‘Wonderful.’ She managed a smile and when he blew her a kiss made a show of raising her hand to catch it.
She brought the kidney dish to her mouth just in time, retching the little she had eaten at lunchtime. Well, she thought grimly, that was one lesson she learned well at her mother’s knee: do whatever it takes to survive.
* * *
By the time Pat returned, Kieran was back on the bed beside her and Lucy’s face ached from smiling.
‘Aren’t you just the very picture of a happy little family-to-be?’ Pat said.
Her eyes were bright. There must have been a bottle of wine with dinner. Two beers was Kieran’s limit. Another point in his favour.
‘I know, I know.’ Pat pantomimed zipping her lips. ‘It just slipped out. Are you very cross with me?’
‘Of course not,’ Lucy said. ‘I’m just sorry I didn’t get to tell him myself. I would have waited a while, of course. This isn’t exactly the place for celebrating.’
‘Lucy’s right, Pat. We need to be sensitive to other people’s suffering,’ Kieran said, in a tone of great magnanimity. ‘Not everyone got the happy ending.’
His hand weighed down on her belly. Six more months of this shit and the child would be born with a flat head.
He kissed her fingertips and pressed them to his cheek. She could no longer think of it as stealing.
It’s what you have that counts, not what you lost, Denis had said. Well, she had a plan and that was a start.
TIM
The rain came in heavy horizontal slashes, as if all along it had been held back by the power of prayer or wanting. Tim told himself that it was the weather trapping him in his car and not the walk across the hospital car park that would send him into a past that could take the legs from under him.
On the radio, news stations were full of the rescue. Confirmation of the dead changed the tone, opened the door to outrage and less measured words. Politicians were eager to be seen to offer sincere condolences from their safe distances. God forbid any of them would sit their arse into their state car and stand eyeball to eyeball with the families. Who would have guessed Donnellan would turn out to be the best of them? The rest listened more to their media advisers and stuck to the script carefully written for them. The sentence or two of sympathy, then the straight shot to blame. Talk of compensation. Empty assurances that the families could never be truly compensated for their loss and yet the implication that money greased the wheel into silence.
He slammed the radio off. Useless fuckers, the lot of them. With their hollow statements and their unbroken lives.
At the start of every callout, there was a moment when everything was still theoretical. When nobody had any idea how things were going to go. The adrenalin would hum under his skin and make his veins pop. His breaths, slow and deliberate, crackled inside his ears. The world went silent and time stood still. A lot of the lads wore miraculous medals pinned to vests and inside helmets, gifts from religious mothers and superstitious girlfriends. Some of them insisted on a prayer in the truck on the way out, or – sometimes – on the way back, if things had gone south. On good days, prayers of thanks were forgotten, or done privately, spinning through the air with the beer caps at the end of the shift. Back then, if he held perfectly still, Tim could picture Nina and Aisling, only a blink away if he needed them.
He no longer wore the helmet. They would never be replaced.
He grabbed an envelope from the glovebox and banged the door shut before he had time to change his mind.
* * *
Inside the hospital, he headed straight for the makeshift media centre.
‘I’m not here to tread on your toes,’ he told Loretta. ‘I know you’re on point from here on.’
‘Right. What can I do for you?’ she asked, in that tinkling tone that certain women used to conceal aggression.
There was an unspoken rule in hospitals that nothing was ever confronted directly. Wiggle room was always left for doubt. For a last-minute reprieve. God’s head around the door.
‘Loose ends for the board,’ he told her. ‘Nothing more. I just want to talk to the families.’
‘The families…’ She consulted her file. ‘They were put in the waiting room of one of the day clinics after it shut.’
* * *
They had taken a side of the room each, as if by agreement. The unity of the crash site had been left behind at the traffic lights. While drama might be shared, grief never could be. Through the glass doors, he saw Denis and Vera, sitting with two young women who could only be Orla’s sisters. Vera got to her feet, touching each of her daughters’ heads as she passed by. That casual touch, the privilege of parents the world over. He saw it between Deb and the kids, her hand on the back of Brendan’s neck while he sat at the table, or on Laura’s shoulder as she waited at the front door for her lift to arrive.
Jason’s wife was playing cards, with the mechanical motions of someone accustomed to passing the time. He said something to her and she put her hand on his arm.
‘I am being patient,’ he said, loudly enough for Tim to hear him. ‘You’re the one who has to be entertained. You’re the one sitting there flipping cards. I’m just waiting.’
If she replied, it was too low to hear. She continued dealing her hand of Patience.
‘Can’t you put away the goddamn cards? You’re not a child.’
This time, her voice carried. ‘I taught Paul to play Clock Patience when he was a little boy. He played it for hours, all summer long. So I’m not entertaining myself, I’m remembering. I’m happy to remember.’ She snapped the cards onto the table with increasing force.
‘Elmarie—’
‘No.’ She shook her head and refused to look at him.
‘He used to leave those damn cards everywhere,’ he said and covered his eyes with his hand.
There was nothing Tim could say to them. Without answers, he was worse than useless.
* * *
The code for the paediatric ward hadn’t changed. The walls were a different shade of cream, the old rainbows replaced with new. The fish swimming in the tank were new or old, it was hard to tell. He had no reason to remember them. He had never got to stand beside the tank with Aisling, pointing out first one, then another, each of them picking a favourite.
They brought Aisling here from the resuscitation room. He and Nina had joined the parents whose lives were reduced to shopping bags of microwaved meals and watching the clock until doctors’ rounds. Even now, he heard the same murmured phrases, the bright low talk of being missed by siblings, of ‘taking you home soon’.
In their driveway, the paramedics had loaded Aisling into the ambulance and assumed that Nina would be the one to accompany them. He raged all the way behind them, tailgating the ambulance as it screamed through wet streets and red lights. Outside the resuscitation room, Nina did the talking.
‘O negative,’ she said.
‘8.25 kilos at her last check-up,’ she said.
‘Nothing since 10 p.m.,’ she said. ‘She finished with night feeds two months ago.’
Her memory of the minutiae of Aisling’s life undid him. If asked, what would he have said? When she cries, she likes to have her belly rubbed. The sound of snapping fingers frightens her. Reggae music makes her laugh. She sleeps curled like a comma. Like a diver. Like a baby.
He said nothing while they stretched her out on her back, more tube than baby.
You know what’s important now, was one of the things people said. You’re in our prayers, was another. He wanted to shake them and tell them that sorrows did not have to be infinite in order to appreciate life’s joys. He had already known how lucky he was.
It took seventy-one hours for the infection to take her. For the world to end.
Seventy-one hours until the doctors turned off the machines that breathed for her.
Two years on, he still couldn’t bear silence.
* * *
‘How are things now?’ Deb answered on the
first ring. ‘Are they all out?’ Her voice connected him to reality, to the sheer miraculous flesh-and-blood of her.
Deb and the kids. It was like coming back from the dead.
‘When Aisling died, I could still hear people out on the corridor. Laughing. Making plans for lunch. Joking about football matches. I wanted to scream and rip the doors from their frames.’
‘I can’t imagine,’ she said gently.
‘I don’t know where it went, that rage on her behalf.’ Breathe into the little box in his chest, breathe deeper, push the walls of the box, make room, breathe out. Deb waited and he loved her for her patience, that most unsexy and desirable thing. ‘The more time passes, the more it feels like Aisling’s death has become about me surviving it. My life makes her death smaller. Does that make me crazy?’
He found Nina in the bathroom the night after the funeral. Was she only a dream I had? she cried. He lifted her T-shirt and traced her stretchmarks in the mirror. Counted her rings, like a tree.
‘There must be things to cause you to lose your reason, or you must have none to lose,’ Deb said.
‘Is that a quote?’
‘Would you believe me if I claimed it was my own?’
‘I’d quit my job and start printing tea towels,’ he said and they both laughed.
‘I know you think about her all the time,’ she said. ‘I’m happy for you to talk about her as much as you like.’
‘I don’t want to upset Brendan and Laura.’ He knew that was only a half-truth. Knew he tensed at the idea they would ask questions that underlined her strangeness to them. The distance that might open up between his life then and his life now.
‘Sometimes life is upsetting,’ Deb said. ‘They know about Aisling, they just don’t feel they have the right to ask about her.’
‘Laura seems so fragile this past while,’ he said. After weeks of wondering if he should say something, if it was his place, the words came surprisingly easily. He waited for her to tell him that it was not his business. That he saw death everywhere. That just because he lost his daughter did not mean that everyone else was equally careless.
‘I know.’
He wanted to ask her why they hadn’t talked about it before now, but he already knew the answer.
‘I think I’ve been holding out for the move to secondary school next year, hoping that getting away from some of those girls will help.’ She sighed. ‘That just boils down to ignoring it and hoping it’ll go away, doesn’t it?’
‘You were trying to give her the chance to work it out for herself.’
‘But?’
‘No buts. It just might be time to step in.’
‘That’s a but masquerading as a just,’ she said, and they laughed again.
‘I’m going to talk to the school,’ she said. ‘Will you come?’
‘If Laura is comfortable with me being there.’
‘She’ll need us both.’
‘She’ll have us both.’
* * *
The hospital chapel was as empty as ever. Perhaps the designated ‘reflection room’ now bore the brunt of the whispered wishes.
He came here on every one of those three days, while Aisling’s life hung in the balance and there was nothing to do but wait and hope. In the third row from the front, he knelt and prayed for recovery. He asked for too much, he knew that. He should have been grateful for any version of her, instead of hoping for her old perfection.
Nina didn’t understand the transformation of hope into prayer. Nor the reverse effect in the weeks and months after Aisling’s death, when prayer became hope for the future.
‘Off to buy the snake oil?’ she asked one Sunday morning, as he folded his paper and reached for the car keys.
‘I don’t expect you to believe or to come with me,’ he told her. ‘But the snide comments need to stop.’
‘I’m not the one fooling myself into thinking this was all part of some fucking plan.’
‘As opposed to your grand plan to replace her with another baby?’
So went their weekends. Her fury grew, its coldness filling the space between them in the bed. What she never understood was that in order for her to win that battle, he had to be defeated.
‘I thought I might find you here.’
Nina slid into the seat beside him, as if his memories had conjured her out of thin air.
‘Faith expects a lot on days like today,’ he said. ‘I don’t even know why I’m here.’ He waited for the onslaught, the picking-apart of any little comfort.
Instead, she sighed. ‘Science and technology didn’t have such a shit-hot day either.’
They laughed, brief and guilty.
‘How about you, are you okay?’
‘You know what I keep wondering?’ she said.
There was something in her voice, the kind of false brightness that used to signal that the day had been a bad one. That she saw a baby about the right age in the supermarket. Or met someone on the street who didn’t know and asked how Aisling was doing in crèche. Or found some marketing whatnot in the postbox, Aisling’s name on the envelope like a slap.
‘Tell me.’ Her voice was almost chatty. ‘What do you call yourself? In your own head, I mean?’
‘I don’t understand the question.’
‘I can get my head around the idea of a broken marriage, but I just can’t hit on an expression for Aisling, you know? I read a lot of grief books,’ she continued. ‘One of them suggested “lost parent”. What do you think?’
‘I—’
‘I’m kind of on the fence about it, to be honest. It’s not the expression itself, it’s what it implies. If I am a lost parent now, what happens when Aisling stops being the biggest thing in my life? What happens when I lose that too?’
Her breath was coming fast. He caught her hand and held it. Breathed in and out. In and out. It was something people fixated on. As if a collective noun for people like them, people whose memories were riddled with bullet holes, would make them easier to deal with.
‘Maybe there isn’t an expression because there doesn’t need to be one,’ he said, at last. ‘I’m Aisling’s father, whether she’s here or not. You might look at… things and think that I’m forgetting her, but I’m not. Nor are you. Just because you hold a child’s hand or take them to the movies doesn’t mean you’re leaving her behind. If life moves on, it moves with her, not without her.’
‘What’s it like?’ she asked. ‘Living in a house with children. Being around them.’ She kept her eyes trained on the altar, as if there would be a quiz later on the number of thorns in Jesus’ crown, the precise angle of his ribcage.
‘It’s complicated.’ He owed her more than that. He took away her chance to have another child, for fuck’s sake. ‘I walk on eggshells a lot of the time. It’s hard to know whether me being more involved would make them feel more secure or less. I’m flapping in the dark most of the time. I haven’t grown into it.’
‘I miss our girl. You, me, all of it,’ Nina said, so softly he almost didn’t hear her.
Tim gathered her into his arms, a wordless comfort. When they kissed, it felt like the most natural thing in the world, but when they stopped, that, too, felt natural.
Nina dried her eyes on her sleeve.
‘Here,’ he said. He handed her the envelope he had taken from the glovebox of his car.
‘That’s not a tissue,’ she said.
‘It’s not. It’s—’
‘The letter,’ she finished. ‘Why?’
‘I wrote it for you. You should have it.’
‘You didn’t—’
‘No!’ He wouldn’t have added to it. Couldn’t have, even if he had wanted to. ‘That was ours. Ours and Aisling’s.’
‘Thank you,’ she said.
They sat side by side, as easily as if it had never been otherwise.
‘I should go,’ she said finally.
‘Are you okay?’
‘No,’ she said and they both laughed.
‘That’s a good place to start.’
‘It’s something,’ she agreed.
He didn’t turn to watch her walk away. They had been here before, like many broken couples before them. Loving each other most at the moment of parting. A tempting hole to fall into, but a hole no less. If they were both in it, who would be there to pull them out? The job of a partner was to make the other better, not worse.
He looked at his watch. He needed to go and get ready for the final press conference. Leo and the Chief would appreciate the show of support. It wouldn’t be easy for them to stand at the podium and follow the map for situations like this. ‘It is regrettable’, but never ‘We regret’. ‘Everything that could be done was done’, but never ‘We did everything we could’. The careful words that he himself had written earlier in the day. Three versions, one for each of the possible outcomes. None of which addressed either blame or responsibility. That passive voice. Oh, but if he could only give it form, he would belt it into pulp. His stomach growled with upset.
‘Smile and smile and be a villain.’ His voice was loud in the empty chapel.
At the site, before leaving, he had stood beside Leo while the last of the ambulances sped off into the black.
‘Would you say you’re happy, Leo?’ he asked.
‘In the job or in general?’ Leo frowned.
‘Either. Both. I don’t know.’
‘Happiness isn’t something I can think about today,’ he said.
At the time, he had nodded his agreement, unable to imagine it otherwise. Now, he thought of home. The kitchen warm with condensation and argument. Deb steadfast against Brendan’s attempts to avoid his homework. Laura handing him a cup of coffee.
Leo had it all wrong. Days like today, happiness was the only thing to think about.
NINA
Nina left Tim in the chapel. Funny how it wasn’t any easier to be the one who walked away. She felt unsteady, as if she were on solid ground after years at sea. If she drove like this, the car would judder along the road in a series of bunny hops, inviting swears and horn-blowing. On the corridor, a sign pointed to the reflection room. Inside, Nina lowered herself onto one of the cushions lining the walls.
Where the Edge Is Page 24