Absolution

“ . . . you have to study and learn so that you can

make up your own mind about history and everything else

but you can’t make up an empty mind.”

Frank McCourt

Angela’s Ashes



Meg found it uncomfortable being inside an unfolding story instead of helping it unfold. Standing in the kitchen watching Niall, she could imagine the guilt and the responsibility he felt, and she couldn’t help wondering if Kieran’s body had already been over the cliff and in the ocean while she and Adam had been talking to James in the field. And how? Why? Had he jumped? Fallen in the darkness? Run over it by mistake, trying to get away? Or had it been something more sinister?

She had a hard time picturing James as a murderer, so surely it had to have been something else? On the other hand, she’d interviewed two murderers in the course of her career, and both times she had been struck by how human and ordinary they had seemed. One had been a twenty-five-year-old mother about to lose custody of her young boys who had killed them so that her husband wouldn’t win. The other had been a dentist who’d murdered his mistress because he was afraid his wife would cost him too much in alimony when she found out he’d been unfaithful. Sane, ordinary people who had killed for reasons that didn’t seem remotely sane. Maybe anyone could be pushed into killing.

“What do you really think?” she asked Niall quietly as he and the police were preparing to go back out to speak with Liam, Gemma, and James. “Could James have had something to do with Kieran’s death?”

“I just don’t see it from a physical standpoint if nothing else. But I suppose anything is possible.” He glanced at the officers then bent his head swiftly and kissed her. “I’m sorry about all this. With any luck, I’ll be back before Adam wakes up. If I’m not . . .”

“I’ll play it by ear. Do you mind if I tell him about Kieran if he asks, or should I wait for you to do it? He’ll suspect with the police all over the place, and I don’t want to lie to him.”

“No, don’t lie. That’s the last thing he needs. He shouldn’t have to face any of this. But thank you for being here for him.”

He tugged his jacket back on and followed the policemen out to lead them to the other rental cottage, and Meg stood in the doorway with her arms wrapped around herself for warmth and her hair billowing in the wind. Yellow-coated police in blue hats were searching the road to Kilmichael, and she imagined there were more along the cliffs and in the nearby fields. How would they hope to find anything after the rain, as heavy as it had been?

She took the time while Adam slept to do her best with a washcloth and soap in the bathroom, to brush her teeth and put on clean clothes. Tea didn’t begin to fulfill the caffeine requirement, so she found coffee and a French press in the cupboard and forgave herself for exceeding her one-cup quota. What she actually craved, though she’d never been a smoker in her life, was one of Adam’s cigarettes. She couldn’t fathom why.

At seven o’clock, she tried to phone her mother to explain, and ended up having to go out on the patio and stand on top of the drystone wall between the house and the adjacent field before she got a signal. Even then it fluctuated from one bar to two and the call dropped three times. Her mother’s voice went from just-out-of-a-deep-sleep to full-throttle irritation during the explanation.

When Meg had finished, Ailsa was silent a long, uncomfortable moment. “It was the boy, wasn’t it?” she asked. “I told you he was dangerous.”

“Don’t be ridiculous. I was with him the whole time,” Meg said.

“How do you know when it happened?” Ailsa sniffed. “You don’t have any idea.”

“Exactly. The rescue crew hadn’t even taken the body out of the water yet when the police were here, so we have no information. What’s the point of making accusations?”

“Well, he didn’t end up dead in the water by himself, did he—” A muffled rumble in the background made Ailsa break off the conversation and shush someone, at least, that was how it sounded.

Since her mother had grumbled at her for waking her up, it didn’t take much of a leap to figure out the situation. “There’s a man there with you?” she couldn’t help asking. “Someone spent the night?”

“None of your business,” Ailsa said, and the line dropped again, leaving Meg standing on the wall with the brilliant Irish light spilling over silver-blue water and the green, green quilt of stone-stitched patchwork fields patterned by yellow furze and purple heather. A gray-winged herring gull had landed on the edge of the picnic table and hunkered down, watching her with its head dropped low and its eyes curious, as though she might at any minute pull a fish out of her pocket. It was an intent stare, an insistent one, and Meg turned her back on the bird when the phone rang, bracing herself as she answered.

“When are you coming over here?” her mother demanded without preamble. “There are boats and police everywhere—both on Dursey and down at the parking lot by the cable car station. I can see them from the window.”

“I don’t know when they’ll be done with us.”

Her mother paused. “You don’t mean to tell me you want to stay there?”

Meg turned in the direction of the mainland, but a low hill blocked her view and she could see only the yellow and blue dots of police moving against the white backdrop of the laboratory tent at the excavation site. “I think I need to stay. I want to find out what happened, and Niall—”

“If you’re going to say Niall needs you, don’t. I need you.”

“You’ll be fine—take some time to relax,” Meg said, wishing that every conversation with her mother didn’t feel like she was trying to walk a tightrope. “Or take the car and go into Allihies village. It’s supposed to be charming. They won’t be allowing anyone to come over here the rest of the day, so there’s no point hanging around. I know it doesn’t make sense to you that I want to help Niall and Adam, but I do. And then, too, it’s a story, isn’t it? Stories are what I do.”

“Not in Ireland.”

“But I’m here, so I can’t ignore the fact that something’s happened—and clearly you have a friend to keep you company.”

Ailsa gave an irritated chuff of breath. “That was a mistake. You upset me dredging up the past the way you did, making all those accusations when all this time I was only trying to do the best for you and your sisters and your father. That’s all I’ve ever done.”

Whether it was the clear quality of the Irish light or the reminder in the night that life was just too damn short to waste, Meg had suddenly had enough. She let out a deep slow breath. “Mom, I love you,” she said. “I will always, always love you, but I will not accept responsibility for your mistakes. Anna and Katharine and I never asked for you to make yourself miserable. We didn’t need you to spend all your time taking us around to pageants and lessons. Anna and I didn’t, anyway; we would have been fine. All we wanted was for you and Daddy to stop arguing, for you to be happy, for us to be a family. That’s all any child ever wants. But you did do all those things, and you gave us good foundations and independence, and I’m going to use that to make my own choices. I can’t ignore the fact that Niall and Adam need some help right now—that’s not the kind of person I want to be. They need me more than you do, and I’ll come back over and see you when I can.”

It was the hardest thing she’d ever said to her mother, to anyone really, and when she finished, there was silence on the line. Silence and no explosion. “I may not be here when you show up,” her mother said a few beats later. “I think I’m tired of Ireland anyway. I’ll find a cab that can take me to Cork and go home to Cincinnati.”

Meg’s heart twisted in her chest. “Don’t do that, Mom. Please, don’t.”

But the line had dropped again, or maybe her mother had hung up. Meg checked the bars on the phone and there weren’t any, and by the time the planets or gods of the cellular towers had shifted themselves back into alignment, Ailsa’s phone went straight to voicemail. Meg left a message asking her not to leave, but she didn’t expect that to make much difference. Her mother would do just as she liked. She always had. And apparently she’d spent a lifetime running from her problems instead of facing them.

Meg turned to jump down off the wall, and she found Adam in the open kitchen door. A half laugh at the way he’d startled her vanished beneath the reminder of everything that had happened.

“Where’s Uncle Niall?” he asked.

“He’s gone with the police,” Meg said. “Up to the house to talk to the others, I think.”

Adam studied her, his head tilted and his eyes as insistent as the herring gull who was still roosting on the picnic table watching her, too. “They found Kieran,” he said bleakly. “Didn’t they?”

Meg swallowed a lump in her throat and nodded. “Yes, I’m sorry. I know he was important to you.”

“When did he die? Was it while we were in that field? Did James do it? He did, didn’t he?” Adam’s voice rose with every question, both in volume and in pitch.

Meg jumped off the wall and hurried toward him and folded him into her arms, cautiously in case he wanted to pull away. But he didn’t. He went stiff and then his narrow shoulders began to shudder, and in that moment he was only a child caught in bottomless grief. She could feel every bone and every fear and every scrap of vulnerable longing in him, and then he drew back, and he was a teenager again, aloof and alone and angry.

“Tell me what happened,” he said. “Tell me the truth.”

Meg wished she knew how to help him, wished there was a pill or a potion that would take away adolescence—or just pain. So much pain. “We don’t know anything yet. Except that there is nothing you could have done. It wasn’t your responsibility to fix things or prevent what happened. That’s both the hard part and the advantage of being fourteen. It’s frustrating to feel like you don’t always have a seat at the grown-up table, as if people don’t see you or hear you. But you’re not responsible for the mistakes the adults in your life are making, Adam. You couldn’t have known what was really going on in Kieran’s head, or James’, much less what was happening between the two of them. It was a horrible night last night, and if Kieran was out poking around in that storm, he wanted whatever he was looking for so badly that he wasn’t being rational—or safe. That was his responsibility, not yours. And if James was involved, again, that wasn’t something you could have foreseen. No one else expected it, either.”