Thirteen Ways of Looking

Treaty

1

She is falling, ever so faintly, into age. It is not the slowness of rising in the morning, or the weariness of eyesight, or the chest pains that appear with more and more regularity, but the brittleness of memory that disturbs her now — how the past can glide away so easily, how the present can drift, how they sometimes collide — so that when she sees her torturer on television, she is not sure if her imagination is playing tricks, or if he has simply sifted through the sandbox of memory, slid headlong down the channel of thirty-seven years to tease her into a terrible mistake, or if it is truly him, appearing now on the late Spanish-language news, casual, handsome, controlled.

A crisp blue shirt with an open neck. His teeth white against the dark of his skin. A poised offhandedness to the manner in which he holds himself, at a conference, with several others, a row of microphones set up in front of them.

His appearance is so sudden at the tail end of the news that she pulls back sharply in her armchair, startling the two other Sisters on the couch.

Beverly holds her hand in the air to reassure them: All right, sorry, only me, go back to sleep.

She leans to turn up the volume on the remote but his image is gone, the report tailing off, a young blonde reporter staring confidently into the camera. A shot from along the river Thames. How is that possible? Perhaps she has garbled the images, confused the reports? The geography alone is too dizzying to contemplate.

The slippages of memory have happened so much recently. Mangled sentences, mislaid keys, forgotten names. Rainshowers of words, then drought. Only last week, she got lost on a walk along the beach in the bay, took the wrong path out of the dunes, the wind whipping the grass around her feet. Three miles from the house, she had to ask someone to phone a cab. Even then she couldn’t remember the exact address.

Too many uncertainties, so that even the absolute certainties — the day of the week, the tie of a shoelace, the rhythm of a prayer — have been called into question. And yet there’s something about the man’s face — if only for a split second — that sluices a sense of ice along the tunnel of her spine. The one brief close-up. The way he held himself on the screen, amidst a line of dignitaries. What was it exactly? The peculiar poise that age had brought upon him? The access to the microphones? The flagrant manner of his reappearance? The single quick close-up?

Her torturer. Her abuser. Her rapist.

—

IN THE HALF-MOONLIGHT AT the back of the house, Beverly reaches into her cardigan pocket for her lighter.

She is the only smoker amongst the Sisters. An ancient habit from her childhood in Ireland, she has carried it with her all these years: Belgium, Marseilles, Colombia, Saint Louis, Baltimore, the girls’ home in Houston, and now the southern shore of Long Island.

A quiet getaway, she was told. A retreat for a month or two. Fresh sea air. A time for repose. But she had felt the doom of it all: seventy-six years old, arriving with a single suitcase to a place of final worship.

She taps a cigarette, rolls the flint on the lighter, inhales deeply. The smoke is dizzying. Already the tin coffee can is a quarter full of ash and butts. Her fellow Sisters have grown to tolerate her weakness, even grudgingly admire it, the tall, thin Irish nun with her maverick routine of aloneness.

She watches the cold and the smoke together shape the air. Behind her, the lights in the house flicker off, one by one, the other Sisters off to their prayers.

The trees stand stark against the sky. It is fall, or autumn: sometimes she loses track of which word belongs where. Small matter, it is that time of year when the dark descends early.

She smokes her second cigarette and scrunches it out in the grass at her feet, leans down, searches among the cold blades for the filter, drops it in the hanging coffee can.

That was him. It was most certainly him.

A gust of wind shuts the screen door sharply behind her. She reaches out her arms like someone recently blind. The darkness more visible as her eyes adjust.

In the living room she pauses at the large digital television. A row of lights shine from the contraptions underneath: a cable box, a DVD player. She slips her hand along the edge of the television but can find no buttons. She fumbles in the dark for the remote, bumps against the side of the coffee table. A musty smell rises from the carpet. A dropped spoon. A fallen newspaper.

Only then does she think to strike her lighter.

In the bright flare she spies the head of the remote slipped down between the sofa cushions. A row of menu items, HDM1, HDM2, PC. One needs to be a nuclear engineer these days just to bring a machine to life. She clicks through. Vampires. Baseball. Cop shows. She is tempted, for a moment, to remain with the Mormon wives.

There are three Spanish-language channels all in close proximity to one another. Surely, at some stage during the night, there will be a repeat. She pulls a cushion tight against her stomach. The digital clock flickers. There is, she knows, a way to record the show, even to freeze the screen — one of the Sisters did it last week during a CBS special on the Shroud — but she might lose the image altogether.

When the report finally comes on, she slides off the couch, onto the floor, sits close to the television. London. A series of peace talks. Representatives from all sides gathering together. An array of microphones set up on a table. A line of five men, two women.

The hairs along her arm bristle: Please, Lord, let it not be him.

The words tangle and braid. Guerilla, peace accord, land rights, low-level talks, reconciliation, treaty.

Then it is him. For three short seconds. She reaches her hand toward his face, recoils. His heavy-lidded eyes. His pixelated mouth. He is close-shaven, sharp, his hair neatly cut. He is a little heavier, more compact. He does not speak, but there is no mistake. He has taken on the aura of a diplomat.

She sits back against the couch, fumbles for her cigarettes. Make Yourself present, Lord. Come to my aid.

When he slapped her face, he would call her puta. In the jungle cage he pulled back her hair, yanked it so hard that her neck felt as if it would snap. A whisper. In her ear. As if he himself couldn’t afford to hear the words. Pendeja. In the safe house where she was taken for four weeks, in the white room where she watched the caterpillars crawl along the cracks in the walls, he would read to her aloud from the newspaper before he yanked open her blouse and bit her breast until it bled.

—

SHE IS WOKEN IN the early morning by Sister Anne who sits quietly at the side of the bed. The curtains have been slightly parted.

She pulls back the bed covers, swings her legs out, fumbles for her slippers. She can tell by the angle of light that she has missed morning prayer.

— I overslept. I’m so sorry.

— There’s something we must talk about, Beverly.

— Of course.

Sister Anne is a woman who has aged gracefully apart from a shallow set of accordion lines that seem to hurry toward her cheekbones, giving her a vaguely scattershot look.

— By the television, she says. Last night.

It takes Beverly a moment for the evening to return, as if from one of those ancient sets she knew as a child in Galway, a quick flare of light and then a slow bromiding outward. The recollection of his face. The chill that ripped along her body. The manner in which he was constructed, square upon digital square, all the new edges to him.

— I think I must have woken from, I might, I may have been dreaming.

— Well, it’s unfortunate, but I’m afraid I’m going to have to ask you to stop.

— Of course.

She is unsure of what it is that she must stop. The house is meant as a retreat. None of the Sisters have been told of her background, only that she lived in South America once, that she has come from Houston, that she is suffering exhaustion, she is here to rediscover sleep, that is all.

What she needs now is to get beyond the first bruised moments of waking. To make her bed, to take a shower, to say her dailies.

Sister Anne rises from the chair and only then does Beverly notice that she has brought her a cup of coffee and a biscuit on a saucer. The small mercies.

— Thank you.

Sister Anne turns at the door, haloed in fluorescence from the hallway, and says gently: There will be no need to pay for it, of course.

— Pay for it?

— There are, Beverly, two cigarette burns in the carpet.

—

AT THE HOME IN HOUSTON the girls had been surprised to find a nun they could smoke with. They thought her so tall. Sister Stretch. The home was set up next to a clinic. Theirs was an open-door policy. The girls came and went. The corridors hummed. Mornings in the kitchen, afternoons in the counseling room, evenings out combing streets of half-lamplight: Hermann Park, Montrose, Sunnyside, Hiram Clarke, the Fifth Ward. Whole nights spent awake in the convent house. The protests outside. The shouting. The placards. The bullhorns. She and her Sisters were condemned from the pulpit. Radicals, dissenters. They never thought themselves anything of the sort. It was simply a home, a place for the girls to stay. She counseled them. Children with children. She made no political stance. Abortion, pro-life, anti-woman. The words did not concern her. The language seemed designed to only merchandise flesh. She wanted to be mute in everything but action. To give a shoulder. To take an elbow. To feel her feet strike the ground. She worked late into the night. She listened in church to the priest railing against her, his voice high and indignant. She bowed her head. She accepted the invective. She still took the sacrament. On principle, she never escorted the girls to the clinic, but she watched them go and collected them afterward, took their arms, walked them through the gauntlet. Sometimes the same girls returned, just months later, bearing children once more. Exhaustion got her. Three times she collapsed in the community room. They found her eventually in the chapel, slumped over, a trickle of blood from her nose. She was shocked when, in the downtown hospital, a nurse showed her a mirror: the darkness beneath her eyes looked tattooed in. The emergency-room doctors had mistaken her, at first, as homeless. They ripped off her clothes. She struggled to pull the sheet back across. What perplexed them were the scars on her breasts, how she hid them, the hard jagged lines, their peculiar tracery.

—

THE WIND RIPPLES THE dune grass. She wears a long blue skirt, a dark cardigan, an orange windbreaker. Lay clothes, always. She has not, for forty years, worn any formal clothing, just the simple wooden cross beneath her blouse.

A clean, plain silence rolls along the shore, made cleaner and plainer still by the occasional screech of gulls. It seems to her that some vast hand lies behind the dunes flinging the birds in patterns out over the Atlantic. Far out on the horizon, a tanker disappears from view, as if dropping off the edge of the sea.

Beverly has crumpled her last cigarettes in the cardigan pocket. She likes the feel of the grains, the fall of them from her fingers, sprinkling them now in the cold sand. She cannot remember a time, even in captivity in the jungle, when she went without cigarettes. She places a few grains of tobacco upon her tongue. Raw. Bitter. They will be of no comfort. What was it about his appearance that had corralled her so easily? Why had she stayed up so late with the other Sisters? Why had she watched the Spanish-language news? The odd little magpie of the mind. Nothing is finally finished, then? The past emerges and re-emerges. It builds its random nest in the oddest places.

She struggled for so many years with absolution, the depth of her vows, poverty, chastity, obedience. Working with doctors, experts, theologians to unravel what had happened. Every day she went to the chapel to beseech and pray. Hundreds of hours trying to get to the core of it, understand it, pick it apart. Forgiveness for herself first, they told her. In order, then, to forgive him. Without hubris, without false charity. Therapy sessions, physical exams, spiritual direction, prayer. The embrace of Christ’s agony. The abandonment at the hour. Opening herself to compassion. Trying to put it behind her with the mercy of time. The days slipping by. Small rooms. Long hours. The curtains opening and closing. The disappearance of light. The blackened mirrors. The days spent weeping. The guilt. She sheared her hair. Swept the rosary beads off the bedside table. Took baths fully clothed. No burning bush, no pillar of light. More a pail of acid into which she wanted to dissolve. And here he is, back now, once more. Or perhaps she has simply dreamt it? One of those momentary aftershocks, rippling under the surface? A small pulse of the wound where there used to be a throb?

They had told her, years ago, that it might happen. In Saint Louis, in the convent hospital, along the dark waters of the Mississippi. The anger. The shame. The false pride. The disgrace. It would return. She built up a wall of prayer. Neither life nor death, nothing can separate me from Your love and mercy. If I pass through raging waters in the sea, Lord, I shall not drown. She repeated the prayers over and over. Stone upon stone. A finished wall. Yet why is it now that she has allowed him to scale it? He is, after all, only a man on television, the image of an image. But so well dressed. So poised. So public. What right does he have to talk about peace? What had he done to achieve such grace?

Back along the roadway, she passes a deckchair left over from the summer, its innards fluttering in the wind. The sand blows in swirled patterns on the footpath. She pulls the padded hood up around her face, reaches up and presses the bridge of her nose between her fingers.

A two-mile walk back to the convent house. She has, at least, a sturdy pair of shoes.

Flip-flops. Made from car tires. Slapping against the soles of her feet. She was dragged from the jeep. Blindfolded, driven away. Rushed down a mud road. A clearing in the bamboo. On the first night her feet swelled with insect bites. By the second night, they had bled and festered. Eventually they gave her rubber boots for the marches. Always on the move. From one clearing in the jungle to the next. They thought her first a human-rights worker. She wore lay clothes. She worked alone. Word filtered out on the radio: she was a Maryknoll, a nun. He didn’t believe it. He ripped the wooden cross from her neck. She said nothing. Other nuns had been shot. She was nothing special. He spat when she prayed. He was so young then. No more than twenty-three, twenty-four. Already a commander and the hatred had hardened in him, but she thought for sure that she could find some point of tenderness. She used to imagine dropping her words behind his eyes to find a soft point, in his memory, some prayer, some word, something maternal she could jolt from him. He knew none of the rhythms of prayers: he had grown up without them. No nursery rhymes. Only the right-wing paramilitary songs, none of which she knew. She would somehow reach him, she was sure of it — but he remained aloof, absent. Even when there were others alongside her in captivity, aid workers, radicals, professors, and once, for a few days, a left-wing senatorial candidate. Five months in the jungle, four weeks in a safe house — six months in all. His ability to stare. That thousand-yard remove. He had a mole on his cheek. Was it still there? Last night she had reached out and touched the ghost of his face, the television static. Surely she would have noted the absence of the mole. Why had she not thought of it before? Why hadn’t she recorded the program? She could have destroyed it, rid herself of him. What have I done? Forgive me, Lord.

Once he took off his bandana and stuffed it in her mouth to stop her from making noise, so that toward the end she just lay there, compliant, a vague freedom in the shame, the thought of elsewhere, the west of Ireland, the stone walls, the rain permanent across the fields, her mother’s face, flushed with disgrace, the shape of her father moving out into the laneway, her brother walking down the road, away from her, that childhood, gone, a bead of his sweat dripping down on the bridge of her nose, puta, he pushed her head down against the dirt, puta, the sound of his voice, quiet and controlled, puta.

She is startled by the toot of a horn behind her and the hiss of car tires. It has begun to gently drizzle.

— Coming home?

As if in synch, Sister Anne and Sister Yun lean toward her, earnest, expectant. Such an odd word, home. She finds herself trying to speak, but the words are lodged inside her somehow, not so much in her throat but in the hollow of her stomach, and when she responds she is startled by the rise of the sounds through her: Sí, gracias, a casa, es un poco frío, so incongruent and displaced, she has no idea how she has lapsed so easily into Spanish, how she has allowed him so immediately back into her life, when she was sure that he had died, or faded into the jungle again, or disappeared.

Carlos had escaped. Rumors of death squads, retribution. She kept up on the news in sporadic bursts, but she never allowed it to slip under her skin, not since Saint Louis anyway. After that, a shelter in Baltimore, then the girls’ home in Houston. Deeper wounds, other lives. The life of a Maryknoll. There were some over the years who had tried to make of her a heroine, a figurehead, a political autograph, and she knew that they whispered behind her back, of book deals, movie contracts. Even her brother in England had wanted to make a radio documentary, but she preferred to think of other things, life in the village before she was captured, the volume of blue sky, the children in the schoolhouse, the fall of rain on the tin roof, the dust rising from the dirt floor of her shack, the yellow barrel at the back of the classroom, the wooden ladle dipping for rainwater, the stick of chalk in her cigarette box, the faulty carburetor in the jeep, she was always trying to fix it, she leaned across the engine, the chalk dissolving in the rain.

— 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, like the frame of a painting thrown onto the ground. She finishes the cigarette in three hard draws.

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, can’t help you there.

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.

She wishes a moment to be back again with the girls in Houston. To conjure a safe place out of nothing. To return to the known, the benign, the easy. To stand with them at the back entrance. Sister Stretch. Perching on the back steps, smoking. Kneeling in the small basement chapel alongside her Sisters. Or even the simplicity of the convent house on Long Island. To walk along the beach and watch the gulls drawn through the dawn. Sister Anne. Sister Camille. The other Sister, the Argentinian, she cannot recall her name, what was it?

At the traffic light on Vauxhall Bridge Road, she pauses. It catches then, and she remembers: John Islip Street.

—

HE HAS GAINED A small paunch and his eyes are puffy as if sleep has eluded him for a while now, but he is still tall and elegant and silver-haired, the sort of man who insists on a tie even while alone in the late afternoon.

— Bev, he says.

Her childhood name. It reminds her of the stone bridge over the river in Oughterard, the water running quick and shallow and light-veined beneath her.

— What in the world are you doing here?

He reaches immediately for her suitcase. She stands a moment on the precipice of the apartment. The river ran swiftly west. Copper-colored in summertime. Fly-fishermen stood at the bend where the oak trees bowed. A low plain of red sky cupped over them.

He takes her arm and guides her toward the living room. An ancient coat of books on the walls: novels, photography collections, advance reading copies, poetry. Stacks of them piled every which way on the floor.

He sweeps five or six books from the lumpy brown couch. They skitter across the carpet to meet their fellows.

— Collision, she says.

Ian takes her hand. His fingers feel cold to the touch. What is it that he fills his days with now? What gives him pause? What, apart from books, jostles his mind? Even from a young age he never really believed in God, or ideas of poverty, purity, piety. There were times, in recent years, on the phone, that he railed against the Catholic Church. The abuse. The scandals. The Magdalene Laundries. The deceitful morass of bureaucracy. The lives bought, he said, on the condition of the buyer’s ignorance. She knew the flaws, the awful shame, the flagrant greed. She had no need to defend it, to protest. She, too, had doubted the Church — more deeply, perhaps, than her brother could ever have known. Not so much in the jungle, but afterward, in the crisp sheets of the Saint Louis hospital, where she admitted the terror, as if it had been set on delay. What was it that she herself had desired? What mirror had He thrust at her? There were days that the blame hit her with such force she could hardly stand. She told herself it was her fault: her body, her mind, her failure. She had enticed him. Asked for it. Deserved it. The days withheld their light. Her mind was an empty seed. The despair swelled in the husk of dark.

— Are you okay? What happened? Bev? You said collision.

— I did?

— I’ll make tea. I’ll get you a cup of tea.

— I’d like that, yes.

The rattle of teacups. He pokes his head around the corner.

— I’ll be right there, he says, don’t fall asleep.

She hears, then, the high whistle of the kettle and the soft sigh of the fridge door.

On one bookshelf stands a photograph of their parents sitting on the front bumper of an ancient motorcar, the large white headlights, the curved panels, the air horn. An impossible era. They stand remote from her, more photograph than memory. Somewhere, deep in the apartment, she hears a voice, and then a burst of classical music. A radio piano.

Ian enters the room and carefully places the tray down on the table. Two china cups, a plate of biscuits, a teapot in a cozy. He is still a man of the ancient ways. He was married once, long ago, to a woman from Scotland, but they never had children. A woman of short hair and spectacles. A psycholinguist. They divorced. Ian had been afraid to tell Beverly at first. What was her name again? These words escaping, like slow punctured air from her lungs.

He pours the tea through a small metal strainer and holds the jug of milk up as if to measure not just her preference, but her demeanor.

— I think I might be forgetting things, Ian.

— Oh, God, no.

— It’s not Alzheimer’s, not that.

She pauses with the teacup at her mouth: Or, rather, not forgetting. I’m not sure what to say. It’s a sort of remembering, I suppose.

— Whatever do you mean?

— He came back, you know.

— Who came back, Bev?

A curtain opens up on her brother’s face, then, when she tells him: the exhaustion in Houston, the move to Long Island, the appearance on the television, the confusion, the doubt, the night on the stairs with Sister Anne, the constant return of Carlos’s face as she walked along the beach, how he was a man of peace now, it rattled her, she could not shake it, she had to come see him, she had to see if perhaps it was true, is it possible to find peace when all along you have sought to destroy it, how is it that a man can change so entirely, where did the shift within him occur, what was the word she was looking for, reconciliation?

— And now he’s at some peace conference?

— An institute, yes.

— And you want to see him?

— I don’t even know for sure if it’s him.

The quick flit of Ian’s eyes: green, same as her own. A brother, then. Perhaps that is it? Perhaps Carlos had a brother? A cousin? She has never even entertained the notion. A twin even. The panic claws her throat. What if it’s the simplest error of all and there is someone identical? An exact duplicate who is, in fact, the opposite?

Ian picks a biscuit from the plate, bites down softly, and lets it dissolve on his tongue.

— What day is it today?

— Sunday of course.

A sharp breath escapes her: Oh, I missed mass. The first time in my life. I missed mass, Ian. I can’t believe I missed it.

— You’ve been traveling.

— I’m tired, Ian. So very, very tired.

She lifts the saucer toward the teacup to calm the shake in her hands.

— I’m sure there’s some sort of dispensation, isn’t there? Isn’t there some sort of Catholic word?

He toes around in his books as if he might find the word in the mess on the floor.

— Indulgence, he says, snapping his fingers. Isn’t that it? Indulgence?

—

SHE WAKES IN HIS BED: she has never once slept in a double bed before. An indulgence, yes. She stumbles, fully clothed, to the window, parts the blinds to the yellow streetlight. A sheen of wet on the ground. The light skids in patches along the footpath. She hears the laughter of two young women, tottering arm in arm down the street. A black taxi cab trawls slowly through the rain. Monday morning. A plenary indulgence.

In the corridor she hears the whirr of a computer printer. A light leaks out from a gap in the living-room door. Through the gap she sees Ian caught in a blue light, books scattered around him, bent into whatever work is at hand.

She returns to her room, kneels at the bed for her morning lauds. For the needs of those who are confused. For the needs of those who are without hope. For the needs of those who have no one to pray for them.

It is still dark when she hears the clatter of cutlery and the whistle of the kettle. He sits bleary-eyed at the breakfast table.

— For you, he says, guiding a file across the Formica table.

She fingers the sharp edge of the folder, then turns to the first page. Ian has printed out all the information he can find from the Internet. Three pictures of Carlos, one a headshot, one with government ministers, one taken outside the Institute for Peace.

— His name is Euclides Largo. I mean, that’s what he calls himself.

— Euclides.

— Fifty-nine years old. He’s with a small left-wing party.

— That can’t be.

— I’ve been researching all night. They’ve a lot of support in the countryside, it seems. They’re left wing.

— But he’s right wing. I mean that’s…

— Go figure.

— Are they Catholic, his party?

— They don’t seem — I don’t know, I don’t think so. Who knows? I’m sorry, Bev. All I can tell is that he’s moved up through the ranks over the years.

A surge of bitterness at the base of her spine.

— He was a lawyer before he got into politics. His main thrust is coal mining. He represents the miners. Copper deposits, corporate access to the mines, that sort of thing. He makes his argument for peace on the basis of economics.

She drags the file a little closer and runs her fingers along the edge of his photograph. She has a sudden urge for a cigarette: she has not craved one in days.

To smoke, to cough, to burn and disappear.

— It’s him.

— Are you sure?

She is pierced by the thought that it is all a delusion stacked against her faith, a test of her ability to believe.

— Sure as God, she says.

— You could go to the newspapers.

— And what?

— I can call some friends at the radio station. The embassy. You should call the embassy—

— And say what?

— He raped you, Bev.

— Thirty-seven years ago.

A trapezoid of morning light crosses the kitchen floor. She hears a shout from farther along the street and a blast of laughter, then the smash of a bottle on the pavement: so early, so late.

Ian rises to the kitchen window to part the curtains to look down the length of the street.

— Hooligans, he says.

He waits at the curtains, opening and closing them as if there is some Morse code that he might reveal to the street below.

— You don’t still smoke, do you? she asks.

He shuffles into the living room, returns moments later with a small blue bag of tobacco and rolling papers. He fumbles with the paper, licks the edge, smooths it down, passes her the roll-up, takes a box of matches from the kitchen drawer. The smell of sulfur jags her awake.

—

IT IS A FOUR-STORY townhouse fronted by a black ironwork fence, on the eastern side of the river. The walls of the Institute look recently painted, perfectly white. Flowerpots in the windowsills with red flowers, hydrangeas. A large brass plate on the wall. She had expected something grander, more surprising. Nobody gathered outside. No mothers with placards. No cameras or waiting limousines.

A feeble rain drizzles down. She stands at the curb and looks up to see the dark outline of a lamp in the front window. The vague shadows of figures crossing and recrossing the room. It strikes her as a place more of silence than peace. She is at the door before she even catches herself. Her hand on the intercom button. The buzzer sounds. She glances up at the security camera. A silence and then a second buzzing. Longer, more insistent, impatient even.

— Can I help you?

What vanity brought me here, what conceit? She sees a shape in the window, someone looking out at her.

— Sorry, she says into the intercom.

She turns her face into her damp headscarf, descends the steps, walks quickly away, an old woman, the cost weighed in every tendon.

At a corner sandwich shop, she stops. Newspapers on a rack outside. An Irish paper too: she has not seen one in many years. The red light of a camera blinks as she steps inside. She buys the paper and a coffee, sits at the counter to read.

From a distance she watches the front of the Institute, the quiet comings and goings, the shapes of shapes.

The hours drift. The shop is quiet. She scans the paper, even the sports pages, but cannot recall a single word of what she has read.

In the late afternoon she stops at the church in Westminster. From his accent the priest is young, African. Formal. Correct. Mannered. Even in the darkness she can tell he is one who stiffens his collar. She has, she says, failed in the most ordinary way to embrace forgiveness. She has lied about her whereabouts to others. She has failed His grace. She has spent her time in sloth. She has not sought out her fellow Sisters in London, nor any solace from her family within the Church. She has missed her duties: mass, prayer, the holy sacrament. She is unsure now if any of her service is toward the Lord.

It is, in the end, she thinks, the shallowest of confessions: all of the truth, none of the honesty.

After penance, she wanders out into the city, along the Thames. The river sweeps by, turbulent and bulging, but without sound.

In Ian’s apartment she moves out from his room, allows him his double bed. She takes a blanket to the couch. She sleeps, surrounded by books.

—

BEVERLY REPEATS THE RITUAL three days in a row, standing outside the Institute, waiting, watching, shuffling away, her headscarf pulled tight. In the sandwich shop she sits on a swivel stool at the counter, from which she can see through the window the length of the street. Always a flurry of activity in the morning. Black cars. A series of shapes hustling up the steps. The lights inside flickering on and off. At lunchtime, too, the men and women coming down the steps. From a distance any number of them could be him. In the evening, when the dark descends, it is harder to tell, the street shiny with rain, the lamplight carrying the shapes away.

It seems to her that she could sit here for seasons on end: watching the street leaf and unleaf itself.

Decades ago, in Bogotá, there had been a time when she waited for a bus to return her to the village. She remained in the station for two and a half days. Diesel fumes. The screech of brakes. She sat on a wooden bench, clutching her ticket. She had not eaten and carried only a small flask of water. She read from the scriptures. Peter the Apostle. Manacled to that same post. The Mamertine.

On the fifth day she sees him.

It is late afternoon. She sits in the corner of the shop, her hands curled around a cold coffee cup. The newspaper is spread out in front of her. The headlines of a foreign country. The shop is quiet, monitored by the series of cameras set up high around the corners.

She is about to finish her coffee and return to Ian’s apartment when the bell sounds out on the door.

A gust of cold wind. The small hint of a cough. She bends forward and grips the counter. He glides past her. It takes a moment to even realize that it is him. The back of his hair is perfectly combed. His suit is rumpled but smart. There is a click from the heels of his shoes. At the fridge he takes out a cold coffee drink. He has, under his arm, a Spanish-language paper. Why did she not see him walking along the street? Where has he appeared from? He says something, she is sure, to the Pakistani shopkeeper: she cannot quite hear. He drops a coin in the small tray at the side of the register.

She removes her dark cardigan, folds it in her lap, swivels on the chair, places her hands in the well of her skirt, watches him in the shop-window reflection, all of him reversed, right to left.

A smell of aftershave rolls from him as he passes. Is it enough to have seen him? To just be here? I should allow myself, in the obedience of faith, to be used by God’s love. Make of myself a prayerful absence.

She reaches out to tug the side of his jacket. The flap end, close to his hip. The cloth feels so terribly expensive.

He turns. A surge of heat pulses through her. A bristling of the hair on her arms. World without end. The mole on his cheek. The tilt of his eye.

— Euclides Largo?

— Yes?

She can tell straight away that he has become the sort of man who is happy to be recognized. His skin has grown lighter, as if he has come indoors, drawn the curtains on that other life. He arches an eyebrow, reaches out a political hand. She does not take it. She grips her cardigan instead. No language at all. To bless him now, to forgive him, to let him go on his way?

— You’re at the Institute?

— Yes.

— I saw you on television. Spanish language. In New York.

— A wonderful city.

He favors the door a moment, glances outside, but then turns: And you are…?

— I’m just — an interested observer.

He leans back as if to put her in focus.

— Journalist?

— I’m far too old to be interested in journalism. I’m just watching from a distance, Mr. Largo.

— But you speak Spanish?

— Just a little.

He peels back the cellophane tab from the lid of the drink, taps the bottom of the container against the heel of his hand. It strikes her that he wears no rings on his fingers. No marriage, then, no children.

A tightness cramps her chest when he brings the coffee to his mouth. She lets out a small sound: something trapped, hidden. He nods as if about to leave, but she leans forward on the stool. Am I supposed to directly bestow my forgiveness, Lord? Am I to reconcile with evil? Is that what is being asked of me? Is that what You demand after all these years? Apokatastasis panton. The restoral of all things. To what, then, shall I be restored? Is there no wisdom? Is that what I have to learn? That there is finally none at all?

It has, she notices, begun to rain outside, a steady patter against the window.

She speaks slowly, the words emerging, small stones of sound: The television said you’re working at the draft of a treaty?

— We are.

— You’re aligned with the miners?

— And their families, sí. We’re struggling, but we are, how you say, we are getting along, bit and bit. We’ll have a statement—

— Poco a poco.

— So, you do speak Spanish?

— It’s coming back to me. And your English? It’s good now.

— Excuse me?

— Your English is good now, Carlos.

She stands. She is a full head taller than him. Still she does not offer her hand.

— Excuse me?

— It’s good, Carlos. Your English.

— Euclides, he says. Largo.

— Sister Beverly Clarke, she says.

He glances over his shoulder toward a waiting car outside, a small fan of smoke rising from its exhaust, the rain bouncing off the roof. Two young boys enter the shop: when they remove their hoods one of them looks remarkably to her like the boy who played the piano in Victoria Station.

— You’ve become a man of peace, Carlos.

— I’m not sure — excuse me — I think you’ve maybe mistaken me—

— I don’t think so.

— You must excuse me. I have a car waiting.

It strikes her how ordinary and extraordinary both, then, this moment, a street-corner shop, the rain, a London sidestreet, her rapist, thirty-seven years ago, the sound of a distant piano, a pigeon flapping through a railway station, her brother, the books on the floor, a collision, that ancient river in Galway where she made her decision to join the Church, so young then, the way the light shone even on the underside of the bridge, bouncing up from the copper-colored Owenriff.

— I’m not here to hurt you, Carlos. You have more important things to do. I’m not here to ruin what you are doing.

— What is it you said your name was again?

— Sister Beverly Clarke.

— Well, Sister Beverly Clarke, it’s a pleasure to meet you, but I think you’ve mistaken me—

— But I’d like to know how you achieved it.

— I’m afraid you’re wasting your time.

— Where did you find it, Carlos? That grace?

— Encantado. Let me go. My jacket. You’re holding my jacket.

Beverly is surprised to feel the tug in her fingers, that it is true, she has brought him closer, that there is the faint smell of coffee from his breath, that she has bridged this space, caught him so unaware.

She lets go of him, hears the high ping of the cash register and the fumble for money, a laugh from one of the young boys as they leave the shop.

— Do you recognize me?

— Por supuesto no le…

She touches the top button on her blouse, opens it. He steps back, attempts an ease into his face.

— Are you sure, Carlos?

— No me llame Carlos.

— I’m interested in what it means to you. When you sit there and you talk about peace?

A second button, the necklace at her fingers. The shopkeeper has not moved, his dark hands spread wide on the countertop.

— I would be happy to talk to you in my office, Miss—

— Sister Beverly.

— You could arrange it with my secretary.

— You’re doing good work, Carlos.

— Stop it.

— I’m not going to harm that.

He leans toward her: No sé quién diablo eres, tu.

She opens the third button on her blouse, her flesh cold to the touch. He turns, panicked, toward the shopkeeper, then glances back to Beverly.

— No puedes hacer esto.

— It healed, see?

— Soltame.

No embarrassment. No shame. She is surprised by the banality of it, how naked, how ordinary it is to her, the small ruin of her breast in her hand.

— Que quieres conmigo?

— Nothing.

— Tell me what you want.

— Nothing, Carlos. Nothing. I just want you to know that I’m here, I exist, that’s all.

He backs, panicked, toward the door. A small hitch in his step as he leaves. He grasps for the handle. The door swings slowly closed behind him.

She watches through the window as Carlos yanks open the rear door of a car. Something apparitional in the moment. A man immune to himself. It looks to her as if he is stepping into a caisson of his own loneliness. He slams the door. The tinted window powers down.

She begins to rebutton her blouse.

From the rear seat Carlos stares out. He gestures with an open hand and the car lurches forward, the small rope of exhaust fumes dispersing into the air.

Five yards along the car stops again and the door opens. His suit jacket swings in the wind. He steps over the curb, his hands above his head as if he might stop the rain.

The shop bell sounds again. The top of his shoes are wet and dripping. He stands, his face red, the veins in his neck shining. Something shifting and buzzing in his eyes.

He looks up at the shop ceiling, turns his back to the camera. So, he does not want to be seen, then. For how many years has he walked in this wilderness?

He leans forward, a sheen of sweat or rain on his brow, she can’t tell which. He hovers a moment close to her, his breath sharp in her ear.

— Puta, he whispers.

The word is immediately meek and useless. It grazes against her, dissolves, tumbles, something graceful even about its fall.

Beverly turns her back, steps toward the counter, the tea, her newspaper. No nerves in her fingers. No shake in her hands. She closes the final button of her blouse.

She is aware, now, exactly what sort of man he has become. No peace about him. No great swerve in his life. He has polished all his lies.

She could, now, do anything at all: arrange a conference, expose him to the newspapers, call him to task, let others know, create a revenge out of justice. But she will, she knows, just sit at the counter, slowly sip her tea, let the minutes pass, fold the newspaper, rise, leave the shop, shuffle down along the Thames, return to her brother’s flat, sit with him, talk, allow the night to fade away, and later she will slip into the warm bath, rise, towel, glance at the mirror, look away again, dress, sleep in the chair instead of the bed, listen to the evening tap against the windowpane, rise then, leave, return to Houston, a long flight across the Atlantic, a return, up the steps, those young girls, that small bakery of love and death.

There is a silence behind her, then she hears the sound of the shop door closing, a car door, an engine, and Carlos is gone.

Beverly runs her finger around the rim of the saucer, folds the newspaper, smooths out the creases, moves toward the cash register. Rows of cigarettes, lottery tickets, sweets. She slides the folded newspaper across the counter. She will leave the paper for the shopkeeper now, allow him to sell it again, why not: she has no more use for it.

She returns to her seat, ties her headscarf, lifts her coat into her arms.

The shopkeeper remains still, his hands spread wide. There is, she notices, a copy of the Qur’an near the register, thumbed, used. On a black-and-white television screen behind him, she sees the front door of the shop, the aisles of food, a small coin of baldness in the back of his head.

He has about him the air of a man prone to bruises and scars. There is a dark mark in the center of his forehead. A prayer bruise. She feels herself shiver. She has stepped into his world, showed herself immodest.

— Excuse me, sir?

— Madam?

— I’m sorry, she says.

— I didn’t see anything, Madam. I assure you. I did not see a thing.

She likes him for the quickness of the lie. She glances up at the ceiling camera.

— Those tapes?

— Yes?

— I don’t suppose you could give them to me?

— Excuse me?

— I wouldn’t like anybody else to see them.

He seems to ponder it a moment, weigh it. He reaches out and pats the newspaper on the counter, nods at her with a sharp cordiality.

— I’m afraid not. They record on the drive. There’s no actual tapes. I can’t give them to you.

He touches his hand to his chest where a row of pens sit in his shirt pocket.

— But nobody will see them, I promise you.

Beverly pulls the cardigan around her shoulders, hitches her coat, catches a glimpse of herself in the cubed screens, two or three versions, standing in the store, from the front, from behind, caught in the chorus of light and dark.

She steps through the shop, pauses a moment, spies the reflection of the shopkeeper in the window. At the cash register, the blinking red camera light above him is immutable, almost sacred.

— Thank you, she says without turning.

It is, she recognizes, an agreement of faith with a man whose name she does not even know.

She reaches for the door handle, pulls up the collar of her coat against the chill, steps out to the street and into the hard free fall of rain.