Immaculate Heart

 

Begin Reading

Table of Contents

About the Author

Copyright Page

 

Thank you for buying this

St. Martin's Press ebook.

 

To receive special offers, bonus content,

and info on new releases and other great reads,

sign up for our newsletters.

 

Or visit us online at

us.macmillan.com/newslettersignup

 

For email updates on the author, click
here
.

 

The author and publisher have provided this e-book to you for your personal use only. You may not make this e-book publicly available in any way.
Copyright infringement is against the law. If you believe the copy of this e-book you are reading infringes on the author's copyright, please notify the publisher at:
us.macmillanusa.com/piracy
.

 

 

 

For Seanan,

my Old Shoe

 

“They say time happens all at once,” the woman says. “Did you ever hear that?” She stands in the surf wearing a blue dress that billows in the wind. The dress looks like one my mom used to wear on Sundays until somebody spilled bleach on it.

I shake my head. “What did you do with your shoes?” I ask. There are so many families on the outing today that I can't tell at first whose parents are whose. But she isn't anybody's mother. I've worked that out now.

The sun is at her back, so her face is in shadow, but I can tell she's smiling. “Past, present, and future, all rolled in together,” she goes on. “So it doesn't matter what you do, does it? It doesn't matter, sure it doesn't.”

I don't know why this lady wants to talk to me. I don't understand why she's telling me this stuff, when I'm just some kid digging for sand crabs along the shoreline of a country I've never been to before. From somewhere—all the way down the far end of the beach, it sounds like—I can hear my sister laughing.

“You don't see it yet, but you will.” The wind lifts the woman's long black hair and makes darting shapes with it in the bright air. “It's happened, it's done, and that means you can do anything you like.”

 

1

NOVEMBER 5

“The widow let out a terrible shriek, and her husband's hand fell from her waist as he crumpled to the floor. Then there came a great confusion in the house, but when the neighbors took him by the wrist, they found him well and truly lifeless. And that,” said the old man, “is how Jack Brennan came to dance at his own wake.”

Leo slumped back against the worn red upholstery inside the snug as if the story had exhausted him, and for a minute or two we sipped our pints in silence. He had the most remarkable ears I'd ever seen: the tops were mottled red and purple, the gray thatch sprouting from his inner ear was so thick it was a wonder he could hear anything at all, and the lobes dribbled down the sides of his face like melted candle wax.

“You didn't tell it quite so well as John did,” Paudie said at last. “But sure, that's a good story no matter how you tell it.”

I vaguely remembered Paudie and Brona from my first trip to Ireland when I was twelve, and Uncle John from the handful of times he'd come to the U.S., but this was the first time I'd met Leo. He told me he'd spent almost forty years making shoelaces in Liverpool, and I was still trying to work out whether or not he was joking.

“Ye'll never hear that story the way that Johnny told it.” Leo rubbed at his eyes with trembling fingers. “Ye'll never hear it again. Not the way he told it.”

The sight of the old man's tremors threw me backward into the afternoon. Halfway to Ballymorris in the pissing rain (as Leo called it), a crow had flown into my windshield, and just sitting here remembering it brought back the juddering of the steering wheel, the shuddering sensation up and down my arms. The wipers had flung the bird onto the highway, and when I'd lifted my eyes to the rearview mirror, I saw it, wings a mess, twitching on the pavement. A second crow came down to land beside the first, peering closely at its comrade, and I'd wondered if birds knew what to say in those final seconds any more than humans did.

Brona sighed. “Can't we talk of something
other
than death and dying?” John was gone, but it wouldn't do anybody any good to brood over it. She reached over and patted my arm. “What about you? You must have loads of stories from all the traveling you do, chasin' after news.”

Leo dismissed his friend's question with a wave of a crinkled hand. “We've plenty of time to hear about all that.” He leaned in with a conspiratorial air, drumming the table with his fingers. “C'mere, now, tell us: d'you have a wife or a girlfriend or—”

“He hasn't got a wife!” Paudie cut in. “Can't you see he hasn't got a ring on?”

Leo was not to be denied. “Well then, how about a girlfriend?”

I hid my face in my pint and waited for the moment to pass, because your love life is the last thing you want to talk about when you've left a good woman crying in her underwear only two nights before. Right now Laurel was probably in the living room, subtracting her books from the collection she'd so happily merged two years ago. Maybe she was alone, or maybe she'd invited a friend over—one who'd never liked me to begin with—but either way, there'd be nothing left of hers by the time I got home. I hated this: the knowing you couldn't give someone what they wanted, and the wishing they'd stop wanting it so the two of you could carry on with the easy life you'd already laid out for yourselves.

At least the worst of it was happening while I was three thousand miles away.

Brona proved her wise heart by changing the subject. “And how long do we have you for? Don't tell us you're leaving tomorrow!”

“I had a bunch of vacation days saved up,” I said. “I fly home on the sixteenth.”

“Ah, that's a nice bit of time,” Paudie replied with satisfaction. “We'll show you everything there is to see, and a good deal more besides.” Brona slid him a doubtful look over the rim of her glass.

“I thought I might drive down to Galway for a night or two,” I said. “Maybe see the Cliffs of Moher. I don't know if we went there the last time I was here.”

“D'you recall how our car broke down on the way home from Sligo that day?” Paudie laughed. “You lads were all worn out from the long day of swimming, and we had to pile ourselves into Johnny's and the Gallaghers' cars for the rest of the trip home.”

As he spoke, the day revisited itself upon me: squished into the backseat of an old sedan, sand itching in every crevice, the right side of my body pressed against the freckled contours of a ginger-haired girl. We'd played together; I remembered I'd liked her, but packed into the backseat of that car with the threadbare red-and-brown upholstery, no one spoke or laughed as we had on the beach. Probably just sunburnt and cranky after the long day.

I shrugged and gave him an apologetic smile. “I wish I could remember more from that time we were here.” When conversations went this way, I tended to act as if I remembered less than I did, even if the memory in question seemed inconsequential on the surface. The past was the safest place to hide anything you couldn't make sense of.

“Ah, well,” Paudie sighed. “'Twas a long time ago now.”

Brona had opened her mouth to respond when someone caught her eye in the doorway behind me. I turned and recognized their faces from the wake that afternoon, and once Brona had accepted their reprised condolences, I had to nod and smile through another round of
Ethna's grandson, all the way from New York!
(And in Park Slope, someone else was saying,
What an asshole he turned out to be…)

Brona was my grandmother's first cousin, her closest family left now that her brother was gone. When I arrived at the little row house where my great-uncle John had lived out his bachelorhood, Brona had answered the door, clutched me by the lapels, and drawn my face down level with hers to plant a thick wet kiss on my cheek. “You're twice as tall as the last time I saw you,” she'd said, and I remembered how she'd once offered me a box of candy and inside was a sad little clump of Turkish delight left over from a none-too-recent Christmas. I'd pried off a piece, and my jaw went sore from chewing. “I light a candle for your poor sister every Sunday,” Brona told me as she took my coat, and I hadn't known what to say to that.

It was odd to see a light burning in a dead man's window, to knock on the door and find the front room full of strangers who already knew my name, but it was a relief that I could actually understand them this time. When I was a kid, it would take me a minute to figure out what people were saying—they might laugh at what they'd said before I even got it—and those hiccups in my comprehension had made me feel stupid. My grandmother had lost most of her accent after living so long in Pennsylvania.

On Uncle John's kitchen table there were sandwich fixings, five different brands of whiskey, and a slab of fruitcake on a paper doily. There was a sense that no one would use these plates and teacups again after tonight, and yet the wake had felt a little like a birthday party. The coziness of a good stiff drink, a crackling fire in the fireplace, amiable company, and even a bit of laughter here and there—it was easy to go on as if we weren't feeling anything different underneath. John had been a good man, but I still speculated about the things in his life, the dark things, that no one here would ever know the truth of.

Brona had informed me that she sometimes did food demos for the local supermarket as she assembled a plate for me. “Here's some Gortnamona goat's cheese for your sandwich. Lovely stuff. You've never tasted the like of it, not even in New York City.” When they spoke of John, they made me wish I'd paid this visit years ago, that my grandmother and I had come back together when I was old enough to appreciate things like goat's cheese and old people's ghost stories.

And yet I'd felt in the rental car, hadn't I, that Mallory was coming back with me somehow? I'd been looking in the rearview at that crow lying in the roadway when something in the backseat had caught the light: the white of an eye perhaps, as if she were turning away in tears from the heap of feathers on the wet road. I'd looked again, my heart lodged in my throat, and seen only my duffel bag there on the seat.

Mallory had always cried over dead animals. She'd found the jawbone of a sheep in the sand that day. It was only a bone, but she'd been pretty much inconsolable.

I shook myself. No more of that, now. I could blame myself for other things, but it wasn't my fault she was dead.

It was so comforting, all the clamor and reek of the pub. Brona and the men had fallen into talking of other things with their friends and neighbors—wasn't so-and-so in hospital passing a kidney stone, and didn't Carmel Keane down the road have her front garden dug up with all the plumbing trouble—and I couldn't see the television above the bar from my seat, so I occupied myself with the pictures and bric-a-brac on the walls. There were drums with harps or Celtic knots painted on the front, and a yellowed broadsheet titled
Poblacht Na H-Eireann,
and a vintage advertisement with a blonde flashing her legs atop a head of stout.
There are only TWO things a man can't resist … a pint of Guinness and ANOTHER pint!