He slid forward into the water.
—There we go, she said in Hebrew. Let me wash that mop.
She perched at the edge of the bath, took hold of his shoulder blades, ran a pumice stone over his back, massaged the shampoo into his hair. His skin was so very transparent. The air in his lungs changed the shape of his back. She applied a little conditioner to his scalp. His hair was thick and long. She would have to get it cut soon.
Tomas grunted and leaned forward, tugged at the front of his bathing shorts. His shoulders tautened against her fingers. She knew, then, what it was. He bent over to try to disguise himself against the fabric of the shorts. Rebecca stood without looking at him, handed him the soap and the sponge.
Impossible to be a child forever. A mother, always.
—You’re on your own now, she said.
She moved away, closed the door and stood outside in the corridor, listening to his stark breathing and the persistent splash of water, its rhythm sounding out against the faint percussion of the sea.
1
She is falling, ever so faintly, into age. It is not the slowness of rising in the morning, or the weariness of eyesight, or the chest pains that appear with more and more regularity, but the brittleness of memory that disturbs her now—how the past can glide away so easily, how the present can drift, how they sometimes collide—so that when she sees her torturer on television, she is not sure if her imagination is playing tricks, or if he has simply sifted through the sandbox of memory, slid headlong down the channel of thirty-seven years to tease her into a terrible mistake, or if it is truly him, appearing now on the late Spanish-language news, casual, handsome, controlled.
A crisp blue shirt with an open neck. His teeth white against the dark of his skin. A poised offhandedness to the manner in which he holds himself, at a conference, with several others, a row of microphones set up in front of them.
His appearance is so sudden at the tail end of the news that she pulls back sharply in her armchair, startling the two other Sisters on the couch.
Beverly holds her hand in the air to reassure them: All right, sorry, only me, go back to sleep.
She leans to turn up the volume on the remote but his image is gone, the report tailing off, a young blonde reporter staring confidently into the camera. A shot from along the river Thames. How is that possible? Perhaps she has garbled the images, confused the reports? The geography alone is too dizzying to contemplate.
The slippages of memory have happened so much recently. Mangled sentences, mislaid keys, forgotten names. Rainshowers of words, then drought. Only last week, she got lost on a walk along the beach in the bay, took the wrong path out of the dunes, the wind whipping the grass around her feet. Three miles from the house, she had to ask someone to phone a cab. Even then she couldn’t remember the exact address.
Too many uncertainties, so that even the absolute certainties—the day of the week, the tie of a shoelace, the rhythm of a prayer—have been called into question. And yet there’s something about the man’s face—if only for a split second—that sluices a sense of ice along the tunnel of her spine. The one brief close-up. The way he held himself on the screen, amidst a line of dignitaries. What was it exactly? The peculiar poise that age had brought upon him? The access to the microphones? The flagrant manner of his reappearance? The single quick close-up?
Her torturer. Her abuser. Her rapist.
—
IN THE HALF-MOONLIGHT AT the back of the house, Beverly reaches into her cardigan pocket for her lighter.
She is the only smoker amongst the Sisters. An ancient habit from her childhood in Ireland, she has carried it with her all these years: Belgium, Marseilles, Colombia, Saint Louis, Baltimore, the girls’ home in Houston, and now the southern shore of Long Island.
A quiet getaway, she was told. A retreat for a month or two. Fresh sea air. A time for repose. But she had felt the doom of it all: seventy-six years old, arriving with a single suitcase to a place of final worship.
She taps a cigarette, rolls the flint on the lighter, inhales deeply. The smoke is dizzying. Already the tin coffee can is a quarter full of ash and butts. Her fellow Sisters have grown to tolerate her weakness, even grudgingly admire it, the tall, thin Irish nun with her maverick routine of aloneness.
She watches the cold and the smoke together shape the air. Behind her, the lights in the house flicker off, one by one, the other Sisters off to their prayers.
The trees stand stark against the sky. It is fall, or autumn: sometimes she loses track of which word belongs where. Small matter, it is that time of year when the dark descends early.
She smokes her second cigarette and scrunches it out in the grass at her feet, leans down, searches among the cold blades for the filter, drops it in the hanging coffee can.
That was him. It was most certainly him.
A gust of wind shuts the screen door sharply behind her. She reaches out her arms like someone recently blind. The darkness more visible as her eyes adjust.
In the living room she pauses at the large digital television. A row of lights shine from the contraptions underneath: a cable box, a DVD player. She slips her hand along the edge of the television but can find no buttons. She fumbles in the dark for the remote, bumps against the side of the coffee table. A musty smell rises from the carpet. A dropped spoon. A fallen newspaper.
Only then does she think to strike her lighter.
In the bright flare she spies the head of the remote slipped down between the sofa cushions. A row of menu items, HDM1, HDM2, PC. One needs to be a nuclear engineer these days just to bring a machine to life. She clicks through. Vampires. Baseball. Cop shows. She is tempted, for a moment, to remain with the Mormon wives.
There are three Spanish-language channels all in close proximity to one another. Surely, at some stage during the night, there will be a repeat. She pulls a cushion tight against her stomach. The digital clock flickers. There is, she knows, a way to record the show, even to freeze the screen—one of the Sisters did it last week during a CBS special on the Shroud—but she might lose the image altogether.
When the report finally comes on, she slides off the couch, onto the floor, sits close to the television. London. A series of peace talks. Representatives from all sides gathering together. An array of microphones set up on a table. A line of five men, two women.
The hairs along her arm bristle: Please, Lord, let it not be him.
The words tangle and braid. Guerilla, peace accord, land rights, low-level talks, reconciliation, treaty.
Then it is him. For three short seconds. She reaches her hand toward his face, recoils. His heavy-lidded eyes. His pixelated mouth. He is close-shaven, sharp, his hair neatly cut. He is a little heavier, more compact. He does not speak, but there is no mistake. He has taken on the aura of a diplomat.
She sits back against the couch, fumbles for her cigarettes. Make Yourself present, Lord. Come to my aid.
When he slapped her face, he would call her puta. In the jungle cage he pulled back her hair, yanked it so hard that her neck felt as if it would snap. A whisper. In her ear. As if he himself couldn’t afford to hear the words. Pendeja. In the safe house where she was taken for four weeks, in the white room where she watched the caterpillars crawl along the cracks in the walls, he would read to her aloud from the newspaper before he yanked open her blouse and bit her breast until it bled.
—
SHE IS WOKEN IN the early morning by Sister Anne who sits quietly at the side of the bed. The curtains have been slightly parted.
She pulls back the bed covers, swings her legs out, fumbles for her slippers. She can tell by the angle of light that she has missed morning prayer.
—I overslept. I’m so sorry.
—There’s something we must talk about, Beverly.
—Of course.
Sister Anne is a woman who has aged gracefully apart from a shallow set of accordion lines that seem to hurry toward her cheekbones, giving her a vaguely scattersho
t look.
—By the television, she says. Last night.
It takes Beverly a moment for the evening to return, as if from one of those ancient sets she knew as a child in Galway, a quick flare of light and then a slow bromiding outward. The recollection of his face. The chill that ripped along her body. The manner in which he was constructed, square upon digital square, all the new edges to him.
—I think I must have woken from, I might, I may have been dreaming.
—Well, it’s unfortunate, but I’m afraid I’m going to have to ask you to stop.
—Of course.
She is unsure of what it is that she must stop. The house is meant as a retreat. None of the Sisters have been told of her background, only that she lived in South America once, that she has come from Houston, that she is suffering exhaustion, she is here to rediscover sleep, that is all.
What she needs now is to get beyond the first bruised moments of waking. To make her bed, to take a shower, to say her dailies.
Sister Anne rises from the chair and only then does Beverly notice that she has brought her a cup of coffee and a biscuit on a saucer. The small mercies.
—Thank you.
Sister Anne turns at the door, haloed in fluorescence from the hallway, and says gently: There will be no need to pay for it, of course.
—Pay for it?
—There are, Beverly, two cigarette burns in the carpet.
—
AT THE HOME IN HOUSTON the girls had been surprised to find a nun they could smoke with. They thought her so tall. Sister Stretch. The home was set up next to a clinic. Theirs was an open-door policy. The girls came and went. The corridors hummed. Mornings in the kitchen, afternoons in the counseling room, evenings out combing streets of half-lamplight: Hermann Park, Montrose, Sunnyside, Hiram Clarke, the Fifth Ward. Whole nights spent awake in the convent house. The protests outside. The shouting. The placards. The bullhorns. She and her Sisters were condemned from the pulpit. Radicals, dissenters. They never thought themselves anything of the sort. It was simply a home, a place for the girls to stay. She counseled them. Children with children. She made no political stance. Abortion, pro-life, anti-woman. The words did not concern her. The language seemed designed to only merchandise flesh. She wanted to be mute in everything but action. To give a shoulder. To take an elbow. To feel her feet strike the ground. She worked late into the night. She listened in church to the priest railing against her, his voice high and indignant. She bowed her head. She accepted the invective. She still took the sacrament. On principle, she never escorted the girls to the clinic, but she watched them go and collected them afterward, took their arms, walked them through the gauntlet. Sometimes the same girls returned, just months later, bearing children once more. Exhaustion got her. Three times she collapsed in the community room. They found her eventually in the chapel, slumped over, a trickle of blood from her nose. She was shocked when, in the downtown hospital, a nurse showed her a mirror: the darkness beneath her eyes looked tattooed in. The emergency-room doctors had mistaken her, at first, as homeless. They ripped off her clothes. She struggled to pull the sheet back across. What perplexed them were the scars on her breasts, how she hid them, the hard jagged lines, their peculiar tracery.
—
THE WIND RIPPLES THE dune grass. She wears a long blue skirt, a dark cardigan, an orange windbreaker. Lay clothes, always. She has not, for forty years, worn any formal clothing, just the simple wooden cross beneath her blouse.
A clean, plain silence rolls along the shore, made cleaner and plainer still by the occasional screech of gulls. It seems to her that some vast hand lies behind the dunes flinging the birds in patterns out over the Atlantic. Far out on the horizon, a tanker disappears from view, as if dropping off the edge of the sea.
Beverly has crumpled her last cigarettes in the cardigan pocket. She likes the feel of the grains, the fall of them from her fingers, sprinkling them now in the cold sand. She cannot remember a time, even in captivity in the jungle, when she went without cigarettes. She places a few grains of tobacco upon her tongue. Raw. Bitter. They will be of no comfort. What was it about his appearance that had corralled her so easily? Why had she stayed up so late with the other Sisters? Why had she watched the Spanish-language news? The odd little magpie of the mind. Nothing is finally finished, then? The past emerges and re-emerges. It builds its random nest in the oddest places.
She struggled for so many years with absolution, the depth of her vows, poverty, chastity, obedience. Working with doctors, experts, theologians to unravel what had happened. Every day she went to the chapel to beseech and pray. Hundreds of hours trying to get to the core of it, understand it, pick it apart. Forgiveness for herself first, they told her. In order, then, to forgive him. Without hubris, without false charity. Therapy sessions, physical exams, spiritual direction, prayer. The embrace of Christ’s agony. The abandonment at the hour. Opening herself to compassion. Trying to put it behind her with the mercy of time. The days slipping by. Small rooms. Long hours. The curtains opening and closing. The disappearance of light. The blackened mirrors. The days spent weeping. The guilt. She sheared her hair. Swept the rosary beads off the bedside table. Took baths fully clothed. No burning bush, no pillar of light. More a pail of acid into which she wanted to dissolve. And here he is, back now, once more. Or perhaps she has simply dreamt it? One of those momentary aftershocks, rippling under the surface? A small pulse of the wound where there used to be a throb?
They had told her, years ago, that it might happen. In Saint Louis, in the convent hospital, along the dark waters of the Mississippi. The anger. The shame. The false pride. The disgrace. It would return. She built up a wall of prayer. Neither life nor death, nothing can separate me from Your love and mercy. If I pass through raging waters in the sea, Lord, I shall not drown. She repeated the prayers over and over. Stone upon stone. A finished wall. Yet why is it now that she has allowed him to scale it? He is, after all, only a man on television, the image of an image. But so well dressed. So poised. So public. What right does he have to talk about peace? What had he done to achieve such grace?
Back along the roadway, she passes a deckchair left over from the summer, its innards fluttering in the wind. The sand blows in swirled patterns on the footpath. She pulls the padded hood up around her face, reaches up and presses the bridge of her nose between her fingers.
A two-mile walk back to the convent house. She has, at least, a sturdy pair of shoes.
Flip-flops. Made from car tires. Slapping against the soles of her feet. She was dragged from the jeep. Blindfolded, driven away. Rushed down a mud road. A clearing in the bamboo. On the first night her feet swelled with insect bites. By the second night, they had bled and festered. Eventually they gave her rubber boots for the marches. Always on the move. From one clearing in the jungle to the next. They thought her first a human-rights worker. She wore lay clothes. She worked alone. Word filtered out on the radio: she was a Maryknoll, a nun. He didn’t believe it. He ripped the wooden cross from her neck. She said nothing. Other nuns had been shot. She was nothing special. He spat when she prayed. He was so young then. No more than twenty-three, twenty-four. Already a commander and the hatred had hardened in him, but she thought for sure that she could find some point of tenderness. She used to imagine dropping her words behind his eyes to find a soft point, in his memory, some prayer, some word, something maternal she could jolt from him. He knew none of the rhythms of prayers: he had grown up without them. No nursery rhymes. Only the right-wing paramilitary songs, none of which she knew. She would somehow reach him, she was sure of it—but he remained aloof, absent. Even when there were others alongside her in captivity, aid workers, radicals, professors, and once, for a few days, a left-wing senatorial candidate. Five months in the jungle, four weeks in a safe house—six months in all. His ability to stare. That thousand-yard remove. He had a mole on his cheek. Was it still there? Last night she had reached out and touched the ghost of his face, the television static.
Surely she would have noted the absence of the mole. Why had she not thought of it before? Why hadn’t she recorded the program? She could have destroyed it, rid herself of him. What have I done? Forgive me, Lord.
Once he took off his bandana and stuffed it in her mouth to stop her from making noise, so that toward the end she just lay there, compliant, a vague freedom in the shame, the thought of elsewhere, the west of Ireland, the stone walls, the rain permanent across the fields, her mother’s face, flushed with disgrace, the shape of her father moving out into the laneway, her brother walking down the road, away from her, that childhood, gone, a bead of his sweat dripping down on the bridge of her nose, puta, he pushed her head down against the dirt, puta, the sound of his voice, quiet and controlled, puta.
She is startled by the toot of a horn behind her and the hiss of car tires. It has begun to gently drizzle.
—Coming home?
As if in synch, Sister Anne and Sister Yun lean toward her, earnest, expectant. Such an odd word, home. She finds herself trying to speak, but the words are lodged inside her somehow, not so much in her throat but in the hollow of her stomach, and when she responds she is startled by the rise of the sounds through her: Sí, gracias, a casa, es un poco frío, so incongruent and displaced, she has no idea how she has lapsed so easily into Spanish, how she has allowed him so immediately back into her life, when she was sure that he had died, or faded into the jungle again, or disappeared.
Carlos had escaped. Rumors of death squads, retribution. She kept up on the news in sporadic bursts, but she never allowed it to slip under her skin, not since Saint Louis anyway. After that, a shelter in Baltimore, then the girls’ home in Houston. Deeper wounds, other lives. The life of a Maryknoll. There were some over the years who had tried to make of her a heroine, a figurehead, a political autograph, and she knew that they whispered behind her back, of book deals, movie contracts. Even her brother in England had wanted to make a radio documentary, but she preferred to think of other things, life in the village before she was captured, the volume of blue sky, the children in the schoolhouse, the fall of rain on the tin roof, the dust rising from the dirt floor of her shack, the yellow barrel at the back of the classroom, the wooden ladle dipping for rainwater, the stick of chalk in her cigarette box, the faulty carburetor in the jeep, she was always trying to fix it, she leaned across the engine, the chalk dissolving in the rain.