Immaculate Heart Read online

  The four friends agree that the experience has strengthened their bond, and that they now feel more inclined to prayer and reflection. “We believe She has chosen us for a reason,” said Miss Orla Gallagher. “Not because we are the most devout, but because we could be.”

  Her younger sister, Miss Síle Gallagher, went on to explain that the apparition took solid form. At one point she felt the Blessed Virgin’s hand, warm and soft, on her own. “It was as real as when my mam used to come in to kiss me good night,” she said.

  I shivered a little, and looked over at Paudie. “Did Tess ever talk to you about what she experienced?”

  “From time to time, she would tell me a bit. She hasn’t spoken of it in years now, so don’t be surprised if she says very little to you when you see her.”

  “She did agree to meet with me,” I pointed out. We’d known each other a long time ago, but not well enough to justify any sort of reunion. Not really.

  “So she did,” Paudie said.

  A little while later, we came to the end of the scrapbook. I’d expected to find an interview with Martina McGowan about the “miracle,” but in the later articles, it was only ever mentioned in passing, as if the writers had taken the whole business for undeniable fact. Yet another opportunity wasted through lazy journalism—and, as had happened to me on more than one occasion, I felt spurred on by someone else’s failure. Someone had to tell the story properly, and I knew it should be me. This place was in my blood, after all.

  “I’ll only ask you the one thing.” Paudie closed the scrapbook and laid his palm on it as if he were about to swear on a Bible. “Whatever Tess tells you, I’d like to read your piece before you publish it. Can you promise me that?”

  “Of course,” I said. I’d reneged on this sort of thing before, but I’d worry about that when the time came.

  The old man nodded. “Good lad.”

  I rose from my stool to help him with the tea things. No one had come into the shop in the hour I’d been there, but if Paudie noticed, he gave no sign.

  * * *

  Late that afternoon, Brona drove me out to a place called Gurteen to see the tumbledown stone cottage where my grandmother’s father was born, and the quiet little churchyard where the rest of our ancestors were buried. Paudie and Leo came along and provided a running commentary from the backseat. They pointed out what looked like an old milking shed and said that was where their parents had gone set dancing back in the day. “That place, there.” Paudie tapped on the foggy glass. “That was Jack Brennan’s house. The man who danced at his own wake.” The rain eased to a drizzle but never let up entirely, and as we passed building after ruined building, I began to understand why my grandmother had been so desperate to leave.

  “Sometimes I get a bit lonely for the old days,” Leo sighed. “Before there was anything more to build and all the Poles showed up.”

  “Leo!” Brona gasped, and I laughed.

  “If he’s going to be xenophobic,” I said, “at least he has the decency to be upfront about it.”

  We came to the ruined church and got out of the car. The building wasn’t that dilapidated, actually—it still had a roof—and we waited behind Brona as she fitted the key she’d borrowed from the parish secretary into the padlock on the side gate.

  “This is the old Protestant church,” said Paudie as we passed into the graveyard. “If you travel round, you’ll find the Catholic churches are all on the new side, owing to the suppression of the faith up to the time of Daniel O’Connell.”

  “Oh, don’t bore the lad with all that!” Leo replied breezily.

  Paudie sniffed. “I was only after givin’ him a bit of historical context.”

  “Tell me about your gran,” Leo asked. “Is she happy?”

  It was a simple question, but it still struck me as a bit odd. “She seems happy,” I ventured. “She likes living in Florida. She stays busy.”

  “Oh? And how does she keep busy?”

  “She volunteers at the library, she’s part of a bridge circle, stuff like that. I guess you could say it keeps her young.”

  “She’ll always be young to me,” he said as we passed onto the uneven ground of the graveyard.

  I had no idea what it felt like to know that you’d never see an old friend again—even if you were both still alive and well on opposite sides of the ocean—and I hoped I never would. “I guess it’s been a long time since you last saw her.”

  “Sixty years,” Leo replied, and there was more emotion in those two words than I’d seen in him so far.

  Beyond the churchyard wall stretched a crooked grid of fields. Everything was green, but nothing was growing. “Were you very close friends growing up?”

  “Oh, aye. Johnny and Paudie and Colum and Brona. And myself and Ethna,” he added. “Did she tell you about me? Before you came?”

  I laughed. “If you’re asking if she remembers you, Leo, I’d say forgetting you was never an option.”

  He gave an impatient wave of his hand. “But did she mention me a’tall?” He faltered on a sunken patch of earth, and I reached out and gripped him under the elbow.

  “She told me about you, yeah.” Brona was leading us down to the Donegan family plot. I couldn’t have cared less, but she didn’t need to know that.

  “And what did she say? Your gran?”

  “She said you were a troublemaker.”

  He chuckled, but I could see he didn’t find it as funny as he was making out to. “That’s Ethna,” he said, and then we arrived at the old gravesite.

  We watched as Brona cleared away the dead leaves from the base of the marker, then got down on her knees and crossed herself as she murmured a prayer. The stone was speckled gray and green with lichen, the list of names meaningless beyond the simple fact of genetic inheritance. This was an old graveyard, but the burials had continued until recently. There were plaques full of platitudes headed MOTHER or SISTER, waterlogged plastic globes with fake flowers inside. Paudie stood with his hands thrust in his coat pockets, looking up at the trees and the sky as if he might find what he was looking for above our heads rather than beneath our feet.

  After a minute or two, Leo and I started back to the car. “Did ya know your granddad?” he asked.

  “He died when I was a kid,” I said. “I wish I’d had more time with him.”

  “Was he a good man?”

  “Everyone says he was.”

  “Aye, but how do you remember him?”

  A memory welled up, Christmastime in midtown Manhattan. Mallory was only a baby.

  My grandparents had taken me up to the city for the day to see the Rockettes, and while my grandmother was off shopping in one of the department stores, my grandfather snuck me into a tobacconist’s. The place was crowded, the men in the lounge area towering over me in a haze of smoke. “Don’t you ever take up smoking, son,” my grandfather told me as the man behind the counter handed him a package of pipe tobacco. “It’s a nasty habit, but I can’t seem to help myself.” That had been his second-to-last Christmas.

  “He was kind,” I said. “Yeah. I do remember him that way.”

  I glanced at Leo and found him already looking at me. The old man nodded gravely. “Then he was worthy.”

  * * *

  “I counted twelve pubs on the ride back,” I said as Paudie delivered the first round that night. “Why do you always go to the same one?”

  “Ah, we’ve been comin’ here since we were each of us in nappies,” Leo replied as he took his first sip. “Why go anywhere else, when here’s the next best thing to your own sitting room?”

  “And that’s no exaggeration,” Brona put in. “Paudie’s uncle used to own this place, long before it was known as Napper Tandy’s, and all the family would come out for the Sunday carvery.”

  “They don’t do the carvery anymore,” Leo said gloomily. “Now, that I don’t like. They’d do very well to start it up again, but sure, no one listens to an old man.”

  “The Sunday carv
ery,” Brona sighed. “We took you once, when you were here. You and your sister. Do you remember that?”

  I’d eaten all the roast beef on Mallory’s plate. She hadn’t wanted it. But I shook my head. “I don’t. I’m sorry.”

  “When you go home, ask your gran if she remembers the carvery lunch at McGowan’s pub, and how afterwards we’d play conkers in the yard.”

  “I’ll ask her,” I said.

  For a minute we drank in silence. “And what’s your plan for tomorrow, once you’ve met with Tess?” Paudie asked.

  “Hopefully I’ll get to talk to Father Lynch,” I said. “And if there’s time in the afternoon I’ll drive up to Sligo to see Síle.”

  “Look at this one, all free and easy!” Leo’s laugh made me think of opening a soda can that’s been shaken. He was fizzing over. “From all that they tell me, lad, you’ll have an easier time gettin’ in to see the queen of the Shee.”

  3

  NOVEMBER 7

  I found St. Brigid’s Youth Centre around the corner from the church in an old row house, sunflowers and butterflies painted on the façade by childish hands. There was no sidewalk, so I was pretty much standing in the road as I waited for Tess McGowan to come to the door. The houses were two-storied, but there was a smallness to them that made me feel I could reach up and tap on an upstairs windowpane. Every other house on the street was done in some desiccated color, gray or beige or yellow like old teeth. Smoke rose from the chimneys of several houses along the lane, the scent in the air rich and earthy, though Brona had told me hardly anyone burned real peat anymore, only peat briquettes from the corner shop. The smell of peat I remembered from the last trip, even though we’d come in the middle of July. It was ten o’clock in the morning, and nothing stirred the lace curtains in every front window.

  When she opened the door, her freckles were the first thing I saw: bright and abundant on her pale skin, as if she were still a ten-year-old tomboy. She’d pulled her burnished red hair back from her face with the sort of clip my mother had worn in the eighties, and a gold cross pendant dangled below the neckline of a plain gray pullover. She greeted me with a firm handshake and a cautious smile, laughing out loud when I called her Teresa.

  “Call me Tess.” Her eyes roved over my face. “You’ve hardly changed.”

  “Neither have you,” I said cheerfully, but I didn’t like how it made me feel, replying as if we’d known each other better than we had.

  Today was Wednesday, but when we passed the front sitting room, a pair of teenage boys glanced up from the television. In that second, I took in their knobby throats, spotted cheeks, and worn-out band shirts, the black vinyl couch and the Nintendo controllers clenched in their skinny fingers, the open bags of potato chips and overturned soda cans on the shag carpet at their feet.

  “Shouldn’t they be in school?” I whispered as Tess led me up the stairs.

  “If they’re going to mitch, I’d much rather see them here,” she replied as she closed her office door behind me. “I want this to be a safe place for them to grow out of all that.” She went to a sideboard and picked up an electric kettle. “I’ve just boiled water for tea. Will you have a cup?”

  “Yes, please.” Her desk looked out over the narrow street. Settling myself in the thrift-store chair beside it felt a little like taking a seat in a confession box.

  Tess dropped tea bags in a pair of mugs and poured the water. “So Brona passed you Johnny’s phone, did she? It gave me a fright yesterday when his name showed up on the caller ID.”

  I was taking in the walls, the cracks in the plaster carefully patched. There were years’ worth of photographs of teenagers dressed like pirates and witches and aliens; strumming guitars on a makeshift stage with their hair in their eyes; standing outside the youth center with their arms slung casually around Tess’s shoulders; holding up their paintings for the camera while trying not to look quite so proud as they felt. There were posters too, JESUS IS MY FAVOURITE ROCKSTAR and WE LOVE BECAUSE HE LOVED US FIRST. I turned back to face her. “Sorry about that. It’s just easier for while I’m here. The roaming charges on my iPhone are crazy.”

  She cast me a wry smile—Johnny wouldn’t mind—as she carried the mugs to the desk. I watched her remove the tea bag and stir a spoonful of sugar into her cup. “How long have you worked here?” I asked.

  She cocked her head, forming a mental tally. “Seven years? Eight? Closer to eight, I suppose.”

  “Paudie says you run this place single-handedly.”

  She shrugged. “That makes it sound like work. I’ve never seen it that way.”

  I drank my tea. “I guess you’re doing what you’re meant to be doing, then.”

  Tess smiled, and the smile was her answer. She would have been attractive if she weren’t dressed like a nun—but then, she was a nun, or near enough to it.

  She cleared her throat. “Well, then. I suppose we’d better get to the purpose of your visit. You want to write an article about the apparition, is that right?”

  “I’m not sure yet. I guess I should start by telling you I don’t have any preconceived ideas about what you experienced, and I’m not looking for an answer as to whether or not you actually saw what you think you saw. I may be a journalist, but I also know that some questions truly don’t have answers.” She raised her fingers to the cross around her neck and smiled faintly in agreement. “I’m interested in the social context,” I went on. “Leo was telling me that the visitations brought the town a great deal of money and attention, and I want to understand how and why it changed this place.” I gave her my most affable smile. “So what do you say, Tess? Is it all right if I ask you a few questions?”

  She gave me a look I couldn’t interpret. “You’re one of those people who’re never not working, aren’t you?”

  I grinned. “I’ll admit to it if you will.”

  She let out a soft little laugh. “Fair enough.”

  “If I’m being too pushy, will you tell me?”

  She hesitated.

  “Tess?”

  “It’s only … it’s only that it’s a bit strange to have you back here after all this time. To know you and not know you at the same time, and to have you…” She drew a breath. “To have you here, asking after the one thing I never talk about.”

  “Look,” I said. “I’ll be perfectly honest. I want to remember that trip in 1982 a whole lot better than I actually do. I remember we went to the beach that day, and of course I remember you…” From the way she was looking at me now I could tell I’d hurt her feelings, though she was making an effort to mask it. “I’m sorry,” I said. “I really wish I could remember more. I know I liked you—I know we got along well that day. Could we … could we maybe start there?”

  She nodded and gave me half a smile. “I’ll tell you whatever you’d like to know. It’s just that I haven’t discussed it in so long. I haven’t given an interview since that time.”

  “Really? Not in twenty years?”

  She picked a speck of lint off her jeans. “I try not to speak or think of it, if I can help it.”

  Tess seemed like a practical, down-to-earth sort of woman—not at all a religious nut who’d stake her life’s work on a hallucination, or make up elaborate stories for the attention they’d temporarily afford her. We would come around to the apparition itself; I just wasn’t sure yet how the conversation would carry us there.

  “We can just talk about the town, if you prefer.” I drew my digital recorder out of my jacket pocket. “May I?” She nodded, and I turned it on and laid it on the desk between us. I began the recording with her name, the date, and our location. “Can you tell me a little bit about what life was like for you growing up in Ballymorris?” I asked. “Did you like it here?”

  She laughed. “Don’t tell me you haven’t noticed it’s the sort of place everyone dreams of running away from!”

  “And yet you’re still here.” I smiled. “Presumably long-term?”

  Tess nodded, then re
membered the recorder. “Long-term, yes.”

  “You grew up here—and did you go away to college?”

  “I went to university in Galway. And afterwards I went abroad, for the better part of my twenties.”

  “Some sort of missionary work?”

  “I was a volunteer. I lived and worked in orphanages in Kenya and Nepal. There were several other projects I was involved in over the years, but those were the ones nearest to my heart.”

  “So what brought you back to Ballymorris?”

  I watched her face as she gathered her answer. “Wasn’t there ever a time in your life when you realized you had to face your fate—that there wasn’t any sense putting it off?”

  “Every morning,” I replied, and she smiled.

  “Ah, but I mean it,” she said. “The real work is here. I’ve traveled quite a bit, through Africa and Asia and South America, but I always knew I’d come home again.”

  “And are you happy here now?”

  “I’m happy when I’m useful,” she replied. “So yes, I am happy.”

  I couldn’t help smirking a little. “That’s a bit of a nonanswer, don’t you think?”

  “Why?” she asked. “Are you happy?”

  “I’m sitting in a comfortable chair with a hot cup of tea, having a lively conversation with an old friend,” I said. “Sure, I’m happy.” It wasn’t a lie, really—this trip was the best sort of distraction from how rotten things were back in New York.

  Tess gave me a searching look, but I kept smiling. “Fair enough,” she said.

  “Paudie tells me you’re a member of a lay order of nuns. How did you decide on the religious life?”

  “It isn’t something you decide on,” she replied. “I suppose you could say it chooses you.”

  Something chilled me in the way she said this. “That’s an interesting way of putting it. How do you know when it’s ‘chosen’ you?”