Let The Great World Spin: A Novel - By Colum McCann Page 0,134

sweet flowers while the boys tore the butterflies apart to see how they were made. Some of the wings were so colorful they could only be poisonous. When I left my home and arrived in New York, I rented a small apartment in Queens, and, one day, distraught, I got a tattoo on my ankle, the wings spread wide. It is one of the stupidest things I have ever done. I hated myself for the cheapness I had become.

“You’re daydreaming,” Corrigan says to me.

“Am I?”

My head against his shoulder, he laughs as if the laughter wants to travel a good distance, down through my body also.

“Corrie?”

“Uh-huh?”

“You like my tattoo?”

He prods me playfully. “I can live with it,” he says.

“Tell me the truth.”

“No, I like it, I do.”

“Mentiroso,” I say. He creases his forehead. “Fibber.”

“I’m not fibbing. Kids! Kids, do you think I’m fibbing?”

Neither of them says a word.

“See?” says Corrigan. “I told you.”

My desire for him now is raw and sharp. I lean forward and kiss his lips. It is the first time we have kissed in front of the children, but they do not seem to notice. A sliver of cold at my neck.

There are times—though not often—when I wish that I didn’t have children at all. Just make them disappear, God, for an hour or so, no more, just an hour, that’s all. Just do it quickly and out of my sight, have them go up in a puff of smoke and be gone, then bring them back fully intact, as if they didn’t leave at all. But just let me be alone, with him, this man, Corrigan, for a tiny while, just me and him, together.

I leave my head on his shoulder. He touches the side of my face absently. What can be on his mind? There are so many things to pull him away from me. Sometimes, I feel he is made of a magnet. He bounces and spins in midair around me. I go to the kitchen and make him café. He likes it very strong and hot with three spoonfuls of sugar. He lifts the spoon out and licks it triumphantly, as if the spoon has gotten him through an ordeal. He breathes on the spoon and then hangs it off the end of his nose, so it dangles there, absurdly.

He turns to me. “What do you think, Adie?”

“Que payaso.”

“Gracias,” he says in his awful accent.

He walks over in front of the television set with the spoon still hanging off the end of his nose. It falls and he catches it and then he breathes on it once more, does his trick. The children explode in laughter. “Let me, let me, let me.”

These are the little things I am learning. He is ridiculous enough to hang spoons off the end of his nose. This, and he likes to blow his café cool, three short blows, one long blow. This, and he has no taste for cereal. This, and that he’s good at fixing toasters.

The children return to the television show. He sits back and finishes his café. He stares at the far wall. I know he is thinking again of his God and his church and his loss if he decides to leave the Order. It is like his own shadow has leaped up to get him. I know all this because he smiles at me and it is a smile that contains everything, including a shrug, and then he suddenly gets up from the table, stretches, goes to the couch and falls over the back of it, sits between the children, as if they can protect him. He drapes his arms around them, over their shoulders. I like him and dislike him for this, both at once. I feel a desire for him again, in my mouth now, sharp like salt.

“You know,” he says, “I’ve work to do.”

“Don’t go, Corrie. Just hang around awhile. Work can wait.”

“Yeah,” he says, as if he might believe it.

He pulls the children closer to him and they allow it. I want him to make up his mind. I want to hear him say that he can have both God and me, also my children and my little clapboard house. I want him to remain here—exactly here—on the couch, without moving.

I will always wonder what it was, what that moment of beauty was, when he whispered it to me, when we found him smashed up in the hospital, what it was he was saying when he whispered into