Stony River (28 page)

Miranda feels a sharp pain in her chest. She's aware of a siren on the street outside St. Bernadette's as she sees Nolan's legs collapse like a marionette's, then the rest of him drop onto the pavement, the dark blue hat Doris has with her today tumbling off his head.

“I got my coat so I could go wherever he was, take care of him.” Doris's hands twist Nolan's hat. “Frank found his voice, then. ‘He
didn't make it, Doris,' he said.” She straightens her back and pastes on a plucky smile. “There, I've told you without crying. I couldn't have, even a week ago. I couldn't tell Bill's folks or mine that night. Father Wolchek had to.”

Miranda pictures Nolan on a gurney in the room he called the cooler and shudders.

“Oh, sweetie, are you cold?” Doris asks. Her hands vigorously rub Miranda's arms and shoulders through her coat. “Should we walk around?”

Miranda quickly shakes her head, ashamed of concerning Doris at such a time but annoyed as well. She's not some newly orphaned waif needing to be coddled. “May I?” she asks, reaching for the hat. She remembers Nolan balancing it on his knee the day she met him.

“I brought it hoping you would.”

Miranda runs her fingers over the gold braid encircling the brim, the gold feathery shapes on the stiff bill and the bronze eagle on the front. She closes her eyes and draws into the blindness all that her fingers have felt. She inhales deeply for a count of six, exhales for six. Repeats until her body feels light and her mind lifted up and free. She envisions the hat big enough to enter. The lining is cold and slippery, redolent with a gray smell of unwashed hair that pinches her nostrils. Fear and urgency reside within. Swirling colors and shapes behind her eyes give way to images. Her lungs tighten. “Two men running, one falling behind, out of breath.”

“Is one Bill?”

“I think not. Neither is tall enough.” Miranda hasn't seen Nolan since he and Doris left her at St. Bernadette's, but his height has stayed with her. “One has a gun. There's a car. Three shots. Two wounds.” How tragically unnecessary it was. She opens her eyes when she hears Doris weeping. The images vanish.

“Don't stop,” Doris says. “I'm okay.” She smiles weakly. “Honestly, you'd think I'd be all cried out.”

“I'll not be seeing more right now,” Miranda says. At times this blind sight feels like a curse. It's as though she's behind heavy panes of warped glass. Did she just see what actually happened or only what Doris thinks happened? Miranda folds Doris's hands into hers and fully absorbs the impact the news had on this woman she loves. She feels no personal loss at Nolan's passing but is fond of Carolyn and wee Mickey. She senses the holes already opening in their hearts.

“I can try another time if you'd like.”

“I'd like,” Doris says.

Doris has often praised Nolan as a devoted father. Miranda knows only the man who sent Nicholas away. She wouldn't have wanted to be at the funeral even if Doris had invited her, but it wounds her sorely that Doris didn't.

DORIS'S MIND STEWED
with emotions: awkwardness at having waited to tell Miranda about Bill's death; guilt over not having been able to rescue Miranda and Cian—a guilt aged nearly two years and implacably linked to anger at Bill; and the grief, of course, the heartstopping grief. Waking up each morning still feeling the weight of him in her arms.

Now this: Miranda hearing three shots and seeing two men besides Bill.

Having Miranda at the funeral would have been a slap at Bill. Adopting her and Cian was out of the question while he was alive. Now, she dared imagine them living with her, away from the clutches of St. Bernadette's—she'd come to see even the building as evil. She felt its eyes on their backs, sensed its jaws eager to seize and devour them both. Doris blamed St. Bernadette's for Miranda's disturbing ability to go into trances and see things others could not. She prayed every night for Miranda's soul. To see the poor girl in that ratty coat
with the missing buttons and those dreary black oxfords! Early on, Doris had borrowed money from her mother and bought the child an adorable fitted red wool coat with a black velvet collar, but it had ended up in some communal wardrobe. Doris was dying to get that trim figure into something spiffy, put some pale pink lipstick on her and enough face powder to smooth out the complexion that had lost its milky purity at St. Bernadette's.

She'd need to go to confession for coveting the girl's share of the proceeds from the house sale, but Bill's life insurance wouldn't hold them for more than a year. She'd met with the mother superior and Miranda's tutor this morning. Mother Alfreda said it was unlikely she'd release a child to a single parent.

A single parent.

The awful truth of those words.

Sister Celine asked Mother Alfreda if an exception couldn't be made; Doris was such a faithful visitor. A faint possibility, the reverend mother said, and only if Miranda returned once a month for religious guidance until ready to enter the convent. Mother Alfreda was worried that secular life would “extinguish the light” of Miranda's soul. Sister Celine said experiencing life outside for a while would ensure that Miranda's choice of a religious vocation was freely made. Doris had kept her tongue but was thinking that, once Miranda got a taste of outside, no way in blazes would she go back. She sensed a sad resignation in Mother Alfreda, who nodded finally and said Miranda would have to agree to it. If she did, Doris would petition the court for an advance on the girl's trust fund. Thank the Blessed Virgin the department had covered Bill's funeral.

“Frank came up to me after we buried Bill, his eyes all red,” Doris told Miranda. “He was suffering terribly. He said, ‘It should have been me. My kids are grown.' That touched me, sweetie.” She pulled a hanky from her coat pocket and wiped her eyes. “It made me feel good to know Frank held him as he died, honestly it did.” The walls
of her throat closed up; she couldn't stop her voice from going thin and shaky. “Since it couldn't be me.”

“Oh, look, I've made you cry,” she said as Miranda swiped at her eyes with a sleeve.

Doris's small living room had swelled that night with the police chief, the mayor, the editor of the
Record,
the doctor who'd pronounced Bill dead and the rescue squad volunteers who'd responded after hearing the radio call. She didn't tell Miranda she'd tossed everybody out except Frank and Father Wolchek after the mayor said a guardian would have to be appointed for Carolyn and Mickey. The nerve of anyone deciding a child's mother wasn't guardian enough. Thinking about it enraged her all over again that Miranda had come so close to losing Cian.

“How's my little guy?” she asked now. “I miss him something fierce.”

Last summer St. Bernadette's had begun allowing Doris to take the children off the grounds on visiting Sundays. She often brought Carolyn and Mickey along. Cian was a dreamy child, good-natured and affectionate. He called her Dori and gave her little wet kisses. She wanted to clasp him to her bosom every five minutes like some bambino-starved Italian grandmother. She hardly noticed anymore that his head was too small for his body. A sunhat she'd bought him when they went down the shore made him appear almost normal.

“He made a spatter painting yesterday,” Miranda said. “Rubbed the toothbrush over the screen, then peered underneath quite seriously and said, ‘ooh, ooh,' as the white paint came out on the gray construction paper Sister Cameron gave him.”

“What was it like, his painting?”

“Like what the pigeons have left us here, I'm thinking.”

Doris laughed. The last time she saw Cian he'd hopped on one foot and counted to two for her. She was sure Carolyn had counted higher when she was three, but being bright wasn't everything. What
Doris saw was a child content with whatever the day brought. If that meant he was retarded, she could think of a worse fate. She suspected he'd be further ahead if he had spent the last two years in her care. And poor sweet Miranda, beset with calluses on her knees and visions she couldn't explain. Doris would be forever atoning for abandoning those children. Why did Bill ask her to take care of them that day and then deliver their souls to an orphanage?

She wanted to ask Miranda, Do you hate me? Instead, she said, “How would you feel about coming to live with me? You and Cian. I'll get a job to support us. You can stay home with the kids. On weekends, we'll take them all over the place. It'll be great fun.”

MIRANDA HAS ACHED
for these words, imagined her heart thickening in gratitude. She wants to ask, Why now? She's often wondered if, at Doris's house two years ago, she did something so terrible that Doris would never bring her home again, not even for an hour. She studies the pigeons strutting around them, unable to spot two with exactly the same coloring. She admires them for not feeling they have to dress alike as jays, robins and nuns must do.

“Mother Alfreda will send me to librarian school if I enter the convent,” she says.

“Why would you want to be a librarian?”

Doris's puzzled look is surprising. Miranda is sure she natters on about the library to the point of tedium. “Did I not tell you I'm in charge of story hour for the kindergartners?” In charge is a bit of a boast. Sister Theodore insists on approving the books Miranda reads aloud to the children. Her dark eyebrows reach their greatest height when she dismisses as lewd or anti-Christian some tales Miranda enjoyed as a child and asks to bring into the library. “Sister Theodore says I have the talent and dedication necessary to succeed.”

Doris lets out a shuddering sigh. “Of course you do. But what happens to Cian if you enter the convent?”

Miranda has considered that. It would be good for Cian to have a man in his life, but according to Mother Alfreda, she can never be married in a state of grace, for the “foul stain” of incest has forever derailed the possibility of raising Cian in a true Catholic family. No point trying to explain that, since Danú and Dagda were not blood relatives, it couldn't have been incest.

“Father Shandley says Cian can live with him and his housekeeper,” she tells Doris. “I can see him whenever I want.”

Doris's face acquires sudden color and her eyes grow alarmingly large. She stands and takes a few steps back on the footpath, frightening a wobbling pigeon. She flails her arms. “That's a horrible idea. I won't have you losing Cian again.” The pigeon flaps and climbs until it's wheeling high atop St. Bernadette's.

Miranda recalls the pink-and-green striped towels stacked in Doris's bathroom and a shell-shaped dish holding little round soaps, a big window in the front room to let in the sun. Doris's house has a television. Cian would be able to kiss the screen and say “Snap, Crackle, Pop” as he does in the nursery.

“Could I attend librarian school?”

“I don't see why not. There must be night classes.”

If Miranda joins the convent she'll become a bride of Christ and wear a plain silver band. Nuns, like pigeons, mate for life. Mother Alfreda says Miranda's destiny is in the convent. Sister Celine says it's in a world without walls. Their competing visions of her future remind her of James's tale of two swineherds who quarreled over whose power was greater, turning themselves into birds, dragons, sea creatures, worms and ghosts to get the better of each other.

“I need to think on it,” she says at last. It won't hurt Doris to wait for a change.

FOURTEEN