Immaculate Heart (10 page)

I pointed to a signature at the bottom right of one of the paintings:
Síle Ní
Ghallchobhair
. “Is that the Gaelic version of your name?”

She nodded. “Irish, not Gaelic.”

“Sorry.”

She smiled as she rinsed out a metal teapot. “Keep saying ‘sorry,' and you'll fit right in.”

“Did you go to art school?”

“For a time.” Síle drew a couple of bags out of a tin as the water came to a boil. “It didn't agree with me.”

“Maybe you didn't need it.” I watched her pour the water into the teapot and place two mugs, a ceramic sugar pot, and a package of ginger biscuits—the same brand her sister had offered me that morning—on a plain wooden tray.

“I don't drink cow's milk,” she said. “I hope you don't mind.”

I shrugged. “Have you had many journalists visiting you here?”

“I've lived here nearly four years, and you're the first. Most people have long since forgotten about it, and I suppose that's for the best.” She brought the tray over to a narrow table beside her bed, and we sat down opposite one another.

“Best … for you?” I asked.

“Now, that I couldn't say.” Síle flicked me a sardonic look. “They tell me I'm the last person to know what's best for me.” She poured the tea and nudged the sugar pot toward me with the back of her hand.

It was too soon to be asking any more questions along that line. I turned to look out the iron-barred window. To the left the sea was dark and roiling, and to the right I could see a strange knob of a mountain in the distance. “You're right on the Atlantic,” I said.

“Pity the weather's so foul. I'd love to go for a walk on the strand.” She smiled deviously. “Like old times, you might say.”

“It's the same beach?”

“The very one.”

I tried to picture us running along the sandy strip between the water and the rocks, but with the weather this bad, it was impossible to imagine. The irony of her living here now—trapped in an old house overlooking a place where she'd once been as free as children ever get. It made me shudder.

“We'll go out the next time you come,” Síle said.

Again my pulse quickened, and a little voice behind my ear said,
You can't even remember why you came here.
“Would they let us do that?”

She shrugged. “I can do what I like.”

“It seems like you're happy enough,” I said as I glanced at the drawings on the walls. “Like you're making the best of it.”

“Which is what I'd still be doing, were I anywhere else.” Síle smiled as she brought her steaming mug to her lips. “They're spending massive amounts of money to keep me here. Have you any notion what a place like Ardmeen House costs?”

“No idea.”

“What do you reckon? ‘Ballpark,' as you Americans say.”

“Two hundred a day?”

She laughed, knowing I'd aim much too low. “Nearer to eight hundred.” I gasped and muttered a four-letter word. “Insurance covers most of it, and my mam and dad pay the rest. When I first got here, it kept me awake nights, the feeling burdensome, but I don't worry about that anymore. It's for their peace of mind that I stay here, so I don't feel guilty for saving the money I make from my paintings.”

“Where do you sell them?”

“There's a gallery in Sligo,” she said. “I've sold some there, and at a couple other places in Derry and Athlone. And there are a few cafés in Donegal that sometimes hang my pictures as well. The owners come to visit me here, and they choose what they like. I don't make a lot, but it's a much more useful thing to do than just sitting in a corner carving up the insides of my arms.” I winced. “Sorry,” she said. “Sometimes I go too far.”

“Does your family visit you?”

She smirked to herself as she topped up our mugs. “More often than I'd like.”

“How often is too often?”

“Once a month. Always on a Sunday.”

“I met your sister this morning.”

She lifted her brows, but I could tell she wasn't surprised. “Did you?”

“You're very different.”

Síle laughed. “How is Orla?”

“All right, I guess.” I paused. “She told me she never visits you.”

“I did speak to her on the phone there the other week. But she never comes; she tells our mam and dad she's too busy with the wee ones. It's easier for both of us that she doesn't, although I do wish I could meet the babbies. But she'll never let me—not before they're grown, at any rate.”

I knew then, somehow knew for certain, that Orla had blocked everything she'd seen and heard and felt. I didn't see why one sister should be free and “normal” and the other in a mental home when they'd had the very same experience. It was bad enough to live like a bird in a cage, but it was an even bigger shame for a bird so lovely.

“A lot of things have happened to me in the meantime,” Síle said gently. “Orla was afraid. She's always been afraid. Better not to see it, she thinks. Better not to feel it. In some ways, I'm much freer in here than she'll ever be.”

There was such truth in what she'd said that I could practically feel it humming in the walls. “Síle?”

“Hmm?”

“Why are you here?”

“Because they say I'll never be cured. Cured of what, though, nobody seems to know—or at least they won't tell me. There used to be a name for it, but they've since taken it out of the book.”

I looked at her. I had to put one hand on top of the other to keep from reaching out to run my thumb along her lower lip.

“I could leave,” she said softly. “I could behave exactly as they're asking me to, and after a time, they'd let me leave. Whatever the doctor's told you, we're none of us a danger to ourselves or each other. But if I were to go out—find a flat, find a job—and then things got too confusing again, I'd only end up back where I started.”

Now I reached out and touched her lightly on the knee. “You're the sanest person I've met since I got here.”

She flashed me a sad little smile. “That's kind of you to say.”

“I mean it.”

“Do you want to know what it's like? To be mad, I mean.” I nodded, and she said, “You have people round you who profess to love you, but then they go and twist every word you say to make you look like you don't know which way is up.” Síle sighed. “No—that isn't fair of me. They don't do it purposefully. They've no idea they're doing it.”

“Everybody does that,” I said.

“Don't they, though?” She leaned forward and moved the tea tray to the floor. “I want to do something for you,” she said as she reached for my hand. “I'm going to read your palm.” She pressed my fingers open and gently squeezed the base of my thumb. “Tell me something.”

“Anything.”

“D'you have a girlfriend?”

I'd known this would come up somehow, but I still couldn't answer without hesitation. “No,” I said.

She traced her forefinger along my life line, and considered it. “Did you love her?”

What kind of man would I be, if I said no? “I think so.”

“Then you did the right thing.”

“Are you reading that off my hand?”

We looked up from my palm at the same time. “I don't have to,” she said, and we kept looking. I couldn't remember the last time I'd wanted someone like this.

“Next time you come,” she went on, “you can tell me everything Tess and Orla told you. Then I'll tell you my part.”

“We don't have to,” I said. “Not unless you want to.”

“It's the reason you came, isn't it?”

I'd all but forgotten why I was here, and she knew it. I gave in to the urge to paper it over. “They said you saw her first,” I said.

“They do say that.”

“Do you remember it? The first time it happened?”

“I do,” she said. “I remember it well.”

“Can you tell me about it?”

Síle looked beyond me now, as if the past were reconfiguring itself just over my right shoulder. “They wanted people to think that I was the one who saw Her the clearest and that maybe I'd even convinced them of things that weren't there. But I wasn't the only one to see Her,” she said softly. “I wasn't, and I'll tell you how I know. After a certain point, Tess started going up to the hill by herself. She thought none of us knew, and I don't know, maybe Orla never guessed. They were drifting, by that point.”

“She didn't tell me she went up by herself,” I said. I liked Tess—had always liked her. I didn't want to think of her misleading me.

When Síle refocused her eyes, it was like she could read my thoughts scrolling across my forehead. “I wouldn't think any less of her. Haven't you ever forgotten anything on purpose?”

We just looked at each other. “Maybe I have,” I said.

She rose to her feet. “You don't have much time.”

“Is that on my palm, too?”

She laughed. “I meant time left in your visit. He'll be knocking in a minute.”

“Will they let me come again?”

“Oh, Martin and I have an understanding,” she replied airily. “Dr. Kiely never lets on, but she lets him do as he thinks best.” Síle smiled then, a luminous smile, as if she'd swallowed the moon for breakfast. She'd flashed me that smile many times before.

“I'm sorry about your sister,” she said softly. “I've been wanting to say it since you first walked in, but I just couldn't bring myself to it.” Síle reached out a pale hand as if to touch my chest, but she didn't. “Sometimes I pretend she's alive as ever, and I can't see her only because we've gone our separate ways.”

I looked at the floorboards. “Thanks,” I said. “That's … very kind of you. To think of her.”

“I remember that day so clearly. I've always remembered her. How we laughed and laughed together. How I wished she lived here, so I could have her for a real friend.” Brona's words came back to me:
no one ever knew what to make of her.

“That might have been the happiest day of her life,” I said, and the truth of it set my skin to prickling. “The happiest day, thanks to you.” Another smile shone out of that lovely face, and I let it eclipse the memory of Mallory in the little white casket, Mallory in the dark.

Then there came the knock at the door, and Síle put her hand to my cheek in the second before it opened.

*   *   *

Brona decided not to come down with me to the pub that night, and it was just as well. “So you met Síle Gallagher,” Leo said musingly. “Fair play to ya, lad! Some led me to believe they defend that place with swords and cannon fire.” He drained his pint glass and smacked his lips. “What didja tell them?”

“Said I was an old friend.”

“Sure, that's true enough,” Paudie said.

“And when you went in to see her—what did you say?” Leo asked.

“We talked about a lot of things. She's very … playful,” I said lamely. “She knows how to put a person at ease.”

Leo tittered like a nine-year-old girl. “And what sort of things did ye talk about?”

“Her adventures in India. Her artwork. Her family. That sort of thing.”

“You didn't ask her about the apparition?” Paudie asked.

“There wasn't time.”

I didn't look up from my pint, but I could feel Leo smirking at me. “You got there and forgot why you'd come, isn't that it?”

I tried to suppress a grin, and failed. “Pretty much.”

“She's the sort makes you forget yer own name,” he said. “I may be an old man, but I'm young enough yet.”

Paudie rolled his eyes. “Will you be seein' her again?”

The old men looked at me. Leo tossed back his head and laughed.

*   *   *

The next tape was labeled
Declan Keaveney, 8 February 1988
. In that room in my mind, the boy in the black-and-white newspaper photographs came to life: the surly turn of the lip and the anywhere-but-here posture, his hair in greasy black spikes, handsome and callow. I saw him dressed in a thermal shirt, army boots, and the leather bomber, and he tapped his foot on the hardwood floor and settled and resettled himself in the chair as if fidgeting could get him out of the interview any faster. Father Dowd asked him the same basic questions about the apparition, and his answers essentially matched Tess's, though they were not so willingly given. When the priest asked him to interpret what he'd seen, he became even less cooperative.

 

FATHER DOWD

Do you feel blessed?

 

DECLAN

I don't. I don't feel any different.

 

FATHER DOWD

You saw a vision of the Blessed Virgin Mary, and you don't feel any different?

 

DECLAN

(irritated at having to repeat himself)

I don't feel any different.

 

FATHER DOWD

Don't you see? This is a chance to do some good in the world, lad. To
be
somebody.

The young man rolls his eyes as the priest is talking.

 

DECLAN

I'm already somebody.

 

FATHER DOWD

And are you
already
doing good in the world?

 

DECLAN

Probably not by your standards, Father.

The priest heaves a sigh, and just then he looks at least ten years older.

 

FATHER DOWD

(sternly)

If we're to see this through, we need your cooperation.

 

DECLAN

How do ya mean, “see it through”?

 

FATHER DOWD

Why, bringing Our Lady's message to the world.

The priest pauses, for emphasis. But it's like the boy's bricked an invisible wall across his desk and nothing can get through it.