'The Mountains Wild' Chapters 49 & 50

Footsteps.

I keep eye contact with him. Very slowly, he moves his hand out from behind his leg and that’s when I see it; my Glock. He’s gotten it from the gun safe.

“Dad?” Lilly’s standing there on the stairs in her pajamas.

“Hi, Lil,” I call up, trying to keep the desperation out of my voice. “I just got home.”

“Mom!” She starts to run down the stairs, but then she sees my face. “What’s going on?”

“Nothing, Lil. Please go upstairs, okay? To your room. I’ll be right there.”

She stares at me for a minute, trying to figure it out. She knows something’s wrong. “Dad? Is everyone okay? Is Uncle Danny ...?”

Before I can stop him, he’s up the stairs. He gasps, then makes a low moaning sound. He hugs Lilly, then takes her face in his hands. He says, “Lil, I love you more than I’ve ever loved anyone. You’re the best, best thing, Lil. The only good thing that I ever did. Never forget that.” I hear the Glock clatter to the floor and then he’s gone. I can hear his feet pounding on the kitchen floor.

“Call 911!” I scream at Lilly as I race after him. “Tell them I need at least two units and an ambulance.”

 

***

 

I know where he’s going. I sprint the length of Bay Street, taking a shortcut through a backyard down toward the water. The pavilion looks sinister, looming in the tiny bit of moonlight.

I sprint through, past the swing set and the lifeguard station and stand there, searching the beach in front of me, but I can’t see him until I do, a bobbing head out past the floats. I kick off my shoes and wade into the water. It’s still cold and I can feel numbness climb up my legs.

But I strike out, swimming straight for him, keeping an eye on the beach so I don’t get too far over. I can see him ahead of me. I’m closing in.

“Brian,” I call out. “Come back to the beach!” But he keeps swimming, straight out, toward Connecticut. He’s a good swimmer and I can see his arms breaking the water, hear the little splashes. I’m a good swimmer, too, though, and I’m closing the distance.

And then he goes under for a minute. I don’t see him at all. His head reappears, but only the top of it. We’re pretty far out.

“Brian!” And then I feel him there, next to me, the weight of him.

He thought he could keep going, thought he could just slowly sink under the water. But now his survival instinct is kicking in and he’s panicking as his body tires. He’s grabbing for me, trying to use me as a float and I remember my lifeguard training. I’ve got to get him to calm down, to let me tow him back to the beach.

“Brian, let me help you,” I shout at him, but he goes under again.

I dive, my hands out in front of me, feeling for him under the dark water, but he’s not there. It’s only when I turn that my leg slams into something solid and I dive toward it, pushing him, pulling him up to the surface.

I get my arm around his neck and start swimming. It’s slow going. He’s so heavy, and though he’s stopped flailing, it feels like he’s working against me.

I drag him up on the sand, my back screaming at me. I’m soaked and just starting to feel the cold. But I get on top of him, pinning him down and I grab him by the ears and I hold him and even though the words mean nothing, even though I have no jurisdiction in this, I say, “Brian Giancarlo Lombardi, I place you under arrest for the murders of Erin Flaherty and Katerina Greiner. Anything you say can and will be used against you in a court of law.”

But he doesn’t say anything. His eyes are open. His body is limp on the sand.

Then she was quiet.

The sirens wail from up on Bay Road. I brush his hair away from his eyes and I lie down with my head on his chest to wait.

 

-------------------------------------------  

 

The morning he moves out, Brian and I lie on our bed one last time, staring at the picture on the bureau of Lilly as a baby. We’ve been talking about separating all night, yelling and accusing each other of things, fighting against it. And then I say, “I think you should move out for a bit,” and he says, “Okay,” and there’s nothing left and we lie there, embracing because it’s over.

“It was Erin,” he says after a long time. “That’s when it started to go wrong. It was always going to go wrong.”

I don’t understand what he means. I think he means it was Ireland, that it was always going to wrong once I’d been to Ireland, because of Conor, because I couldn’t love Brian when I already loved Conor.

After he leaves, I get under the covers and I cry, trying not to wake up Lilly in her room next door. And the bed feels so big and empty and I think of Erin, and the way she would drape an arm over me while she slept, the smell of her, her warm hand clutching mine.

And I long for her. I cry for the end of my marriage, for the failure of it, for everything it means, but I cry, too, for Erin. And I remember what she whispered to me the night my mom died.

“She’s not gone,” she said. “Can’t you feel her, Maggie? Can’t you feel that she’s here?” And I say that I can, that her love is like a cloud, always there, drifting in and out of sight.

“I used to think,” she said, “that because my mom left, it meant she didn’t love me. But I think maybe her love has been here all that time, even if she couldn’t be.” She smoothed my hair from my forehead and I let the tears come and she held me tight and I could hear her breathing slow and even but still she held on to me, all through that night.   

 

Chapter 50

Wednesday, November 2, 2016

 

ROLY AND I GET THE CARVERY lunch at the hotel in Glenmalure.

We eat well, roast beef and potatoes. A pint each since we have time to walk them off.

When we’re done, we hike up into the woods and then out onto the broad boggy expanse of the Mullacor Saddle.

“Nice shoes,” I tell him when we stop to look out across the mountains.

He looks down at the shiny leather hiking boots. “Thanks, D’arcy. Laura picked them up for me. You know, it’s really not good for the wingtips to be immersing them in mud all the time, sure it’s not.”

It takes us almost an hour to reach the site where they found Erin’s body. It’s a half mile or so from Katerina Greiner’s grave, in a little stand of trees, just as Brian described it. It’s been six months now and the summer’s come and gone, and you can barely see where they excavated, then filled the earth back in. Golden grass has mostly covered the site. It’s late autumn and unseasonably warm, and the mountains are the way I remember them from long ago, rusty brown and purple, no small, trickling streams to be heard.

I think of her grave at St. Patrick’s, the simple writing Uncle Danny chose, a small engraved flower and cross. He goes nearly every day and it’s helped him, to be able to talk to her. His heart is better. He looks younger than he has in years. I thought it would kill him, finding out about Brian, but instead it’s as though something’s lifted.

“I didn’t understand, until I read the letter from Father Anthony, why she came here,” I tell him. “She’d decided to tell us what happened. She didn’t care about the statute of limitations or anything. She just wanted to ... tell the truth. And he’d told her about this place, in his letter.” I can almost recite it from memory now.   

 

Dear Erin,

You have been very, very brave and I want you to know that I am willing to testify about what I know, if you should decide that you want me to. I have struggled, as I know you have struggled, to know what to do.

Many years ago, when I was in seminary in Ireland, I went to the Wicklow Mountains with a group of other seminarians and we walked and camped in the mountains near Glendalough, a holy place where St. Kevin retreated many years ago, to be with God, and with himself. We weren’t far from the Wicklow Way, when we came upon a rough stone altar in the woods. It was a mass rock, where mass would have been celebrated during the years that Catholicism was outlawed in Ireland. One of the boys who was from the area told us that a priest had been killed there and that it was known to locals as a very holy place.

Erin, I felt the presence of that priest, and I felt the presence of God, and I felt the presence of myself in those woods, of the very essence of myself. I have never felt so sure of my vocation, and of my humanness.

I urge you to find that place for yourself, the quiet place where you can talk to God and discover what is in your heart, what is right for you. And when you do, I am here to support you, whatever that may look like.  

 

 

“She came here looking for that mass rock,” I tell him. “The first time she came down, she couldn’t find it, and then she just wanted to get out of Dublin, because of Brian, and she came down again, so she could look again.” I pause and gaze out across the expanse of rust-colored bog. “I know they’ve looked and looked. I know it’s unlikely. But I like to think she found it, that she experienced that peace before she died.”

“And she left the necklace for you to find so you’d think of the priest.”

“I think she left the scarf and the ID for me, to say, ‘Maggie, pay attention. It’s me.’ It was the only thing she had, when she saw him. She must have known what was going to happen. And then the necklace was the message. ‘Father Anthony knew. Look in the box he gave me.’ ”

“And you did, you found her,” Roly says. “Anything going to happen to the brother and his friends?”

“I don’t know.” I can’t talk about Frank. I haven’t gotten ahold of that anger and it’s always threatening to rise up and take over my body. I still have to shut it down.

“How are you, D’arcy?” Roly asks after a few minutes. “How are you holding up?”

“I’m okay now, better,” I tell him. “It’s been tough with Lilly. She swings back and forth between hating me and clinging to me. I’m grateful to Emer and her girlfriend for having her at their holiday house in Galway for a week. She needs a little time away from me. I saw Niamh when I was out there dropping Lilly off. She’s actually doing really well.”

“Grand. And how about the thing with Brenda Donaghy’s family, huh?” he says. “When Griz told me they’d rung in to the tip line, I could scarcely believe it. All these years.”

The call had come into the tip line in the chaotic days after they arrested Cathal Deasey. Ann Forde, seventy-two, of Limerick, had seen the call for any information about a Brenda Donaghy Flaherty who had left Ireland in the late ’60s or early ’70s. It had taken her a few weeks to remember that her sister Brigid had loved the name Brenda, had seen it on a television program once and had thought it was beautiful and dramatic.

She told me that Brigid had gone to New York in 1968. She had stayed in touch for a few months and then she hadn’t. They weren’t a close family and she assumed that Brigid had just wanted to start over.

In 1983 Ann had moved back to Ireland from London, and into her mother’s flat in Balbriggan. One day a package came from the States, from a man in Texas who said he’d been Brigid’s landlord. She had passed away, from heart failure, he said the doctors told him, and here was her driver’s license and did Ann want her things? The license said Brigid Forde, which had been her actual name. Donaghy was her mother’s maiden name and she liked to use it. Brenda Donaghy had been an invention, a wish. I met Ann at the Skerries South beach right after Lilly and I arrived and I showed her a picture of Erin and told her what had happened.

I turn to look at Roly. He’s squinting into the sun, looking out across the golden brown bog.

“How about you?” I ask him. “You’re kind of the big man these days, huh? You got Cathal Deasey, you’ll get the conviction on Teresa and June, on Niamh.”

“Couldn’t have done it without you, D’arcy. You’re a bit of a celebrity, too, you know.”

“Ah, you would have gotten him. You had the thing on the truck and you would have figured out about Croydon. Or Griz would have.” I smile at him.

“I don’t know. We were so fixed on Niall Deasey, we didn’t think about the fact that Cathal Deasey had the same roots over here. That he knew the area, too. That the mountains meant something to him. That he would have come over to visit for Petey Deasey’s eightieth birthday party. We’re checking other murders in the UK now. During the years that he and Niall were running the garage over there, he got around a lot. We’ve got some psych stuff, too. Apparently he had kind of a love/hate thing with his father. He worshipped him and he resented him, for making him English rather than Irish, for abandoning him.”

“How did Niall Deasey take it?”

“He was shocked, so he was,” Roly says. “I really think he didn’t know his brother was a psychopath.”

“What about John White?” I ask him. “You decided what you’re going to do about him?”

“I’m going to let that sit for right now, thank you very much,” Roly says. “That’s the last thing I need.” He glares at me a little.

“No judgment here,” I say. “We do what we have to do.”

“Anyway, thanks, D’arcy. For all you did.”

He smiles and puts an arm around me and we stay there for a long time, feeling the last of the day on our backs, looking out across the hills and valleys. He’s warm and solid. We don’t turn around and head back until we’ve soaked up every last bit of the dying sun.  

 

***  

 

A few days later, I’m walking down Grafton Street.

Grafton Street in November.

It’s full of tourists and I dodge them, heading down to the bottom. Someone’s playing a Lady Gaga song on a saw. Someone else is playing the fiddle badly, trying for “Danny Boy.”

The air smells of peat smoke and apples. There’s not a rain cloud in sight.

I cross Nassau Street with a thick clot of students, the girls young and bright and laughing, teetering in high-heeled boots. The city feels familiar to me now, the dark faces of buildings, the distant mountains, the way the clouds run across the sky. Something leaps within me when I see the gray archway and I duck under it, standing there for a moment in the frigid shade. The table offering student tours looks exactly the same. The group of girls are still ahead of me, shouting and joking.

On the other side of the arch, in the courtyard, the sun is shining, Even Lecky looks happy today.

I have that feeling of coming down off a mountain and into a valley, a warm, homecoming sort of feeling. Ireland.

I sit down on the cement wall by the library, where the sun can reach my face for as long as it lasts. I have an Irish Times and a coffee and nowhere to be.

It’s two hours before I look up and I see him coming out of the main doors and down the steps. He’s looking down, his hair flopping over his forehead, his shoulders bent, his frame thinner in profile. It feels like I’m getting a glimpse into time, the way it will line his face and gray his hair, the way his shoulders will carry years.

He looks up.

Conor.

Finally, Conor.  

 

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Erin is leaving for Dublin on a bitter Saturday morning early in January, a new beginning, a fresh start for a new year.

I wake up early and do seven miles on the roads that wind down toward the water. I finish up on the beach, my sneakers turning up the wet gray sand and pebbles along the shore. Long Island Sound is dark and rough, the wind whipping up little meringues of whitecaps here and there. The air is thick with salt water; I can’t tell if it’s raining or if the wind is lifting it up from the Sound, but I can feel my soaked ponytail slapping against the collar of my running jacket.

I see her once I’m past the big houses west of the Tide Club. She’s wearing one of Uncle Danny’s old yellow raincoats and standing on the beach, smoking and looking out across the water. I slow my pace and jog up toer, letting her hear me. She drops the cigarette on the beach, grinds it into the sand with her heel. When she turns her face toward me, her cheeks are pink, her mouth grim. We’re still careful around each other, her hurt feelings a haze around her body. I’ve only seen her once since Christmas Day, and that was at the bar, where we could pretend nothing had happened, that nothing had changed.

“You all packed?” I ask her, huffing the cold air. I run my hands over my face, wiping off the salty rain. It is rain, I realize, coming faster now. Out in the bay, a Boston Whaler chugs slowly through the water.

“Yeah. My dad’s loading my stuff into the car. I wanted to say goodbye to the beach, you know?” When she turns to look at me, the hood falls back and her hair, curly in the wet air, springs out around her face. She has on her leather jacket under the raincoat, the scarf I gave her for Christmas, her claddagh necklace, the amethyst heart held by the little silver hands, glistening with a tiny drop of rain.

She looks down the beach toward Jessica’s house and something crosses her face, a little spasm of sorrow tugging her mouth down. She and Jessica are going to miss each other.

“You can look at it from over there,” I tell her, pointing vaguely to the mouth of the Sound, to the ocean, to Ireland.

“What? Oh. ...” She smiles. “Yeah.”

“How’s Danny?” I bend over, pulling up on my toes. I don’t want my Achilles seizing up again.

“Trying to pretend he doesn’t care but I think he’s kind of a mess. He said California was one thing. Or Florida. But Ireland feels really far away. You’ll check on him, won’t you? You and your dad?”

“Of course. I’ll be at the bar.”

She looks up, a flash of concern crossing her face. “I know. He appreciates it. He feels like, really guilty you didn’t go back to finish school out there.”

“So not his fault.” I bend again to stretch my right hamstring. I can still smell cigarette smoke, mixing with her perfume, Anaïs Anaïs, and I have a sudden flashback to the pile of magazine samples she used to keep on her dresser, before she saved up enough money working at the bar to buy a whole bottle.

I take a deep breath, start, stop, start again. “Are you sure about this?”

She looks back at the water one more time and then turns around.

“Bye, Mags,” she says. She doesn’t move to hug me. She starts walking.

“Good luck.”

She turns around. Her eyes are bright against the gray sky, the exact blue of my eyes, of my mother’s eyes, of our grandmother’s and countless unknown ancestors who crossed that ocean behind me. “It’s going to be okay, Mags,” she says. “It’s really going to be okay. I just need ... it’s going to be okay.”

The wind picks up. A gull wheels overhead and drops a clamshell on the rocks. And then she smiles, a huge, glorious smile that crinkles her eyes and lifts her whole face toward the thin light. She’s so beautiful I can’t help but smile back.

“Love ya, Mags,” she says.

“I’m sorry,” I whisper, but I don’t know if she hears me.

I watch her as she walks up toward the house, a bright, shining yellow form glowing through the gray. I wait until I can’t see her anymore.

 

THE END 

 

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