Grace After Henry

by Eithne Shortall

  I looked at him and those pale blue eyes looked back at me.

  For a split second it was so normal. Here he was. Of course he was. Where else would he be? Then I started to spiral. It couldn’t be. There was no way. He was dead. A truck on its way back to the UK after delivering a consignment of beet sugar had crushed his body under its rear wheel and the driver hadn’t felt a thing. I remembered that I was a little insane lately and Henry probably wasn’t there at all. It was probably just a man with similar hair or shoulders or just a man. It was another one of those, I remembered Patsy’s words, another manifestation of hope. I looked at my feet and forced my eyes to close. I opened them as quickly as I could and looked up. It was still him. I could have vomited or cried or fallen to the floor but really I needed to stop spending so much time on the floor. So I forced myself to stay upright. Either I had lost my mind or it was Henry.

  ‘You mind if I . . .?’

  I nodded, because what else in the whole wide world was there to do? And then he was in the house. Our house. The house we had so badly wanted. There was a battle raging in my mind but if I could keep it at bay, then I could exist in this dream state or mental breakdown or whatever it was that had Henry moving towards me in the hallway of our dream home. But as he crossed the threshold, something shattered. It was him, and yet. Henry moved past me, not towards me, as if it was me who wasn’t who they really were. He passed me and I wanted to inhale, to get his smell, but nothing worked as it should. I tried to keep my mind in place, to stop it reaching into pragmatism. If I wanted, I could stretch out and touch him. Was it another one of those dreams?

  I stood to one side because, again, what else was there?

  He hesitated between doors. How did he not remember our house? Henry looked to me, questioningly, but I could only shake my head. Or maybe I hadn’t moved at all, but either way the hallway was spinning.

  ‘Right . . .’ And he took another step towards the stairs. ‘I reckon the boiler is in the bathroom? Upstairs?’

  I couldn’t stop looking at him. Was it him? Henry, and not quite Henry. The skin more tanned and the hair lighter. Like Henry after a holiday, maybe. Is that where he’d been all this time? Had he been on holiday? Did he go back to Lisbon or Dubrovnik? Or had he gone somewhere new? I was in a dream and my head was floating. After a moment I followed Henry, or Not Henry, up the stairs. He turned into the bedroom mistaking it for the bathroom. How long had it been since he was here? That day in December when we came to see this place, when we fell in love with it and maybe a little more with each other and how our lives could have been. I was confused. I tried to remember the month (April) and the circumstances (Henry was dead; the boiler wouldn’t heat).

  He wandered into the bedroom and realising his mistake, turned. ‘Sorry, wrong—’

  But something wasn’t right. I heard the voice from where I stood on the landing and it wasn’t Henry’s voice. I was as sure that it was not his voice as I was that the man who had just walked into the bedroom was him. I did my best not to panic, not to lose it completely. He didn’t finish the sentence and he didn’t reappear onto the landing. I no longer had any idea who that man was, the man pausing in our bedroom. I stood there looking at the doorframe, afraid that if I moved he would disappear and Henry would be gone from me. A wave of nausea crashed on all sides but I didn’t look down. I didn’t close my eyes. Not this time. I could not lose Henry again. I tried not to breathe.

  Reality was starting to creep in, but the lack of oxygen to my brain only allowed it to travel so far. After some version of eternity, he emerged from the bedroom. Only now it was Henry again. He was holding something. He presented it to me and it reflected the sun from the skylight above.

  ‘Is this . . .?’ Henry’s mouth moving, but another sound coming out. He looked up from the picture frame to my face, his eyes asking me something. He tried again. ‘Is this . . .?’

  And I nodded. It is us, Henry! It is us in Portugal! Our first holiday abroad. We were sitting on a wall by the sea and the sun was setting behind us. There were freckles across my nose, and his hair was almost as light as it was on this version of him that stood on the landing of the house that should have been ours. I wanted to reach out but I didn’t move.

  ‘You,’ I said, barely more than a whisper. And he turned the frame to face him.

  ‘This is you,’ he said, looking at me with those same translucent eyes. ‘And this is . . .’ His hand moved to the man beside me. To Henry. To him. ‘And this is . . .’

  ‘Henry.’ A little louder this time.

  I was looking at him, and he at me, and suddenly my knees buckled. The battle of CO2 versus reality roared in my brain. He threw out his hands and the picture fell to the ground, the frame breaking but not splintering, just a jagged line through his face, and I balanced against him. Those hands like mitts, big and strong and surprisingly capable of untangling Christmas tree lights and carrying me to bed when I fell asleep on the couch. I wanted it to be him so badly.

  When I was standing, and breathing, he let go.

  ‘What?’ I said, because the oxygen had carried in reality and I was suddenly aware of where and when and, almost, who we were. But ‘what’ escaped me.

  He picked up the cracked frame and I thought how it was from Ikea and I’d just been there and I was not going back again, no way, not for a picture frame. He held it in one hand, fingers stretching the whole way around, and he said: ‘So that’s my brother.’

  I looked at this man and tried to figure out what he was. Almost Henry. But of course not Henry. Henry was gone. Or he had been and now he was back. Had I willed him back? Suddenly I was afraid and unsure and before I knew what to say I said, ‘Don’t leave.’

  ‘I’m . . . I won’t,’ he said. ‘Will we sit? Downstairs, maybe?’

  One hand holding the frame, the other still on my arm.

  ‘Let’s sit downstairs. I think I can help explain.’

  Andy

  SIXTEEN

  Ihad been standing on the side of the road for a full half hour before a car finally stopped. The bus driver that dropped me off told me this was as nice a day as you’d see in spring but we obviously had different ideas of what passed for spring. Could I not have packed just one pair of full-length trousers?

  ‘Where are you for?’ called the driver, winding down the window on the passenger side.

  I checked the scrap of paper again. ‘A house called The Sanctuary? The only address I have for it is Farmleigh, County Wicklow. Do you know it?’

  The man gave a laugh. ‘Yeah, I know it. Though it hasn’t been The Sanctuary in years. Never deserved that name in the first place.’ He leaned over to open the door. ‘Hop in. I’ll drop you up the road.’

  He didn’t have to tell me twice. I had been in Ireland four weeks. This was my third trip to Wicklow and the closest I’d come to actually reaching my destination. ‘Thanks, mate.’ I strapped myself into the passenger seat. ‘Much appreciated.’

  ‘You’re not Irish anyway.’

  ‘No, I’m not,’ I agreed, having no interest in going through the ins and outs of my birth and ambiguous nationality. ‘I’m Australian.’

  ‘An Aussie.’ The man laughed again, pulled out onto the road. ‘I hear the beer is very dear down there. Is that true?’

  ‘Dear, as in expensive?’

  ‘Yeah. Mad expensive, I’ve heard.’

  ‘I guess.’ I pushed the scrap of paper into the front pocket of my shorts. ‘What did you mean about The Sanctuary not deserving its name? I thought it was just a house name – like you get in rural places.’

  ‘Maybe it’s just a house now, but years ago it was a factory.’

  ‘A factory?’ The car climbed the hill and from the window, I watched the Irish countryside whizz by. There were a couple of farmhouses and a few sheep, but that was it in terms of enterprise. ‘Out here?’

  ‘Nobody from here ever called that place The Sanctuary. We knew it as The Factory. They were producing babies
like they were coming off a conveyer belt. Sometimes we’d cycle up after school to try to catch a glimpse of the girls in the backyard. The story was they were only allowed out once a week. Wednesdays, I think it was. It’s so long ago now I can’t quite remember. I feel bad about it, a bunch of us up there gawking at those poor unfortunates. I don’t think any of us would be proud of that now. Nowadays it’s the only thing you hear on the radio – Mother and Baby Homes this, forced adoptions that – but we hadn’t a clue. They were just women who couldn’t keep their legs closed. Jesus,’ he said, and I gripped the edge of the seat as he swerved around another bend as casually as if he were changing lanes, ‘when I think of it.’

  ‘Was it . . . a Mother and Baby Home?’ I knew all about those institutions now. I’d read everything about Ireland’s adoption history since coming here. But I still felt weird saying the name, it sounded so cosy – Mother and Baby Home – only it never fit the reality. And it definitely never occurred to me that I might have been born in one.

  ‘Ah no,’ said the driver who, I reckoned, was about twenty years older than me. ‘It wasn’t anything like the scale of those places. The Factory was more of a halfway house. You know?’

  I looked at him. I didn’t know.

  ‘Where women in trouble went while they waited for the thing to arrive,’ he explained. ‘Until they could hand it over and go back to their own lives.’ He shook his head. ‘The stuff we used to shout at them. I do now, I feel shocking bad about it.’

  ‘And is it still . . .?’

  ‘A factory? No no. That stuff ended years ago. Although the foremen would have kept it up if there’d been the business, I’d say.’

  ‘The factory had foremen?’

  ‘That was their name, Mr and Mrs Forman.’ He glanced over at me and laughed. ‘I know. You couldn’t make it up. Never saw anything wrong with what they were doing either. God’s work. Here we are now.’ The driver nodded ahead to a white and red cottage. The paint had faded and there were a few slates missing but even with that it wouldn’t have been out of place on a twee postcard. This was the Ireland Mum used to get teary-eyed about when she’d had a couple of drinks. A few more drinks, though, and she couldn’t say enough bad things about the place.

  ‘It’s so . . . pretty,’ I marvelled as the car pulled in. I couldn’t remember when I’d last described anything as ‘pretty’. Possibly never.

  ‘I suppose it is,’ said the driver, observing the cottage. ‘Gives me the creeps, though. What has you visiting anyway?’

  ‘Family tree stuff,’ I told him, opening the car door and then adding for no particular reason: ‘I had an uncle born here.’

  ‘Poor bastard. Rather him than me.’

  ‘Yeah. Thanks for the lift,’ I said as I climbed out.

  ‘Oh, wait!’

  The driver rolled down the window again. ‘Yeah?’

  ‘Do they still live here, the Formans? The ones who ran the . . . factory?’

  ‘Sure do. They come into town for Mass on Sundays, and there are carers in and out to them. They never did anything wrong, technically. But sure that’s Ireland for you: nobody’s ever to blame, technically. They should be locked up, as far as I’m concerned.’ He started up the engine again. ‘Best of luck now.’

  ‘Thanks.’

  The car pulled off and I turned to have a proper look at the house where I was born.

  Andy

  SEVENTEEN

  Icouldn’t remember a time when I hadn’t known I was adopted. Mum regularly told me how she got me from a baby hospital in Dublin right before she and my aunt and grandma moved to Australia. People found it hard to believe that before she died I’d had zero interest in finding out about where I came from. It was a point of fascination in the school yard. I’d moved around enough to know that being adopted was exotic enough to interest schoolmates who might otherwise ignore the arrival of yet another new kid. But when lung cancer finally got her, I suddenly felt compelled to know. I guess it was the loss that spurred me on. I’d always felt like something was missing and even though I hadn’t been so close to Mum in later years, when she was no longer there that inherent loneliness had become more acute.

  Before I arrived in this country, getting information was like pulling teeth. Tenacity and dedication were not traits I had possessed in a long time and I was as surprised as anyone that I hadn’t just given up. I already had my adoption certificate and Grandma told me that the ‘baby hospital’ where Mum had gotten me was in south Dublin. Communication with the Irish adoption authorities had been slow to start but once it transpired my birth mother was dead, they were a lot more forthcoming. The second phone call from my assigned social worker provided me with her name and the information, which they presumed I already had, that she’d given birth to another boy about twenty minutes before me. That was what the social worker told me: I had a twin.

  Understandably I was stunned, speechless actually, and the woman on the phone started stuttering and saying that maybe she’d gotten it wrong and she’d double check and come back to me. But by the time she rang back a few weeks later and confirmed that yes I had had a brother, I was no longer so surprised. I’d quizzed Grandma and she was as shocked as me, and there was no way Mum had been told, but somehow, somewhere deep down, it was like I already knew.

  I had always told myself that the sense of longing I carried was due to being an only child or knowing I was adopted or having a flaky mother. And yet none of those reasons ever felt quite right. But a brother, that felt real.

  ‘What do you mean had?’ I asked the social worker, speaking into the phone in the dead of night in the reception of the Sydney resort where I was living and working. ‘What do you mean I had a brother?’

  The woman at the end of the line hesitated. I imagined her in an office in Dublin, looking out onto some rainy field. It was the close of the working day on the other side of the world. And then she told me that my brother had died a week previously in a traffic accident.

  She had promised to come back with more information but when I hadn’t heard from her in two weeks and my internet searches proved useless, I phoned the office only to be told she had gone on maternity leave. After that, I might as well have been speaking Swahili for all the information I got out of them. I hadn’t expected to care this much – but then I hadn’t expected to have a brother. There was something about this other life, this unknown existence on the opposite hemisphere that could as easily have been mine, that kept me going.

  I took what little money Esmerelda – my mum; she’d been christened Edna but refused to answer to it – had left me and booked a flight to Ireland. I left the resort where I’d been working for six months and the woman I’d been seeing for as long, without handing in my notice to either. Maybe in Ireland I’d understand what it was to belong and I’d stop being the sort of man who thought nothing of running away.

  ‘Hello?’ I knocked on the front door of The Sanctuary, or The Factory, or whatever this fairly modest-looking cottage was called.

  I waited but nothing stirred inside. ‘Hello!’ I shouted. ‘Is anyone home?’

  A few days after I arrived in Dublin, I had gone to the ‘hospital’ where Mum had gotten me but it was an apartment complex now. I spent two weeks unsuccessfully trying to meet someone from the adoption services. In the end I found the Adoption Rights Alliance and they pointed me in the direction of St Patrick’s Guild – the religious order that had run the hospital I’d been adopted from. I’d finally started getting places but by then I was running out of money. Esmerelda hadn’t left a lot. Which she’d be glad about; life was for living and all that. I stopped by a few building sites and called into hardware shops looking for numbers. I found enough nixers to get by.

  I checked my watch. I had a couple of hours until a lunchtime job near the city.

  I’d filled out several Freedom of Information forms but was told it could take five weeks to get a decision on my request, and even then that decision might be that
the information would take several more weeks to source. So I’d started turning up at the head offices of the guild that handled my adoption. Most mornings if I didn’t have a job on, I went there. I’d camp out in the foyer, badgering the receptionist and marvelling at this new-found tenacity. They threatened to call the police but I knew they were bluffing, and eventually they cracked.

  I tried the front door of The Sanctuary a third time but didn’t bother waiting for a response before heading around the side of the house. I looked through a dirty window into a bedroom that didn’t look like it had been occupied anytime recently. The backyard was large and overgrown. There was a kennel with no sign of a dog and a shed that looked like it might collapse at any minute. In the middle of the weeds stood a statue of the Virgin Mary, dressed in her white and blue with a set of rosary beads draped over her hands. I tried the back door.

  ‘Hello? Hell-oohh??’

  St Patrick’s Guild had handed over a file so immaculately presented I was convinced they’d written it up while I was waiting in the foyer, and not thirty-four years before. But the guild was known for its impeccable record-keeping – ‘Like the Nazis,’ said the woman at the adoption alliance, adding that the problem wouldn’t be the file existing, the problem would be getting them to hand it over. But they had. A couple of sheets of paper imprinted with the neatest handwriting: Child Two. Born to Frances Clinch, aged 19, on 2 October 1984, the second brother, twin. Both born at The Sanctuary, Farmleigh, Co Wicklow. Child One removed by private adoption. Child Two unexpected, surplus.

  ‘Hello!’

  A flutter of wings as birds fled the adjacent tree. I started knocking on the back door and didn’t stop.

  ‘HELLO HELLO HELLO HELLO HELLO HELLO HELLO . . .’

  I’d found Frances’s grave and I went to visit a couple of times. I didn’t feel anything in particular for the slab of marble in the middle of a massive cemetery that also doubled as a tourist attraction and was always full of sightseers searching out the historical Irish figures buried there. It just made Frances seem even less significant.