Stony River. Tricia Dower
to read.”
The card was for her benefit. Most books on the shelves were published before Miranda was born. They don’t hold all James wants her to learn. “I mean to see him,” she says. The dead man might have stolen that card. James could be in a public house right now, performing card tricks for drinks.
“I can arrange that, provided you’re next of kin.”
His words call up a line from a book forgotten until now: It is understood that the next of kin is Mr. Henry Baskerville.
“James is my father,” she says, thinking how deficient a word is father. “My mother passed over years ago and there’s no one else.” She thinks on her mother’s parents, brothers and sisters all perishing in their summer cottage when it was swept out to sea by a fierce storm two years before Miranda was born. James spoke of it only once because she trembled and cried for days afterward, imagining herself tossed about and pelted by flying crockery. If there be family alive in Ireland she doesn’t know of them.
Nolan is quiet for a moment. Then, “That’s rough. I’m sorry.” He reaches over and pats her knee, sending a shiver of longing through her. “There a priest or minister I can call for you?”
She shakes her head. James says a soul’s journey needs no priest, no mediator.
“An unusual name, that—Key-uhn. How’s it spelled?”
She tells him and, sensing the need to offer more, adds, “It means ancient one.”
“You and the boy can’t stay here by yourself,” he says, putting words to the terrible truth creeping into her mind: only James knows where the money tree grows, how to find food, bless the well, chop wood.
“And where shall we go?”
“Children’s Aid will find you a family, might take a day or so.” He spins his hat around in his long-fingered hands. “You can stay at my house tonight, at least.”
She cannot recall being anywhere but here.
“I don’t suppose you have a telephone,” he says.
“We do not.” Or anything else that would allow a tradesman access to the house.
“Did your father have an employer we should contact?”
“He did not.”
“Will you be okay if I leave you a few minutes to radio the station? I should let my wife know you’re coming.”
She nods and stands with him, follows him to the door and watches it close behind him. With both men outside, now, she considers locking it. The family they found for Jane Eyre treated her badly: You ought to beg and not live with gentlemen’s children like us.
She’s never tried to leave their house before, though she could have easily. James locked the back from the outside when he made his forays into the World but he always left the key inside the front door. Finding her gone would have shattered him after all he’d forfeited for her: a professorship, old mates, traveling to his mother’s wake. She could never be that ungrateful.
Her mind flies through each room of the house. The windows facing the back are shuttered from the outside. The small window on the back door at the bottom of the kitchen stairs isn’t. She’d have to smash it, drag a chair down the stairs to the landing, stand on it and crawl out. Push Cian through first and drop him to the ground. Would the officers hear? Would Cian get hurt? And Nicholas, how could she leave Nicholas? Her mind is surveying the upstairs when Cian lets out a high-pitched cry. She turns to see him toddling toward her, clutching his groin and dribbling urine. His face twists in pain. She scoops him up, rocks him in her arms and softly finishes the verse, “The wind blew up and blew them in again. Poor old Michael Finnigan.” He smiles up at her with such love and trust she can no longer dam her tears. She carries him into the kitchen and crumbles to the floor next to Nicholas, who licks her salty face.
There’s naught to deliberate. She must accept Nolan’s help.
He and Dunn return with two sweaty-faced men and contraptions for which she has no words. To catch and contain Nicholas, they explain, so they can transport him by truck. He can’t ride with her and the child, they say in response to her question. Not enough room. No, the cage isn’t cruel. It will prevent him from being thrown about the truck and getting hurt. She doesn’t know how else to resist.
The net isn’t needed. Head down, tail drooping, Nicholas meekly enters the cage when she directs him to. “Anon,” she tells this creature she has loved from the time they stood nose to nose. He refuses to meet her gaze.
Nolan suggests she dress the child and clothe herself in something “more suitable.” She remembers a worn valise in James room and tiptoes in to get it, half expecting him to be there and scold her for entering his private space. She chooses a dress her mother once wore and packs two others, along with rags and cotton drawers for her bleeding times, the petticoat, three handkerchiefs, heavy stockings, flannel pajamas, a woolen jumper, clean nappies and the bits of garb James has managed to acquire for Cian. She dresses the lad for the heat, in a white cotton singlet and nappy.
“Sure we never needed them,” she explains, when Nolan inquires about coats. He frowns and scribbles in his notebook. The lad has no shoes but she manages to squeeze into her mother’s open-toed high heels, the ones she played glass slipper in when she was younger.
Dunn asks about birth and death certificates, wills, the deed to the house and other “relevant documents.” If any exist, they’re in the locked desk in James’s room, a possibility she doesn’t mention, partly because Dunn is gruff and presumptuous but also because she doesn’t know what else might be there James wouldn’t want them seeing.
No room for the books, the phonograph and records, they tell her. Someone will collect them for her later. After having lived in this house so long with the days stretched out before her, she’s rushed now into leaving. She packs Cian’s Peter Rabbit bowl and the small flannel blanket he sucks on at night, her lexicon, a pencil, a moonstone, a white candle and matches, her hairbrush and a drawing James made of the goddess Ethleen holding the moon—a milky-skinned, dark-haired woman wearing a gown of starlight. For as long as Miranda can remember, the drawing has hung over her bed as proxy for her mother. She says anon to the walls, floors and ceilings and all who lodge within them, wondering who will hear their scratches and whispers in the night until she returns.
• • •
Tereza’s ass was sweating. She’d rather have been puffing cigs with the guys who hung out at the corner store in her building but they weren’t around. She was stuck with a kid who looked like Tiny Tears with those blond curls and chubby gut. The only cool thing about Linda—sandals with laces that crisscrossed her ankles like a Roman soldier’s—was also the only cool thing about a Jesus movie Tereza had gotten rooked into seeing by a dumb girl the last place she’d lived. When Tereza became a star, she’d say uh-uh to movies that made you feel like you had to be “saved” from yourself. She liked sci-fi thrillers where the entire earth had to be saved from total destruction. She wasn’t keen on most girls, either. They didn’t know as much as guys about things that mattered. Take Linda: she didn’t know shit about the river even though she’d lived only blocks from it her whole life. And she was scared of too much to be any fun.
Tereza would have split by now if the cop car hadn’t shown up. She’d almost crapped her pants when it did, thinking Jimmy had gotten home early and sicced the cops on her for leaving Allen alone while Ma was out looking for work. Then it occurred to her the last person Jimmy would want to see was a cop.
A Charlie Chan mystery was going on in Crazy Haggerty’s. Two cops had clomped into the house, come out one at a time and parked themselves in their car for a while. Then dogcatchers showed up in a white truck, went in with the cops and came out with a black German shepherd. Tereza would’ve liked that dog. Jimmy wouldn’t be so fast to smack her with Rin Tin Tin at her side.
It was ages before the short cop waddled out the front door carrying a small, tan suitcase. The tall one followed, holding the