Bridge of Sighs (76 page)

When they finally finished the parking lot, Tessa told Noonan to go home, that he’d done his part, but he knew the Lynches were still snowed in across the street, so he followed Lucy over there, and they began again. At one point Lucy heard the phone ringing inside and went in to answer it, telling Noonan to rest for a while, but he kept working, as if good-faith exhaustion might appease the angry, jealous God who decided whether small-town girls got pregnant or not. The pain in his wrist was worse now, and that, too, was fine.

Across the intersection people continued to traipse in and out of Ikey’s, parking in the lot he and Lucy and Dec had cleared by hand, and for some reason, watching this, he felt a welling up of emotion he didn’t immediately recognize as pride, perhaps because there was so little justification for it. Was it possible to achieve such intense satisfaction simply by shoveling snow for a corner grocery? Right then, leaning on his shovel, he felt almost weak with gratitude for the long day’s labors, proud not only of himself, but also of the Lynches, even Dec, for their daily devotion to Ikey’s. Last night he’d given Nan a guided tour of the West End world that had both fascinated and frightened her. He’d taken secret pleasure in showing her the hard realities she’d been sheltered from, but that had been a very different sort of pride from what he felt now, because in truth he no longer belonged to that West End world any more than she did. And this morning, returning Nan to the Borough, it had struck him that he didn’t belong there either. When her mother had screamed at him to get out, he remembered thinking she had every right to do so.

But here, right here, was a place he
could
belong, or at least was worth belonging to, where he’d always be welcome, even if he ended up as dubious a character as Dec Lynch. Back in November, Sarah was in tears at the notion that something might happen to Ikey’s. At the time her fear had seemed melodramatic, but now he understood. She was taking a stand against her father’s values. Noonan didn’t know anything about Mr. Berg’s novel, but he was certain nothing like Ikey’s was in it. No, he was drawn to extremes, both philosophical and dramatic. The poor black man who dreamed of fish and whose wife played the number appealed to his grand sense of racial injustice, because these people never had a chance. That they thought they did deepened the irony, and oh how Mr. Berg loved irony. On the other extreme were the grand dreamers—the Gatsbys and the Ahabs—who were determined either to conquer or to tear down and reshape whole worlds. In class they’d also read
Death of a Salesman,
though it was clear Mr. Berg didn’t care about Willy Loman. He was simply pitiful. Small men with small dreams didn’t interest him, even when their dreams demanded enormous faith and endless forbearance. Ikey Lubin’s was a small thing. A small, good thing. You could count on it much like you could count on the Lynches, not for what they didn’t have but for what they did. Was it something like this—some small, good thing—his father had been yearning for when he invested in Nell’s?

“That was Nan,” Lucy said when he came back outside and picked up his shovel.

“Really?” he said, surprised. If Nan was calling Lucy, then maybe, even if she was done with Noonan, she still wanted to be friends with him and Sarah. That morning, when she’d waved at him from her bedroom window, he’d gotten the distinct impression she was blowing all of them off.

“She said nothing happened last night,” Lucy said, grinning and happy now.

“Is that right.”

“She said you almost did, but then you decided not to.”

He nodded.

“That was smart,” Lucy said, and Noonan could tell his friend was every bit as relieved as if he himself had been the one in jeopardy. “She and her mom made up, too,” he added.

Noonan doubted this could be true but didn’t say anything.

“They’re flying to Atlanta tomorrow for a whole week,” Lucy went on. “There are some southern colleges her mother wants her to visit. One’s in Atlanta, and they’re going to drive to the others.”

He wondered if that meant Mr. Beverly would remain behind. Maybe they’d just leave him under the car.

“That’s the only bad part,” Lucy went on. “I was hoping she’d go to school here in New York. That way you guys could keep seeing each other. She really likes you, and you like her, so…”

They continued to work, Lucy chattering happily away, reenergized by his belief that sex had been avoided, that all was well. Noonan couldn’t help feeling sorry for him. Nan had shrewdly selected him as the best person to lie to, the person most likely to believe her, also knowing that he’d do his best to convince others. Lucy would always be the sort of person you’d lie to. Something in him wanted you to, so you could tell yourself you were doing him a favor. The first person he’d set out to convince would be Sarah, which was all to the good. All day long Noonan had been worrying about what she’d think of him when she learned he’d slept with Nan just hours after that kiss on the landing.

That last night’s secret might be safe for a while should have cheered him, but it didn’t, and exhaustion, held at bay until now, finally set in. Suddenly he could barely keep his feet, and every time he tossed another shovelful of snow his throbbing wrist felt ready to snap like a dry twig. It was early evening when they finally finished the driveway, and as they were crossing the intersection, a photographer from the
Thomaston Guardian
took their picture, dragging their shovels behind them like a couple of twelve-year-olds. At Ikey’s he went into the tiny, unheated washroom out back and there sank heavily onto the freezing toilet seat, too tired to rise, his mind scrubbed clean, his body numb. At some point he half realized something was going on out front, some flurry of activity in the store. Had he actually dozed off in there?

That must’ve been what happened, because when he returned everything in the store had changed. Sarah was there, and Lucy had taken her in his arms. Big Lou, at the register, had silent tears tracking down his cheeks. Tessa wasn’t scolding her husband for being sentimental either, and it was this, even more than Dec, shaking his head at him from across the room, that proved this was serious, whatever this was. His first guilty thought was that Sarah’d had an attack of conscience. She’d gotten home yesterday and realized that it hadn’t been “just a kiss” after all, but a terrible betrayal. Because of
course
she’d kissed Noonan back. He remembered now that her lips had parted, welcoming him. He was smiling, remembering that, when she noticed him standing there, and their eyes met. In that instant he knew he’d been wrong, that this wasn’t about him and had nothing to do with the kiss. Nor had Nan called her to report what he’d done. This was something much bigger, far worse.

“It don’t make no sense,” Big Lou said, causing Noonan’s heart to sink, because this was what he always said when something was horrible, or unfair, or unexpected, something that didn’t fit into his overall scheme of things or conform to how he thought the world should operate.

It was Tessa who finally took him aside. The night before on the South Shore, in the same blizzard that had buried Thomaston, Sarah’s mother’s new husband had lost control of their car and hit a tree. He, apparently, had died on impact. Her mother, who wasn’t wearing a seat belt, had been hurled through the windshield. Her injuries, on a normal night, wouldn’t have been fatal, but the wreck hadn’t been discovered until morning, and by then she’d bled to death in the snow. They’d both been drunk. Sarah had been out when the call came, and when she returned home her father was feeding the pages of his novel into the fireplace. And so she’d known even before he told her.

A car pulled up at the curb, and its horn tooted just as Mrs. Lynch finished relating all this. It was his father, and Noonan knew why he was there. It was Sunday, his night to tend bar at Nell’s, and he should’ve been there an hour ago. “You go on,” Tessa said when he told her. “I’ll explain. We’ll take care of her.”

He knew they would. All the Lynches, even Dec, not just Lucy. He again recalled yesterday’s kiss and thinking that in the instant his lips had touched Sarah’s everything had changed, but saw now that he’d been wrong. It was, as Sarah had said, just a kiss. When she realized he was standing there and looked into his eyes, he’d seen that for Sarah the kiss had never even happened. She’d held his gaze only briefly, then turned away.

“M
AX HAS YOU
all prepped,” his father told him. “Don’t forget to thank her.”

Noonan said he wouldn’t. His father was clearly not happy with him, and who could blame him? He’d waited for him at the diner that morning for over an hour, before giving up and eating breakfast alone. Then, after Noonan had finally called to explain what had happened at the Beverlys’, he’d had to have Max drive him to the Borough to retrieve his car. Now he had to come fetch him for his shift. But arriving at Nell’s in the middle of an argument wouldn’t do. Willie could tell and would be upset, so they rode in silence all the way.

He did his best behind the bar but screwed up one drink after another. “What the hell’s the matter with you tonight?” his father finally asked. Noonan said he was just exhausted from shoveling snow all day, grateful it hadn’t occurred to his father to ask about the scene he’d interrupted back at Ikey’s. At one point, though, Willie, his psychic tuning fork vibrating as usual, came out of the kitchen, tenderly took his hand in his own and rested his broad forehead on Noonan’s shoulder and told him not to worry, that everything would be okay. “Hey, William,” his father called down the bar. “Come here a sec.” Boys didn’t hold hands with boys, Noonan heard his father explain.

“He was just trying to be nice,” he said later, when Willie was out of earshot.

“I understand that,” his father said. “Next time, when he kisses you, he’ll be trying to be nice then, too.”

Max, who’d gone into town to visit her mother in her nursing home, returned at nine-thirty, took one look at Noonan and told him to go home.

When they pulled up in front of the drugstore, his father turned off the ignition, and as Noonan started to get out, told him to hold on a minute. “So,” he said, “I guess this Berg girl is the one you really like, huh?”

He was far too exhausted for this or any other conversation with his father. “I guess,” he said. “I don’t know.”

“But the Beverly girl’s the one you slept with.”

“It’s kind of hard to explain.”

His father shook his head. “Not really. You know what I see when I look at you?”

“Nope.” But he knew what was coming.

“Me.”

Noonan swallowed what he felt like saying, but was pleased to feel some of the delicious old loathing return.

U
PSTAIRS,
it was cold. Maybe not as cold as it had been the night before, though it felt even colder. As soon as he crawled into the sleeping bag, he smelled Nan, and his stomach lurched. Unzipping, he dragged the bag over to the lamp and used the same washcloth he’d given her that morning to scrub at the spot of her blood that had dried on the fabric, as if by removing that he could undo the act that occasioned it. But all this accomplished was to start his wrist aching again and to turn a small dry spot into a large wet one. The cloying scent of spoiled, petulant little girl remained.

He tried not to think about how Sarah was lost to him. What he couldn’t help wondering was when, precisely, she’d decided on Lou Lynch and not Bobby Marconi. Something told him that when they’d kissed yesterday, her decision hadn’t yet been made, which meant she hadn’t known for sure until today. Had it become clear only when she learned about her mother? Had she known in that instant of brutal loss whose comforting embrace and genuine kindness she wanted and needed? Or was it when she’d come into Ikey’s? And if
he’d
been the one out front and Lucy in the back, would that same grief and loss have propelled her into his arms instead? But these were pointless questions. It didn’t matter how or why she’d chosen. She’d just chosen.

Only when Noonan tried to crawl inside the bottom, closed end did he realize he’d put the top of the sleeping bag facing the back of the building instead of the street, as usual. Not that it made any difference, he thought, getting inside and zipping up. He’d be asleep in a minute anyway. Except he wasn’t. Despite his exhaustion, he lay awake shivering on the wet spot, the pain in his wrist coming in long leisurely waves now. If Sarah had chosen, then the thing to do was not care. Wasn’t that what he’d told Nan last night, that caring was something you could just decide not to do? Hadn’t he mastered that trick long ago? In the morning he would wake up and simply not give a shit.

He lay there telling himself this and staring at a strange shape—a cloaked man?—at the far end of the room. It took him a while to recognize the triangle at its apex as the point of Sarah’s easel, and for some reason this reminded him of his cathedral dream. He’d thought of it off and on in the intervening months, even considered asking Three Mock if he knew of anybody on the Hill who had a dream book. But that would just give him a number, something he could play, and what he wanted was the dream’s meaning. Tonight, oddly enough, he thought maybe he knew it. If he’d had to sum up in a single word what the cathedral had felt like, it was “home.”

Earlier, shoveling snow with Lucy, he’d felt like Ikey Lubin’s might be home, but he now understood that had been merely a yearning. The Lynch store was no more his home than Nell’s was his father’s. Ikey’s was just a place he’d become invested in. A small, good thing, yes, but not
his
small, good thing. He was welcome there, true, but always as a visitor. In her drawing Sarah had been right to locate him outside, about to enter. Realizing this, Noonan felt, for perhaps the first time, the terrible combination of loss—of something he wasn’t sure he could afford to lose—and fear that there might be nothing to replace it. After all, what did it mean if your only true home was a place that didn’t even exist outside your own head? Wasn’t that just an indication that you didn’t belong anywhere?