When Light Is Like Water

by Molly McCloskey

  Around eight, I kissed Eddie goodbye in the front hall and set off. As I descended the mountain road, faster than was wise, I felt as though the car might rise from the earth and become airborne. I was that giddy. I had to force myself to slow down.

  It was only when I was the far side of town that it began to dawn on me what I was doing. By the time I’d passed through Carrick-on-Shannon, I was asking myself if I really needed to go all the way to Dublin to accomplish my mission. Dublin seemed very far away, a point of no return. Perhaps I should carry on only as far as Longford. Then I thought of waking up in Longford, and it seemed no way to begin the rest of my life. I was some miles beyond Dromod when my heart began to race. I wanted to pull over but wasn’t sure I should risk it on the shoulder or how exactly to execute the move – I was travelling, along with everybody else, at about 100 kilometres per hour. In the space of an instant, I grew terrified of the fact of myself behind the wheel of a fast-moving car, and I thought if I didn’t get off that road immediately I was going to lose control completely. A petrol station appeared, and I swerved into the forecourt and switched off the engine, breathless and drained of all bravado.

  I sat there for probably half an hour, the windows open to the warm night, a homely rhythm to the scene – the comings and goings of cars to the petrol pumps, people in and out of the shop for cigarettes or sweets or a pint of milk, the faces of children, sleepy and dumbstruck, in car windows. The shaking in my hands eased, my heartbeat slowed to normal. There was a sense of relief in discovering I hadn’t the courage to go through with it.

  I thought of phoning Eddie. There was a phone box outside the little shop. I heard myself telling him that I was coming home, the good news, as though I’d been given the all-clear after a health scare. The feeling, or some variation on it, was familiar. I’d felt it every time I came home after being with Cauley: how close I’d come to peril and ruin, and how thrilling, suddenly, the safety of the hearth. Each time, in his innocence, Eddie looked precious to me all over again and I was abject with tenderness.

  I started the car and pulled out of the petrol station, and headed west, towards home. I stuck to the speed limit and cars zoomed by me, driven by people who seemed frighteningly sure of themselves.

  When I pulled into our driveway it was almost midnight, the mountain behind the house huge and implacable. The moon was nearly full, and a few clouds floated by, mercury-coloured in the moonlight. I went round to the kitchen door, so as not to wake Eddie, along the path that ran beside the big back garden. We’d done nothing with the plans we’d drawn up for it that spring, and it was even wilder now and more overgrown than it had been the day we’d bought the house. It had assumed an aura of the unapproachable, a monument to our mysterious inertia, and I sometimes imagined it growing and spreading until it engulfed the house itself.

  Eddie was in bed. I put my bag down at the foot of the stairs and went into the living room. I pulled the curtain and opened the sliding glass door, and moonlight spilled like smoke into the room. The front garden looked impossibly still. It was a small rockery, everything in it diminutive: the baby strawberries, dwarf heather that looked like bonsai shrubs, tiny purple-petalled flowers squeezing through the crevices. If the back garden was a jungle, there was a tension about the front; it was all control, tightness, denial. I thought of the woman who’d owned the house before us, the woman with anorexia. When we’d first moved in I used to imagine I could feel her here – she’d left a lot of herself behind, in the form of objects and decor but also an air of malaise that didn’t lift until we’d stripped nearly every literal remnant of her existence away. Only the rockery served as a reminder.

  Eventually, I climbed the stairs and got into bed. Eddie stirred but didn’t wake, and I pressed against his broad back, feeling small and depleted.

  The days after that were tentative and muted, as though we were awaiting news of some kind. I wasn’t sleeping well. It felt more like jet lag than insomnia, abetted by the summer light. I never got used to the seasonal fluctuations at that latitude – the twenty-hour days of summer, going to bed when there was still light in the sky. I would crawl, exhausted, between the sheets at ten o’clock, then wake at three or four and lie there tossing, my mind as restless as if I were on stimulants, as the dawn bled blueish-white into the room. Around six I would fall again into a deep sleep, waking groggy and rueful, having slept, once again, through Eddie’s dressing and departure.

  One evening, after a hot, heavy rain, I said that I was going for a walk. It was about eight o’clock. There was an unusual light, lime-tinted, which was making everything – the trees and grass, the hedges, the one house opposite us – appear backlit and artificial, like pieces in a stage set. I wanted to be out in it, and away, for a few minutes, from Eddie. The following afternoon he was flying to the south of England on business, and I was heading to Dublin to be with Cauley for two whole days. As always, just before I saw Cauley, I was jangled, woozy with anticipation.

  When I said I was going for a walk, Eddie said, ‘I’ll come.’

  My heart quickened. I nearly said, Why?

  ‘Okay,’ I said meekly. I opened the door and Olivia shot out, looked in both directions with a twitch and headed off at a canter up the back garden.

  When we were on the road Eddie took my hand and said, out of the blue, ‘I was thinking maybe mid-September we might go to see your mother and Stan.’

  ‘Really?’ I took this in. ‘You’d go, too?’ My mother and Eddie loved each other, and he and Stan got on well, but usually Eddie was working and I went alone to Florida. I was aware I’d sounded uninviting, and added, ‘Can you take holidays?’

  ‘I should be able to.’

  ‘That would be great,’ I said, though what I felt was terror. Terror that, come September, none of this would exist; terror that my mother would never look at me in the same way again; terror – yes, this, too, occurred to me – that Eddie and my mother had spoken and decided I needed to get away and that some kind of intervention was on the cards. Perhaps Eddie meant to leave me there, return me to my mother, like merchandise that had not performed as promised.

  Oh, I had so much shame that summer.

  ‘We could rent a car,’ he said, ‘take them down to the Keys.’

  ‘They’d love that,’ I said, staring straight ahead at the dark bank of trees at the T-junction the far end of our road. ‘She and Stan used to go to Key West. They haven’t been in a while.’

  ‘When were we there? Was it four years ago?’

  ‘I think,’ I said.

  ‘Gas,’ he said. ‘Time flies.’

  My jaw was clenched. I had begun to feel faint, and frighteningly insubstantial, as I had in the car the other night, as I had on the street corner the day I met Jane.

  ‘I need to sit.’ I rested on a stone wall bordering a neighbour’s field.

  Eddie stood looking at me. ‘Y’all right?’ he said, lightly, distractedly, as though he neither needed nor expected an answer.

  When I swallowed, my throat felt swollen. ‘I’m okay,’ I said. ‘I just got light-headed.’

  He sat down beside me and put his arm around my lower back and gazed out towards the bay, which was half in cloud and half in a low sun. He said not another word. I could feel him sturdy beside me in that way of his, self-evident and unafraid. I tried to steady myself. I let my head rest on his shoulder and stared out at the view, that scoop of earth between the mountain and the bay, with its tufts of trees and its geometry of fields, the hay sheds and the new dormers and the dank little cottages.

  The minutes passed. Colours came and went in the sky.

  I thought maybe the time had come, that he was inviting me to come clean, and the temptation to do so was enormous. Maybe this was my chance and I should take it. Maybe there would be a worse price to pay if I didn’t speak now. But I was too exhausted by secrecy, by the guilt and all the unwelcome power that came with it, to judge whether confessing was the wise thing to do, or whether now
was the time.

  I had begun to believe that Eddie knew something was going on, and knew it was in Dublin. When I’d returned from my last assignation with Cauley, he was in the sitting room reading the paper. It was about nine in the evening. I walked in, and he folded the paper on his lap and stared at me and didn’t say hello.

  ‘What’s wrong?’ I’d asked, because he looked a little shocked.

  He shook his head, as though emerging from some preoccupation. ‘Nothing,’ he said, but clearly there was something. His tone, it seemed, was intended to suggest as much. The normal thing would be to press him – what is it? – but the last thing I wanted was an answer.

  ‘Nothing,’ he repeated. ‘Welcome home.’

  I’d spent the days after in a state of paranoia, certain Eddie was observing the signs of strain in me, waiting for me to crack, not wanting to ask me the question either – what is it? – because he didn’t want to hear my answer.

  ‘Let’s go home,’ I whispered, and we rose together and turned back down the lane.

  It was only when we reached the house and Eddie asked me if I wanted tea that I was struck by the fact that he’d hardly seemed puzzled, or even surprised, by my spell of dizziness and incapacitation. True, he was one of those men who don’t ask a lot of questions. In his case, it wasn’t narcissism or self-importance but rather a notion of himself – was it even conscious? – as an anchor. His job was not to get caught up in passing storms or details but to stay solid and a bit apart. This was one of the things I had first loved about him, the steadiness with which he conducted himself. But that night I found it strange. Eddie was always the first to suggest I see the doctor for some minor ache or pain, and here I’d been faint for no reason and he hadn’t even expressed curiosity, let alone concern. Still, for the rest of the evening he was exceptionally gentle, solicitous, even in his silence. He was like someone auditioning for the part of my husband.

  Around eleven, he said he was heading up to bed. The announcement felt loaded. It was a night we might’ve made love, the mood was like that, an off-kilter intensity that seemed poised to tip towards the erotic. I felt he wanted to claim me, and I was surprised by a flush of desire. Something illicit seemed to course between us. I shifted on the sofa and thought of calling him over to me, having him right there, hungrily and fast. Then I thought of Cauley, and I couldn’t do it.

  ‘Goodnight,’ I said. ‘I’ll be up later.’

  He tossed a magazine on the chair and left the room.

  I stayed up for a long time that night. I turned off the lamps and sat there in the dark, and a feeling of deadness came over me. I don’t mean that I felt numb, but that I felt posthumous, as though I were surveying it all from on high, this life that no longer had anything to do with me. I thought of an evening some weeks before when I’d come home from Dublin. I had been with Cauley that day, I still smelled of him, and I’d sniffed at my own skin like an animal. On the days I’d been to his place, I felt sly and almost predatory afterwards, plugged into the world in a whole new way. It wasn’t that the world had changed but that I was sensing more of its aspects. I looked at men differently, and they did the same to me. The air hummed with arousal, as though they knew what I’d been up to, and I felt initiated and vaguely criminal, on the other side of some line where I understood myself better and felt the worse for it. Back at home that evening I had sat on the brick step on the edge of the rockery, where the strawberry vines spread like tiny fingers in the dirt. The air was balmy and there was a wash of light from the west, a peach-coloured sun sinking below the firs that blocked our house from the road. I had wanted to get to the house before Eddie did. I’d felt the need to present myself to it, not quite to prostrate myself, but something not far from it. I’d wanted to walk into our home and feel forgiven, the way one feels when with animals or children, as though innocence were a contagious thing and reacquiring it as simple as being in its presence.

  My mother loved sunsets. She considered them events. She liked to place herself at a certain beachside café near her condo and watch the sun disappear. Sometimes we did this when I visited her, though I had little interest in sunsets and, to my subsequent regret, often told her so. ‘I don’t get it,’ I would say, ‘why anyone would ever take a picture of a sunset. It’s not like you capture anything of the splendour. It’s not like it isn’t going to happen again tomorrow.’

  She would shake her head and smile wryly. ‘You never know when the world will end.’

  ‘Well, if it does,’ I’d say, ‘nobody’s going to be looking at their photo albums.’

  What was wrong with me, raining on her parade like that? My mother gazed at the horizon with a look of rapture, and I sat there parsing the experience for value.

  One evening, not long after Stan’s death, something in me shifted. We were sitting in our usual place, on high stools at the café, overlooking the beach and the Gulf. As the sun was sinking, a long, washed-out crimson band appeared above the line of the horizon, throbbing faintly like a heartbeat. As we watched, the colours appeared to intensify, as though the sun might flare and ignite. I glanced at my mother, who was watching it all with an air of beatific calm, so at home in the world, and still so capable of awe. I wondered how Stan’s death had changed the tenor of such moments for her, whether these everyday majesties had intensified or been diminished. I looked back towards the horizon just in time to see a green flash as the sun vanished beyond the curve of the earth. My mother gasped, and I was speechless in the face of the sheer, soundless spectacle of the pulsing world.

  After that, I tried to make a point of watching the sunset, even if only from the driver’s seat of my car, to be mindful of the colours the sky assumed on any given evening. In Nairobi, I was often on my way home from work. It was always around half past six, that time of day when the heat seemed to draw, like a tide, back into itself. It became like a call to prayer, that hour, a time when I began, ritually, to think about my mother, minutes in which the whole of our history came to me in the form of a mood, as love is a mood, so that everything was coloured, briefly, by the knowledge of her existence.

  Stan’s death knocked her sideways, not just emotionally but mentally. She grew anxious and forgetful. She was overwhelmed by the smallest things. She became fixated on the +/− button on her old Nokia; she believed this was the key to keeping the device working. I told her, again and again, that this was only the volume control. She said that when she pushed the button she got a little green door. Yes, I said, the green bars are for volume. But now it’s disappeared, she would say, sounding almost panicked. Yes, I would say, when it’s not being adjusted, it won’t stay on the screen. She was also obsessed with charging her phone. Though she very rarely used it, she became nervous if it was away from the charger for even an hour.

  Throughout that period, which she mostly emerged from – the confusion of grief lifted and she regained her equilibrium – I alternated between great frustration and the feeling of falling in love with her, over and over again. I felt a deep, almost unbearable pity for her humanity.

  When she died, two years after Stan’s death, I kept certain things, odd things I wouldn’t have expected, including that flip-top phone. When I look at it I see her snapping it smartly shut, a misleading air of mastery, some trace remnant of the years when she was young and strong and sure of herself.

  During her dying, which I mark as having begun in the late spring of last year with the sequence of mini-strokes, I used to think of hairline fractures spreading like veins across an ice sheet. Now, what I think of mostly is how small she got, how I could’ve lifted her and carried her, loose-boned and limp, as though from a battlefield.

  One of the strokes happened when I was with her. We were pottering about the house, deciding whether to go to the beach or not, when she began to speak in a kind of mashed-up English. I looked at her, expecting her to right herself; occasionally, in playfulness, she made nonsense sounds, to indicate something hardly worth going into. Yada
yada yada, she’d say, and roll her eyes. But this was different. She didn’t seem to know it was happening. She stood before me, perfectly clear-eyed, perfectly steady, speaking gibberish. She was like a person possessed, and for the short time she remained in the grip of this I was stricken with the knowledge that there was nothing on earth I could do to reach her.

  It passed. The nurse came. She made my mother an appointment with her doctor for the following day. For the rest of that afternoon, my mother was lucid, but so cold that she shivered for hours. I brought her blankets and made her cups of hot tea. She was like someone who’d descended frostbitten from high altitude, the chill gone so deep in her it had to work its way out. I sat on the edge of the bed. It looked like there was nothing but a few sticks under the blanket, arranged haphazardly. When I lifted the covers to put heavier socks on her, she raised her head slightly to watch. Some days before, she had banged her calf on the coffee table, and a purple-black bruise had spread violently on the surface of her skin.

  ‘Talk to the doctor about that, too,’ I said.

  ‘Mmm …’ she said vaguely, gazing at the leg with bemusement, as though it were not of her.

  The next day she seemed herself again. She said I should stop fussing, I was making her feel like an invalid.

  ‘I’m old,’ she said tartly. ‘Things happen.’

  When I asked her if this particular thing had ever happened before – I’d already noticed she didn’t like to use the word stroke – she said, ‘Not that I know of.’ She said it with such false nonchalance I felt sure she was lying.

  She sent me out for a few groceries. It was a test. In order to pass I had to show that I was not afraid to leave her alone. She needed to know this. She told me to take the car, but I wanted to walk, much to her bafflement. My mother was not lazy, but she was very American in ways and viewed any walking that was not solely for pleasure as somehow debasing, or even dangerous.