Nora said, “The other night, that wasn’t your fault. That’s all I was saying.”
“Then whose bloody fault was it? I’m lost here, Nora. I’m in the dark and I’m drowning and nobody will lift one finger to help me out. Rosie’s gone. Kevin’s gone. Half the Place thinks I’m a murderer. I feel like I’m losing my mind. I came to you because I thought you were the one person who would have some clue what I’m going through. I’m begging you, Nora. Tell me what the hell is going on.”
I can multitask; the fact that I was aiming to push her buttons didn’t stop me from meaning just about every word. Nora watched me; in the near dark her eyes were enormous and troubled. She said, “I didn’t see what started the two of them off, Francis. If I had to guess, but, I’d say it was that your da was talking to my ma.”
And there it was. Just that quickly, like gears interlocking and starting to move, dozens of little things going right back to my childhood spun and whirred and clicked neatly into place. I had thought up a hundred possible explanations, each one more involved and unlikely than the last-Matt Daly ratting out one of my da’s less legal activities, some hereditary feud going back to who stole whose last potato during the Famine-but I had never thought of the one thing that starts practically every fight between two men, specially the truly vicious ones: a woman. I said, “The two of them had a thing together.”
I saw her lashes flutter, quick and embarrassed. It was too dark to tell, but I would have bet she was blushing. “I think so, yeah. No one’s ever said it to me straight out, but… I’m almost sure.”
“When?”
“Ah, ages ago, before they were married-it wasn’t an affair, nothing like that. Just kid stuff.”
Which, as I knew better than most people, never stopped anything from mattering. “And then what happened?”
I waited for Nora to describe unspeakable acts of violence, probably involving strangulation, but she shook her head. “I don’t know, Francis. I don’t. Like I said, nobody ever talked to me about it; I just figured it out on my own, from bits and bobs.”
I leaned over and jammed out my smoke on the gravel, shoved it back in the packet. “Now this,” I said, “I didn’t see coming. Color me stupid.”
“Why…? I wouldn’t’ve thought you’d care.”
“You mean, why do I care about anything that happened around here, when I couldn’t be arsed coming back for twenty-odd years?”
She was still gazing at me, worried and bewildered. The moon had come out; in the cold half-light the garden looked pristine and unreal, like some symmetrical suburban limbo. I said, “Nora, tell me something. Do you think I’m a murderer?”
It scared me shitless, how badly I wanted her to say no. That was when I knew I should get up and leave-I already had everything she could give me, every extra second was a bad idea. Nora said, simply and matter-offactly, “No. I never did.”
Something twisted inside me. I said, “Apparently a lot of people do.”
She shook her head. “Once, when I was just a wee little young one-five or six, maybe-I had one of Sallie Hearne’s cat’s kittens out in the street to play with, and a bunch of big fellas came along and took it away, to tease me. They were throwing it back and forth, and I was screaming… Then you came and made them stop: got the kitten for me, told me to take it back to Hearne’s. You wouldn’t remember.”
“I do, yeah,” I said. The wordless plea in her eyes: she needed the two of us to share that memory, and of all the things she needed that was the only tiny one I could give. “Of course I remember.”
“Someone who’d do that, I can’t see him hurting anyone; not on purpose. Maybe I’m just stupid.”
That twist again, more painful. “Not stupid,” I said. “Just sweet. The sweetest thing.”
In that light she looked like a girl, like a ghost, she looked like a breath-taking black-and-white Rosie escaped for one thin slice of time from a flickering old film or a dream. I knew if I touched her she would vanish, turn back into Nora in the blink of an eye and be gone for good. The smile on her lips could have pulled my heart out of my chest.
I touched her hair, only, with the tips of my fingers. Her breath was quick and warm against the inside of my wrist. “Where have you been?” I said softly, close to her mouth. “Where have you been all this time?”
We clutched at each other like wild lost kids, on fire and desperate. My hands knew the soft hot curves of her hips by heart, their shape rose up to meet me from some fathoms-deep place in my mind that I had thought was lost forever. I don’t know who she was looking for; she kissed me hard enough that I tasted blood. She smelled like vanilla. Rosie used to smell of lemon drops and sun and the airy solvent they used in the factory to clean stains off the cloth. I dug my fingers deep into Nora’s rich curls and felt her breasts heave against my chest, so that for a second I thought she was crying.
