by Liz Moore
Patricia and her friends used to sit in pubs for hours and get drunk and talk about boys—men? it was such an awkward age—and Yeats and U2. They were all young and foolish and horribly torn between Catholicism and the impressive club of academia. At school, they laughed at wrinkled old incense-smelling religion, along with Joyce and Freud and the others. At home, they said their rosaries with guilty fervor and went to Mass with their mums and das like all Catholic girls did.
One night Patricia got to the Burren before her friends did, and she went up to the bar and ordered a pint.
Siobhan’s dad—the barman—said, “Okay, but it’ll cost you.” He was trying to be funny, but that was what came out.
Patricia looked at him like he was weird and said, “Has the price changed, or what?”
Frank—that was Siobhan’s dad—said, “No, I was just trying to think of something to say to you. You and your friends always coming in here and me never saying anything to you.”
After that, he asked her to dinner.
Siobhan liked to hear that story when she was younger. Patricia was best at telling it—she related Frank’s verbal incompetence in a hilariously exaggerated way—and Frank always pretended to be mad but laughed at the end. “Okay, but it’ll cost you!” Patricia would say, low-voiced, hysterical.
Siobhan was twelve when her mum died. It was unexpected, and that was the worst part, Siobhan always thought. Her mum had gotten ill and waited to get better. Two weeks later she was gone; they said it was an infection that could have been easily cured had Patricia seen a doctor right away.
Siobhan never understood why anyone would say that. Rubbing it in like that. Making her mother look foolish, like the victim of something, when she was the smartest person Siobhan knew. Smarter than her dad, certainly. Smarter than her teachers.
Her dad had let Siobhan and Hugh stay home from school for a week, and then he sent them off. Partly, Siobhan thought, it was so he could have the house to himself to look at photo albums and cry. When she went back to school it was as if nothing had changed; her friends kind of tiptoed around her a little bit, but that was it. She knew that the sisters had told her classmates about her mother while Siobhan was at home.
A lot of them came to the memorial service, dragged there by their own Irish parents. The mums swooped down on Siobhan and Hugh and Frank and gave teary hugs and words of encouragement and trifles. The dads frowned a little stiffly and shook Frank’s hand and said, “If there’s anything…”
Siobhan’s classmates hung back shyly until they discovered one another and then chatted, even laughing sometimes. Siobhan could see the only way they could make themselves feel sad was by picturing their own mums dying. Then their eyes would get teary, a little, and they’d glance at Siobhan guiltily.
Siobhan went home after the service and up to her room. She put on Nirvana’s Nevermind. Hugh came into her room—normally he knew better than that—and crawled up onto her bed nervously. Siobhan ignored him but let him sit with her and listen.
Downstairs, her dad was on the couch, curled into himself with pain, wondering what he was going to do with a nine-year-old, a twelve-year-old, and the rest of his life.
IV.
If there’s one thing Siobhan hates, it’s lying. She is sitting across from Jax Powers-Kline, president of A&R at Titan Records. She’s doing it; she’s offering them the deal that the other members of the Burn are practically pleading for, have their tongues on the table for. Mike G. and Mike R. are sitting next to each other and Mike R. keeps hitting Mike G. emphatically under the table whenever the exec says something impressive—which is clearly her only job.
“The Burn is hot right now,” says Jax Powers-Kline. “No pun intended.” She chuckles. She has never heard their music before, but she has read Theo’s notes and they’re worth signing. She’s done this a hundred times before. “I love your work. I want to help you make it better. I want to make the Burn the best it can be. And I want to make sure the entire country—the entire world—gets a chance to experience the power of your music. So what do you say? Do we have a deal?”
Pete and Mike R. try to disguise their excitement, stuttering something about having the lawyer look at it, but Siobhan isn’t listening. She is gazing at her reflection in the mirrored wall across from her. She has gained weight in the past year and she can see the exec calculating already how best to encourage her to lose it.
The band takes the paper contract—Mike R. accepting it and holding it as if it were an infant—and says they will look it over. The band files out and Siobhan rises from her chair last, at once picturing the stain on the chair of her eighth-grade English class, at once picturing Kurt Cobain in his final year, eyes pleading for mercy from an audience that was nameless, immense, and overwhelming. Then the shot. Then the blood.
Then the knife. Then the blood.
V.
Hugh has come to her apartment in Brooklyn with his things. It’s the day before Christmas. The two of them are taking the train to Yonkers—Hugh with his enormous suitcase for a month at home; Siobhan with her little one for a few days, and her acoustic guitar. She doesn’t feel like bringing an amp.
Christmas has become perfunctory in their house. It’s a relic of the past. It’s a reenactment of all of the Christmases before Siobhan turned twelve. Their dad still puts out stockings with candy in them that he has bought from the Irish imports store on McLean Avenue.
He joined the Rotary Club after their mum died. He kept busy that way; he had made a group of friends he bowled and played cards with. He still works at the same bar he’s worked at since coming to America; bartending is the only part of Ireland he has not left behind. There he has a small set of loyal friends and regulars who know his name and use it fondly. But the house is still empty at night and, though he won’t admit it even to himself, he misses having Hugh and Siobhan home with him. He and Hugh fought continually while Hugh was in high school, after Siobhan moved out. She held them together.
But now his two children are coming home for Christmas, and he has cleaned up the place a bit, put up a wreath on the front door and a tree in the living room (though he felt a bit womanish doing it), and he answers the doorbell with a swollen heart.
Hugh and Siobhan are standing there, bundled up for winter, suitcases in hand.
“Hello, you two,” says Frank. “Come in then.”
After their Christmas Eve dinner—chicken meals from Boston Market and shortbread cookies that Siobhan made yesterday—and after opening presents—Hugh gave Siobhan a mug that said #1 SISTER and Siobhan called him a cheap bastard—they retreat to their separate corners. The house was always old and it’s gotten older, drafty in its retirement.
Hugh walks into his room and collapses onto his bed. He is thinking of Angela, the girl he’s been dating casually for three months. He likes her better than she likes him. He likes her better than any girl he’s met before. He might be in love with her, actually.
Frank is sitting on the edge of his bed, eyes closed. He is remembering moving to America with Patricia, filling out forms, taking exams. He remembers making her tea and worrying together blissfully about how they’d manage to pay the rent, a baby on the way, another after that. They worried as a way of showing love.
Frank’s eyes are still closed. He is pulling a thread from his very old sweater. He is praying for the happiness of his children.
Siobhan opens the door to her childhood bedroom and the familiar cold hits her like a wall. In the near-dark she finds her way to the light on the bedside table, stubs her toe on the bed, says, “Fucking A.” She collapses, holding her foot, in agony. She finds the lamp from her place on the floor and it sheds light on all the junk she’s kept under her bed for years.
Kurt Cobain stares up at her from the cover of Rolling Stone.
Siobhan is frozen—meeting him like this, unexpectedly, seems too much to bear. She takes the magazine out from its dusty place and touches Kurt’s eyelined eyes. His mouth—his woun
ded mouth. His nose.
The only man I’ve ever loved, she thinks—and is abruptly hurt for herself, realizing the truth of it and the sadness.
She stands and hobbles to the window. Outside, it has begun to snow.
Her mum. Kurt Cobain. Downstairs, her dad in his bedroom, maybe drinking, maybe not. Hugh, lovesick and funny. James Joyce in the ground in Ireland. Her family in America. Her ancestors across the Atlantic, thousands of them, all lined up in perfect Irish succession, all of them watching her.
And here’s Siobhan: in love with a dead man with desperate eyes, a man she’s never met, a man she bled for twice.
3.
TOM, WHO CANNOT SAVE THE WORLD
I was handsome, I was strong
I knew the words of every song
Did my singing please you?
No, the words you sang were wrong.
—LEONARD COHEN, “Teachers”
I.
The babies are crying again. Tom is still asleep, but he won’t be for long.
Right now he is in the midst of a lovely dream: In it, he is at his mother’s cabin in Vermont. It is late autumn and the reservoir is so low that a mile of beach stretches between the house and the water. Tom’s older brother, who has been dead for ten years, is alive and talking to him about philosophy while they walk along the beach.
“Ben,” says dream-Tom, “I’m scared of my life.” He turns to his brother, who has disappeared but is still there.
“Tom,” says Tom’s invisible brother. “What’s that noise?”
He’s up, he’s up. Camilla is lying still to his left, and he gets out of bed carefully so she doesn’t wake. This is the first time she’s slept in thirty-six hours. Having two daughters twelve months apart was not her idea. Tom fumbles for his robe in the dark. The small squeals down the hall are increasing in frequency and volume. The girls will turn hysterical in thirty seconds if the nipple of a bottle is not placed in both of their mouths.
Tom is fully awake now, barreling down the hall toward the kitchen, where he nukes two bottles of formula for less than the recommended time, and then into the babies’ room. His wife has decorated it in shades of green. It was Camilla’s mother’s idea to have the girls sleep in the same room, despite the difference in their ages—despite the fact that Clara sleeps better than Alice but Alice wakes her up. Camilla’s mother has been into some neo-hippie/New Age stuff this year, and read someplace that siblings that sleep in the same room have better relationships later in life. Camilla bought into it and Tom didn’t feel like arguing, though tonight he thinks he might have a case.
He turns on the soft baby light and shuts the door behind him, feeling slightly unsure what to do next. There’s two of them. One of him. It’s not fair. He doesn’t have a chance.
“Shhhhh, shhh,” says Tom uselessly. He can never figure this part out. The girls’ howls don’t desist, and Tom puts the bottles down on the nightstand and then bends to scoop up Alice—the younger of the two, only four months old—from the left crib. He plugs one bottle into her mouth. From the other crib, sixteen-month-old Clara’s cries turn to screams. He hands Clara the other bottle, half bending into the crib while balancing Alice on his hip, and then has a sudden vision of her choking—she’s lying down, and you’re supposed to prop them up, right? He yanks it away again. This does not further his cause. Clara is barely pausing for breath while she screams. He puts Alice back in her crib and she immediately starts up again.
“Let’s be rational here,” he says to Clara and Alice.
When at last he has arranged two babies in his lap and they are suckling greedily from their bottles, Tom leans his head against the back of the chair and thinks how strange it is that he loves these creatures—strangers, really.
“I haven’t known you guys for very long at all,” he says. “Isn’t that weird?”
They don’t think so.
An hour later, and the three of them are still awake. The girls are alert and smiley in their cribs, gurgling and cheering. Ready to play at three o’clock in the morning. Tom’s eyes are closing, but each time he makes for the door Alice whimpers threateningly. A police car goes by and casts its blue and red stain across the wall. Tom wants to cry. Most of all, he wants to sleep. He has to leave tomorrow and he’s going to be wasted.
He reaches for the guitar that’s propped in the corner. The old thing is hopelessly buzzy and will never be tuned, but it was Tom’s first and he can’t get rid of it. He drops the low E to D and does his Leonard Cohen impression:
“It’s fooouurrr in the moorning, the eennd of December, I’m wriiiiting you noooow just to seeee if you’re better…”
The girls are out cold.
Tom watches his daughters sleep, feeling ancient and comforted in the tradition. He imagines his own parents watching him, and theirs watching them. He wants to shelter Clara and Alice like a willow tree forever.
Their little heads are still and their soft backs rise and fall together. They cannot know these things: on Alice’s eighth birthday, a man with a camera will follow their family and friends into the skating rink at Chelsea Piers and their father will rip the camera from his hands. Clara will cry and Alice will not speak to Tom for the rest of the day.
On her first day of sixth grade, Clara’s English teacher, in a noble attempt to make her students love poetry, will play the first single off Tom’s latest album and will ask the class to analyze its lyrics. Clara’s classmates will of course know who she is and will laugh.
Alice will be asked to her prom by a boy she has loved since age thirteen. He will come to the apartment to meet her father and then will not dance with her for the rest of the night.
II.
Tom and Camilla have been fighting. Recently, everything triggers them—what to have for dinner, whether to hire a housekeeper, where to find a babysitter. And now Tom is packing to go away again. It’s January, the time of year that the band gets ready to go on tour.
Camilla has always gone with them before, but now they have the girls and the idea of two babies on a tour bus is unappealing. Camilla’s mother is coming to stay with them while Tom is away.
It seems strange to Camilla not to be leaving. She has always packed up her things like Tom and the rest of the band and hopped on one of the buses, driving for hours and hours and staying in strange hotels. Watching Tom bent over his guitar with inspiration late at night after a show. Stopping for lunch at little joints along the way and taking everyone’s order so they wouldn’t have to get off the buses and possibly face a mob. Standing around backstage and marveling at the sheer number of people in the audience. Terrified at the way they loved her husband.
The girls, especially. Such young girls and all of them screaming, some of them crying from love for Tom. She remembers being desperately in love with Jon Bon Jovi, and she wonders if these girls hate her. She wonders if she is supposed to feel guilty for being married to Tom, or grateful, or undeserving. Sometimes she feels all three.
Most of all she feels overwhelmed. She and Tom met in the midnineties (when we were babies! she thinks, often) and dated for years before getting married. He and the band got famous sometime during this period, but she can’t even really remember when. It still feels new, though, this life under scrutiny. It’s a life of comparison, really—imagining what it would be like to be normal again, or to walk to the grocery store with her husband without a fan stopping him for an autograph, or to move to the suburbs and be happy and build snowmen in a small snow-covered yard.
Now Tom is bent over his suitcase, stuffing his shoes in on top of a pile of shirts. His manager, Glen, is sitting on their bed and talking about merchandise. Camilla watches Tom from the doorway and smiles. He’s always packed in the weirdest order.
“Let me,” she says. Tom startles.
“It’s okay,” he says. He sits on the suitcase and zippers it from that position.
Camilla laughs and rolls her eyes at Glen. She looks at Tom, who is triumphantly lifting h
is closed suitcase off the bed. “Are you going to say goodbye to the girls?”
Camilla’s mother is on the floor with Clara and Alice in the living room, and she is making crazy cooing noises. She sees Glen and Tom with his suitcase and picks up Alice, making her little hand wave.
“Say bye-bye to Daddy! Bye-bye, Daddy!” says Camilla’s mother, of whom Tom has always been afraid.
Tom picks up each daughter in turn and kisses them both hard.
“Bye-bye,” he says, and feels stupid.
“Awwww,” says Glen. Tom wants to deck him. He’s been getting more and more annoying in recent years. Glen claps him on the back and says, “Let’s get the show on the road, Tommy!”
Camilla, Clara, and Alice watch. Tom is walking out the door. He’s walking to the elevator. And the door is closing. Camilla waves to the metal door. She turns and faces her daughters, feeling as though she’s forgotten something, or something has forgotten her.
III.
The show tonight is at a stadium in New Jersey. The band does a sound check at two and then heads to the hotel.
At six P.M., they climb back onto the bus to do the show. They pull into the alley that goes behind the place, passing a crowd that has already begun to assemble—though no one will be let in until seven. The windows of the bus are tinted, Tom knows, but he still feels strange staring through them at this horde of young people who have, by now, seen the buses and are hitting each other affectionately and screaming. He feels as if they must be able to see him, standing here stupidly, leaning on the Formica slab that serves as a table.
Tom has the conviction that if these people knew him, they might hate him. They probably would have made fun of him in high school, anyway. He watches as three girls run toward the bus and Tom is afraid, just for a moment, that they will be caught beneath its wheels, crushed like animals. But they stop just short of it and content themselves with howling at its sleek black sides.