“Useful skill,” I said. “But it might be better for you to buy a secondhand car that runs, rather than count on fully rehabbing this one.”
“Maybe,” he said. Straightening, Aidan went to a nearby shelf. Among the tools lay his pack of cigarettes and lighter. He took one out, flicked the lighter, and ignited the slender white cylinder.
I took the opportunity to look around. The setup inside the garage had changed. At the far end, Colm’s heavy bag still hung from the rafters, but the weight bench had been moved out to make room for a cot, which was covered with a motley assortment of blankets. Nearby, a cardboard chest of drawers had been set up, with a single photograph in a frame atop it. Overhead, a bare bulb illuminated the whole place.
“Does it bother you,” I asked Aidan, “being exiled out here?”
Aidan hesitated before speaking. “Hugh gets kind of weird when he sees me. Like he did at the hospital,” he said. “Otherwise, no; I like having my own space. Don’t forget, it was me who didn’t want to spend a lot of time around him.” Aidan tapped ash into a Mason-jar lid he was using for an ashtray. “Besides, it’s not like I can’t be in the house. I just have to stay downstairs. Hugh doesn’t do the stairs very well with his cane, so he’s going to be upstairs a lot. At least for a while.”
“I see,” I said.
It was hardly an ideal arrangement, but more and more I was coming to understand what Judge Henderson had told me: you can’t dictate how families order their affairs, or run their lives.
The framed photo on the dresser caught my eye; I gave it a closer look. In it, Elisabeth Hennessy sat under her magnolia tree, holding a boy of about two or three on her lap. His hair was lighter even than hers, and I doubted very much he was Liam or Colm.
“Is that you with your mother?” I asked him.
“Yes,” Aidan said.
“It’s the photo you and your dad fought about?” I asked.
“Yeah, it is,” he said.
“If you don’t mind my asking,” I said, “where’d you hide it, that Hugh never found it?”
Aidan smiled. “With Aunt Brigitte,” he said. “I mailed it to her that same day, and she held on to it for me.”
He’d carried it with him thereafter, even on the streets as a runaway. His reverence for his mother was palpable, and I thought that Hugh had been perceptive, if cruel, the day he’d banished Aidan from a visit to Elisabeth’s grave.
“Your mother’s birthday is coming up, isn’t it?” I said. The kids had mentioned it, the last time I’d eaten dinner with them.
Aidan nodded. “Sunday,” he said. “We’re probably all going out there.”
Taking out my billfold, I fished my card from it. “Listen, I’ve got to go,” I said. “I know Marlinchen has these phone numbers, but now you’ll have them too, in case you ever need anything.”
“You’re not going to be around anymore?” Aidan asked.
I smiled ruefully. “I seem to have become obsolete.”
And indeed, as I pulled down the long driveway, I watched the old weather-beaten house fall away in my rearview mirror as if it were for the last time.
But when I slept that night, I dreamed that Hennepin County had put Hugh Hennessy on trial, on the condition that I would be his prosecutor. In court, I stood to do my cross-examination.
Mr. Hennessy, I said, please tell the court what happened in your study on the night in question.
I saw a pair of crows, Hugh said.
That wasn’t the response I’d expected. Could you please restate your answer? I said.
Lightning struck the house, he said.
Someone among the spectators snickered. The judge said, Control your witness, Counsel.
But Hugh would not stop. It was a pit bull, he said. I saw a pair of crows. Lightning struck the house. I saw a pair of crows. I saw a pair of crows. I saw a pair of crows.
31
At the cemetery where the Hennessy children’s mother was buried, a marble angel stood guard over the headstone, either serenely reflecting or grieving. Below, the stone read, Elisabeth Hannelore Hennessy, Beloved Wife and Mother.
It was a bright Sunday afternoon, and I was sitting at the graveyard’s highest point, a mausoleum with a half flight of stone stairs leading up to it. Two pine trees offered shade from the western sun, and it was here that I’d staked out a spot to watch Elisabeth’s grave and wait for the visitor I hoped was coming on the anniversary of her birth.
For the past two days, I’d tried to put the Hennessys out of my mind. Early on, when Marlinchen had come to visit me, asking for help I’d thought I couldn’t provide, all I’d wanted was to be shed of these people. Now Marlinchen, the official head of her household, had given me leave to forget about them, and I couldn’t. I was maddened by a contradiction that I couldn’t resolve.
Dr. Leventhal had supported the idea that a young child’s mind could be so malleable that it would fabricate a memory, even a visual one. But the detail in Aidan’s story was so realistic: the finger was just barely attached… blood was dripping off it. From the little individual tooth mark he’d seen, filling up with blood, to the fact that his finger hadn’t quite been severed- it was You Are There, documentary realism.
Somehow, I didn’t think Aidan would be able to conjure such a detailed, lurid image of his injured hand. He didn’t seem that imaginative to me. It was one of the things I liked about him, that he was simple and straightforward. I wasn’t the world’s biggest fan of hidden depths. Shiloh had plenty of them, and they’d ended up ruining his life.
Besides, to fabricate a memory was one thing, but a fear? Aidan was truly afraid of dogs. That indicated my theory, about the study and the loaded pistol, was wrong. I could deal with that. I’m semipro at being wrong; it’s a correctable situation. That wasn’t the problem. The problem was Marlinchen and her memory of what she thought was a lightning strike, but sounded to me like an accidental shooting in the house. A memory Aidan didn’t share. Either Marlinchen was mistaken, or Aidan himself was, and yet they both seemed convincing when they told their stories.
Then there was the old BMW. Hugh had locked it away for fourteen years. It fit in the same time frame as the carpet replacement in the study and Aidan and Marlinchen’s mismatched early memories. It was one more thing that occupied that fourteen-years-ago plateau. The threshold, as Dr. Leventhal had called it.
My first idea was that Hugh had put the car away because Aidan had bled copiously in it, and unlike the study, Hugh couldn’t get it properly cleaned up. But if Aidan shot himself in the hand, the universal first instinct would be to wrap the hand in a towel and keep pressure on it. Certainly it would have bled, but I couldn’t see it bleeding so much that Hugh couldn’t clean it up. And had he believed that someday someone would examine his car, looking for evidence that his son’s accident didn’t happen the way Hugh had said it happened? I’d seen some paranoia in my day, but that seemed outlandish.
It wasn’t impossible, though. The problem was that I knew so little of Hugh’s character. I couldn’t talk with him, and there were limits to what his children could explain.
What I really needed was the memories of an adult who’d been close to the Hennessys early in their marriage. One who’d known Hugh and Elisabeth well during that time of their lives. One who, like Aidan, had been banished from the Hennessy home. Whose banishment, like everything else, had happened on that fourteen-years-ago threshold.
It was two hours later when he came, a tall, thin man heading up the path, toward Elisabeth Hennessy’s grave, holding a small bunch of white narcissus in his hands. Time had changed J. D. Campion little. His black hair was still long enough to be caught back in a small ponytail on his neck, and he still wore a beard. There was no gray in either. The flowers he slipped into the recessed holder were wrapped in the clear cellophane that florists provide.