Let The Great World Spin: A Novel - By Colum McCann Page 0,32

and her skirt rose slightly: a red welt on the ankle near where her tattoo was.

“Thanks for renting the van.”

“Yeah, no problem.”

“You didn’t have to do it.”

“No big deal.”

“It runs in the family?”

“Corrigan’s going to pay me back,” I said.

A bridge lay between us, composed almost entirely of my brother. She shaded her dark eyes and looked down towards the water, as if Corrigan might have been in the surf alongside her children, not in some dark courthouse arguing a series of hopeless causes.

“He will be down there for days, trying to get them out,” she said. “It’s happened before. Sometimes I think they would be better off if they learned their lesson. People get locked up for less.”

I was warming up to her, but wanted to push her, to see how far she’d go for him.

“Then he’d have nowhere to go, would he?” I asked. “At night. Nowhere to work.”

“Maybe, maybe not.”

“He’d have to go to you, then, wouldn’t he?”

“Yes, maybe,” she said, and a little shadow of anger went across her face. “Why you ask me this?”

“I’m just saying.”

“I don’t know what you’re saying,” she said.

“Just don’t string him along.”

“I’m not stringing him along,” she said. “Why would I want to, as you say, string him along? ¿Por qué? Me dice que eso.”

Her accent had sharpened: the Spanish had an edge to it. She let the sand drift between her fingers and looked at me like it was the first time she’d seen me, but the silence calmed her and finally she said: “I don’t really know what to do. God is cruel, no?”

“Corrigan’s one is, that’s for sure. I don’t know about yours.”

“Mine is right beside his.”

The kids were throwing a frisbee at each other in the surf. They leaped at the flying disc and landed in the water and splashed.

“I’m terrified, you know,” she said. “I like him so much. Too much. He doesn’t know what he’s going to do, you understand? And I don’t want to stand in his way.”

“I know what I’d do. If I were him.”

“But you’re not, are you?” she said.

She turned away and whistled at the children and they came trudging up the sand. Their bodies were brown and supple. Adelita pulled Eliana close and softly blew sand off her ear. Somehow, for whatever reason, I could see Corrigan in both of them. It was like he had already entered them by osmosis. Jacobo climbed in her lap too. Adelita nipped his ear with her teeth and he squealed in delight.

She had safely surrounded herself with the children and I wondered if it was the same thing she did with Corrigan, reeling him in close enough and then shielding herself, gathering the many and making it too much. For a moment I hated her and the complications that she had brought to my brother’s life, and I felt a strange fondness for the hookers who had taken him away, to some police station, down to the very dregs, some terrible cell with iron bars and stale bread and filthy toilets. Maybe he was even in the cells alongside them. Maybe he got himself arrested just so he could be near them. It wouldn’t have surprised me.

He was at the origin of things and I now had a meaning for my brother—he was a crack of light under the door, and yet the door was shut to him. Only bits and pieces of him would leak out and he would end up barricaded behind that which he had penetrated. Maybe it was entirely his own fault. Maybe he welcomed the complications: he had created them purely because he needed them to survive.

I knew then that it would only end badly, her and Corrigan, these children. Someone or other was going to get torn asunder. And yet why shouldn’t they fall in love, if even just for a short while? Why shouldn’t Corrigan live his life in the body that was hurting him, giving up in places? Why shouldn’t he have a moment of release from this God of his? It was a torture shop for him, worrying about the world, having to deal with intricacies when what he really wanted was to be ordinary and do the simple thing.

Yet nothing was simple, certainly not simplification. Poverty, chastity, obedience—he had spent his life in fealty to them, but was unarmed when they turned against him.

I watched Adelita as she loosened an elastic band from her daughter’s hair. She tapped her on the bottom