IN THE MORNING she called them on the telephone and offered to take them to St. Mary’s Cathedral for mass. They agreed, and half an hour later they met in the hotel lobby. They shook hands, and the woman said formally that her name was Anna and her husband’s was Gustavo.
Margaret said her name as well, and she told them that her husband Jack could not be here because he had to travel a great deal. He was a mining geologist.
The man said, “Geólogo?” to the woman, and she nodded. To Margaret she said, “Gustavo and I are teachers. Carmensita was going to be as well. Hugo had not decided.”
They were again clothed all in black, Anna in her long dress and a hat with a black veil. People in the hotel lobby stole glances at them.
The church was one of the oldest on the coast. It had high vaults of stone and wood joinery and tall leaded windows, and all the woodwork and the very stone were steeped in incense for generations.
At communion the parents went up to the rail and knelt. When the priest offered the mother the host, she raised her veil and he placed it on her tongue and she lowered the veil again and bowed her head. The father had the host put into his cupped hands.
After the service she took them back to the hotel, and from her room she called the minister and explained. No ceremony at the urn wall, she said, because the parents would be taking the ashes home with them. Just the memorial service.
The parents had not wanted breakfast and they would not eat lunch. But they sat with her at the table and spoke mostly English with each other for her benefit. They sipped water and told her about their children. They were much the same stories she might have told about Andrew. Sweet and adorable when they were small, more and more strong-willed and independent as they grew older. A fine closeness between brother and sister. Acts of rebellion from the boy. He ran away from home once when he was sixteen, but in the night threw pebbles at his sister’s window and let her know where he was. And in the morning she went there and persuaded him to come home.
“And where was he?” Margaret asked.
“In the small Santa María Chapel. Our bigger churches are locked at night now.”
“In a chapel. Was he religious?”
“Not really. But it was raining. And he’d been an altar boy in primary school. I sewed his sobrepelliz.” The mother ran her hands over her front. “All white, and a small cross here,” she said.
She reached up and let the veil fall over her face. She opened her purse and took out a handkerchief and snapped shut the purse and sat back in her chair.
In the afternoon they drove south to Sweetbarry. The parents were in the back seat. She took the coastal road again, the ocean always to their left, the small, solitary white houses like stranded lifeboats. She felt proud of it all, loved to hear them comment to each other and in her limited Spanish knew enough words to follow their exchanges.
Halfway there, the mother said, “Tell us about your son, please.”
And she found it a welcome relief to tell them all that was on her mind while they sat in the back seat, listening.
She told them about Andrew’s schooling to become an engineer, and about his dream to become a military pilot; about the last time she saw him, hoisting his duffel bag, so eager to get on that bus. The grinning faces in the windows, boys going off on their big adventure. She saw that last happy moment so often, she said. And she would tell herself, Remember that. Remember that. So very often. As if she could still not believe it. As if by recalling it, she might be able to make it real again and then undo it. Change the outcome.
They drove on. At some point the father cleared his throat and then spoke for the first time, unprompted and at length. He spoke with great formality.
“Señora Bradley,” he said. “With your permission. Anna and I always said that we must allow our children to make their own mistakes, small mistakes, and learn from them. Some of their own decisions. We never imagined that any outcome could be so unforgiving. You speak of your son leaving you that day on the bus, but perhaps it was not you he was leaving. Perhaps men, young and old, embark on adventures to discover themselves, as the storybooks tell. And to pry themselves loose from the familiar, the safe. The predictable.
“We cannot change our children’s nature, we can only hope to guide them somewhat. Anna and I, we talk about this, and we very much want to think that this is true. That they set out on the necessary journey, a journey of which they cannot know the ending, but at the time of setting out, the ending is not important. It is the journey that matters. And endings such as that of your son and our children, how can they be foreseen? They cannot. They are unknowable.”
Anna said something to him in Spanish, and he replied gently in English that it was true and that it was important.
“Señora Bradley,” he said, “our son loved his sister, but this adventure was surely his idea. The newspapers are writing of other students doing it. It is new but already quite common. An act of independence and a thrill, and as much as four thousand American dollars in cash per carrier. In many places in our country you can buy a house for that. And it is all prepared and organized like a guided tour, and always they come back safe. Until now. But you see the temptation for the young? The attraction?
“We cannot know what happened on that island. Perhaps he fought a man and tried to protect his sister. And she had come along perhaps to protect him. You see? We cannot know. The only thing that is certain is that their mother and I will always love them and we will be sad for a long time, perhaps always.”
They drove on in silence. Through Marriott’s Cove, through Western Shore. When she could see the steeple of St. Peter’s in the distance she slowed the car and pointed it out to them. That was where the service would be held on Tuesday, she said.
In the rear-view mirror she could see them sitting close together. Anna was not wearing the veil now. She had her glasses off and was dabbing at her eyes with a tissue.
They sat with their heads and shoulders so close together that not one sliver of daylight could be seen between them.
At the house she put them up in Andrew’s room. She levelled the mattresses and put fresh linens on the bed. She carried away the lead bucket and the driftwood chair and brought in chairs from the other bedrooms. Then she let them rest for a while.
She put a note for them on the kitchen table and then drove down to the Outrigger. The restaurant was busy. Warm and cosy inside, with burning candles on the tables. Windows overlooking the wooden dock with yellow light bulbs on wires and two deep-sea fishing boats tied to wooden bollards. She stood inside the door and motioned to Tammy.
“What’s up, Margaret?” Tammy said. “This morning the minister told us about the service for the dead kids on Tuesday. Brother and sister they were, he said. Oh my God. That’s so sad!”
“Isn’t it.”
“We’ll surely all be there on Tuesday.”
“Good. Listen, I’ve got the parents staying with me. They haven’t eaten all day and I want to serve them a nice dinner. What’s on tonight?”
“Ah. The special is fresh-caught haddock. The Mary-Beth came in just a few hours ago. You can serve it with yellow beans and parsley potatoes from the valley. Maybe take those cooked and heat them and take the fish raw. Do the fillets pan-fried in butter. A bit of salt and pepper on it. They’ll love it, Margaret. Don’t overcook the fish. No more than a minute or so on each side.”
The next day the parents went for a long walk in borrowed slickers over their black clothes, down the shore path to the lighthouse and the sentinel rocks, and back through town.
They rested in their room, and then Margaret served them tea and sat with them for a time. For dinner she cooked a ham, and Aileen made the side dishes. With Aileen, Franklin, and Danny present they were six around the table. They sat with their heads bowed while the father said grace in Spanish.
“Bendícenos, Señor, bendice estos alimentos que por tu bondad vamos a recibir…”
During the meal he asked about Jack, and she said that Jack was a few thousand miles away, at a silver mine on the other side of the country. The father said he taught geography and the earth’s history and Anna taught English and Spanish literature. Aileen tried to engage Anna in conversation but Anna hardly spoke at all. Before long she excused herself and never came back to the table. The father went to look after her, and when he came back downstairs he too asked to be excused.
“With your permission,” he said. “Anna, my wife, is very sad. And she is tired. I will be with her now. Thank you for everything. You are very kind.”
He inclined his head to the group around the table.
Next morning on the way to church there was dense fog, and wet leaves covered the ground. She drove with the flashers going and the low beams on.
At the church Franklin in his wool suit served as a greeter, and he shook their hands and the hands of the parents and showed them to the front pew, where Aileen and Danny were already seated. People leaned forward to see the parents, and then the first few began to file out of their pews and line up before the father and the mother in her veil. They bowed their heads and murmured condolences, and before long the entire centre aisle was filled with people waiting to do the same.
The urns stood on the Lord’s Table, which was a long slab of stone on rough-hewn trestles, covered with a white cloth. A small upright wooden crucifix and six lit candles were the only other objects on the table. The urns were burnished metal containers with screw tops.
When the people had stopped coming forward, the mother raised her veil and walked up to the urns. The father followed, but then he stood back. She put her hands on the urns and then picked them up one at a time and held them to her cheeks. She stood with each urn for a long moment and then set it back on the table.
When the parents had returned to their pew, Reverend McMurtry climbed the steps to the pulpit. He held up his hands and let them fall. He said that the congregation had come together that day to say farewell to Hugo and Carmensita, two young people who had died here among them. And that they were gathered here also to give support and warmth as a community to the bereaved parents.
He spoke about God’s open arms and about the end of life on earth also being a new beginning, and when he had stepped down from the pulpit, old Mr. Thompson, who normally on a weekday would be pumping gas at the co-op, walked up to the Bible stand and found his page and began to read.
“Teach us to number our days,” he read, “that we may gain a heart of wisdom…”
At one point the main door must have been opened and kept open for a while, because in the church they could suddenly smell the ocean and the cold salt air, and on the Lord’s Table the candle flames twisted and smoked and then stood straight again.
Up in the loft Miss Belvedere began to play the mother’s lament that Margaret had asked her to play, from Gustav Mahler’s Songs upon the Death of Children. And with the second line of music, Joan Hendricks by her side began to sing.
The parents spent the rest of the day in their room. Margaret brought them lunch and then tea and candles and matches. She brought in a third chair and sat with them in the late afternoon gloom by the light of a single candle.
For a while they talked about their children, but soon they fell silent. She tried to think of more things to say that might help them and help her, but there was nothing. Nothing beyond the good words the father had spoken during the car ride down about human journeys and allowing children to make their own mistakes, and two days later even those words seemed to miss the point.
Behind their thoughts, if they could slow them enough, they could feel this moment passing into this, and then this and this. They could hear the water and the rocks. They could hear seabirds and the wind in the trees, and in the last grey light of day they could hear the fox. Four, five sharp barks close by, and the last one the rising note, like no other sound anywhere. When they heard it, the parents raised their heads and looked at each other and then at her, and Margaret explained about the mother fox and her cubs, and that they were denning not far away.
The father looked confused.
“Es un zorro,” Anna explained to him. “En realidad una zorra, con dos cachorros. Viven aquí.”
“Una zorra,” he said. His face relaxed, then he nodded and looked over at Margaret and smiled.
Not long thereafter she asked them down to dinner. Aileen had brought over a tureen with a lobster dish and left it on the kitchen table with a note to them. Margaret made a little green salad and opened a bottle of white wine, and then they sat down, the three of them around one corner of the table. Out the window it was night now. There was some silver still in the sky to the west, and the trees were darker than the sky. A half moon behind the white pine by her driveway.
In the morning it was raining and blowing hard. They were about to climb into the car for the drive to the airport when Anna paused and straightened and turned to Margaret. For a moment they stood with their hands on their hats and the wind tearing at their clothes.
“I saw the cruz de plata, of course,” said Anna. “The mother’s medal they gave you. And yesterday I suddenly understood completely why this funeral, and why the cremación. I do not know why not sooner. I do not know.”
She let go of her hat with one hand and gave Margaret a one-armed embrace. “We will be friends,” she said. “You will see.”