by Helen Cullen
Kalindi returned to her office in the art history department; she wiped a smudge from the brass plaque on her door with a handkerchief, lingering over her name, Dr. Kalindi Aguri Moone, and nodded. On her desk lay a present for Murtagh: prints from the kintsugi exhibition she’d visited in Tokyo. She felt a tug, remembering his look of longing when she told him she was attending; “the art of precious scars,” he’d said. She spread the images across her desk in a fan, examining the glossy colored photographs of the ceramic pots, once broken, now pieced back together, their cracks filled with lacquer mixed with gold and silver powder. Their fractured history celebrated and not hidden. Illuminated. She gathered the prints together and sealed them in a brown envelope, and placed it on top of two heavy pouches of the kintsugi powder wrapped in white paper inside a corrugated cardboard box. They would bring it to him on Sunday, with the unicycle he’d mentioned in passing he’d always wanted to try. His fifty-fourth birthday seemed as good a time as any.
She heard squealing from the marble corridor outside her door and looked up to see Mossy wobbling through the door on the unicycle. “It appears I am something of a natural,” he said, before crashing into her bookshelves.
“Aagggh! Be careful!” she shouted, rushing forward to steady him.
“You know something, darling?” he said. “I’m not sure, if our house burned down, I’d be the first thing you’d save.”
She helped him dismount and patted him on the bottom. “But you wouldn’t need saving,” she said. “You’ve got legs of your own. The books, however, can’t help themselves.”
He stood over her desk and poked the squidgy parcel with his forefinger. “Is that the stuff for Dad?”
“It is,” she said. “And the unicycle!”
“Oh no! Is that why you wanted it? Where do you even get these ideas?”
“From listening,” she said, and yanked his ear.
“What is it?” he asked. “Your worry vein is protruding.”
She rubbed between her eyebrows with her right knuckle.
“It’s just your dad, the studio, his work. I wish he would try some new things. Those sculptures he used to make, they were so, so powerful—and now, he’s happy reproducing the same things over and over again. It’s so sad.”
Mossy shrugged. “His heart’s not in it.”
She closed the box and neatly secured it with tape.
“But after all this time?”
“It doesn’t feel so long ago to me.”
Kalindi stopped what she was doing, watched her husband pretend to read the spines of books on her shelves.
“I’m sorry, hon, I didn’t mean it like that. I just don’t understand how he can shut off that side of himself. He has a gift, and instead he acts like a factory worker on an assembly line.”
“I feel bad that we don’t visit more often. When we were in school, we made the trip from the island to here five days a week, and now it feels like such an expedition to go once a month.”
Kalindi nodded. “And we should make more excuses for him to come to us. Your dad loves a good project. I’ll have a think about it.”
Mossy sneezed, three times, and she passed him a handkerchief plucked from amid the clutter on her desk. “Are you picking up the kids today?” he asked.
“You know I am.” She sighed. “Every Tuesday. I only forgot them once, you know.”
“That’s not what I was suggesting.” He tossed the handkerchief into her overflowing wastepaper basket. “I’d better go. There’s a tour coming through at three.”
He dipped her into a Hollywood kiss, and she laughed, pushing him away.
“Don’t forget to eat something,” she said, and started sizing up the unicycle for wrapping paper. He was humming “Hey Ho” as he left the room, and she picked up the tune.
Kalindi wasn’t sure she believed in luck, but she knew she believed in him.
Was that why Murtagh was so stuck?
The person who had believed in him most was gone.
She thought of the Cure song Sive had sung at her birthday and realized “Just Like Heaven” could have been written for Murtagh.
The only girl he’d ever loved was drowned deep inside of him.
And now he was still lost.
And so lonely.
How could she help him believe in himself again?
As he had inspired her after the babies were born, when she was racked with guilt and felt she was failing both at home and at work. He had taken her aside and said, “Kalindi, you have a chance now to set your daughter free—break the chain of guilt you’ve inherited from your mother—and her from her mother before that. Let Maya see you loving your work, and taking time for you, and so one day she will feel okay to claim that for herself. There’s probably fewer greater gifts you can give her.”
How could she help him honor Maeve’s memory but still find a way to move forward?
To let go just enough.
So the scars became precious cracks, instead.
Cracks that let the light in.
Dublin: February 2013
MURTAGH SAT IN the window on the first floor of Cornucopia restaurant on Wexford Street.
He fiddled with the gold sash curtains that brushed against the back of his chair. It annoyed him, feeling the presence of them there, the glance of color in his peripheral vision, but he couldn’t change tables again. This was his third attempt to settle; his first seat rejected as the table rocked a little when he leaned his elbows on it; the second because it was in the direct path of the door so it was impossible not to look up at everyone as they flounced through as if arriving on stage. This conversation was going to be difficult enough without the constant distraction of unwitting intruders. He should have chosen somewhere quieter, but at least they’d be by the window now. Awkward silences, should there be any, could be so much more subtly negated by people-watching through a window than being trapped in the center of a room.
Even though the watery February sunlight blasted through the windows, a yellow tealight burned defiantly in a glass holder. He nudged it forward with two fingers across the wooden table, testing how close he could push it to the brink without it falling over. A waitress wearing a long hemp dress that covered her feet shuffled over to him with his chai latte and the wheatgrass shot he had accidentally also ordered, but he accepted both, worrying as she moved away that her skirt would trip her on the stairs. Downing the wheatgrass shot in one swift movement, he grimaced as it slid down his throat, beating his chest with his fist to expedite its passage, then surreptitiously placed the empty glass on the windowsill behind the curtains.
With every creak of the floorboards he glanced toward the door, willing a familiar face to appear while simultaneously dreading it. If this thread remained unpulled, wouldn’t everything be simpler? But that wasn’t what he wanted. His life had become so neat that he barely impacted upon the world at all; he was desperate to color outside the lines. There was room in his life for one more dream, maybe.
And then, feeling as if he had received no warning at all, Murtagh saw him.
There he stood, across the street, waiting for a break in the traffic. As if he were an ordinary person conducting his business in Dublin that day. As if the Earth hadn’t been quietly rotating toward this moment for decades; the truth his grief had illuminated.
Murtagh watched him waiting as the restaurant dissolved around him. He wished himself invisible, so he could observe forever, prolonging this moment of anticipation before he confronted whatever reality would offer instead.
Fionn looked physically different and yet essentially unchanged.
His dreadlocks were gone, replaced now by a close crop. It made his cheekbones appear more prominent, his jawline more severe.
Silver-rimmed spectacles and a full beard gave him an air of sophistication that Murtagh couldn’t recall from
before. He was forced to admit how much time had truly passed—of course Fionn would have abandoned his khaki shorts and tie-dyed T-shirts by now. He just hadn’t expected the slim-fitting dark slacks and crisp white button-down shirt or a silk turquoise scarf.
Murtagh glanced down at his navy corduroys, seeing with new eyes how old his good trousers had become. He sucked in his stomach and tucked in his blue-and-white-checked shirt before pulling it back outside, and sighed.
It was all he could do not to attempt an escape, but it was too late.
Fionn looked up and saw him.
Stared directly into his eyes.
Raised his hand to wave, but Murtagh detected no smile.
If anything, confusion creased his face.
Shock, even.
Was that at his appearance?
Murtagh leaned back behind the curtains.
Gripped the white rail that bordered the window.
Later Fionn would tell him, yes, he had been shocked, not by how Murtagh looked, but rather by the realization he was sitting there at all. A physical human, flesh and muscle, wearing clothes, hair and nails growing, heart beating and blood flowing. As if he suddenly understood that for all these years he hadn’t been frozen exactly as Fionn had remembered him. As if time hadn’t stood still on the island ever since the moment he had left on the ferry with no one there to wave him goodbye.
Murtagh heard a stumble at the door and braced himself for impact, but Fionn didn’t appear as quickly as he’d expected.
He forced himself to stare at the laminated red-and-white menu centered on the table.
To read it slowly and not watch the door.
His lips silently mouthed the words: Sweet potato and butterbean soup, garlic potatoes with roasted hazelnuts, baked tofu with beetroot, pear and rocket. The text blurred before his eyes when he felt a hand on his shoulder.
The firm grip steadied him, and he placed his own hand on top of Fionn’s.
It was cool to his touch, the softness of his skin now familiar in a way that he’d forgotten, but that brought him immediate comfort.
Without meeting his eyes, he stood and enveloped Fionn with his arms. Breathed in the soapy cleanliness of him, the hint of lemongrass, a note of something muskier. They sat, their knees touching so gently under the table that Murtagh wasn’t sure if he was imagining the sensation of it.
Fionn spoke first.
“Maeve—I’m so sorry, Murtagh. I—”
Murtagh shook his head. “I know,” he said. “I know.”
Fionn watched him, absorbing what could not be said but lived in his eyes. “When I got your letter, I couldn’t believe it. I’d given up waiting for you to reply.”
“I posted it in Eyre Square five years to the day since I got yours,” Murtagh explained. “On the eleventh of January, 2013.”
Fionn bit his thumbnail then visibly flinched, joining his hands together on the table as if in prayer. “What took you so long?” he asked. “Your letter didn’t explain why now, after all this time.”
Through the window Murtagh watched a child run out in front of a pizza deliveryman on a bicycle, who swerved to avoid him. The boy dropped a doughnut on the street and started to cry as his mother yanked him away by the sleeve of his bottle-green school-uniform jumper.
“It felt like it was the right time.” He stopped, and Fionn nodded at him to go on. “No, that’s not true,” he continued. “It was more like I suddenly realized that it would never be the right time. Not for someone like me. And I was tired of waiting for some great sign that would never come. I still can’t believe she wrote to you. She left no letter for the kids, you know? That was hard for them, very hard.”
“Why do you think she chose not to?”
Murtagh smoothed his hair away from his face. “Because there would never be the right words? So they wouldn’t fixate on it? So they’d remember her and not just what she said in a letter? I’m not sure, but Maeve would have had her reasons, and they would have been good ones.”
Fionn leaned back in his chair and looked up at the waitress, who was beaming at him, twisting her ginger ponytail between her fingers while she waited for his order. Murtagh didn’t like the way he smiled back, as if they shared a secret that would never be known to him.
Fionn ordered a peppermint tea, then called her back to upgrade to an espresso instead.
“You know I didn’t get it until much later. Maeve’s letter, I mean,” he said. “I was teaching in Sri Lanka at the time, when it happened, and it was nearly two years before I was back at my mum’s. I might never have found it at all if I hadn’t gone home to clear out her flat when she died.”
“Oh, I’m sorry, Fionn. I didn’t realize... I know how close you and your mother were.”
Fionn pulled back his shoulders, sat straighter in his chair.
“If she meant that much to me,” he said, “maybe I should have been there looking after her instead of gallivanting around the world sending her postcards.”
Murtagh moved the menus out of the way and touched Fionn’s hand tentatively before recoiling again.
“You can’t think like that. All parents want is for their children to be happy, trust me. You have to live your own life—and it must have been sudden?”
Fionn nodded. “Pneumonia. It shouldn’t have killed her, but it did. It was complicated.”
“Had you told her...about...you? Before she died?”
Fionn smiled. “Yes, she laughed at me. Thought it hysterical that I imagined it was news.”
He looked relieved to see the waitress arrive, and Murtagh waited for him to speak again.
“Do you want to read it?” Fionn paused. “Maeve’s letter?”
Murtagh leaned back in his chair, moved it a little away from the table.
“You brought it?”
Fionn reached inside his blazer and fumbled to open a small red wooden button that secured a pocket there. From inside he retrieved one of the powder-blue envelopes that Maeve had loved so much. It was creased, frayed at the corners, the stamp curling away from its place. Murtagh stared at Maeve’s handwriting, feeling the stroke of the letters curling up from the envelope like vines to wind around his wrists and bind him. Oh, Maeve.
Fionn placed it on the table before him, but Murtagh looked away.
“Not now, Fionn. Not now.” His hand hovered over the envelope, but he didn’t touch it.
Fionn buttoned it back inside his blazer.
“I understand how you feel about your mother,” Murtagh continued, cupping his coffee in both palms. “The absence of action can feel terribly violent in the end—aggressive passivity. I feel with Maeve, I was too...too hands off, maybe, when I should have been grabbing on. Stronger than her. I feel the person I am now can see what needed to be done, but the me back then was incapable. Did she want me to intervene? Could I have helped her?”
Fionn took his glasses off and wiped the lens in Murtagh’s untouched napkin.
“You did help her, Murtagh,” he said. “No one could have loved her more. It’s so easy to look back and imagine a different way of being, but you both did the best you could with who you were then. We can’t resent our past selves for not knowing or thinking what we know and think now. We had to live through all of that history to be able to reach that understanding.”
“But Maeve never got the chance.”
“No,” he said quietly, “but you did.”
His cup clattered into its saucer and Murtagh pressed his fingers over his eyes, taking deep breaths.
“Do you feel like a walk?” Fionn asked, squeezing his knee under the table.
Murtagh smiled weakly. “Didn’t I always?”
Following Fionn down the stairs, he wondered what kind of pair they made.
He reached out to lift a single brown hair from Fionn’s shoulder and let hi
s hand, this time, rest upon him for a moment.
With each step, his boots felt a tiny bit lighter and something within him began to unravel.
He let the threads go and they rolled out from his fingertips into the street below, guiding him on.
Inis Óg: September 20, 2014
NOT MANY PEOPLE were expected to arrive from the mainland for Nollaig’s thirtieth birthday party. It would be Christmas week, after all, and the crossing perilous, as the Atlantic raged against who knew what. It made it easier to explain an absence of friends; the guest list consisted mostly of islanders. There was no need for official invitations; word had spread, along with news of Pegeen O’Flaherty expecting again and the trouble the Clancy brothers had found for themselves after the match in Cork against Skibbereen. Everything was set for Saturday night; the function room of Tigh Ned’s reserved, unnecessarily, since July.
“Of course, I can’t celebrate my birthday on the actual day,” she’d said to Ned as he scribbled her name across the page in a battered blue diary from 1998 that the Electricity Supply Board had sent with his bill sixteen years before. It was helpfully marked each month with the day the payment was due.
“The maaynest thing I ever got,” he’d said, and repeated again now as Nollaig watched him misspell her name with a stubby pencil. She ignored him.
“As usual, people want to be with their own families that day.”
Ned coughed and closed the cover of the diary with a slap, rolling the pencil along the top of the bar. “Aye,” he answered as he watched the pencil stall in a circle of sticky red lemonade. “Some people are fierce selfish all right.”