Rosewater and Soda Bread (20 page)

Bahar snorted. “Don't act the innocent. I know what you and Malachy have been doing. It's not only necking you're after, is it, little sis?”

Layla blanched. “What do you mean by that?”

Bahar smiled triumphantly. “Don't forget, this is a small town. I only have to go to the butcher shop to hear all about your love life.”

“At least I have a love life. What are you going to do now, become a nun?”

Bahar stared at her sisters. “Maybe.”

Layla and Marjan looked shocked.

“Are you serious about that, Bahar?” Marjan moved away from the counter.

“Yes, maybe. I don't know. All I know is that I have found God, and you two have no business telling me otherwise.” She came from around the table, her hand in her apron pocket.

“You're right, we don't have any business telling you what to believe. But are you sure, Bahar? This is a big step.”

“I know it's a big step. I've been working toward it for over a year. Ever since that first time up Croagh Patrick.” Bahar paused. “Look, doesn't it mean something that I haven't had a headache for nearly the same time? Don't you understand that I've found some peace finally?”

Neither Marjan nor Layla said a word. It was true; Bahar had not reached for her jar of migraine medicine—a tribal mixture of cardamom, cloves, and nutmeg—for a very long time.

Bahar moved to the stairs up to the flat. She placed her free hand on the banister and turned around. “If either of you is interested, I'll be attending full Mass for the first time on All Saints' Day. That's the first of November. You are both invited, if you care to come along.” She stepped resolutely up the stairs and slammed the flat door.

Marjan spoke first. “She's happy. And we have to be happy for her. Even if we don't understand all her reasons. We can't worry about things we don't know about.”

Layla rattled the silver carousel on the island, plucking at an old order. “Last time she decided to go all religious on us we ended up having to run away. Aren't you worried about that?”

The carousel spun noisily, throwing shards of light into Mar-jan's eyes. She watched the pieces of paper fly by, their edges smudged with food stains and curling back like delicate fabric swaths. Suddenly, they seemed to resemble the curtains of chadors, the black cloths rushing by her as she stepped into the apartment that day so long ago.

She could see them again, those women, the ones who had taken her sister under their darkened wings. Like stark ravens, swooping in while Marjan was held against her will in Gohid. Marjan had lost everything she held dear in the space of a few days, her thoughts whittled down to a cycle of regrets. In the end, it was Khanoum Zanganeh who had brought her out of her stupor.

Her cellmate, a working girl of some experience, had been feeding Marjan bits of survival technique, as well as stale bread and water, during her time at the detention center.

“Make sure you cover your whole face with your hands. Like this,” Khanoum Zanganeh had advised her, flapping her fingers over her heavily made-up face like shadow puppets.

“You'll be blindfolded again, so you won't know where you are landing. Just be sure to hold up your hands—they'll unshackle you a second before they throw you out. Make sure your beautiful face won't get marked. You hear me?” Khanoum Zanganeh wriggled her brown fingers again. “Just like this, Khanoum Aminpour. Just like the dove of peace.”

Part of Marjan wanted to believe the old prostitute, to imagine that she was really going to be released. It was the same part of her that had thought Ali's precautions overly dramatic, his warnings of what might happen if they got arrested highly unlikely. She remembered clearly, as though he were sitting before her once again.

“They'll use wires. On the bottoms of your feet. Listen to me, Marjan, are you listening? If they beat you, I want you to tell them a lie. Tell them anything but the truth. Then let yourself faint. Don't be brave.”

His green eyes had flickered in the low light of
The Voices
basement offices, the steam from their bowls of food rising between them. Their late-night meals of soothing noodle soup or cheese and bread were a ritual, something they shared when everyone else had crept back home to their families.

Their talks turned often to what they would do if either of them were ever arrested. Everyone who worked with the movement, the uprising, had to be prepared for interrogation. It would have been naïve to think otherwise.

Neither of them had ever contemplated the end result—what would happen once she was released. And when the time had come, when they had been arrested that night in the offices of
The Voice
, Marjan knew why. Ali did not expect to be released. He knew he would never get out of the Revolution alive.

“Aren't you worried?” Layla had said. Yes, she was worried, thought Marjan. She worried about it, them, everything, all the time. Despite her best efforts to do otherwise.

THERE WAS NOTHING LIKE a good bike ride to bring joy to a lonely spinster's life. The sheer sensation of the ride was right up there with flannel bedclothes and hot bubble baths, a red hot-water bottle pressed against old and tired thighs.

Marie Brennan grinned inwardly at the thought as she pumped the ten-speed bicycle up the nettle-lined hillside. The clank of chain and pedal was even more harmonious than she remembered. It had been a long time since she had last heard that simple noise.

A proud owner of a Schwinn since she was a girl of fourteen, Marie had not ridden the blue bicycle of her youth in over ten years, not since her sister, Dervla, had come to live with her. Dervla did not approve of bicycles for women. She believed that there was something entirely unseemly about the motions, straddling and siphoning and all, so Marie had obliged as she always did when it came to her older sibling's commands: she had kept the bike stored in the shed they shared with Antonia Nolan's relics shop and run all her errands on foot, bar the few necessary trips a year to Castlebar or Dublin.

Marie had kept the bike hidden away, but she had never forgotten about it—some of her fondest girlhood memories involved that blue Schwinn—so when Dervla had insisted she unearth it to visit Estelle Delmonico's cottage, she had not needed to be asked twice.

Marie guided the bicycle past a burbling freshwater stream. The bouncing water flowed directly from a gully that found its
estuary deep on the other side of the Reek, not far from where she'd started her journey. It would eventually end in the basin of Clew Bay, which announced itself as she turned the side of the hill. She glanced out at the Bay, breathing in deeply. The sky over the water was overcast as usual, the depths of blue shrouded for their mystery. Those waters contained a thousand stories, Marie told herself, moved to tears by the beauty. The Bay always brought out her emotions, its divine essence something she did not enjoy or appreciate enough, at least not in her everyday existence.

With her days spent in routine—squeezing Dervla into her girdle and stockings was an hour's work at the very least—she rarely left the environs of the musty little flat, let alone Main Mall. Sure, a walk to the mini-mart or the Butcher's Block did help break up the monotony of her sister's carps, as did the highlight of her day, the only lining in her ever-constant cumulus: noontime Mass inside Saint Barnabas's alabaster hush.

Father Mahoney was always at hand when she had a moment's confession. She wondered what he would think now, to see her rounding the hilly corner. Wouldn't think too highly of her, that's what. Would no doubt dispense thirty Hail Marys next time she faced the confessional's latticed window. He might even expose her on his new radio program as an example, tell the whole world what a mean spirit she was really.

Marie's face flared with shame as goose bumps rose along her soft neck. She had had a speech prepared for when she saw the Italian woman, but the words seemed to be slipping from her mind the closer she got to the cottage. She had never been steady under any kind of stress.

Trying her best to ignore her jitters, the spinster turned down a brambly lane and slowed her pedaling. Her sister's voice, unfortunately, was harder to ignore: “Even that witch can't be
dumb to the proper manners of tea. She'll invite you in a jiffy, I'd say. Then you can see what kind of heathen she's been hiding away.”

Marie frowned. She did not understand Dervla's drive to know every single thing that went on in town and out of it. Hadn't Padraig Carey said that there was nothing to fear? That Anne-Marie O'Connell had no clue what she was talking about? Why couldn't Dervla be happy to leave it at that?

Marie sighed and took another look at the ocean. She could see all the way to the islands, the drumlins that rose westward in cliffs and melted eastward into soft, dandelion coastlines. The last she had heard there were over three hundred of those drumlins along the Bay.

If only she could get herself a drumlin all of her own, Marie Brennan told herself. She could be quite happy there, alone with her beloved Schwinn.

LEANING HER BICYCLE AGAINST an alder trunk, Marie turned away from the water and quickly crossed over a small stone bridge. A trio of mallards, their green, iridescent feathers gleaming, turned to stare at her as she hurried across the humpy moat and water. Just above it stood the Delmonico homestead.

The tidy, whitewashed cottage was indeed neat and beautiful, thought Marie. Green shutters and a flagstone path bordered its front, a Dutch door opened into what she supposed would be the front parlor. She had never been to Estelle's cottage before; although the Italian widow had been living in town for over forty years, ever since Marie had attended Saint Joseph's herself, not three sentences had passed between them.

Marie climbed the gravelly path to the front door, taking in
the sweet smell of the rosebush to her left. Tightening the knot on her head scarf and clutching her purse to her chest, she took a deep breath. She lifted her hand to knock just as she heard Es-telle. Her voice was coming from around the house, where a thicket of willows created a natural gate blocking most of the view.

Creeping slowly along the front of the cottage, Marie came to the willow gate. There, between two entwined branches, she saw the Italian woman.

She was talking to someone sitting near the back door. Marie's heart began pumping in her chest. It was the girl, the one from the hospital.

Yes, a redhead. She was sitting in a low wheelchair, a tartan blanket over her legs. Her tangle of dark red-brown hair masked her face, but Marie was sure it was the same girl Anne-Marie O'Connell said she had tended. Could Dervla be right in her suspicions? Was Estelle really harboring a baby-killing heathen?

The spinster knelt closer and squinted, holding her breath. Estelle seemed to be busy at something on the lawn before her.

“… so when my Luigi said he was going to build me a door to his heart, I think he talk about maybe a new kitchen here in the house. Something with a good sofa so I could sit and look when he try his new recipes, yes? By this time my feet were bad too, so I can only stand in the shop and kitchen for small times, no more than one hour before I have to take a chair or something. This is okay for my Luigi, because he was the
artiste
, the creator. I only support his dreams, his vision for new cannoli or
pavlova a la fresca
.

“So I was thinking he wanted me close to him while he is a-baking here. And I wait and wait, but no sofa comes. Instead, my Luigi is out here every day after work in the shop, putting plants here and there, doing this or that with the ground, but
never letting me see, yes? Big surprise again. But this time it was not a Vespa. This time it was something that would make me travel even longer way, without ever leaving my back garden. This time it was the walk to my inside. To my heart and to his heart.”

Estelle paused and placed her hands on her soft hips. From where Marie crouched, she could clearly see through the willow to the Italian woman's feet: planted there was a sea of lavender bordering a flagstone path.

Estelle leaned down slowly and patted the plants. “Here is the lavanda. And over there is the rosemary. Lavender and rosemary, over and over again. But it was not the plants but this stone that is the important thing. Here, look at this.”