The Book of Illumination (4 page)

“Yeah.”

I sat down. All of a sudden I felt very tired, and then I remembered that I had forgotten to pick up the blueberry muffin I’d intended to buy with my Starbucks on my way in this morning. I was fading. Maybe they’d be giving out leftover Luna bars on the common. I liked those Chocolate Pecan Pie ones.

Sylvia wiped off the top of her desk—aha! She did tuck Kleenex up her sleeve! She came over and sat down beside me.

“Are you …crazy busy right now?” she asked.

“My son’s getting home in a little while. I really have to—”

“No,” she interrupted, “I mean, are you working full-time?”

“I wish.” She had no idea how I wished. We were getting by, but just barely.

She nodded and smiled. “Could we meet for coffee tomorrow?”

“I have a meeting at two in Carlisle, but I’m free in the morning.”

“There’s a café on the corner of Mass. Ave. and Commonwealth. Would eight thirty be too early?”

“Not at all,” I said.

T
HE CANNELLONI WERE
warming up when I heard Declan’s truck pull into the driveway. I glanced out the window, but the doors didn’t open right away. Transitions were hard. As much as Henry might want to see me, he hated saying good-bye to his dad. On Fridays, it went the other way.

Declan and his wife, Kelly, had been separated for eight months when he and I met one night at a bar in the North End. I wish I could blame the luscious and vaguely tawdry turn the evening took (backseat of a car parked up by the ocean in Swampscott) on something like euphoria over Italy’s winning the World Cup or the Patriots’ winning the Super Bowl, but I can’t. It was the fatal … No, fatal is not a word I could ever use in a sentence that leads directly to Henry. Nothing ended that night. In fact, just the opposite.

It was the …
irresistible
combination of eyes the blue of faded jeans, a spring sea breeze wafting sweetly up Hanover Street, and, well, let’s just say
more than two
whiskey sours, a throwback of a cocktail choice I later had reason to regret. Briefly.

A violin maker from North Bennet had introduced us. He knew Declan from a soccer league.

“How are you?” Declan had asked, with his soft Galway lilt.

“Can’t complain.” Or wouldn’t dream of it, when standing in front of a dead ringer for Gabriel Byrne.

“Sure you can.” He had smiled.

“Who would listen?”

“I would.”

That’s all it took. That and the crooked little smile I now see on Henry every so often, when he’s pretty sure I’ll appreciate the humor in a sticky situation, or at least forgive him without a lot of drama.

When the Wild Cherry nail polish, for example, that he was secretly using to paint in the heart on a card he was making for me accidentally tipped over onto my expensive, handmade Italian paper, paper that took weeks to arrive.

Well, he
was
making me a card.

I took a sip of my wine. Declan had opened his door, and rather than exiting through the door on the passenger side, Henry was sliding across the seat. He liked to hang out in the driver’s seat for a minute or two, hands on the wheel, just getting the feel of things. I knocked on the window, but they didn’t hear me.

Declan had been truthful that first night. He and Kelly were separated, they’d been unhappy, they were trying to work things out. They didn’t have Delia and Nell at the time, or I like to think I would have exercised a little more restraint.

What can I say?

I was weak.

“Hi, sweetie!” I called down as they clomped up the stairs to our second floor apartment. “How
was
it?”

His face told me a lot: that it had been great, but he wasn’t great right now because it was over. He appeared to need what I knew he
would want the least: a hot bath, an early bedtime, Mommy love. The cannelloni might revive him for a while, but it wasn’t going to be an easy night.

In the past few months, ever since starting kindergarten at St. Enda’s, he’d become acutely conscious that he lived with—a girl. And Delia and Nell were girls. So was Kelly. The only two guys in the whole sorry picture were him and his dad. This had made the weekly return to Mom-land all the more difficult.

I wasn’t sure where this was coming from. He’d had very little awareness of boys and girls—or rather, boys versus girls—at the touchy-feely preschool he’d attended for two years. In fact, he’d been shocked to learn that his best friend, Carey, who’d had the cubby next to his for two years and whose Lego-building skills were universally admired,
was
a girl.

It didn’t come from Declan, either; I was pretty sure of that. Though he
is
a police officer, which might lead you to draw certain conclusions, he had only one brother in a house full of girls. He got it. His sisters had made very sure of that.

“You must be starving!” I said as Declan swung Henry’s backpack onto the kitchen table.

“We had McDonald’s,” Henry said.

“At one o’clock!” Declan added, seeing the look on my face.

I really wanted to kiss him (Henry, that is) but I could tell this would not be a good idea. I ruffled his hair a bit, and he pulled away.

“Go dump your stuff and wash up,” I said. And then, in an attempt to cheer him up, I added, “I have a surprise for you after supper.” I didn’t, but I’d think of something.

“What?” he demanded.

“Never mind,” I said.

“Come on!” he wheedled.

“After supper,” I said in a singsong voice. He made a face but
headed off toward the bathroom. I heard the water blasting out at full force.

“How was it?” I asked Declan.

“Oh, grand, yeah.”

“How are the girls?”

“Right as rain; everybody’s good.”

He’d seen some sun and wind in the past few days, and my stomach did a little swoop.

“You want a beer? Glass of wine?” I wished I felt the way most divorced women feel when the dads make the return drop: relieved to see the back of him. But then, you can’t be divorced if you were never married.

“No, thanks.” He smiled. “I should probably—” He glanced in the direction of the driveway.

“Sure,” I said. “No problem.”

I knew he would have stayed for a while if I invoked Henry, the difficulty of the transition, all of that, but that would be cheating. This whole weird arrangement of ours worked because nobody played games, and I wasn’t about to start.

Kelly and I had a couple of rough patches in the first year or two, but things have gradually worked out. I like her, and I think she likes me; well enough, anyway. She treats Henry like a son, not a stepson, and I will never be able to repay her for that. They’re sending the girls to St. Enda’s—Delia will start in the fall and Nell the year after—in part so the kids can be in school together. And Dec never misses a T-ball game or a parents’ night. Kelly wouldn’t let him. Given that I had an affair with her husband while they were still technically married, adding one more obstacle to their process of reconciliation, she’s been a regular Mother Teresa. The least I can do is act like a grown-up and not confuse—or represent—a need or desire of my own as Henry’s.

“The canoe tipped over!” Henry announced excitedly, bouncing over to the table, where the pan of cannelloni sat cooling.

“Good thing you had your life jacket on!” I said.

The glance I shot Declan said,
He did have his life jacket on, didn’t he?

The glance he shot back said,
Of course he had his life jacket on! What kind of idiot do you think I am?

“I hate life jackets,” Henry announced. “I know how to swim.”

He peeled off some of the cheese topping and popped it into his mouth before I could stop him. I’d recently pointed out that this was kind of like cheating, because everybody knows that the cheese topping is the best part and everybody wants their own. To which he responded by pointing out that since I always let him have my cheese anyway, and it’s just the two of us here, what was the problem? I had a glimpse of what he might be like as a teenager.

“And there was a
ghost!”
he said.

I snapped to. I have always feared (a lot) and hoped (a tiny bit) that Henry might have inherited my ability, as I inherited Nona’s, but so far, no sign in sight.

“There was the
story
of a ghost,” Declan clarified, shooting me a significant glance.

Declan knows about me. Depending on how you look at it, either he has helped me out a number of times or I have helped him. He might well have made detective without my “anonymous tips” (that’s what we decided to call them), pieces of information I picked up from the earthbound spirits of crime victims. He might have cracked those very cold cases on his own. But we shall never know.

“She fell in the lake and died!” Henry said, his mouth full of cheese.

“Don’t talk with your mouth full,” I said. “Who?”

He tried to answer without opening his mouth very much. “The little girl. In the olden days.”

“I thought you didn’t believe in ghosts,” I said, scooping some cannelloni onto a plate and setting it on the table. Henry grabbed a fork from the drawer, sat down, and tucked in. He appeared to be ravenous.

He looked up at Declan. “Do you think there’s ghosts, Daddy?” I sensed that this might break along gender lines.

“Oh, I’m keeping an open mind,” Declan said.

What he had said to me, when we had
the conversation
, was, “Well, there’s more than one meaning to the word, true.” I think he has his doubts, to be honest, but he grew up on his granny’s fireside tales from the west of Ireland, so he’s pretty used to talk of faeries and changelings and great, gray horses striding through the surf and carrying off wives and children.

“You can hear her crying,” Henry said. “At night sometimes.”

“Did
you
hear her?” I asked.

He nodded earnestly, eyes wide. “I think I did.” He paused. “I
might
have.”

Declan’s wry grin said,
No way
.

“What’s my surprise?” Henry asked. He had just gotten out of the tub and into his pj’s, and he had that clean baby-hair smell that I found hard to resist.

“Nat’s taking you to the movies!” She wasn’t, but she would. She owed me.

“Oh,” he said, sounding a little disappointed.

“I thought you were dying to see …” The name of the movie momentarily escaped me, but not the image of an army of insects preparing to do battle with a muskrat, a ferret, and a mole. “That ant one,” I finished lamely.

“I thought maybe we were getting cable,” he said sadly. Much to his continuing disappointment, I drew the line at cable and microwaves.
I didn’t want us eating Hot Pockets, and I didn’t want to be called “Dude.”

I smiled. “Sorry.”

“When?” he asked.

“When what?” I had forgotten I was in the middle of a lie.

“When’s Nat taking me?”

“Oh! Soon! This week!” I hoped.

“Okay,” he said sweetly, and I immediately hated myself. He was so trusting. Not that I didn’t plan to make good on this fake promise of mine—I did; I would—but still, it was a small betrayal.