The Innocent Sleep (22 page)

I needed to clear my head. But my mind was racing. I sat in the van, watching the waves come in and out. I breathed deeply. I tried to calm myself, to still my shaking hands. I reached into the glove compartment for the flask I kept there. I gave it a good shake to see if there was still some left, unscrewed the top, and gulped. The whiskey made me shiver and gag. The second gulp eased me.

There were a few people in the water. Splashing about and swimming out to the rocks. My father used to bring me here, to the Forty Foot, before Christmas dinner. Just the two of us. We always had a late dinner on Christmas Day. There’s less people, he’d say, and I knew by the way he said it that he meant it as a good thing.

Caught by a sudden impulse, I reached into the back and grabbed a towel that had been stuffed into one of the moving boxes. Then, leaving the van behind, I made my way down to the water. With all the food I had eaten and the wine I had drunk, with the nervy distraction and anxiety I was feeling, it was probably the worst thing I could have done: gone for a swim. But that’s what I am telling you: I was not thinking straight. I was determined. And the questions had gathered again, gathered to a chorus of accusation:
You, why, you, you.

I made my way to the rocky changing area, a concrete shelter with stone benches. A man in a pair of orange trunks was beating his chest. “It’s the only thing for you.” He pointed to the woman sitting beside him. She had a scarf wrapped around her head and a mildly amused look. “As for my wife,” he said, “there are two chances of her getting into that water: Bob Hope and no hope.”

She nodded to me, and the man chuckled and started to sing, “I’m dreaming of a white Christmas.” Their cheer bounced off me. I was impervious to anything but my own loneliness.

I stripped. The woman took a sharp intake of breath, and her husband said something about “old school.” I walked naked toward the rocks, braced myself, and jumped in. The water was freezing, and I sank with a gasp. Surfacing, I sucked air into my lungs and gave a yelp. I swam out a distance, then began to feel sluggish.
You drugged him. You left him to his death.
My stomach ached. I counted twelve strokes, thought about turning back, but as I did so, a sharp pain struck in my side. I braced myself, and the pain struck again.
Why did you leave him there? Why could you not have taken him with you?
In that moment, all the fight went out of me. I took a deep breath and relaxed. There was no point in struggling anymore. My arms floated outward and my head went under again. Strangely, the water didn’t seem so cold to me then. I pointed my toes and sank deeper into the sea. Down, down, I went, giving myself to the water, feeling it closing in above me, claiming me. My eyes opened, and I could see a dark, grainy sediment. It was like the texture and quality of the CCTV footage. Then my body shot upward, toward the light, and I bobbed out of the water before going down again.
My baby boy
.
My baby boy
. This time, the water’s grainy texture yielded those very images I had saved and replayed for Robin. I felt like I could have kept on falling toward the seafloor, but I shot up again like some kind of buoy, and this time my head was not plunged back into the water’s steely embrace.

I swam back to shore and climbed out. The man in the orange trunks handed me my towel. “Here, have a wee dram of that,” he said, passing me a flask of hot coffee laced with whiskey. “You scared my wife off,” he said.

I apologized. He laughed. “You’re all right?”

“I am,” I said, still shivering, and handed back his flask. The few who had been in the water when I’d first jumped in had disappeared. The man told me I was the last of the day. “You had me worried for a moment, bobbing up and down like that. Best to swim with someone watching.” He wished me a good Christmas and headed off toward his car, where his wife was waiting. I felt their eyes on me as I walked back to the van.

I got dressed and called home. I don’t know why. The phone rang, but there was no answer. I pictured it clanging away in the empty house, echoing from room to room; the dusk settling, dessert half eaten.

There in the car, I closed my eyes. I tried to put myself back in time. I tried to peer into the rubble with my mind’s eye to see the lifeless body of my boy. Dust clogged the image, and I struggled to find some sense of acceptance. My son’s body, pulled down into the yielding earth, covered over, decaying, turning to dust. I kept my eyes shut, trying to feel it, trying to believe it. But it would not come. Something within me prevented my accepting it. Instead, I opened my eyes and fumbled in my jacket. Hands shaking, I pulled out my phone.

There within my list of messages was the text from Spencer: “Is this him?” The image attached showed a blurry and distant shot of the boy. I stared at the picture and felt a glow of conviction gather within me. It was him. I knew it was him.

I rang Spencer. “The address, I need the address.”

“And a merry Christmas to you too. I’m not giving it to you over the phone, Harry. Why don’t you stop over tomorrow.”

I hung up.

The cold of the sea had entered my bones. My body shook. I looked at my hands; they were mottled and blue, and I couldn’t help but think of Cozimo’s hands, speckled with liver spots, frail, the hands of an old man, and I remembered his words to me: “Very unlikely. But not impossible.” There was only one place I could go now. I eased the car back onto the road and headed into the city.

*   *   *

Spencer
answered the door wearing socks, a Lloyd Cole T-shirt, and a Santa hat. He was holding a can of beer. “Harry. Jesus, are you okay?”

I walked past him, into the warm fug of his flat, needing some heat to penetrate my bones. Spencer’s latest girlfriend, Angela, was sitting on the couch. I knew her from a long time ago.

“Hello, stranger,” she said.

She wore Spencer’s robe, and the way her hair was tossed, she looked like she had just climbed out of bed. I stood there, stunned and confused. At my elbow, Spencer looked sheepish, eyeing me with an air of mild apprehension.

“Harry, is everything okay?” he asked again.

Angela got up and reached for my arm. “You look cold, pet. Your hair is wet.” She shot a glance at Spencer.

“Christmas swim,” I said, laughing, but the laugh came out hollow and forced, and I saw the look of alarm that passed between them. I was hanging by a thread.

“Christ, Harry,” Spencer said. “Sit down there and I’ll get something to warm you up.”

Smoke wafted from the kitchen.

“The turkey is incinerated,” Angela said.

Spencer shrugged. “Burnt to a sausage.”

“I don’t care,” Angela said. “I’m going to have a shower and get dressed. Then I’m ringing the Shelbourne and booking a table.”

“Last of the big spenders,” Spencer said.

His blithe tone was betrayed by the concerned expression on his face. Was he talking to Angela under his breath? I couldn’t be sure. I was so far gone.

“Can I get you a sweater or a towel, something to make you warmer?”

“I’m fine, Angela,” I said.

She shrugged and left the room.

“I’ve come for the address.”

“Harry, it’s Christmas fucking Day.”

“I can’t wait any longer. I know you have it—now, cough up.”

“Listen, buddy—”

“Don’t tell me to listen, Spencer.”

“All right, all right!” He put his hands up in a gesture of surrender and crossed to the other side of the room, where he lifted his jeans off the back of the couch and fished in the pockets until he found a scrap of paper. I kept my eyes fixed on the note as he returned to me, passing it from one hand to the other, his reluctance apparent. It felt like he was taunting me with it.

“I’m not giving it to you without going with you,” he said.

“Let’s go, then.”

He sighed and shook his head. “You know, Harry, I think this might be a red herring.”

“What?”

“The address, the boy.”

“You’ve seen him. The picture you sent me—”

“I saw
a
boy, Harry—”

“You went there. You saw him with your own two eyes. The picture—”

“It’s not him, Harry.”

I stopped. I held my breath, waiting for him to say more, wanting him to speak, even as part of me shrank from what he might say.

“Look. When I got the address, I decided to take a drive down there and check it out myself before passing the information on to you. So I went. I checked it out. The house is a cottage in the middle of nowhere. There’s nothing sinister about it. There was a couple there with their kid.”

“With Dillon.”

“There’s a vague likeness. But I’m telling you honestly, I don’t think it’s him.”

I didn’t speak, just stood there withstanding his concerned gaze.

“You’ve got to let it go,” he said gently. “This obsession you’ve developed … it’s not healthy. I’m worried about you, Harry.”

He went to put his hand on my shoulder, but I raised my palm, warning him to back off.

“Listen, I’m sure Robin is worried about you. Why not head home? We can talk about this tomorrow.”

I hung my head; something within me was starting to give way.

“I need a drink,” he said then. “How about it?”

“Yeah. Sure.”

He went to the fridge and set about fixing gin and tonics, and I stood there listening to him talk about a total lunar eclipse, how the moon turns red, how we were about to have one, and something else about the moon passing through a shadow created by the earth that I did not understand.

At the same time, my eyes were fixed on the kitchen counter and the scrap of paper he had left tucked behind a coffee cup. Rattling ice cubes into each glass, Spencer kept talking, and for once I was grateful for his verbosity, as it meant he didn’t notice me leaning forward to pluck that note from its hiding place. He was slicing limes and cucumbers and rattling on about God knows what while I passed my gaze over the scrawl of his handwriting, absorbing that address into my memory. Not an easy thing to do when you’re full of goose and booze and still shivering from plunging into the frigid waters of the Irish Sea, but I managed it.

And then with the address in my head, I slipped out the front door, Spencer’s voice trailing behind me as I left.

Downstairs, I found the van where I had left it, parked alongside Spencer’s old Jag. Before I got the key into the lock, a sudden impulse overtook me. I walked over to the passenger side of the Jag and tried the door. Locked. I looked about, found a fist-sized rock by the car’s front tire, and with barely a moment’s thought, I smashed that rock through the passenger side’s glass window with one heavy swipe. Reaching in, I opened the door while the car alarm screamed around me. I lunged toward the glove compartment and found what I was looking for. I didn’t stop to check if it was loaded, just jammed the gun into my pocket, jumped into the van, and took off without once looking back.

*   *   *

On
the road again. Darkness was falling, and the streets were silent and empty. My phone lit up. Someone had rung through to my voice mail and left a message. In fact, there were two messages. I was sure one would be from Spencer. He had tried to play it cool at his place, ease me into trusting him again. But it wasn’t him. The first message was from Cozimo. His voice sounded frail and far away. I could barely make out what he said: “Harry, I’m sorry. I should have liked to have talked more. I should have liked to have told you…” The sentence ended in an excruciating incompleteness, much like our last meeting. The next message was from Robin.

She sounded hoarse, as if she had been crying. “Harry, I’ve left with my parents. I’ll be staying with them tonight. I don’t know what else to say.” That was it. The phone went dead. I pulled over and rang her back. There was no answer. But I kept dialing. Ten, twenty, who knows how many times. Finally, she answered in a whisper, “Harry?”

“Robin.”

“Harry, I don’t want to hear it.”

“What?”

“Whatever you’re going to say.”

A long sigh came out of her. I don’t know why, but I was smiling. It was time to come clean, and I felt strangely exhilarated. I knew she wasn’t going to hang up. Wait till she hears what Javier said, wait till she hears about the green amulet, the tarot card, the Sun card, for Christ’s sake, wait till she hears all that, I thought. And the child mummy in London and
The Book of the Dead,
all of it leading me to Dillon. She would be convinced, won over—not swayed but swept away by the guidance I was receiving. Surely with her own intuitive sense she would realize all this. But before I could tell her anything she said, “I’m worried about you.”

“Don’t be.”

“You’ve been acting so … erratically.”

“I have an address, Robin.
The
address.”

A pause.

“This has to stop, Harry. You need help.”

“Don’t you see? Everything is so clear now. He’s so close, Robin. After all this time, I’m almost there. I’ve almost reached him.”

“Jesus, can’t you hear yourself? This is exactly like last time.”

“Last time?” I said, momentarily thrown. “What are you talking about? Today is the first day I’ve told you about this.”

“You’re confused, Harry. You’re not well. You need to see someone.”

“Robin, you don’t understand.”

“I can’t handle this by myself anymore. I’ve tried to pretend that you’re all right, that this is just a blip—a temporary lapse brought about by stress. But it’s more serious than that. I finally realized that tonight. Harry—I’m frightened for you.” The pitch of her voice shifted, and I heard genuine alarm in her tone.

“Frightened
for
me or frightened
of
me?”

She ignored the question.

“I’ve come back to my parents’,” she whispered desperately into the phone.

“But I want you to come home.”

“No, Harry.”

“Are you leaving me?” I asked, jolted suddenly by the possibility. “Is that what you’re doing?”

She paused, as if thinking about what I had asked. I waited to hear what she would say next, waited to hear the bend in her voice as she denied it, as she cleaved to my request to come home. But she did not say what I thought she would.