Aideen had skulked into Bleekland’s office, felt a wisp of fear like gas churn in her gut, snatched down the front door key on its “Honor, Leadership & Academic Excellence” ring. If Brigid could see her now! Before her stood the hottest ride she’s ever personally known (Clean-Cut notwithstanding), who’d come across town in the middle of the night to see her!
“Hi,” he’d said.
It was a powerful moment. Aideen Gogarty couldn’t have written a haiku, a limerick, a free range verse, a text message, a tweet, anything that could more closely capture beauty than the fact of that single word and this boy standing before her with his loose, manic hair, a faded hipster Black Betty T-shirt beneath the jacket, a pale scar, like one of her brothers’ white fishing grubs planted along his thick brow, all of it. This would have been enough, and yet there was more.
“Next time should we pull a Rapunzel?”
He was already referring to next time! And so boldly she took his freezing hand in hers. Sean raised her fingers to his lips and kissed her hand gallantly. Honestly, was this really happening to Aideen Gogarty right here in the entry of Millburn School’s residential house? And then he was kissing her. She’d never had her mouth explored by any person other than her doughy, skeptical dentist, who seemed never to believe that she’d flossed. At first, Sean’s little eel of a tongue barged into her mouth, darted to and fro as if lost, not a thing like the hundreds of screen kisses she’d seen and studied, where it all begins on the outside and works its way in. No, Sean’s tongue was trying to get somewhere, Sean’s tongue was in a hurry, and she stood with her mouth awkwardly agape, unsure of how exactly to reciprocate. She felt foolish and ungainly, worried her tongue would land on the wrong target, and at first it did: the dry corner where his lips met, then wetly, clumsily, the double-barreled groove of skin below his nose.
“We can’t stay here,” she said and led the way through the common room, ashamed of its childish décor and mortifying list of house rules handwritten on a dry-erase board. They entered a large storage closet where Miss Packer, the kindly cleaning lady who always smiled at Aideen and said “Ah God love you,” housed her mops and brooms and dusters. There was a gap between the shelving large enough for them to sit side by side on the floor, backs against the wall—not comfortable, exactly, but it would do.
They kissed again. His tongue calmed some, more of a ramble, an exploratory roam. This was somehow exactly as she’d imagined and yet nothing at all as she’d imagined. She found herself responding, gradually gaining confidence. Before long, they were heavy-breathing. Aideen struggled valiantly to process all that was happening and to reject the image, which seemed to be on an endless mental loop, of Bleekland or even sweet, pudgy Packer bursting in on them. She began to worry about where she’d put the front door key—was it still in the door or had she slipped it into her pocket? Without allowing herself to overponder—she was terrified he’d be uninterested or, worse, disappointed—she stopped and placed Sean’s hands on her breasts over her top. And then she thought, There are two ice packs on my tits and giggled. He removed his hands immediately.
“I’m sorry,” she said.
“No, I’m sorry,” he said.
They sat. She had a wild notion that maybe she should just reach over and press her hand into his crotch. She was curious how it would feel: like a squashy carnival sausage? Or a skinny wooden stick you find strewn on the strand when the tide is low, one you might toss for a dog to fetch? In the dark, she could only see the outline of him. She felt his hand land gently on her hair.
“I saw your grandma today. We brought her lunch.”
“Grandma!” She echoed mockingly and felt delirious. “That’s, like, so American.”
“Poor old Millie Gogarty, you know? I feel sorry for her, all alone in that house.”
“I know, me too. She can really drive everyone completely mental, though.”
“She kind of reminds me of my mom. Like before. Like with all the crazy shit she busts out with, you know? My mom was kinda like that.”
“You must miss her.”
He didn’t reply and then Aideen said, “Gran is a head case but she means well. One time I really needed money to get tickets for Clean-Cut—”
“Not that plonker again!”
“Look at you with the Irish verbiage.”
“You are forbidden to utter his name in my presence.”
God, how she fancied him.
That’s when he had told her she was pretty.
“But you can’t even see me.”
“I have your face in my brain,” he said and they laughed.
He ran his hand along her bare arm; she shuddered. Then they heard a door closing from the floor above. Aideen immediately ripped away from Sean and jumped to her feet.
“You have to go.”
She grabbed his hand, tiptoed from the closet all the way to the exit door where, out in the open, they were most vulnerable. Jesus, she had left the keys in the door. Aideen unlocked it frantically and pushed him out of the building; she laughs at the thought of it now. But before he left, as if he couldn’t resist, he kissed her a final time, even as she smacked him off and shoved him out. She ran to Bleekland’s office to replace the keys, hands shakily trying to find the hook, and, before climbing the stairs, turned to watch him already all the way across the broad, uninspired lawn, running off into the moonless night.
24
Purely by happenstance at the garage getting a bulb replaced in his own car, Kevin learns that it had been Mum, not Sylvia, behind the wheel when her Renault had gotten smashed up. Taking Kevin’s cash, the mechanic says, “Hate to say it but she’s becoming one of my best customers.”
Kevin thanks the man cheerily, but he’s deeply livid. Not only is his mother a danger on the road, but the accomplice she’s roped in for subterfuge is the very person who’s supposed to be keeping her safe, not lying to his bloody face. He zooms out of the garage, pulls to the side of the road, and finds Sylvia’s number on his phone.
“Your services,” he says coldly upon her ‘hello,’ “are no longer required.”
“What?”
“I’m sacking you.”
“I don’t understand.”
“As of today.”
“But was something—is there a specific thing that—”
“Yes, there is. You lied to me. You said you were driving the day she crashed but it wasn’t you, was it?”
“Oh, that.” She sounds unfazed. “I’m sorry. That was my fault, but she was really worried about your reaction. She was totally freaking out. She thought you would take the car keys from her.”
“Goodbye, Sylvia.”
“But wait—” she says and so he does; he waits for the inevitable heartfelt apology, the groveling—not that he intends to act upon it. “What about my money? I’m still owed for three shifts this week.”
He hangs up and turns into the supermarket. Grace is home early today and so he’s planned an above-average meal; he badly needs to assuage the guilt that has begun to consume him. He needs to right his wrong. Kevin’s holding a clutch of scrawny carrots in the produce aisle, determined to never contact Rose Byrd again, when someone smashes violently into his trolley.
It’s Mum.
“Am I invited?” she says, eyeing his packets of minced meat.
“To the parents’ hockey dinner? Not your bag, Mum.”
“What’s that sourpuss for? Can I entice you to tea today? Sylvia has the day off.”
“No, but I do need to talk to you.”
“Oh?”
“Not here.”
“Why not here?”
“Because I don’t want to get into a big thing standing in the middle of the supermarket.”
“I didn’t know we were getting into a big thing.”
“Look, I’ll meet you at the coffee stand in ten minutes, good?”
* * *
He waits twenty minutes for her. She’s probably pocketing apricots or blabbing at
the poor butcher about the appalling state of his cuts. Finally, when his mother joins him, Kevin says, “I’ve let Sylvia go.”
They are seated on tall, backless stools at a tiny bar table with paper cups of bitter coffee, pools of plastic shopping bags heaped at their feet.
“I’ve had to fire her, Mum. Don’t look at me like that.”
“Why on earth…?”
“I had no choice.”
“But she was just at the house yesterday.”
“Yes, well that was her last day I’m afraid.”
“I have no idea what you’re talking about. I’m ringing her right when I get home.”
“Let me—just sit down. Let me explain.”
“She’s due tomorrow.”
“No she isn’t. She’s no longer coming.”
“You can’t just do that!”
“I thought you didn’t even want a caretaker?”
“How would you know what I want?”
“Look, just sit down. Calm down. Jesus, good thing I didn’t mention this near the pineapples.”
Mum doesn’t laugh.
“You’ve been keeping something from me.”
“I don’t know what you’re on about,” she says.
“You crashed the car again, didn’t you?”
Maddeningly, she shrugs. “You don’t mean that little bump here, at the car park? Ah sure, Kevin, come on now, that’s just—”
“That was the third one in half a year. It’s just not safe.”
“What does that have to do with Sylvia?”
“Sylvia lied to me. She’s supposed to tell me what’s going—”
“Spy on me!”
Kevin sighs. “No, of course not. I’m the contact person and she’s supposed to let me know when an incident like this happens.”
Mum snorts. “Incident!”
“I realize you have no respect for the concept of responsibility whatsoever, but the fact is that she was totally irresponsible for not telling me the truth. It’s unacceptable. I can’t trust her.”
“Well, I trust her and that’s what matters. And it’s my fault anyway because I told her not to mention it—I didn’t want to worry you. This is all a fuss over nothing. She’s still got the job.”
“She has not.”
“She has.”
He shakes his head. “Look, I’m sorry but it’s done. Anyway, it’s done.”
* * *
Further domestic drama greets him on the home front, this one mundane and death-related: Ciaran’s fish, Pika and Chu, present as quite dead, two stiff floaters in one aquarium. Given the appalling state of the tank, over which a film of dark charcoal fuzz has grown ominously across the rocks and fake fauna and rusted treasure ship, Kevin can’t say he’s terribly surprised.
He mentally scrolls through various openings and riffs and, deciding to wing it, calls out, “Ciaran, love, come here, will you?”
Ciaran, his most obedient child, bunny-hops into the room in red tracksuit bottoms and a T-shirt that reads TAG YOUR IT, whose grammatical error never fails to irk his father. Does nobody approve a T-shirt before it’s shipped from China? Or is it deliberately misspelled to thwart the mainstream? Cool, the universe seems at great pains to repeatedly point out to Kevin, has bypassed him.
“I have some news.” Like all of the Gogarty kids but not their parents (Grace’s imaginary tryst with the milkman, which is an old joke between them, notwithstanding), Ciaran is blue-eyed, his lashes bovine. “Pika and Chu have died.”
Ciaran cries so instantly it’s astonishing, as if Kevin pushed a button on him marked “grief.” His narrow shoulders slump, the tears streaming.
“I’m sorry,” says Kevin and he is. He holds his little boy closely, a hard lump, to his surprise, rising up in his own throat. He gulps. He feels rattled, off his game.
Kevin had promised himself he wouldn’t ring or text message Rose Byrd again, and he hasn’t and he is not going to be that guy, it’s nonsense, the whole thing, and over now, it was a few measly kisses (albeit stirring, erotic, filled with longing and possibility). Still, kisses that should never have happened, and there are worse and further lines to cross and he won’t be crossing them. (Yet in two hours he will feel crushed, gutted, when she writes, Can we meet up? I’ll be nice, promise, and he forces himself to ignore and delete, ignore and delete.)
Kevin strokes Ciaran’s back, murmurs soothing words. As the son of a woman who pooh-poohed anguish—“You’ll be grand!” Millie used to say to any sign of emotional upset with a pat on the bum and off you go—he tries to make it a point not to rush the heavy stuff.
“You know,” he says. “I think Pika and Chu were quite a happy pair, far as I can tell. Delirious I should think, if not exactly bright. I mean, they were always swimming in circles, forgetting that they’d just swum in circles and then, hey, hold the phone! I’ve got an idea! Let’s swim in circles.”
“Daddy!” Ciaran scolds, smiling and crying.
“Feckin’ eejits! No, but the truth is, they always got to be together. That’s a good thing, to have a fellow fish. And then you would come in and brighten their whole world just by tapping some smelly flakes of food into their tank. They had a grand old time of it,” he says and then adds, “Deadly.” He winces, but his son doesn’t seem to notice his gaffe.
Ciaran lifts his head from Kevin’s chest and says, “You think so?”
“I do.”
“They’re never going to be alive again.”
“Well.” Kevin pauses. “They’ll be together in heaven.” He says this uncomfortably since he hasn’t believed in heaven or religion or God or any of it for years, yet he finds that fatherhood compels him to perpetuate these myths.
“Hi Mum,” says Ciaran.
Kevin hadn’t even heard Grace come in, but here is his wife, striding toward them, coat still on.
“What’s happened?” she says, going immediately to Ciaran.
Kevin rolls his eyes toward the fish tank to communicate the double carcass situation.
“Oh no. Oh, I’m sorry. Poor darling.”
The boy climbs into his mother’s arms and she rocks him slowly. Kevin finds this tableau powerfully moving. He has a strong urge to blurt everything out—she has always been his primary confidante; so little in his life seems real until he shares it with her. If only he could talk to Grace about Rose!
Ciaran sits up. “Can we bury them in the garden?”
“I think better to have a water burial,” says Kevin. “We can whoosh them out to sea where they started. How ’bout Mum says a few words?”
“No, you should,” Ciaran says.
“You’re right,” says Grace, but Kevin sees the briefest cloud pass her features.
“No,” says Kevin, feeling such a tenderness for his wife now, his unwitting victim. “Mum gives speeches all the time. Trust me, no better woman for the job.”
* * *
The Gogartys have lost track of how many guppies they’ve flushed down the loo over the years. Yet as unceremonious a ritual as it appears, the children are inevitably moved. Standing at the toilet, Ciaran proves to be no exception. But he’s a resilient kid—all his gang are, really—and by teatime, he’s tapping away on the laptop, all vestiges of melancholia vanished.
“Any word from Starjar?” Grace asks Kevin later as they climb into bed.
He did not practice full disclosure in his retelling of his clusterfuck of a job interview. He omitted key details, including his request for an extra bicky on his way out, the singular embarrassing moment that has haunted him since.
“Nothing yet.”
“Well if they don’t hire you, then they’re just thick,” she says, extinguishing her light. He lies, scrolling through his phone, his back deliberately walled between them. She ignores this, cuddles up behind him. She finds his thigh beneath the covers and runs her fingers along it and he freezes. He doesn’t—he can’t—reciprocate. He can’t do this. With a platonic squeeze of his shoulder, she eventually give
s up and shifts back to her own side.
25
Despite the fact that the central heating at Margate, cranked up of late at skyrocketing cost to impress Sylvia and Co., is currently clanking away at high volume, the house remains mercilessly cold. Millie turns the oven to its highest mark and leaves it open—at least one room will be warm for Sylvia’s hastily planned visit.
After she rings the doorbell, which she never does, Sylvia silently hands over her key.
“This is all my fault,” she says.
“It isn’t. It’s mine.”
“I should’ve told Kevin the truth.”
“Not at’all. I begged you not to,” says Millie.
“How did he even find out? I thought we were in the clear.”
“His friend’s mother’s brother works in the garage.” Millie sighs. “That’s Dublin for you.”
Sylvia says, “I just wanted to say goodbye and thank-you. I’m really gonna miss working with you. You’re really the coolest boss I’ve ever had.”
“Kevin has no say in this. I’m going to clear it all up. Come and sit down.”
To Millie’s horror, Sylvia’s eyes fill. Millie has never seen her companion succumbing to negative emotion; her range heretofore has only encompassed all manner of high spirits, from jolly cheer to breathy gratitude.
“What did Kevin say? Was he monstrous?”
“No, no he was fine. It’s not that.” The American makes a sort of choking noise.
“Sil?”
Millie notes a striking, oversized turquoise bangle that encircles Sylvia’s slender wrist. She’s curious about her caretaker’s gypsy jewelry, especially a ring that serves to fuse together her second and third fingers like a bridge, as if they’re webbed.
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