And when she did fall—fear and dizziness overtaking her—the long journey from standing with her two feet planted on the hard ground to landing on her rear felt for split second like she'd really gone over. When she realized she was safe, she looked over her shoulder to face how close she'd been to death and saw that there were still a good ten feet between her and the edge. They'd been telling her the truth after all, and knowing she'd been safe all along made her feel as if her mother had swooped in and wrapped a blanket tight around her shoulders. She loved them then, felt guilty for not trusting them, for not knowing in her heart that they'd never let her fall.
Of the five of them, the Cahill children, the last family left in Ballyroan—Jack, Padraic, Little Tom, Johanna, and Greta—Johanna was the only one who wouldn't have stopped on her own. Barely bigger than Greta, a full eight years younger than Padraic, she'd taken every step backward as confidently as she'd taken the first. The rest of them had refused the final step, not believing they could back up farther without falling over the edge, except Johanna, who they had to call back.
"That's it," Jack had had to say at the final point. "You're at the edge. Now walk back toward us."
15
"JUST A MINUTE," Greta said. She felt both James and Eavan watching her as she put one foot in front of the other, detected something grainy under her sandal, bent to sweep a few stray crumbs together and then press them against her fingers. When she turned, they were still looking at her—two ruddy faces next to each other, bodies too big for the delicate legs of the chairs they sat on. She brushed her hands over the sink and then started to walk out of the kitchen. The letter still sat on the table, and as she moved away from its neat rows of blue ink, its precise folds, she felt it reproaching her. In those first few years, when Julia was an infant and then a toddler, with Michael and Greta timing their shifts around the baby but never each other, it would occur to Greta what a terrible thing her sister had done, and her fury toward Johanna would become a cold hand that had gotten its numbing fingers around her heart. But as Julia got older and Eavan and James came along, unexpected thoughts began coming to Greta, thoughts that made old furies stumble and fall into a thousand scattered pieces, and no matter how badly Greta wanted to catch them in her arms and put them together again, they would not be reassembled. Strange questions would stop her as she walked down the avenue or reached for her wallet in the grocery store or riffled through the children's clothing racks at Macy's with one of the kids in tow, holding shirts or jeans up against their bodies to gauge their ever-changing sizes. Who had really done the leaving behind? Who had done what to whom? And when these questions struck her, it felt as if she'd been walking along a pitch-black road, only to have the spotlight switched on at the very spot where there was nowhere to duck and hide. And the spotlight followed her wherever she moved and amplified everything she did. She tried to close her eyes and ignore the feeling, but it was still there, for years it had been there, crouching at the edge of her conscience, just as the letter was still sitting on the table, waving at her as the ceiling fan beat the air overhead.
"Where are you going?" Eavan asked, jumping up to follow close behind.
"Eavan," Greta said simply, walking down the hall and slowly closing her bedroom door on her daughter's bewildered expression, Eavan's two fat cheeks pulled long and taut by her gaping mouth. With her hand tight around the knob, Greta pressed until she heard the click of the bolt. Earlier, after they'd tucked the sheets tight at the corners of the bed and tugged at the quilt until it hung evenly on both sides, Greta had raised the blinds to the highest point and Eavan had opened the windows. Now the room was full of sunlight, full of fresh May air, fragrant with the smell of a neighbor's grass cuttings. After so many years, Greta had gotten used to the noiselessness of the suburbs, the neat and ordered quietness of each house in its place. The sounds Greta did hear were always distant, the next block over or farther away, and it had taken her a long time to stop looking up, looking around, waiting for the noisemaker to appear. Car engines roared. Dogs barked. Lawn mowers coughed and grunted. But rarely on the Wards' block, or so it seemed. Rarely where Greta could look out the window and find the source.
"What are you going to do?" Eavan asked, her voice closer, somehow, than it had been with the door open. Greta could tell that she'd put her mouth to the narrow slice of space between the door and the wall, just as she used to do as a little girl.
The doorbell rang. The screen door squealed.
"James," Eavan said, a command, her voice thrown away from the door and down the hall to her brother. James called out a welcome to the first guests.
"Mom?" Eavan said, quieter now that someone might overhear. When she was little, she used to crouch down until she could rest her chin on her knees, purse her lips, cup her hands around her mouth, and stretch her neck toward the crack beside the doorknob as if it were a microphone, a walkie-talkie, a tin can pulled tight at the end of a string. It was usually Julia she was trying to speak to on the other side of the door. When they first moved to Recess, Julia took no time getting used to having a room to herself. She closed her bedroom door when she read, when she spoke on the phone, when she changed clothes. At night Greta and Michael discussed the change in Julia since leaving the city. She'd grown up, they decided. Eavan, unused to sleeping in a room by herself, unused to having only her own things about her, spent every night for weeks creeping down the stairs after midnight, pillow clutched tightly to her chest, whispering, "Julia? Can I sleep with you?" As far as Greta knew, Julia always said yes, because there they'd be in the morning, one a fully grown woman, one just a girl, twisted up in the sheets, their arms resting on each other's hair, as if they'd walked miles upon miles upon miles and then collapsed where they stood. During the day the door would stay closed to Eavan, so she'd crouch, press her lips against the slim gap where the door met the wall, and ask Julia what she was doing, ask to be let in, ask if Julia would like to come up to her room and color. At those moments Eavan always reminded Greta of herself, whispering Johanna a message through the weathered planks of the stable door.
"Just give me a minute, will you please?" Greta said. After a moment she heard Eavan move away.
Greta listened as the guests greeted her children, asked for Julia, mentioned Eavan's growing belly, offered congratulations. She heard the pop of a wine cork pulled free, the thin tap of three glasses being set down, one by one, on the kitchen countertop, the thud of more car doors, more greetings, the rasp of gift bags stuffed with tissue paper, the heavy tread of male footsteps, a woman's voice imbued with the long o's and us of Donegal, scolding, "Pick up your feet, Oran, Jesus. You think you're down in the tunnel?" The guests were hurrying, quieter than they'd normally be at a party, no gales of laughter, no hellos shouted outside from the ones who were already in. "Is he on his way?" they asked in their separate ways, voices lowered, a surprise party in the hour before the honored's arrival the most serious kind of party there is. The crosscurrent from all the open windows rattled the bedroom door in its frame. Greta walked around the bed to her side and sat down.
The longer she sat, the farther away the party seemed. Through the window, which looked toward the western half of the street, Greta could see that the curb was almost completely lined with cars. Soon they'd have to park on the next block. Surely Michael would see these cars and know. Surely Michael would figure it all out before even arriving at the house, and on he'd sail, pressing his foot to the gas, pulling his cap down over his eyes. Up to town he'd go, Greta figured. Up to Sweeney's for a hamburger and a pint. An idea came into her head and settled across her thoughts like a balm: maybe she'd go join him, order up her own burger, her own pint, call the house after a few hours to ask if the coast was clear.
"Ma." James opened the door just enough to peek in. "People are asking for you."
"Any sign?" Greta asked without turning around.
"Not yet. Julia called to say they—"
"Not them. Your father. Any s
ign of your father yet?"
"No." James waited a few seconds and then shut the door.
There were things the children didn't know. At some point in the past year, without ever deciding to do so and without telling a soul, Greta had begun taking an inventory of moments when Michael didn't seem himself. First, he could never manage to find his keys. This was common, Greta told herself. It happened to everyone, look at the people on the TV comedies. What was less common—and this was the difference that gave her a feeling in her gut like a mugger had come up to her on the street and shown her his knife—is for a man who can't find his keys to sit in his car for more than ten minutes before realizing what he was missing. It had happened only a handful of times, but each time, Michael had looked at Greta with anger, as if she'd hidden the keys on him, as if she were playing a joke, as if it were her fault he couldn't make the car go. Second, after forty years of refrigeration, Greta had recently caught him looking for the butter in the cupboard or on the ledge above the stove. Third, he kept forgetting that Eavan was pregnant. Fourth, he sometimes referred to Julia or Eavan as Maeve, a name he hadn't mentioned in years. Fifth, once in a while, usually on a Sunday afternoon, he would go downstairs to the basement bedroom to look for James. "James cleaned his room finally," he'd say to Greta when he came back upstairs. "Went out, did he?"
"Michael," Greta would say, some mechanism in her throat causing her voice to go tight and serious even as she tried to sound light and pleasant. "James moved out, remember? James lives in Brooklyn now." She'd look right in his eyes as she reminded him. If she was carrying something, she'd put it down. She'd touch some part of his body. If she was standing and he was sitting, she'd knead his back and shoulders as she corrected him in a loud and clear voice. Remember this, she would add silently as she dug into his flesh. Pay attention.
"Well, I know that, Greta," Michael would say. "I just thought..."
Greta would wait, hoping for a perfectly sound explanation for why he thought his son who moved out six years earlier might be staying in the bedroom downstairs. None came.
The list went on and on. Sometimes she could convince herself that they were all little things, really, until you looked at them all together, and why do that? Once, when she couldn't manage to convince herself, she mentioned something vague to Eavan and asked her to look up about forgetfulness on the Internet. A few days later Eavan had shown up with the ginseng tablets and a few loose pages about Alzheimer's disease. The pages described people who forgot where they lived, the names of their children. People who didn't know what to do with a toothbrush, a comb, a bar of soap. People who had to be watched like kindergartners lest they wander off one afternoon and never come back. People who forgot everything except for their earliest memories, which came back to them with the clarity of far more recent history.
According to the pages, printed on the backs of first-draft garage sale flyers Eavan was crafting to post around town, there was no treatment, no cure. Diagnosis, yes. And pills. And careful observation. And advice on how to make life easier—locks on the dials of the kitchen stove, bracelets engraved with home address and phone number.
"This is bad," Greta had said after absorbing the information.
"Exactly," Eavan had said. "He's not even close to anything like this. He's probably tired is all. And did I already tell you that Gary locked himself out of his car twice last month?"
Greta folded the pages into quarters and tucked them in among the canisters of flour, sugar, and oats on the top shelf of the cupboard. "Did he really?" Greta asked, and as Eavan went on and on about all the little things everyone, young and old, forgets every day, Greta thought about the people described in the pages and wondered how it had happened. Had they simply opened their eyes one morning to find large swaths of memory rubbed out, or had it happened in bits, standing at a party and insisting that someone's name was on the tip of the tongue, stopping halfway through a story and asking, What was I saying? Had they realized something was missing, or had they just pushed forward, filling in the blanks with whatever fit.
For years Michael had been talking about how much he wanted to go to North Dakota to see the Badlands. He wanted to go to Alaska. He wanted to see the Rocky Mountains. He informed Greta one night as he was getting into bed that all of Yellowstone National Park was in truth an enormous volcano that could erupt at any moment, so that was added to the list. He wanted to go to South Carolina to see if there really were travellers living there, still speaking the Shelta of home. "There are Wards there," he'd said recently. "Since the famine. I saw it on the television." When he first mentioned the possibility of retirement, he sat across the table from Greta and pitched these places one after another. They would trade in his sedan and get a bigger car, more suitable for cross-country driving. He would be at the wheel. Greta would navigate.
"Me in charge of the map?" Greta had laughed. "You're dreaming."
And then, as the months went by and he still hadn't set a last day, she saw that he really was dreaming. She noticed that instead of looking forward to what came next, he'd begun looking back, way back, to the camps and the tents and the tinsmithing trade he'd cycled away from one day in the Burren. More and more he mentioned Maeve and the made-up language they spoke as children that only they could understand. There's not a thing wrong with this man's memory, Greta convinced herself as she listened to the details.
"A turf fire is warmer than a wood fire," he swore one day, and wanted to show her in the backyard.
"Fire is fire," Greta told him lightly, hoping to God he'd stay where he was and at the same time trying to think of a way to stop him if he marched outside and began splitting wood. Authentic turf was impossible to come by in America, so whatever happened, one side of the demonstration would be built entirely upon imagination.
"Hah," he'd said, sitting back in his chair, satisfied by some mysterious point he'd just proven. "That's country people for you. That's what country people know."
He remembered the ship, his berth on the floor, sleeping with his hand in his pocket to protect the few pounds Lily had given him to exchange for dollars on the other side.
And once, only once, just a week or so before he set a firm last day, he mentioned Johanna. Not Johanna as Greta's older sister, as she had been referenced over the years, but Johanna in relation to himself. It was early March, the morning after the last snowstorm of the season. They were shoveling the driveway. Michael plowed through his half in no time and came around to help Greta.
"She was lovely," he said. "Brazen, but lovely. Wasn't she?" Greta nodded, wiped her running nose with her glove, thought of Johanna as she was then, especially in the months before they left for America. As Lily used to say, there was no holding her. There was no keeping her. Then Greta thought of herself as she was during that time—like a day-old chick that couldn't manage to grow out of its box.
"But I loved you," he said simply. He stopped shoveling, as if the thought had taken him by surprise. After fourteen inches of snow the street was even quieter than usual. The air was sharp and brittle, the world made smaller and brought closer by the thick blanket now holding everything together. As far as Greta could tell, she and Michael were the only two who had ventured outside so far that morning, and it seemed to her that the other houses were empty and she and Michael were completely alone. Under a ski jacket James had grown out of, under her thick wool sweater and her long johns, Greta flushed.
"You had a funny way of showing it," she teased, lifting a mound of powdery snow and tossing it into the wind.
But he didn't even look at her as the snow blew back in his face. He just leaned on his shovel and continued to stare off across their brief stretch of property, everything a thick, downy white except for the trees, whose branches were weighed down with glinting ornaments.
"I was very young," he said.
"I know that, Michael," Greta said, dropping her shovel and closing the distance between them. She could no longer feel her toes inside her boots.
"What's gotten into you?"
He shrugged, blinked back to the present, surveyed the work left on the driveway. "Isn't it good luck we never had snow like this at home?" He filled his shovel with a massive heap and walked down the length of the driveway to the curb, where he dumped it. Greta watched him do it again.
"Why are you bringing it all the way over there?" she asked. For the past hour they'd simply tossed the shoveled snow to either side of the driveway. In some places the piles they made were more than four feet deep. From past years Greta knew that these hills that marked the boundary of the drive would be the last white patches to disappear once warmer weather returned.
His eyes were hidden by his cap, but she could tell by the set of his mouth that he was completely baffled. "Well, where do you want me to put it?" he asked. He held a third shovelful aloft with both arms as he waited for her answer.
The tunnels were a worry. He'd be okay, she told herself. The others would watch out for him. Then he came home that day—a rainy Thursday, he'd dripped a path from the garage all the way to his chair in the kitchen—and told her about going up to the supply shed for another hard hat only to discover it already on his head. He'd told her to make her laugh, and she did laugh, even as her heart became a cup that ran over.
At a quarter to five, there came a knock on the bedroom door. "Hey, Mom?" James said in a low voice. "Can I come in?"
Greta stood to open the door for him and looked over his shoulder and down the short hall to glimpse the crowd in the living room. An old neighbor from Eighty-fourth Street saw Greta and waved. James held up his cell phone. "It's Julia. What should I tell her? They're stuck in traffic. Should I tell her to stay stuck? Then we could meet up with them later? Or tomorrow?"
The Walking People Page 39