Colum McCann - Let the Great World Spin

He reached into his pocket and took out the keyring with the pictures of the babies, handed it to Jazzlyn’s mother. She stared at it, smiled, then suddenly pulled away and slapped Ciaran’s face. He looked like he was grateful for it. One of the cops half grinned. Ciaran nodded and pursed his lips, then stepped backward toward me.

I had no idea what sort of complications I had stepped myself into.

The preacher coughed and asked for silence and said he had a few final words. He went through the formalities of prayer and the old biblical Ashes to ashes and dust to dust , but then he said that it was his firm belief that ashes could someday return to wood, that was the miracle not just of heaven, but the miracle of the actual world, that things could be reconstituted and the dead could come alive, most especially in our hearts, and that’s how he’d like to end things, and it was time to lay Jazzlyn to rest because that’s what he wanted her to do, rest.

When the service was ended the cops put the handcuffs back on Tillie’s wrists. She wailed just one single time. The cops walked her off. She broke down into soundless sobs.

I accompanied Ciaran out of the cemetery. He took off his jacket and hung it over his shoulder, not nonchalantly, but to beat the heat. We went down the pathway toward the gates on Lafayette Avenue. Ciaran walked a quarter of a step in front of me. People can look different from hour to hour depending on the angle of daylight. He was older than me, in his mid-thirties or so, but he looked younger a moment, and I felt protective of him, the soft walk, the little bit of jowliness to him, the roll of tubbiness at his waist. He stopped and watched a squirrel climb over a large tombstone. It was one of those moments when everything is out of balance, I suppose, and just watching an odd thing seems to make sense. The squirrel scampered up a tree trunk, the sound of its nails like water in a tub.

— Why was she in handcuffs?

— She got eight months or something. For a robbery charge on top of the prostitution.

— So they only let her out for the funeral?

— Yeah, from what I can gather.

There was nothing to say. The preacher had already said it. We walked out the gates and turned together in the same direction, toward the expressway, but he stopped and went to shake my hand.

— I’ll give you a lift home, I said.

— Home? he said, with a half-laugh. Can your car swim?

— Sorry?

— Nothing, he said, shaking his head.

We went down along Quincy, where I had parked the car. I suppose he knew it the minute he saw the Pontiac. It was parked with its front facing us. One wheel was up on the curb. The smashed headlight was apparent and the fender dented. He stopped a moment in the middle of the road, half nodded, as if it all made sense to him now. His face fell in upon itself, like a sandcastle in time lapse. I found myself shaking as I got into the driver’s side, leaned across to open up the passenger door.

— This is the car, isn’t it?

I sat a long time, running my fingers over the dashboard, dusty with pollen.

— It was an accident, I said.

— This is the car, he repeated.

— I didn’t mean to do it. We didn’t mean for it to happen.

— We? he said.

I sounded exactly like Blaine, I knew. All I was doing was holding my hand up against the guilt. Avoiding the failure, the drugs, the recklessness. I felt so foolish and inadequate. It was as if I had burned the whole house down and was searching through the rubble for bits of how it used to be, but found only the match that had sparked it all. I was clawing around frantically, looking for any justification. And yet there was still another part of me that thought perhaps I was being honest, or as honest as I could get, having left the scene of the crime, having run away from the truth. Blaine had said that things just happen. It was a pathetic logic, but it was, at its core, true. Things happen. We had not wanted them to happen. They had arisen out of the ashes of chance.

I kept cleaning the dashboard, rubbing the dust and pollen on the leg of my jeans. The mind always seeks another, simpler place, less weighted. I wanted to rev the engine alive and drive into the nearest river. What could have been a simple touch of the brakes, or a minuscule swerve, had become unfathomable. I needed to be airborne. I wanted to be one of those animals that needed to fly in order to eat.

— You don’t work for the hospital at all, then?

— No.

— Were you driving it? The car?

— Was I what?

— Were you driving it or not?

— I guess I was.

It was the only lie I’ve ever told that has made any sense to me. There was the faint crackle of something between us: cars as bodies, crashing.

Ciaran sat, staring straight ahead through the windshield. A little sound came from him that was closer to a laugh than anything else. He rolled the window up and down, ran his fingers along the ledge, then tapped the glass with his knuckles, like he was figuring a means of escape.

— I’m going to say one thing, he said.

I felt the glass was being tapped all around me: soon it would splinter and crumble.

— One thing, that’s all.

— Please, I said.

— You should have stopped.

He thumped the dashboard with the heel of his hand. I wanted him to curse me, to damn me from a height, for trying to calm my own conscience, for lying, for letting me get away with it, for appearing at his brother’s apartment. A further part of me wanted him to actually turn and hit me, really hit me, draw blood, hurt me, ruin me.

— Right, he said. I’m gone.

He had his hand on the handle. He pushed the door open with his shoulder and stepped partly out, then closed it again, leaned back in the seat, exhausted.

— You should’ve fucking stopped. Why didn’t you?

Another car pulled into the gap in front of us to parallel-park, a big blue Oldsmobile with silver fins. We sat silently watching it trying to maneuver into the space between us and the car in front. It had just enough room. It angled in, then pulled out, then angled back in again. We watched it like it was the most important thing in the world. Not a movement between us. The driver leaned over his shoulder and cranked the wheel. Just before he put it in park he reversed once more and gently touched against the grille of my car. We heard a tinkle: the last of the glass left in the broken headlight. The driver jumped out, his arms held high in surrender, but I waved him away. He was an owl-faced creature, with spectacles, and the surprise of it made his face half comic. He hurried off down the road, looking over his shoulder as if to make sure.

— I don’t know, I said. I just don’t know. There’s no explanation. I was scared. I’m sorry. I can’t say it enough.

— Shit, he said.

He lit a cigarette, cracked the window slightly and blew smoke sideways out of his mouth, then looked away.

— Listen, he said finally. I need to get away from here. Just drop me off.

— Where?

— I don’t know. You want to go for a coffee somewhere? A drink?

Both of us were flummoxed by what was traveling between us. I had witnessed the death of his brother. Smashed that life shut. I didn’t say a word, just nodded and put the car in gear, squeezed it out of the gap, pulled out into the empty road. A quiet drink in a dark bar was not the worst of fates.

Later that night, when I got home — if home was what I could call it anymore — I went swimming. The water was murky and full of odd plants. Strange leaves and tendrils. The stars looked like nail heads in the sky — pull a few of them out and the darkness would fall. Blaine had completed a couple of paintings and had set them up around the lake in various parts of the forest and around the water edge. A doubt had kicked in, as if he knew it was a stupid idea, but still wanted to experiment with it.