“There’s a café on the corner of Mass. Ave. and Commonwealth. Would eight thirty be too early?”
“Not at all,” I said.
Chapter Four
THE CANNELLONI WERE warming up when I heard Declan’s truck pull into the driveway. I glanced out the window, but the doors didn’t open right away. Transitions were hard. As much as Henry might want to see me, he hated saying good-bye to his dad. On Fridays, it went the other way.
Declan and his wife, Kelly, had been separated for eight months when he and I met one night at a bar in the North End. I wish I could blame the luscious and vaguely tawdry turn the evening took (backseat of a car parked up by the ocean in Swampscott) on something like euphoria over Italy’s winning the World Cup or the Patriots’ winning the Super Bowl, but I can’t. It was the fatal … No, fatal is not a word I could ever use in a sentence that leads directly to Henry. Nothing ended that night. In fact, just the opposite.
It was the … irresistible combination of eyes the blue of faded jeans, a spring sea breeze wafting sweetly up Hanover Street, and, well, let’s just say more than two whiskey sours, a throwback of a cocktail choice I later had reason to regret. Briefly.
A violin maker from North Bennet had introduced us. He knew Declan from a soccer league.
“How are you?” Declan had asked, with his soft Galway lilt.
“Can’t complain.” Or wouldn’t dream of it, when standing in front of a dead ringer for Gabriel Byrne.
“Sure you can.” He had smiled.
“Who would listen?”
“I would.”
That’s all it took. That and the crooked little smile I now see on Henry every so often, when he’s pretty sure I’ll appreciate the humor in a sticky situation, or at least forgive him without a lot of drama.
When the Wild Cherry nail polish, for example, that he was secretly using to paint in the heart on a card he was making for me accidentally tipped over onto my expensive, handmade Italian paper, paper that took weeks to arrive.
Well, he was making me a card.
I took a sip of my wine. Declan had opened his door, and rather than exiting through the door on the passenger side, Henry was sliding across the seat. He liked to hang out in the driver’s seat for a minute or two, hands on the wheel, just getting the feel of things. I knocked on the window, but they didn’t hear me.
Declan had been truthful that first night. He and Kelly were separated, they’d been unhappy, they were trying to work things out. They didn’t have Delia and Nell at the time, or I like to think I would have exercised a little more restraint.
What can I say?
I was weak.
“Hi, sweetie!” I called down as they clomped up the stairs to our second floor apartment. “How was it?”
His face told me a lot: that it had been great, but he wasn’t great right now because it was over. He appeared to need what I knew he would want the least: a hot bath, an early bedtime, Mommy love. The cannelloni might revive him for a while, but it wasn’t going to be an easy night.
In the past few months, ever since starting kindergarten at St. Enda’s, he’d become acutely conscious that he lived with—a girl. And Delia and Nell were girls. So was Kelly. The only two guys in the whole sorry picture were him and his dad. This had made the weekly return to Mom-land all the more difficult.
I wasn’t sure where this was coming from. He’d had very little awareness of boys and girls—or rather, boys versus girls—at the touchy-feely preschool he’d attended for two years. In fact, he’d been shocked to learn that his best friend, Carey, who’d had the cubby next to his for two years and whose Lego-building skills were universally admired, was a girl.
It didn’t come from Declan, either; I was pretty sure of that. Though he is a police officer, which might lead you to draw certain conclusions, he had only one brother in a house full of girls. He got it. His sisters had made very sure of that.
“You must be starving!” I said as Declan swung Henry’s backpack onto the kitchen table.
“We had McDonald’s,” Henry said.
“At one o’clock!” Declan added, seeing the look on my face.
I really wanted to kiss him (Henry, that is) but I could tell this would not be a good idea. I ruffled his hair a bit, and he pulled away.
“Go dump your stuff and wash up,” I said. And then, in an attempt to cheer him up, I added, “I have a surprise for you after supper.” I didn’t, but I’d think of something.
“What?” he demanded.
“Never mind,” I said.
“Come on!” he wheedled.
“After supper,” I said in a singsong voice. He made a face but headed off toward the bathroom. I heard the water blasting out at full force.
“How was it?” I asked Declan.
“Oh, grand, yeah.”
“How are the girls?”
“Right as rain; everybody’s good.”
He’d seen some sun and wind in the past few days, and my stomach did a little swoop.
“You want a beer? Glass of wine?” I wished I felt the way most divorced women feel when the dads make the return drop: relieved to see the back of him. But then, you can’t be divorced if you were never married.
“No, thanks.” He smiled. “I should probably—” He glanced in the direction of the driveway.
“Sure,” I said. “No problem.”
I knew he would have stayed for a while if I invoked Henry, the difficulty of the transition, all of that, but that would be cheating. This whole weird arrangement of ours worked because nobody played games, and I wasn’t about to start.
Kelly and I had a couple of rough patches in the first year or two, but things have gradually worked out. I like her, and I think she likes me; well enough, anyway. She treats Henry like a son, not a stepson, and I will never be able to repay her for that. They’re sending the girls to St. Enda’s—Delia will start in the fall and Nell the year after—in part so the kids can be in school together. And Dec never misses a T-ball game or a parents’ night. Kelly wouldn’t let him. Given that I had an affair with her husband while they were still technically married, adding one more obstacle to their process of reconciliation, she’s been a regular Mother Teresa. The least I can do is act like a grown-up and not confuse—or represent—a need or desire of my own as Henry’s.
“The canoe tipped over!” Henry announced excitedly, bouncing over to the table, where the pan of cannelloni sat cooling.
“Good thing you had your life jacket on!” I said.
The glance I shot Declan said, He did have his life jacket on, didn’t he?
The glance he shot back said, Of course he had his life jacket on! What kind of idiot do you think I am?
“I hate life jackets,” Henry announced. “I know how to swim.”
He peeled off some of the cheese topping and popped it into his mouth before I could stop him. I’d recently pointed out that this was kind of like cheating, because everybody knows that the cheese topping is the best part and everybody wants their own. To which he responded by pointing out that since I always let him have my cheese anyway, and it’s just the two of us here, what was the problem? I had a glimpse of what he might be like as a teenager.
“And there was a ghost!” he said.
I snapped to. I have always feared (a lot) and hoped (a tiny bit) that Henry might have inherited my ability, as I inherited Nona’s, but so far, no sign in sight.
“There was the story of a ghost,” Declan clarified, shooting me a significant glance.
Declan knows about me. Depending on how you look at it, either he has helped me out a number of times or I have helped him. He might well have made detective without my “anonymous tips” (that’s what we decided to call them), pieces of information I picked up from the earthbound spirits of crime victims. He might have cracked those very cold cases on his own. But we shall never know.
“She fell in the lake and died!” Henry said, his mouth full of cheese.
“Don
’t talk with your mouth full,” I said. “Who?”
He tried to answer without opening his mouth very much. “The little girl. In the olden days.”
“I thought you didn’t believe in ghosts,” I said, scooping some cannelloni onto a plate and setting it on the table. Henry grabbed a fork from the drawer, sat down, and tucked in. He appeared to be ravenous.
He looked up at Declan. “Do you think there’s ghosts, Daddy?” I sensed that this might break along gender lines.
“Oh, I’m keeping an open mind,” Declan said.
What he had said to me, when we had the conversation, was, “Well, there’s more than one meaning to the word, true.” I think he has his doubts, to be honest, but he grew up on his granny’s fireside tales from the west of Ireland, so he’s pretty used to talk of faeries and changelings and great, gray horses striding through the surf and carrying off wives and children.
“You can hear her crying,” Henry said. “At night sometimes.”
“Did you hear her?” I asked.
He nodded earnestly, eyes wide. “I think I did.” He paused. “I might have.”
Declan’s wry grin said, No way.
“What’s my surprise?” Henry asked. He had just gotten out of the tub and into his pj’s, and he had that clean baby-hair smell that I found hard to resist.
“Nat’s taking you to the movies!” She wasn’t, but she would. She owed me.
“Oh,” he said, sounding a little disappointed.
“I thought you were dying to see …” The name of the movie momentarily escaped me, but not the image of an army of insects preparing to do battle with a muskrat, a ferret, and a mole. “That ant one,” I finished lamely.
“I thought maybe we were getting cable,” he said sadly. Much to his continuing disappointment, I drew the line at cable and microwaves. I didn’t want us eating Hot Pockets, and I didn’t want to be called “Dude.”
I smiled. “Sorry.”
“When?” he asked.
“When what?” I had forgotten I was in the middle of a lie.
“When’s Nat taking me?”
“Oh! Soon! This week!” I hoped.
“Okay,” he said sweetly, and I immediately hated myself. He was so trusting. Not that I didn’t plan to make good on this fake promise of mine—I did; I would—but still, it was a small betrayal.
Like telling him he could turn the traffic light green if he blew hard enough. Like the father in a story I’d read one time burning the grilled cheeses and serving them to his kids anyway, black side down.
Oh, well.
“I’ll read you two chapters tonight!” I said. We were making our way through Redwall, one chapter a night, and two would be a treat.
“But I was gone three nights,” he reasoned.
I did a swift, silent calculation—three chapters would take us an hour. But if I read quietly and had him all tucked in, warm and cozy, he’d probably last about twenty minutes.
“All right,” I said, as though he had won a huge victory.
Momentarily forgetting that I was a girl, he gave me a hard hug, then pulled back, looked me straight in the eyes, and gave me a kiss.
Chapter Five
A HEAVY OVERNIGHT rainstorm had washed the streets and the sidewalks and stripped the trees of leaves that might otherwise have hung on for a few more days. The low clouds were breaking up as I ordered my coffee and settled in at a table by the window. A police car roared by. A beautiful fat woman, who must have lived or worked in the building just in from the corner, was using a lime green power hose to wash the slippery fallen leaves into the street.
Inside the Café Rouge, a stack of cornstalks paid incongruous homage to the season, tucked in as they were among the stylish French posters and alabaster lamps. It was my second time in the place, and the guy who poured my coffee was so nice, and so cute, that I folded a dollar into the tip cup.
I was hoping that this meeting wouldn’t take too long. I had a two o’clock appointment in Carlisle with a demanding client and I needed to have my ducks in a row. It was the kind of job that fed the bank account but not the spirit. A wealthy developer in the western exurbs had hired me to create thirteen identical coffee-table books celebrating his completion of a dozen virtually identical trophy houses on the former site of a hundred-year-old orchard.
He’d hired an architectural photographer to document the destruction of the orchard and all the phases of construction. Now that the houses had all been sold, presumably to people who hadn’t caught up with the news that two-story “great rooms” were hard to furnish and had a tendency to make one feel small and unsettled, he’d hired me to make the actual books. They were to be bound in leather and embossed in gilt. He would present them to the buyers at the closings. Of course, he also wanted a copy of the book for himself.
I caught sight of Sylvia across the way. It was cruel to notice, but she already had the air of an old-lady-in-the-making, waiting patiently for the light to change with her umbrella and rain boots and bags. I stopped myself. This was mean. Still, I couldn’t help wondering if she had one of those clear, fold-up rain hats, the kind in the little vinyl sleeve, tucked into a compartment in her purse.
“Coffee?” I asked as she caught sight of me and approached the table.
“Tea, please. With lemon.”
“I’ve been thinking,” she said moments later, stirring honey into the steamy liquid in front of her, “that maybe I could hire you.”
I took a deep breath. While I have gotten paid (sometimes extravagantly) for my work with earthbound spirits, I had already decided that I was not going to take any money from Sylvia. This—uh, consultation—was a deposit in the checkbook of my soul.
“No, I really … I couldn’t.”
“But I thought you weren’t working full-time.”
“I’m not.”
She gave me a puzzled look, then shook her head. “I meant, hire you to bind some books.” Oh.
“I’ve got some discretionary funds.” She smiled slyly.
I saw the logic immediately: I would have access to the monks and the monks would have access to me.
“I’d love to,” I said. “But is there enough work?”
“Oh, yeah. Dozens of books on British history, memoirs of the Great Indian Uprising, Kashmiri travelogues. Finny’s father-in-law was a diplomat in Hyderabad. I could probably keep you busy for a couple of months.”
“That’d be great.”
“You could start anytime. In fact, you could even come in with me now. I could show you around.”
“Sure.” I didn’t have to leave for Carlisle until one.
Sylvia looked a little relieved. “We just have to stop by Finny’s house on the way,” she said. “Tad’s cleaning it out to put it on the market. He asked me to look at a couple of books that have turned up.”
We chatted, finishing our drinks slowly, then took our time walking down Commonwealth Avenue. The “house” was, well, frankly, a mansion in the middle of the block between Clarendon and Dartmouth streets. It was flanked by two other buildings that looked recently restored, and though its tiny front garden had been allowed to go to seed, the place had the worn and comfortable air of money. Old money. Sylvia rang the bell. The remaining leaves on the magnolia tree beside us glowed brightly in a shaft of sunlight.
I had learned to recognize some of the signs of vast, inherited wealth shortly after I moved to Boston. I was walking around this very neighborhood, looking for a studio or a one-bedroom to rent. It was the first of September and many of the apartments were turning over—students were leaving town and others were arriving, and U-Hauls were everywhere you looked. I happened upon an elegant matron having a conversation with someone I took to be a neighborhood “character,” if not actually a homeless person, resting on the building’s granite stoop.
I asked if by chance they (meaning the well-fed matron, of course) knew of any small apartments becoming available, and the vagrant offered to take me inside. To my sur
prise, she owned the building. And three or four others in Back Bay. She had a studio apartment for rent.
I moved in a week later, and over the next two years, I learned a lot about old money, Boston style. That the people who had it didn’t tend to put in “cook’s kitchens” with polished-granite countertops and Sub-Zero freezers and didn’t tend to worry too much about the sofas sagging and the walls cracking and the oriental rugs wearing thin. They rode old three-speed bikes and wore sweaters with holes in the elbows, and their summer places were less like the McMansions ruining Nantucket than like the cabins at Girl Scout camp.
A housekeeper, whom Sylvia introduced to me as Mrs. Martin, answered the door swiftly, greeted Sylvia warmly, and offered us banana bread, the nostalgic waft of which nearly brought tears to my eyes. Sylvia declined for us both (Speak for yourself! I felt like saying), so Mrs. Martin led us right up a formal staircase to Mr. Winslow’s second-floor study, where we were supposed to wait for Tad, who was on the phone. I longed for more than a glimpse of the first-floor rooms, being categorically in love with all things forlorn—falling-down houses, homely little kids in eyeglasses—but all I had time to notice were sheets covering the furniture, floors in need of refinishing, and large, dark rectangles on the faded wallpaper where paintings had formerly hung.
The study was partially disassembled, and Sylvia sank down on a hassock as soon as Mrs. Martin closed the door. It was sad, and I didn’t even know him. Half of the books were gone from the shelves, and the drawers of the tables waiting to be taken to Skinner, where they were going to be auctioned off with the rest of the furniture the heirs didn’t want, had all been emptied out. Cardboard boxes under the windows were filled with papers, notebooks, and small, old volumes, and an open shoe box (Brooks Brothers) on top of Mr. Winslow’s desk held what I took to be the intimate contents of his top desk drawer: coins, old pens, a key chain, some faded Polaroids curling at the edges.
I thought of my mother and father in one such photo, sitting in the sand at a beach on Lake Erie. It was taken before they were married, when I imagine that the word husband on my mother’s tongue still had the tang of a rare, exotic fruit. I can easily recall the image, the way she’s leaning in under my father’s arm, her head tilted slightly in the softening light, caught in the middle of a word she is speaking to whomever clicked the shutter. Ten years later, she was dead.
The Book of Illumination Page 3
