by Darby Harn
“I’m three days sober. I’m doing my best. It’s hard.”
“And any sexual issues?”
He shakes his head. “None.”
“No frustrations.”
“I’m developing one.”
“I’ll help you sort it out,” she says.
“I’m grand, thanks.”
“You are.” She leans over to him. Her hand on his knee. Christ. “Be honest, Trevor. What is it with me?”
Colm scratches his chin. “This is a legitimate question.”
Trevor scoots away. “Have we all gone?”
Aoife leans back so far she nearly tips over. “Oh, c’mon. Have some fun. We’re all for the grave, like. Tell me. How many women you been with, Trevor?”
Angus grunts at the coffee stand. “You let in one…”
“Shut your hole, you old git. You only wish.” Aoife nudges Trevor’s arm. “So? How many?”
“I don’t know. Not a lot.”
“Doesn’t matter for men, does it? Four.”
“That’s a good guess.”
“I’m talking about me now.”
“You’ve been with four women?”
Her smile is slow in coming. She holds up four fingers. “What do you say? You want to be a thumb?”
Trevor laughs. “I bet that works.”
Aoife is bewildered. “Why shouldn’t it?”
I pull at her sleeve. “Catch yourself on, woman.”
She turns to me. “How many women you been with?”
“You’ve soured me on the lot.”
She sticks her tongue out.
Colm sighs. “Anything else anyone wants to add?”
Angus Dolan clears his throat. “I’ll tell you my trouble,” and the faces of the others sink. We were done. “I’m supposed to have this higher power. And I have these prayers, written out for me. These aren’t my words. Someone else wrote these. You can’t talk to God with someone else’s words. It must be why He doesn’t answer. None of these words are His. None of these words are ours. We had words. We had our own faith. Our own way of living and then we took on the idols of others and now we are ignored. Now we are judged. We’re fucked.”
Aoife snorts. “Except for Trevor here.”
I pinch her arm. “Come on to fuck, Aoife.”
She sours. “Can I sleep at yours again?”
“Are you not at the home tonight?”
“Why, are you down the pier?”
“Shut your gob.”
She covers her mouth. “I didn’t say anything.”
“It’s a very difficult time,” Colm says, his voice cutting through the hall. “You and I have discussed this before Angus. Every day is a contest. Every day a battle. I guess I’m trying to say keep talking to God, Angus. Don’t give up.”
Thank you, Colm.
Angus shrugs. “What answer can there be?”
Colm sighs. “There won’t be one.”
“Then what am I talking to him for?”
“You’re asking the question. The question is all that matters. God gave you one thing above all other creatures and that’s the ability to question your existence. But there’s no understanding. Not in this life. And no sense carrying around questions for answers that’ll be waiting for you at the end.”
“Practical,” I say.
“Christ was a practical man. Same as Yoda. You take with you only what you need. Nothing more.”
I roll my eyes. No wonder he and Gavin get on.
Trevor spins a straw around his cup of coffee. “We’re all fucked, aren’t we? We’ve heard the answer. The answer is I’m tired of youse. Youse are yesterday’s news.”
“What was Christ’s answer on the cross?” Colm says.
“Christ was resurrected,” Trevor says.
“We may yet be.”
Trevor shakes his head. “As what? To where? In the Bible it says God was to make the world his Kingdom in the end. There’s not going to be any world, is there?”
“Angus gets no answer because there’s no answer,” I say. “We all create our own higher powers but it’s us talking to ourselves. There’s nothing else for us.”
“There’s grace,” Colm says.
“The fuck do I care about grace?”
Colm opens his mouth to say something, then thinks different. He has plenty on his mind. He doesn’t say it. He doesn’t know how. He’s never had the words for me.
“Say your peace,” I tell him.
Colm scratches his chin. “Finding grace is us finding our better selves. Asking the question. Accepting the silence.”
“I don’t want my better self. I want my life back.”
“We can never go back. Only forward. You pray each step is better than the last. Each step is true.”
“Did you get that out of a fortune cookie?”
“You’ve road ahead of you, Mairead.”
“What’s the rest of my life, Colm? Watching Ma go to pieces? Everyone here on the bloody island?”
He grimaces. “We all face that.”
“I won’t,” I say. The air goes out of the room. “I won’t be some dog wandering the hills knocking over refuse bins. I won’t be sleeping in ditches and pleading for mercy at the end. I’ll be going to my death. I’ll be going to my son. He’s waiting.”
The room creaks.
“We’ve all thought about it,” Trevor says. “It’s a decision we all face. Mairead is being very honest. She’s told us a lot tonight. Thank you, Mairead. For your courage.”
I shake my head. “I’m a coward.”
“There’s no cowards allowed in here,” Colm says.
Thank you, Colm.
I listen to them debate and argue, like I’m not even there. I’ve been so deep in my own pain it never occurred to me what anyone else thought about the end. They go back and forth now as if they’ve had this conversation a hundred times, and so they have, in their heads. Their hearts. For each, it’s different. Angus has his wife, her sister, her children, their children. Colm has only himself now. Aoife has no one. Her parents are both passed. Her brothers and sisters gone to the mainland. She leans on her hand. Drunk. Exhausted. Alone.
I pinch her again. “Come on, then.”
She picks up her coat and stumbles after me. The men go on arguing their deaths. The dog stays put. He seems confused. Like he doesn’t know if he’s coming or going. I hold the door open.
I’m always holding the door open.
Curled claws patter across the hall. We go out into the piss. Gavin is closer. Ma is waiting. You’re waiting, I know. This pain. I can’t live with this pain. My chest open. My heart gone.
Mo leanbh. Mo stór.
She leans on me, Aoife. “Can I… can I sleep?”
“Let’s just go to the home. You can rest. I’ll take the night shift, yeah? You get some sleep tonight.”
“What about him?”
We trudge up the hill, toward the home. He can manage without me for one night. It’s not as if I’m going anywhere.
Rain syrups the roof of the sunroom adjacent the oratory in the home. Paintings of the island adorn the walls, along with wicker baskets and ceramic crockery. A pictorial tells the story of the bright red dresser at the center of the room, tracing its crafting on the island in the 1950s through its recent restoration by the residents.
The last one is of some stranger, an unbridled smile on her face as her son palms paint all over her cheeks. The caption reads: Making a mess. The Mairead in the photo doesn’t seem as alien as she might have a few weeks before. I can still smile. He makes me smile; he makes me laugh. We are childish, almost. We are young.
I feel young.
Aoife plops into a sofa “Telly said the storm is going to be the biggest on record.”
I haven’t seen any news. Rain skitters and skats against the boards of the home and I can’t tell it from the drumming of idle fingers and rattle of near empty pill bottles. I haven’t been away from here, out in the dark, for days.
She blows away the hair that’s fallen across her eyes. “Have an orgasm for me, will you? Be a love.”
Spray flicks my cheek and I flinch. Fog gone. Dark left. The moon like a piece of paper someone set on fire to watch it burn. Tides wash over the broken lighthouse on a knot of an island between Inishèan and Inishmore. The peaks of Connemara like the shadows of sleeping giants across the bay on the mainland. Another land. Another world. Are you there.
Are you waiting for me.
I haven’t been to the cemetery in days. The home absorbs all my time and attention. Gavin. For months I’ve been out here on the shore, wrinkled in a damp, cold fugue, laced up, sewn up and ready for earth. Now I shy from the spray. The wind. The sea shies away, as if to tempt me into chasing it and I’ve got to get on. They’re waiting for me back at the home. They need me.
Don’t you need me.
The sea swipes at my heels. The tides jealous. Spiteful. This going back and forth. This tearing me apart, day and night.
I’ve got to get on.
“This is going to be a proper storm,” I say.
The dog sits on the floor in a permanent state of alarm, head darting after every sound the gale produces as it blunts against Gavin’s apartment. The boards over the broken windows bow and stretch. All this and the worst of it is still days away. On the telly, the weatherman tracks the progress of Storm Asterisk out in the Atlantic. Headed right for us. Storm of the century, he says, without any trace of irony. The mannequin at the anchor desk asks him what he’s calling it ‘Asterisk’ for.
The century being truncated so, the weatherman says.
Gavin puts some of the shredded plywood on the fire. “Come over here,” he says. “You have to be freezing.”
I keep to the window. “When I was a girl… a big storm would come up like this and I’d go up to the monastery. Into the tower. The sound the wind would make. I’d sit in there with all the birds and just listen. I suppose it was a bit mental.”
“Your mom had to have been scared to death.”
“She didn’t notice,” I say. “I should get back to her.”
“You’ll get soaked.”
“Shall I call a taxi?”
“Colm will probably take you. He has gas.”
“I’m fine walking.”
“Let me walk back with you, at least.”
I shake my head. “They say the storm surge will be deadly. Could wash out the road, tides being what they are. I suppose the airstrip will be washed out as well.”
He sighs. Why do I bother. If he lets go of that pill bottle, it will be as the waves wash over the rim of the island.
“I don't want to… push,” Gavin says. “I don't want to get too far ahead, but then I think there's really not that much runway left. Mairead. This feels like home to me. You feel like home.”
The boards groan off their nails over the window.
“The party for Samhain is tomorrow,” I say. I wait for him to say Yes. And as we agreed, I’ll be leaving. He says nothing. “I’ll probably fall asleep before midnight, anyways. Usually I watch the Voyager at 11 and nod off a bit.”
“Voyager?”
“The Star Trek. Idiots.”
“You watch Star Trek?”
I leave the window, and sit in his lap. “Did my stock just go up with you?”
“Well, yeah. By a lot.”
“It’s terrible, though. I only watch it because… I don’t know why. They’re always losing shuttles. The ship is always getting torn to pieces. The only thing Janeway ever runs out of is the fucks she has to give. And anything ever goes wrong, they just re-route the whatever to the whatever and on they go. They’re stranded on the other side of the galaxy with no way to get home and no food or supplies and they just keep on going, one week after the other. Do you know what I mean?”
“I may have written some angry fan mail,” he says.
“You could go to the party, like. As an alien. I could boil up some mashed potatoes and stick it to your forehead.”
He pinches me. “I remember this Star Wars thing. I don’t know. I was in grade school yet. I just had the mask. The little slit for the mouth was so sharp, I cut my tongue on it.”
“Why do you men pretend? ‘I dunno. Some Star Wars thing.’ You know full well what it is. You know all the names. The serial numbers on the little robot things, like. You saw it in the theaters, didn’t you? The Star Wars.”
“I saw it at the drive-in.”
“Ahhhh, you’re ancient.”
“Too old for you?”
My lips dab at his, once, twice, three times until he catches me. “I’ll dress you up. What’s his face. Your man with the laser sword, like. Obi-Wan Kenobi.”
“It’s a lightsaber, just FYI. You’ll go?”
“If I go… I’ll go with Aoife. I’ll meet you there.”
He kisses me. “Ok.”
“Don’t… don’t be kissing on me. Don’t be hanging on me.”
“People tend to expect spectacular displays of public affection from me, so I don't know. I'll do my best.”
“Do you know what I mean?”
“It's no one's business. It's just us.”
I rest my head against his. “It’s just us.”
“Mairead. I want you to know… you opened your heart to me. You don't know… I was vanishing. Just like he did. I just went cold. I stand here and stare at the phone. The door. I just close off. Turn and walk out. Drop into the vault. I don't want to do that anymore. I want to live. I want us to live.”
“Gavin…”
He chases my lips again. “What if I stayed?”
Lord God. “You can’t stay.”
“You don’t want me to.”
“All I want is my son.”
He can say nothing. He can do nothing. What is he doing.
What are we doing.
I kick the last of the blanket off and leave the chair. “I need to get on. Ma’s waiting on me.”
It’s all he does is think about this. I know it. How to say it. How to convince me. “Mairead, I love you.”
Love. That word lands like the wind against the plywood covering the window. The board strains, bending far as it will go. He’s not in love with me. This is just our fear.
Our desperation.
Chapter Ten
From up the dark road, the ends of cigarettes seem like fireflies on the front patio of the pub. For a moment it’s like it used to be, walking down the lane back home late on a Friday night after some trad. It was never like this, though. Ma was never with me. We’ve never been anywhere together except funerals and wakes. Tonight she’s a dog going down the road, drifting toward every person she comes on.
Ma charges right in to the pub. I keep outside. That German bloke stuck here with the others mixes his accordion whine with all the percussion of the sea, in a chair outside the patio area of the pub.
I nod to the German. “Tráthnóna maith duit.”
He doesn’t look at me. “Diese contemptable sprache.”
“There’s a lull in the storm. The plane will come back.”
“Es gibt keine hoffen.”
Doesn’t sound optimistic. I straighten the cat ears I cut out of some old felt, flopping down on my hair band. The patio fills up. A black-eyed moon plays hide and seek behind some low clouds.
“Cat Sidhe,” an Arabic man says. A French glaze to his voice. He sits alone at one of the little tables with a bottle of wine and a deflated pack of cigarettes. I don’t know the age of men. They all seem boys to me now, whether they’re gray or not. “I’ve no milk. Now I will have bad luck.”
“I’m bad luck in any case,” I say.
“Some wine?”
“Thank you, no.”
“Cigarette?”
“They make me gag.”
“You must have some vice.”
“I keep bringing home things that don’t belong to me.”
“You are more
cat burglar, then? What do you steal?”
“Hope.”
He nods, sanguine. “Oui.”
“I keep doing it. I just won’t be told.”
“You cannot steal hope,” he says. “Only give it.”
“I don’t mean to trouble you.”
“You are no trouble. As-salamu alaykum.”
“Céad míle fáilte.”
“An bhfuil tú ó anseo?” His Irish is perfect.
“Tá mé ó Kilbanna.”
“Ah, the seals. I love the seals. Zaim. My name is Zaim.”
I sit with him. “Mairead.”
“The nurse?”
There’s no disguising it. “I am, so.”
“You are not stealing hope from anyone. Let me tell you. There is no hope among we who are stranded here. But when one of us goes to you, they come back with it.”
“I don’t see how.”
“There is hope in strength. And purpose. And order. Order? Comment dites-vous? Normalcy. They are sick, you fix them, things are normal. Things continue. Continuity. You have so many words.”
“It’s just putting bandages on wounds I can’t heal.”
“There is a lot of hope in bandages.”
“That won’t go on a card, Zaim.”
Zaim waves the cigarette curtly: no. “Perhaps that is why I’m still a poor man. Tant pis. Are you sure you will not share some with me? It’s the last bottle on the island, so I’m told.”
I want to lick the inside of the glass. “Better not.”
We sit in the silence, Zaim and I, broken a bit by the intermittent call of the German’s accordion.
“You got stranded here, then?”
“I came here with purpose,” Zaim says, and tells me what they all do. He came on holiday to the island many summers ago. He had gone up to the monastery with his friends, and on the way back he saw a woman coming out of the water from a swim down the beach. His friends went back on the evening boat. He stayed with her.
“She’s not here with you?”
“No,” he says, and stabs out the last of the cigarette.
“I’m sorry.”
“I have been sorry. A sorry man, without her. But tonight… I am thankful. When I came back here a few months ago, it was to honor our memory of this place. To find something of her again. I meant to go back to France. Now I understand, I began and I end, here.”