by Colum McCann
Sheila sat with her eyes closed, smiling, her straw hat tilted down over her eyes. An old Italian whose name I didn’t know—a dapper man in perfectly pressed trousers—dented and redented his hat upon his knee and sighed. Shoes were taken off. Ankles exposed. The waves crashed along the shore and the day slipped from us, sand between our fingers.
Radios, beach umbrellas, the burn of salt air.
Adelita walked down to the waterfront, where her children were kicking happily in the low surf. She drew attention like a draft of wind. Men watched her wherever she went, the slender curve of her body against the McCa_9781400063734_4p_01_r1.w.qxp 4/13/09 2:31 PM Page 66
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white uniform. She sat on the sand beside me with her knees pressed against her breasts. She shifted 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.
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“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.
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I watched Adelita as she loosened an elastic band from her daughter’s hair. She tapped her on the bottom and sent her along the beach. The waves broke far out.
“What did your husband do?” I asked.
“He was in the army.”
“Do you miss him?”
She stared at me.
“Time doesn’t cure everything,” she said, looking away along the strand, “but it cures a lot. I live here now. This is my place. I won’t go back. If that’s what you’re asking me, I won’t go back.”
It was a look that suggested she was part of a mystery she wouldn’t let go of. He was hers now. She had made her declaration. There could indeed be no going back. I recalled Corrigan when he was a boy, when everything was pure and definite, when he walked along the strand in Dublin, marveling at the roughness of a shell, or the noise of a low- flying plane, or the eave of a church, the bits and pieces of what he thought was assured around him, written in the inside of that cigarette box.
—
our m ot h er us ed to like to use a gambit in the telling of her stories:
“Once upon a time and long ago, in fact so long ago that I couldn’t have been there, and if I had been there, I could not be here, but I am here, and I wasn’t there, but I’ll tell you anyway: Once upon a time and long ago . . .” whereupon she would launch into a story of her own creation, fables that sent my brother and me to different places, and we would wake in the morning wondering if we had dreamed different parts of the same dream, or if we had duplicated each other, or if in some strange world our dreams had overlapped and switched places with each other, something I would have done easily after I heard about Corrigan’s smash into the guardrail: Teach me, brother, how to live.
We have all heard of these things before. The love letter arriving as the teacup falls. The guitar striking up as the last breath sounds out. I don’t attribute it to God or to sentiment. Perhaps it’s chance. Or perhaps chance is just another way to try to convince ourselves that we are valuable.
Yet the plain fact of the matter is that it happened and there was nothing we could do to stop it—Corrigan at the wheel of the van, having spent McCa_9781400063734_4p_01_r1.w.qxp 4/13/09 2:31 PM Page 69
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all day down in the Tombs and the courtrooms of lower Manhattan, driving north up along the FDR, with Jazzlyn beside him in the passenger seat, her yellow high heels and her neon swimsuit, her choker tight around her neck, and Tillie had been locked away on a robbery charge, she had taken the rap, and my brother was giving Jazzlyn a lift back to her kids, who we
re more than keyrings, more than a flip in the air, and they were going fast along the East River, hemmed in by the buildings and the shadows, when Corrigan went to change lanes, maybe he hit the indica-tor, maybe he didn’t, maybe he was dizzy or tired or out of sorts, maybe he’d gotten some medicine that slowed him or fogged his vision, maybe he tapped the brake, maybe he cut it too hard, maybe he was gently humming a bit of a tune, who knows, but it was said that he was clipped in the rear by a fancy car, some old antique, nobody saw the driver, a gold vehicle going about its everyday applause of itself, it caught the back end of his van, nudged it slightly, but it sent Corrigan into a spin across all three lanes, like some big brown dancing thing, elegant for a split second, and I think now of Corrigan gripping the steering wheel, frightened, his eyes large and tender, while Jazzlyn beside him screamed, and her body tightened, her neck tensed, it all flashing in front of her—her short vicious life—and the van skidded on the dry roadway, hit a car, hit a newspaper truck, and then smashed headlong into the guardrail at the edge of the highway, and Jazzlyn went head- first through the windshield, no safety belt, a body already on the way to heaven, and Corrigan was smashed back by the steering wheel, which caught his chest and shattered his breastbone, his head rebounding off the spidery glass, bloody, and then he was whipped back into the seat with such force that the metal frame of the seat shattered, a thousand pounds of moving steel, the van still spinning from one side of the road to the other, and Jazzlyn’s body, only barely dressed, made a flying arc through the air, fifty or sixty miles per hour, and she smashed in a crumpled heap by the guardrail, one foot bent in the air as if stepping upwards, or wanting to step upwards, and the only thing of hers they found later in the van was a yellow stiletto, with a Bible sitting canted right beside it, having fallen out of the glove compartment, one on top of the other and both of them littered with glass, and Corrigan, still breathing, was bounced around and smashed sideways so that he finished up with his body twisted down in the dark well by the accelerator and the brake, and the engine whirled as if it still McCa_9781400063734_4p_01_r1.w.qxp 4/13/09 2:31 PM Page 70
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wanted to go fast and be stopped at the same time, all of Corrigan’s weight on both of the pedals.
They were sure he was dead at first, and he was loaded in a meat wagon with Jazzlyn. A cough of blood alerted a paramedic. He was taken to a hospital on the East Side.
Who knows where we were, driving back, in another part of the city, on a ramp, in a traffic jam, at a toll booth—does it matter? There was a little bubble of blood at my brother’s mouth. We drove on, singing quietly, while the kids in the back seats dozed. Albee had solved a problem for himself. He called it a mutual checkmate. My brother was scooped into an ambulance. There was nothing we could have done to save him. No words that would have brought him back. It had been a summer of sirens. His was another. The lights spun. They took him to Metropolitan Hospital, the emergency room. Sprinted him down through the pale-green corridors. Blood on the floor behind them. Two thin tracks from the back trolley wheels. Mayhem all around. I dropped Adelita and her children outside the tiny clapboard house where they lived. She turned and looked over her shoulder at me, waved. She smiled. She was his. She would suit him. She was all right. He would find his God with her. My brother was wheeled into the triage room. Shouts and whispers. An oxygen mask over his face. Chest ripped open. A collapsed lung. One- inch tubes inserted to keep him breathing. A nurse with a manual blood-pressure cuff. I sat at the wheel of the van and watched as the lights went on in Adelita’s house. I saw her shape against the light curtains until heavier ones were drawn across. I started the engine. They held him in traction with counterweights above the bed. A single breathing machine by his bed. The floor so skiddy with blood that the interns had to wipe their feet.
I drove on, oblivious. The Bronx streets were potholed. The orange and gray of arson. Some kids were dancing on the corners. Their bodies in flux.
Like they had discovered something entirely new about themselves, shaking it through like a sort of faith. They cleared the room while they took X- rays. I pulled in under the bridge where I had spent most of my summer.
A few girls were scattered around that night—the ones who had missed the raid. Some swallows scissored out from underneath the rafters. Seeding the sky. They didn’t call out to me. My brother, in Metropolitan Hospital, still breathing. I was supposed to work in Queens, but I crossed the road McCa_9781400063734_4p_01_r1.w.qxp 4/13/09 2:31 PM Page 71
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instead. I had no idea what was happening. The blood swelling in his lungs. Towards the tiny bar. The jukebox blared. The Four Tops. Intra-venous lines. Martha and the Vandellas. Oxygen masks. Jimi Hendrix. The doctors did not wear gloves. They stabilized him. Gave him a shot of morphine. Shot it right into his muscle. Wondered about the bruises on the inside of his arm. Took him for a junkie at first. The word was he’d come in with a dead hooker. They found a religious medal in the pocket of his pants. I left the bar and crossed the late- night boulevard, half drunk.
A woman called out to me. It wasn’t Tillie. I didn’t turn. Darkness. In the courtyard some kids were high and playing basketball without a ball.
Everyone working towards repair. The single lights of the heart machine beeping. A nurse leaned into him. He was whispering something. What last words? Make this world dark. Release me. Give me love, Lord, but not just yet. They lifted his mask. I got to the fifth floor of the projects. The stairs exhausted me. Corrigan lay in the hospital room, in the cramped space of his own prayer. I leaned against the apartment door. Someone had tried to pry open the gold lock on the telephone. Some books lay scattered on the floor. There was nothing to take. Perhaps he drifted in and out, in and out, in and out. Tests going to see how much blood he had lost. In and out. In and out. The knock came on the door at two in the morning. Not many knocked. I shouted for them to come in. She pushed the door slowly. My brother’s heart machine at a slow canter. In and out. She held a tube of lipstick. That I recall. Not a girl I knew. Jazzlyn has been in a crash, she said. Maybe her friend. Not a hooker. Almost casually. With half a shrug. The lipstick going across her mouth. A vivid red slash. My brother’s heart machine blipping. The line like water. Not returning to any original place. I burst out through the door. Through the graffiti. The city wore it now, the swirls, the whorls. Fumes of the fresh.
I stopped at Adelita’s house. Oh, Jesus, she said. The shock in her eyes. She pulled a jacket over her nightgown. I’m bringing my kids, she said. She bundled them into my arms. The taxi sped, flashing its lights.
At the hospital, her children sat in the waiting room. Drawing with crayons. On newspaper. We ran to find Corrigan. Oh, she said. Oh. Oh, God. Doors swinging open everywhere. Closing again. The lights fluorescent above us. Corrigan lay in a small monkish cell. A doctor closed the door on us. I’m a nurse, said Adelita. Please, please, let me see him, I have to see him. The doctor turned with a shrug. Oh, God. Oh. We pulled McCa_9781400063734_4p_01_r1.w.qxp 4/13/09 2:31 PM Page 72
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two very simple wooden chairs up by his bed. Teach me who I might be.
Teach me what I can become. Teach me.
The doctor came in, clipboard to his chest. He spoke, quietly, of internal injuries. A whole new language of trauma. The electrocardiogram beeped. Adelita leaned down to him. He was saying something in his morphine haze. He had seen something beautiful, he whispered. She kissed his brow. Her hand on his wrist. Heart monitor flickering. What’s he saying? I asked her. Outside, the clack of wheels down the corridor.
The screams. The sobs. The odd laughter of interns. Corrigan whispered something to her again, the blood bubbling at his mouth. I touched her forearm. What’s he saying? Nonsense, she said, he’s talking nonsense.
He’s hallucinating. Her ear to his mouth now. Does he want a priest? Is that what
he wants? She turned to me. He says he saw something beautiful. Does he want a priest? I shouted. Corrigan was lifting his head slightly again. Adelita leaned down to him. Her reigning calmness. She was softly crying. Oh, she said, his forehead’s cold. His forehead’s very cold.
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From outside, the sounds of park avenue. Quiet. Ordered. Controlled. Still, the nerves jangle in her. Soon she will receive the women. The prospect ties a small knot at the base of her spine. She brings her hands to her elbows, hugs her forearms. The wind ruffles the light curtains at the window. Alençon lace. Handmade, tatted, with silk trimmings. Never much for French lace. She would have preferred an ordinary fabric, a light voile. The lace was Solomon’s idea, long ago. The stuff of marriage. The good glue. He brought her breakfast this morning, on the three- handled tray. Croissant, lightly glazed. Chamomile tea. A little slice of lemon on the side. He even lay down on the bed in his suit and touched her hair. Kissed her before he left. Solomon, wise Solomon, briefcase in hand, off downtown. The slight waddle in his step. The clack of his polished shoes on the marble floor. His low- growled good- bye. Not mean, just throaty. Sometimes it strikes her—there is my husband. There he goes. Same way he’s been going for thirty- one years. And then a sort of silence interrupted. The drifting sounds, the snap of the lock, the dim bell, the elevator boy —G’morning Mr. Soderberg!— the whine of the door, the clank of machinery, the soft murmur of descent, the clanging stop at the lobby below, the roundelay of the cables rising.