'The Mountains Wild' Chapters 45 & 46

And then I slam my feet against the side of his head. I hear him grunt. I got him, but not hard enough. He swears and grabs my shoulders, pulling me up to standing.

And then he starts pushing me toward the closet.

“No!” I’m thrashing around, trying to get us away from the doorway. If he puts me in there, that’s it. For me, for Niamh Horrigan.

Erin.

“Shut up, you fucking bitch. Shut up!” And he raises the knife high above his head and I close my eyes.

Lilly.

And then I hear glass breaking and a second later what sounds like a shot and Cathal Deasey is rolling off me as the sirens scream and suddenly the room is full of light. There’s one more gunshot, an explosion in the center of the chaos.

“Maggie, stay down,” Griz yells and I look up to see her in shooting stance, looming over Cathal Deasey, who’s clutching his leg and screaming. The lights from the cars stream in the windows. The room is full of people.

“It’s okay!” she shouts to me. “It’s okay now. We’re here.”

“She’s in there!” I shout to them, pointing to the closet. “At the back! Get her out.”

And it’s only a minute before they’re pulling her out, Niamh Horrigan, her hands and mouth duct-taped, her eyes wild and terrified. And I think, Erin? Erin?

But they go in and search the crawl space and there’s no one — nothing — else there and I’m up and running and out the front door and it’s then I see Roly on the ground. They’re working on him but the blood is everywhere and when I look at his face, I can’t see anything there to tell me he’s alive.

 

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I’m two days over my due date when the doctors tell me they’re worried about Lilly. “Her fluid’s low,” a nurse says. “We want to get her out.” I call Brian at work, and Uncle Danny. Brian meets me at the hospital, carrying my bag. He looks scared, so young I almost laugh, but I’ve never been so glad to see someone in my life. He grins and says, “Here we go, Mags. She’ll be here soon.” In that moment, I love him more than I have ever loved him. He’s safety. He’s home. He’s mine.

The Pitocin hits me like a wrecking ball. I start to feel a few small contractions and then the next one feels like someone’s got me in a vise and is whipping my body back and forth. It goes on for what feels like forever, a powerful contraction gripping me and rising to an unbearable peak, then easing off for a minute or two only to rise again, worse than before.

Brian keeps me going. He counts for me, tells me it’s going to be over soon. And then suddenly they’re pushing me down on the bed. Someone’s talking to Brian. The bed is moving. They tell me they’re going to get the baby out.

Something on my face. Pain. I don’t remember anything after that.

I wake up to a blurry ceiling, thirst, more pain.

Brian is standing there, holding Lilly.

“Here she is,” he says, smiling and holding her out to me. “Here she is, Mags. What’s her name?”

“Lillian Erin,” I say. “Lillian Erin Lombardi.”

I whisper her name to her. She’s tiny, wriggling a little as she gets close to me. “You should see her, Erin,” I whisper into her soft hair. “You should see her.”

 

Chapter 46

Wednesday, June 8, 2016 

 

IT'S TOUCH AND GO ALL THE WAY to the hospital, but then they get Roly stabilized and by the time they get him to St. Vincent’s, they can tell us they think he’s going to make it.

I sit with Laura until they tell her he’s awake and that she can go in, and when she asks if I want to come, too, I tell her I’ll catch up with her tomorrow. When she hugs me, I can smell her perfume and feel the tears on her cheek. She says, “A good few times now, I’ve had to sit with the wife at the hospital when her husband doesn’t come home. One of my best friends, like. She was widowed at thirty-six. Bernie. We sat here for days. But I never thought we’d be here. I never thought it would be him.”

“He’s going to be okay, though,” I tell her. “You’re going to feel guilty about that, in the coming days, but don’t let it take away from how grateful you are. I’m grateful, too.”

She smiles and I watch the nurses let her into his room.  

 

***  

 

When I come out of the hospital to hail a cab, Stephen Hines is up at the front of the clot of reporters. There are a couple of guards keeping them away from the entrance and they nod to me as I walk past. The reporters feel him watch me and they all converge, shouting questions to me: “Is your cousin’s body in Ballyclash, Detective D’arcy?” “What is Niamh Horrigan’s condition?” “Who kidnapped her?” I ignore them and keep walking.

But Hines breaks away and follows me. “Any comment, Detective D’arcy?” he asks. His hair is loose on his shoulders and he’s wearing a dirty T-shirt under his jacket, as though he leapt out of bed to come here.

“No, I don’t have any fucking comment,” I say, but goodnaturedly. I smile at him.

“Come on, give me something. You saved Niamh Horrigan’s life.” He’s holding his phone out, recording what ever I’m about to say.

I talk to the phone. “No, I didn’t. Detective Inspector Byrne and Detective Garda Grzeskiewicz saved her life. They’re the heroes here. I just happened to be there.”

“Does it give you any peace, knowing what happened to your cousin?”

I stop walking and meet his eyes. “No, it doesn’t give me any peace. What do you think?” For a second I wonder if he’s going to keep badgering me, but instead he nods, as if to say okay, and lets me pass.

When I look up, past the reporters, Conor’s standing there waiting for me.

“I called your phone,” he says. “And the woman who answered it said you were here.”

“My ...?” I realize my phone must still be in Roly’s car. Griz.

“Can I drive you home?”

“I guess so.” I look up at him for a long moment. His face is in shadow, his eyes dark and liquid. The car is warm. I wince putting on my seat belt and he touches my shoulder and then he pulls out into traffic and starts driving.

“I heard about what happened on the news,” he says. “I saw you. They had a shot of the house and there you were in the background and I felt like my guts had been ripped out. You saved that woman. You saved her life. They said Detective Byrne is stable. I’m glad.”

We’re completely silent. I feel the weight of him, the inevitability of something. He drives smoothly. The road is clear and empty this time of night. “You haven’t been honest with me,” I say finally, into the emptiness. “There’s something you haven’t told me. I don’t know what it is, but there’s something. Will you tell me now?”

He turns the wheel, slowly, getting off onto a side street. He shuts the car off and puts both hands on the wheel. I wait.

A man walking a dog crosses in front of us. The car makes a settling sound, a fan shutting off somewhere beneath the hood.

He doesn’t look at me. “You know when you meet someone and you recognize something in them? You think, ‘Ah. I know you’? I felt like that when I first met Erin. She walked into the café and it was like I recognized her. I think she felt the same way. We just liked each other. We liked talking and I started walking her home sometimes.”

I feel it as a physical pain. He loved her. I had known all along. I just hadn’t wanted to see it.

“The gang of us from the café went out drinking one night. There’d been some conversation about a case that was in the courts then. It was in all the papers. She must have seen something on my face. I was walking her home and she said, ‘How old were you? When it happened. How old were you?’ and without even thinking, I said, ‘Twelve,’ and she said, ‘It happened to me too. I was fourteen.’ ”

I turn to look at him but he has his eyes on the road ahead. I have the sense of something out there, something shimmering and dangerous, like an animal under the surface of the water.

“ ‘Who was it?’ she asked me. I couldn’t say it. I’d never said it to anyone. I couldn’t say it. I just ... I asked her the same question and she started to cry. She said she’d never told anyone either. That she’d been ... raped.” There’s a long, heavy silence. “That’s what we were talking about.”

Silence.

“I didn’t know,” I say.

“She said she’d never told anyone. I hadn’t either. We ... We were friends after that. Everyone at the café thought I fancied her. Bláithín thought I fancied her. It was terribly cruel, when I think of it now. Here was Erin, who knew the most intimate, secret thing about me, something I hadn’t even told Bláithín. And I invited her out with us, let Bláithín see that there was this thing between us. In some ways, I don’t think we ever recovered from that.”

“Who was it?” I ask into the quiet car.

“Erin never told me,” he says. “But me? A neighbor. I went round to feed his cows sometimes, make a little dosh. I learned, in therapy—there’s been a lot of therapy—that I have it better than a lot of victims. I stopped it. I put my foot down after it...after it happened once. I made excuses not to be alone with him and it never happened again. I never told anyone, until I told the therapist. I’m okay now, but it took a long time. Splitting with Bláithín, it was ... I could only see the marriage clearly once I’d reckoned with ... it.”

He starts the car up. I reach out and put a hand on his arm. I leave it there, rubbing little circles on his skin.

We’re almost to the hotel. We pass the big AIB building. I take a deep breath. “Why didn’t you tell me?”

“It’s embarrassing. There’s a certain amount of shame. Erin told me never to tell anyone. I had the feeling it was someone close to her, that if it got out, it would be disastrous for her. She said something about how everyone would be mad at her if she ever told. Once she was gone, I couldn’t ask permission. I’m sorry,” he says. I turn to look at him.

“I’m so sorry,” I say. “I had no idea. About Erin. About you. I’m so sorry.”

He looks down at me. “It’s okay. It really is. I’m okay.”

“Erin didn’t say anything ...” I’m thinking horrible thoughts suddenly. Uncle Danny. My dad. No. “She didn’t tell you who it was?” “No. Not a word. It seemed raw, especially as the summer went on. It felt like she was starting to deal with it. I recognized the signs. I knew she hadn’t, well, gotten past it, you know? Because I hadn’t, either.”

“Oh my God.” I’m staring straight ahead at the houses along the little side street. He turns the car on again and pulls out, turns back onto the Main Road. We’re silent as we drive up Baggot Street.

I reach for his free hand and he takes mine gratefully.

“I wanted to tell you,” he says. “But I didn’t know how to start. I almost did once.”

“What stopped you?”

“I think I was pretty sure I was in love with you. I thought it might make you not love me back, I guess. That you’d think something was wrong with me.”

“I don’t,” I say, rubbing my thumb along his. “I could never.”

“She told me once that she had hurt you. She didn’t tell me what it was, but she felt guilty about it. She said that it ... the rape ... made her do bad things. Made her hurt people. Do you know what she meant?”

I nod.

We’re almost to the hotel when I say, “I don’t want to go up there. Can we go to your house?”

“Yeah,” he says. “Bláithín’s bringing Adrien back, but I don’t care. I just want you there.”

We ride through the quiet streets of Dublin in silence.

 

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Christmas. A grim, gray December day. My mother’s been dead for six months. We’re barely functioning, barely able to acknowledge the day. Father Anthony visits Christmas Eve and prayed with my dad but I can’t bring myself to say the words with them. I stay in the kitchen, baking my mother’s soda bread, trying to do it right. I can’t get through it without crying.

On Christmas morning, we go down to Uncle Danny’s and have breakfast, open a few presents. I give Erin a velvet scarf, decorated with butterflies. She puts it on, wears it all day. She’s quiet, thoughtful, and we watch The Sound of Music, which is our Christmas tradition. Around three we head over to the bar. Uncle Danny opens it for a few friends, more than a few usually. This is our other Christmas tradition, and Jessica and a bunch of Erin’s high school friends come out and so does my friend Helen, who lives in Portland, Oregon, now.

It’s late when Uncle Danny asks me to take Erin home. “She had a few too many, I think,” he says. “Get her into bed if you can.”

By the time we’re in the car, heading for the bay, she’s not too bad, babbling about Jessica’s new boyfriend and smoking out the window of my car.

“Can you put that out?” I ask her. But she ignores me, telling me about how Jessica met the guy at the supermarket.

“I was thinking, Mags,” she says. “About moving to Ireland. Wouldn’t that be awesome? Patrick’s cousin is from Dublin and he said they always need people to work in pubs. He said I’d be great at it because I know everything already, from the bar. I think I’m going to do it. You can come visit me. Weren’t you supposed to spend the year over there before you left school? Maybe you can come and live with me.”

I don’t say anything, but she can feel the energy shift in the car. I just drive, focusing on the feel of my foot on the gas pedal, the way my back presses into the seat of my mom’s Honda.

“What?” she asks after a minute, challenging, hurt.

“Nothing.” I keep driving.

“Say it. I know you want to.”

“Erin, you can do whatever you want. This is probably not the craziest thing you’ve ever done, even.”

“You think it’s crazy?”

“I think it’s pretty par for the course, if you want to know the truth. This is what you do when things don’t work out for you one place. You run away. I should have seen it coming, actually, after you broke up with whatshisname Patchogue guy.”

“I’m not running away.”

“Okay. Whatever you say.” We’re on Ocean Avenue now and I turn down Bay toward our houses. It’s dark and cold outside. She pushes her cigarette butt out the slit at the top of the window and rolls it up. I just want her out of the car.

“Screw you, Maggie. What if this is what I’m supposed to do? What if things work out for me over there?”

I don’t mean to, but I must make a sound, a little Ha! because she screams and says, “See! You don’t think I can do it. You think I’m a screw-up.”

“You are a screw-up. Why should this be any different?” I’m furious, the rage filling me up and exploding out of me. “Do you know how awful you make everything for everybody? Uncle Danny? He never knows if you’re going to be alive or dead when he gets home. My dad? All your friends? Every one thinks you’re a screw-up. Everyone’s tired of your bullshit. Don’t you know that by now?”

I’m practically screaming. We’re at the end of the road and I pull over, manage to get the parking brake on.

She stares at me for a long moment, her eyes spheres of reflected streetlight in the dark car. She smells like cigarette smoke and rum.

“You don’t understand anything,” she says finally. “You don’t know anything at all.”

There’s a moment where she waits for me to ask, waits for me to say something else. I stare out into the dark night, pushing the tears down, pushing the words down. I focus on a tiny crack in the windshield, a crack my mom must have gotten at some point. The tiny sliver of streetlight reflects and bounces around inside the crack, a little mirrored hall of light.

“Maggie.” She says it like the start of something. She’s waiting for me to answer.

I keep staring at the little crack in the windshield. I don’t say anything.

And she’s gone, the door slamming, running toward Uncle Danny’s house, the water below us black and yellow in the moonlight, and I don’t even care, don’t even check to make sure she gets home. I just drive away, trying to shake off my rage and shame.

 

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