Chapter Twelve #2
“Listen to me,” she says. She feels a surge of solidity that she knows is limited and specific, just enough to carry her through this conversation. “I’m serious: you pay attention.”
Trey turns from the sink to look at her.
“Forget Tommy and Eugene,” Lena says. “Forget those fuckers ever existed. And”—she raises her voice over whatever Trey is trying to say— “the same for Sam Murray and his apprenticeship. Forget him.”
“Cal already gave me hassle about staying in school. What’s that got to—”
“I don’t give a shite about school. Get yourself an apprenticeship tomorrow, if you want. But you get it in Dublin, or Wexford, or anywhere that’s far enough that you’ll haveta live there. Me and Cal and your mam, and your mates, we’ll come visit you. Don’t come back.”
Trey stands still. She says, with no expression at all, “ ’Cause this was my fault. Tommy’s going after you and Cal ’cause I fucked with him. If I’m gone, he’ll lay off.”
“What?” Lena says. “No. Jesus, no.” She had forgotten the extent to which teenagers are the center of the universe.
Trey’s face doesn’t change: she thinks Lena’s lying to her. “I’m gonna sort it. I don’t haveta leave. Once we get Eugene to—”
“No. Nothing like that. I swear.”
“Then why?”
“Because,” Lena says. “This place is fucking lethal.”
Trey says, very levelly, “I know that.”
They look at each other, across all the things Lena knows and guesses about Trey’s life. She realizes, with a strange jolt of perspective, that for the first time they’re looking at each other not the way an adult and a teenager do, but as two women.
She wants to somehow inject into Trey’s head all the vast parts that she doesn’t know. Understanding this place’s dark streak is only the first step. Trey has no conception of what it means to live out your whole life side by side with that.
“Listen,” she says.
She gives Trey the whole story: her pathetic detective work, Mrs. Duggan, Tommy showing up at the gate.
She has a vague memory of how she imagined handing this over, as the magic talisman that would cancel out all the damage she’s done and let Trey live here unscathed.
Somehow it’s been turned into the opposite: the one thing that might get Trey out to safety.
Trey listens without moving. She’s come to take after Cal; she listens like him, leaning back against the counter with her head down and a twitch of concentration between her eyebrows. There are still speckles of blood on her cheek.
“Fair play to you,” she says, glancing up, when Lena stops talking.
“Thanks,” Lena says. “I did no good to anyone except Tommy, but thanks all the same.”
Trey says, “I’m gonna get him for this.”
“No,” Lena says. “You’re not. That’s what I thought I was doing. I went out there guns blazing, all ready to take him down. Look at me now.”
“He’s a fuck,” Trey says, but abstractedly, by reflex. She’s unfolding and refolding her wad of kitchen roll, thinking. “I toldja Rachel found out something.”
“You can’t do anything about him,” Lena says. “And doing nothing’ll take you to pieces. Go home and look up apprenticeships. I’ll lend you the money for a flat.”
“Nah,” Trey says. She turns back to the window and gets to work on her face again, tilting her head to peer at her reflection. “Thanks,” she adds, as an afterthought.
“You’re not still going after Eugene,” Lena says. “Right?”
Trey blows out a scornful puff of air, like that’s baby stuff. “Nah. Don’t need to bother with that.”
“Then what?”
Trey looks at Lena, over her shoulder, like she’s the thickest thing alive. “Gonna tell Cal,” she says.
“No,” Lena says. She feels like banging her head off the wall. “No. That won’t do any good. Did you not hear a word I just said?”
“Yeah. Cal knows how to go at this stuff, but, from his job. He’ll sort it.” Trey gives her face one more perfunctory scrub and throws the kitchen roll in the bin. “He was only waiting ’cause he’d nothing to go off. Now we know the story, he’ll be all on for doing something.”
“He will, yeah. And Tommy’ll find a way to use it against him or me or you or all three of us. Do you want that?”
She’s hoping the thought of harming Cal will get through, but Trey just shakes her head. “Cal’s not thick,” she says. “We’ll keep things tight, make sure nothing gets out, nothing gets back to Tommy that he can use.”
This is a level of Ardnakelty that Lena never thought she’d hear out of Trey Reddy’s mouth: keep things tight, let nothing out, nothing anyone can use.
She should have found a way to get Trey out of here years ago, while the place still despised her, before it revised its views and took possession.
Instead she got comfortable and left it too late.
Trey is giving her a curious look. “It’ll be grand,” she says, almost gently.
Lena doesn’t answer. She’s exhausted, the kind of bone-crumbling exhaustion that used to hit her out of nowhere in the months after Sean died.
Trey grins at her, on the way towards the door. “Motherfucker’s goin’ down,” she says.
Con McHugh hasn’t been in touch about the nursing chair in a while.
Normally Cal would just keep working on it, on the grounds that anything going on inside Con’s head isn’t his problem unless he’s told otherwise, but somehow every head in this townland appears to have become his problem these days.
He has no idea what to do with himself instead.
He’s walked the back roads till his legs ached and even Rip started lagging.
He pokes around on the internet for a while, researching what to do about rising damp, but his connection is being shitty and he stops when he realizes he’s in danger of throwing the laptop.
He actually considers kicking in a cupboard door, just so he’ll have something he can fix.
Tommy Moynihan is good at this. He’s left things perfectly poised, so finely balanced that Cal can’t touch them.
He can’t do anything because he doesn’t know what’s going on, but he can’t move to find out without hitting a tripwire.
If Tommy had taken one step farther, Cal would have had no choice but to fight back; but Tommy’s stopped just short of that, holding that one more step like a grenade whose pin he can pull any time.
The only thing Cal can do is sit still, with his head down, and let Tommy have his will.
He can’t remember ever feeling anger like this, sealed-in and unstoppably corrosive. He wishes he were a cop again, but he knows it’s probably a good thing that he’s not.
The evening is dark and gusty, wind growling in the treetops and slamming against the windowpanes at irregular intervals that make it impossible to be at rest. Cal sits at the kitchen table and tries to work on a present he’s making for Lena, a trefoil knot whittled from a block of Sylvester’s walnut tree, just on the off chance that the two of them are still together come Christmas.
This morning he held her hand for so long that his arm went to sleep, but he couldn’t feel her there. She held his and barely looked at him.
He knows he’s missing something, because he can’t for the life of him see what could have made this change.
Lena has never given two shits what people say about her; Cal finds it hard to believe that she would be this shook by some dumbass rumor, and anyway her strangeness started before the rumors did.
He’s considered that she might be pissed off with him for getting mixed up in this mess and bringing Tommy down on them, but that doesn’t seem like enough to warrant this reaction, especially considering that she’s been deliberately getting mixed up in this mess herself.
And Lena isn’t the kind to fool around with the silent treatment and guessing games; if she had a problem with something he’d done, she would tell him, or leave him.
He wonders if that’s what she’s working her way towards.
He could head down to Noreen’s and ask whether Lena seems OK to her, which might at least give him some hint of whether the problem lies only between him and Lena, or whether it’s a broader thing.
He rejects the idea as soon as it enters his mind.
Noreen, wound tight as she is, would go into a frenzy of worry and start bombarding Lena with attempts to find out what’s going on and smack it back into shape, which would just make Lena withdraw farther into whatever distant place she’s occupying.
Cal has always known that Lena’s chosen weapons are barricades, not artillery, but he never thought she would use them against him.
Last night he dreamed that he found her house abandoned, leaves blowing in through broken windows to scud across the kitchen table, and when he went to Noreen’s looking for her, Noreen gave him a funny look and didn’t know who he was talking about.
His fingers are clumsy today, and one wrong cut could fuck up the whole trefoil, a three-pointed endless knot that he currently feels like only a fool would try to carve out of wood, so he’s working at the speed of molasses and getting more frustrated by the minute.
Mostly he has music on while he works, but he doesn’t like the thought of missing something, whistling away to Nathaniel Rateliff like a dumbass while Tommy’s boys close in around the house.
What with the wind, he misses Trey’s approach anyway; when she slams the door open, he and Rip both jump a mile.
“Jesus, kid,” Cal says. His heart is pounding. “Can’t you open a door like a human being? What happened to your face?”
“That fuck Tommy Moynihan,” Trey says. She fires her schoolbag across the room like she’s shot-putting, and lands it on the armchair with so much force that the chair rocks.
“He did that?” Cal says. He’s out of his chair.
“What? Nah. That was school. Listen to this.”