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Soon thereafter they married. The three of them, boy, girl, and Virgin, set themselves up on the top floor of her parents’ hum-ble house and promptly had five children. Every morning the girl, who was now a mother and a wife, knelt to say a prayer to her own r u n

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likeness and was happy. The boy, who was quite grown by now into a man, had won the only thing he had ever wanted in life and so was happy as well. People came by their little apartment on the pretense of visiting or borrowing some tea or admiring a new baby, but really it was just that they never got tired of seeing Mother Mary as Doreen. The women crossed themselves and said its beauty was exactly like hers, though the ones who were jealous added on the phrase

“had been.” Exactly like her beauty had been.

Bernadette smiled. “That’s what you’ll say when I’m old,” she said to her husband. “Look at that statue over there. That’s what Bernadette used to look like.”

Doyle leaned over and kissed the part of his wife’s hair. “You’ll never be old.”

No one implied that Doreen and her husband lived a perfect life.

They owed the butcher. Their eldest daughter came into the world with one leg that was shorter than the other and her thump thump thump coming up the stairwell was the sound that broke her mother’s heart every day. He drank too much, the great-grandfather, but then so did half the island. These were still lean years a scant generation after the Great Famine, and they would have had no more or less than anyone else they knew but for the statue, which was not only a glorious object but the proof of their love. Love between hardscrabble young married people with five children was a thing in short supply, and so in that sense they were better off than the other hardworking men and their once beautiful wives.

“Then one day something turned inside the Bay of Easkey. Suddenly the sea could not do enough for my great-grandfather. Every fish within twenty miles swam into his net. The more fish he pulled out, the more people lined up to buy them. He made three times as much as he had ever made in a day, and that led to three times as much drinking and the generous buying of drinks, and soon the men a n n p a t c h e t t ❆ 8

were talking about the statue of the Virgin.” Bernadette raised her hand and made a slight gesture towards the woman on her mantel-piece to underscore the fact that they were one and the same. “The men were making some mildly scandalous toasts to her beauty and his wife’s beauty and my great-grandfather’s adventuresome youth.

A man called Kilkelly, who was as drunk as the rest of them, leaned himself across the bar and with the drink his friend had paid for in his hand, said, ‘Tell the truth for once now. You stole it, didn’t you?

You walked into a church and took it straight off the altar.’” Kilkelly would later say he had never in his life had this thought before and that he didn’t actually believe it was true. The comment was born in the spirit of a joking sort of cruelty that one has towards a fortunate man. But he did say it, and in all of the merriment and the slamming down of glasses on the bar and the drinking to a sea full of fish, the great-grandfather heard him and the words went through his heart like a spear through the side of Christ.

It happened on a night when he was seventeen years old and far away from Easkey. He was as drunk that night as he had ever been and still been standing, in some town he never bothered to ask the name of, swaying through the streets in a cold fog. He was looking for a dry place to sleep it off and, praise God, the side door to the church was open. A lucky oversight, because those priests kept their property locked up tight from drunks like him. He felt his way along and found a cushion in a pew to put his head on. He went to sleep right there in the first row. When he woke up the light was pouring in through the blue and gold windows, spreading out across the polished floors and the pews and the worn cloth of his own muddy trousers and who did he see in that light but Doreen Clark, the singular dream of his youth right there on the altar smiling down at him.

Those were her eyes, those were her little hands, that was her incan-r u n

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descent hair that he had longed to touch every Sunday he had sat behind her in mass since he was a child. This could only mean that God had called on him to go home and win her back. He had to go to Easkey, collect Doreen Clark, and bring her here to see the statue that pointed him to her so directly. But then he closed his eyes and tried to think again. She would never travel to another town in his company if she hadn’t even been willing to go down to the harbor with him to watch the fishing boats come in. Logic instructed him to borrow the statue for the week it took to walk it home and back.

Surely God made allowances for borrowing in certain severe situa-tions. He took off his jacket and wrapped it gently around the Virgin Mother, whom he was already coming to think of as his little Doreen, then left the church by the same door through which he’d entered. It was an unnervingly simple departure. No one saw him. No one cried out,
Thief!
Mile after mile he looked over his shoulder waiting to see the hoards of angry Catholics chasing him down for kidnapping, but none of them came. The farther away he got with this pleasant weight in his arms, the more he knew the statue was never going back. He had the entire long walk home to imagine different scenarios for what might have happened. Once, he came upon an abandoned church in a town where every last person had died of a fever and so he picked the Virgin up and carried her away. Once, the church had burned to the ground and he found the statue standing unsinged in the embers, her arms raised to him. He thought of winning it in a game of dice with a priest, or receiving it as a gift for performing some act of heroism as yet unimagined, but then he worried that a better man would show benevolence and decline to take what was offered. On the third day of his trip home he decided it would be better if the statue had come from someplace very far away, someplace holy that would sit above all suspicions, like Rome. He had had the statue made for her. It was a n n p a t c h e t t ❆ 10

not a coincidental likeness but a tribute of his own design. It was then he began to see himself as a great man coming back in glory. As ridiculous as his story was, no one had ever doubted it. His proof was in the irrefutable likeness of Doreen Clark’s face, in her iron rust hair.

His proof was in the fact that when he finally found his way home and told her the story she’d agreed to marry him.

Every man in the bar saw the truth now, the terrible crumple and blanch of a lie come undone, and the great-grandfather, who was then only twenty-fi ve, turned his back on the crowd and fell on his drink in silence. By the time he had fi nished, settled the bill and walked home, the news of his crime had swept across the valley like a soaking rain. All the riches the fish had supplied had been consumed by himself and his kind and he had been exposed as a fraud.

By the time he walked through the door of his own home, there wasn’t a detail of the evening that his wife had not been told.

It was at this point that Bernadette fell quiet. She leaned her head against her husband’s shoulder and for awhile they simply waited in the low, gold light of early evening, as if someone else might walk through the front door and finish the story for her. “Well?” Doyle said. He was interested now. He wanted to know.

“Things go downhill from here,” Bernadette said. “There’s no redemption.”

“You only have to tell it once,” he said.

Doreen Clark, now Mrs. Billy Lovell, had come to see in one night that her happiness, her marriage, and her children had all been based on thievery and willful deception. The Catholic Church had been robbed and so had she, but there could be no extrication for her now, no returning to her youthful dreams. She lifted the statue of her own likeness into her arms, touching the cheek that had once been her cheek. There was no imagining how empty the apartment r u n

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would be now. She bagged it gently in one of the wedding pillowcases her mother had tatted with lace, a case she had wrapped in tissue paper and stored in a chest at the foot of her bed without ever once laying her head on it. Then she sent the great-grandfather out of the house and into the horrible darkness. “Take it back,” was all she said.

Of course he couldn’t take it back, any more than he could take back a leaf in a cluttered autumn forest to the rightful tree from which it fell. Ireland was crowded with pubs and crowded with churches and all he was sure of was that eight years before he had stumbled out of one of them and into the other. He did not know which saint the church was named for. How could he walk to every one of them in the country asking the question door to door, “Have I stolen this from you?” So he walked to no place in particular. He thought about his sins and his intentions, one of which was quite bad and the other of which was pure. He carried the Virgin in his arms like a child and from time to time he would pull the pillowcase back from her beautiful face and weep for the love of his wife.

Then he would go home. That was more or less the way it went for the rest of their lives, she turned him out and he came back again.

Every time he walked down his own street his children would rush to meet him, their dirty little hands stretching up towards his neck.

“Da, did you bring her home?” they’d cry. His wife would let him stay two days or two months or sometimes even two years until she couldn’t stand it anymore, living with the burden of their sins. But she was like the children, too, and her heart always stuttered with joy and relief to see the bulky shape inside the pillowcase as her husband started back up the stairs. She would lift the statue from his arms and carry Mary Mother of God back to the dresser, studying the face that had been her face, the serene and tender face that she a n n p a t c h e t t ❆ 12

had outgrown. Had that ever been the color of her hair? Then she would cross herself and say a prayer.

“And she didn’t give it back to the church?” Doyle said. “I mean her own church.”

“Well,” Bernadette said. “It didn’t belong to them, not them specifically. And the Lovells were all pretty attached to it. In the end she gave it to my grandmother Loretta, the one with the short leg, and all of her siblings were so furious that Loretta had to pack up the statue and her family and take the boat to Boston.”

“It might have been a bit of an overreaction.” She shook her head. “People in my family take this very seriously. When Loretta moved to Florida she gave the statue to my mother, and from there, well . . .” She pointed again.

Doyle kissed her hair. He kissed the narrow path of skin beside her eye. “That isn’t such a bad story. There are certainly worse ones out there.”

But Bernadette was true to her word and Doyle never heard her tell the statue’s full history again. Later on there was a shorter, cheer-ier version she used for the boys as a bedtime story that did not involve theft, and when a guest would comment on a peculiar likeness between Bernadette and the Virgin in the years that the statue stayed in the living room she never gave out anything more than a slight, fl attered smile.

From the moment of their childhood in which Bernadette’s sisters figured out who looked like the statue they had sung a never-ending chorus of petulance behind her:
Bernadette’s the lucky one
, so she couldn’t help but feel it was true. She had the statue after all, the image of herself and her mother and her mother’s mother before her all the way back to Ireland. How many hours had she lain on her stomach staring at those blue robes as a child, touching her r u n

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finger ever so lightly to the sharp edge of the halo as she prayed for better grades, prayed for better boys, prayed to find money on the sidewalk?

Once she was married, Bernadette managed to give up praying to the statue for years. She sometimes prayed to a vague idea of God, more out of respect to her Uncle Sullivan than anything else.

If he thought there was something to faith then there must be something to faith. After their son Sullivan was born and was baptized, the religion of her childhood started to creep back into her daily life, maybe because there was more to pray for, that her boy would stay healthy, that he would be safe. She did not pray for Doyle to be elected to the City Council, though sometimes she prayed unconsciously for the speeches and the fund-raising dinners to come to an end. She did not understand her husband’s love of politics but she prayed for him to have what he wanted because she loved him.

She prayed for what she wanted as well—the day she would have her own redheaded daughter to pass the statue on to—and then she simply prayed for another child. She prayed for her pregnancy to hold to term and then she prayed for another chance at pregnancy, and then another and another, but the praying didn’t get her anywhere. She prayed for the strength and the wisdom to be satisfi ed by all that she had, a beautiful son, a loving husband. She prayed to accept God’s will. She prayed to stop praying, a pastime that never failed to make her feel selfish and childish, but she could not stop.

By then Sullivan was twelve years old, independent and wild, and Doyle was starting to talk about running for mayor. They had spent two years on the adoption wait-list, standing in line with everybody else. She did not ask for anything as ridiculous as a redhead or a girl, just a baby. Any baby would be fine. Bernadette’s religion was the large, boisterous families she had come from and she believed a n n p a t c h e t t ❆ 14

in them deeply. She had meant to put two beds in every room in the house. She believed that Sullivan needed siblings as badly as she needed more children to love. She waited and looked to her statue, and she prayed.

Happiness compresses time, makes it dense and bright, pocket-sized. Of those four good years between Teddy’s arrival and Bernadette’s death, Doyle can somehow assemble only about two weeks’

worth of memories: Teddy coming to them when he was fi ve days old, and then the agency calling back only a few days later to say that the mother had changed her mind, not that she wanted her baby back but that she had decided her sons should stay together.