Marcus sipped his whiskey and stared at me, and I stared back. A lamp on a table beside his armchair was angled toward his face, and with his dark hair and beard, his dark eyes, he looked like a figure from a Baroque painting, a Caravaggio Christ, luminous and reproachful. I had prepared what I’d say if he said anything more about hitting Cassie. He got up and came over to where I sat, bringing his glass of whiskey with him. He leaned down and kissed me, and I felt the coarse tickle of his beard, tasted the whiskey off his tongue. He put his glass down and pulled me to my feet, kissing me again, a longer kiss this time, his hands moving through my hair, sliding down along my neck to rest on my shoulders. I thought I heard a noise from the hall, and pulled away. He looked at me, questioningly.
“Lou Anne…” I said, inclining my head toward the door, but he just smiled. “Ah, my little Louise,” he said. “Always such a worrier.” He went to kiss me again, but paused. “You’re called after her, aren’t you?” he said. “I’ve only just realized. You’re called after Lou Anne.” This seemed to amuse him; he smiled and shook his head, then took me by the hand and, wordlessly, led me out to the hall and upstairs to my bedroom.
He pushed me down onto the bed and, removing his jeans and shirt, lay down beside me. As he unbuttoned my blouse, I listened for sounds from Cassie’s room next door, or from Lou Anne’s downstairs. He unhooked my bra and, raising himself on one elbow, stared at me for a moment before tracing a finger in slow circles around one of my nipples. I lay perfectly still as his finger trailed lower over my ribs, stopping at the patch of bruised skin that had darkened now to shades of blue and mauve. He put his mouth to it and kissed it. “Poor Louise,” he said. “What was your mother thinking, sending you here?” His lips moved down along my stomach. He unbuttoned my jeans, tugged my knickers halfway down my thighs, and then I felt his mouth again, warm and wet, the busyness of his tongue. “Hush,” he said when, forgetting myself, I made a noise, and then he reached for his jacket from the floor and took a square of foil from an inside pocket.
Afterward he talked about things he hadn’t talked about before: his family—mostly his mother and younger sister, because his father was dead—who, it turned out, were living in Offaly, and who didn’t appear to be in any way rich, but who ran a small grocery shop and farmed forty acres of land left to his sister by a grandmother.
“When do you visit them?” I asked, because it occurred to me that there had never been a weekend when he hadn’t been at the house.
“I don’t,” he said.
I wondered how his mother allowed it. I had already made a visit home to Tuamgraney. “But they’re your family,” I said.
“What’s family, when you think about it?” he said. “It’s just something that happens to you; a bunch of people, not of your choosing, that you’re forced into relationships with. I believe we have the right to choose our own families.”
Your family was your family, I thought, and there was nothing you could do about it. I wanted to say this, but feared it might all have something to do with philosophy and then I would look foolish. I stroked the dark hair of his chest and stayed quiet.
“Do you know where I’d go if I could go anywhere I liked?” he said, and he began to talk again about Argentina. We had climbed under the bedclothes at this stage, and as he talked, his hand rested in the damp hollow between my legs, his fingers playing with me halfheartedly. I must have drifted off to sleep, because I woke sometime later to see him in the doorway, his profile briefly visible in the light from the landing as he pulled the door shut behind him.
—
SUNDAY MORNING, I FOUND Lou Anne and Marcus making sandwiches in the kitchen. Marcus looked up from slicing a block of cheese and said, “We’re going to the lake, if you’d like to come.”
“Why would she want to go to the lake?” Lou Anne said. “I wouldn’t go myself, only I promised Cassie. It’s madness, going this time of year—we’ll catch our death of cold.”
“It’s not cold,” Marcus said. He nodded to the window where a watery October sun was slanting through the blinds.
“I’d like to go,” I said, before Lou Anne could say anything more. I was grateful, joyous even. Marcus had paid me hardly any attention these past few days, even when I’d tried to humor him by making an effort with Cassie.
Lou Anne got a flask from a cupboard and filled it with boiling water. She began to add spoonfuls of instant coffee, counting them under her breath.
“Have you got a swimsuit?” Marcus said.
“It’s too damned cold for swimming,” Lou Anne said, putting the top on the flask. “Cassie will do her bit of paddling, we’ll eat our sandwiches, and we’ll come home.” She packed the flask into a navy holdall on the kitchen table.
I had a red bikini that I’d bought the year before during a shopping trip to Galway. It had journeyed from Galway to Tuamgraney to Dublin without ever being worn, or being seen by my mother. I went upstairs and changed into it, checked how it looked in the bathroom mirror. Good, I thought, it looked good, and I put my clothes back on over it and went downstairs.
I’d presumed that we would take a bus, but Lou Anne had arranged the loan of a car, a little red Ford Fiesta. She was driving, and Cassie was in the passenger seat, Marcus and I in the back. A couple of cassette tapes were scattered across the dash, and Lou Anne selected one that turned out to be Debussy and put it on. It was lavish, ambiguous music, and, as we proceeded down Drumcondra Road, the strangeness of the harmonies unsettled me, brought a feeling I was unable to identify as one thing or another. I was holding a tartan picnic rug on my lap, and Marcus slid his hand underneath, let it rest on my thigh. Lou Anne’s driving was erratic: She took corners too wide and too fast, went through a red light at a junction. The city was quiet that morning, mellow, the outlines of the trees softened by the scant yellowing leaves that still clung to their branches, and as we passed the cemetery an elderly man raised a hand in greeting, perhaps mistaking us for someone else.
We drove for an hour, maybe more, turning off the main road onto a narrower one, and farther on again, onto what was no more than a dirt track. Ahead of us was a lake, a dip scooped out of the surrounding farmland with a small woods at one end that stretched all the way down to the edge. Close to the shore, saplings had taken root in the lake bed, half-formed trees pushing up out of the water. When the dirt track petered out, we trundled downhill through a field. Lou Anne parked as close to the lake’s edge as she could, so close that I feared if the hand brake didn’t hold, the Fiesta might end up in the water.
We all climbed out and Lou Anne took the rug from me, snatched it away before I could offer to carry it. I went to lift the picnic basket from the boot, but she took that, too. The lake was gray and still, as black as onyx out at the center. Lou Anne spread the rug on a patch of grass and sat on it, looking out at the lake, the picnic basket unopened beside her. Cassie was already struggling out of her clothes, discarding them in a haphazard fashion for Marcus to gather up, until she was down to a navy one-piece. I noticed, and was ashamed of noticing, that her legs were heavily dimpled with cellulite and marked with long blue veins. Marcus had rolled up the ends of his trousers. He held out a hand to Cassie and motioned toward the water, but she crouched on the shingle. Scattered over the surface were dragonflies, all of them dead, felled perhaps by a recent turn in the weather, because even with the sunshine, it was colder here than in the city. She picked one up, but it came apart, leaving her holding only its leg. Scolding loudly, she began to gather others, arranging them in a line on top of a large stone.
I took off my shoes and socks, slid my jeans down to my ankles, and stepped out of them. I pulled my T-shirt over my head, the hairs on my arms standing up in little spiky forests. I was in only my bikini now, and I put one hand behind my back to check that the string was fastened. Without looking at Marcus, I walked the short distance to the water. The shingle hurt my feet, but I kept walking. The cold, when I waded in, was excruciating, but I steeled myse
lf against it, kept walking out until the water lapped the top of my thighs and then I stopped, still with my back to him, to allow him to look at me. I’d stubbed my toe on a stone and knew it must be bleeding, but I didn’t care. I stood in the freezing water and let him look, while I stared across at the hills on the other side of the lake. The fields were better tended there, with fences, and a farmhouse standing in a clearing like something from a Constable painting. There was a pasture dotted with black-and-white cows, all so quiet and neatly ordered, tiny and far away. I dived down into the water, imagining how I would appear from the shore, the arc of my back, the red of the bikini against the white of my skin. I swam out farther, stopping to tread water somewhere around the middle. Only then did I look back.
Marcus was faced away from the lake, talking to Lou Anne. She was still sitting on the rug, fully clothed, with a towel wrapped around her shoulders. Cassie was a little farther off, scrabbling after her insects in the shingle. Marcus and Lou Anne were speaking in raised voices, but I was too far out to hear what was being said. All around me the water was black and still, and when I looked down at my feet they appeared white and ghostly. Back onshore, Marcus began to gesticulate. Lou Anne jumped to her feet, discarding the towel. She stood within inches of Marcus, waving her arms about, at one point shouting. Then she was walking away from him, breaking after a while into a run, getting smaller and smaller until she disappeared into the trees.
Marcus stared after her for a moment before turning, at last, to the lake. He stood with his hands on his hips, his gaze fixed on me as I continued to tread water. He stripped to his swim shorts, and waded in. As he swam, I watched his dark head approaching like an otter, and when he drew close, I turned and headed for the opposite bank. I stood in the shallows, waiting, like some creature emerged from the deep, water running in rivulets down my body. He scooped me up without saying anything and laid me down behind an evergreen bush that provided a screen of sorts. He struggled with the ties of my bikini top until, reaching behind, I undid it for him. He climbed on top of me then with none of the preamble of the last time and, pulling my bikini bottoms to one side, pushed into me, his mouth on mine, one hand kneading my breast. He thrust into me hard and fast, pressing me down into the mud, so that I imagined an indent forming like a worm cast that come winter would harden and fossilize. He groaned and collapsed onto my chest, and we lay there together, mud on my arms and between my legs, my hair glued into rope-thick strands, like a bird taken from an oil slick.
He pulled out of me suddenly, and, sitting up, he began putting back on his swim trunks. I sat up, too, noticing only then Lou Anne’s voice coming from the other side of the lake. I looked about for my bikini top, found it floating at the water’s edge. Marcus was halfway across by the time I’d tied the strings and set out after him. I could see Lou Anne up to her waist in the water. She was calling for Cassie and Marcus, and then Cassie again. Marcus reached her, took her by the arm, and dragged her to the shore. She tried to fight him off, but he gripped her by the shoulders. “Listen to me,” he said. “She’s not in the water. She wouldn’t have gone in by herself, you know that.”
“How do you know what she’d have done?” Lou Anne said, and she wrested herself free of him. “What makes you think you know anything about my daughter?” I had reached them now and stood shivering beside Marcus. Lou Anne waded past us, back into the lake, and thrashed to and fro, churning up the water until it grew brown and cloudy and it was impossible to see anything.
“She followed you into the woods,” I said. While it had formed as a half thought, a possibility, I knew as soon as I had voiced it that this was what must have happened. Lou Anne took off right away, running toward the trees. Marcus and I struggled into our clothes and shoes and ran after her. A short distance into the woods, the path split, one trail continuing on straight, the other leading uphill in a less defined route. Marcus stopped, as did I, but Lou Anne carried on uphill. “It has to be this one,” she said. “I’d have seen her if she took the other.” Litter began to appear along the side of the trail—empty crisp packets, dirty nappies—signs that we were headed back toward the main road. The path widened, became more defined, and I saw a brightness up ahead. No one was talking now. Marcus and Lou Anne were in front, behaving as if I weren’t there. When Lou Anne’s foot caught on a tree root, Marcus reached out to steady her and she took his hand, kept hold of it as they ran on. And then we were out of the trees and standing on the hard shoulder of a road, blinking in the sudden sunshine. It was the road we’d driven down earlier before turning onto the dirt track, because I recognized a field that had caught my attention. It was laid out like a gymkhana, and now a man was putting a gray horse through its paces, riding it over a series of jumps constructed from colorful poles.
“There she is!” Lou Anne said. I squinted and saw Cassie some twenty yards away, just after the turnoff for the lake where the main road disappeared around a bend. She was a strange sight in her swimsuit, like something beached or shipwrecked, a mermaid from a childhood story with her fair hair loose around her shoulders. She had her back to us and was walking along the middle of the road, about to turn the corner. From that distance there was something stately about her, something ethereal, and as the light caught her hair she appeared almost transfigured. “Cassie!” Lou Anne shouted. She turned then, Cassie, and saw us. She didn’t immediately come toward us, but she must have recognized us, because she waved. Lou Anne was still holding Marcus’s hand, and in the field alongside, the man was still riding his horse, a steady drum of hooves fractured by small silences as he cleared each jump. A car came around the corner. It struck Cassie, tossing her into the air, her legs at a strange angle to her body. She landed on the car bonnet, where she traveled for a few yards before the car skidded to a halt, depositing her onto the road.
—
YEARS LATER, ON A trip home for a conference, I took a detour in a hired car and tried on impulse to find the lake, taking out the map provided by the rental company, guessing at the route we might have taken that day. Eventually I arrived at a pool of dark water that I knew wasn’t it, but I stayed awhile nonetheless, and then, knowing I wouldn’t try anymore, I drove back to the airport, gave back the car, and boarded my plane. I was teaching at a college in the American Midwest by then. Lou Anne had sold the house in Drumcondra the year after Cassie died and had bought a small house in County Clare. She was closer to my mother geographically now, but they rarely visited each other, although they continued to exchange Christmas cards. My mother said that Lou Anne asked after me in these, though I never pressed her on the details.
I moved out of the house in the weeks after the accident, as did Marcus, though he and I didn’t keep in touch. I saw him once, a couple of years later, on a street in Temple Bar, clean shaven and in a suit. He was standing in the doorway of an office building with a number of other men in suits. He quickly looked at the ground as I passed, and I was glad that he did. It’s rarely I think of him now, but to this day I can’t hear Debussy without a tightening in my throat. Once, preparing to go into a meeting in Denver, I had to slip away to the restroom and lock myself in a cubicle for ten minutes having been ambushed by the piped Muzak of the elevator. What returns from time to time, though I wish it wouldn’t, is that afternoon playing ball on the patio outside the house on Drumcondra Road. It lingers beneath the surface, quivering like a small but troublesome cyst. The dry October day, Cassie, the ball, the little clouds of dust; and Lou Anne looking down from the upstairs window, a sadness, a disappointment, in her face that at the time I attributed to the ruined terra-cotta planter, but which I now know was something else entirely.
It was a little after seven a.m., and outside in the garden her nine-year-old son, Finn, was stringing a tennis net between two trees, stringing it not in the normal fashion, the way one might to play tennis, but horizontally, like a hammock. He was wearing a pair of too-short trousers, perhaps the trousers from last year’s school uniform, and no shoes. Th
e grounds on this side of the property were ragged but pretty, bounded by a low stone wall that allowed views across the fields to the gray slate roofs of Portlaoise. “I think it might’ve been a mistake to tell him about the ducks,” Bill said.
“It’s not about the ducks,” she said. “If it wasn’t the ducks, it would be something else.”
They were having coffee in a room at the front of the house, a high-ceilinged, corniced room that she continued to think of as the dining room, though two years on, it remained unfurnished, apart from a small mahogany table they’d brought from their old house and two faux Queen Anne chairs. The room was long and narrow, with a south-facing bay window and another, smaller window overlooking the side garden, where their son was going back and forth between trees, checking and double-checking his knots. He’d found the net in the shed. It wasn’t their net, though she supposed it must be now; it had come with the house, and had belonged to one or other of the people who had owned this place before them. Finn had commandeered it for the purpose of catching dead, or soon to be dead, birds. Birds, it seemed, were the next great heralds of the apocalypse, and Finn had decided it was important to catch them in the act of falling. Before the birds, there had been two long weeks of insects: a meticulous recording of spiders, flies, and beetles, tallies of the dead entered each night in a blue-lined copybook.
Bill left the window and came to sit beside her at the table. He was wearing an old shirt from his banking days—old but expensive, a Lanvin pinstripe with double cuffs, crumpled because he’d slept in it the night before—and a pair of tracksuit bottoms. He’d stopped getting his hair cut, and now it hung limp and slightly graying just below his ears.
“Will you take Finn to school today?” she said. It was half inquiry, half request.
“We’ll see,” he said. “We don’t want to rush things, do we?”
Dinosaurs on Other Planets Page 14