The Drive with Eilis

There wasn’t silence on the drive, at least on Eilis’s part. She chirped and warbled along as they headed south. Eilis was off to see a specialist who, she feared, would tell her she needed to go to London again. Eilis’s sidelong gaze as she spoke registered the shadow that flickered across Mary’s face at the word “again.” It was enough to tell Eilis that Mary had not known about the previous visit, and therefore must have confirmed two things for Eilis.

One: there wasn’t any gossip circulating the clinic about Eilis’s condition and

two: Eilis could confess all to Mary in safety.

“I was in a such a panic yesterday when I had that pain. It was all I could do to keep myself of a piece. You see, the daughter has had such a time and if this should go wrong now, it would be the end of all of us.”

Mary kept her eyes on the road, driving silently, but wearing the mask that they all learned to don when working with grieving and frightened people whose circumstances would seem to be too much to bear. The mask was called “positive regard.” It was a shabby substitute for compassion, but compassion and empathy are both exhausting virtues, as Mary’s least favorite professor, Dr. Sinclair emphatically pointed out to her students. She also reveled in the opportunity to instruct all her students to master the fine art of substituting the mask of “positive regard” for compassion and empathy. She’d warble, “once you can fake that, you’ve got it made.” And though Mary thought Sinclair a disgusting and venal bitch, she agreed with her on this particular issue though she would be loathe to admit it. She found other peoples’ pain and fear so exhausting and she did not abide sharing it at all. Mary nodded as Eilis spoke, but she did not attend to the words. She was thinking again about the sleep-walking and whether she should call her counselor or wait to see if it was just a one-off incident this time.

“Would you look at the light on it!?” Eilis’s voice brought Mary up so short she swerved the car, just missing the lamp post that leaned into the narrow lane. They were at the turn of The Statue and as always it was suffused in a light that came from nowhere apparent. The car had stalled and before Mary could turn the key Eilis had the door open and was out the car. Mary let the Megane roll back out of the lane and grudgingly climbed out herself.

There was a sweetness to the odor of the damp and fleshy overgrowth that intensified with each of Mary’s steps into the grotto. Eilis was stone-still in front of the statue as Mary joined her. Up close, the statue looked nothing like it did from a distance. From afar it looked complete, whole. In fact there was little detail to the bits that were left of it. There was not quite a face, the arms ended somewhere between elbow and wrist. It was neither male nor female, saint nor cherub. It was, though, even up close, suffused with light that seemed to emanate as far as Mary’s companion. When Eilis turned her chin to Mary, the older woman’s face was awash with tears. “Is it wrong what I am doing? How is it that we could ever know?”

“I’m sure it isn’t. It isn’t wrong,” Mary answered, not knowing what it was Eilis was speaking of, but somehow sure she was saying the right thing. Standing so near it now, Mary found the statue more unsettling, but seductive rather than repulsive. The two women stood in the pool of light, each in her own thoughts as a cloud tumbled by the sun and, in the sudden shadow, Mary shivered so hard and abruptly she almost lost her balance.

“I’ll drop you at the surgery door,” Mary told Eilis and she turned and walked briskly back to the car. Tears spilled from Mary’s eyes for no reason and she thumped herself in the chest three times in anger to make herself stop.