The Innocent Sleep (33 page)

We all scrambled to our feet, the air charged with this new electricity, and I felt the gun heavy in my hand, felt all the possibility contained within it, how I could use it to take control. And yet, she had you in her arms, Dillon. I could not wave a weapon at my own son.

Garrick was the first to speak, his tone low and careful.

“Eva, stay calm, honey. We will get this all straightened out, but you gotta stay calm, okay?”

Only she was well beyond that. Shaking and scared, with tears brimming in her eyes, she clutched at you tighter, Dillon.

“We shouldn’t have come back here,” she said, convulsing with emotion. “We shouldn’t have taken the risk.”

“Eva…”

“It’s all my fault. I shouldn’t have brought you both with me.”

Garrick seemed reluctant to say anything, but he obviously did not want to see Eva in distress. “We agreed, Eva. Your mother…”

She dropped her head and dipped her face so that it rested on your crown, her arms about you, Dillon, and she seemed to drink in your whole being. In a disquieting way, I suppose, she was already taking her leave of you, already preparing herself for that unbearable loss, trying to gather up as much of you as she could so that she could save her memories of you in these final minutes, to make them rich and solid enough to last a lifetime. I knew all that and felt the slow corrosion of pity working away at my resolve. Dillon, it almost worked.

In that moment, Garrick moved around her, and I had to focus suddenly as he was coming toward me, slowly, carefully, his palms held up as if to show that he meant me no harm. But we were well past that. I tightened my grip on the gun.

“Not another step,” I told him.

“Let them go, Harry,” he said quietly. “The rest of them. Let them go. Let’s you and me sit down together, alone, and work this thing through.”

“No.”

“Come on. Be reasonable. Let Eva and Robin take Dillon outside, where it’s safe.” And then, in a lower voice, he said, “I don’t want him here in this room with that gun.”

As he spoke those words, my eyes flickered to your face, Dillon, and I saw how it was pale with fear, and I felt a moment of crushing shame, to think that my actions had inspired that fear. And all at once the years were falling away and I was back there on that street in Tangier, dust in my eyes, blinking in disbelief at the emptiness, the terrible vacuum that stood in place of my home, my sleeping son.

I bent my head and closed my eyes, passing a hand over my forehead. I was a mess. What a way for you to see me, Dillon. Bedraggled, beaten, sore. I don’t think I would have recognized myself. A hand pressed gently against the small of my back and my eyes flared open, my hand shaking, and I saw Robin there, leaning into me, her arm about me.

“Please, Harry,” she said gently. “Let him go. I promise I won’t take my eyes off him. I won’t let her take him. Not again.”

I gazed into the warmth of her eyes and I swear, in that moment, I could have fallen into her arms. She looked at me again, and I could feel the love, the old love. Wherever it had gone, it was back. It was like something physical in my gut, a presence in my blood.

“All right,” I said, my voice breaking. It was the thought of being parted from you again, Dillon, even for just a few moments. The thought of you leaving my sight once more filled me with a deep foreboding.

You looked at me, then to Eva and Garrick.

Garrick managed to whisper to you: “It’s okay, Dillon. This will all be over soon. Go with Mom. You’ll be fine. I’ll be fine. I will see you soon.” His eyes widened.

Eva was shaking. I couldn’t look at Robin, lest I lose my resolve.

Eva went to embrace Garrick, and then you looked at him one last time. Maybe you did get on with him, maybe he was good to you, but you did not walk over to him. Instead, you turned and gazed into your mother’s eyes. You seemed to know what was happening.

“I’ll be okay,” you said, your voice clear and calm. How brave you were, Dillon. I imagined holding you then for the first time in years. I leaned toward you and took in your every sinew, inhaled the smell from your hair. You did not resist. Even when I kissed your cheek.

“Dillon,” I said, but I could not finish what I wanted to say. I was overcome. And then you let yourself be taken by your mother, away and into the night. My heart lurched. I ached, every pore of me ached, at seeing you leave again.

*   *   *

We
watched you silently—Garrick and I. He was slumped in the corner by the stairs, one hand pressed against his ruined face. I was by the door. Together we watched the backs of the three figures as they descended the steps, down into the darkened slope of the garden. I had my back to Garrick, which wasn’t wise, but the fight seemed to have gone out of him the moment I’d agreed to let you leave. He seemed spent. And so I followed the shapes of the ones I loved for as long as I could. Distantly, I heard a car, and saw the sweep of headlights across the driveway. But the distraction was fleeting. I kept watching until the darkness swallowed you up—until there was nothing left of you.

*   *   *

You
probably want to know what happened then. You may already know. Or you may have worked it out for yourself.

Either way—this is how it went for me.

The car zoomed into the driveway, spitting up gravel on all sides. It drew to a sudden halt, and Spencer got out. His face had a toughness about it, a knowing fierceness, but there was apprehension there, too. “Harry, what’s going on?”

I knew from the tenor of his voice that he was frightened, and that scared me even more. I experienced a fleeting moment of clarity, as if I had stepped outside my own body and could see precisely the mess I had gotten myself into. The gun pressed hotly in my palm.

“Stay back,” I shouted from the doorway.

He came forward. “Harry, for fuck’s sake, put that thing down.”

I didn’t. Instead, I aimed it at him. There was a scream, a cry of fright. Whose voice was it? Robin’s? Eva’s? For all I know, it could have been my own. Retreating quickly, I slammed the door shut, my hands shaking. Then, leaning in to steady myself, I pressed my forehead against the hardwood door.

It was almost as if I had forgotten about Garrick.

I had found you again, Dillon. That one thought played through my head. And then the strike came, a sharp blow to the back of my head. I felt it acutely and fiercely, and I dropped to the ground. Blood was pouring into my ear. A soupy, disorientating flow. I lay there, paralyzed.

He stepped over me, pulled open the door, and I stirred from my fearful paralysis, tackling Garrick and rolling him onto the ground. I had thought he was spent, but I felt the strength in his body, sinewy and tough. He gripped my arms and pulled me under him, and I reached up and clawed at the wound on his face, causing him to cry out in rage and pain. And I, too, was enraged. Incensed. My ear was full and my hair was matted with more and more blood, and as it dripped into my mouth, I spat at the man who had taken you.

The door was half open, our bodies jammed against it, and then, out of the corner of my eye, I saw half a dozen Chinese lanterns float into the air.

“What the fuck?” Spencer came running toward me and Garrick, but he was stopped in his tracks by the gunshot.

At first I thought it was fireworks or one of the Chinese lanterns exploding into the night. But there was no fantastic spillage of light and magic. Garrick must have prized the gun from my hand or picked it up after it had fallen; I don’t know. But I do know that this time the first sensation was not visual. The bullet went through me so quickly that the first thing I felt was lightness.

It felt like I was floating.

How could the knuckle of lead have done any damage traveling through me so fast, this little package propelled by gunpowder—but it did, Dillon.

And it was amazing, the tumbling mélange of images that came to me then.

Garrick’s face retreated, and Spencer cradled my head in his arms.

Sound and sense revolved into each other and what came to me was the Egyptian boy prince, the boy on a horse, the red flag, the sun and the dry cobbles of Tangier. Your singing, gurgling childish sounds, your whimper and your playful digs. Your nighttime embrace, your “Dada” in the dark, your tickles and giggles and rousing temper, your tears and your laughter. Your paint-stained hands in Tangier, Dillon. All of it a boon and precious cargo carried to me then—its happy host.

So now you know, Dillon. That is what happened.

A cold, white day of protest in Dublin is how it started, and as I drifted into another state of being, into the cold embrace of another winter, I was not saddened, Dillon; I had found you after all. Instead, the one burning, shining desire within me as my life left me was to paint one more canvas. Can you believe it, Dillon?

And what is the image, what was the image to be? From whence does it come? My dying imagination or a faint memory of our first times together?

Dearest Dillon, does it matter?

CHAPTER TWENTY

ROBIN

On
a late afternoon in September, I find myself sitting alone outside a café in the heart of the medina. It is the kind of place that appeals to the tide of tourists who browse through the stalls of the Petit Socco, looking for a refuge from the fierce trade of that market, the haggling and the hassling, the guides and the touts, seeking out a chair in which to sip mint tea while watching the world go about its business here in Tangier. The waiter, a young Moroccan with a quick smile and distracted eyes, listens while I tell him my order, then gives a dismissive nod and wanders off in an unhurried manner. All around me are Americans, Italians, French nationals, and Australians, some still bearing enthusiastic looks, others with the slump of the weary traveler, all on plastic seats pulled up to rickety tables that front the square, bathed now in the gentle heat of the declining sun, the shadows lengthening as evening draws in.

Of all the people in this busy place, I am the only one who sits alone.

The coffee I ordered comes, plonked down without ceremony.

“De rien,”
my waiter intones without feeling when I thank him, then drifts away to another table, his tray held aloft, skimming the heads of the customers seated around me.

I take a sip, then fiddle with my cell phone. One of the women at the next table leans in to impart some confidential information to her partner, who then swivels in his chair and gives me a brief, appraising look before turning away. I am distinctly aware, in this moment, that I am a woman alone in this place. It is at once strange and yet familiar, too. The sights and smells reach some inner part of me, caressing the touchstone of memory, stirring it up again. The grand silhouettes of the tall palm trees that line the perimeter of the Petit Socco, black against the evening sky and its puckering of gray clouds scudding the horizon, the gentle lull in commerce that takes place at this hour of the day before the evening traders arrive to set up their stalls, the smell of exhaust fumes from waspish mopeds mingling with the sharp cleansing scent of the mint tea being brewed up and down this strip of cafés—all of it blends and rises up around me in a miasma of familiarity. And yet there is something profoundly wrong about being alone here in this place, in this city, where so often I had been with Harry.

But then, of course, I am not alone. My children are with me. Right now, they are at the Mendoubia Gardens with their uncle Mark and his girlfriend, Suki. An hour has passed since I watched them go, that happy group, the boy carried aloft on his uncle’s shoulders, the baby kicking her legs in her pram. I had kept my eyes on them until they disappeared from view, an involuntary clutch about my heart as I lost sight of them. An hour, and only now, with the coffee warming my throat, do I start to relax. Yet still, I keep my mobile within easy reach, one eye watchful for an incoming call or text.

“Take some time to yourself,” Mark had said to me. “Make the most of us while we’re still here.”

“I don’t know,” I had said, chewing my lip, reluctance pulling me back.

“We’ll be gone tomorrow, and then you’ll be wishing you had let us take the children off your hands while you still had a chance.”

And so I had put my fear aside and let them go.

I am unused to being alone, not quite sure of what to do with myself. There is no book in my hands to amuse or distract me. I fiddle with a sachet of sugar, sip from my cup, and all at once, without warning, I am back there, on that cold winter day, in that lonely abandoned place, pulled by the drag of memory, and I recall with piercing rawness the events of that terrible day.

*   *   *

We
hurried down the steps, down, down into the shadowy garden, gray in the dim light. The snow lay thickly about the house, and I labored to plow my way through it, my heart beating high and light in my chest, the metallic taste of blood in my mouth from where I had chewed the inside of my cheek in those nervous moments before fleeing the house. My coat was too hot, the sheer weight of it hampering my movements. Sweat formed under my clothing. My whole body felt liquid and heavy. And underneath my ribs, my heart hammered away with fear and uncertainty. Every step I took put distance between us and the danger that was contained within that house. But I had left Harry behind.

I looked about myself, at the scrubby bushes and wiry trees black against the snow, and had no idea where to go, or what to do then. Eva had stopped, and I felt a corresponding hesitation within her, as she paused and stared back at the house, her arm still held protectively about the boy. When I saw the fear and suspicion in his eyes, it caused a tightening about my heart. I couldn’t stop looking at him, couldn’t resist the urge to glance down at his face, to check again that it was really him, that it was really my son, the boy who was dead. Eva held his hand, avoiding my gaze, and yet I felt no anger toward her. That would come later, when it was all over and I realized the great wrong that had been done to us, the theft of those precious years, the breaking of a bond that might forever be beyond repair. But in that moment, I was still occupying a place of disbelief and a surging emotion that I couldn’t quite identify: Relief? Joy? The blasting away of all my sorrow? The boy who was dead, the boy who had been claimed by the earth, now returned to me, older, changed, but living, breathing. At that moment, it was all that mattered.