The Summer of Impossible Things

by Rowan Coleman

  ‘So Riss left you some packages, then?’

  Hearing her use Mum’s nickname jars. She knows about the packages, that must have been what brought her down, afraid that the secret she and Mum shared for so long might come to light now, implicating her in a murder. She’s testing us. ‘What was in them?’

  ‘The truth,’ I say. ‘We know what happened that night that she left. Everything.’

  Stephanie looks at Mr Gillespie, who keeps his gaze trained out of the window.

  ‘Just a reminder,’ he says quietly. ‘Everything you say in this office is privileged.’

  ‘You know everything?’ Stephanie asks us.

  ‘Not who,’ Pea admits. ‘But everything else, everything she went through. What she did. We know you helped her get away with Dad.’

  ‘I truly believed that I did the right thing.’ Stephanie holds Pea’s gaze. ‘I hoped I did, and then, for a long time, I was afraid I hadn’t done enough.’

  ‘You never thought about the police? I mean, it was selfdefence …’

  ‘A man like him,’ Stephanie places every word with great care, like pieces on a chessboard. ‘Well, a man like that never pays for what he does. He was revered, respected, not because of who he was, but because of what he was, what he represented. Even now, even today, it would be very hard to make an accusation against a man like that stick, not without damaging the person making the accusation, not without consequences. What we did, the choices we made – it was for the best. It was a fresh chance. For her, for you, too.’

  I think of Delaney, protected from justice by his dog collar and his church. It must have seemed like there was no way out for Mum other than the way she took.

  As I watch Stephanie struggling to describe the indescribable, there is no sign of the fierce protector I met in the past. She seems meek, defeated.

  ‘The thing is,’ Pea says, ‘she never recovered from that night. She never came to terms with what had happened. She couldn’t, because of what she did. If she’d had her family, especially you, maybe she would have been able to face it. I know that I can face the world a thousand times over with my sister at my side.’

  ‘Listen –’ Stephanie leans forward in her seat, impressing every word onto us with surgical precision ‘– I realise that you girls have been through a lot, but you can’t tell anyone about this. You can’t go to the police now. It’s very important that you don’t. She’s gone. He can’t hurt her anymore. But if the authorities find out what we did … People round here have long memories, I could still get hurt, and maybe you think that wouldn’t matter so much, but it wouldn’t just be me. It would be you too. That night, while she waited, I had to …’ Stephanie paused, her gaze turning inwards as she remembers. ‘I had to do difficult things, ask for help from some serious people, you know what I mean? I paid the price, my price. After that night … I married the man that made it happen; that was his fee. I married him and it wasn’t a good marriage; he wasn’t a good man. The longer I knew him, the more cruel and twisted he became. But I was never going to leave him and he knew that; I couldn’t because he knew everything. He had the power to hurt me, but not only me, her too. He’s dead now, I don’t miss him. But those people, the people he worked for, they never forget anything, they never let any slight go. So, you have to realise, it’s done, it’s over with. You don’t talk about it outside this room. Not ever. Not just for me, but for yourselves.’

  As Stephanie lowers her eyes, a tug of empathy pulls at my chest. These last thirty years must have been hard on her, alone, separated from the person she loved most, trapped in a marriage that made her unhappy. She felt that she didn’t have any choice but to abandon my mother; she couldn’t have known that cutting her free the way she did was one of the reasons that Mum always felt so adrift.

  ‘If I’d known, if I’d known how it would stay with her, how she’d never be able to get it out of her head, if I’d known that she’d never be happy after the sacrifices we made …’ She falters, glancing up at Gillespie.

  ‘You wouldn’t have made them?’ I say, and again her head snaps up and she studies me, hard, absorbing every feature. I know she sees that man in me.

  ‘Luna.’ She says my name carefully. ‘I would have done it exactly the same way again. That’s what you have to understand: there was no other choice where Marissa had a chance. I had to give her a chance. I had to. I loved her. I would have done – did do – anything for her, the same way that you would do anything for your sister.’

  ‘Why haven’t you asked his name?’ Mr Gillespie asks as he turns back from the window to look at me. ‘Don’t you want to know who your father was?’

  ‘I know who my father is,’ I say, wondering if this is what Gillespie and Stephanie were arguing about before we came in, whether to tell us the truth or not. ‘I know the name of the man that raped my mother.’

  Stephanie sits up a little in her chair, her shoulders stiffening, and Gillespie, despite his professional calm, raises an eyebrow.

  ‘How?’ Stephanie asks, suddenly bristling with fear. ‘We swore we’d never tell.’

  ‘I was talking to Mrs Finkle about what it was like when Mum left, and she mentioned the other person who vanished on the night of the blackout. He walked right out of a party and never came back. Father Thomas Delaney. It’s him, isn’t it?’

  ‘Yes.’ Stephanie lowers her eyes, and any doubt I had is gone.

  ‘When did you find out?’ There’s a tremor in Pea’s voice as she looks at me, and tears brim in her eyes. ‘Her priest?’

  ‘I’m sorry, I was going to tell you. I meant to …’ I turn back to Stephanie. ‘We aren’t going to tell anyone anything, not even my father … Henry, I mean. You don’t need to worry, Stephanie.’

  Stephanie nods, then stands and walks towards the door.

  ‘I missed her every single day for the last thirty years, and I always will. I thought she’d live her life, be happy, be the person she could be. I only knew about you after you were born, when she sent me a letter with a photo in. Maybe I should have written back then; I wanted to, but Curtis wouldn’t let me. He didn’t let me see any of my old friends after we were married, and if I even mentioned Riss’s name … he got real angry. Pops was sick, the neighbourhood was going to hell, and I thought, So what, you had a baby, so what? At least you’ve got a baby. I was jealous of her, God help me. When Curtis died a couple of years ago, it felt like it had been too long to try again.’

  ‘I’m sorry, for what this whole mess did to your life too,’ I say to my aunt, and her features soften and she almost smiles, and I almost catch a glimpse of the girl I met before.

  ‘I just wish for both of you that she’d had the life she should have had,’ Stephanie says sadly. ‘Maybe you two girls can live it for her, the way she would have wanted. Selling the building will help. All these years it’s stood there empty, it’s felt like a mausoleum. Just sign the papers and I’ll have it sold in no time, a weight off all our backs.’

  ‘I want to wait a little longer,’ I say.

  Stephanie looks at me.

  ‘I’m just not ready yet, not right now. I need a few days, that’s all. We can sign the papers before we go.’

  ‘Why?’ Stephanie is curt, suddenly desperate for the nightmare of the last thirty years to be over at last. She has been just as trapped and imprisoned by her sister’s tragedy as the rest of us have, and she longs to be free, as free as she can be. ‘Luna, what will change in a couple of days that hasn’t changed for the last thirty years?’

  ‘Maybe everything,’ I say.

  CHAPTER THIRTY

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  The Church of the Transfiguration soars upwards, cutting purposefully into the flawless blue sky, all straight decisive lines and acute angles. Over the imposing light-oak door that seems designed for giants, the date 1925 is carved into a plain rectangle tablet. There was nothing about it I recognise fr
om my own experience of places of worship. The village church that we had sometimes gone to with school or for weddings was so old, so familiar, it seemed almost as much part of the landscape as the hills behind it, and the woods around it. St Mary’s is made of thousands of flint stones, constructed with Norman arches and a spire that has become crooked and twisted over time, although somehow it still stands. Stone effigies of long-dead nobles, their names and lives forgotten, are set into the walls and there is a sense of not only the passing of time, but timelessness. One place, that is always constant, always true.

  Yet these two building thousands of miles and years apart still have one thing in common: they are both declaring to the sky, ‘Look at this triumph. Look what Man has done in your name.’

  Lifting my camera, I focus it upwards. From where I am standing I can’t get the full extent of the architecture into frame, but somehow that seems like the point.

  ‘It looks like that church from The Omen,’ Pea mutters.

  ‘This place must have been a second home to Mum,’ I say. ‘She must have felt safe here, especially after Rosa died. She must have felt safe with him. When we were growing up, she never went anywhere near a church if she could help it.’

  A great knot of emotion has coiled in and around my gut. I’m not sure exactly what it is that I am feeling so intensely; something like grief, something like fear and fury, in a heaving tangle.

  ‘What are we looking for here, Luna?’ Pea asks, as we stand on the threshold. ‘I mean, we know he’s not here anymore, don’t we? He’s dead. She killed him.’

  ‘Oh, he’s here,’ I tell her. ‘I can feel him.’

  As soon as the words are out of my mouth I am battling an unseen head wind, something powerful that seems to be seeking to push me away from this place. Nothing physical changes, the air doesn’t even stir around me, but I feel it, this pressure, this force of some kind of will meeting my own, determined to deny me. Somehow I know that it isn’t a malignance or an enemy that is barring my way, it’s a warning, a foreshadowing. In this place, for the first time since the impossible became true, the universe is telling me this is my last chance to turn back.

  But all of my life has been leading me towards this moment.

  ‘Come on,’ I say, grabbing Pea’s hand, pushing open the heavy door and the warning aside with quite some force of effort.

  I can feel, I can hear, a thousand single moments reflect all around me. A thousand footsteps and whispered prayers. A thousand hopes, a thousand fears, all reaching for the same thing, the same need for comfort and reassurance, and in amongst those moments I hear my mother, grieving for her own, meeting me in a perfect loop.

  I don’t believe in ghosts, but I don’t need to. I know, somehow, that just a hair’s breath away, behind one gossamer-fine sheet of fabric, every other person who has ever walked up and down these steps, and every person who ever will, is doing it forever more, in this one moment. Soon, I’ll leave this moment behind and walk into the next, but that won’t mean that it’s gone. It’s still there, echoing forever. And in one of them, he’s there too, waiting for me, without knowing why. I can sense him getting near.

  Inside the church it’s unexpectedly bright and light. The clear-glass windows are long and high, letting in dramatic slants of sunlight that make the whitewashed walls luminous. Light-oak pews stand to attention in regimented lines either side of a central aisle, focused on the altar, where the figure of Christ on the cross presides over all. There’s a vividness to it, a drama, and you can feel the thrum of faith in the air, humming like an electric charge.

  A lady comes in behind us, and gives a faintly disapproving glance before dipping her finger in what must be the holy water, fixed to a wall just inside the door. She bows before the altar, making a sign of the cross, before she slips into a pew. Pea and I exchange a nervous look. There are rules, rituals, that we are not privy to. We are both outsiders here.

  ‘What do we do?’ Pea whispers to me, out of the side of her mouth.

  ‘I don’t know,’ I admit. ‘Wait.’

  ‘For what?’

  I’m about to tell her I don’t know that either when another woman touches me on the shoulder.

  ‘Can I help you?’ she speaks softly, and as I turn I know her at once. Riss’s friend Michelle, her hair still tightly curly, although peppered with silver, and while she is heavier now than she was, her face is still open, happy and peaceful. She starts when she sees me, startled by a flash of recognition that is dismissed at once, because after all I cannot possibly be that woman she met one summer, exactly thirty years ago.

  ‘This isn’t really a church for tourists,’ she says pleasantly. ‘If you want, I can point you in the direction of our beautiful cathedral, although you’ll need to take a subway, or a cab if you can find one.’

  ‘Oh, we’re not tourists, we’re from England,’ I say.

  She represses a smile. ‘Since we won the War of Independence, that makes you a tourist.’

  ‘Our mum used to come here,’ Pea explains. ‘She grew up in Bay Ridge and we … we recently lost her, so we’re just visiting the places that meant a lot to her and this was one of them.’

  ‘I’m so sorry,’ she says, her face softening. ‘Do you mind me asking who your mother was? Perhaps I knew your family.’

  ‘Marissa Lupo.’ I break the news gently, predicting exactly how her face will fall, how her hands will cover her mouth in shock.

  ‘You’re Riss’s girls?’ Her tone raises just enough to disturb the atmosphere, making little ripples in the quiet.

  ‘You knew her?’ Pea whispers.

  ‘Knew her? I loved her.’ Michelle turns away from us for a second, the light making a halo of her profile. Shaking her head, she takes a breath. ‘I’m Michelle Cavates, or at least I was then. Michelle Knight now. And Riss … we grew up together, I must have seen her every single day of my life since grade school. Until the day she left. Oh my god, oh Riss, how?’

  Neither of us answer; even now, after everything we’ve seen and know, it seems impossible to speak of Mum’s death as if it were a real event that happened to us, and not some story that belongs to a stranger.

  ‘I’m sorry, the shock,’ she says, taking our hands and squeezing them. ‘I don’t mean to pry. Here, come with me. Come sit in my office and we can talk properly.’

  ‘Coffee?’ Michelle gestures to a pot she has on the go in the corner of her office. We had followed her through a side door of the church itself and through a glass-covered walkway that had been built to connect the church to an administrative ante-building in the late sixties. ‘Or tea … you Brits like tea, don’t you? I have some around here, I think …’

  She starts opening and shutting the drawers of her desk.

  ‘Water would be great, please,’ I say, and Pea nods.

  ‘There’s a cooler just down the hall, I’ll bring you both a cup.’

  As we wait for her to return, Pea reaches her hand out to me and I take it.

  ‘Are you OK?’ she asks me. ‘You look … you don’t look great.’

  ‘I’m OK.’ I smile. ‘I feel good actually. Strong.’

  Pea looks sceptical, but still she takes me at my word, releasing my fingers as Michelle returns to the room.

  Michelle puts two plastic cups of water down in front of us, resting her chin on the heels of hand as she takes a seat. ‘I’m so sorry for your loss. How long ago since she passed?’

  ‘A few months, not long,’ I say. ‘It was an accident.’

  I know Pea won’t mind me saying what is partially true, although what’s written on our mother’s death certificate is accidental overdose. When I think of the woman that Michelle knew for so long, that woman had nothing to do with the one that took her own life. I don’t want to take her memories away from her.

  ‘I can’t believe it, you know.’ Michelle blinks in disbelief. ‘It’s like she wasn’t really gone until just now. She was gone, sure, one minute she was here, and then the lig
hts went out all over the city, and when they came back on she wasn’t. But somehow that didn’t matter, because I knew she was still out there. I used to think about her, you know? I used to think that, if ever I saw her again, it’d be just the same as it always was, we’d pick up where we left off without missing a beat, and I always used to hope I’d get that chance someday. That she’d come home for a visit or I’d go to England. And now I know I won’t – well, it hurts.’

  I take a sip of water, and already it feels warmed by the air. Michelle rubs her palms over her face, leaving traces of electric-blue mascara on her cheeks.

  ‘We wrote to each other for a while,’ she says. ‘Then life gets in the way, and what you mean to be a couple of weeks turns into months and then it’s years since you’ve been in touch. How are you girls doing? How’s Henry?’

  ‘We take it day by day,’ Pea says.

  ‘What else do you remember about that summer?’ I ask, searching for something, a phrase or a memory that might act as a door, a way through.

  If Michelle is surprised by my question she doesn’t show it. ‘It was hot, so hot – it felt like you only really came alive after the sun went down. Things were different that summer, the film crew were still in town right up until August. Well, you guys must know that. Even though I didn’t have anything to do with it, it felt like the whole place was somehow shinier, like this little corner of nowhere we lived in was finally on the map, you know?’ Michelle smiles, sitting up and straightening her shoulders as she speaks. ‘I never felt proud of where I lived before then. I loved it, don’t get me wrong, but to feel proud of it … I guess most of that happened in seventy-eight, though, when the movie came out …’