“But, Anne, why’d you go? Could you not think of any reason not to?” Bridget asked. “There was a man had a shop at home who was like your Mr. Kilcoyne, and I always told him my mother was expecting me. That she’d come round looking for me any minute. And then I’d run off.” They were sitting on a low wall in a schoolyard on the outskirts of London, both assistants at the hospital, both Irish and living with a group of other Irish girls they found through an ad in the newspaper.
Why did I go? Anne wondered. It was a good question, and one, even more than forty years on, she couldn’t answer. Once, she almost sent her sister, younger than Anne by one year but older seeming than Anne in some ways, and Anne had heard in the schoolyard that she had a fella. Mr. Kilcoyne had come to the door as always, but instead of pulling on her cardigan right away she said she wasn’t feeling well. “Bernadette can go,” she said. Her father turned the radio down and rubbed his wiry brows. Bernadette looked up from picking her fingernails in surprise. Like a school pantomime, everything stopped for a beat of one or two breaths. But then, before Bernadette or Mr. Kilcoyne could even respond, Anne continued. “But the girls are used to me now,” she said. Always, when she returned home, her father would ask after the Kilcoyne daughters, two of them still in nappies when it all began. Bernadette would have made the tea and would be sitting in the corner, hopping her foot, waiting for time to pass. She almost told them once, the first time Mr. Kilcoyne put his hand under her clothes, his cold hand that had delivered a calf that morning, but her father was taking his tea and listening to the radio and next thing she knew he was packing his pipe and heading out again. Watching him cross the small yard to the path by the cowshed, she knew that even if she told him, nothing would change except then it would be in the air between them, undiscussed, just like her mother’s death. Bernadette went flying outside to visit with her schoolmate, who was passing on the low road.
Anne regretted telling Bridget almost immediately. Telling her, bringing that story to England, spoiled England for her. When she left for America two years later, she knew she would be smarter. She’d bring none of Ireland with her. She’d start the training program in New York City and she’d buy a few new blouses and she’d get her hair cut like Jackie Kennedy and she’d never even think about Ireland again.
But she’d learned a thing or two from all those years of being made to sit in rooms with doctors, first in the nice hospital and then in the one that was less nice. She’d learned that the beginning of one’s life mattered the most, that life was top-heavy in that way. Why else would the doctors keep asking about it, when the events that had gotten her locked in a hospital had happened so much more recently? She’d turned her back on Ireland the day she left but it was still there, behind her, like a shadow that followed her from place to place to place. The body that had driven several hours south along the New York State Thruway to see a son she hadn’t spoken to in so many years was the same body that cut through the tall grass of St. Dymphna’s in 1967. It was the same body that pushed out two baby boys, the same body that made itself stiff as a plank when Mr. Kilcoyne breathed too close to her ear.
The beginning mattered for Peter, too, whether he knew that yet or not. All those years of moving carefully around the house in Gillam had made an imprint on him, somewhere.
* * *
There were some months when Anne would drive the four hours downstate to check up on Peter as many as three times, staying six or eight or even twelve hours at a stretch. She’d turn on the radio while she waited to glimpse him, listen to a celebrity interview or instructions on how to brine a turkey or how to save herself if she were to ever find her car submerged in water. On those trips, if the weather was especially nice, she’d stop at the lookout on the Palisades and sit on a bench, gazing at the broad Hudson. Often, when her mind was so full of Peter that she needed a break from thinking about him, she’d force herself to change the subject, like an engine releasing a bit of steam, and instead she’d imagine the wilderness on either side of the river as it had once been. She’d imagine what it must have been like for Henry Hudson, how terrifying and how thrilling and, ultimately, how frustrating. The thing was, sometimes four hundred years seemed like an impossibly huge amount of time to fathom, and sometimes it seemed like nothing at all. A patient at the nursing home, a man who used to work at the college, once told her about humanity’s common ancestor, a woman named Lucy who lived over three million years ago. Compared to Lucy, Henry Hudson had navigated the north river for the first time only yesterday. Compared to Henry Hudson’s first voyage upriver, Anne had last lived in a house with Peter only a second ago. Less.
There were some months when she didn’t go to see him at all, and instead told herself that she’d seen what she’d wanted to see—he was healthy, he was happy—and now it was time to leave him alone. She told herself that just knowing where he was would have to be enough for her, but whenever a few months went by, the same aimless impatience welled up that she’d felt all those years ago in Gillam. Kate Gleeson had been nothing but a regular suburban girl, like a million others. Was she especially beautiful? No. Was she particularly smart? Anne doubted it. So what was it then? When she dwelled on the question too much, her internal gears began turning more quickly. He could have gone to a better college. He could have become a doctor or a senator and then she’d point to him and look back to her life in Ireland and she’d be able to measure a great distance. But to come all the way here and raise a child who became a cop (how Irish, how typical) and fall in love with any old girl—what was the point? When she thought too much about all of this, she wouldn’t be able to sleep for staring at the ceiling.
Used to be, at the very least, she could make Peter stay inside their house if she didn’t want him seeing Kate. And now here was Kate, arms crossed, always standing between them.
She tried to let it go, to breathe in and out and let the information go still inside her brain, but there was a twist in Kate that Peter didn’t see—her face, livid and red outside the Hungarian bakery on Lexington that morning, was like the shedding of a mask, and Anne thought, Yes, exactly, this is what you’re really like—but that was the story with men and women since the beginning of time. They never saw each other clearly until it was too late. And yet, even as she thought those things, she also thought there was something to admire in the way Kate had come striding directly at her, the way she’d looked right into her face and told her to stay away. She loves him, Anne saw that day. She loves him more than whatever else she has in her life. And she’s fierce. There might be more to her than Anne had credited.
If she didn’t have the courage to approach Peter, to try to connect with him again, then what was the point of watching him like a stalker? She knew that was the question, and she didn’t need Dr. Oliver to be the one to ask. The crazy thing was that Kate almost always saw her. It was as if she knew when Anne was out there, and looked around for her as soon as she stepped through the door. Of course, it was possible that she went through every day with the same hunted expression she wore when Anne was watching, but it always felt to Anne like she knew.
* * *
They moved in together. To a dingy ground floor apartment in Alphabet City. She lost track of them for a few months, but then the detective found them. Anne looked in the barred window one afternoon when neither of them were home and saw dishes in the sink, a pile of empty bottles in a bin by the door, a pair of cereal boxes on the counter.
She hadn’t been down in several weeks when September 11, 2001, arrived. According to the news there was no point in driving down right away because she wouldn’t be able to get near him, not by car, not by public transportation, so instead she watched the television she’d finally purchased, and searched for his face in the footage of police officers trying to make sense of the chaos. He wasn’t dead. If he were dead, she was certain she’d know. Still, she wanted to hear his voice. So, every few hours, she went down to the payphone on Perry Street and using a prepaid card sh
e dialed his number, a landline, but it just kept ringing. Finally, on September 13, he answered.
“Peter?” she said, when he said hello.
“Yes?” he said, after the slightest hesitation. He sounded tired. He waited and waited and waited. Don’t go down there, she wanted to say. Leave it for other people. There were stories of rubble sliding, of objects falling from great heights.
She could hear him breathing on the other end of the line when she hung up.
* * *
About a year after they moved in together, Anne saw Kate coming around the corner with dry cleaning slung over her shoulder when she ran into a woman she seemed to know, showed that woman her hand. Where a moment before she’d seemed so serious, now she looked radiant, and nodded to accept whatever the other woman was saying to her while the dry cleaning bags brushed the filthy sidewalk. She was still smiling into the collar of her coat as she fished out the keys to her building. Next thing Peter jogged up, began to move more stealthily when he realized Kate hadn’t seen him. He crept up behind her and grabbed her by the waist. Anne’s heart clutched inside her chest.
Married, Anne knew. She tried to get a good look at him, at his left hand, as if looking closely might give her the details she craved. Had the Gleesons all been there? George? Had they had a big party? In the early morning, Peter came outside alone. She could always tell when he hadn’t worked in a few days because his beard came in thick and sudden, just like Brian’s used to. She followed him to the park, where he did a few half-hearted pull-ups and then quit, sat on the cold tarmac, then lay flat, arms and legs thrown wide. He’d grown a little thicker in the years that had passed since she first saw him, that Halloween night. He squinted at the sky and after a while closed his eyes as his breath rose straight up from his mouth in plumes. She hadn’t seen him coming back from a run in a long time.
Kate worked odd hours, whatever she did—she used to commute to Queens, but now she took the subway to Twenty-Sixth Street. Peter’s hours shifted weekly, too, and sometimes he was just coming home as Kate was leaving and they’d pause at the security door of their building to hug each other, talk about things that Anne couldn’t hear.
They moved out of that apartment in 2004. She sensed something was brewing, something about the way they rushed around and conferred outside the building, and then the next several times she came down she didn’t see them at all. Finally, she worked up the courage to peek in their window once again, but drew back quickly when she met eyes with a stout middle-aged man cooking something in a pan, not wearing a shirt.
The man came to the window. “See something you like?”
Anne stood her ground. “Wasn’t there someone else who used to live here?”
He laughed. “There probably was, yes, but now I live here.” He looked her up and down. “You want to come in?”
Anne hurried away.
* * *
The private detective she’d enlisted all those years before was no longer in business, so she had to find another. He got her the address in Floral Park and a photo of a little Tudor that looked like a gingerbread house. He also confirmed they were married. They’d only put ten percent down on the house.
“What’s the block like? The neighborhood?” It had come as a shock, this change, though she supposed when she thought about it that she hadn’t expected them to live in that grim apartment forever.
The detective shrugged. “What do you want to know?”
“I don’t know,” Anne said.
She stayed away for months and months but studied Floral Park on a map, memorized the route she’d have to take. The year 2005 arrived, and she was still trying and failing to imagine him in a house that was not their house in Gillam. Finally, she drove three hours down to the city, over a bridge, and then out to Long Island. As she read the signs, she remembered that she’d once been to a beach on Long Island, years earlier, with Brian, before they were married, maybe their second or third date. She’d forgotten all about it, and then all of a sudden she could see Brian sitting on the sand and telling her to go swim, he’d stay with their stuff so no one would take it. In America, in New York, he said, someone always has to hang back and stand guard.
It was a very small but sweet house, snow on the eaves and the tops of all the bushes, warm yellow light inside. The driveway was pitted and cracked. She looked around at all the things her son must look at when he stepped out the door in the mornings. Anne turned off the engine and watched for signs of Peter, as if she might spot his old bike outside. After not very long she saw Kate pass by a ground floor window, the blinds open, the lights inside illuminating her as clearly as if she were on a stage. Tidying up, it seemed, laundry in her arms. She passed by the window again and Anne realized that what Kate was holding in her arms, pressing to her chest, was not a pile of laundry, but a baby.
It took a beat to put it together: Peter’s baby, too.
She got out of the car and stood in a place where she was well shadowed. There they were again. Kate Gleeson and Anne’s own baby grandchild. A brand-new person, made out of nothing. Anne remembered Peter as a baby, how quickly he transformed. For so long he could barely move at all, and then one day he pulled himself up to standing. Another day he walked. Another day he seemed to already know all the words he’d ever need to know in a life.
A few cars passed, and with each one Anne leaned away from the sweep of the headlights and vowed that if Peter came home right then, she would approach him. It was even more important now. She thought of her father for the first time in years. He’d been dead and gone since before Peter was born, but this small person living in a place called Long Island, United States of America, wouldn’t exist if Anne hadn’t existed, and her parents before her, so on and so forth until the beginning of time. She thought of her father’s muck-caked boots, him spitting outside in the yard. She thought of the small threads of tobacco that used to rain down around him at the table, how they’d stain the floor if she didn’t sweep them up quickly enough. She thought about how lonely he and Bernadette must have been when Anne left for England, announcing her plan on a Thursday and gone by Saturday morning.
She thought of her mother, about how much of her, too, might be contained within that small body. Suddenly, she went cold with worry.
But none of the cars were Peter’s, and no one came outside, and eventually the sky became streaked with morning.
* * *
When she left Floral Park after finding out about the baby, it was with a plan to return in no time at all. She was no longer required to see Dr. Oliver. She could get a job somewhere near them. She could stop by and mind the child for an hour if Kate wanted to get to the store. She thought about how little was in her apartment, how she could pack it up in a single hour if she wanted to. And yet, as soon as she parked her car, walked up the stairs to her apartment, opened the door and sat down on the edge of her bed, she knew that Kate would never let her mind that baby, her grandchild. And in a moment of perfect stillness, Anne couldn’t blame her. Where an hour earlier she had a mind to stop by her apartment only long enough to pack up and drive right back down to them, now she saw that the baby would make it more difficult. She knew time was passing, of course she did, but she thought at some point when the moment was perfect she’d eventually step back into his life and pick up where they left off. He was married, yes, but only to Kate Gleeson. But now there was a baby, which meant he was further along in his life than she’d understood. She calculated. He was twenty-eight already. There’d be more children after this one, probably. What was painful before would now be unbearable.
She drove down to Floral Park every few months, but only once did she glimpse Peter, and that glimpse was so brief it barely counted. Their garage door opened and he appeared. He grabbed hold of the garbage can and carried it down the driveway to the curb. He seemed tired, worried. He looked up at the roofline of the house. He rubbed his eyes. Then he plunged his hand into his pocket, fished out a set of keys, slipped into
his car, and drove away, leaving the garage door wide open. Her child, in this grown man’s body. She clutched the steering wheel so tightly that her fingers hurt when she let go.
Otherwise, it was only Kate she glimpsed. Kate with that baby who turned into a toddler. A boy. Brown curls. Wriggly in her arms. Then, not terribly long after that boy began taking steps, there was Kate rushing to the car with another baby in her arms. Even when there were two cars in the driveway and Anne thought, surely, he was in there somewhere, all Anne glimpsed time after time after time was Kate moving through lighted rooms, saying things that Anne couldn’t hear. “Those babies are my grandchildren,” she’d say aloud over and over. Where before she used to leave feeling sad but somewhat reassured—he was doing okay, after all, he had a job, even if he was a cop; he had a partner, even if that partner was Kate Gleeson—since that first baby was born she felt unsettled.
Twice, she spotted George, though he looked different, and it wasn’t until the second time that she figured out who he was. He appeared taller than he used to and younger than he should be, though that wasn’t possible, was it? The way he carried himself down their front path told Anne he’d been there more times than he could count.
* * *
It was too much to think about, and so she found things to do up in Saratoga to keep herself away. She volunteered at the food bank every week. She walked dogs around town for people who were on vacation. She tried reading stories to kids at the library but they all seemed so needy, more interested in telling her stories about themselves and their pets and their brothers and grandpas than listening to the story she read. She kept track of the ages of her grandchildren, though she didn’t know their birthdays. Whenever she saw them for the first time after not seeing them for several months, it was as if they’d transformed. A few times she felt too tired to drive all the way back upstate, so she stayed at a motor lodge on Jericho Turnpike. She glimpsed Peter driving toward her one morning as she was heading toward his house. The sun was in his eyes.
Ask Again, Yes Page 26