Chapter Twenty-Two #2
“If she’d texted anyone,” Lena says, “they’d have gone looking for her straightaway, and they mighta found her in time.
And then she’da been bundled away somewhere on a psych hold, nice and safe, and anyhow she’da been just some young one with mental health issues.
Unstable, like. Crying out for attention.
You wouldn’t want to listen to anything she said. ”
She hears the tightening in her voice. Tommy would have done it perfectly, grieved by the bizarre accusations, but compassionate towards human frailty. Rachel knew Tommy, better than Lena does. She knew what to fear.
“She thought Eugene would find the note,” she says, “when he came to meet her. If anything could give him the guts to go against Tommy, it’d be that. He’d tell the world, and everyone’d be up in arms, and that’d be the end of Tommy.”
Cal arranges all this in his mind, drawing patterns with a finger on the step between them.
Lena leaves him to it. The two of them may be here only to recognize that what they made has been damaged beyond repair, and to do this one last thing together, lay it to rest. But whatever they’re doing, they need to start from the same ground.
“It could’ve worked,” Cal says. “Eugene’s a little shit, but he seems like he actually cared about Rachel.”
“It woulda worked,” Lena says. “I shoulda seen it ages ago.” She thinks of Sheila telling her A grown woman knows sometimes there’s nothing to be done, so you do nothing. When there was nothing to be done, Rachel made something.
“Sheila says Rachel was soft,” she says. “Soft as butter. I’m not so sure.”
Cal is thinking about Eugene, so convinced his father killed Rachel that he’s ready to get up in court and swear Tommy confessed. He says, “Are you gonna tell people?”
Lena watches him. She says, “How about you?”
It takes Cal a while to answer. “It’s been a bad time,” he says.
“This place pretty near ripped itself apart. Now it seems like maybe people can quit going at each other’s throats and start fixing up the damage, getting back to normal, even if it takes a while.
I don’t see much use in stirring things up again. ”
Lena nods. “That’s very sensible altogether,” she says. “Whatever you say, say nothing; sure, talk only ever led to trouble. If it wasn’t for the accent, anyone’d take you for a local.”
Cal can’t read the edge in her voice. He doesn’t answer.
“And o’ course,” Lena points out, “you need to stay quiet, to keep Tommy in line. If he gets proof he didn’t kill Rachel, that’s half your leverage gone, and you wouldn’t want that.”
“Well, it’s not proof,” Cal says. “Mrs. Duggan’s word against Eugene’s. That’s not gonna get Tommy off the hook.” He knows that’s not the point.
Lena says, “I told Eugene.”
Cal turns to stare at her. Her face is lifted to look out over the frost-bleached fields; her profile shows nothing. He doesn’t understand any of this, what she was aiming to do, why she never told him any of it, why she’s telling him now. He says, “When?”
“Julie Quinn had his number,” Lena says. “He usedta hang around with her Niall. I rang him to meet me, after I left Mrs. Duggan, and I told him. He’s in rag order, isn’t he?”
Cal remembers how he wondered, yesterday evening, what had pushed Eugene over the line. He asks, “What’d he say?”
“At first he was bulling to go after Mrs. Duggan,” Lena says, “although I’m not sure what he had in mind; loads of noise about the Guards and suing, I don’t think he knew himself.
I said to him, you can do what you want to do, or you can do what Rachel wanted done. Take your pick. Then I left him to it.”
Cal says, “Why tell him?”
Lena rearranges her hands, tucking them into the opposite sleeves of her sweatshirt for warmth. “Like you said,” she says, “he cared about Rachel. In the end, he let her do what she wanted with her own death. No one else would. I thought she oughta have that.”
Cal draws more patterns on the step and goes through yesterday’s conversation. As far as he can see, Tommy told the truth on pretty close to everything. Presumably Cal should feel a twinge of conscience somewhere around this, but he doesn’t.
“I’ll keep quiet,” Lena says, “but not to suit anyone around here; to suit Rachel. She went into that river to get a job done. It’s done.”
The finality in her voice comes to Cal like grief. All around, things are ending, without fanfare, falling as simply as leaves.
“I’m going to tell Claire and Fintan, just,” Lena says. “I wouldn’t say they’ll do anything with it, but I could be wrong. Either way, that’s up to them. It might break their hearts all over again, I don’t know, but they oughta know Rachel had her reasons.”
Her eyes move to Cal, measuring him. “Are you going to say I oughta keep my mouth shut, leave well enough alone?”
“No,” Cal says. “I think you’re right.”
“Well, that’s a relief,” Lena says, and this time the edge in her voice is clear and sharp. “I was worried you’d gone native altogether. At least you’re not that far gone.”
Cal feels a sudden burst of anger. He says, “You never told me any of this.”
“You would’ve handed it over to Mart,” Lena says, “for him to use. That wasn’t what I was doing it for.”
“Not if you didn’t want me to. All you had to do was ask.”
“I never aimed to make your decisions for you,” Lena says. “The only decisions I make are my own.”
“What the hell,” Cal says. His voice is rising. “That’s not how it works. We’re supposed to be in this together.”
“We weren’t,” Lena says flatly. “When I found out what Tommy was up to, you brought it straight to Mart. When you heard what people were saying about us, you did the same again. You were in this with Mart Lavin and his boyos.”
“I was trying to fix things. That’s all I ever aimed to do.
Maybe I could’ve found some other way if you’d told me what was going on, but you weren’t talking to me.
I didn’t even see you. You made those damn decisions for me just fine.
What the hell was I supposed to do? Sit on my ass while that shitbird Moynihan trashed everything? ”
He wants to get up off the step, move somewhere, hit something. His hands are shaking. He clasps them together to still them.
“I was trying,” he says. “Maybe I did it wrong. You didn’t even try.”
His anger doesn’t bother Lena; it’s another thing that puts them on the same ground. He has a point, and she welcomes that. She takes her time getting her answer clear.
“When I first found out what Tommy was at,” she says, “I was going to tell the whole place. I couldn’t wait. Wild rebel, me, all ready to watch the world burn.”
Probably some of it was for Trey. Maybe some, whether she liked it or not, was for Rachel. Some was for herself, and for Cal, to show him that he didn’t have to end up what he is now: Ardnakelty’s man, subject to all its pulls and its requirements.
“And then,” she says, “Tommy showed up here and explained if I didn’t behave myself, he’d land me in jail or in a mental ward. And as soon as the pressure was on him, he sent over a Guard to get the ball rolling.”
“And if you’d told me any of that,” Cal says, “we could have figured out what to do about it. Together.”
“Probably I should have,” Lena says. “But it was never that I wasn’t talking to you.
After Tommy got to work on me, I had no talk left in me for anyone that was part of this place.
” Her voice is level, but she doesn’t try to keep out the traces of these last weeks.
“All I wanted was to get it off me, before it ate me alive. I would’ve got in that car and left, only I had nowhere to go. ”
She watches Cal hear the parts she isn’t saying; his eyes close against them for a second. This is a space she never intended to let anyone enter. But wherever they go next, he needs to know how they got here.
“Tell me something,” she says, after a while. “When ye went over to Tommy yesterday. Which one of ye did the talking?”
“I did,” Cal says. The anger has gone out of him.
Lena nods. “It sounds like you did a good job,” she says.
Cal understands what she means. Most things he’s offered this townland, pretty much anyone could have offered the same, but not this time. He’s stepped into a place. Who he is may be no different from the man Lena took up with, but what he is, and what he brings to her, has changed.
“I live here,” he says. “I’m just trying to do that right.”
“I know,” Lena says. “It’s not as easy as it looks, is it?”
“I didn’t plan on this,” Cal says. “Things seemed like they’d finally settled.
You and me, and Trey was on a good track, and people had quit treating me like a tourist and trying to get me to wear a leprechaun suit to the pub.
Things were working great, far as I could tell.
I guess I figured they would just keep on going the same way. ”
“I wanted to think that,” Lena says. “I almost had myself convinced, for a while there.”
The anger has gone out of her, too. Back when she wanted Cal partly because he had nothing of this place built into him, she was an eejit to think that would stay unchanged. He’s growing in this soil now.
If his outsiderhood was ever what she prized most in him, it isn’t any more.
She’s changed as well. When Cal felt it happening, he held on to her as best he could, steadfast, hoping if he held on long enough they’d know each other again.
It’s not that she feels she owes him the same in return; it just seems like, of all the things people have done over the last weeks and hoped they were doing right, that was the only one that didn’t have a payload of darkness enclosed somewhere inside it.
Lena values that, more than she ever noticed before.
“Sheila and a couple of others called round here a few days ago,” she says, “to say they’d tell the world they were with me when Rachel died. That was the last thing I expected. I hadn’t seen Yvonne and Julie since school, not properly, but there they were.”