“You knew?” asked Katherine.
“For years it feels I have been waiting for you to come back to me.” He lifted his head to the night sky. “You were lost to me, Katherine—my fiancé—a ghost of a woman.” He gasped between tears. “All I longed for was that he would not matter to you anymore—that you would love me with the same passion that you loved him—that you would throw your arms around me finally as though I meant something to you.” He cupped his head in his hands and through his fingers she heard him say, “I didn’t mean to—Katherine—oh God, Katherine, I didn’t mean to.”
“What are you talking about, George?”
George let his hands fall from his face. When he spoke, his voice seemed hollow, and his eyes were wide and needy. “That night a call came in—someone had seen a man fall into the river beyond the foundry. We spread out on both sides of the bank—the swell so bad, the current so strong, the water so cold that none of us expected to find anyone alive—the rain and wind making it almost impossible to see anything”—George swallowed hard—“and I had moved upriver, away from the others, away from the foundry—I don’t know why—some reason—instinct—perhaps—coincidence—and just beyond where the bank broadens at the distillery—tucked away in under a clump of reeds”—George struggles to keep talking—“caught on a bolt from an old metal girder lodged in the riverbed—there he was—the collar of his jacket hooked onto the bolt—his head only half submerged”—George stared into nothingness as he recounted the events to Katherine—“he was breathing—he was still alive.”
Katherine spoke with a quiet exactitude, her body shivering with the increasing night. “They said that he was dead when they pulled him from the water.”
“Yes, he was.”
“But you’re saying he was still alive when you found him.”
“Yes.”
“I don’t understand.”
For the first time since he had spoken, George turned his head to look at her with a helpless despair. Then tears began to choke him. “I did nothing, Katherine, I did nothing. I just watched him.”
Katherine stood motionless. Then in a small, broken, voice she said, “You let him die?”
George said nothing.
“You let him die!” she repeated in disbelief.
George looked at her, this time pleading for succor, asking for forgiveness with the eyes of a ruined man.
“Katherine,” he said softly amid his tears. “Oh Katherine.”
A lizard scuttled out from behind the dry stone trough at their feet and disappeared soundlessly across the courtyard. Fireflies darted once again in the gloom, illuminating only their own infinitesimal world. The swollen moon was hanging above them as though from a silver hinge.
They checked out of their hotel in the cool of the early morning. They had not slept. Left behind on the squat cabinet beside their bed were the sombreros they had bought only two days before. By the time they climbed aboard their bus in the plaza, the sun was burning the world. Their long journey back to Nogales was wordless. The intense heat this time made them feel solid and heavy. Once again, the bus rattled along the roads of orange-brown dust, the tall trees on either side offering little shade. As they left the town, the endless fields of sugarcane spread out before them, taller than the tallest man, soft green and yellow-streaked, their tips falling backward, as though they were fainting from the heat. Hedges of organ-pipe cacti with gnarled, robust skins hemmed the outlying villages, threatening the volcanic orchards and cutting the cruel blue of the sky. The fields gave way to vast plains of arid scrubland, where a lone farmer walked a desolate cow, a rope looped around its horns. The bare mountains loomed oppressively in the distance, the same mountains that, on their journey in, had elated them.
When they disembarked at the border, the street seller who had taken their photograph approached them once again. Seeing that they had no sombreros, he tried to sell them more, holding his arms open to them, smiling at them with a wide, handsome grin. But they had walked past him without a word, their faces somber, their heads bent. Alone, together.
Their new life in America didn’t happen. As it turned out, Aunt Mildred’s connections were not as solid as she had led George to believe, and the jobs were not as plentiful in Phoenix as her letters had suggested. Their savings were disappearing week by week and the hope of creating a new life for themselves in America became more and more of a distant dream. George applied for whatever jobs came up. He wasn’t choosy, taking work for a time as a school janitor until he could secure something with better prospects, but he didn’t find anything. Even the state Fire Department had little to offer him. After four months, they made the decision to return to Belfast. They departed Phoenix on a balmy summer evening, the air heavy with the scent of orange blossom, and boarded the train back to New York, their hearts filled with a mixture of defeat and relief.
A few days after taking Elsa on her own to see her mother at the Royal Victoria Hospital, George takes all three girls, but this time the usual chatting is absent from the back of the car. The three girls seem isolated and in their own space. They sit looking out of the car window. There are plumes of smoke rising up to the cold sky at the end of their street. There is the smell of burning rubber. Then Elsa sees it—a black shell, a strange black cave. The large front window of Mr. McGovern’s shop has been completely demolished and Mr. McGovern’s groceries—his neatly stacked packets of tea, his thoughtfully arranged fruit and vegetables in their baskets, his appetizing selection of cooked meats—have all been hauled through the gaping hole and left smashed and spattered and burned on the pavement. The “open” sign hangs desolately from the edge of a shard of glass on the door of the shop. Smoke still rises from the burned wood. The words TAIGS OUT have been painted in large red letters on the outside wall.
“What happened to Mr. and Mrs. McGovern’s shop?” asks Elsa, alarmed. “Are Mr. and Mrs. McGovern alright?” Maureen and Elizabeth turn to look out of the car window.
“Apparently, someone threw a petrol bomb into their shop last night. I was just talking to Isabel’s mother before we left.” Elsa makes a face at the mention of Isabel’s name. “She had heard about it this morning,” George continues, “and, yes, they’re alright, thank God, they’re alright.”
“But who would do that?” asks Maureen concerned. As George drives on the girls hear him muttering “Thugs” to himself and see him shaking his head.
Elsa now imagines what it might have been like for Mr. and Mrs. McGovern in the burning shop. Her father had always told her how quickly a fire could spread, how it could destroy a whole room in seconds, how the smoke could choke and kill you before the flames would even reach you, how you would never have time to collect and bring with you all of your favorite things. She imagines Mr. and Mrs. McGovern sleeping soundly between their crisp sheets in their full nightclothes. She in her seersucker nightie and rollers, he in his plaid maroon pajamas and his cotton bed socks. His thorax rattling and cracking under the strain of his great snores and then the sound of the smashing glass. What in God’s name?
The smash, Elsa imagines, is followed by a low thud, and then all falls flat and quiet. In her mind she can see Mr. McGovern jump up from the bed and in a cold confusion grab whatever clothes he can find, pulling his trousers over his pajama bottoms, struggling to find his shoes, calling to his wife. Now Mrs. McGovern groans, but she still remains a large static lump under the blankets. Mr. McGovern thumps her in panic, telling her to wake up! He reaches for his teeth in the glass beside the bed, spilling the water everywhere, hurting his gums as he thrusts them into his mouth.
And then he smells it, the acrid, foul smell of smoke. Mr. McGovern shakes his wife harshly. Mrs. McGovern stirs. Voices can be heard on the street. He pulls at his wife until she is at last upright. Then she is wide awake, staring wildly about her, bewildered and frightened. Quick! Get out! The bloody place is on fire! He is almost screaming now. Mrs. McGovern goes to grab her dressing gown, but her husband pushe
s her toward the door. Mrs. McGovern, terrified, waddles, as quickly as her stiff hips will allow, down the narrow staircase of their flat into the parlor. Black smoke is streaming in under the rim of the closed door that leads from the shop. Inside the shop, everything is catching fire easily, the wooden shelves, the linoleum floor, the paper blinds. The new glass fronts on the shelves are cracking loudly. Mr. McGovern’s white nylon shopcoat, hanging on the door at the back of the shop, is a blazing beacon torchlighting the demise of a livelihood.
Elsa imagines it all.
Mrs. McGovern is making small moans and shaking her hands at everything she cannot take with her as she moves toward the back door—her new settee, her documents, the photographs of the grandchildren. Mr. McGovern slips on the stairs as he trundles down them, banging the back of his head on the wooden handrail, like he is in a cartoon. Then he is beside her, twisting at the lock on the door, desperate now. Mrs. McGovern is giving out a childlike whine. The smoke is easing into the parlor, filling it up, engulfing them. They are coughing and spluttering, pulling at the safety chain, twisting at the lock.
Dear God, this bloody door! And then the door opens. They stagger out onto the laneway at the back of the shop, coughing loudly. They stand there, bewildered, wondering what they have lost.
And in the back parlor, its door wide open to the night, the paper-thin Christmas-red, vinyl tablecloth on their parlor table dissolves in the flames.
And the jars of sweets are cracking and splitting. The rock-hard clumps of sticky sweets all melting, Elsa imagines. The chocolates, the raspberry ruffles, the black jacks, the bonbons, butterscotch, caramels, lollipops, Jujubes, the Sugarmines and the flying saucers, all melting in the blistering heat to become one huge molten mass of glistening, sugary, burned sweet lava flowing through the sweet shop like an enormous sweet, sticky river. A gorgeous sticky river.
“Look at that!” Elizabeth nudges Elsa as she sits beside her in the back of the car. Elsa rouses from her daydream and stares out of the car window to where Elizabeth is pointing. By this stage, they are close to the hospital, but there is a large burning bus ahead, splayed across the middle of the road like a great steel carcass. It sits like some petrified, cornered circus animal bleeding fire and smoke. More things burning, thinks Elsa, everything’s burning. She wonders if anyone has been burned in the big bus.
“Is it an accident?” she asks her father.
“No,” says George. The annoyance in his voice at having to find another route to the hospital is mixed with concern. “Just some trouble ahead. Just an isolated incident.”
“What’s an ‘isolated incident,’ Daddy?” asks Elsa.
“Something that there’s just—one of—just one thing that’s happened. It’s fine. It’ll all settle down again and be forgotten about.”
“But that’s two things I’ve seen burning in the one day—that’s two isolated incidents,” continues Elsa.
“Will you have to put it out?” Elizabeth is suddenly taken with the realization that her father may have to step out of the car and try to put out the fire single-handedly.
“Of course not, love. I’m sure the machines are already well on their way.”
But there is no fire brigade in sight.
Now around the burning bus, clusters of young men are wielding sticks and holding beer cans, stoking up the temperature of newly found intentions, whooping with each stone that they hurl into the burning bus. The stones rattle and split the last slivers of glass left in the window frames and drop into the belly of the fire.
As George begins to reverse the car, two youths lurch off the pavement toward them. George makes his maneuvers in the car very deliberate, reversing as far as he can in order to swing the car around. The two young men suddenly backtrack to follow the car. One of the men has the leg of a table in his hand, and as George turns the car, the man hits the car with the table leg on its rear fender. The girls jump.
“Daddy, I’m scared.” Elizabeth starts to cry.
“It’s okay, love. It’s all right. We’ll be out of here in a minute.” George rotates the steering wheel to straighten the car, and as he turns his head to check clearance from the curb he finds himself looking straight into the face of one of the young men. The young man glares at George, his vengeance resting on a cusp, waiting for a trigger.
George places his foot on the accelerator and, turning his head away, moves the car quickly forward. He sees the young man in his rearview mirror staring after the car, surmising whether he has just missed an opportunity to make a point.
Over the weeks and months to come, George will make his journey back and forth to the Royal Victoria Hospital, sometimes alone, sometimes with the three girls in the back of the car, rarely with Stephen in tow—a pilgrimage to the woman he loves—wondering to himself if there would come a time when such a young man would need no such moment of deliberation, no such moment of weighing up before he brought the broken bottle down upon a face, or pulled the trigger of a gun, or smashed the window of a car and dragged out the driver and beat the driver in front of his children.
Katherine has been discharged from hospital to spend some time at home. With her treatment here has come a remission and Katherine has appeared stronger, but she is still far from well. However, the hospital team feel that it would be a good thing for Katherine and the family to spend Christmas together and they have talked George through the administration of her medication.
Katherine’s bedroom has been prepared and readjusted to cater to her disappearing body. New pillows have been settled at the headboard to provide a spine for her so that she may sit up. All clutter has been cleared away from the bedside table so that her reach, feeble as it is, will not become easily confused. On the table George has placed a glass and a little jug of water, tissues, and Katherine’s morphine and laxatives.
A few magazines and books are placed on the shelf of the bedside table, and around the picture frames that hang on the wall in the room some golden tinsel has been draped. On the windowsill stand three “Welcome Home” cards.
Elsa can see that her father is greeting Katherine’s homecoming with a mixture of excitement and dread. He is at sixes and sevens. He takes the little paraffin heater from the garage up to the bedroom, now worrying that the oily fumes that it releases will aggravate Katherine’s breathing. But the room will be too cold without it, he keeps saying. He has moved Stephen’s cot into the girls’ bedroom, which is now cramped for space. To the gray woolen throw on the back of the sofa in the back room, her father has also added a blanket in case, he says, his presence in his own bed beside Katherine is too uncomfortable for her.
But now on the day of Katherine’s return, amid her slow dance from one room to another, she insists that she sleep in the girls’ bedroom at the front of the house and that the girls and Stephen sleep in the back bedroom.
As her father moves the furniture, Elsa can detect that his anger has a distinctive disappointment to it. He is stretched to his limits and has no tolerance left. He appears angry with Katherine for wanting the furniture moved, angry with her for moaning and complaining, angry with her most of all for being sick. He pushes the children’s beds together sharply, the carpet buckling underneath from the rough movements, and then he squeezes in Stephen’s cot just behind the door. It is all awkward and wrong. The door cannot open fully now and there is no room to move. He has upended their double bed on the small landing and now struggles to angle it through the door of the front bedroom. It lands with an unmerciful crash. He arranges all the bits and pieces Katherine needs, once again, on the table beside the bed. He stops for a moment. He is breathless and tired, but he turns to Elsa and nods his head and gives her a small smile, as though to say, “Thank God she’s home. Thank God your mother is home.”
When Christmas morning comes, the three girls keep their voices down lest they disturb their mother. It is four o’clock in the morning and still dark. In the cramped back room, there is a conspiratorial air among them as
they slip their hands into their stockings to find what Santa Claus has left them. A mandarin orange, bubbles, chocolate coins, a skipping rope. They giggle quietly and communicate in fast, fractured whispers, only to fall guiltily silent as they remember—and remind one another—that they must not wake their mother.
The day moves by as though it were a strange story unfolding. They are enjoying Christmas Day, but it has never been this static, nor this careful.
Later that afternoon, Katherine is lying on the brown leatherette sofa in the back room. She is wrapped in the gray woolen throw with its mint green edges, and the two-bar electric fire is on beside her. Maureen, Elizabeth, and Elsa play “What’s the time, Mr. Wolf?” in the back garden. Their voices are crisp and light as they play. Elizabeth and Elsa are poised and ready to run and Maureen is ready to catch them. The snow that had fallen during the very early hours of the morning is still powdery and soft and the world appears to have been made quieter by it. Stephen has so many layers of clothes on him, he totters around like a little snowman. His woolly hat has slipped down over his eyes and his arms are stretched out in front of him. Together the children are an oil painting of a winter scene. The snow graces their Wellington boots, their cheeks glow crimson, and Katherine is now not at the kitchen window to watch them.
But soon the children come back into the house, as though they sense that without their mother there to offer witness, their play means nothing. George helps Stephen out of his coat and boots while the girls quietly collect their model village of Applewood Green from their bedroom to bring downstairs. They settle together in the back room and begin to arrange the painted plastic houses and people.
“Mummy, can we use your legs to make hills and things?” Elsa asks.
“Give your mother some space, girls. Let her rest.” George is concerned the children will tire Katherine out.
“No, really, it’s fine,” Katherine reassures George.
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