CHAPTER 9
THE LOCKED DOOR
POV: MAE
The dining room table seats twenty, and on Friday night he puts me at his right hand.
Nineteen empty chairs. Silver candlesticks the length of my arm. A fire at one end of the room, and the dead Draven men watching from the walls with their gray eyes. Rosa brings the plates one at a time, sets them down without a sound, and goes away again.
This morning he showed me two years of my life pinned to a wall in a basement.
Tonight he’s cutting his steak.
I don’t touch mine.
“Rule two,” he says, without looking up.
“I’m not hungry.”
“You ate half a pear at breakfast and nothing since.” He sets his knife down. “Eat, Magdalene.”
“I don’t want your food.”
“It isn’t my food. It’s yours. Everything on this table is yours. The plate. The fork. The chair you’re sitting on. You can throw all of it at the wall if you like. Rosa will clean it up. But you’ll eat something first.”
I look at the little glass bowl beside my plate. Pears, poached in red wine, dark as garnets, the way the nuns made them on the feast of the Assumption.
He knows that too.
I don’t pick up my fork.
He watches me not pick it up. Then he reaches over and takes one of the pears out of my bowl with his bare fingers. He cuts a thin red crescent off it with his own knife, and he holds it out to me across the corner of the table.
Between his finger and thumb.
“Eat,” he says.
I stare at it. The syrup running down to his knuckle. The scarred hand. The gray eyes over it, waiting.
“I’m not a dog,” I say.
“No. A dog would have eaten by now.”
My face goes hot.
He doesn’t move. He holds the slice out, patient, the way he held his thumb against my lip in the office. He can hold still forever. I’ve seen him do it.
The fire crackles. In the kitchen, Rosa drops a spoon.
I lean across the corner of the table.
I take the pear from his fingers with my mouth.
My lips close over his fingertips. The syrup is sweet and dark and tastes like wine, like the chapel, like Assumption Day. His fingers are warm. I feel his breath stop.
And then I bite.
Not the pear. Him.
I close my teeth on the side of his finger, hard, harder than I’ve ever bitten anything, and hold, and look up at him over his own hand.
He doesn’t pull away.
He doesn’t flinch.
His eyes go black. And the corner of his mouth, the scarred corner, moves.
I let go.
There’s a little row of dents in his finger, going red. A bead of blood at one end.
He looks at it.
Then he puts the finger in his mouth.
I can’t breathe.
“Again,” he says, when he takes it out.
I pick up my fork.
I eat all of it. The steak. The potatoes. The rest of the pear, off my own plate, with my own spoon. Every bite, I feel him watching my mouth. Every bite, I think about his finger. Every bite, I hate myself, and I don’t stop.
When I’m done, he walks me to the foot of the stairs. He doesn’t touch me. He stops on the bottom step.
“I’m at the docks tomorrow,” he says. “Nine o’clock. Theo’s with me. I won’t be back until afternoon.”
I look at him.
Why is he telling me?
“Goodnight, Magdalene,” he says.
I lie awake in the big bed until two, thinking about nine o’clock, and a man in a green jacket, and a rolling door that stays up for four minutes.
***
The linen truck comes on Saturdays at ten-fifteen, and the driver never locks the back.
I know because I’ve watched it twice. Once on Thursday from the window seat, when I didn’t know I was watching. Once this morning, on purpose.
A white box truck backs into the service alley behind Draven House.
A man in a green jacket gets out with a clipboard.
Rosa meets him at the kitchen door. They talk about her grandson for four minutes while he loads canvas bags of our sheets into the back and takes the clean ones off, and the rolling door stays up the whole time.
Four minutes.
Ronan left at nine with Theo. I heard the garage door. Before that I heard him on the stairs, stopping outside my room, not knocking. Then going.
You don’t leave this house without Theo.
I put on the camel coat.
It’s the first time I’ve touched it. It’s the softest thing I’ve ever worn, and it smells faintly of the closet, cedar and new wool, and I hate how good it feels on my shoulders. It comes to my knees. It has deep pockets. There’s nothing in them.
I put on boots from the slanted shelf. They fit. Of course they—
I stop the thought before it finishes. I don’t need to hear it again.
At ten-sixteen I’m in the back hall behind the kitchen with my heart going so hard I can feel it in my teeth.
I can hear Rosa. —and he says to me, Vovó, I want to be a lawyer—
I think about the camera in the kitchen. The one on the garage. The one over my bed.
Let him watch me leave.
I walk out the service door, down two steps, climb into the back of the truck between the canvas bags, and pull the nearest one over my legs.
It smells like our sheets. Like him.
The door rolls down.
***
It’s dark and it bounces and it smells like bleach, and I count.
In Latin at first. Then English. Then I just breathe.
Twenty-two minutes. Three stops. At the third, the rolling door goes up and gray daylight pours in, and a different man in a green jacket says, “Jesus Christ,” when he sees me.
“Sorry,” I say. “God bless you.”
I climb past him into the snow.
Dorchester Avenue. I know this corner. There’s the bakery that sells day-old bread for a dollar. There’s the bus stop where I waited for the 17 with my collar up.
Eight blocks.
I run them.
The camel coat flaps around my knees. The boots are good in the snow, and I hate that too. People stare. A woman in a coat that expensive, running up Adams Street with no hat and her hair loose and a bite on her throat.
I don’t care.
St. Agnes rises at the end of the block, red brick gone dark with wet, the bell tower gray against a gray sky. I’ve never been so happy to see anything.
I take the front steps two at a time and ring the bell.
It takes a long time.
Then the door opens four inches, on the chain.
Mother Clare’s face. Pearl-rimmed glasses. Hands folded, even now, even behind a door.
“Mother.” It comes out as a sob. “Mother, please. Let me in.”
She looks at me through the gap. At the coat. At my throat.
“You don’t live here anymore, Mrs. Draven.”
“I’m a postulant here. I’ve been here two years—”
“You’re a married woman. We don’t take married women.”
“He made me.” My voice cracks. “Mother, you were there. You saw. He made me marry him—”
“I saw you say I do.” Her glasses catch the light. “Twice, if I recall. Once to the priest, once to him.”
I grab the edge of the door. “Please. Let me talk to Sister Bernadette. Just for a minute. Just—”
“Child.”
She has never said child in that voice. Soft. Almost sorry.
“He pays for the heat,” she says.
And she closes the door.
The chain rattles. The bolt slides.
I stand on the top step with my hand still out, touching nothing.
***
The side door to the chapel is never locked. It hasn’t been since the soup kitchen opened, because old men come in to get warm, and Mother says God doesn’t keep office hours.
It isn’t locked now.
I slip inside.
The chapel is cold and dim. The candles are out except on the Advent wreath, where one purple candle stands half burned and the second waits.
My footsteps are loud on the stone. I walk up the side aisle with my arms wrapped around myself inside his coat, and I don’t know where I’m going. To my pew. To the altar. To God.
Somebody is sitting in my pew.
Third from the front. Left side.
Dark coat. Broad shoulders. Black gloves resting on the back of the pew in front of him.
I stop so hard my boots squeak.
He doesn’t turn around.
“You took the long way,” Ronan says.
I can’t move.
“The linen truck,” he goes on, to the altar. “Three stops. Eight blocks on foot. You ran the last two. Your heart rate hit one sixty-one on the front steps.”
My heart rate.
I look down at my hand. At the gold on my finger. The tiny beads. The R.
“It’s the ring,” I say.
“Among other things.”
I could take it off. Right now. Twist it over my knuckle and throw it across the chapel and let it roll under a pew.
My fingers close around it.
I don’t take it off.
He stands. He steps out of the pew into the side aisle and turns to face me. In the dim chapel his eyes are almost black and the scar at his mouth is white.
He’s holding something folded in one gloved hand.
White cotton. Starched.
One of my veils.
“Mother Clare let me into your cell,” he says. “She was very helpful.”
“She works for you.”
“Everyone works for me.” He tips his head toward the altar. “Come.”
I don’t move.
“Magdalene.”
I go.
He walks me up to the altar rail with one hand at the small of my back, light, almost polite. The marble step is worn in two shallow dips where a hundred years of knees have knelt.
“Kneel.”
“This is a church.”
“I know where we are. Kneel.”
I kneel.
The stone is cold through the wool trousers. The rail is smooth under my hands. Above me hang the crucifix and the tabernacle lamp, red.
Ronan doesn’t kneel. He stands beside me with his coat brushing my shoulder and puts his gloved hand at the back of my head, in my hair. Not pulling. Just there. Heavy.
“Say them again.”
“Say what?”
“Your vows. The real ones.”
My throat closes. “I already—”
“You said I do. Say the rest. In your own words. To me.”
His fingers tighten in my hair. Not enough to hurt. Enough to tip my head back so I have to look up at him, standing between me and the cross.
My body goes hot. All of it. Knees on cold marble and everything else burning, and I hate it, and I can’t stop it.
“I, Magdalene,” I say. My voice shakes. “Take you. Ronan.”
“Go on.”
“To have. And to hold. From this day forward.”
“And?”
“For better. For worse.” I swallow. “For richer. For poorer.”
“And?”
I stare at him.
“That’s all of it,” I say.
“No,” he says. “It isn’t.”
I know what he means. I can see it in his face.
“That isn’t in the vows.”
“It is now.”
The tabernacle lamp flickers. Somewhere in the building, a radiator knocks.
“And obey,” I whisper.
His thumb moves once against my scalp.
“Good.”
He lets go of my hair. He steps past me to the Advent wreath beside the altar and holds the corner of my white veil to the flame of the purple candle.
It catches slowly. Starch always does. A thin brown line, then a curl of smoke, then fire running up the cotton, bright and fast.
He holds it until it’s nearly at his glove.
Then he drops it on the marble step beside my knees, and I watch two years of mornings burn down to a curl of black ash.
“The other two are in my car,” he says. “Along with your hand cream, your hairpins, and the crucifix that hung over your bed. There’s nothing left in this building with your name on it.”
I stare at the ash.
“The linen service won’t be coming on Saturdays anymore,” he adds. “Rosa will do the sheets.”
He holds out his hand.
I look at it a long moment. Then I put mine in it, and he pulls me up off my knees, and I stand in my old chapel in his coat with his ring on my finger and my veil in ashes at my feet.
Behind us, the side door I came in by is still open, letting in the cold.
Across the nave, the front door is locked. I heard the bolt.
The only door that ever opened for me was his.