CHAPTER 20
THE LEDGER
POV: RONAN
I put the ledger on the desk between us.
Green cloth binding, gone gray at the corners. Accounting paper. Columns ruled by hand. On the spine, in white ink, in my handwriting: ST. A.
She knows it the second she sees it.
Not this book. Its twin. The one she kept on a shelf in Mother Clare’s office and took down at midnight and added up four times with a pencil. The one with the same line at the bottom of every quarter for two years.
It’s Tuesday. Nine in the morning. The fifteenth. Snow again, soft and wet, sliding down the windows of my study.
She’s sitting in the chair across from my desk in the gray dress, with her hands folded in her lap and her hair still damp from the shower. The new mark on her throat is dark. She put her own gauze on my hands this morning, and she did a better job than Rosa.
She looks at the ledger. Then at me.
“What is this?”
“The other side of your book.”
She doesn’t touch it.
“Crewe knows something,” I say. “Declan died trying to tell me. I spent all of yesterday finding out what.” I put my hands flat on the desk on either side of the ledger.
“It’s this. Frank’s been living at Conor’s cousin’s house for two weeks.
He’s been talking. He’s been telling anyone who’ll listen, including a bishop who takes his confession on Thursdays, about a man who paid him a hundred and eighty thousand dollars two years ago to disappear. ”
Her face doesn’t move.
“Crewe’s going to use it,” I say. “He’s going to find a way to get it to you.
Through Clare, through a letter, through your father’s own mouth.
He’s going to tell you a story about your marriage, and he’s going to call it fraud, and he’s going to tell you he can make it go away.
” I push the ledger an inch toward her. “I’d rather you heard it from me. ”
“Heard what?”
“Open it.”
She looks at me for a long moment. Then she reaches out and opens the cover.
The first page is a photocopy. A marker. The kind of IOU men sign at Conor’s tables, on the back of a bar napkin, with a date and a number and a name.
FRANCIS X. HOLLOWAY — $180,000 — SECURED AGAINST: DAUGHTER.
Under it, in a different pen, another line.
PAID IN FULL. R.D.
The date is November, two years ago. Nine days after my mother’s funeral.
She stares at it.
“I know about this,” she says, slowly. “You told me. In the office. You said you bought—”
“I said your father offered you at a card table. I said Conor was paid. I didn’t say when. Or who else I paid.”
“Who else?”
“Turn the page.”
She turns it.
A letter. My letterhead. Addressed to Reverend Mother Clare Sheehan, Sisters of St. Agnes, Adams Street, Dorchester.
She reads it. I watch her read it. I know it by heart.
Reverend Mother — A young woman from your parish will come to you within the week asking to enter as a postulant.
Her name is Magdalene Holloway. You will accept her.
You will give her the fourth cell on the third floor of the east wing, facing Adams Street.
You will not ask her for a dowry. Beginning this quarter, St. Agnes will receive an annual gift of three hundred and sixty thousand dollars, paid quarterly, for as long as she remains under your roof.
The gift is to remain anonymous. You will not tell her. — R. Draven.
She reads it twice. Her lips move on the second pass.
Then she turns the page.
Invoices. The new boiler, installed a month after she arrived. The roof. The storm windows on the east wing. The choir loft rail.
Her own handwriting. A photocopy of a page from her book, the first quarter she kept it. Anonymous. Designated gift. $90,000. In pencil. In the careful round hand the nuns taught her.
Next page. A short note from Clare to me, a year later. She’s asked to keep the books. She’s very good with numbers. Shall I let her?
My reply, below, in red ink. Yes.
She stops turning pages.
She sits with her hands on the open book and looks down at it, and the snow slides down the windows, and the clock on the mantel ticks, and she doesn’t say anything for so long that I start counting.
In Latin. Her habit. I’ve caught it.
Viginti. Triginta.
“The cell,” she says finally.
“Yes.”
“The window. Facing the street.”
“Yes.”
“You chose it.”
“So I could see you.”
“The job. The books.”
“Clare asked. I said yes.”
“The boiler.” Her voice is very quiet. “The first winter. I thought it was a miracle. Sister Bernadette cried. We said a novena of thanks.”
I say nothing.
She lifts her head.
Her eyes are dry. That’s the worst part. They’re dry and very clear, and they’re looking at me the way she looked at the pages. Adding me up.
“I went there to disappear,” she says. “After the bridge. I went there because I thought it was the one place in Boston that didn’t belong to a man. I thought it belonged to God.”
“I know.”
“You bought it.”
“I bought you somewhere warm to kneel.”
“You bought my vocation.” She stands up.
The chair scrapes. “Two years, I scrubbed floors and sang Lauds at five in the morning and thought I was paying for something. For the bridge. For the water. I thought I was earning it. And every morning when I got up, the heat was on because you paid for it, and the roof didn’t leak because you paid for it, and the window I stood at every night with the blind up was your window—”
“Yes.”
“—and Mother Clare knew. The whole time. She looked at me every morning at breakfast and she knew—”
“Yes.”
“Stop saying yes!”
She comes around the desk.
I stand up.
She hits me.
Open hand, across the face, hard. Right across the scar. The sound is loud in the quiet study, a crack like a branch going under snow. My head turns with it.
I let it.
I turn my head back and look at her.
She’s breathing hard. Her hand is still up. Her palm is red. Her eyes are wet now, finally, and furious, and bright.
“You should have told me,” she says.
“If I had, you’d have run.”
“Where?” It comes out almost a laugh. Almost a sob. “Where would I have run, Ronan? You owned the heat.”
I don’t answer that. There isn’t an answer.
She drops her hand.
She looks down at the ledger on my desk. At her own handwriting. Anonymous. Designated gift.
Then she looks at me one more time.
I don’t know what she sees. I know what I want her to see. I know I won’t beg for it.
She walks to the door.
I don’t stop her. Every part of me wants to. My hands are on the desk, and I leave them there, and I feel the gauze she wrapped this morning go warm and wet at the knuckles where I’m pressing down.
At the door, she stops. She doesn’t turn.
I pick her phone up off the corner of the desk. The cracked one with the chipped daisy on the back.
“Mae.”
She stops.
I hold it out.
“It’s yours, dove,” I say. “Call anyone you want.”
She turns her head and looks at the phone in my hand. At the daisy. At me.
She comes back and takes it.
Her fingers don’t touch mine. She slides it into the pocket of the cardigan and walks out.
***
I go down to the Crypt.
I don’t turn on the lights. I sit in the chair in front of the screens in the dark. Theo scrubbed them last night. You’d never know.
Bottom row, left. The kitchen. Rosa at the counter, her hand over her mouth, watching the hall.
Bottom row, center. My bedroom. Empty.
Middle row, right. The glass door at the back of the house.
She goes through it.
She doesn’t put on the camel coat. She goes out in the gray dress and the cardigan into the snow, and her arms are wrapped around herself, and her head is down. She walks the covered passage fast. I watch her on the passage camera. I watch her on the chapel camera when she comes through the door.
She doesn’t kneel.
She stands in front of the altar with her back to the lens. She puts her hands over her face.
Her shoulders shake.
I sit in the dark and watch my wife cry in my mother’s chapel, and I don’t go to her. I don’t let myself. My phone is face up on the desk. Her little green dot sits on the map exactly where she is, inside a stone building in my own back garden.
She has her phone. She has a coat she didn’t take, and boots she didn’t put on, and a front door with no one on it since Declan.
The gate on the garden wall has a bolt on the inside. Anybody could open it.
I watch.
She takes her hands down from her face.
She turns around.
For a long moment she stands looking at the chapel door, at the snow blowing past it, at the path back across the garden, at the gate she can’t see from there.
Then she walks to the prie-dieu and sits down on the kneeler with her back against the altar, and pulls her knees up, and wraps her arms around them.
She takes the phone out of her pocket. She looks at it.
She puts it back.
She doesn’t leave the house.
She leaves the chapel door open.