Chapter Seventeen #3
They both look at Cal. “If she catches us,” Kate says, “we’ll say we’re monitoring bird movements for a school yoke.”
“And we’ll get there from the other side,” Trey says. “From the lane, up the back of the ridge. So no one’ll see us coming.”
“OK,” Cal says, not that he has much choice. “You go ahead and watch today, and we’ll hope you get lucky. Tomorrow you’ve got school.”
They humor him by not arguing. “Cool,” Trey says. “Let’s go.” She starts easing her feet out from under Rip.
“If you’re gonna sit out there in the cold all day,” Cal says, “you need some hot food inside you, and sandwiches or something to take along. You want to eat here?”
“I haveta go home,” Kate says, standing up. “Show my mam I’m not dead or pregnant after last night.”
Trey snorts; Kate’s mam’s worries are apparently a familiar theme. “I’m not dead or pregnant,” she tells Cal.
“Congratulations,” Cal says.
“Meet you at the top of the lane in like an hour and a half,” Kate says to Trey. To Cal she says, “We’ll text you. And we won’t get caught.”
Trey walks Kate out. Cal, at the kitchen window, watches for anyone watching them as they stand talking in the day that’s still unchanged, stagnant in its cold gray dusk. After a minute or two Trey nods, and Kate swings herself onto her bike and heads off.
“What do you want to eat?” Cal asks, when Trey comes back in.
Trey leans against the counter. She says, “Heard there was a fight in Seán’s last night.”
“Yeah.”
“About what?”
“What you’d expect. Some people like Tommy Moynihan’s big plan, some don’t. Mouth McHugh was running his mouth, I shut it for him, other guys got involved.”
Trey says, “There’s people saying Lena gave Rachel the antifreeze.”
Cal opens the fridge to see what he has to feed her. He says, “I know that.”
“That why you hit Mouth?”
“Pretty much. Yeah.”
“Mouth didn’t start that. That was Moynihans.”
“Yup,” Cal says. He finds eggs and sausages. He can feel Trey watching him and wanting something from him—solutions, justice, revenge, who knows. Whatever it is, he doesn’t have it.
“That why Lena’s head’s wrecked?” she says. “ ’Cause there’s people shit-talking her?”
“Dunno,” Cal says. “You should ask her.”
“How come you don’t ask her?”
Even with his back to the kid, Cal can feel the tension humming off her.
Him and Lena having a minor disagreement was enough to send Trey out the door; whatever’s going on between them now would send her into a wild animal’s silent panic.
He feels a rush of helpless anger, at Lena and at himself.
If they can’t keep the kid in school and can’t keep her away from Tommy Moynihan’s bullshit, the least they could do is keep themselves from fucking up whatever belief she has that the world might hold a few safe places.
“Don’t you worry about me and Lena,” he says. “It’s a weird time, is all; everyone’s feeling nervy. It’s all gonna be fine.”
“How’s it gonna be fuckin’ fine? Her sitting over there like a fuckin’ emo, ‘Oh what’s the point of anything,’ not even talking to you—when was the last time she was round here?
And you’re like”—Trey does jaw-dropped vagueness—“ ‘Duh, not gonna do anything, except maybe I’ll beat someone up, that oughta sort it—’ The pair of ye need a good kick up the hole. ”
“Kid,” Cal says, turning around to her. He’s at the end of his rope. “I’m doing everything I can.”
Trey receives that with a long silence. “Rooks are sticking something up your exhaust,” she says in the end, turning away from him to get out plates. “Think it’s your sponge.”
If anyone is going to flush Eugene out of cover, it’s Clodagh Moynihan.
Clodagh is a scrawny, sharp-nosed, tight-lipped woman who, once she lights on a tender spot, can’t stop herself from pecking frenetically away at it; Cal would bet she’s been following Eugene around the house, asking whether he needs to see a grief counselor, listing breaches of etiquette she spotted at the funeral, tapping on the bathroom door to make sure he hasn’t drowned himself in the bath, and suggesting eligible candidates for his next girlfriend.
In Eugene’s shoes, after weeks of this, Cal would need a lot of bourbon on the rocks and a lot of long drives, or long walks, or both.
He hopes Eugene is going heavy on the bourbon and light on the driving.
Apparently Clodagh takes Sundays off, though.
While Cal pries the sponge out of his exhaust and finishes washing his car, Trey and Kate report the Moynihans coming home, presumably from mass and lunch in town, and then staying home.
Three women who all look like Clodagh arrive in fancy cars, and leave a couple of hours later.
Nothing else happens. Trey keeps Cal updated via increasingly bored texts: the Moynihans’ conservatory sofas are the color of shite, Red Geraghty’s ram isn’t doing his job and she and Kate reckon he’s gay, they’ve found an emoji wearing Tommy Moynihan’s hat.
Cal isn’t sure what to make of this. He’s seen Trey go after things she cared about before, and she was trained on her target like a rifle sight, no room for anything outside her crosshairs.
She sure as hell wasn’t sending him hat emojis.
This being Sunday, Cal phones Alyssa, once Seattle is awake.
Alyssa is buoyant with a work project that she’s finally managed to get off the ground—it means changing her flights, but she’s coming on the twenty-second, and what does Trey want for Christmas?
She asks Cal how things are going on his end, and he tells her about Con McHugh’s nursing chair, and how Trey’s rematch against Lisnacarragh got postponed because the pitch was too wet.
They have a laugh about Irish weather. Cal imagines trying to explain what’s actually been going on around here, and the disconcerted silence he would get in response, like he was speaking an unfamiliar language.
Alyssa seems so terrifyingly far away that he wants to reach through the phone and grab her into a hug, but a part of him feels like he should be telling her to cancel the trip.
This doesn’t seem like somewhere he wants Alyssa to be.
When it starts getting late, he convinces Trey and Kate to go home, or at least to tell him they will.
Then he turns off all his lights except the living-room lamp and pulls the armchair in front of the window, where he can keep an eye on his front yard and where any visitor will see him awake and silhouetted against the light.
When he lets Rip out before bedtime, he stands in the cold on his back porch and sees all Mart’s windows lit.
The night brings nothing. A few sets of headlights pass along the road, but they don’t slow down.
Rip, in his bed by the fire, lifts his head occasionally, raising an ear to some sound too faint for Cal to hear, but he never goes to alert.
Cal dozes off and on in the armchair, jerked awake by loud dreams that are gone before he can catch them.
It’s early days; people need time to think things over, build up their courage.
Cal tells himself there’s no rush—Tommy’s plans clearly don’t include going anywhere near Lena himself, and it’s not like he can have her in handcuffs before the day is out.
All the same, Cal can’t tamp down a rising sense of urgency, like something terrible is happening somewhere out there in the darkness, and he should be running flat out to stop it.
Too much is underway, unseen, among the peaceful spread of fields.
Regardless of Trey’s helpful relationship advice, he still hasn’t updated Lena.
He has no way of telling what might drive her farther away, to a distance they’ll never be able to cross.
He texted her—Good night. Love you—and then put his phone away, so he wouldn’t watch for the reply that isn’t coming.
He’s always known she had rooms he couldn’t enter.
This never felt like a problem before—the spaces she let him into were broad and generous, and he loved them—but now it seems fatal.
Something has shifted her geography: the locked rooms have expanded, till the ones where he was welcome don’t exist any more.
He wonders whether it would have made any difference if they had gotten married, like Noreen and everyone wanted them to.
He knows better than many that marriage is no guarantee of permanence, but it would at least be something solid binding them.
As it is, Lena isn’t his wife, Trey isn’t his kid, his land may not be his land much longer, everything he’s built here has no more solidity than mist over the fields.
Lena has started sleeping in the sitting room.
Her bed feels unsafe; she might sleep too deeply, miss something coming closer until it’s too late and she’s trapped.
Instead she piles duvets on the sofa and curls awkwardly under them, fully dressed, in the dim light of a corner lamp and the dying fire.
Even with the fire, the room is never warm enough, but Lena prefers it that way: the chill keeps her in the shallows of sleep, ready.
In their corner, the dogs twitch and sigh.
Sean had a shotgun, for vermin. Lena has taken it out of the gun safe where it sat untouched for six years, cleaned it and loaded it and put it under the sofa where she can reach it quickly.
She’s out of practice, but she knows better than to let anyone see her getting her eye back in.
She doesn’t expect the shotgun to make any difference, anyhow.
She just wants the knowledge that she’s done everything she can.
When Daisy lets out a huff of a bark, deep in the night, Lena is awake instantly. Both dogs are half out of their bed, bodies taut and stretched towards the front door. The lamplight catches in their eyes; the fire is only a red pulse in the grate.
Lena sits up, very carefully, and listens. Outside the front of the house, something moves, a scrape and a rustle. Daisy starts a low, slow growl.
“No,” Lena says, in an undertone. Daisy quiets, but she stays tense, quivering with alert.
Inch by inch, Lena takes the shotgun from under the sofa and stands up.
She doesn’t go to the window; if she moves the curtain, she’ll be clear against the lamplight.
The spare bedroom is at the front of the house, but she doesn’t know how many of them are out there; she could look out the window and find herself eye to eye.
She stands still, holding the shotgun, feeling the chill swirl around her ankles, waiting for whatever comes next.
Nellie lets out a suppressed little moan.
Something heavy gives one thump, loud and deliberate, against the front door. Both dogs flinch. After a moment there’s the rhythmic crunch of gravel as someone big walks away, in no hurry, down the drive.
Lena goes into the spare bedroom and makes herself put her eye to the crack between the curtains. Down by the gate there’s movement, a thicker dark against the darkness, shifting and then gone. After a while a car starts up, around the bend, with no lights. Its sound fades away towards the village.
Lena waits a long time before she goes to the front door. The dogs try to come too, but she sends them back to their bed. She opens the door with the shotgun in her other hand.
No one’s there. In the light from the doorway she can see the broad footprints tracking their way through the gravel, straight up the drive and back again. On the doorstep is a liter bottle of antifreeze, and beside it a bowl, neatly half filled.
Lena understands both messages. The bowl is to tell her that they can get the dogs any time they like. The bottle is for her.
It would be the simplest way to clean up this mess.
Women lose hold every day; a few of them kill their rivals; some of those can’t live with what they’ve done.
The story would be clear and convenient, and over.
The wave of sympathy for poor Eugene, victim of a slut and a mad bitch, would carry him onto the council and wash away any objections to Tommy’s plans.
The infighting and tension would ebb, and everyone would keep moving on.
She doesn’t want to touch the antifreeze, but a fox or a hedgehog could pass by. She takes the bowl into the kitchen, pours the antifreeze down the sink, and throws the bowl in the bin. She leaves the bottle where it is.
Far off through the townland’s winter silence she can hear the river, endless and relentless. Its silt smells rich and cold at the back of her nostrils. She thinks of men dragging the water, and of the hordes of souls who would come up, howling, on the dragging hooks.