The Apple Tart of Hope (17 page)

I got to the bottom of why Stevie suddenly didn't want anything to do with me. It took me days of pestering. He'd told me to go away, but I wouldn't. I kept on calling, and I kept on whacking his window, and in the end I wore him down. “Why, why don't you want me to talk to you?” I kept asking, and I was never going to give up because I didn't want to lose Stevie in all of this too. So at last, he told me.

“Mr. O'Leary from your school called around here the other day. He wanted to give us a package of things that had been in Oscar's locker. He thought it was stuff we might like to have. It was my chance to look through some of his things for clues and stuff. I thought it would be useful.

“But Dad said I wasn't to touch any of it, that he'd go through it when he was ready. He put it all away in a kitchen drawer . . . But he's my brother. I've a right to see the things he left behind. Anyway, guess what I found, Meg? What do you think I found?”

“I don't know,” I said.

“I found a letter from you.”

“Oh God, Stevie. Oh I'm sorry,” I said, knowing what he was referring
to, and seeing him hold up the envelope with my handwriting on the outside. “I'm just so mortified. You see, he wasn't ever supposed to read that, and anyway, I found out afterward that he didn't feel the same as I felt. Stevie, the whole thing was a total mess. I told him to ignore it. And he was glad that we were going to put the whole thing out of our heads.”

“Anyone would have been glad to ignore a letter like this. What did you expect?”

“Honestly? Well, I guess once I knew he'd read it, I guess I kind of hoped that he'd feel the same way too. I dunno, I suppose part of me expected him to agree with me, you know? Have the same feelings.”

“How could you have expected him to feel the same as that, Meg?” said Stevie and it looked as if he was going to cry, and the hope that I had always seen in his face looked as if it had deserted him now too. “How terrible you must be feeling now that things have turned out the way they have.”

“Yes, it's another thing that I wish hadn't happened.”

Stevie's face had crumpled then.

“Meg, how could you? How could you have said those things to him at the time when he needed your friendship most?”

“I know, Stevie, my feelings for him changed—it's hard to explain and maybe you're too young to understand.”

Something suddenly wasn't adding up about Stevie and the way he looked so annoyed and I stopped and looked at the envelope he held tightly in his hands.

“Stevie, can you show me the letter?”

“Why?” he said, and his teeth were clamped together and he was not looking at me.

“Why do you want to see it again? You know what's in it. You know the words you typed—even if you didn't want him to read them, you still typed them.”

“
Typed
them? I didn't type them, Stevie, I wrote them.”

He did look at me again, then, and I looked at him and we both kept glaring at each other, fuming and silent.

“Stevie, please, show it to me.”

Stevie smoothed the envelope. He handed it to me. I took it. I lifted the puckered lip, pulled out the note and opened it up. It had been folded and unfolded many times. I read what it said, and what it said was
nothing
I had ever written and nothing I would ever write and nothing I believed and nothing I would ever say. When I'd finished reading my shaking angry hands made the letter tremble between us.

I examined the envelope for signs of tampering—it had definitely been opened and closed a few times. Two little giveaway jagged vertical rips were on the lip. Someone had taken my letter out, replaced it and written my name at the bottom— though it was a careless and bad forgery because my handwriting was nowhere near as tall and liquid as the signature I was now looking at with my own eyes.

“Stevie, I swear to you, I swear I never wrote this.”

Stevie's knuckles and his face had gone white and his lips were pressed together. He looked confused, so I started talking slowly to him to make sure he'd understood.

“I'd never have written anything like this to your brother; do you hear me? Someone took my letter—the one I wrote, and put this one in its place.”

I held it up, then, away from my face as if it could do more damage than it had already done.

“Who could have done something like that?” whispered Stevie.

In a cold, clear instant I knew exactly who.

“It was on purpose, don't you see, Stevie? Paloma went after your brother. I think she wanted to destroy him.”

“But I don't understand,” said Stevie. “Why would she do that?”

“To keep me away from Oscar, maybe. To keep Oscar away from me? Because she's pure nasty and mean? To make him feel alone and unloved and abandoned and foolish and humiliated?”

Anyway, if they were the things that she had set out to do, I was afraid that she had succeeded.

“It's her fault,” I said to Stevie. “Paloma Killealy. She did it to him, and the whole time she was pretending to be his friend.”

“What could she have had against him?” he asked.

“His magic. His kindness. His charm. She was jealous of him and it was because Oscar had shone like a star and she wanted to be the one to shine. And she was furious with him for not being in love with her, because Paloma thinks the world should fall at her feet. And she was raging because Oscar did not. She wanted to dismantle him and take him down. And she thought about it and planned the whole thing with a whole lot of vicious intelligence.

“She purposely turned everyone against the idea that making apple tarts was a good and worthwhile, decent thing to do. She went around whispering things about him. Lies and innuendos that made everyone think he was weird. And she turned everyone against him and I hold her a hundred percent responsible for what has happened, but it was my fault too, Stevie.

“I mean, if anyone can save you from jumping off a pier, it's someone who's supposed to be your friend, don't you think? That's one of the basic reasons
for
friendship.”

“Open the door, I know you're in there,” I shouted until my throat was sore. When Paloma opened it, she stood in the doorway of her new huge house with the wind blowing her hair as if she was in a slow-motion movie clip, beautiful and perfect-skinned. I held the letter in front of her wide-eyed face.

“It's your fault,” I said, “all your stupid fault. Why did you do it, Paloma? Why did you take my letter out and put a completely different letter in, one full of lies, pretending to be me? Why did you forge this and pretend it was from me and why did you humiliate him and why did you make him fall in love with you? And now he's gone! You have destroyed him completely, and you've taken him away from us—from his father whose heart is broken, from Stevie who only had one brother and whose mother is already dead, from me, who'll never have someone like that ever again, because there was only one Oscar Dunleavy. You are responsible for this.

“And now it turns out I had a chance! There was a chance he might have been for me, and I might have been for him and I'll never know, and I won't forgive you for it, Paloma Killealy. This is your fault. It will always be your fault.”

She blinked slowly at me and looked sleepily into my face, unconcerned and blameless-looking.

“I have no idea what on earth you are talking about,” she said. “Nobody can prove any of what you're saying. Now please go away. You're obviously out of your mind.”

I'd planned to do her harm, though I hadn't thought through the specifics. But I realized there wasn't any point. My rage was strong and it made my body feel powerful, but it wasn't going to pull Oscar out of the deep. It was too late.

I couldn't make things better for anyone and I couldn't think what else to do, so I made an apple tart. It didn't come out the way Oscar's used to, but it was as close as I could get. I took it over to the Dunleavys and Oscar's dad hugged me and said I was a good person and how he knew I was only ever doing my best for Oscar, and Stevie came right over to me and hugged me around my knees too.

“Meggy, in case you think I've given up hope, I haven't. He's still not dead, he's alive, I keep telling you.”

But Oscar's dad definitely didn't believe that anymore. I could see by the look on his face. He looked very tired. It must have felt better to give up. Hope can be exhausting.

“If you ever happen to be confused by something,” Oscar always used to say, “it's a good idea to go to the sea. Things feel clearer when you're standing where the water meets the land and you can listen to the swell of the tide, and the pure enormousness of this ocean—huge and salty—connecting everything to everything else.”

I know it's not a particularly normal thing to do—creep out of your bed in the middle of the night, and sneak away to go and sit on the end of a pier, but by now the squat bollard seemed to be calling for me practically all the time. I remembered how I'd told Katy Collopy about the whispering bollard, but how she hadn't been any help.

I knew that I wasn't suddenly going to find him or anything. But I needed to be on my own for a while, near to where Oscar had disappeared, when it was quiet and when no one would come and tell me to stop torturing myself or that enough was enough.

“Oscar, Oscaaaaar!” I knew that shouting for him wouldn't do any good, but still it made me feel better, there in the quietness.

Nobody can hear you from the pier. It's one of those funny things. I'm not exactly sure whether it's the way the harbor creates a cocoon of sound, or whether the sea has its own muffling effect, but it was something we had discovered long ago, me and Oscar. We could shout secrets to one another at that pier and nobody would ever be able to hear a thing.

“Oscar, where have you
gone
?” I shouted.

“Oscar, where are you
now
?” I begged.

“Why did you go without saying good-bye?” I pleaded.

“Oscar, I'm sorry,” I screamed.

“Oscar, come back,” I whispered.

I sat at the end of the pier dangling my legs over and looking at the water far below.

“I don't think he can hear you, from here,” said a voice.

I rolled over and scrambled to my feet. A man was leaning, quiet and still, on the bollard.

I think I made some kind of startled noise, then. but I can't remember.

“I'm really terribly sorry to have disturbed you.”

“Disturbed? What do you expect? Creeping up on someone like that in the middle of the night?”

“I don't wish to appear pedantic, but strictly speaking, it was you who crept up on me. I was here first.” He switched on a flashlight and everything started to glimmer in its milky halo of light.

He was wearing a light suit. He looked smart, and his hands were beautiful and soft-looking.

He leaned over, staring at something else in his hands. He was rolling a scraggly wad of tobacco into a crinkly white rectangle of paper. On his little finger, a flat gold ring glinted. He licked the length of the small package, and stuck it down around itself, turning it, as if by magic, into a straight, tight, white stick. Such a nice delicate activity, except that in the end it was just a cigarette.

He cupped his hand around a box of matches that he'd taken from some inside pocket. There was that fizz and ripple that always happens when someone strikes a match. At the end of his cigarette, the dot of an orange glow sharpened and softened and sharpened again as he took a couple of drags.

I tried my best to act as if nothing in the world was bothering me. It's difficult to regain your composure when you've been seen shouting the name of your probably dead best friend into the inky blackness.

He didn't say any of the things you might imagine an adult would say when they come across a girl in her pajamas late at night. Nothing about what on earth I was doing, nothing about the risk of catching my death of cold, nothing about what my parents would say if they knew.

The night was windless and the sea was like a flat polished floor. From his cigarette, a tiny thin wisp of blue smoke tumbled into the sky.

“Please sit down again,” he said. “I'm sorry for having made you jump like that.”

Part of me was telling myself it would be wise to get away before I was murdered and dismembered, but his voice was gentle and vaguely recognizable, so I sat again on the ground so that I could feel the cold from the stone slabs seeping into me.

I put my elbows on my knees and I breathed in the salty air. And before I even knew what was happening, this sob burst out of me.

“My dear girl,” said the man.

He didn't move or reach over or stand up. But his velvety gravelly voice was pure and good and the terrible tightness in me began to loosen its grip. Like a small key gently turning.

“What ails you?”

I told him that I'd been the friend of a guy called Oscar Dunleavy. I told him that I'd let my friend down very badly and that now he was dead and it was my fault.

“How is it your fault?” he asked. At first I couldn't answer. But when I started talking, I tried to explain how I'd deserted him when he must have needed me, and how my pride and my jealousy had stopped me writing to him and how now I would never be able to send him a message. Never again. I pressed my hands on the knobbly stone and I cried a good bit more.

“He was a friend of mine too,” said the man, after I'd stopped crying and we'd been quiet for ages.

“Him and those legendary apple tarts.”

I looked up, and it wasn't until that moment that I recognized him.

“Barney?” I said. “Barney Brittle? Is that you?”

“Yes,” he said, and chuckled. “Indeed it is.”

“But you're so clean!”

I apologized straightaway, because that could have been quite a rude thing to say, but he didn't seem offended. He smiled and said that things had got a lot better for him since he'd last seen me here.