CHAPTER 17
THE brIDGE
POV: MAE
Ronan lights the pink candle with a kitchen match.
It’s Sunday. Gaudete. The third week of Advent, the one where the priest wears rose instead of purple, because the waiting is almost over.
Rejoice.
We’re alone in his mother’s chapel at eight in the morning. There’s a new cloth on the altar. White. Plain. No stain.
I didn’t ask where the old one went.
He shakes the match out and stands beside the wreath with his hands folded. I kneel on the prie-dieu. My knees remember last night. The velvet is soft, and it still hurts, and I don’t mind.
We don’t pray out loud. I don’t know what he prays for. I pray for nothing. I just kneel and feel him standing there, close enough to touch.
When we go back into the house, Declan is at the glass door.
“Morning, ma’am. Boss.” Click, click. “Nice little service?”
“Very nice,” I say.
I smile at him.
It’s the first lie I’ve told in this house.
***
“You can’t,” I said last night.
It was one in the morning. We were in his bed. He’d told me what the number meant. The laundromat. The monsignor. Fourteen months. He told it flat, lying on his back with his bandaged hand in my hair, and when he got to the part about Albright, I sat up.
“He’s on my door,” I said. “He’s been on my door since Friday.”
“I know.”
“He asked what time I pray. He asked about Mass. He asked—” I pressed my hand to my mouth. “He walked me to the chapel last night. He stood at the door while we—”
“I know.”
“You can’t let him keep standing there.”
“I’m not going to.”
“When?”
“Tomorrow. Five o’clock.”
“Why not now?”
“Because now he’d run.” Ronan looked at the ceiling. “Tomorrow, he’ll be waiting for you. He’ll think he knows where you’re going. I want him somewhere he chose to stand.”
I looked down at him. At his profile in the dark.
“I can do it,” I said.
He turned his head.
“Tell him,” I said. “Tomorrow. That I pray at five. In the chapel. Alone. He’ll walk me. You said yourself, he’ll want to know exactly where I am.”
“No.”
“He’s been watching me for a week so he can hand me to the men who burned your warehouse.” My voice was shaking. I let it. “Let him watch me walk him into a wall.”
Ronan was quiet for a long time.
“You’ll smile at him,” he said finally.
“I’ll smile at him.”
“You’ll tell him you like to pray alone.”
“I do like to pray alone.”
“And at the glass door, you’ll go through. And you won’t look back. Whatever you hear.”
“Whatever I hear,” I said.
***
It’s easier than it should be.
At noon, I tell Declan I’ll be in the chapel at five. For vespers. I’ve missed saying them. I’d like to be alone, if that’s all right.
“Course, ma’am.” Click. “I’ll walk you out.”
At three, I take a bath and wash my hair.
At four-thirty, I put on the gray dress. The cardigan. The black veil. I sit on the edge of Ronan’s bed with my hands folded and my heart going so hard I can see the fabric move over it, and I think: You are lying to a man so he can be killed.
I wait to feel sick.
I feel very calm.
At four fifty-five, I open the bedroom door. Declan is there.
“Ready, ma’am?”
“Ready.”
He walks me down. Through the hall. Past Grace Draven in her chair by the window. Through the kitchen, where Rosa is standing at the stove with her back to us and doesn’t turn around.
He talks the whole way. About the snow. About his daughter’s hockey team. About how his wife makes a lasagna at Christmas that would make me cry.
I say, How nice. I say, Really? I say, She sounds lovely.
At the glass door, he reaches past me for the handle.
“After you, ma’am.”
“Thank you, Declan.”
I step through. The cold hits my face.
I don’t look back.
Behind me, very close, I hear a sound. A small sound. Like a man’s breath going out of him all at once.
Then Theo’s voice, quiet and even: “Hands on the glass, Dec. Slow.”
Then nothing.
I walk down the covered passage in the snow with my veil lifting in the wind, and I don’t look back, and I open the door of the chapel and go in, and I shut it behind me.
***
The candles are lit. All three on the wreath. The pink one burns tallest.
I don’t kneel.
I stand in front of the altar with my arms wrapped around myself and I shake. Not from cold. From the bottom of me up. My teeth chatter. My knees want to go.
You did that.
The door opens behind me.
“It’s done,” Ronan says. “He’s downstairs. Theo’s with him.”
I nod. I can’t turn around yet.
“You did well.”
“I lied to him,” I say. “The whole way through the house. His daughter plays hockey.”
“I know.”
“His wife makes lasagna.”
“I know.” A pause. “He was going to walk you to a car on Christmas Eve, Mae. He had it set for when you went to midnight Mass. He’d have taken the lasagna home after.”
I close my eyes.
“I’m going down now,” he says. “Stay here. Rosa will bring you—”
“Wait.”
He stops.
I turn around.
He’s standing just inside the door in his shirtsleeves. No coat. His bandaged hands at his sides. He has his gun on under his arm, and his face has gone the way it went in the sacristy, like a pond before the ice cracks.
“Before you go down there,” I say, “there’s something you should know about me.”
“Mae—”
“You know everything. You said so. You have my medical records and my bank balance and my mother’s birthday backward. You know what I eat and when I sleep and how I—” My face burns. I keep going. “You know everything I ever did in that cell.”
“Yes.”
“You don’t know this.”
He goes still.
“Sit,” I say.
He looks at me for a long moment.
He sits in the front pew.
I stand in front of him with the altar at my back and the candles behind me, and I tell him.
“I was nineteen,” I say. “It was January. I cleaned offices in Cambridge at night, three nights a week, eleven to three. A building by the river. It paid cash. My father didn’t know about it, and I kept the money in a coffee can under my bed, and I was going to use it to get out.
“The Red Line stops running before three. So I walked home. Across the Longfellow Bridge. Every time. There’s a path on the side, by the rail, and at that hour there’s nobody on it. Just the salt-and-pepper towers and the river and the ice.
“There was a man who used to come to our kitchen on Friday nights. One of the men my father owed. Big. Soft hands. He called me sweetheart. He used to watch me wash the dishes. My father would go out to the corner store for cigarettes and leave me in the kitchen with him, and he’d sit there and watch me wash the dishes, and he never touched me.
Not once. He just watched. Like he was waiting for something to be his.
“That night he was on the bridge.
“I don’t know how he knew. Maybe he followed me from the building. Maybe my father told him. I think my father told him. He was standing by the rail halfway across, where the lamps don’t reach. He said, There she is. Like he’d been looking for me a long time.
“He said my father had run out of money. He said my father said I’d work it off. He said it would be easier if I didn’t make a fuss.
“He put his hand on my arm. Here.” I touch my arm above the elbow, where the Kavanagh man took me in the chapel. “And he started walking me toward the steps down to the river road, where there was a car.
“I didn’t scream. There was nobody to hear. I didn’t pray. I didn’t say God bless you.
“I let him walk me four steps. I let him think I wasn’t going to make a fuss. Then I turned into him, fast, and I put both hands on his chest, and I pushed.
“The rail on that bridge only comes up to here.” I touch my hip. “He was big and he was surprised and there was ice.
“He went over.
“It’s a long way down to the Charles in January.
I heard him hit. I went to the rail and I looked.
It was so dark. There was ice at the edges and black water in the middle, and he came up once.
He came up once and he reached. His hand came up out of the water.
I could see it, white, in the light from the towers.
“I had a scarf. I had a phone. There was a life ring on a post twenty feet away. I saw it.
“I didn’t move.
“I stood at the rail and I watched until the water went flat. I stayed until I was sure. I counted. In Latin. I got to three hundred and forty before I let myself go home.
“I showered. I went to bed. I got up and went to Mass on Sunday and sang in the choir.
On Tuesday there were three lines in the Globe.
Man drowns in Charles River. Alcohol suspected.
Nobody came to the door. Nobody asked me anything.
My father stopped going out for cigarettes on Friday nights, and he never looked at me the same way, and he never said a word.
“I never told anyone. Not a priest. Not Mother Clare. Not God, even. I tried. I knelt in that confessional a hundred times and I never once said it.
“When I went to St. Agnes, everyone thought I was running to God. I wasn’t. I was looking for somewhere to put it. Somewhere with walls. I thought if I prayed long enough and scrubbed enough floors, I’d feel sorry.
“I never did.
“That’s why I said good. About Liam. That’s why I ate the pear. That’s why I could smile at Declan all the way through your house.
“You think you found a saint in a choir loft.” I’m crying now. I don’t know when that started. I don’t wipe it away. “You didn’t. You found a girl who watched a man drown and counted to three hundred and forty and went home and slept.”
I stop.
The candles hiss.
The chapel is so quiet I can hear the snow ticking against the colored glass.
He doesn’t move. He sits in the front pew and looks up at me, and his face is nothing I can read. Not anger. Not disgust. Not pity.
I wait for him to stand up and walk out.
He stands up.
He doesn’t walk out.
He comes to me. Two steps. And then, in front of his mother’s altar, in front of the pink Gaudete candle, in front of Saint Agnes and her lamb, Ronan Draven goes down on his knees on the stone.
He takes my hands in his bandaged ones. He looks up at me.
His eyes are wet. It’s the first time.
“I didn’t know,” he says.
His voice is rough and low and full of something I’ve never heard in it. Not grief. Something like the opposite.
“Two years,” he says. “I had your blood type. Your grades. The name of every girl who was ever unkind to you in school. The hand cream. The pears. I had everything.” His thumbs press into my palms. “I didn’t have this.”
“Now you do,” I whisper.
“Now I do.”
He lifts my hands and puts his mouth to the inside of my wrist. Right over my pulse. Right where a man once put his thumb in a soup line.
He looks up at me from his knees.
“There she is,” he says.