Stony River. Tricia Dower
vex him,” she says.
“Where’re you from?” Dunn asks. “You talk strange.”
How to answer? She speaks like James. The officers are the strange-sounding ones. Dawg. Tawk.
“How ’bout you radio the station, Frank?” Nolan nods toward the door. “Let ’em know what’s up.” Officer Dunn leaves.
She climbs the stairs and hurries down the hallway to Cian, who’s rattling the bars of his cot and bleating. “Mandy!” he cries, his mouth pitifully distorted. He stands in his cot, hiccupping little sobs. A sodden nappy rings his ankles. Ammonia from it and others in a nearby bucket stings her eyes. His fair hair is sweaty, his wee organ an angry red from rash. When James left yesterday, he said he’d return with the ingredients for a healing salve.
“Mandy’s here, poor biscuit.”
If she had the lad’s trusting nature she’d chance opening a window in hopes of a cooling breeze. If she didn’t fear exhausting the drinking water, she’d bathe Cian and launder his nappies. Fear is the mortal’s curse, James says. Look at me, so dreadfully afraid of losing you. She lifts the slight child, shaking the wet nappy from his feet. She carries him down the stairs.
Nolan peers up from a notepad. His eyebrows lift. In surprise? Dismay? For a moment she forgets to wonder why he’s here. Perhaps he isn’t. It’s easy to imagine herself, James and Cian as the only souls alive. She heads for the burgundy horsehair sofa in the library. As she sits, dust motes rise in a slow dance and drift back down. She drapes Cian across her lap and wriggles one arm free of the petticoat. He clamps his mouth on her breast, wraps a spindly arm about her waist. His head is warm and damp in the crook of her arm.
Nolan remains in the entryway. To see him, she’d have to wrench her head around. “So the child is yours?” he says. “You look too young.”
In three years, when she’s eighteen, nobody can wrest her from James. She will stand beside him under a ceiling of stars while he invokes the mighty ones. When she’s eighteen, she’ll venture out on her own for Cian’s earthly needs. James won’t have to bring her lilacs each spring. She’ll seek them where they grow and drown her nose in their drunken scent, lie on soft grass, garbed in gossamer and sunlight. She will climb Merlin’s oak tree and Heidi’s mountain, row a boat down the enchanted river behind the house, tread on hot sand and sing as boldly as she wants without worrying someone will hear. She and Nicholas will lope over carpets of dandelions as they do in her dreams. Lope is a word she likes to say out loud for the way her tongue starts it off before disappearing behind her lips.
“You say you have news?”
“Yeah.”
She hears him inhale deeply, hears his belt jangle as he shifts weight from one foot to the other. “Mr. Haggerty died on the three-forty-two from Penn Station yesterday,” he says.
“What’s a three-forty-two?”
“You serious?” When she doesn’t answer, he says, “A train.”
“Did he jump?”
“Why would you even think that?” He jangles again.
“Anna Karenina did.”
“Who?”
“A woman in a book.” The longest she’s ever read, one James challenged her to get through, hoping to seduce her from the youthful fantasies she prefers. “But truly, truly, it’s not my fault, or only my fault a little bit,” she says aloud, trying to say it daintily like Anna.
Nolan releases a short, tuneless whistle and says, “Jeez, it’s stifling in here. How can you breathe?” His shoes squeak behind her as he goes to the window and pulls back the drapes. He grunts with the effort of hoisting a sash that’s not been lifted since the lad was born for fear his cries would be heard. Panic rises in her throat, a reflex. She tenses, ready to flee upstairs with Cian until she remembers it’s too late to avoid detection.
“Okay if I take a seat?” He’s at the chair on her left.
She nods and he sits, his face in profile, his gaze averted. She runs an imaginary finger over the small bump on his long nose as he hangs his hat on one knee. World scents cling to him, as they do to James when he’s been out. She likes to guess at them, surprising James with her accuracy. Nolan smells of leather and smoke.
“Several passengers witnessed him collapse and die. The coroner determined it was a heart attack. He won’t order an autopsy unless the family insists.”
She focuses on the far wall near the fireplace on a spot where the floral wallpaper is peeling, envisions an angry heart with arms and legs leaping from James’s chest and stabbing him with a fork. Her own chest begins to ache. Pain is an illusion, James says. Float above it. She stares at the dangling wallpaper strip and floats as far as the anchor of Cian’s rhythmic sucking on her nipple allows.
Nolan glances at her then quickly looks down. “You okay?”
“Aye.”
It will storm tonight. She can tell from the weight of the air pressing in through the open window. Thunder will prowl the sky and Nicholas, the house. Lightning will crackle outside the room she shares with Cian and they’ll both cry out for James.
Later, Bill Nolan will tell his wife the girl’s composure was unnerving. No sign of grief as she sat brazenly nursing that naked, emaciated, shrunken-headed child on a couch with lion-clawed feet. He will file a report that says Miranda Haggerty is disturbingly detached and possibly slow-witted.
“Has he started walking yet?”
“Oh aye.”
“I ask because he seems weak.”
She unhooks Cian from her breast and sits him up on the couch. “Will you walk for the man, then?” The lad widens his hazel eyes at the officer then hides his face in her shoulder. “He’s not seen the likes of you before,” she says.
“The uniform, I suppose. You take him out, right? The park, the doctor’s?”
Why doesn’t the officer leave, now he’s delivered his news? She pulls the strap back over her shoulder, tucks in her breast and lifts her hair from her perspiring neck. She doesn’t lie but she’s learned to remain silent when it suits her.
Nolan stares at her straight on, his cheeks flushing, his Nicholas-brown eyes intense. “I’ve got a three-year-old daughter and my wife’s expecting again. We’re hoping for a boy.”
“Why is that, now?”
“I don’t know.” He laughs self-consciously and rubs the back of his neck. “Don’t most men want sons to carry on their names?” He clears his throat and straightens his spine. “Who’s your boy’s father?”
Some mysteries cannot be expressed in words to the unready, James says, for they will not be understood. She is sworn to secrecy for the child’s sake. She peers down at Cian clinging to her and softly sings his favorite song: “There was an old man called Michael Finnigan, he grew whiskers on his chinnigan.”
Cian lays a finger on her mouth and says, “Mandy.”
She sucks in the finger and he laughs, a deep chuckle that threatens to loosen her fragile hold on the tears pooling behind her eyes. Without James, who will guide Cian to his calling? Who will brush her hair?
Nolan pulls his notepad from his shirt pocket. “That your name? Mandy?”
“Only to the lad.”
He slaps the notepad on his open palm, an angry sound that jolts her. “I’m trying not to push you but I need more to go on, here, Miss Whoever You Are, more than you’re giving me.”
James flashed with impatience, too, yesterday morning, when she asked would he bring back strawberries. “I cannot cover the sun with my finger, can I?” he said.
Well, she, too, can