'The Mountains Wild' Chapters 33 & 34

Thirteen days.

She’s been gone thirteen days.

I eke out a slow five miles around the city, running alongside the Grand Canal all the way to Dolphin’s Barn, then taking the little residential streets as they come, all the way back to the hotel. The run helps to get rid of my nerves, my anxiety at being displaced from the investigation. I know everyone down in Wicklow, as well as Roly and his team and everyone else working to find Niamh, are chipping away at the case, but after two days of total immersion, I don’t like not knowing what they’re up to.

Later, dressed in jeans and a black silk top I bought at a store on Grafton Street, I look at my eyes in the mirror. They’re lined, tired. Still me. I remember his face from the park yesterday, older Conor. Still Conor.

Bláithín Arpin.

He’s just being polite. An old friend. He knows about the investigation. He feels sorry for you. Of course he wants to take you to dinner. It doesn’t mean anything. I put on lipstick and mascara, send Lilly an I love you text, and walk up toward St. Stephen’s Green, through the early evening sun and after-work crowds.

He’s waiting when I get there. “Can we walk a little?” he asks, and I nod. It’s Friday night. The air is warm, the park is full of people, strolling, talking, celebrating the end of the week. Griz told me that down in Wicklow, people won’t let their daughters go out alone. But here, it’s like nothing’s happened.

Walking next to Conor, I keep stealing glances. His graying hair. The way the angled light shows the lines next to his eyes. He’s just a middle-aged man. I might not look twice at him if I passed him on the street.

But then he looks over at me and smiles and I remember his mouth, his skin, his back. I must blush. “I don’t even know where to start,” he says. “I have so many questions.” A hesitation. “Are you, are you married?”

“Divorced,” I say, too quickly.

“I am as well.” I feel my heart leap when he says it. Bláithín Arpin. “Well, just about. We’ve been separated for quite a long time.”

“I’m sorry. Is your son okay with it?”

“It’s been tricky. You?” “Yeah, I think she’s happier this way. We get along well. But ... tell me about your sheep farm. Are your parents still alive?”

“Ah, yeah. My da still does all the chores. My mam helps him. They’re still going strong. Adrien and I are going home to see them in a couple weeks.” He touches my shoulder to steer me out of the way of a group of teenagers, laughing and taking up the walkway.

“Do you still go and stand on the edge of the field and watch the sunset?”

He turns to look at me, his eyes wide. “I’d forgotten I told you that. I did, didn’t I?”

“When I think about you, that’s how I think about you,” I tell him.

“I do still stand there. Every time I’m home. It’s changed. Someone put up a holiday house. Someone else let a field grow up. But I can still see the hills.”

We’ve stopped walking. We’re just standing there, in the middle of the walkway, staring at each other.

Finally, he says, “I was thinking about you, all day. I couldn’t sit down. I couldn’t do anything else. Adrien asked me what was wrong and I didn’t know what to say. I hope that’s all right to say.”

“I couldn’t stop thinking about you, either.”

He looks down at me. Then his hands are on my shoulders. “There’s something I have to say.”

“Yeah?” I’m holding my breath.

“I was completely in love with you.” He breathes out, as though he can’t believe he said it. “It’s terrible of me to say it. I was with Bláithín but I, right from the beginning, I was drawn to you. It felt like —”

I’m tripping over myself. “I was completely in love with you, too. It was twenty-three years ago. But I can remember it exactly. It’s — That first time, at the café —” I want to say that I can still feel it, this thing, like some kind of exotic animal. I can feel it hovering between us, levitating on invisible wings.

“Shite.” He grins.

“Yeah, shite.” I grin back. “Was that what you were going to tell me, that night when you came to the house?”

“I guess so. I was ready to tell Bláithín we were through and I went for pints with some friends from college and I guess I’d had a few and I just wanted to tell you. I wanted to say it.”

“And then you came in and Roly and I were in bed.” I hide my head in my hands. “I did something really stupid that night. I got really drunk. He brought me home and he was tired. There was absolutely nothing there. Just the friendship. A really good friendship. I replayed that moment over and over in my head. I wrote you letters, a few of them, to the café, to explain, and I thought after I wrote you and I didn’t hear back that you’d come for some other reason, that it had to do with Erin or something. And then . . .” I tell him about my dad, about everything. In the sliver of light coming from a streetlight, I see something flash across his face. A quick grimace of pain.

“I never went back to the café,” he says. “I ... We moved to Paris for a year.”

We stop walking. We’re holding each other’s hands suddenly, our fingers rubbing circles on each other’s skin, and then we’re kissing. Time folds in on itself. We’re on the beach at Sandymount. The wind is blowing. He’s holding my face. We’re in Erin’s bedroom. He’s looking at me. He’s stroking my face. We’re kissing again. Harder. Hungrier. The air smells of apple blossoms.

When we break apart, we laugh and start walking again, hand in hand now. “We’d better get to the restaurant,” he says. “I know you’re a cop and all, but a charge for public indecency isn’t going to help my career any.”  

 

***  

 

It’s dark, cozy, a second-story place off Dawson Street decorated with black-and-white photographs of 1950s and ’60s Dublin. We order gin and tonics and salmon for dinner. He tells me he had to take Adrien to Bláithín’s parents’ house in Brittas Bay and it took longer than he thought.

“I’m not going to complain about my soon-to-be-ex-wife on a date,” he says. “But it’s not an easy situation.”

“I don’t think it ever is,” I tell him. “I know a woman who was so angry at her ex that she hid opened cans of tuna all over his house. She was a completely normal woman, but she broke into his house and hid them in, like, really impossible places so that he would never find them.”

“Tuna?”

“It started to rot and his house smelled terrible. He couldn’t figure out what it was and he tried everything but it just kept getting worse and worse.”

“That’s awful. Did he deserve it?”

“I don’t even know. He always seemed like a perfectly nice guy to me. According to her, he did.”

“Do you and your ex get on, then?”

“Now we do. But it took a while. He was really angry for a long time. I didn’t feel much of anything. I kept hoping he’d find someone else so I wouldn’t have to feel sorry for him. I was so guilty for so long. We didn’t really have much in common, but after Erin, and my dad, Brian was very kind to us, to me and Uncle Danny, and I guess I mistook that for ... well, for the real thing.” I can’t help flashing back to the night Brian came into the bar, how I surprised myself by being happy to see him, by laughing, by having fun for the first time in a very, very long time. “We got pregnant and got married and ... a few years in, he still loved me and I didn’t love him and there was nothing I could do. It would have been better if I’d cheated on him. But now things are pretty good. He’s staying at my house with Lilly right now.”

“Did he ever find anyone?”

“He’s had a few girlfriends. Nothing serious.”

“And you?”

“Nothing very serious. There was this man in Ireland, you see, who I kept thinking about.”

“Is that right? Tell me about him.”

“Mmmmm. Well, I actually don’t know him all that well. That’s the thing.”

“That is the thing, isn’t it?”

We stare at each other for a long moment. Then our food comes and without talking about it, we sort of start again, talking about work, about our kids. I tell him about Lilly. He tells me about Adrien.

“He’s been to so many therapists and doctors and I think what it comes down to is that he’s got anxiety. Things at home were bad until Bláithín moved down to Wicklow and then he hit puberty and it’s just been ... pretty rough, actually ... But he’s better now. He seems to have evened out a bit. He likes his school.”

We have another drink each when we’re done with dinner and then we walk down Dawson Street and through Trinity. He takes my hand in Parliament Square and we stop to kiss under neath the statue of Lecky.

“Do you think we’re horrifying the young ones?” he murmurs. “Old people kissing in public?”

“Probably.” Kissing him feels both familiar and strange. Cold air. Apples. Conor’s sweater.

“Maybe you’d better come up to the hotel, so we don’t horrify these poor young people.”

He smiles and tucks my hand under his arm. “It really is the least we can do.” I wake up at three, the feel of another body in my bed unfamiliar. Streetlights shine through the open curtains and I get up to close them, then snuggle up against Conor’s back under the covers, finding the curve of his back again, the weight of his arms, the dip of his stomach.

“You’re not going anywhere, are you?” he murmurs.

“Uh-uh,” I whisper. “I’m not going anywhere.”

“Okay,” he whispers. “Okay.”  

 

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My junior year of high school, I can’t stop thinking about Brian Lombardi. When I see him at school, I feel anxious, unsettled, exhilarated. He always says hi, giving me a shy smile that I replay over and over and over again throughout the day.

One day in early spring, Brian and I walk to the corner store to get a snack before taking the late bus home. Erin and another senior named Alex Tsakos are smoking outside and when she sees us, something crosses her face. I can’t read it. But later, I’m doing homework on our deck and she comes out and sits next to me.

“I had to give your mom money from my dad,” she says. “So, what’s up with you and Brian Lombardi? Do you like him?”

I can’t lie to Erin. “I guess,” I say.

“I think he likes you, too. He was asking me if you like anyone.”

“Really?” I can’t help the soaring hope that rips through me. Erin gets up and goes to the edge of the deck, looking out across the Sound. She’s wearing shorts and I can see the strong lines of her legs, the delicate curve of her feet in flip-flops. I wish she’d look at me, tell me she misses me, come over and put a hand on my shoulder. Anything.

“Well, see ya,” she says. And she’s gone. It’s the way she always goes from anywhere, slipping quietly out of view, leaving a hole where she’d been standing.

A summer night, a couple of weeks later. There’s a party on the beach. Someone’s parents are away, is all I know. My friend Helen and I walk down from my house, find the light from a fire, try to identify the featureless figures in the dark. We’re juniors now and we don’t feel as stupid at these parties. The seniors have stopped caring about who’s popular and who’s not. They’ll talk to anyone now.

By the firelight, I find Brian on the sand. He’s got two beers and he hands me one. We drink in awkward silence. We both know that there’s something here. I wonder if Erin’s said anything to him. I imagine her saying, “My little cousin has the hots for you, Lombardi.” It makes me feel ashamed to think of it.

“What are you doing this summer?” I ask him. “Before college?”

“Working for my dad,” he says. “Hanging out. You going to be around?”

“Yeah, working at the beach probably.”

“Well, we’ll have to hang out a lot.” He turns so he’s standing next to me and I feel his hand snake around to the small of my back. He rests it there.

“Hey, little cuz,” Erin shouts at me. Brian takes his hand back and we both look up at her. She’s drunk, really drunk, and she’s stumbling on the sand, coming toward us. “How are you guys doing?”

“Okay,” I say. “You all right?”

“I’m fine.” She’s slurring a little, but she’s not so drunk that she doesn’t pick up on the tension between us. She gets a little grin on her face and then she reaches up to touch Brian’s face. “You okay, Brian? You doing okay?”

“Yeah.” He laughs nervously.

She looks at me then and she lets me see that she’s putting an arm around Brian, squeezing his butt.

“You should go home,” she says to me. “It’s late. Too late for little girls.”

Her words are a slap.

I look at Brian, but he refuses to meet my eyes.

“Come on, you should go home,” she says. “Shouldn’t she, Brian? Stuff happens late at night.” She’s running her fingers through his hair now.

Brian keeps his eyes down. He doesn’t look at either of us.

There’s a long silence. Someone shouts at the other end of the beach.

Erin’s looking up at Brian now, rubbing his cheek. He looks embarrassed. He still won’t meet my eyes.

I feel tears welling and I mumble something at them, then turn and run all the way home.

 

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