Her hand had reached mine. She clutched my fingers like a child. Hers were so thin I could feel the bones moving, and terribly cold.
I said, “Even if I do, there’s nothing I can do about it. I’m not a layperson on a jury; I don’t have the luxury of acting on my conscience. My job is to follow the evidence. If you don’t want Conor going to jail, Mrs. Spain, then you need to be in court to save him. After what he did for you, I think you owe him that much.”
I heard myself: pompous, self-righteous, vapid, the kind of puffed-up little prick who spends his school days lecturing his classmates on the evils of alcohol and getting his head slammed into locker doors. If I believed in curses, I would believe that this is mine: when it matters most, in the moments when I know with the greatest clarity exactly what needs to be done, everything I say comes out wrong.
Jenny said-to the machines and the walls and the air, as much as to me-“He’ll be all right.”
She was planning her note again. “Mrs. Spain,” I said. “I understand a little of what you’re going through. I know you probably don’t believe me, but I swear on everything that’s holy, it’s the truth. I understand what you want to do. But there are still people who need you. There are still things you need to do. You can’t just let go of those. They’re yours.”
Just for a second, I thought Jenny had heard me. Her eyes met mine, startled and clear, as if in that instant she had caught a glimpse of the world still turning, outside this sealed room: children outgrowing their clothes and old people forgetting old hurts, lovers coming together and coming apart, tides wearing rock away to sand, leaves falling to cover seeds germinating deep in the cold earth. For a second I thought that, by some miracle, I had found the right words.
Then her eyes fell away and she twisted her hand out of mine-I hadn’t realized, until then, that I was squeezing it tight enough to hurt. She said, “I don’t even know what Conor was doing there. When I woke up in here, when I started remembering what happened, I thought probably he was never there at all; probably I’d imagined him. Right up until you said it today, I thought that. What was he…? How did he get there?”
I said, “He had been spending a bit of time in Brianstown. When he saw that you and Pat were in trouble, he came to help.”
I saw the pieces start falling into place, slowly and painfully. “The pin,” Jenny said. “The JoJo’s pin. Was that…? Was that
I had too little mind left to figure out which answer was the most likely to hold her, or the least cruel. The second of silence told her. “Oh, God. And I thought…” A quick, high gasp, like a hurt child’s. “The break-ins, too?”
“I can’t go into that.”
Jenny nodded. That surge of fight had used up the last of her strength; she looked almost past moving. After a while she said quietly, “Poor Conor.”
“Yes,” I said. “I suppose so.”
We sat there for a long time. Jenny didn’t speak, didn’t look at me; she was done. She leaned her head back on the pillows and watched her fingers tracing the creases in the sheet, slowly, steadily, over and over. After a while her eyes closed.
In the corridor two women passed by talking and laughing, shoes clicking briskly on the tiled floor. My throat hurt from the dry air. Outside the window, the light had moved on; I didn’t remember hearing rain, but the leaves looked dark and drenched, shivering against a mottled, sulky sky. Jenny’s head fell to one side. Small ragged shudders caught at her chest, until gradually the ebb and flow of her breath smoothed them away.
I still don’t know why I stayed there. Maybe my legs wouldn’t move, or maybe I was afraid to leave Jenny alone; or maybe some part of me was still hoping that she would turn in her sleep and murmur the secret password, the thing that would unlock the code, magic the gibbering mess of shadows to black and white, and show me how all of this made sense.
19
Fiona was in the corridor, hunched in one of the plastic chairs that were scattered along the wall, wrapping a ratty striped scarf around her wrists. Beyond her, the waxy green shine of the floor stretched on for what seemed like miles.
Her head snapped up when I clicked the door shut behind me. “How’s Jenny? Is she OK?”
“She’s asleep.” I pulled up another chair and sat down next to her. The red duffle coat smelled of cold air and smoke: she had been outside for a cigarette.
“I should go in. She gets freaked out if no one’s there when she wakes up.”
I said, “How long have you known?”
Instantly Fiona’s face went blank. “Known what?”
There were a thousand clever ways I could have done it. I had nothing left for any of them. “Your sister just confessed to the murders of her family. I’m pretty sure this isn’t a big surprise to you.”
The blank look didn’t budge. “She’s off her head on painkillers. She hasn’t got a clue what she’s talking about.”
“Believe me, Ms. Rafferty, she knew exactly what she was saying. All the details of her story match the evidence.”
“You bullied her into it. The state she’s in, you could make her say anything. I could report you.”
She was as exhausted as I was; she couldn’t even manage to put a tough edge on it. “Ms. Rafferty,” I said. “Please, let’s not do this. Anything you say to me here is off-the-record; I can’t even prove we ever had this conversation. The same goes for your sister’s confession: legally, it doesn’t exist. I’m just trying to find a way to end this mess before any more damage gets done.”
Fiona scanned my face, tired red eyes trying to focus. The harsh lights turned her skin grayish and pitted; she looked older and sicker than Jenny. Down the corridor a child was crying, immense bereft sobs, like the world had shattered around him.
Something, I don’t know what, told Fiona I meant it. Unusual, I had thought when we interviewed her, perceptive; back then I hadn’t been pleased, but it worked for me in the end. The fight went out of her body, and her head fell back against the wall. She said, “Why did she…? She loved them so
“I can’t tell you that. When did you know?”
After a moment Fiona said, “When you told me Conor said he’d done it. I knew he hadn’t. No matter what had happened to him since I saw him, no matter if he had another fight with Pat and Jenny, even if he’d completely lost his mind: he wouldn’t do that.”
There was no doubt in her voice, not a thread. For a strange, exhausted moment I envied them both, her and Conor Brennan. Just about everything in this life is treacherous, ready to twist and shape-shift at any second; it seemed to me that the whole world would be a different place if you had someone you were certain of, certain to the bone, or if you could be that to someone else. I know husbands and wives who are that to each other. I know partners.
Fiona said, “At first I thought you were making it up, but I’m mostly pretty good at telling when people are lying. So I tried to think why Conor would say that. Probably he’d have done it to protect Pat, to keep him out of jail; but Pat was dead. That left Jenny.”
I heard the small, painful sound of her swallowing. “So,” she said, “I knew.”
“That’s why you didn’t tell Jenny that Conor had been arrested.”
“Yeah. I didn’t know what she’d do-if she’d try to own up, if she’d freak out and have a relapse or something…”
I said, “You were sure she was guilty, straightaway. You were positive Conor would never do this, but you didn’t feel the same way about your own sister.”
“You think I should have.”
“I don’t know what you should have thought,” I said. Rule Number Something: suspects and witnesses need to believe you’re omniscient; you never let them see you being anything other than sure. I couldn’t remember, any more, why it mattered. “I’m just wondering what made the difference.”
