CHAPTER 13
THE HYMN
POV: MAE
Rosa has wrapped his knuckles in white gauze, and he’s buttering toast with them like nothing happened.
It’s nine o’clock. I slept four hours. I came down because rule number two says I eat what’s put in front of me, and because I wanted to see his hands in daylight.
They’re worse in daylight.
Both of them. The right one worst. The gauze is spotted rust-brown over the knuckles, and when he closes his fingers around the knife, I watch him decide not to wince.
He looks up.
“Sit.”
I sit. Rosa sets a plate in front of me. Eggs. Toast. The pear, sliced and fanned. She doesn’t look at either of us. She goes back to the stove and turns the radio up a little, a man arguing about the Patriots, and I understand she’s giving us noise to hide in.
“Will he die?” I ask.
“No.”
“Will he—” I don’t know how to finish it.
“He’ll never close his right hand again.” Ronan sets the knife down. “He’ll hold his coffee in his left for the rest of his life. Every morning when he does it, he’ll think about you.”
I should put my fork down. I should feel sick.
I eat a slice of pear.
“Say something,” he says.
“I said good last night.”
“I remember.”
“I’ve been waiting all morning to feel sorry.”
“And?”
I look at the gauze. At the small spot of fresh red soaking through over his second knuckle.
“I’m still waiting,” I say.
Something moves behind his face. Not a smile. Something older and quieter. He picks the knife back up and goes on buttering his toast. I eat my eggs. The man on the radio says the season is over, and neither of us says anything else.
***
He leaves at ten with Theo. On his way out, Theo gives me a small nod, like a man tipping a hat he isn’t wearing.
Rule one: I don’t leave the house.
The house is big.
I’ve been here seven days and I’ve seen four rooms. My room. The kitchen. The study, from the doorway. The Crypt, which I’d give a year of my life to unsee and which I think about every time I close my eyes.
Today I walk.
Draven House is five floors of old money stacked on top of itself.
The second floor is a library two stories tall, with a rolling ladder and a fireplace I could stand up in.
The books are real. Somebody read them. There are pencil notes in the margins of the Augustine, in a small, slanted hand that isn’t his.
Across the hall is a music room. A piano under a dust sheet. I lift the corner. Black lacquer, ivory keys gone the color of weak tea. I touch middle C, and it’s out of tune, a sour little sound that hangs in the cold air.
Nobody has played it in a long time.
The dining room is on the ground floor, behind the kitchen. A table for twenty. Twenty chairs. I’ve eaten at it once, on Friday, at his right hand, with nineteen empty chairs watching.
The portraits start in the hall outside.
Men, mostly. Gray eyes in every one. A man in a high collar with a whaling ship behind him.
A man in a 1920s suit with a watch chain and a mouth like a closed purse.
A man in a tuxedo, older, white-haired, one hand on the silver head of a cane.
He has Ronan’s eyes and none of Ronan’s stillness.
Even in paint, he looks like he’s about to interrupt you.
At the end of the hall, by herself, a woman.
She’s sitting in a chair by a window. Dark hair pinned up. A soft mouth that looks like it was about to laugh when the painter told her to stop. A blue dress. Her hands are folded in her lap, and wound through her fingers is a rosary.
Black beads. Onyx.
I know those beads. I’ve watched them move through his gloved fingers.
There’s a small brass plate on the frame.
GRACE DRAVEN. 1961 – 2024.
I stand in front of her a long time.
“You’re the one who read the Augustine,” I tell her.
She doesn’t answer. She looks out of her window, about to laugh.
***
At the very back of the house, past the kitchen and the mudroom, there’s a glass door.
Beyond it, a covered passage runs across the snowy garden to a small stone building at the far end. An old carriage house, I think. Its windows are colored, red and blue and gold, dull in the winter light.
The glass door isn’t locked.
I look up. There’s a camera over it. Of course there is.
Rule one says the house. It doesn’t say what counts as the house.
I go.
The passage is cold. My breath smokes. The stone building has a wooden door with iron hinges, and when I push it, it swings open without a sound, like someone oils it every week.
It’s a chapel.
Small. Eight pews, four on each side. A stone floor worn smooth. A marble altar with a white linen cloth and two tall candles. Above it, the colored window I saw from the house: a young woman in red with a white lamb in her arms.
Saint Agnes.
My saint. My convent’s saint. Here, in the back garden of the man who bought me.
To the left of the altar stands a prie-dieu. A single kneeler, a slanted wooden rest for your elbows, a pad of dark red velvet for your knees. The velvet is worn pale in two shallow dips.
On a stand beside it, an Advent wreath. Two purple candles burned down, one purple candle new. And the pink one. Gaudete. Waiting for Sunday.
Somebody lit these.
Somebody comes here.
I kneel on the prie-dieu. The velvet is soft and cold. My knees fit the worn dips like they were made for them.
I fold my hands. I close my eyes.
Make me sorry.
Nothing.
Make me sorry for last night. For the gala. For the lamp. For “good.” For all of it.
Nothing.
I think about his hands on the kitchen table. The gauze. The little bloom of red.
I think about his mouth between my legs on Thursday night. Not Him. Me.
I think about Liam Kavanagh holding a coffee cup with his left hand for the rest of his life, and what I feel is not sorry.
It’s warm. It’s low in my stomach. It’s worse than anything I’ve ever confessed.
You’re kneeling in his mother’s chapel thinking about his mouth.
I open my eyes and look up at Saint Agnes in her red dress, holding her lamb.
“I know,” I tell her. “I know.”
***
I don’t know how long I stay. The light in the window goes from gold to gray to blue. My knees go numb, stop hurting, start again.
Somewhere down on Charles Street, a church bell rings five.
The door opens behind me.
I don’t turn around. I know the step. I know the smell before it reaches me. Cedar. Candle wax. Snow on leather.
“You found it,” Ronan says.
“You didn’t lock it.”
“No.”
He doesn’t come closer. I hear him stop at the back, by the last pew.
“This was your mother’s,” I say.
A pause.
“You read the plate.”
“Grace.”
“Grace,” he agrees. Quietly. Like the word costs him something.
“She has your rosary in the painting.”
“It’s hers. I only carry it.”
I turn on the kneeler to look at him. He’s still in his coat, snow melting on the shoulders. His bandaged hands hang at his sides. In the blue light from the window, the scar on his face is the palest thing in the room.
“She was a girl at St. Agnes,” he says. “The parish school, before my father. When she got sick, she said she didn’t want the cathedral.
She wanted St. Agnes. The little church on Adams Street where the nuns taught her to read.
” He looks up at the window, at the saint in red.
“My father thought it was beneath us. He did it anyway. He always did what she asked, right up until he didn’t. ”
Something turns over in my memory. Slow and heavy, like a key in an old lock.
Two years ago. November. I was twenty. I still lived in my father’s apartment and cleaned offices at night, and on Sundays I sang in the parish choir at St. Agnes because it was the only place anyone ever told me I did something right.
There was a funeral.
A big one. Black cars all the way down Adams Street. Men in long dark coats on the sidewalk in the rain. The pastor told the choir to wear our good robes. He told me I’d sing the In Paradisum alone, at the end, when they carried the coffin out, because I had the voice for it.
I remember the front pew. Rows of men who looked like money. A white-haired man with a cane.
And beside him, a younger man who didn’t cry.
Everyone else did. Even the men in the long coats. He sat with his back straight and his hands on his knees, and he didn’t move. Not once. Not even when they closed the lid.
“That was you,” I say.
“Yes.”
“You didn’t cry.”
“No.”
“Everyone else did.”
“Everyone else was being paid to.”
He says it flat, but his hands close at his sides. The gauze pulls tight.
“I was looking at the coffin,” he says. “Then you started. Up in the loft. Alone.” He stops. “I looked up. I didn’t look at anything else for two years.”
The chapel is very quiet. The candles on the altar aren’t lit. The only light is the window.
“Is that when you—”
“Yes.”
A week after that funeral, I think, my father sat me down at the kitchen table and couldn’t look at me.
A week after that, I walked up the front steps of St. Agnes with one suitcase.
I open my mouth to say it. I don’t know why. Something about the dates, the order of things, sits in my chest like a stone.
He’s watching me. He’s very still.
I close my mouth.
“Sing it,” he says.
I blink. “What?”
“Sing it.”
“Here?”
“Here.”
“I haven’t sung it since—”
“I know,” he says. “I’d have heard.”
I look at him a long moment.
Then I turn back around on the prie-dieu to face the altar, because I can’t do this looking at him. I fold my hands on the wooden rest. I breathe in the cold and the stone and the old smell of wax.
My voice comes out thin at first. Rusty. It cracks on the first word.
In paradisum deducant te Angeli.
May the angels lead you into paradise.
It steadies on the second line. The chapel is small and the stone takes the sound and gives it back to me warmer, rounder, like a hand under my elbow.
In tuo adventu suscipiant te martyres—
I sing it the way I sang it two years ago, to a coffin I never saw inside. Slow. The Latin laid down one word at a time, like stones across water.
—et perducant te in civitatem sanctam Ierusalem.
Behind me, I hear the beads.
The small click of onyx, one against the next. He’s running the rosary through his fingers. Click. Click.
Then it stops.
Chorus angelorum te suscipiat—
I don’t turn around. I don’t need to. I can feel the silence where the clicking was. I can feel him standing at the back of his mother’s chapel with the beads gone still in his ruined hands.
—et cum Lazaro quondam paupere, aeternam habeas requiem.
The last note goes up into the window and doesn’t come down.
Nobody moves.
I stay on my knees with my hands folded and my heart going hard and slow, and I listen. There’s no sound at all. Not the beads. Not breathing.
When I finally stand and turn around, he hasn’t moved from the back pew.
His eyes are closed.
Both his hands are wrapped around the rosary so tightly that the gauze has gone red again at the knuckles. And they’re shaking.
The man who drowned a priest in holy water. The man who put a bullet through a hand and came home and buttered toast.
His hands are shaking.
I walk down the aisle to him. My shoes are loud on the stone.
He opens his eyes when I stop in front of him. They’re dry. His voice, when it comes, isn’t.
“Again,” he says, rough. “Some other night. Not now.”
“All right.”
His hand comes up. The bandaged right one. He sets it on the back of my neck under my hair, heavy and warm through the gauze, and pulls me in until his forehead almost touches mine.
Almost.
He doesn’t kiss me. He only breathes. I can feel it on my mouth.
I lift my hand.
I’ve never touched him. Not once. He’s touched me everywhere, and I’ve never touched him.
I touch the scar.
I put one fingertip at the corner of his mouth where it starts and draw it down, slowly, along the pale line to the edge of his jaw. The skin there is smooth and tight and warmer than I expected.
He goes still under my hand. All of him.
“Careful,” he says.
“Why?”
“Because if you keep doing that, I won’t stop. And you still haven’t said it.”
My finger rests at the end of the scar, on the hinge of his jaw.
“How did you get this?”
“Another night.”
I keep my finger there one breath longer. Then I take my hand back.
He lets me go.
I walk out of the chapel into the blue dark of the passage. The cold hits my face, and my fingertip is still warm where it touched him.
I don’t wipe it off.
It’s the first thing I’ve ever given him.
It won’t be the last.