CHAPTER 23
THE VERDICT
POV: MAE
The doctor who comes to Draven House at midnight has hands like a pianist and doesn’t ask my name.
He’s old and neat, with a leather bag and half-moon glasses, and he calls Ronan sir and me nothing at all. He sits me on the edge of the clawfoot tub in the black marble bathroom and tips my chin toward the light and looks at my lip for a long time.
“No stitches,” he says. “It’ll swell.”
He looks at my cheek. The mark from Liam’s hand has come up red and hot, the shape of four fingers.
“Ice,” he says.
He takes my wrists and turns them over. The skin is torn in a ring where the plastic bit in, raw and weeping, flecked with dried blood.
“Did you fight it?” he asks. It’s the first question he’s asked me.
“Yes.”
He nods, like that’s the right answer, and paints something on them that burns like the devil, and wraps them in white gauze.
Now we match. Ronan’s hands and mine.
He’s in the doorway the whole time. He hasn’t taken off his shirt. There’s frost-melt on his shoulders and something darker on his cuffs, and he doesn’t move from the doorframe, and he doesn’t say anything, and he doesn’t take his eyes off me once.
When the doctor has gone, Rosa brings tea. Chamomile, with honey. She puts it into my hands and folds my fingers around the cup, the way you’d do for a child, and then she touches my hair once, quickly, and goes.
I drink it on the edge of the tub.
Ronan watches me drink it.
“Where is he?” I ask.
“Downstairs.”
“In the Crypt.”
“Yes.”
“Is he—”
“Alive. Tied to a chair. One of mine is with him.” He pauses. “He’s asked for you four times.”
I look down into the tea. A little honey has gathered at the bottom, gold and slow.
“Tomorrow,” I say.
“Tomorrow,” he agrees.
***
I sleep.
I don’t expect to. I expect to lie in his bed and see the cold room, the bulb swinging, Liam’s hand coming back. I expect to see my father in the booth with his lips moving over the money.
I close my eyes and I’m gone.
When I wake, it’s still dark. The clock on the nightstand says 4:10.
He isn’t in the bed.
He’s in the chair.
He’s pulled the armchair from the corner of the room up beside the bed, and he’s sitting in it with his coat still on and his gun on his knee and his bandaged hand resting on top of the gun. He isn’t asleep. His eyes are open, on me.
Not on a screen. Not through a lens in the ceiling with a green light.
On me.
“You didn’t go down,” I say. My voice is thick. “To the screens.”
“No.”
“Why?”
He looks at me for a long time in the dark.
“Because this time I needed to be in the room,” he says.
I don’t know what to do with that. I lie there with my wrapped wrists on top of the covers and look back at him until my eyes close again.
***
In the morning, I ask him to take me down.
He doesn’t argue. He waits outside the bathroom while I dress. The gray dress. The cardigan. No veil. The veil is gone; they took it off me in the van and I don’t know where it is. My hair is loose and I leave it.
He walks me through the kitchen. Rosa is at the stove. She turns around when we pass, and she looks at me, and she crosses herself.
The pantry. The steel door. His thumb on the glass.
The cold air comes up the stairs.
At the top, he stops.
“You don’t have to,” he says.
“I know.”
“I can do it without you. You’d never have to see him again.”
“I know,” I say. “That’s why I have to.”
He looks at me a moment longer. Then he goes down first.
***
My father is in a folding chair in the middle of the concrete floor.
Not Ronan’s chair. Ronan’s chair is pushed back against the far wall by the servers, and someone has cleaned it, and it looks like a thing that has been cleaned.
My father is in a gray metal folding chair from a church basement, with his wrists zip-tied behind it and his ankles tied to the legs.
One of Ronan’s men stands against the wall by the stairs with his hands folded in front of him. He nods to me. I don’t know his name.
My father’s head comes up when he hears us on the stairs.
He looks terrible. Worse than the diner. He hasn’t slept. His face is gray and loose and there’s a smear of dried blood under his nose where someone must have hit him when they pulled him out of the van. The Bruins jacket is gone. Under it, a stained undershirt. His arms look thin.
His eyes go to me. Then past me. To the wall.
The corkboard.
I watch him see it.
I watch him see two years of me pinned in rows. The soup kitchen. The bus stop. The CVS line. The steps of St. Agnes with one suitcase. The window with the black veil and my palm on the glass.
His mouth falls open.
“Jesus Christ,” he whispers. “Jesus Christ, Maggie.”
“Hi, Dad.”
“He—” My father can’t take his eyes off the wall. “All this time? He’s been— Jesus. He’s worse than me. He’s worse than I ever—”
“No,” I say.
My father looks at me.
“He isn’t worse than you,” I say. “He paid.”
It lands on my father like a slap. I watch it land. I watch his face do something I’ve never seen it do, which is understand something all at once.
Ronan doesn’t move. He stands a step behind me, to my left, where I can feel him without seeing him. He doesn’t say a word.
This is mine.
I walk across the concrete and stand in front of my father’s chair. I’m taller than him this way. I’ve never been taller than him.
“You asked for me,” I say.
“Baby. Oh, baby, your face.” His eyes fill. He looks at my lip. My cheek. My wrapped wrists. “Did they— who did that? Who—”
“Liam Kavanagh.”
He flinches.
“He’s dead,” I say.
My father stares at me. Then at Ronan. Then back at me.
“Maggie,” he says. “Listen to me. Please. I didn’t know they’d hurt you.
I swear to God. They said— Conor said it was just to get you away from him.
From this. From—” He jerks his chin at the wall.
“They said the Bishop had a place for you. A shelter. Somewhere safe. The Bishop’s a good man, baby, I’ve been going to him.
Every Thursday. I’ve been confessing. He listens.
He said you’d be looked after. He said he’d make it right with the Church, the marriage, all of it, he said he’d get you out—”
“The Bishop,” I say.
“Crewe. Bishop Crewe. He’s been so good to me, Maggie, he’s—”
“Our Lady of the Harbor,” I say. “In Chelsea.”
My father’s face goes still.
“Girls go in,” I say. “Girls whose fathers owe people. Some of them go home. Some of them go to the boats. Monsignor Albright picked which ones.”
“I didn’t—”
“You told him to pick me.”
“No—”
“You told him on a Thursday. In confession.” I keep my voice very flat. The way Ronan does. “And then you went and sat in Conor’s cousin’s kitchen and waited for the money.”
He’s crying now. Real tears. They run down into the stubble on his chin. He can’t wipe them. His hands are behind his back.
“He’s gonna reach you,” he says, through it.
“The Bishop. He’s gonna reach you through the nuns.
He told me. Before Christmas. He’s gonna send the old one, Clare, with an offer.
Sanctuary. He said you’d take it. He said you’re a good Catholic girl, and a good Catholic girl always goes back to the Church in the end. ”
I look at him.
“Thank you,” I say.
He doesn’t understand. He blinks at me.
“Your mother,” he says. Desperate now. Reaching for anything. “Maggie. Your mother would want—”
“Don’t.”
“She’d want you to forgive me. You know she would. She was a saint, your mother, she forgave me everything, every single—”
“Don’t.”
It comes out of me so loud it rings off the concrete. The man by the stairs straightens. Behind me, I feel Ronan shift his weight and go still again.
My father shuts his mouth.
The servers hum.
I breathe. In. Out. I look down at my father in his folding chair, and I think about the question I asked him in the diner, and the clock over the counter, and his eyes flicking to it.
“I asked you something yesterday,” I say. “You didn’t answer. I’m going to ask you again. I want you to tell me the truth. It’s the last thing you’ll ever tell me, so you might as well.”
He goes white.
“Did you ever once,” I say, “in twenty-two years, look at me and see anything but money?”
He looks up at me.
For a long moment I think he won’t answer. I think he’ll cry, or beg, or say my mother’s name again.
He doesn’t.
Something comes into his face. Something tired and honest and very old. It’s the face of a man who’s lost so many hands of cards that he doesn’t bother bluffing the last one.
“When you were born,” my father says, “you were so small. The nurse put you in my arms, and you were so small, and you had all that black hair. And I looked at you.” His voice breaks. “And I thought, she’s going to be worth something someday.”
The Crypt is very quiet.
I stand there.
I thought it would hurt more. I thought it would knock me down.
It doesn’t. It’s like finally seeing the last line of a ledger you’ve been adding all your life. The number’s worse than you hoped. But at least it’s a number. At least the column is closed.
I close my eyes.
Unus.
Duo.
Tres.
I count the way I counted on the bridge, standing at the rail over black water. Slow. In Latin. My father’s breathing, ragged. The servers humming. Ronan behind me, not moving, not making a sound.
Quattuor. Quinque. Sex.
He sold me for a bar tab when I was twenty.
Septem.
He sold me for a marker two weeks ago.
Octo.
He sold me for twenty thousand dollars in a white envelope yesterday, and he counted it while they carried me past.
Novem.
Decem.
I open my eyes.
“He sold me three times,” I say. Not to my father. To the man behind me. “There won’t be a fourth.”
My father makes a sound. “Maggie—”
I turn around.
Ronan is looking at me. His face is perfectly still. His eyes aren’t. His eyes are the darkest I’ve ever seen them, and there’s something in them that looks like awe.
“Don’t tell me where,” I say to him. “Don’t tell me how. Don’t ever tell me.”
“I won’t.”
“The envelope,” I say. “The twenty thousand.”
He reaches into his coat and takes it out. White, thick, a little bent at one corner. It’s been in his pocket since the loading dock.
I take it from him.
I don’t look back at the chair.
“Maggie,” my father says behind me. “Maggie, please. Baby. I’m your father. I’m your—”
I walk to the stairs.
I climb them. I don’t hurry. The steel door is open at the top. The pantry. The kitchen.
Rosa is at the stove. She turns around. Her eyes go to my face and then to the envelope in my hands.
I hold it out to her.
“For St. Agnes,” I say. “For the soup kitchen. Give it to Sister Bernadette. Tell her it’s for the Tuesdays.”
Rosa takes it. Her hands are shaking. She nods.
I walk through the kitchen and the mudroom to the glass door, and out through the covered passage, into the snow, into the chapel. The candles on the wreath are out. The pink one is half burned. The fourth purple one, the last one, is waiting for Sunday.
I don’t kneel.
I stand in front of the altar and look up at Saint Agnes and her lamb.
Behind me, through the open chapel door and the open passage and the open glass door and the house, very far away and very small, like a book dropped flat on a table in another room, there’s a sound.
One.
I stand very still.
I wait to feel it.
The snow ticks on the colored glass. Saint Agnes holds her lamb and looks down at me with her painted eyes. My wrists throb under the gauze.
I don’t cross myself.
I don’t pray for him.