by Denyse Woods
“This is what you’re dealing with,” her doctor had said, showing her the size of the liver on a diagram—it took up half a ribcage, which was exactly his point. “It’s the biggest organ we’ve got and yours isn’t working. Blood tests will probably confirm you have Hepatitis A, so if you can’t get one hundred percent bedrest for a month at least, I’ll have to send you to the hospital for infectious diseases.”
No, thanks, she thought. A month?
“Hepatitis isn’t to be messed with. You’re really very ill.”
“Of course she’ll get total rest,” her mother had insisted. “She’ll be fine at home.”
But Thea was not fine. Her sister Kate was in Cork, her brothers in college, and her parents at work all day, and they seemed to think that leaving a kettle beside the bed, with teabags, a mug, and milk, amounted to good care, as if she had no more than a bad cold. So she lay in bed, untended. Getting up to go to the bathroom was as much exertion as she was allowed and as much as she could manage, and since she had to drink gallons every day, she was more out of the bed than in it, either pottering up to the next landing to the bathroom or down to get more water. She was spending half the day on the stairs. It was lonely too, even more so than in that hotel room. At least there she had room service and Sachiv, whom she missed now with every breath she took.
Her spirits were so low as to be underground. When the door slammed every morning, a silence settled in, like some invisible being who took over the house when everyone else went out, but she had neither the energy nor the inclination to see friends. In the evenings, her father sat on her bed and read to her from the newspapers and her mother went on cooking as normal—failing to provide fat-free meals as instructed by their doctor. They simply expected Thea to avoid whatever was bad for her. By eight o’clock they had retreated to the television. Her illness, to them, was a blessing. It had taken her out of a war zone.
It was fortuitous that when Brona called to see how she was doing, Thea answered the phone herself.
“You’re not supposed to be out of bed,” her aunt cried.
“Everyone’s out.”
“But you mustn’t be rushing down to the phone. The man said one hundred percent bedrest!”
“Sorry. I came down because I wanted to hear a voice.” Thea’s eyes welled with tears.
“Thea?”
She didn’t hold back. Apprised of the details of her recovery, her father’s sister said, “This is no way to get well. You must come down here to recuperate.”
“Brona, I could get back to Baghdad in less time than it would take me to get to you!” She was easily swayed, though. She adored her aunt, who was also her godmother, and getting away from home, where failure of so many different hues bounced back at her from the bedroom walls, was tempting. Seven hours in the car seemed a small price to pay for a bit of easy company.
The house in West Cork was big and empty, the rooms small and cozy, and Brona was there, bringing Thea fat-free breakfasts and tea on demand. Her blankets were smoothed and a fresh nightie brought every day. It struck Thea as particularly sad that her aunt, who was such a natural carer, had never had children and had been widowed in her forties, yet she lived in that remote place, looking down on the jagged slate-like rocks that protected the coastline like barbed wire. The Atlantic, Brona used to say, was like a husband—sometimes cross, sometimes calm, but always there, solicitous, and wise enough to know when to intrude on her thoughts and her chores, and when not to. “I don’t live alone,” she said to Thea. “Me and the Atlantic, we’re like a snail and an elephant sharing the same garden.” Sometimes Thea would come across her standing at the sink, looking out across the bay toward Mizen Head. “I feed off it,” she explained one day. “I suck it into my heart and am always the better for it.” She turned. “And it’ll do the same for you, pet.”
Brona played her part too. She read her niece well (though Thea was baffled as to how she managed to be so intuitive, happy hermit that she was): she guessed there was a man and told Thea what to do with him. She scolded her because he was married, but cared for her because she was hurt.
One afternoon, she came up to Thea’s bright, sunny room with tea and bread—biscuits were off the menu—and found her lying on her side, staring at the dormer window, her fingers deep in the belly fur of the sleeping cat stretched along her chest. Setting down the mug, then the plate, Brona said, “Would you not read a book or those magazines I got you?”
“No concentration.”
“Or concentrating, is it, too much on the one thing? All this pining isn’t going to make you better.”
“No, it makes me feel even more wasted.”
“Ah, darling,” she said, “that’s no good.”
Thea stroked the cat’s back. “I didn’t even realize I’d fallen so hard, Brona. That this was one of the big ones, one of those love affairs you never quite get over. . . . He knew it, though.”
“Well, you may be hurting now, pet, but you’re only the one person. It could be his wife hurting, through no fault of her own, and their children too. He wasn’t yours to have, no matter how bad you feel. And there’ll be others.”
“There wasn’t for you.”
Brona narrowed her eyes and gave her an impish look. “You’re very sure of that, are you?”
“Brona!”
Her aunt stood up. “That’s enough of that. What you have to do, young lady, is get yourself over this man.” She tucked in the sheet. “It’ll be a lot harder than getting over the illness, granted, but there’s nothing else to be done. Sure isn’t he taken, and far away, and that’s all there is to it.”
“But where could you have met someone?”
Brona pushed a stray strand of gray hair back over her ear and glanced at the sunlight that was like another person, having leaped in from outdoors and landed on the timber floorboards. And then she came back again, from wherever, whomever, she had gone to. “You have to break the habit of thinking about him. Any habit can be broken.”
“And how’s that to be done, when I have zilch energy to do anything other than lie around thinking all day?”
“Think about something else. Daydream.”
“What?”
Brona nodded. “Fantasize.”
“That’s what I am doing!”
“Yes, but, darling, it’s the wrong man you’re dreaming about.”
“Is there another?”
“That’s up to you. Sure, doesn’t every one of us have an inner life that’s all our own?” Brona’s voice was softer than usual. With a glance at the bare crucifix on the wall (Thea steeled herself for a religious rant), she went on, “I couldn’t have survived out here on the edge of nowhere without another existence—an imagined one.”
Thea disentangled herself from the cat, fixed her pillow to support her lower back and reached for her mug. “You daydream?”
“Doesn’t everyone?”
“No. You know what the nuns always said about daydreamers! ‘Time-wasters.’ ‘Good-for-nothing layabouts.’ So tell me! Tell me who you fantasize about.”
Brona looked out of her tiny window with her tiny eyes, as if she was about to reveal her hidden life, then did not. Her daydreams were not for the telling.
One fresh, sunny day, as Thea improved, Brona wrapped her up in a great coat, took a cushion and her arm, and led her along the road to a low wall in front of a line of cottages. There they sat, looking down at Brona’s leveed field, an exact rectangle delineated by a stone wall.
“You’d never see green like that in Iraq,” said Thea. “It’s dusty there, juicy here.”
“I remember trying to call you and the others up for your tea, during the summers.”
“We went up and down this slope like we were going from one room to another.” Thea smiled. “Now it looks miles away. I don’t think I’ll ever get down there again.”
“When you’ve got your strength back.”
“I’ll go out to the lighthouse. That’s my objecti
ve.”
“That’s a long way too.”
Thea looked back at the house, sitting on its U-bend, with a view up the road and down it, standing over a lake and an ocean, and hard-hewn fields. A bit grubby, it was like an oversized cottage. She turned to the sea—its rippled surface like crushed silk—and back to the house. “Is it haunted, Brona?”
Brona wrinkled her nose, her eyes still on the awkward fields. “You asked that a lot when you were little.”
“Did I? Well, children are very intuitive.” It was easier, somehow, to talk about the house outside it. “I’ve been wondering if that’s why you’ve never left.” Thea looked at her. “Is Christie still here?”
“Christie is where God wants him to be: by His side. He didn’t call him back so very young just for the sake of leaving him behind with me.”
“But there is something, isn’t there? I feel it. Sometimes I can hear it. And you—you see it, don’t you?”
“Get away with that.” Brona hunched her shoulders, moved her scarf away from her mouth.
“I lie there all day and . . . I don’t know. It has a sense of somewhere else. It feels warm when it’s cold, light when it’s dark. . . .”
“Time to go on back in, now. Time to go in.”
“Why won’t you tell me? Don’t you want to pass it on to the next generation?”
Brona was on her feet, offering her arm. “It’s the quiet, darling. The . . .” she inhaled a great breath of ocean air “. . . enormity of all this. It puts us very deep into our thoughts.”
Deep in her thoughts, Thea continued to brood about having lost her job (she had exceeded her twenty days’ sick leave in one go), her lover, and her health, but Brona continued to put her back together, like a jigsaw, piece by piece, giving her potions brewed from her own herbs. She was a shaman, Thea decided, some kind of healer, and she was certainly playing mind games with her niece, or something was: the cliffs, the hills, the edge of the ocean—who knew? Because sometimes, when she sat outside wrapped in blankets and looked across Dunmanus Bay, Thea felt a heat, an intense, glaring heat, sliding around her bones which was neither Irish nor spring-like. It made no sense, but she could feel herself heal in its light, and she enjoyed also the comfort of company, even when Brona was gone for hours to shop in Bantry. In this barren place, she never felt alone.
With her energy returning and the flesh coming back to her bones, she was able to take short strolls by the cottages, and always went back indoors to find tea and scones waiting by the stove. Ireland was getting between the ridges, smoothing out the humps and pits that had been so uncomfortable these last weeks. She still missed Kim and Reggie, the women in the office, but calm was spreading. Acceptance. There was no point in arguing with Fate. Hepatitis had taken hold of her and flung her in another direction. Off course. Too far off course ever to get back. Or was she?
Finding work with another firm in Baghdad would possibly be detrimental to her health and her heart, since she doubted her conscience would allow her to mess with Sachiv’s family and position again. She had no right to him. It had been short, intense, and although she had been pulled down deep and had known love for the first time, it was a wasted love, good for nothing. Rather than struggle backward down an upward escalator, should she not simply walk on?
One afternoon she decided to go out toward the lighthouse, along the goat tracks between the hills. She promised Brona she would be gone no more than ten minutes, but as she clambered along the ridges, her energy rose to the task. She could feel herself beating. The blood was pumping through her and the wind was stinging her face, and the ocean was silver. So she went on, following tracks that went down into dips and up over ridges, until she came past a reedy brown lake, feeling good, almost happy. She sat on a rock, high over the dark, still lake.
Ripples on the water; ripples on her mind.
Sachiv had sat very close to her, on the side of the bed, fiddling with her fingers.
“I should thank you for helping to get me home,” she had said, “but I hate you for it.”
“We made a mistake.”
“Don’t be hard on yourself.”
“I mean we wasted too much time.”
“We’ll have more time,” she said, “when I’m better.”
He looked down at her. “This is a serious thing you have, and Baghdad is no place to be sick. You could not recuperate in the heat. It asks its price, this place.”
“So I’ve discovered.”
“You must get well, that is the important thing. But we will see one another again, here or somewhere.” He looked at her hands, squeezing her fingers. “Until then, every time the elevator opens—a hundred times a day—I will look for you.”
She ran her thumb across his eyelid. “No tears,” she said. “I have no tears. Too dehydrated. You’ll have to cry for both of us.”
Later that evening, the young man who had agreed to travel with her had turned as Reggie and Kim, supporting Thea—dragging her almost—helped her from the elevator. He was unable to disguise his shock. Christ, he seemed to be thinking, she’s this weak?
He was jittery, full-on—a good man doing a good thing, who wished he didn’t have to—and behind them, near the desk, another good man hovered. They were running late. Like an extra piece of luggage, Thea wasn’t even introduced to Alex. They had to get to the airport and, in an awkward jumble, they made straight for the door.
Sachiv went ahead and stood by the jeep. Thea slipped into those eyes one last time. “Don’t be surprised,” he said, helping her into the car. “Don’t be surprised by what I do.” He kissed the back of her hand and let her go.
On the way to the airport, Reggie had talked to the stranger in the front seat, while Kim’s tight grip on Thea’s wrist betrayed her own apprehension. What a lousy, sickly end to their adventure: Kim friendless in Baghdad, while Thea was being pulled from Iraq, like a clam from a rock. The journey was at last under way, but she was scared. The night stretched out, an unlit highway.
Resting her head on the back seat, she lifted her heavy eyelids to catch a last glimpse of Baghdad, but the low white city and the slow river were hidden in darkness. The headlights illuminated only the palm trees. Lines of them, along the roadside, like a guard of honor bidding her farewell.
She too bade farewell, to this strong country and its brave people, to the donkeys and camels, and that blue onion monu-ment, dancing with itself. Images hurried forward, sharp but alluring: the dusty plain between the rivers; old typewriters with heavy keys; women in navy suits; tracer bullets in the night sky. Soldiers and spies. Palms and palaces. White villas and mud houses. Hummus and tabbouleh.
Iraq. Iraq.
I will come back, she thought. I will, though she knew, with certainty, that she would not.
III
Meet Me in Muscat
And there she stood.
Exactly as he had imagined, expected and foretold—he turned, and she was there.
It seemed odd that he hadn’t noticed her coming down the long white steps since he was the only other person by the sinkhole, where the slightest sound echoed and sunlight poured in, like tea into a copper urn. The crystalline water, glassy green and still, had dazzled him perhaps. He had been contemplating shattering its mirror-surface by throwing himself in, when his peripheral vision picked her up, right of field.
Her slender fingers lightly holding the hem of her skirt, her shoulders rounded beneath an almost see-through cream shirt, she was staring across the pool, apparently mesmerized by the pitch-perfect reflections of rim upon rim of sandstone curves. She kicked off her sandals and stepped into the water, past clumps of silky seaweed. So familiar, the way she moved. Crouched near the entrance to the cave, where the channel disappeared, like a train into a tunnel, he watched her paddle.
The years had scarcely touched her. Without even turning, she reached into his chest and squeezed his heart so tightly that he let out a grunt.
She had come back, as he had always know
n she would.
“Christ,” he whispered. She twisted around and looked up at the rim of the sinkhole high above them, where three tourists stood near the steps, hesitating: it was a long way down and an even longer way up, given the heat.
No doubt feeling his eyes on her back, she glanced over her shoulder, saw him, but carried on paddling. He walked across the stones toward her, stopped a few meters away.
She turned, smiled. “Hello.”
“Hello, you.”
The intimacy ricocheted. Her smile slipped into confusion; she edged away.
Bringing his voice, his being, up from depths, he managed to say, “What kept you?”
She looked back. “I’m sorry?”
“What kept you so long?”
“I . . . I think you must be mistaking—”
“Not that I’m complaining,” he added quickly, moving closer. “It’s so great to see you.”
“—me for someone else.”
Their voices bounced around the buff brown cylinder in which they stood. He put his hands on his waist, smiling. “Oh, come on, I’ve thickened out a bit, but I haven’t changed that much, have I?”
“I’m afraid I don’t . . .” Another glance up at the other tourists.
Who was she with? And what was she doing? How could she not recognize him? Know him?
“Must be some mistake,” she said, and stepped unsteadily away, avoiding the small underwater boulders which stood in her way. Ripples in multiple arcs set off from her shins across the pool, like an eager armada. Distracted, she watched them go all the way to the wall beyond.