Thirteen Ways of Looking by Colum McCann
—Hurry up now, Beverly.
She slips her hands from the pockets of her cardigan, slides into the backseat. The window powers up.
—You’ll catch your death.
On the front dashboard Sister Yun performs a little drumroll with long thin fingers.
—We must not miss the three o’clock.
The Hour of Great Mercy, the most fervent of her prayers, the time of Christ’s dying on the cross. In the jungle she would listen for a guard’s radio, and it grew so that she could almost tell the time by the angle of sun through the trees.
—Are you sure you’re all right, Beverly?
—You’re hardly wrapped up at all.
—You must be freezing.
She watches as Sister Anne adjusts the rearview mirror.
—What’s that you were saying?
Sister Anne’s rosary beads click against the steering wheel as she guides the car into the road.
—Oh, nothing really. My mind wanders sometimes. Forgive me. Frío. I think I said it’s cold.
The two elderly nuns lock eyes in the mirror a moment. She glances away, grateful for the silence, until Sister Anne reaches forward to put NPR on the radio: a drone attack in Afghanistan, a typhoon in the Philippines, a wildfire in Australia.
The car slides through the quiet Long Island town, the small boutiques, the coffee shops, the travel agency, the flower arrangement store, the pastelería.
—
THE HOUSE IS a recent gift to the Church. It has not yet been fully renovated, or consecrated, so it is still a place of mirrors. She sees herself everywhere. One in the front hallway, gilded and ornate, catching the reflection of the front steps, so that, at the doorway, one seems to be coming and going at the same time. A mirror, too, at the top of the winding stairs, near the Sacred Heart, with a fresh vase of flowers beneath it. A series of oil paintings along the corridor, with glass frames, so that at the wrong angle she can catch sight of herself as she moves along. In her bathroom there is another mirror which runs the length of the wall.
She thought first of obscuring it entirely, draping it with a cloth, but did not want to be rude, it was simply best to ignore, let it be.
Beverly stands pale, white, naked, scarred. She turns quickly from the mirror, steps into the shower, pulls the sliding door across. The water pumps cold at first and then the heat deepens. A strong pulse of water at her stomach, her shoulders, her neck. She applies the conditioner, rinses, holds, stands back once more, soaps her feet, her toes. Puts her head against the fresh cool tile of the wall. Feels the last drips fall down upon her back.
She steps out on the cold floor, turbans a towel around her head. After he bit her breast, he stitched it crudely himself, pulled the flap of it together and shoved a heated needle into it, pulled the medicated thread through. Wrapped up a bottle of antiseptic, ribboned it, gave it to her like a gift. When it became infected, he took her to the camp infirmary where they ripped her breast open again. He didn’t go near her for weeks afterward. Twice she cut it open herself just to keep him at bay.
—
WITH HER BACK TO THE MIRROR, she towels herself off and dresses. The late news. The last moments of the day. The world at its least consoling. The dark falling outside. Everything moving toward sleep, or its lack. The elderly Argentinian sisters half-doze on the couch together. A copy of Clarín spread out in front of them. Trays and teacups. Magazines. The carpet has not been fixed, but the armchairs have been scooted forward to cover the cigarette burns. How was it that she didn’t even notice? Not just once but twice. So reckless. She could have burned the whole place down. She cannot even remember lighting up.
A pulse of need whips through her. They say it is the most addictive drug of all. She will go tomorrow to the local pharmacy. Nicotine patches. Chewing gum. A matter of willpower.
She likes it here with her elderly Sisters, the informality, the openness, the sense that so much of their work has been done, that now it is time to sit back and watch time unfold, to pray in the face of the sorrows to which the world is still bound.
She watches the Sisters stir, both of them sitting up as if roped to one another.
—Can we watch the…a ver las noticias?
—Sí, sí, por que, no?
A report on the disappearance of the jaguar species in the Amazon. A mine collapse near Valparaiso. News of the elections in Guatemala. Toward the end of the news there is a small report of the London conference—minimal progress in the talks, something about narco-traffic, mining rights, a timeline for further peace talks in Havana—but there is no sight or mention of Carlos.
She should check the Internet, but for all these years she has managed to avoid it, leave it in the background, she is not even sure how to use it: the prospect is mildly terrifying.
—Demasiada tristeza, says Sister María, rising from her chair.
—Buenas noches.
Beverly watches as the two elderly women climb the stairs, shadow to shadow, their cardigans twined.
She waits all the way through the second repeat of the program, just in case. Ridiculous. As if the repeat might change itself and he might somehow appear, changed once again.
Has he become a man of peace somehow? Has he offered his cheek, Lord? Has he turned himself around? How many other things run counter to the life he once had? Who is he now? An elegant man in a blue shirt? A participant at a peace institute? What accident of circumstance brought the conference to London? How did he manage to shuck his past?
Only once she saw him almost crack. At the safe house near Puerto Boyacá. The windows were sealed and blackened. Whatever light came in crept under the door. Vague sounds from outside the door. A distant radio. She tried to remember old poems, prayers, psalms, even the way the words looked on the page. He unchained her and brought her a glass of coconut milk. She had no idea why. He came across the hard dirt floor. A slight limp. He wore black laced boots, his camouflage trousers tucked into them. A sheathed knife dangled from his belt. He kneeled down in front of her. His eyes heavy-lidded and brown. His cheeks unshaven. The flashlight stung her momentarily. She drew away. Carlos put one hand on the back of her neck and tilted her chin with his forefinger and had her drink: the milk was cool, though there was no fridge in the house. She could feel the coolness, a whole childhood of it, falling through her. Rain on the coral beach in Galway. White tennis balls on the broken court. Her brother at his shortwave radio. A nest of wires and voices. Her father’s cattle huddled on a laneway. The broken church bell. A grass verge of green in the laneway. High windows. Too tall for the school chairs. The milk came in small silver cans. She would not cry or whimper. She had always refused him that. Carlos sat back against the wall and looked at her, his own lip quivering. She thought the milk to be the harbinger of some abuse—a punch to the ear, the knife to the throat, a heave against the wall—but he simply fed it to her, then drank from the same glass, muttered something that sounded like an apology, and left, closed the thick steel door behind him. A little rim of light leaked under the door.
—
IT IS TWO IN the morning by the clock on the DVD when she rises for bed. She shuffles across the kitchen floor, reaches to switch off the outdoor porch light. The ashtray still hangs there, the tin can moving ever so slightly in the breeze.
Beverly opens the screen door. The ashtray has not been emptied. She tilts it. The odor is foul.
She walks the length of the porch in the hard cold. The stars out, nailheading the night. A few clouds drifting. The trees shaped against the dark. She squeezes her thumbs against her forehead once more: To abase the self in such a way, no, I cannot. I must resist.
An alarming silence. There was a while in Saint Louis, years ago, when she simply could not stand to be outside: the very sound of insects drilled into her.
She reaches deftly into the bucket, smooths the crush from a misshapen cigarette, lights up.
On the lawn, a sudden square of light falls from an upstairs window, l
A swell of revulsion stabs her stomach and she sways, dizzy with regret.
Inside, she locks the door, puts her head against the frame. Is this what awaits me, Lord? Is this where I finish? Is this where You have led me?
There is a flick of shadow at the top of the stairs. A creak. Flecks of light ordering and reordering themselves. She moves through the darkened living room, grabs ahold of the banisters.
Sister Anne is sitting in the middle of the stairs in her dressing gown and slippers. No disapproval in the broad pale expanse of her forehead. No tightening of the lips. No shake of her head.
—Can’t sleep?
—I’m just fidgety.
Beverly is well aware of the pungency of the cigarette. She pulls her breath in, turns to the wall, squeezes herself past the staircase mirror. Her face is lean and spectral, her neck striated.
—You know, Beverly, that I am here at any stage, if you need to talk.
—Of course.
—We are, in large measure, the prayers we share.
She turns quickly from her reflection, pauses at the top of the stairs in the red light from the Sacred Heart.
—Actually, I was thinking of making a little journey.
—Sorry?
—London. I was thinking of making a little journey to London.
A surge of panic: it is an idea so sudden and unplanned that she feels as if she has been sideswiped by her own shadow.
—Why ever so?
A cellar, an airless place, a mineshaft, a caterpillar crawl, a chain across the floor, a single bead of light underneath the door.
—I have a brother there.
—But you only just got here. Didn’t the doctors say that you need to rest?
To bend, to shape, to break the truth. Have I become the liar I never wanted to become? Why not tell Sister Anne that she has just, quite simply, been knocked off balance? That she has seen a man she knew long ago? That he has resurfaced? That she must affirm it is him? That he is representing himself as a man of peace? That he is there in London now? That she must leave? That this is all she now knows, all she can tell?
—Is anything the matter with him?
—Sorry?
—Is something the matter with your brother?
—He’s ill.
To survive one mistake she has committed herself to the next and then the next. She shifts her foot slightly on the stair.
As a child, her brother spent a year in bed with spinal tuberculosis. His room was full of crystals, coils, wires: he taught himself how to build model radios. He was six years younger than her, but she sat by his bed with him, listening to the chatter of ships from out on the Atlantic. Years later she wrote him letters, once a week, until he, too, left—first for Dublin, then Edinburgh, until he drifted down to London to review literature for the BBC. They fell into that life of distant brother and sister: the yearly Christmas cards, the occasional phone calls, the funerals of their parents. Drifting farther still until she was kidnapped. He had organized petitions for her then. Marches on the Dáil, the House of Commons, the Colombian embassy. Afterward he wanted to make the radio documentary about what had happened to her, but she couldn’t do it. They chained you? They beat you with a wooden board? They kept you locked up in a room? They fed you from a metal dish? Paralyzed by the truth. He allowed her the silence. They fell into the old patterns again, talking once or twice a year, not so much out of neglect or embarrassment, but simply because that’s how it seemed families worked, their seepage.
—He’s ill, you say?
—Yes.
—Is he a smoker then too?
There is no malice in Sister Anne’s question, but it stings her. So, you were watching me? You opened your curtains and the light fell on the lawn? You saw me reach into the coffee can? You smelled the smoke drifting up to your room? Have I become hostage yet again? Is this where I end up, after all these years? A room on Long Island, at the end of the continent, the water cresting silently against the shore?
—He’ll be in my prayers.
—You’re very kind.
—You’ll have to get permission from your Order.
—They will pray alongside me, I’m sure.
—God measures us. He truly does.
—Yes, He does.
—Is there anything else you need to tell me, Beverly?
He put a chain around my neck. He ripped my breast. He violated me.
—No, she says, stepping through the guttering red light, along the landing. She pauses a moment at her door, leans against the frame, hears the click of Sister Anne’s door.
The house falls quiet and the shadows fold down, dark.
2
Victoria Station. A crush of faces. A salmon-along of tourists. Her long skirt brushes the floor. Her suitcase has no wheels and the handle is unhinged so that she has to drag it behind her, reluctant, unwieldy. She would like a moment’s respite. To sit down and take the weight off her legs. Find a refuge. A traveler’s chapel maybe, or a small café with a quiet corner.
She is startled by a pigeon flapping along past a piano. The piano is, it seems, an art project, left in the train station for anyone to play.
The pigeon hovers, then lands a moment on the lid, walks along the beveled edge.
At a food stall Beverly buys herself a croissant and a cup of tea in a paper cup. Awful to drink tea from paper, the little tab of the teabag hanging down. There is nowhere to sit, so she drifts across to the piano, perches on the edge of the bench.
A pulsing pain in her lower back. The journey has been arduous, a two-hour delay in JFK, a runway incident in Heathrow, the wrong direction on the tube from Paddington—she was woken only when she got to the end of the line.
The pigeon returns and pecks at her feet. It is, she notices, extraordinarily fat, the color of a thing into which no color goes. How odd to think that it might live inside the station, a nest in the rafters, its whole life without a tree of any sort.
She lays her head against the lacquered edge of the piano and is shaken awake moments later by a pale young boy whose mother stands nearby, vaguely apologetic, wanting to play. For a moment she cannot recall where she is, or how she has gotten here.
—Don’t forget your tea, Missus.
She pats the young boy on the head. A blessing upon him. Used to be, long ago, we could make the sign of the cross. Gone, those days. Maybe just as well: who knows what the mother might say if she attempted to bless the child?
Outside the light pours down hard and clear and yellow. The tea has grown tepid but she drains the last mouthful anyway. No rubbish can in sight. She crumples the cup and stuffs it in her cardigan pocket, moves toward the taxi line, nudging the suitcase along.
From a distance she is sure she hears the faint rumor of the piano: the boy is confident and agile beyond his years.
She nudges forward in the queue, pats her cardigan pocket, flicks through her passport, searching for her brother’s address. A ticket stub, a few receipts, nothing else. Lord, help me now. I must find his address. Near Victoria Station. I remember that.
She lays the suitcase flat on the ground, thumbs open the steel lock. Three dresses, an overcoat, a change of shoes, a Thomas Merton book, a biography of the new Pope. An acute wave of helplessness sweeps over her, a nausea that begins in the pit of her stomach, rises and spreads.
—You all right there?
There is a tattoo at the collar of the taxi driver’s shirt, the extension of a vine or a bramble of some sort. She flips the suitcase closed, snaps the locks, pushes down on the lid to keep herself from toppling forward, stands shakily.
He gazes up at her with mild alarm. She is a full head and shoulders taller than him. If she were to fall she might topple him.
—I lost the address. My brother. It was written down. It’s…a cog in my head. It just comes and goes.
—Sorry, love, he says
She watches as the driver opens his car door for another customer. A vine. Dark green. A line through the trees. The sound of a radio. A small steel lock on the door. Escape. It was easy enough to cut through the bamboo: once with a sharpened coat hanger, once with a piece of corrugated metal. She squeezed herself through the gap, crept along in her rubber-soled shoes. She got as far as the river, but it was so swollen with rain that it terrified her: she simply sank to her knees and waited, slumped against the trunk of a tree. They found her, covered head to toe in ant bites. When she recovered, she was beaten. He pulled a hood over her head. Darkness folded around her. The cloth smelled of rotting fruit. She vomited and he left her in the hood a few minutes, to stew. Afterward she mumbled her prayers. Rosary after rosary. Her body ached. She bled. It seeped through to her dress. Carlos allowed her to wash. The appalling embarrassment. Always turning away, hunched over, covering her breasts, her groin, bent into whatever shadow she might find. Someone watching from afar. She wondered what might happen if she ever conceived a child. One time, the clock of her body stopped for two months. It terrified her, then she bled again. She was not forsaken. She cleaned herself. Immerse yourself in prayer wherever you happen to be.
Beverly shuffles out from the taxi line and back under the awning of the railway station. The ambush of the mind. She has grown unreliable even to herself. These turnings, these slippages. The distant piano still sounds out. Perhaps that’s the piped music of the station? What was the name of Ian’s street? How did I get here? I had his address when I was at the airport. On the train. On the tube. Maybe it fluttered to the floor.