CHAPTER 16
THE NUMBERS
POV: RONAN
There’s blood on my mother’s altar cloth.
I stand in the chapel at six in the morning with the candles guttered out and look at it for a long time. A small dark stain, dry now, rust on white. The shape of nothing.
The shape of her.
I carried her up at two, wrapped in my coat, the veil trailing. I didn’t take her to her room. I took her to mine. She was asleep before I got her under the covers. She’s asleep now, forty feet above me, in my bed, on my side of it, with one hand under her cheek.
I checked before I came down. Fifty-one beats a minute.
I lift the linen off the altar. I fold it the way my mother taught me to fold it when I was seven and served Mass for her in this room. In half. In half again. The stain inside.
I take it down to the Crypt.
There’s a drawer in the desk that locks with a key, not a thumb.
A real key, brass, that I keep on the rosary cord between the fourth and fifth decade.
Inside the drawer, there’s a prayer card from my mother’s funeral.
A pressed white rose from her coffin. A program with the order of service, and on it, halfway down, in small type: In Paradisum — soloist, Miss M. Holloway.
I put the altar cloth on top of them.
I lock the drawer.
***
When I go back up, she’s awake.
She’s sitting up in my bed with the sheet pulled to her chest. Her hair is a dark mess over one shoulder. The veil is gone, on the floor somewhere, and the bite on her throat has a second mark beside it now that I don’t remember making.
She watches me come in. She doesn’t pull the sheet higher.
“You were gone,” she says.
“Not far.”
“The chapel.”
“Yes.”
“The cloth,” she says.
It isn’t a question. I don’t answer it.
I sit on the edge of the bed. She looks at my hands. Rosa rewrapped them at five. Clean white gauze. It won’t last the day.
“Does it hurt, dove?” I ask.
She thinks about it. Honestly. Shifting under the sheet, feeling for it.
“Yes.”
“Good.”
She stares at me. Then she laughs.
It comes out of her surprised, like something that got loose. A real laugh. I’ve heard her laugh at Sister Bernadette through a steamed-up laundry window. I’ve never heard her laugh at me.
I want to hear it every morning for the rest of my life.
“That’s my line,” she says.
“It was. Now it’s mine.”
Her eyes drop to the bed. The wide expanse of it. The dark headboard. The other pillow, the one with the dent where my head never was because I didn’t sleep.
“I’ve never slept in a bed this big,” she says.
“You’ll sleep in this one now.”
She looks up.
“Rule five,” I say.
“You said there were four.”
“I said four you’d hear. The rest you’d learn.” I lean in and put my bandaged thumb on the new mark on her throat. “You sleep here. In my bed. Every night. Your room is for your clothes.”
“And if I want to sleep in my room?”
“You won’t.”
She opens her mouth to argue.
Then she closes it. Her cheeks go pink. She looks at my mouth.
“No,” she says. “I won’t.”
***
At ten, I take her to the water.
She sits beside me in the back of the car in the camel coat, and Declan drives, because Theo’s in Quincy on something I sent him to do. Declan works his gum and watches us in the mirror. He’s cheerful. He asks her if she’s warm enough. He asks if she slept well.
“Very well,” she says. “Thank you, Declan.”
She’s learned his first name. I note it.
Conley Terminal on a Saturday in December is steel and snow and wind.
The cranes stand over the stacked containers in rows, red and blue and gray, and the ships sit at their berths with their holds open like mouths.
Men in orange vests stop what they’re doing when my car pulls through the gate. They take off their hats.
She sees that. I watch her see it.
“Walk with me,” I say.
I take her down the wharf. The wind comes off the harbor like a blade. It pulls her hair out from under the veil and whips it across her face, and she doesn’t push it back. Gulls. The smell of diesel and salt and cold iron.
“All of this,” she says.
“All of it.”
“The cranes. The ships.”
“The water,” I say. “Everything that comes into this city by sea comes through something I own. Half of what goes out, too. When your convent’s heating oil comes up from New Jersey on a barge, it ties up here. I get a piece.”
She looks up at me. “Of my heating oil.”
“Of everything.”
We walk to the end of the wharf. The berths are numbered on the concrete in yellow paint, faded and chipped, each number as tall as a man.
I stop at eleven.
She looks down. It takes her a second. Then I watch her go still.
DEC 24 — CONLEY TERMINAL — BERTH 11.
She’s standing on it. Her boots are on the yellow one.
“This is where he wanted me,” she says.
“Yes.”
“On Christmas Eve.”
“Yes.”
“On a boat.”
I don’t answer. I watch her look out at the gray water, at the ship tied up there now, a rusty container carrier with a Liberian flag and nobody on deck.
I expect her to step off the number. Most people would.
She doesn’t.
She stands on it with her hands in the pockets of the coat I bought her and the wind tearing at the veil I gave her, and she looks at the water like she’s measuring it.
“Then I’ll come back here,” she says. “On Christmas Eve. On your arm.” She turns her head and looks up at me, and her eyes are clear and dry. “And he can watch.”
The wind howls through the cranes.
Somewhere behind us on the wharf, a man in an orange vest has stopped working to stare. I don’t look at him. I look at my wife standing on the number my enemy painted on her like a price tag and turning it into a promise.
“All right,” I say.
***
My office at the Seaport is warm. Theo is waiting, back from Quincy, his coat still on and snow in his hair.
“Crewe,” he says, before I can ask.
“Go on.”
“Had lunch on Tuesday. A place in Quincy near the yacht club. With Conor’s cousin.” He glances at Mae, then back at me. “The same cousin Frank’s staying with.”
“Tuesday,” I say. “The day before the chapel.”
“Yeah.”
“Keep going.”
“Already am.”
He goes. Mae has taken off her coat. She’s standing at the glass wall looking down at the terminal where she stood ten minutes ago. Berth eleven is a yellow dot in the snow.
She didn’t ask who Crewe was having lunch with, or why. She heard. She let it go by.
I walk to my desk. I open the bottom drawer and take out a black binder, two inches thick, and set it on the desk.
“Come here.”
She comes.
“Rosa says you do sums in your head,” I say. “She says you added up her grocery receipts in the kitchen on Thursday faster than her calculator.”
“Rosa talks too much.”
“Rosa’s been with me eleven years. She talks exactly enough.” I open the binder. “Draven House security. Payroll. Overtime. Gate logs. Every man who stands at my door.” I turn it toward her. “And the personal accounts of each one. Every deposit. Every withdrawal.”
She looks at the pages. Then at me.
“You have your own men’s bank statements.”
“I have everyone’s bank statements.”
“Why are you showing me?”
“Because you kept the books for a convent that should have gone under in March,” I say, “and it didn’t. Sit.”
She sits.
She doesn’t read the way other people read. She puts one finger on the top line and runs it down, fast, not stopping, and her lips move. I realize she’s counting in Latin. She turns a page. Then another. She doesn’t look up.
I stand behind her chair and watch the back of her neck, the dark hair falling forward, the mark I left.
It takes her four minutes.
She stops. Her finger rests on a line near the bottom of a page.
“Someone in your house is paid twice,” she says.
The office is very quiet. Down on the terminal, a crane horn sounds.
“Show me.”
She turns the binder a little so I can see.
“Here. His salary from you comes on the fifteenth and the thirtieth. It’s the same every month.
That’s fine.” Her finger slides to a second column.
“But on the first of every month, there’s another deposit.
Cash, at a branch in Dorchester. Twenty-five hundred dollars. ”
“Every month.”
“For—” She turns back two pages. Three. “Fourteen months.”
The air in the room changes temperature.
Twenty-five hundred dollars. Fourteen months. Out of a laundromat on Dorchester Avenue. Into the account of a monsignor who died in a font.
And into this one.
She doesn’t know. She never heard me say the number. She’s looking up at me, waiting, her finger still on the line, and her face is clear and serious and pleased with itself, the way it was when she found my eleven dollars in March.
“Name,” I say.
She looks down at the top of the page.
“Declan Byrne.”
I close the binder.
I help her into her coat. My hands are steady. I put my palm at the small of her back and walk her out of the office to the private elevator, and I press my thumb to the glass, and the doors open.
We go down.
When the doors slide apart at the lobby, he’s there.
Declan Byrne is holding the street door open for us, chewing his gum, with snow on his shoulders and a smile on his face.