“Can’t his brother do it?”
“I suppose so,” Gran says. “But Gus asked me. And in any case, you’ve got to go home, Aideen. I promised your dad. If you don’t get on that plane tomorrow, he’ll really have my head.”
“Not alone!” Aideen says, loud enough to stir curiosity among her waiting room comrades.
“Why not? Didn’t you go round here on your own, not a bother on you?”
“I can’t.”
“You can.”
“But I mean, that’s it? That’s it? We’re, like, done? Like, what was the point? Sylvia’s got away scot-free, you didn’t get your money back. I never saw Sean.”
Gran appears to be smirking. “Well, in actual fact, we didn’t get nothing.”
“That’s a double negative.”
“You’re a great one for the ol’ grammar, Aideen.”
Aideen, growing narkier by the second, is done with this conversation, this clinic, this lark, this country.
“Come here to me and I’ll tell you,” says Gran. “They could put a warrant out for Sylvia’s arrest. Bob said what happened to Gus is considered assault, if he were to press charges. But even if he doesn’t, it’s a jolly good thing we followed Sylvia to Mr. Pale’s house. Apparently he’s a bigwig here, or was, something to do with investing in a laser hair removal system. Would you know what that was? Anyway, the police are on the case. They don’t take elder fraud lightly here. They’ve a whole unit devoted to it.”
“If she goes to jail, what would happen to Sean?” Aideen has visions of her love being shunted to another rando in the family or, worse, among strangers, in a state-designated foster home. Or a facility. Or on the streets.
“Well, he’s nearly eighteen, isn’t he?”
“In May.”
“There you go,” says Gran. “He’ll be grand.”
Aideen contemplates what is too unthinkable, too dangerous, which is to go straight over to Sylvia’s apartment and demand entry. She sees herself climbing the stairs; she can hear the primal thump of his music even before she’s at the door. Maybe his guitar’s strapped to his torso because he’s just been playing it.
“You know what shocked me the most if I’m honest?” Gran’s saying. “Sylvia was scared. For a minute there, she was really scared.”
“She was.”
“That’s very satisfying to me—not that I want to go round scaring people. But the fact that—”
“Yeah, I get it.”
“I might be old,” says Gran, “but I’m not feckin’ dead.”
“You’re gas, Gran.”
“And you with the keys down your knickers!”
Aideen smiles. “I got the feeling she didn’t like that very much,” Aideen says quietly, for comic effect, and soon the two of them, remembering the absurd trauma of their afternoon, are in stitches.
“Whatever happened to the keys? Did you leave them there?” Gran asks.
Aideen takes them from her pocket. “I didn’t know what to do with them.”
“A souvenir?” Gran stands up. “You ought to go now and get your things together. I’ll meet you back at the Castaways.”
“Oh, Gran, but your ring.”
Gran sighs and folds her hands together. “Well now, that’s a loss. I’ll give you that one. I was thirty-one when your granddad proposed to me, did you know that? I’ll never forget his face. He looked absolutely terrified, like he was about to wet himself. I don’t think I believed he loved me until that moment. And the ring—that was his grandmother’s ring. And I’ve had it in my possession every day since, except for that first day. Did I never tell you that story?”
Of course she has. Aideen Gogarty herself could bloody well tell it.
“I don’t think so.”
The mother with the baby is watching them carefully; half the room is probably eavesdropping out of sheer boredom. Gran straightens herself up and then she’s off—it’s a gorgeous day in Dublin, the ring, too loose, slips from her finger, but they don’t know when or where, her betrothed’s on his knees in the weeds (Aideen thinking, what the fuck does “betrothed” mean?), he spots the sign the next day, and then Gran and the lady who found the ring have tea in the Shelbourne Hotel—sandwiches and scones with clotted cream.
“Clotted cream?” says Aideen, noting the addition of this new detail and wondering is it fact or fiction and does it matter.
“And strawberries, too, now that I think of it.”
62
Even if the number of useful roles Millie Gogarty can play diminishes as time unfolds, was there ever a more suitable one than to simply keep Gus Sparks company, to chatter merrily away as he rests, depleted but grateful, in his hospital bed? She brings great gusto to her task, sharing with the possibly concussed building manager various colorful observations gleaned (à la Aideen) from her time spent in the Urgent Care waiting room before his transfer here—this gentleman had a poxy eyeball, that nurse with the hideous shoes was twice seen leaving her station to smoke fags beneath the clinic’s awning, and so on.
It’s evening but not yet nighttime and Gus’s fairly generous sixth-floor window lays bare a vast, rose sky. Though she isn’t one to frequently take her own emotional pulse, Millie would have to admit, at this point in this room in this country with this particular person, she is experiencing a sort of lightness. Despite the day’s terrible upset and injury, she feels she’s where she ought to be.
But Gus voices concern about where she isn’t, namely, with Aideen, so Millie borrows his mobile and soon learns that her granddaughter, suitcase at the door, is safely ensconced in the Castaways, devouring something called XXTRA Flamin’ Hot Cheetos while lying abed watching 19 Kids and Counting.
It’s official: Aideen’s gone American.
Millie fusses around Gus like an old married lady, pours him water from a carafe on his bed tray, and places the straw carefully to his mouth, holding the cup steady as he drinks. She remembers nursing Peter after his strokes, though that was far worse—she’d had to teach him how to sit and stand and eat and speak again. I am Millie. I am your wife. Peter would have found Gus to be obscenely literal, but a decent enough fellow.
After a while, Gus nods off and Millie steels herself for her next, less pleasant task. She steps into the quiet hallway with a scribble of digits to ring her son again. Years ago, Kevin had been the one to find his father slumped on the garden chaise, his cap covering his face so that precious minutes were wasted, Kevin not wanting to wake him, not realizing he’d suffered a heart attack. At the hospital, Kevin had said, “I thought he was asleep” to anyone who would listen—the staff and nurses and doctor. And to Millie who, in her own mute terror, failed, perhaps, to assuage him.
A nurse in pale pink Winnie-the-Pooh scrubs clicks officiously by, rolling complicated machinery that looks like an airplane drinks cart run amok with tubes and wires. Millie hears her son’s “hello.” She tries to remember the last time she told him that she loved him or, even, thank you. And when had she last owned up to Kevin for anything, held herself accountable?
Millie glances back into Gus’s room: he’s trussed up under the bedclothes, his wonderful, handsome, old face turned in her direction. She may regret this when Kevin refuses to hand over her car keys or speaks to her like she’s a dozy granny, and, painfully, she senses she’s relinquishing power. But nevertheless she does; she tells him she’s sorry.
63
At Dublin Airport arrivals hall, Aideen beelines toward Dad and he picks her up, her untied scuffed up high tops swaying inches over the floor, and smothers her with possibly the most mortifying public display of affection Aideen’s suffered in her wobbly adolescence to date. She is briefly visited by the old scorn. It’s so annoying that he assumes she wants to be hugged, that she gets no say in the matter.
At the same time—she’s not going to lie—a part of her secretly glows under this flood of paternal attention and she dips into it and basks, even as she furiously blinks away tears. She’s home
. Aideen doesn’t discount that Dad can be irritating and overbearing and all up in her grill, as her American counterparts might say. But it’s Dad, for fuck’s sake. At some point that she can hardly remember, the fact of her parents’ love seemed in question. Which strikes her now as quite daft. She thinks this moment could contain the makings of a decent limerick, but now’s not the time.
“You do realize,” he says as they make their way to the car park, “that you’re on lockdown for the next quarter century?”
Indeed, what punishment will be exacted? Nine hours in the sky proved to be an extended purgatory of worry. Yet there is surprisingly no discussion of any of the school malarkey. She may be expelled, she may have to change schools, she may be forced to face Bleekland back at Millburn.
They pull up the drive to the house in Dalkey, which looks like a grand thing of regal beauty to her traveler’s eyes compared to the newer pastel architectural backdrop of her recent adventures. Nuala and Ciaran and Gerard—her brother has come!—all file out the door, a scrum of bony beauties, and make their way down the stone steps. They look strangely indecisive, as if no one knows what to say or do. Gerard reaches her first and shakes his head wistfully. “You alright?,” he says and then he hugs her and calls her a numbnut. Her twin, too, pulls her into an embrace and blathers away excitedly. She’s never been to America, what are the boys like, do all the girls wear bikinis? Little Ciaran quietly takes up Aideen’s hand. This, Aideen knows, is how Clean-Cut must feel when the fans descend. Fucking rock star.
Aideen grabs her bag from the car and turns back to the house. Mum is standing in the doorway, arms crossed, bearing an inscrutable expression. Is she happy? Sad? Relieved? All of the above? Her lips tug downward into a grimace. She’s wearing Dad’s “You People Must Be Exhausted from Watching Me Do Everything” apron. She lifts a bottom corner of it to dab at her eye. Maybe, thinks Aideen, all of the above? Aideen is totally capable of keeping her shit together, she really is, until Mum says her name and opens her arms.
* * *
Banned from signing out, Aideen spends her pre-prep afternoons in the Fair House common room playing table tennis and making toast with Fiona Fallon. Fiona’s not a wild whirlwind like Brigid, but neither is she dog-eat-dog. Aideen admires that her new friend can’t resist smashing balls that are obviously unsmashable, and she’s grown to appreciate Fiona’s (albeit winding) stories about the slew of hens (each named) on her family’s farm and how she pines away after William Rush, the bushy-browed twenty-year-old country boy who sells her father tractors.
Aideen’s up by six points when Bleekland, from her glassed-in headquarters, calls out her name. The two girls exchange a look. Per the terms of her reentry, Aideen had delivered Bleekland a handwritten letter of apology, but she’s managed to avoid all dialogue and eye contact with the woman since she slipped quietly back into dorm life. Which is the plan. Continue at Millburn for the next two years without interaction.
Fiona mouths “What?” as Aideen, with a shrug that belies the wash of nausea grinding in her belly, puts down her wooden paddle.
Bleekland stands in the central foyer organizing the day’s post into little piles for the mostly young, terminally homesick foreign girls who depend on them for an outsized portion of their mental equilibrium. She silently hands Aideen an envelope, and though Aideen doesn’t recognize the blocky writing, the return address reads “Clearwater, Florida.”
Gus.
She’s on her heels to flee when Bleekland says, in her maddening no-affect voice, “Did I see knickers hanging on the radiator beside your bed?”
As if. Aideen Gogarty wouldn’t dream of displaying her knickers in public, even among a bunch of girls.
“Clothing on the radiators is a fire hazard.”
“I’ll go and move them now,” Aideen says and wonders if this isn’t a sort of détente, Bleekland telling her off for such a humdrum offense, the normalcy of it.
The old spinster trains her impenetrable stare on Aideen. It pains her, but Aideen manages to meet Bleekland’s eyes. She hopes the woman gets the message she’s trying to telegraph: forgive me. Then she heads straight for the second-floor toilets.
Hey Aideen,
Can you believe this is the first letter I’ve ever written in my life? Lost my phone (with your number) so I’m reduced to this caveman communication. We’re back in Florida but you probably guessed that? I’m going to school again and getting my old band together, but we need a bass player. I’m working on this new song—there’s a funny part in it about that flasher guy we saw, remember that? How you doing? How is that jailhouse treating you? How is that fascist gimp? I’m really sorry about not meeting you at the coffee shop. Feel really shitty about that. Long story, too much to write. Call me? Hey did something sketchy go down between your “grandma” and Sylvia? Heard a wild tale. Are you listening to my playlist?
I miss Dublin, and you.
Call me?
Sean 727 873 0980
When she arrives at his name, Aideen realizes she’s stopped breathing. She reads the note through three more times. Then she allows herself to experience the thrill, the demented, free-fall joy of those two words. Since all the others are signed out or at hockey or wherever they go, and the place is empty, Aideen lets loose a raucous “Yes!” and does a kind of dorky victory dance, banging her elbow against the bog roll holder in the process. Call me!
64
In America, Millie never could locate floury enough potatoes to make proper roasties. She’d tried new potatoes (too waxy), Yukon Gold (wrong consistency), and so on, tried every bloody type of spud in Publix, which had struck her as a scandalous name, especially for a grocery, but she couldn’t manage to magic up the beautiful dish for Gus that she’d had in mind. Normally, the fact that she’d boasted and then been unable to produce might have left her a bit scarlet. But not so with Gus. The man is grateful for all and sundry—a cup of lukewarm coffee, a note she left on his table one afternoon that said, “Back in a few,” a glimpse of a whale on an excursion designed to spot such a beast (or no glimpse of a whale), even an imperfectly roasted potato. Gus Sparks would probably express gratitude for a hot meal of roasted cow dung. She marvels at this, especially considering how little he has—no wife, no children. Her own string of heartaches, on balance, strikes her as scant and humbling. Maybe she has plenty, or enough.
Kevin and Aideen are officially late, which suits her since she’s still trying to navigate the new cooker whose newness she nearly resents. Millie Gogarty doesn’t need all these fancy appliances! But the insurance check had come in, a whopper, and Kevin had ordered all sleek, chrome, top-of-the-line gear, despite her loquacious protestations. He was adamant: if she was going to be back at Margate, about which she was adamant (with a new, thoroughly vetted, part-time companion called Tara Whalen, about whom the jury’s still out), then she needed, and deserved, a kitchen that isn’t burned or broken or frigid or filthy. The day the cabinets were fitted, which Jolly Jessica helped her choose, Kevin had brought her a box wrapped in silver paper so lustrous it pained her to open it. Inside was a fire extinguisher.
Some high-tech beep sounds from the cooker and “READY” appears in alarming red on an otherwise invisible black screen. Millie, who’s ready herself, bungs in her peeled spuds along with the beef and carrots and turnips. On the quartz countertop—as slick and flawless as a freshly paved road—she’s placed a bottle of pink champagne and three crystal flutes instead of two because, sure, why shouldn’t Aideen have a swallow?
Millie’s set a fire in the living room and it’s roaring. Later, when they’ve all gone, she’ll ring Gus at the usual time on the Skype, an innovation that she’s come to rely heavily upon, the most brilliant invention since the electric kettle. They’ve his itinerary to confirm. First of the month, the eagle will land.
On yesterday’s call, Millie had learned that the Pale family was so grateful for Millie and Gus’s tip-off that there was now talk of a financial reward. The America
ns are a fascinating people—and kind, especially her American and her granddaughter’s as well. Aideen and Sean, happily reunited, have apparently spent long hours on their phones comparing notes on the Sylvia saga. Indeed, so appalled was Sean to hear the entirety of his aunt’s crimes that, following a big row, he’s moved in with a friend, at least for now. Sylvia had really done a number on him. To justify their abrupt departure from Ireland all those weeks ago, she’d told him of a bogus job opportunity she’d been offered in Florida and then nicked his phone. Once back home, Sean asked Sylvia for Millie’s contact information—he was only desperate to reach Aideen—but his aunt refused. She told him that Millie was deranged (would you believe?) and that she’d accused Sylvia in Dublin of horrible abuse; she warned him the Gogartys were rotten to the core and forbade him all contact. But Sean, good man, was having none of it. He tried ringing Aideen at Millburn School, but no one there would pass along a message. So he’d taken out pen and paper and done what few in his generation seem to these days: he’d written Aideen a letter. Sylvia had tried to thwart his and Aideen’s communication. But they would not be thwarted; love would not be thwarted!
In time, Millie hears her family coming through the door—the stamping of their feet, a draft of briny air blasting rudely in from the sea along with them.
“Come in, come in,” she says, bustling to them in the hallway.
Kevin does a stage sniff.
“Heavenly,” he says.
“Worth returning my car keys for?”
He rolls his eyes and bends to kiss her. “I believe you’ve shrunk since Monday. Bit dark in here, isn’t it?”
“That bulb needs replacing,” Millie says, “but I can’t reach it.”
“There’s a joke here somewhere.”
“Would you ever find the step stool? I think it’s in the garage.” Millie hasn’t considered that step stool since the day she sat on it to smoke her fag, setting in motion all that came after.
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