CHAPTER 32
THE OPEN DOOR
POV: RONAN
She doesn’t answer.
Not in the chapel. Not on the walk back down to the house with Theo’s men carrying my father behind us under a tarp. Not in the kitchen while I stand at the sink and scrub his blood off my hands under the tap until the water runs clear.
She stands in the doorway and watches me do it.
Then she goes upstairs.
I don’t follow her.
***
Theo comes back to the island on Sunday morning with a briefcase.
He sits at the kitchen table in the stone house with his arm in the cast and a mug of coffee in front of him and the papers spread out, and I sit across from him. The window behind him looks out on the gray water. It’s still snowing. It hasn’t stopped since Christmas.
“Globe ran it this morning,” he says. He turns his phone around so I can see.
BISHOP HARLAN CREWE DIES AT CHRISTMAS EVE RECEPTION.
Under it, a photo of Crewe in his robes, smiling.
Heart failure, sources say. The Cardinal will celebrate the funeral Mass Thursday at the Cathedral of the Holy Cross.
Nothing about bullets. Nothing about a green chair with a hole in the upholstery. Nothing about three men in the oratory, or a crucifix with plaster blown out of it, or a glass of port nobody drank.
“The detective I own handled the Chancery,” Theo says. “The Archdiocese handled the rest. They wanted it quiet worse than we did.”
“And Our Lady of the Harbor?”
“Closing. The Cardinal’s office announced it last night. ‘Reorganization of diocesan charities.’” Theo shrugs with his good shoulder. “Nobody’s going to say the rest out loud. But nobody’s going to send a girl there again, either.”
“Southie?”
“Ours.” He says it flat. “Conor’s cousin came to the Seaport yesterday with his hat in his hand. The rest of them are falling over themselves. Nobody wants to be the next one in the harbor.” He pauses. “They’re calling it Christmas at Berth Eleven. The guys on the docks.”
I don’t say anything.
“Your father,” Theo says.
“The crematorium in Braintree.”
“And the ashes?”
“Not the harbor,” I say. “Not here. She wouldn’t want him here.”
Theo nods. He knows who I mean.
He pushes the papers across the table.
“This is what you asked for.”
I read them.
Keane & Doherty, the lawyers downtown, did them overnight on Christmas for a fee I don’t want to know about. Forty pages. Signatures. Seals.
The port. The unions. The terminals. The warehouses that are still standing. The trucks, the bars, the accounts, the berths. Every piece of it.
To Theodore Ashgrove.
“For now,” Theo says. He’s watching my face. “You said for now.”
“I said until I come back.”
“And if you don’t?”
“Then it’s yours.” I pick up the pen. “You earned it. You broke your arm twice for her.”
“I broke my arm once for her,” Theo says. “The second time was the pie case.”
I almost smile. It pulls the stitches.
I sign.
Every page. Sharp. Fast. My name, over and over. Forty times.
When it’s done, Theo squares the stack and puts it back in the briefcase and closes the latches. He looks at me for a long moment.
“She hasn’t said,” he says.
“No.”
“And if she says no?”
I look out the window at the gray water.
“Then I’ll buy a car,” I say. “And I’ll park it outside wherever she goes. And I’ll sit in it every night for the rest of my life. And I’ll never come closer unless she asks.”
Theo looks at me.
“That’s not letting her go, boss.”
“No,” I agree. “It’s not.”
***
The other envelope is on the table after he leaves.
I put it there myself. I lay everything out in a row on the scrubbed pine, the way my mother used to lay out the good silver on Christmas Eve.
A key. Brass, on a cork float. The launch at the island dock. Full tank. It’ll get her to the mainland in twenty minutes.
A ring of car keys. A Volvo, parked at the marina in Quincy. Nothing anyone would look at twice.
A bank card. An account in her name, opened Christmas morning. Not Draven. Magdalene C. Holloway. Three million dollars. The number doesn’t matter. She’ll count it anyway.
A passport. Her face. Her old name. A clean one. Theo’s people did it in a day.
And the black ring.
What’s left of it. The little rosary, fused and blackened in the Bishop’s fire. The initial melted off. I set it on the end of the row, by itself.
I look at it all for a long time.
There are no cameras in this house.
I didn’t put them in. It’s the only house I’ve ever owned without eyes. My mother asked me not to, the last summer she came here. Just one place, darling. Just one place where nobody’s watching anybody.
I kept my word.
So I don’t know where Mae is. I don’t know if she’s upstairs on the bed, or at the window, or packing the camel coat into a bag. I don’t know her heart rate. I haven’t known it for three days.
I’ve never been so blind in my life.
I sit down at the table in front of the row of things and wait.
***
She comes down at four.
The light’s going. The water outside is turning from gray to iron. She’s in the camel coat with the collar up and her hands in the pockets, and her hair is loose, and her face is pale and set.
She stops in the kitchen doorway.
She looks at the table.
The key. The car. The card. The passport. The ring.
I watch her look at each one. I watch her count them. Her lips move. She’s counting in Latin.
“What is this?” she says.
“The door.”
She looks at me.
“The launch is fueled. The car’s at the marina in Quincy. There’s an account in your name. Your name. Holloway. Nobody touches it but you.” I don’t stand up. I keep my hands flat on the table. “The passport’s clean. You could be in Rome by tomorrow night. Lisbon. Dublin. Anywhere.”
“And you?”
“I’m not coming.”
She doesn’t move.
“Theo has the port,” I say. “Everything. I signed it this morning. There’s nothing in Boston I own anymore except that house on the square, and my mother’s chapel, and a piano nobody plays.”
“Why?”
“Because every door you’ve ever walked through, somebody opened for you.” I look at her. “Your father. The Kavanaghs. Albright. Clare. Me. Especially me. I opened every door you ever went through for two years and let you think it was God.”
The kitchen clock ticks.
“This one,” I say, “I didn’t open. It’s just open.”
She looks at the key on its cork float.
“The ring,” she says.
“Melted.”
“I know it’s melted. Why is it on the table?”
“Because it’s yours. What’s left of it. You put it on yourself, the first night. In the window.” I swallow. “I won’t make you another one unless you ask for it.”
She looks at me for a long time across the kitchen.
I don’t know what she sees. For two years I knew everything about her. Every heartbeat. Now I sit at a pine table on an island with no cameras, and I don’t know what my wife is thinking, and it’s the most frightening thing that has ever happened to me.
Worse than the fish locker.
Worse than the fire.
“And if I go,” she says.
I tell her the truth. I promised her that.
“Then I’ll buy a car,” I say. “And I’ll find out where you went. And I’ll park it outside. Every night. Rome. Lisbon. Wherever.” I don’t look away from her. “I’ll be the car at the curb for the rest of my life. And I’ll never come closer unless you ask.”
Something moves in her face.
“That isn’t letting me go,” she says.
“No,” I say. “I don’t know how to do that.”
The light is almost gone. Her face is a pale shape in the doorway. Behind her, through the window at the end of the hall, the sea is black now, and out across it, very far off, Boston is coming on light by light.
She takes her hands out of her pockets.
She walks to the table. Slowly. She stands over the row of things I laid out.
She picks up the key to the launch. She holds it in her palm. The brass. The cork float. She closes her fingers around it.
My heart stops.
I don’t have a number for it. I don’t need one.
She looks down at me with the key in her fist.
I don’t reach for her.
I don’t reach for the key.
I put both my hands flat on the table, on either side of the empty space where the key was, and I hold still, the way I held still in a car on Adams Street for two years while she didn’t see me.
“The door’s unlocked, dove,” I say.