.”

“Hmmm,” she said, sounding a little disappointed. It probably felt unfair, her childhood friend’s being fortunate enough not only to turn out a flawless dinner, despite using the wrong peppers, but also to be spending Sunday afternoon surrounded by her entire extended family. Plus me. Whereas Nona probably went to eight o’clock Mass, then had dinner with someone else’s
family or spent the day alone. Dad wasn’t far away, but she wasn’t
his
mother. He’d be there in a blink if she needed her screens mended or her driveway shoveled, but he wasn’t going to hang around her hot little house all afternoon.

I feel awfully guilty about the two of them being alone. I wonder if Joe and Jay ever feel this way, and somehow I doubt it. Men are expected to go off into the world and make their way, but for a woman, it’s different. You feel … selfish. Disloyal. And Joe and Jay weren’t nearly as tied to Nona as I was, between the ghost business—my brothers did not inherit the gift—and my being the only girl.

I had wanted, and needed, to get away on my own for a while after college. I just couldn’t bring myself to move back home and resume a version of the life I had led from the time I was a little girl until I went away to school. Dad was never all that crazy about my being involved in the world of the spirits. Nona, on the other hand, just loved the drama of the phone ringing, especially in the middle of the night, and of our being summoned—we usually went together—to a stranger’s house or a funeral home or the office of a private detective. She still answers the calls whenever they come, but now, she goes alone.

“How’s my boy?” she asked.

“He’s great. He’ll be home any minute.”

“Oh. Where is he?”

“He was at his dad’s for the weekend.”

“Ah.” Her tone was a little smug. She knows Henry goes to Dec’s on the weekends, and I think she gets just a tiny bit of satisfaction from knowing that I, too, am often alone on Sundays.
Chi la fa l’aspetti
, she always used to say. What goes around comes around.

Nona has never met Declan, but her tone turns chilly every time his name is mentioned. The irony is, she would love him.
But it’s easier for her to blame him than me for the fact that I will probably never move back home. If he hadn’t gotten me pregnant, after all, I wouldn’t have to stay in Boston for the foreseeable future, if not for the rest of my life, so that Henry can be near his father. Then again, Nona wouldn’t have a great-grandson who sends her drawings for her refrigerator and tells her jokes over the phone and falls asleep in her lap on Christmas Day.

I considered telling her that Nell and Delia were coming here next weekend, but I stopped myself. What was the point? No matter how hard I try to paint my situation as that of a regular mom with a regular family life—laundry, cooking, sleepovers, birthday parties—she is never going to accept it completely. I might do a perfectly commendable job in my unfortunate situation, but in her mind, the fact will always remain that I gave birth to a child out of
wedlock
.

A word that doesn’t exactly fill me with a sense of hopeful abandon.

Complicating matters, she really can’t disapprove of the choice Declan made to go back to Kelly. What she wishes will happen, she has often told me, is that I will meet a “nice young man” who will marry me and adopt Henry, so my son can have a “real father.”
Easier said than done
, I always think, and besides, he
ha
s a real father. A great one.

What always reassures her that I am still “her girl,” though, are tales of the ghosts with whom I am presently communicating.

“Monks?” she said. “How old?”

“Oh, close to a thousand, I think.”

“Where are they from?”

“Ireland.”

“If they want a bishop,” she went on, “you call Monsignor Dolan. He knows everybody. And you helped him a lot.”

I’d met the sprightly cleric in my late teens, when Nona was
sidelined with a case of sciatica. A successful local contractor had died suddenly, just months after making a new will in which he left a valuable piece of lakeside property to the Diocese of Cleveland. But the will could not be found. The lawyer had skipped town, under a cloud of conflict-of-interest charges. And while the contractor’s wife remembered seeing an envelope that she believed contained the revised will, no one could find it in the days following the man’s death.

That’s where I came in, and Monsignor Dolan was in the room when the spirit of the contractor told me where the document was filed. Or rather, misfiled. There’s a summer camp now on the edge of the lake, and in fall and spring, the buildings are used for conferences. It’s much in demand as a location for weddings, and that’s easy money for the diocese. Monsignor Dolan gives me all the credit for this, and having been in the room when the conversation happened, he no longer doubts the existence of ghosts. He’s always happy to help me when I call.

I glanced at the clock: six twenty. Where were the guys?

“I have something to tell you,” Nona went on. I snapped to, fearing the worst: cancer.

“I met someone,” Nona said.

I waited for her to go on, but she didn’t.

“What do you mean?” I asked.

“I
met
someone.”

“Like … a man?” I asked. If she were my age, I wouldn’t feel comfortable voicing this assumption, especially in Cambridge. But this was Nona.

“Of course, a
man,”
she said.

“
Really?”
Wow. “Well, who
is
he? What’s his name?”

“Paul,” Nona answered. “His wife died a year ago.”

“How did you meet him?”

“At church. He invited me out for coffee.”

“When was this?”

“Oh, I don’t know. A while ago.”

“Have you seen him again? Since this coffee?”

“Every day,” she said cheerfully.

“Nona, that’s so great!” I said. “That’s really … great,” I added, unable, in my shock, to think of anything else to say.

What followed was even more shocking.

My grandmother giggled.

Henry was in a philosophical mood. The church Declan and Kelly take the kids to, St. Ambrose’s, can be a little on the old school side, depending on who says the Mass. When Henry’s very tired, which he often is on Sunday nights, he can get fretful over things he’s heard in the sermon, words or concepts that unsettled him in the moment, dispersed like phantoms when he hit the fresh air, and now have returned to hover over his bed.

“Mama,” he said after I’d kissed him and tucked him in and gotten him a second glass of water and promised for the third time that I would firm up his movie date with Nat.

I gave him a stern look. The preliminaries were now officially over. It was bedtime.

“Is your mama in heaven?”

Oh, okay. So he wasn’t just stalling. I sat back down on his bed and took a minute. “I hope so,” I finally said, thinking,
Whatever heaven is
.

“Don’t you
know?”

I shook my head. “Nobody knows, sweetie, not for sure. Nobody ever came back to tell us.”

He thought about this for a minute. “But you
think
she is, right?”

I wondered how truthful I should be. On the spectrum of
confidence in the existence of the exact version of heaven I was raised to spend my life earning admission to, I fall somewhere in the middle. I am absolutely certain that a person’s existence doesn’t end with their last heartbeat; I’ve seen plenty of evidence of that. But I suspect that what lies on the other side of the white light is something far, far grander and more magnificent than the heaven depicted in my grade school catechism, and Henry’s, books that feature images of angels floating around on clouds. Anything is possible, really. I mean, think how unlikely it is that we are alive at all, held on by gravity to an enormous ball turning majestically through space.

“Right?” Henry said, with a little more urgency. Clearly I hadn’t answered fast enough.

He was five, he was tired, he was scared. The time for a nuanced examination of faith and doubt was not now.

“Right,” I said. I hoped it would end there, with a sigh of relief and Henry snuggling deep under the covers, but it didn’t.

“She died when you were little. Littler than me.”

I nodded. He’d heard the story before but he often asked me to repeat it, as though familiarity would eventually rub off its awful edges.

“We were walking to Nona’s,” I began, as I always begin.

“Nona’s same house?” he asked.

“Yup. Uncle Joe and Uncle Jay were at Nona’s and Mama and I were walking over to Nona’s to pick them up.” “From Pop’s.”

“Well, it’s Pop’s house now, but everybody lived there then. Mama and Pop and me, and Uncle Joe and Uncle Jay.”

“I
know!”

I smiled. “I know you know. You know the whole story. So why don’t you tell it to
me
for a change?”

He dove under the covers. When he peeked out he was grinning
nervously and shaking his head. He scurried back under the comforter.

“Come on,” I said.

Silence.

“I thought you knew the story,” I said.

“I do!”

“You must not remember it, then, because—”

From under the covers, I heard him say, “Your mama got hit by a car. And she died. But you didn’t.”

“That’s right,” I said. “She pushed the stroller out of the way, so I was safe.”

He peeked out, and he was no longer grinning.

“But if you got hit, too, you’d be in heaven with your mama.”

“
May-be,”
I said, trying to lighten the conversation with a singsongy tone.

I finally had an inkling of what this might be about. I wrapped his comforter around him and dragged him onto my lap.

“Are you afraid I might die?” I asked quietly.

He looked at me and gave a tentative little nod. Given the hour and how tired he was, there was only one way to handle this.

“Well I’m
not
going to,” I said. “Not today, not tomorrow, not ever.”

He gave me a suspicious look. Was I pulling his leg? Or could what he most wished for possibly be true? Bravely, he said, “Everybody dies, Ma. You have to die sometime.”

I shook my head. “Nope. Not me. I’m the only person who ever lived who is never, ever,
ever
going to die.”

He was starting to smile. “You will, too!”

“Nope. No way! I’m going to hang around and
bug
you and drive you crazy until I’m a thousand years old and have no teeth and have white hair down to the ground! And I’ll make you wait on me and I’ll scare away all your friends.”

I stood up and slung him down onto the bed. He was giggling now and trying to pull away from me. I threw in a tickle or two, stealth-style.

“And if they won’t go away,” I continued, “I’ll fry them up and eat them! And I’ll fry you up and eat you, too! Rrrrrrr!” I tackled him and rustled the covers and tickled his squirming form.

“Noooo!” he said, “I’ll eat you! I’ll fry
you
up and eat
you!!!”

He made gobbling sounds and tried to tickle me.

“And then what?” I said, in my meanest, witchiest voice.

“I’ll go live with Daddy!” he shouted, triumphantly.

A
S USUAL, THIS
morning, I had been early. I hadn’t wanted to be late on my first day of work, so I’d allowed for an extra forty-five minutes of travel time, in case there were problems on the Red Line. There weren’t. With time to spare, I got off at Charles Street, bought a grapefruit juice at Savenor’s, and made my way over to Beacon, then up the hill toward the Athenaeum.