Straying

by Molly McCloskey

  Harry and I look away, in opposite directions, shamed, I guess, or sad. Harry told me once about Dublin in the early eighties, when heroin really came on the scene. He had friends in Dún Laoghaire, not far from where I’m staying now, who’d overdosed or died of AIDS. Sometimes Harry’s stories about Ireland in the decades before I came here awaken in me a vicarious nostalgia that I can understand only as an aspect of my affection for him.

  He tips his head—Shall we?—and we continue along the path.

  A mist is settling in around us. The edges of things are growing furred. The square is nearly deserted. Harry is all in black beside me, from his brogues to his fedora. He looks, in the mist, like a Cold War movie spy. He looks handsome. The last time we had dinner, what I wanted more than anything was for Harry to invite me up to his sixth-floor apartment for a nightcap and let me lie down on his voluminous couch—he’s told me he has a black leather couch—while some milky jazz poured from a four-inch-high speaker and a sheen of moonlight spread across the floorboards.

  I didn’t suggest it.

  He says, “When my father died, I felt a great need to put my life in order, to clarify things. I felt my mortality.”

  “Is that what I’m doing?” I say. “Feeling my mortality?”

  “Nothing wrong with that,” he says, smiling. “We’ve got to feel it sometime.”

  “True,” I say. But I don’t know if I am doing that. I know that a certain pressure has leached from my grief. Its demands are easing. My mother’s death is no longer an instant or a day and the shock that reverberated out from that. It is who I am now, the bearer of her story, her life and the end of it. It has been seven months and as many days since she died. Sometimes I forget, by which I mean not only that the thought comes to me that I must give her a call, but that I forget my own sadness, as though it is an item I have left the house without. I find myself in the midst of a moment of unaccountable delight, and then I remember that my mother is dead, and I think: Why am I not felled by this? Why are we not all, all the time, crippled by grief?

  “So did you clarify things?” I ask.

  Harry stops, turns to me. “Some things,” he says. “Others I just let go.”

  The mist is growing denser, saturating. We shelter under a tree, which doesn’t much help.

  “Look,” Harry says, “the laburnum are coming into flower.” And he gazes out over the square with satisfaction, as though he ordered the spring himself and here it was, arriving.

  TOWARD THE END of my mother’s life, and especially after Stan died, I used to feel, each time I left her, as though I’d failed her in some way. I looked at her with a kind of brokenheartedness, because it was never enough, what I did. I could not save her from this life, or from death. I would go on living in her absence, and this, we all know, is a betrayal. But death is a betrayal, too. One has done it, one has crossed over, as though to the enemy’s side. We were all in this together, and then suddenly we weren’t.

  The day she died, I was in a taxi coming back from Jomo Kenyatta. My mobile rang, and it was a woman who lived in my mother’s building, her closest friend there, whose number my mother had recently insisted on giving me. We spoke briefly, about when and how it had happened, and I told her I would call her when I got back to my house.

  I said goodbye, and when I looked up, I caught the taxi driver’s eye in the rearview mirror. I held his gaze. My mouth was hanging open slightly. For a moment, I felt terribly close to him. I felt he understood everything, and that I did, too, and that the two of us were keepers of a truth so shattering we didn’t dare speak it. When I turned to the window, the world looked distant and inscrutable to me, as though I’d been decoupled from it.

  I spent five days in my mother’s condo after her funeral. I was overcome with inertia and didn’t want to leave. I sat on the sofa at night, where my mother and Stan had sat so many nights, where I had sat with them, the three of us in a row, the HD glaring out at us, and I wanted to sink into the everything and the nothing that was left. I kept the television off and ate my dinner in silence, and felt such a sense of aftermath, I half expected to lift my head and see the living room strewn with wreckage. Instead, I saw a line of paired shoes through the bedroom door. I saw the framed photos fanned atop the wooden console, and my mother’s ancient desktop Dell. I saw the gewgaws on the side table, a collection of finger-high elephants. My mother used to say, in her later years, “Don’t buy me anything, I’m trying to shed stuff.” And she had, and so coolly. I could hardly fathom it, that at the end of a long life, the physical evidence for it should be so inadequate to its depth and breadth. I felt I should be able to open the book of my mother’s life and glimpse multiple interiors in three dimensions, vast tracts of earth and sea traversed, eras, skies, a thousand roads. Instead, there were a few dishes and wineglasses, some laundry, shampoos and creams I didn’t know whether to use or discard.

  Hanging from the doorknob of my mother’s walk-in closet was an ocher-colored canvas beach bag I had given her. I’d got it my first year in Nairobi, when I was on safari, and along the bottom were tiny animals—giraffes and zebras and elephants and lions parading in a line, all the outlandish animals God had made and in which my mother took such delight. I had a dim recollection of much fuss having been made over the bag. My mother was good at that sort of thing, expressing gratitude for even the humblest of gifts, and it was for the memory of that, that particular strain of generosity, that I took the bag and placed it on her bed, along with a few other items, random to the eyes of anyone but me, that I would bring with me when I left.

  In the spare bedroom, in a bag already packed, were my letters to her—one thing she had saved. They had petered out in the early 2000s, when she got email, but in the last years of her life, every time I visited her, she took me into the walk-in closet and showed me where all her papers were and which box contained my letters. She said she wanted me to have them when she was gone. She made me promise not to throw them out. It was a strange thing to contemplate, coming back into possession of the thousand thoughts I had entrusted to her. I used to wonder if, when she died, I would keep my promise. But I have, partly out of superstition and partly because one of the things I learned about my mother over the years was that she was usually right, and for reasons I often did not understand until long after the fact.

  There were lots of letters from the early days with Eddie, from our marriage, and from the end of our marriage, which had caused my mother much sadness. She had a way of intimating that I had been ungrateful—not just to Eddie, whom she adored, but to the gods—and was prone to reminding me, in so many words, that men like Eddie didn’t grow on trees. I never told her what happened at the end, or why I left him. I deflected her questions until she stopped asking. She never knew that Cauley existed. I thought at least I could spare her the sordid details, but it was also true that I couldn’t have borne her disappointment in me.

  There was a lot I did tell her, though. Rereading the letters, I was surprised by just how much. There was something touchingly naive about how honest I once was with her, all the fears and plans and daily routines I shared, an openness that in later years contracted into circumspection, partly to protect her but also because, with age, I’d grown calculating about how I wanted her to think of me. And then there was that tone—common to letters generally, I think—of a rather cumbersome care, all the labored-over details, the logistics and practicalities, the airport meeting points and copied-out train times, the elaborate directions. There was a weight to it all then, in the time before electronic communication, a concreteness. In the days or weeks that passed between one dispatch and the next, I imagine a tremendous faith hanging in the air between us, and what astonishes me still is the trust we placed in the other’s continued, unwitnessed existence.

  During those days in my mother’s condo, I thought often of Eddie. I wondered if I should tell him of her death. I wondered how much time need pass after a divorce before the sharing of such news goes fr
om being a courtesy to being inappropriate or intrusive. There had been such affection between Eddie and my mother, and I used to feel, after we split, that I had deprived them of each other. We had not taken that trip in the autumn that he’d suggested; we hadn’t driven my mother and Stan to the Keys. I tried to remember the last time Eddie and I had been in Florida together. I recalled the three of us—I don’t know where Stan was that day—going to a nature preserve, where we rode bikes along a canal on a path as smooth as marble. The day was clear and bright and not too hot, it was winter, and alligators lolled fatly on the banks. To me they were creatures of the most obvious menace, but they brought out a strange whimsy in my mother, who was, as she might’ve said herself, tickled by the sight of them. I was aware that I was flanked by the two people who mattered most to me in the world, and I felt, as I always do at such rare moments of contentment, shy and a little furtive in the face of my good luck, as though, if it were noticed, it might be taken from me.

  I LET MYSELF IN the front door and inhale the air of the entryway, certain, now that I am moving out, that I can smell the sea again. On the landing are my half-packed cases and the boxes I had shipped from Nairobi. I am leaving the house in two days. I have taken an apartment just down the sea road in Dún Laoghaire, a place that would fit inside the kitchen of this house. I could’ve afforded more space if I’d gone elsewhere in the city, but I’ve grown attached to the view. From the fourth-floor window of my new apartment, I’ll be able to see the harbor, the tides moving in and out, the lights of Howth slithering like a whip into the sea.

  I wonder sometimes what my mother saw at the end, and whether it frightened her. What I imagine is her walking calmly and with resolve into the sea. This isn’t altogether disconcerting. My mother adored the sea. Every time I visited her, we would go on a boat ride, and she and Stan would lean on the rail side by side, like children, pointing out the dolphins or the pelicans. They had embarked with such enthusiasm on the second act of their lives, and I am certain they felt repaid in kind—they had a habit of giving thanks for their good fortune.

  I used to wonder if Eddie and I would be as lucky. I tried to picture us old. I thought he would age well: he would be one of those large, rough-hewn men, hale and rugged and still desirable. Solid as a house. I wanted to be there for that. I wanted to witness his life, to feel the heft of him beside me for the rest of our days. But then a kind of vertigo stole over me, like when you’re standing at a height and looking out and down, thinking, I could do it, I could just jump, the call of the void, and all the life and death that is in your power.

  This morning I went to our old house, Eddie’s and mine. I left Dublin after breakfast and by noon was parked on the lane running parallel to the mountain. I sat there eyeing the house like someone hired to tail whoever lived there. The new owners were already in situ. There was a car in the drive, the lawn was tended, there were potted plants on a front deck that had been added. On the path along the side of the house was a child’s three-wheeler. In spite of this evidence, the house looked deserted, eerily still, as though its inhabitants had fled, abruptly, in the face of some threat. I rolled down my window and stared and stared. Nothing emanated from it, nothing arose in me. It was like being shown a photo of myself at a gathering that I couldn’t recall having attended. The disparity between the richness of our days and the scratch marks they leave behind is so great it’s a wonder we trust so easily in their connection.

  I remembered meeting Eddie on the street that day in town shortly after I’d moved out, the shock of estrangement, which was itself an echo of intimacy. Now I could see us on the path that led to the front door, Eddie turning the key to let us in. I saw him standing in the kitchen, gazing out the back window the way he used to, the mountain pitiless and beautiful against every kind of sky. I thought of Eddie, and I felt self-conscious, and uneasy, and full of remorse, but there was also something tender, a kind of compassion for whoever it was we had once believed ourselves to be. I thought of our last summer together, how there are things we’re unable to say even to ourselves, things we can only enact, as though we cannot believe they are what we really want until they become the only alternative we’ve left ourselves.

  I went to Kevin’s house, too. I had trouble finding it. I had held in my memory something like a child’s drawing of the peninsula—the curve of shoreline, a single lane, the house perched proud and cheerful. But I found myself driving around on a web of roads that felt unfamiliar, and visibility was bad; a heavy rain had turned the landscape blurred and viscous. Eventually, after many U-turns and much doubling back, I found the road. The skies cleared. In the sudden yellow sunshine, the house sprang up before me.

  I hadn’t told Kevin I was coming. I didn’t have a number for him. But country people are strange. You show up at their door after a long absence, and they greet you as though your arrival is the very thing they’ve been expecting. Kevin had the front door open before I was even out of the car. He must’ve seen me passing slowly and then reversing. We greeted each other shyly. We had never been close, but we had once colluded in something ruinous, and I felt with him the sort of intimacy I might feel with a doctor who’d given me news of a terrible illness.

  He’d grown skinny. The baby fat, what we all had back then and would never have thought of as such, was gone. His hair was gray and receding. He led me into the sitting room, which was no longer catastrophic but looked simply like the home of a middle-aged bachelor, lived in but thinly, as though it would take only an hour’s labor to remove any trace of him.

  He asked me how I’d been. I wasn’t sure where to begin or what to leave out or include. I said that I was living in Dublin, that I was on a career break, sort of, that I’d been working abroad. I told him that my mother had died. He said that his mother had also died, and that his father was in a nursing home in town. He told me he’d had a lot of offers on his house during the boom and had been sorely tempted but was glad he hadn’t sold. He’d had to quit the building sites, he said. He had injured his shoulder in an accident and couldn’t do heavy work.

  I pretended to look around the sitting room, then glanced over my shoulder toward the spare bedroom, which was behind me. “Would you mind?”

  “Work away,” he said, as though it were the most natural thing in the world, my turning up out of the blue like that to poke around his spare bedroom.

  If ever there was a case of a person going back and finding the room, the house, the yard, larger than remembered, I have not heard of it. The bedroom was as tiny as a jail cell. I recognized the wardrobe: it was the same one against which Kevin had propped those huge triangles of glass. Now there were two bicycle tires leaning on it, and a pump lying on the floor. Against the wall to the right of the door was the bed. I was tired, and I looked longingly at it, the way you do beds in furniture shops. And then I sat and stared straight ahead of me to where a window should’ve been. I recalled, as clearly as I do any of the scenes from that house, Cauley and me lying on the rumpled sheets and the sun streaming in through the large picture window opposite that looked out over the bedraggled front lawn, beyond which we could see, in the distance, the mountain looming behind my own house. But in reality, there was only a small sash window to the right, facing the gravel drive and a bank of trees that separated Kevin’s property from the neighbor’s.

  I heard Kevin behind me. “Y’all right?” he said.

  I got up quickly, and we scanned the room as though for clues. I thought of asking him to leave me alone for a few more minutes, so I could get my fill of whatever it was I’d come for—forgiveness or consolation or a rush of youth.

  “I’m fine,” I said, and we turned and shuffled out.

  He invited me to stay for lunch. In the kitchen, he opened the fridge, which was clean, if mostly empty, and took out a bottle of mineral water. The floors were swept, I noticed. The stovetop was scrubbed; the kitchen chairs stood uniformly at the table.

  “The place looks good,” I said.
/>   “And me?” Kevin said. “Do I look good?”

  I turned to him. He busied himself finding a bottle opener for the water.

  “You do, actually.”

  He pried the cap off and said, “I should hope so.”

  He told me that by the end of that summer he was having trouble remembering the most familiar things: the name of the woman in the local shop, the meaning of items he’d written on a grocery list, his mother’s phone number. “It was like I had fucking Alzheimer’s,” he said. So someone had dragged him to the hospital, and he dried out for two weeks with Librium and then did ninety meetings in ninety days. After the first one, in a community center on John Street, about a dozen people had come up to him and shaken his hand and said, “We thought you’d never get here,” as though he were delivering supplies to some desperate outpost.

  He got a head of lettuce and a cucumber from the fridge and then went out back to where he’d planted a garden, a raised bed in a plot of trimmed grass I didn’t remember from before—the image I’d retained was of the world stopping at the edge of Kevin’s patio wall. He picked scallions and dug up carrots and tossed everything together, then got two chipped plates out of the cupboard and some unmatched cutlery, and a few slices of brown bread. We brought the whole lot outside and set it on a table made of a flat slab of stone. There were short stools of cracked vinyl that must’ve come from a pub, and we perched on them like little old ladies on a Sunday afternoon, sipping our fizzy water and eating our salad.