The Beach Book Bundle: 3 Novels for Summer Reading: Breathing Lessons, The Alphabet Sisters, Firefly Summer (146 page)

There was no time for a rehearsal, Sister Laura said to them, it had to be right first time. She put all her sorrow and loss into conducting the hastily formed choir. It meant that she didn’t have to think of why the Lord saw fit to take Maggie Daly so soon in such a strange way.

Rachel had been to one Catholic service in her life. A big Italian-American wedding where the church had been filled with mink coats and expensively decorated by a florist. She had particularly remembered the incense, it was a heady thing and went up your nose, making you slightly light-headed.

She got the same feeling in the church in Mountfern. Tommy Leonard and Michael Ryan were serving the mass; this meant they were attending the priests as assistants of some sort, Rachel noticed. They wore choirboy surplices, both of them were pale and they swung the thurible with the incense around the coffin that held the body of their friend. Rachel didn’t see Patrick in the church, though she knew he was somewhere there. She hadn’t told him she was coming nor asked his advice. This was nothing to do with Patrick or her wish to fit into his community. This was all to do with the death of Maggie Daly, her friend.

As the pure high voices of the girls from Mountfern Convent sang the words of the Twenty-third Psalm, the tears came down Rachel’s face. It seemed curiously inappropriate to hear the children singing the words about “He leadeth me the quiet waters by.” It was odd to be able to think of quiet waters as a kind of heaven when the child had ended her life in the water not two hundred yards from this church.

Rachel remembered the excitement on Maggie’s face over the dress. The look of disbelief when she saw herself in the mirror that day up at the lodge, the way she had clapped her hands with pleasure.

Rachel thought about Maggie’s anxious look and her unsureness: “Are you sure I’m not staying too long, Mrs. Fine?”

“Is it really all right if I keep this ribbon all for myself?”

“I used to want all my hair to fall off and start again until I met you, Mrs. Fine, now I think it’s grand, I’m delighted with it.”

“Tell me what it was like for you growing up, was it all Jews and Jewesses where you lived or were there ordinary people there too?”

And on that last day: “I did wear the dress once, Mrs. Fine, but it wasn’t really the right time to wear it. You know me, I’d get it wrong. But next time I’ll make sure that it gets a proper showing.”

Rachel heard that Sheila Whelan had suggested Maggie should be buried in her new dress, it had meant so much to her.

Mrs. Daly had not even considered it. The child would not go to Eternal Life in the trappings and vanities of this life. She would wear a white shroud.

The dress still hung on the back of Maggie’s door.

Rachel felt an overwhelming urge to ask for it back, but she knew it would be misunderstood.

She couldn’t bear to think of Kitty Daly wearing it someday. Or it being given away and worn by some other girl in some other town who had no idea how much it had meant in the short frightened life of a girl who was being buried before her sixteenth birthday.

Uncaring of the careful make-up and the streaks that must be all over her face, Rachel let the tears fall. She looked across the church and saw Kate Ryan, still in her wheelchair. There were tears falling on her face also.

   They followed the small coffin to the grave. In the background the river sounds went on, familiar and almost unheard now by everyone who lived by its side. The June sunshine came down on the graveyard and marble headstones shimmered and shone as if they were lovely exciting things instead of the record of death.

The children stood almost huddled together for comfort. Kerry was a few paces behind.

As the last holy water was shaken and the last prayers said, the grave diggers began to fill the great dark hole in the ground, a space that looked far too big for Maggie.

The children waited motionless until the very last sod was in place. They gathered up the flowers and wreaths and laid them on top. Only then would they leave.

As they walked through the other headstones—the celtic crosses, the plain iron cross shapes, the marble slabs—they remembered all the times they had spent examining the words on the tombstones in the churchyard. Fingering the inscription to William James Fern who died young at Majuba Hill in the Transvaal. He had been young all right but not as young as Maggie. And the tombstone of James Edward Gray which had been so neglected and they had tried to smarten it up for him. They decided that they would go again and do something to James Edward Gray’s resting place.

Maggie would have liked that.

   “I suppose you think it’s barbaric that people will come in here to spend hours drinking on account of the funeral,” Kate said to Rachel.

“No, I think it’s very comforting somehow,” Rachel said. “I’m becoming more and more assimilated you know. Not looking from the outside in anymore.”

“I’ve always said they gave your mother the wrong baby in that hospital, you’re more Irish than we are.” Kate said it as a high compliment.

“It was the last thing I expected when I came here,” Rachel said. “I used to hope that he would find it a disappointment, and decide to go back, back home to New York. I never thought for one moment that I would feel it was home myself.”

Kate looked at her in concern. Despite her praise for Mountfern there was a very lonely note in Rachel’s voice. As if she had been abandoned.

“You do know how much you mean to everybody here.”

Rachel smiled. “Yes, I feel very much at home, very peaceful here. More so than Patrick does in ways. He expected so much, and I expected so little. That must be it.”

“What kind of things do you expect now?” Kate spoke gently.

“I’ve no long-term plans anymore, no strategies, hardly any hope. I just go along one day at a time.”

   Dara walked up to Coyne’s wood with Leopold.

Mary Donnelly said you should never underestimate Leopold. There were times when no human being could give you the company and solidarity you needed and Leopold often rose to those times.

More to please her than from any great hopes of companionship Dara took Leopold to the wood.

To her surprise he was very well behaved, pausing considerately to inquire her intentions at every turn rather than racing off wildly on one direction or sitting down whimpering and refusing to follow.

Dara thought that secretly Mary must have been training Leopold. He actually
looked
much better too, as if somebody had been brushing him. Dara had never thought you could make any impression on that coat but in fact it looked quite shiny and his eyes were bright rather than alternately dulled with despair or rolling in a madness.

She sat on a tree trunk and Leopold went sniffing and snuffling but keeping a courteous eye on Dara in case she decided to move. She didn’t move. She sat there with a long daisy, and threaded the heads of other daisies on its stem to make a flowery bracelet.

She hadn’t wanted to spend any more time with the others. Tommy Leonard had been nice, he said it was bad at a time like this to go off on your own, you needed others around you whether you felt like it or not. Michael said he was going to go up the river and fish on his own. He hoped Dara didn’t think that was rude. She squeezed his arm. She understood completely, as people always said they seemed to feel the same about everything.

She didn’t expect Kerry. This was a part of the wood she had never been with him. It was a place off the main path, a big bank of fuchsia hedge surrounded it. Kerry came in softly through the trees.

“If you like to be on your own I’ll go away,” he said.

He was still in the dark grey suit he had worn at the funeral. He had opened the collar of his shirt and his black tie was loose around his neck. She had never seen him more handsome.

“No, no I’m glad to see you.” She spoke simply.

She sat playing with the daisies, her hair falling over her face as she bent in concentration. She wore a plain white tee shirt and a denim skirt, changed from the good navy dress with the white collar she had worn at the funeral. She looked very young and lost.

Kerry squatted down beside her. He picked a daisy and started to make a collection of daisy heads on one stem too. For a while they said nothing.

Leopold realized that this was somehow important. He stopped his burrowing and sniffing. He sat politely with his head on one side as if waiting for the conversation to begin.

“I wish I could do something to help you,” Kerry said.

“I’m all right. It’s just so terrible for Maggie.”

“It’s like being asleep,” Kerry said.

“And she wouldn’t be in purgatory or anything. You know, waiting to get into heaven.”

“Oh Dara, of
course
she wouldn’t!” Kerry laughed tenderly at the very idea.

“Well why were we all praying that she’d be forgiven her sins and soon see God? She can’t be there yet can she?”

“Where?”

“Heaven. She’d not have gone straight to heaven unless she died coming out of confession.”

Kerry was confused. “Dara sweetheart, it’s like being asleep, I tell you. I saw my mother when she was dead, it was a big sleep. Grace said she saw Maggie’s face last night, her eyes were closed. That’s all it is.”

“And are you sure that she’s not in the fires of purgatory?”

He reached out and held her close to him. “I’m very sure. I know definitely.”

Dara sobbed into his chest. “Oh, I’m so glad, I couldn’t bear Maggie to be all by herself in purgatory, she’d be terrified.”

   Sister Laura said that there would be a lot of delayed shock about the accident. The girls were taking it too calmly. They went up and tended a grave in the Protestant churchyard, they planted a tree near the footbridge. They had asked Mrs. Daly without success if they could have her copper-colored dress. They didn’t know what they wanted to do with it but they wanted it anyway.

Sister Laura couldn’t understand why Dara, Grace and Jacinta did not want to come up to the school to join in a special novena for the repose of Maggie Daly’s soul.

“It’s reposed already,” Dara had said, and the others had gone along with it.

Sister Laura was confused. Dara really meant this, as if she had been given a special message that Maggie was sleeping the sleep of the just. And the others all agreed with her.

   Grace and Michael went fishing a lot. Or that’s what they said they were doing. Michael left early and came back late.

Nobody expected any games or swimming to continue on the bridge. Tommy Leonard had to work in the shop almost all the time, Jacinta and Liam had a horrible cousin from Dublin staying with them and they had to entertain her. They were rightly too embarrassed to bring her anywhere near their friends so it was a matter of cycling energetically to the old ruined abbey by day and going to the pictures at night.

Dara was all alone.

This is what she wanted to be.

She wanted to walk by herself, she wanted to think.

Sometimes Kerry O’Neill came to find her, and when he did they walked, often without saying a word for a half hour or more. Then he might take her face in his hands and kiss her gently. Or he would lay his arm comfortingly around her shoulders as they walked.

“It will pass one day,” he said. “One day you’ll realize that it’s a different sort of memory.” He looked very thoughtful.

“Did you feel that about your mother?”

“Yes. One day it didn’t hurt as much thinking about her. I didn’t believe people when they told me. I thought they were just being nice.”

“What did it feel like, after the day you changed?”

“I felt she was at peace and I must leave her there and not keep thinking of her all the time, and regretting, and wishing and getting angry …”

“Ah, but you loved your mother, you were good to her. Grace told me you used to sit by her bed and read to her.”

“That was hardly much consolation.” His face looked bitter.

The silence fell again, easy and companionable.

Dara didn’t ask him why he thought his mother needed consolation. He didn’t ask Dara why she sounded so guilty about her friend.

   “Do you dream about Maggie?” Dara asked Grace.

“No, I haven’t.” Grace seemed apologetic. “I do think about her but I haven’t dreamed of her at all.”

She looked at Dara anxiously. Dara’s face was very white.

“I do,” Dara said simply. “Every night.”

   “Were you nice to your father?” Dara asked Fergus Slattery unexpectedly.

“No, I expect I was fairly unpleasant to him. I am to most people. Why do you ask?”

“I was wondering do you wish he was back here so that you could explain things to him?”

“No, Dara, he was old. His life was lived. It’s different with Maggie, everyone wishes she were back so that they could explain things to her. And anyway you have nothing to explain, you were all very nice to her, she had a load of grand friends even if her mother was a bit of a trial.” He was trying to be light without being flippant.

“No, I don’t think her friends were good to her,” Dara said. “I think she was lonely and frightened all her life, and I didn’t know it until now when it’s too late.”