CHAPTER 30
THE HARBOR
POV: RONAN
Gone.
Green dot.
Gone.
I don’t remember the stairs.
I remember Theo. His face. White. Over me on the Bishop’s carpet with his one good arm, dragging me up by the collar.
“Boss. Boss. Look at me.”
“Ring.”
“What?”
“Fire.”
He looks at the hearth. He sees it. He doesn’t say anything. He reaches into the fire with his good hand, into the coals, and pulls it out, and drops it on the carpet, and shakes his burned fingers, and swears.
It’s black. Twisted. The little beads fused together.
I pick it up.
It burns. I hold it.
“They took her down the back,” Theo says. “Car. Side door. Kevin saw it go. Gray Suburban. North on Lake. We’re on it but it’s Christmas, the roads are—”
“Where.”
“We don’t know yet, we’re—”
“Where, Theo.”
“I don’t know.”
I close my fist around the ruined ring.
Blood in my eye. The left side of my face open. My shoulder. I can feel my heart beating in the scar. I can feel it beating in the hole in my shoulder.
I can’t feel hers.
Two years. Two years, I could feel hers. Every four seconds. I slept with it. I woke up to it. I sat in a chair in the dark and watched a number on a screen go up and down, up and down, and it was the only prayer I ever said.
It’s gone.
She’s gone.
I don’t know where she is.
“Where—”
“Boss—”
I don’t know where she is.
I don’t—
DEC 24 — CONLEY TERMINAL — BERTH 11.
I’m on my feet.
I don’t remember standing.
“Berth eleven,” I say.
Theo stares at me.
“The ticket. Conor’s gift. At the Copley.” My voice comes out strange. Level. Too level. “She tore it up. Eight pieces. He doesn’t know she tore it up. He thinks it’s still the plan.”
“That was a message, boss, a threat, he wouldn’t actually—”
“He’s Irish. He’s grieving. He’s drunk.” I wipe the blood out of my eye with the heel of my hand. “He’d want me to know. He’d want it to be the place he promised. He’d want it to be mine.”
Theo is already on the phone.
“Harbormaster,” he says. “Now. Get him out of bed. What’s at eleven.”
I hear it through his phone. Tinny. Scared. A man in Charlestown who keeps my berths honest, woken up on Christmas.
Liberian freighter. The Santa Clara. Cleared to sail at six a.m. Halifax. Paperwork came through yesterday. Somebody signed off on it. I thought it was you—
Theo looks at me.
I’m already walking.
***
Conley Terminal on Christmas morning is black and white and empty.
Snow on the stacked containers. Snow on the cranes.
The sodium lamps making orange islands on the wharf.
No men in orange vests. No trucks. Just the wind coming off the harbor, and the water slapping black against the pilings, and at the end of the wharf, at berth eleven, the Santa Clara, lit up, her engines turning over, smoke coming out of her stack.
Six boats come out of the dark on the water side. Mine. Harbor launches. Tugs. Anything that floats. I called every man on the waterfront, and they came, on Christmas, from their beds and their families, because it’s her.
I come down the wharf with eleven men on foot.
There’s a man on the gangway, smoking. He sees us coming. He has time to drop the cigarette.
Then we’re on the ship.
It’s loud. It’s steel. The stairs are narrow and ring under our feet.
Men come out of doors with guns, and some of them are Conor’s, and some of them are crew who don’t know what they’re guarding.
It doesn’t matter. Theo’s behind me with his one good arm.
Someone’s shouting in Portuguese. Someone’s shouting in Russian.
I don’t hear any of it.
I hear her.
Somewhere down in this ship. Not with my ears. The way I heard her across a burning ballroom. The way I heard her in the chapel before she sang.
Down.
A corridor. Green paint. Doors.
A man comes out of one of them with a shotgun. I don’t stop. I shoot him in the knee and he goes down screaming and I step over him.
At the end of the corridor there’s a door.
Behind it, a man is screaming.
Not her.
A man.
I open the door.
***
It’s a small green cabin. A bunk. A table. A porthole.
My father is against the wall by the door with his cane in his hand. He turns when I come in. His face goes through three things at once and I don’t care about any of them.
Conor Kavanagh is on the floor by the table.
He’s on his knees, holding his left wrist in his right hand.
The left hand is a ruin. There’s a hole through the back of it the size of a pencil, and blood is pumping out of it in slow, steady spurts, all over his coat and the floor and a black enamel hatpin lying on the steel.
And in the corner.
In the corner, with her back to the wall, her hands tied in front of her, a curved fishing knife held in both of them, point out, steady as a church candle, is my wife.
Her veil is half off her hair. There’s blood on her face. Not hers. Spattered across her cheek and her chin and the front of the black dress she married me in.
She looks at me.
“You’re bleeding,” she says.
I laugh.
It comes out of me cracked, from somewhere I didn’t know I had. I cross the cabin in two steps and I don’t touch her, not yet, I cut the ties on her wrists with my own knife, and she lowers the fishing knife, slowly, and doesn’t drop it.
“Dove,” I say.
Her face does the thing. The thing it did in the fish locker. It lights.
“I’m here,” she says. “I’m here. I stabbed him with Grace’s pin.”
“I see that.”
“He was going to cut my face. Here.” She touches her cheek. The left side. The line from her mouth to her jaw. My line. “So you’d see it every time you looked in the mirror.”
I look down at Conor Kavanagh on his knees.
He looks up at me. His face is gray and wet. There’s snot in his beard. He’s shaking.
“You took my boy,” he says.
“You sent your boy to put his hand on my wife.”
“He was thirty—”
“He was a man,” I say. “He made a choice.”
I take Conor by the collar of his coat.
He’s heavy. It doesn’t matter. I drag him out of the cabin, past my father, who doesn’t move.
Past Theo in the corridor, who steps back.
Up the ringing stairs, with his boots banging on every step and his ruined hand leaving a trail.
Out onto the deck, into the snow and the wind and the orange light.
She follows. I know she does. I don’t have to look.
The rail of the Santa Clara is waist high. Below it, twenty feet down, the black water of berth eleven slaps against the concrete wharf and the rusted hull. There’s ice at the edges. There’s the yellow number, huge, painted on the wharf, glowing under the lamp.
“Ronan,” Conor says. He’s begging now. “Ronan, please. It’s Christmas. Please—”
I put him over the rail.
He hits the water with a sound like a door slamming. He goes under. He comes up, flailing, shouting, grabbing at the pilings, at the ice. One hand. The other one won’t work.
There’s a boathook on the deck. Long. Aluminum. A steel hook at the end.
I pick it up.
When he comes up the second time, I put the end of the pole on his shoulder, and I push.
He goes under.
He comes up.
I push.
She’s at the rail beside me.
She doesn’t say anything. She stands with her hands on the cold iron and the snow landing in her hair and the veil blowing sideways, and she looks down at the man in the water.
Then she starts to count.
Quietly. In Latin. Under her breath, the way she counted the soup bowls, the way she counted on a bridge.
Unus. Duo. Tres.
He comes up once more. His hand comes up out of the water. White. In the lamplight. Reaching.
Her voice doesn’t stop.
I hold him down with the pole.
Viginti. Triginta.
The water goes still.
Quadraginta. Quinquaginta.
She keeps counting. I keep holding. The wind blows snow across the harbor. The engines of the Santa Clara rumble on under our feet. Out on the water, my six boats circle slowly in the dark with their lights on us.
At a hundred, she stops.
The water in berth eleven is flat and black.
“That’s enough,” she says.
I lift the pole out. I drop it on the deck.
She turns and looks up at me. The blood on her face. The snow in her lashes. Her eyes steady and dry and clear.
“It’s Christmas,” she says. “I promised I’d come back here. On Christmas. On your arm.”
I hold out my arm.
The good one.
She takes it.
***
Behind us, on the deck, somebody clears his throat.
I turn.
My father is standing at the top of the stairs with Theo behind him. Two of my men have him by the elbows. He’s still holding the cane. Nobody’s taken it off him. The silver hound’s head is dark with my blood.
He looks at the rail. At the black water. At the yellow eleven on the wharf.
At her, on my arm.
“Ronan,” he says.
I don’t answer.
“Son. Please. I did it for you. You have to understand I did it for—”
“Take him to the island,” I say to Theo.
Theo nods.
“Saint Brigid’s?” my father says. His voice goes up. “Ronan. Your mother loved that island. You can’t take me to—”
“Put him in a launch,” I say. “Lock him in the chapel. Nobody talks to him. Nobody feeds him.”
They take him. He goes down the gangway between my men, looking back at me the whole way, the cane tapping on the metal.
They put him in one of the boats. The engine whines.
The boat pulls out across the black harbor toward the islands, toward the dark shape of Saint Brigid’s out past Castle Island, and grows small, and its light goes out.
Mae’s hand is on my arm.
My face is open. My shoulder is open. Her ring is a black lump of twisted gold in my pocket.
I look down at my wife.
“One Draven left to bury,” I say.