CHAPTER 33
THE KEY
POV: MAE
The brass key is warm from my hand by the time I reach the dock.
He didn’t follow me. I knew he wouldn’t.
I walked out of the kitchen with the key in my fist and my heart hammering against my ribs and I didn’t look back.
I heard his chair not move. I heard him not stand up.
I went out through the front door into the snow, and pulled it shut behind me, and the only sound was the wind.
There are no cameras on this island.
I still feel him.
I feel him the whole way down the path. It’s steep and icy, cut into the rock in rough steps, with a rope strung along one side on iron posts. The snow is coming sideways off the sea, and it stings my face, and I keep one hand on the rope and one in my pocket around the key.
The dock is a single wooden finger sticking out into black water. At the end of it, the launch rocks on its lines. White hull. A little glass cabin at the front. Snow on the seats.
I climb down into it.
It moves under me. I grab the edge of the windshield. The water slaps against the hull, cold and black and close, and the smell of it comes up to me, salt and diesel and ice.
I put the key in.
I turn it.
The engine catches on the second try. It coughs, and then settles into a low, steady growl that vibrates up through the soles of my boots and into my knees.
I know that sound.
It’s the sound I heard through the steel floor of the Santa Clara on Christmas morning. Hornets on the water. The sound of him coming.
Now it’s the sound of me going.
***
I sit down in the driver’s seat with the engine idling and look across the harbor.
Boston is lit up. All of it. The towers downtown. The cranes at Conley, far off to the right, with red lights blinking on their tops. The bridges. Somewhere in there is Adams Street, and a convent with a new boiler, and a window on the third floor with the blind up and nobody behind it.
Somewhere in there is Louisburg Square, and a house with a chapel in the garden, and a piano under a sheet.
Twenty minutes, he said. The marina in Quincy. A car nobody would look at twice. A card with my name on it. Not his name. Mine.
Rome by tomorrow night.
I try to see it.
A little apartment somewhere with yellow walls. A window over a street. Bread in the morning. Nobody knowing who I am. Nobody knowing where I went. Nobody knowing what I did on a bridge, or in a sacristy, or in a green leather chair in a bishop’s study with his hand going cold in mine.
Nobody knowing my heart rate.
I sit with that.
The engine growls. The snow blows across the windshield and melts.
Nobody.
I have been nobody’s for twenty-two years. My father’s, on a bar napkin. The Church’s, on a man’s letterhead. Conor’s, on a cardboard stub. Crewe’s, on paper filed with the Tribunal.
Nobody’s.
I think about waking up in that yellow room in Rome, and lying there, and knowing that for the first time in two years, nobody is watching. Nobody saw me wake. Nobody counted my breath. Nobody knows that I turned over at four and said a name in my sleep.
It should feel like a door.
It feels like the water at the bottom of the Longfellow Bridge in January.
And I’ll park it outside. Every night. Rome. Lisbon. Wherever.
I close my eyes.
I think about looking out the window of the yellow room at midnight and seeing a car at the curb. Engine off. Lights off. Waiting.
I don’t feel afraid.
I feel my feet already on the stairs. Going down to it.
So what would be the point?
I’d be sitting in a room I paid for with his money, in a city he picked, watching for his car, and he’d be sitting in his car watching my window, and we’d both be pretending it was something other than what it is.
I’m done pretending.
I’ve knelt in a lot of chapels. I’ve told a lot of priests a lot of sins. I’ve never once said the true one out loud.
I want to be watched. By him. For the rest of my life.
That’s the sin. That’s the whole thing.
And I’m not sorry.
***
I turn off the engine.
The silence is enormous. Just the wind, and the water slapping the hull, and my own breath.
I pull the key out.
I stand up in the rocking boat and hold it out over the side, over the black water, on its little cork float. I look at it in the light from the house up on the hill. Brass. A number stamped on it. A door someone opened and left open for me.
I take the cork float off the ring.
I let the key go.
It hits the water with a sound so small I almost don’t hear it, and it’s gone. Down. Into the dark. With Conor’s hand, and my father’s ashes somewhere out past the islands, and his father’s ring.
I climb back up onto the dock.
I walk up the path in the snow.
***
He’s where I left him.
He hasn’t moved. Forty minutes, and he hasn’t moved.
He’s sitting at the pine table in the dark kitchen, with only the light over the stove on, and his hands are flat on the wood on either side of the empty space where the key was.
His arm is in its sling. The stitches in his face are black against his skin.
His eyes come up to me when I open the door.
I don’t know what they look like. I can’t read them. For the first time since I met him, I can’t read his face at all.
I close the door behind me.
“You didn’t follow me,” I say.
“No.”
“You didn’t look.”
“There’s nothing to look with.”
“You could have gone to the window.”
He doesn’t answer that.
“I heard the engine start,” he says. His voice is very quiet. “I heard it run. I heard it stop.”
I walk to the table.
“I dropped the key in the harbor,” I say.
He goes still. All of him. The way he went still in the chapel when I touched his scar.
I look down at the row of things he laid out. The car keys. The card. The passport.
I pick up the passport.
My face. My old name. Magdalene C. Holloway. A clean new document, dark blue, with an eagle on it, that would take me anywhere in the world.
I open it to the photograph. I look at the girl in it for a moment. She looks frightened. She looks like she’s waiting for someone to tell her she’s allowed to go.
I tear it in half.
It’s tough. It takes both hands. I tear the halves again. And again. Until there are eight pieces, the way there were eight pieces of the stub on the red dress, and I open my fingers and let them fall on the pine table between his hands.
He looks down at them.
I pick up the ring.
What’s left of it. The little gold rosary, black and twisted from the Bishop’s fire. The beads fused into a lump. His initial gone. It doesn’t look like a ring anymore. It looks like something you’d find in the ashes after a house burned down.
I slide it onto my finger.
It doesn’t go easily. It’s bent. It scratches over my knuckle. It sits crooked at the base of my finger, heavy and ugly and warm from lying on the table in his kitchen all afternoon.
I hold my hand up so he can see it.
“Make me another,” I say.
He looks at the ring. Then at my face.
“What kind?” His voice is rough.
“Gold. Beads. Your initial where the cross should be.”
“And the sensor?”
“And the sensor.”
He looks at me for a very long time.
“Why?” he says.
“Because I want you to always know.” I put both my hands on the table, on top of the torn passport, on either side of his. “Every four seconds. When I’m asleep. When I’m angry. When I’m in the next room and you can’t see me. For the rest of my life, I want you to know my heart is still going.”
He doesn’t say anything.
He can’t. I watch him try. His throat moves. His hands on the table close into fists and open again.
He starts to stand up.
“Stay there,” I say.
He stops.
I walk around the end of the table to his chair. I take the black veil out of the pocket of the camel coat. The lace. Two pins left in it, Grace’s pins, black enamel heads. I pull the pins out and put them on the table.
I shake out the veil.
“You watched me for two years,” I say. “Through a window. Through a lens in the ceiling. Through a number on a phone.”
“Yes.”
“Tonight, you don’t get to watch.”
I fold the lace over twice into a band. I stand behind his chair. I lay it over his eyes.
He goes very still.
I tie it at the back of his head. Not tight. Tight enough.
“Mae,” he says.
“Say yes.”
He breathes out. Slowly. His shoulders drop.
“Yes,” he says.
***
I lead him upstairs.
It’s strange. He’s so big, and he’s always walked ahead of me, or beside me with his hand at my back steering. Now I have his good hand in mine, and I’m walking backward up the narrow wooden stairs, and he’s following me blind, feeling for each step with his foot, trusting me not to let him fall.
I don’t let him fall.
The bedroom is dark. The only light is the snow outside the window, blue and faint. The bed is the one we’ve slept in since Christmas. Iron frame. White quilt. His mother’s.
I stand him at the foot of it.
“I’m taking off your sling,” I tell him.
“All right.”
I do it carefully. His shoulder is bandaged under his shirt, and I feel him catch his breath when the arm comes free, and I wait until he breathes again.
“I’m unbuttoning your shirt.”
“All right.”
I do it one button at a time. The way he did mine on our wedding night. I push it off his good shoulder and ease it down the bad one, and it falls.
He stands there in the blue light, blindfolded in black lace, his chest bare, the scar under his ribs, the new bandage on his shoulder, the old heart burning on his back that I can’t see from here but can feel, the way you feel the sun on a wall behind you.
“Tell me,” he says. His voice has gone low and strange. “Tell me what you’re doing.”
“I’m looking at you.”
His breath catches.
“You’re beautiful,” I say. “You’re covered in stitches and you’re beautiful. I don’t think anyone’s ever told you.”
“No.”
“I’m telling you.”
I undo his belt.
I kneel.
I tell him that too. I tell him I’m on my knees on his mother’s rag rug.
I tell him I’m taking him in my hand. I tell him how he feels.
Hot. Heavy. Hard for me. I tell him I’m going to put my mouth on him, and then I do, and he makes a sound I’ve never heard, a sound that comes up from somewhere under his ribs, and his good hand comes down blindly and finds my hair.
I take my time.
He took two years. I can take a few minutes.
When his hips start to move and his hand tightens in my hair, I stop. I stand up. I pull my sweater over my head and drop it. I unzip my skirt and step out of it. Everything. Until I’m standing in front of him in nothing, in the cold room, with the melted ring on my finger.
“I’m naked,” I tell him.
His hands come up. Both of them. Even the bad one, even though I see it cost him.
They find me by touch. My shoulders. My collarbones.
They move over me slowly, blind, careful, like a man reading a page in the dark.
My breasts. My ribs. My hips. My stomach.
They map me, every inch, the way his eyes mapped me the first night in front of the fire.
“I know you,” he says, hoarse. “I’d know you anywhere.”
“I know.”
“In the dark. In a crowd. With my eyes out.” His thumbs press into my hipbones. “I’d know you.”
I lie back on his mother’s quilt.
I take his hand and pull him down onto me. He comes blind, knee on the bed, hand braced beside my head, his weight above me. The lace is still over his eyes. His mouth finds my throat on the first try. My mouth on the second.
“Now,” I say against his lips. “And Ronan.”
“What.”
“I asked you once. Don’t be gentle.”
He isn’t.
He finds me with his hand, and then with the rest of him, and he pushes into me in one long, hard stroke that drives the breath out of me and the iron bed into the wall.
He doesn’t need to see. He never needed to see.
He takes me the way I asked, hard and deep, his bad arm shaking under him and his good hand gripping my hip hard enough to leave a mark.
The bed frame knocks the plaster. The snow blows against the glass.
I wrap my legs around him and hold on and say his name into his shoulder, over and over, and every time I say it, he goes harder.
It builds fast and high and wild. I feel it coming like a wave from far out.
At the top of it, I reach up.
I pull the lace off his eyes.
He blinks. The blue light. My face, right there, an inch from his.
“Look at me,” I say.
He looks.
I come with his eyes on mine. With nothing between us. No window. No lens. No number. Just his face above me, his scar and his stitches and his gray eyes gone black, watching me come apart under him like it’s the first time he’s ever seen anything.
He follows me down with my name in his mouth.
***
Later, he sleeps.
I lie beside him in the dark and listen to him breathe. His good arm is across my waist, heavy. The veil is somewhere on the floor.
At three o’clock, I get up.
I don’t wake him. I pull his shirt on over my head. It comes to my knees and smells like cedar and snow and blood. I go down the narrow stairs in my bare feet.
The kitchen is dark. The eight pieces of the passport are still on the table, and the car keys, and the bank card with my old name on it. I leave them there.
I go to the front door.
It’s the only door in the house. Heavy oak. An iron latch. An old iron key, as long as my hand, sitting in the lock on the inside, where it’s been since we came here on Christmas morning.
He never locked it.
Not once. Not the whole three days. Not with me upstairs. Not with his father’s body under a tarp in the shed. Not with Boston lit up across the water.
He left it open.
I put my hand on the cold iron.
I turn the key myself.