The high window was empty; Hugh was not watching, and for a moment I wished he were. Maybe for the first time he’d recognize something he’d failed to see for so long.
Hugh believed strongly in family. In his writing and his life, he’d pursued the ideals of the close-knit, loyal, and loving clan. He’d never been able to see it, but Jacob Candeleur, without a drop of Hennessy blood in him, represented the best of those ideals. From a young age, he’d had a strong instinct to protect those he loved. He’d pulled Marlinchen from the freezing waters of the lake, when she’d fallen through the ice. He’d fought with the bullies who’d picked on Liam. He’d come home from his new life in California to be with his sister and brothers.
With Colm on his heels, Jacob gained the ground of the predetermined, invisible end zone and spiked the ball. Colm, giving up gracefully, extended his hand and gave Jacob a low five, scooped up the ball, and went to regroup with Donal.
Jacob didn’t follow. He stood a moment, breathing hard. Then he dropped to his knees, and from there he lay down on the grass.
There was something evocative about that action, something that stirred a recent memory.
“Oh, God,” I said.
I put the Nova into reverse and backed down the driveway at 40 miles per hour, skidding to a stop ten feet from the deck. Marlinchen stared at me from her place at the grill.
“Call 911,” I yelled to her as I jumped out of the car.
I expected some kind of resistance from her, but she looked down at the grass, where Jacob was still not moving, and her brothers were standing around him, and believed me.
“What should I say?” Marlinchen called.
“Cardiac arrest,” I yelled back, plunging down the slope.
Maybe it had never occurred to Brigitte that the heart defect that killed her lover Paul, the father of her child, was hereditary. Or maybe she’d never found a way to warn the son who wasn’t supposed to know he was her son. Maybe she’d meant to, someday, but her own death had caught her unawares.
Liam, kneeling at his cousin’s side, said, “I don’t think he’s breathing.” He sounded puzzled, like he wanted to be contradicted, wanted someone to tell him that healthy 18-year-olds didn’t just stop breathing.
“Move,” I ordered, dropped to my knees, and rolled Jacob onto his back. I shifted the tigereye leather necklace off the hollow of his throat and laid my fingertips there. The great arteries did not pulse under my touch. I tipped Jacob’s head back, checked the airway. Clear. I closed off his nostrils, breathed for him. Pumped his chest hard enough to contuse the flesh. Breathed again.
When the paramedics came, they asked who was going to go with Aidan, as the kids identified him, to the hospital. I opened my mouth to volunteer Marlinchen, but she shook her head. “You go, Sarah,” she said frantically. “Please, please, you go with him.”
The furious defender of the Hennessy family, who’d chased me off her property, was gone. Marlinchen was a scared teenage girl again, and to her, I was Authority. She still believed I could help her brother when she couldn’t. Numbly, I climbed into the ambulance.
I stayed with Jacob Candeleur all the way to the ER. Among the hectically laboring doctors and nurses, nobody noticed as I trailed along behind them, stood against a wall, watching their futile efforts. I was there as they called the code at 7:11 P.M. and as they dispiritedly filed out.
The last one out, a male nurse, turned to look at me from the doorway. “You gonna notify the family?” he said.
I nodded assent. “In a minute.”
For some time, Hugh Hennessy had been hiding behind the wall of his illness and his privacy, hiding from the people he’d hurt. That ring of people just kept getting bigger. Aidan, whose death his carelessness had long ago caused. Elisabeth, whose suicide he helped bring about. Brigitte, whose child he had taken. Jacob, whose loss of identity had ultimately been fatal. In a way, even Paul Candeleur. Paul the loyal, ready fighter, who’d somehow given his son his values through blood alone, who’d never lived to see how his son’s life would go so wrong. I couldn’t believe this death didn’t hurt Paul, too, somewhere.
33
Marlinchen, already no stranger to adult responsibilities, learned a new set that day, the kind many people don’t have to deal with until their thirties or forties. I guided her through the process of releasing a body to a funeral home, making the necessary choices. I advised her to have all the kids, even Donal, look at Jacob’s body.
“It makes it real,” I told her. “It’ll help them through the denial, and later they can feel like they said goodbye.”
All the kids seemed numb. None of them cried.
Outside, in the hospital parking lot, Marlinchen sat in the passenger seat of the Nova, stared straight ahead, and asked dully, Can you stay over tonight?
You have to be American, I think, to understand how middle-class Americans grieve in modern times. Elsewhere, when people die unexpectedly, there is wailing, there are tears, there is recrimination; you can see it almost every day on CNN. In other places, liquor flows and the telephone doesn’t stop ringing; neighbors come by with food and consolation.
In the Hennessy household, the wide-screen TV held court all evening. Even Liam surrendered to it, his knees drawn up against his chest, seeking comfort in the electronic opiate of modern times.
I cooked for them, keeping it simple: spaghetti with tomato sauce, green salad. Marlinchen made up a tray for Hugh, and just before bed, she gave him a pill. “It helps him sleep,” she said, “and I don’t think I can stay awake tonight, to help him to the bathroom, or read to him if he can’t sleep.”
“That’s probably a good idea,” I said. She seemed to want my guidance on little things like that.
Just before going upstairs, Liam went to stand at the window. He couldn’t see the place where Jacob had died, but in the black glass, he was looking in that direction.
“I don’t get it,” he said. “I just don’t fucking get it.” His sharp-boned face was pinched with something that would blossom into pain, when he stopped trying to fight it so hard and let himself feel it.
I laid a hand on his shoulder and said nothing. Marlinchen and I hadn’t discussed what I’d told her that afternoon, about Jacob Candeleur and the real Aidan. I couldn’t begin to guess when she’d be ready to talk about it again, or to tell the other kids.
Restless, I didn’t fall asleep right away. I was only drifting off, on the family-room couch, when the click of the French doors woke me.
Marlinchen, outside in the moonlight, was dressed in a practical long-sleeved white T-shirt and faded jeans. In her hand was the spade Liam had used to bury Snowball. She was heading toward the magnolia tree.
I’d had no solid evidence for that part of my theory- that Aidan was buried there- but it just seemed so clear to me. What else on the property had that look, of a monument? Why had Hugh walked down there, years ago with Marlinchen, to tell her something he’d said was important? Why were the Hennessy kids drawn to the tree, going there to talk and reflect and be still, as if called there by the whisper of the dead?
I got up and dressed.
Marlinchen didn’t hear me approaching, so intent was she on her work. Slight as she was, she put her body weight into every thrust of the spade, like a tiny backhoe. She was crying as she dug.
“Marlinchen,” I said.
She looked up, tear tracks silver in the moonlight, her face beautiful even in grief.