by Darby Harn
“Don’t say it,” she says.
“It’s just until the storm passes, Ma.”
“I said don’t put me in the home.”
“It’s not safe at the house.”
The steam goes out of her. There’s only so much. The tea cup rattles in her hand. “Who are all these people?”
The cafeteria clots with some of the tourists, put out of their hostels. They play cards, or read books in their sleeping bags. The Italian boy and girl look at me from the corner, expectant. As if I hold the key to their getting home. A few months from now, whoever is left on the island will be pressed into this room, chased up the island from the rising tides. This is the future, here. The moaning, dying future.
“It’s just for now,” I say.
“Are you still here?”
“What do you mean, am I still here?”
“I thought you left, girl.”
I brush her cheek. “Drink your tea.”
I go over the checklist with Saidbh at the nurses’ station. What to do if the power goes. What to do if the generator fails. What to do if people fail. She nods through it. She already knows all this. Sixteen years old. Nothing surprises her now. I go room to room, checking on the residents. Roisin Ni Shealbhaigh persists on the ventilator. Months now. This idea she’ll come out of this coma. For what. All the residents cling to some expectation of health. Recovery. Life. All of them expectant. Even now. Their flame down to a flicker. Drowning in the rain and the sea. Even now, they expect to live.
I find Aoife sleeping in the room Eamon left vacant. “Hey.”
She snorts awake. “My dreams have come true.”
“I’m going for a walk.”
“Are you mad?”
“I’ll be back later,” I say.
She grabs my wrist. “You can’t go down to the shore tonight. The storm is right over us, Mairead.”
This is the most we’ve said since the party. We’ve had rows and spells where we got bored of each other, but not like this. I’m not talking to anyone now, save for Ma. What do I say.
What’s the point.
“I’m not going down to the shore,” I say.
“The pier, then? I thought you broke it off with him.”
“I did.”
“Then where you going to, Mairead?”
“For a walk, like.”
“A walk, she says. You walk one end of the home to the other you’ve walked the island.”
“You’ve got things handled here,” I say.
“Go down the pier, then. Talk him up here. He’s not going anywhere until this blows over, Mairead. If he’s going anywhere at all. Colm says the surge may take the airstrip.”
I look out of the room. “Ma thinks I’ve left.”
“Mairead… you can’t do this.”
“I’ll be back,” I say, and go.
The wind demands submission but I keep my place.
I bend against the gale, no longer a gale but a physical obstruction in the air. An invisible steam roller pushing on the sea, on the island, on me, on the cataclysmic waves disintegrating into spray that never quite lands but clouds the air like a murmuration of starlings. Every drop a bullet. The bruises deep. Nothing between skin and bone but weak blood. The wind distorting me, peeling at me, skinning me but I move only to replace the flowers and candles and pictures the wind disturbs and I am knocked down. I am pushed and bullied and hurried and harried but I will not give in. I will not be moved.
Here I am.
Every wave a car crash.
The echo thunder. Rocks shrapnel. The ground takes on a strange gelatin quality. Headstones topple and are swept out to sea. Even the night lost to lightning. I’ll not leave you. I’ll never leave you.
Mo leanbh. Mo stór.
Spray drenches me.
Sand pits my cheek. The wet deep and heavy through all my layers and I feel my heart thud, thud, thud inside the drum of my chest like I felt yours curled up in the chair with me. Sleepy eyed baby boy. Curls all a mess. Where did you get those curls? Go back to sleep. Ma has to go. They’re waiting on me at the home. Sit and watch telly with Nana. She pats her lap and up in her arms you go. Ma saved all her love of children for you.
You’ll be watching him, I tell her. You’ll be watching him close.
The horizon fuses into a sear of igneous light, a smoke masked furnace of the lightning and the dawn and the comets like little sperm eager to fertilize their death. The apocalypse of the black hole seemed inevitable to me. Rote. It was just the one I got, after dropping a quarter in a dispenser full of plastic bubbles containing any one of dozens of catastrophes. Sometimes you get the one you wanted. Sometimes you already had it. The apocalypse a regular occurrence: drowning in the drink. Cancer. Parkinson’s.
A baby boy, here and gone, like a dream.
This hydraulic sound in the sky like the brakes of a city bus pumping. Inching through constant traffic, crawling through the day grinding out its passage on your skin, red and raw and numb. My lips dry and taut. Taste of copper on my tongue when I wet them. Skin of my face so pressed and stretched and pressed again I can’t move to wince at the pain, to mouth the pain, to show the pain of the storm.
I feel nothing.
I am the marble of the headstones. The karst stone of the island, cracked and broken in some places clean through, yet the life; the color; the flowers, ribald and unrepentant, Japanese knotweed, Mediterranean wild flowers and the nests of African birds, the bugs, the slugs, the snails, the seals, the men come here seeking refuge.
The fools.
Loose stones teeter, the oldest and least secure going over with gusts. The wind whistles through gaps in the stone fences bisecting the island, the eastern cliffs a flute playing a mad melody. The moans of exposed cattle up on the cliffs carry down over the cemetery, on out to the bay and smashing against the heavy concrete wall of cloud cutting off my view of the mainland and the world beyond. My nerve in staying out here. My sanity.
Buckets of rain now.
The sky a nail gun. The ground puddles and loosens and little urchins crawl through the grass left by the waves, as stunned and shocked to be deposited here as I am. They crawl on your shoals and I throw them to sea.
They come flying back.
The wind punishes me for standing up. I huddle low against the rock. Rain burns like cold metal and I sink with the stone. I feel your cold. I’m cold through. Just a few feet between us now and you can sleep easy because Ma’s here.
Mo leanbh. Mo stór.
The morning’s not far. I’m ready now. I’m tired now. So tired. The storm won’t let me rest. Is that the dog scratching against the stile? Just the rain. The island going to pieces.
The rock moves.
The next wave will take it. Me. Will I drown with it. Be crushed by it. I want both. I want to be trapped beneath it, the water burning in my lungs, the pressure crushing my chest one second for every day I spent out here a coward and the manic flutter of the beach grass becomes a trample. A rush. I peel off the stone just enough to look.
Declan. Come to Ma.
I see it in his face.
The hope that dies in my eyes. Gavin knows, as soon as he sees me. He made a mistake coming out here. His life a series of mistakes trying to make up for another and this was hopeless, the two of us both waiting for someone who would never come.
But he stays, Gavin. That’s what he does.
He stays beside me, shivering and if I tell him to leave, he won’t leave. He’ll die out here with me, just to prove himself wrong. I could have been anybody, he would have stopped that day at the shore. He would have asked if they needed anything. He would have said he was sorry for their loss.
He came back for me.
The life he found with me, strange and unlikely, like the stone of the island, blooming flowers from its scars.
I won’t leave.
He begs me, with the claw of his fingers. The ferocity of his heart. The waves pull at us. I won’t leave.
He won’t let go. I pull at him. Back through the grass, to the rabbit fields. Up the cliff, sheer, slick, unforgiving; into the round tower.
He doesn’t say a word, Gavin.
He just holds me inside his coat against the chaos swirling around the tower. Any second the bloody thing will come down on us. Waves smash against the cliffs crumbling just beneath us. A ripple goes through us with every impact. Will this be the one. His heart thunders against mine. His hands shake. He could have died coming out here. Him and that dog. The two strays.
“What is it with you and that dog, anyhow?” I say.
“He won’t leave me alone,” Gavin says.
“Must be annoying, like.”
“Do you want me to go?”
“You’d just come back.”
“Probably.”
“A yo-yo, you are…” I’m all tangled up in his string.
His lips twist up in all he wants to say. Quiet this whole time with me but the words always there, bubbling under the surface. His mind this engine running on the steam jetting up out of the caldera of his heart. All that fire and passion and wanting under a mountain of doubt and regret and fear.
“I was dead before. You’ve given me my life, Mairead.”
“We’ve just gone for a walk, you and me.”
“Walk with me for this bit.”
I’m so tired. All this back and forth. All this waiting. For the storm to end, for you to come, for deliverance. I think of Da, near the end in the hospice room at the home. All his hair and his weight gone. A blow-up skeleton. I sat with him hours, watching soaps, football, anything. His hand like a piece of wax fruit in mine. Ma came and went. Always some errand. She made me angry, so. Will you not stay, for an hour? He tolerated it, like he did everything else. He asked me to be good to Ma. Fair. She had suffered a lot in life, and suffered more in silence. So be fair. He told me about my grandmother, Nora.
My grandmother suffered no one, not even herself. She produced four girls, three stillborn. Family myth has it she died of a broken heart soon after Pegeen, born after Ma, but Da told me how Ma had confessed to him in a singular bit of openness early in their marriage that Nora had drown herself after Pegeen. My grandfather took it out on Ma. Those days, a son was still the most valuable possession a man could own. Without a wife or hope of sons, Ma became a liability.
“Don’t be sad,” Da said. His voice hollow. Carved out. “Be happy. Make happiness. Go back to New York. Don’t worry about your mother, she’ll be fine. She might even be looking forward to some time alone. I keep thinking I interrupted her.”
“She loves you,” I said, regardless.
“And she loves you. So go back. Find someone. Make someone happy. You’ll never do something more worth your time here than making another person happy. There’s nothing else. This is it, Mairead. We’re all just here. So make happiness.”
Those last few days, I kept afloat on his mission for me. Go back. Be strong. Find someone. Then he died. The days just vanished. I don’t know. Life. Ma got sick. The world found its end. I had you. I made you. You were my happiness.
And then.
Dawn comes in spite of itself.
The morning sun makes a honeypot of the Atlantic. The cliffs dripping with gold. Little pellets of spray gone to ice in the air melt on my raw cheeks. Gavin buttons me up in his coat. Holds me close. The pill bottle like a rock between us.
“Come down to the shore with me,” I say. “We’ll spread the ashes there, at the rock.”
Mist swirls around the contour of the eroded cliffs, driven over the rock by the waves and sent back by the wind. No idea of which way to go. The mist hangs there, like the spying gulls. Like Gavin.
“You can’t do it,” I say. “Even now.”
His hand go to stuff his pockets. I’m wearing his coat. “And then what, Mairead? I go home. What will you do? You going to come back at here? You going to hurt yourself?”
“You think you’re to save me?”
“I just want to be good for someone.”
“What do you think is going to happen? We’re going to get married? We’re going to live happily ever after?”
“We can just live, Mairead.”
“There isn’t any living.”
“We can try.”
“You want to stay here? You want to be with me?”
“Yes.”
“Come with me to the shore. We’ll scatter the ashes.”
“The tide’s out,” he says, like any one of his excuses and then he sees I’m not making one. “Mairead…”
“This is what you came here for.”
“I came here to live. I want to live.”
I pat the pocket thick with the ashes of his father. “This isn’t living.”
His face sinks. Bags under his eyes. So tired. I haven’t seen it before. This bleeding pill bottle. So heavy. The jacket, soaked from the grief of the sea. I can barely move.
I hold out my hand. “Walk with me for this bit.”
He starts to say something, but he keeps his words. Maybe he’s tired of repeating himself. Lord God, let it be he’s tired of me. His hands close around mine. His father’s ashes.
“I can’t do this,” he says, and takes the pill bottle.
He goes back into the grass. I expect him to come back. I go down to the shore. Wet rock dazzles with sunshine. Slick. Treacherous. The storm left the coast less than it was. The metal of one of your boats tinks against the stone before me.
Mo leanbh. Mo stór.
I expect Gavin to come back, but he doesn’t even into the night. I fall to the ground. This brutal earth all I have left.
Constant spray rains on the tarmac, eroded deep along its northern edge into the choppy waters of the bay. He’ll be ginger on his landing, that pilot, or he’ll be making a boat out of his plane. Gavin stands in the car park with his bag, waiting. The air buzzes.
Soon now.
Colm pulls in through the mangled gate. Colm pats Gavin on the back and his hand keeps there as the buzz builds again and this time it’s the plane. A minute away. Maybe two.
The plane bounces off the runway. The wings jitter as he brakes hard over the ruts in the tarmac. Gavin looks back at the road. East toward the shore. Up here at the monastery. Does he see me. Will he wonder of me for the rest of his short days, far inland as the seas claim their first. He stares into the tower.
Get on the plane, Gavin. Live. One of us has to live.
Colm says something to him. Gavin’s head drops and he starts toward the plane. The pilot clapping his hands. Hurry up now it’s time. Dozens of stranded tourists flood the car park. Bags on their shoulders. Mad hope in their eyes. Gavin says something.
Of course he does.
The pilot contorts in objection, but Gavin badgers him into taking as many as the plane can hold. The older folks excuse themselves. And like that, the Italian family is delivered. Gavin almost gives someone else a seat, but there’s no staying.
Not now.
Gavin leaves his bag on the tarmac to make as much room as he can, and then gets in. The buzzing builds again and the last plane to ever leave Inishèan climbs past the tower out to sea.
No rush in going back to the home.
No sense. There is nothing I can better there, or anywhere, but the shore. Yours is the only loneliness I can cure now. It’s like a cut. A wound. It hurts and it frightens you, but you feel this energy. This adrenaline. This life. Part of you doesn’t want it to end. Another wants it over. I’m bleeding. I’m dying, but I feel desire to feel this living and I’m lost. I’m so lost.
The dog scratches at the stone.
“Away with you,” I say.
He trots into the beach grass. After a few feet, the dog looks back. Expectant, like. He wants me to follow. To where. For what. Go on. Go on and leave. He whines in protest as I keep my place. The dog waits at the edge of matted beach grass, his eyes cast downwards, as if in some way, he’s disappointed.
Chapter Twelve
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br /> Puckered lips of pink clouds kiss the back of a gentle, taupe sea. The sun summits the eastern shoulder of the island, and the moment is gone. The beauty of the world is that it will not last. The wolf’s eye in Cassiopeia is brighter. Another star flares within it. The diamond of a ring. Saturn, the news says. Some probe the States sent years back captures the whole thing and we watch, Ma and I, unable to look away until Ma looks over at me on the sofa and grabs her chest.
“I thought you’d left, girl.”
“I’ve been back, Ma. Since Da.”
“She’ll never come home, he said. Mairead. But I told him. She’s too much of a home bird.”
“I’ve been back.”
She winces. “You’re not here.”
“I’m home,” I say.
Ma goes back to watching the telly. Her confusion. Do you see this, girl? A wandering black hole? Do you know what it is?
Do you know.
Rounds. Pills. Vitals.
No pills. Only empty paper cups their dementia allows me to make full. There’s nothing I can do for anyone but wait. Without anti-hypertensive medication, nearly all the residents suffer rebound high blood pressure. Without calcium channel blockers like the verapamil, or beta-adrenergic blockers like propranolol, angina runs rampant. Without aspirin, I have no defense against a heart attack. And yet they endure. This anger sustains us all. This injustice.
Getting pure thick, we are.
Saidbh calls me to the nurses’ station. If ever she does, it’s to inform me of some other disaster. She holds the receiver of the landline up, this mortified look on her face.
“It’s for your man,” she says.
I take the phone. “Hello?”
Heavy static makes the woman hard to understand. “He said there was a nurse. I called the nursing home.”