Ghost Songs

by Regina McBride

  •

  Dr. Brumlop, a large, fair-haired woman in her late fifties, listens as Mom chronicles my delinquent behavior.

  Since Nanny died Mom’s upsets are much more frequent and much worse. She has come one or two times to see Dr. Brumlop to get prescriptions of Seconal. It is meant to help her sleep when she has insomnia, but the Seconal does not help my mother sleep. It does not even relax her, but prolongs and intensifies the unhappy episodes, makes her bang into walls or fall, slurring her words and crossing her eyes. She does not need Seconal to get into a state, but it does nothing to help.

  But we are here today to talk about me. Someone Mom works with saw me at a red light on Cerrillos Road at ten thirty on a school morning, in the passenger seat of a car. It was bad enough that I was supposed to be in school at that hour, but then I rolled down the window and, clearly drunk, puked all down the side of the car door.

  I feel Dr. Brumlop’s eyes on me as I stare through the big office window, which is slightly ajar, and focus on the soft gurgling of a fountain in a private garden, the statue of a gray Buddha meditating in a bed of marigolds.

  Dr. Brumlop asks Mom to go into the waiting room so she can speak with me, and when we are alone she asks me vague questions about my behavior. For a moment I have no idea what I might say. I try to answer. It’s just the way things are, I tell her. I hate the conventional world and have not an iota of interest in school. I want to live in the beauty of the moment.

  Without really thinking about it, I find myself telling her how Mom tried to drink the Drano, and about a night when Mom told us that she’d taken a bottle of pills, and how my father called an ambulance. It turned out that she’d lied and when they pumped her stomach they found nothing. She blamed my father for it and said it was his fault she’d had to endure that. I ask Dr. Brumlop, “He was right, wasn’t he, to call an ambulance?”

  Dr. Brumlop’s glasses, which sit low on her nose, reflect the light through the window and glint, obscuring her eyes, but her mouth has fallen open and her eyebrows are drawn together.

  “Yes,” she says, “he was right.”

  •

  I sit on a rock wall at the Cliffs of Moher with a vast view of the sea below. Sometimes, though, I don’t look at the sea at all, but down at the sneakers I’m wearing, a pair I bought in Killarney: black and white and bright orange. It’s the orange I don’t want to stop looking at, the way it emits a fierce glow in the overcast afternoon.

  •

  On the scribbled map he made me, the proprietor from Tommo’s did a rough drawing of the cliffs. He drew an arrow pointing to the last cliff, which I can see from where I sit. Above the arrow, he wrote the words Hag’s Head.

  •

  I am with two other girls in a car ditching school on a winter day. I am sixteen. We’re laughing about something as we zoom along a bare stretch of desert highway, the air in the cab filled with pot smoke.

  I spot my father walking, not dressed for the cold, wearing only a light jacket. He is not far from the Tap Room. My brother has told me that some nights my father sleeps in his car in the parking lot, so I imagine the car must still be parked there and not starting. If he ran the engine all night to keep the heat on, the battery has probably died.

  I don’t mention to my friends that I see him. It will take him an hour and a half to get home by foot and most of the distance he will have to travel will be along bare desert. There is no way we can pick him up and give him a ride. I am supposed to be in school and the car reeks of pot.

  I watch as my father’s figure recedes, growing tiny in the rearview mirror. I stare through the windshield at the empty stretch of land and watch the cold wind shake the piñon brush.

  •

  I wake from near sleep. Sheila, at two and a half, keeps getting out of bed and going in the hall, calling out to Mommy. Since she stopped using a crib, she sleeps in a room with me and Tracy.

  “Sssshhh, sweetie,” Mom says, carrying her in again and covering her.

  “‘Molly Mone’!” Sheila whispers. She means the song “Molly Malone.” “Sing ‘Molly Mone’!”

  In a voice just above a whisper, Mom sings:

  She drove her wheelbarrow

  Through streets broad and narrow,

  Crying cockles and mussels, alive, alive oh!

  On Mom’s voice, I float back to sleep.

  •

  The water hurls itself hard at the cliff and rises straight up into the air, twenty, maybe thirty feet before collapsing into foam. The gulls, riding the wind, are tuned to the sea’s rhythms. Their screams, earnest, echoing pleas, intensify as the water stirs, hurling itself again at the rocks, and rising straight up into air.

  “Hallo!” A voice from behind me in the distance disrupts my reverie. I’m still afraid to turn. It gets closer. “Hallo!” it repeats. It’s a male voice with an accent. I twist around and look.

  A guy about my age, wearing a bright yellow windbreaker, waves at me. He’s smiling, a shock of light curly blond hair around his face. I wave back as he approaches. When he’s a yard away, he takes out a crumpled map and points to one of the other cliffs where there is a stone tower.

  “Did you . . . went? Go?” he asks, winded from climbing. I shake my head no.

  He looks down at the view of the water, whistles with awe, then looks at me, his smile intensifying. “Ah!” he says, opening his arms, then turning to take in the view all around.

  “I am Will,” he says, pointing to himself.

  “My name is Regina,” I say. “I’m American.”

  “I am Dutch.” He tells me he is from a place called Breda in Holland.

  We speak to each other in phrases and single words, nodding and gesturing.

  He points again at the other headland with the castle tower. The two of us set out together, taking a path that he finds on his map. When we see a cow behind a fence he asks me to take a picture of him with it. He sits on the fence reaching his hand out to the cow. When it makes a sudden groaning noise, the two of us look at each other and laugh. After this, everything makes us laugh, including a fat horse standing in high grass chewing and watching us, its ears alert. I drop the bag I’m carrying and things spill out and roll down the hill and he runs after them. A small bottle of lotion keeps rolling just as he almost has it and this makes us laugh even more.

  I feel a smile now on my face as perpetual as the smile on his.

  As we walk I ask if he is a student and he says no, that he works in a department store “selling . . . toys.”

  “Toys!” I cry, delighted. It seems so fitting.

  “But not all toys! Only . . .” He is not sure how to say it. “Soft toys.”

  “Oh!” I say. “Do you mean stuffed toys?”

  He seems uncertain if it’s the right word.

  “Like soft bears and rabbits?”

  “Yes, yes. Soft toys.”

  We climb to each different cliff, and arrive at the last one, Hag’s Head, which reaches farthest into the Atlantic. We photograph each other with the ancient gray watchtower in the background, and take turns standing on a narrow ledge that free-falls hundreds of feet to ocean-slapped rocks below.

  •

  Will is staying in Liscannor, and just as we are about to part ways at the crossroads, he points to a small roadside pub and offers to buy me a glass of Guinness.

  A man at the bar sings a song I know well from my mother’s records, “The Star of the County Down,” and another accompanies him on a tin whistle. A small, very old man with loose pants suspendered up to his chest begins to dance, slipping once on beer. Another man grabs him by the arm as he is falling and tries to guide him to a chair to sit down, but the old one refuses and continues his jig. As Will and I clap encouragement, he beams at us.

  The dance ends and we cheer, and as the little old man disappears into a group on one side of the bar, a different man bursts into song in a high tenor, a slower, moodier air, the glasses on a nearby shelf shaking with the force of his
vibrato.

  Oh, Mary, this London’s a wonderful sight

  With people all workin’ by day and by night.

  Will and I stand so we can see the singer, a thickset man with a large forehead sitting on a barstool, a half-full pint glass in front of him.

  Sure they don’t sow potatoes or barley or wheat

  But there’s gangs of ’em diggin’ for gold in the street.

  I want to laugh, even as tears come to my eyes. The voice so earnest, so exposed in its pleading. There is something both controlled and unhinged about it.

  At least when I asked them that’s what I was told

  So I just took a hand at this diggin’ for gold

  The singer’s face is red, his eyes squeezed shut. The buttons strain at his shirt as he finishes the song:

  But for all that I found there I might as well be

  Where the Mountains of Mourne sweep down to the sea.

  •

  It rains almost my entire walk back to Doolin. I’m soaked and a ways off from Tommo’s when a tall man walking by with a dog comments to me: “It’s a fine day for young ducks.”

  Surprised and delighted, I smile at him. It’s an expression I can imagine my father using. The man then offers me his oilcloth coat to borrow until I get to my destination.

  “I can’t take your coat,” I say.

  “Ah, you’re all right. Take it,” he insists.

  I thank him as he helps me on with it, then walks with me, just a step behind, his wiry gray dog loping ahead, then circling back to us.

  When we pass the cottage where the goose lives, it honks at us from within a hutch where it is weathering the rain.

  “That’s Sally Devlin,” the man says.

  “The goose is named Sally Devlin?” I ask.

  “Yes, and a right devil she is, too.”

  •

  Standing under the awning at Tommo’s in Doolin, soaking wet, I watch the man in the oilcloth coat recede into the distance, his dog dancing around him.

  •

  In my mother’s drawer, a faded, slightly wrinkled prayer card shows the Holy Mother in her most glorious aspect, as she rises to heaven. Before a backdrop of overcast sky, she stands on a cloud upheld by cherubs.

  One of the Holy Mother’s feet presses directly on the head of a cherub, a fraught expression on his partially faded face.

  •

  I’ve been getting anxious, unable to find someone to hitchhike north with me to Yeats country.

  At breakfast I approach Laura, a short, angular Australian girl, after someone mentions to me that she might be traveling north.

  I’ve been watching her the past few days. Tommo’s, with its big communal tables, is not an easy place to remain separate from others, yet she manages it. Her dark hair always looks unwashed, and a patina of dust surrounds her in her rugged frayed jeans and sweatshirt. Her military green backpack is of an obsolete variety, ripped and worn. She strikes me as a vagabond of sorts and I am intrigued by the way she seems to guard her isolation. I suggest we travel together, surprised when she agrees.

  She persuades me to take a detour first across the bay to the Aran Islands. The people there, Laura tells me, speak mostly Irish, and there are prehistoric stone forts on two of the islands that she wants to see. Since I’ve missed the chance to go with the Swiss girls, I agree.

  •

  The afternoon sky glows through a gauze of clouds as we cross Doolin Bay on a steamer, approaching Inisheer, the closest of the three Aran Islands, a sliver of barren limestone and white sand facing an uninterrupted expanse of the Atlantic to the west.

  We secure a room at Flaherty’s Bed and Breakfast and visit the old stone ruin of a castle on the single hill of the otherwise flat isle. From there, the strange austerity of the place is apparent, not a single tree anywhere, and hardly any people, a series of unmortared stone walls laid out in patterns to the south.

  I felt a cold developing as we crossed the bay, and by evening, when Laura wants me to go with her to the pub, my throat is too sore and I have a headache. So she goes on her own while I lie in bed.

  •

  Under the summer shadows of trees on the backyard lawn, Dad throws the Frisbee with force and Rory, the half collie, bounds across the yard after it, leaps up at the perfect moment, and catches it in his mouth.

  My siblings and I squeal and jump and stay on the sidelines, half in and half out of the sun, as Rory races back to Dad and drops the Frisbee at his feet. Dad scoops it up, holding it a moment aloft. Rory breathes hard, his back legs tense and trembling with readiness. Dad throws it and it soars.

  •

  Mom yells and Dad leaves the house. Rory goes to the screen door and watches Dad start the car. He waits there even after Dad has driven away.

  •

  Mom is upset and we don’t want to stay home. The three of us girls are following Jerry, hiking through a big expanse of empty mesa. He’s told us that the rodeo grounds are easy to sneak into before noon. He holds the barbed wire open wide and we each go through to the other side, where there are corrals and stables, bales of hay and fences with saddles on them.

  “See,” he says, “I told you! No one’s here!”

  A dusty brown-and-white Shetland pony with burrs in its heavy mane watches us from its stall.

  We crowd the gate door, reach through, and pet the top and side of its head, the hair coarse and dry. It shakes its head up and down at us, and twitches its tall ears at buzzing flies.

  •

  I toss and turn under the blankets in Flaherty’s Bed and Breakfast. To comfort myself I imagine that Denis is with me, our bodies entwined. Between kisses, he speaks Irish into my hair and neck.

  •

  Tracy and I are driving on a road that leads out of town on a cold February night when the battery in the Dodge Dart dies. A small red sports car pulls over and two handsome, long-haired guys get out to give us a jump. They’re brothers from Illinois, on their way back from Mexico. After they get our car started again, we ask them if they want to smoke a joint. They say yes, and follow us as we drive along a desert road that leads to a stretch of mesa. We park, and when we turn the headlights off, it is dark, except for a sky filled with stars.

  We pair up. Tracy and the taller one, whose name is Rick, sit together on the hood of the Dodge Dart talking, while I wander into the piñon trees with Justin. I have been fending off the loss of my virginity with the local boys, but Justin is from a faraway place, a place I can idealize because it is unknown, and because after this, he and his brother will keep driving north into the night. In spite of the cold, I take off my clothes and lay them on the ground, then lie down on top of them.

  I can just make out his silhouette as he stands above me, taking off his pants. It is too dark to see his face as he lies over me, but I see it in my mind’s eye, the way it looked in the headlights as he hooked the cables to our battery. I am smiling.

  “I’ve never done this before,” I say.

  “Why not?” he asks.

  “I just haven’t.”

  “How old are you?” he asks.

  “Sixteen. How old are you?”

  “Twenty.”

  It hurts for only a moment and then the pain is gone. I touch his long hair that brushes my neck and the side of my face. I touch his arms and his strong back and stare up at the stars and pick out Orion’s belt.

  Driving home, I feel a shivery elation. I tell Tracy and she says she feels sick. Her repulsion confuses me. “You don’t understand,” I say. But she just wants to go home and get away from me. I try to explain but she won’t listen.

  In the bathroom, I examine the watery bloodstains on my inner thighs, then, gazing at my face in the mirror, tell myself that I’ve done something monumental.

  I sneak out of the house and lie on the grass, dead now in winter, looking up again for the three stars of Orion’s belt. I huddle in my coat, a deep cold coming up from the ground.

  •

  Lau
ra is awake early and urging me to get ready to leave for the other two islands, but my sore throat is worse and I feel too weak and foggy-headed.

  “Do you think you can come back for me tomorrow after you visit the other islands? We can take the ferry back across from here to the mainland, then go straight to Yeats country.”

  She looks into the air over my shoulder. I have become an inconvenience.

  “I don’t really want to come back to Inisheer once I leave.”

  “What if we meet tomorrow sometime on the big island, in the vicinity of the great stone fort?”

  She agrees and says that late in the afternoon will be best. But I don’t trust that she’ll really try, and it worries me, so after breakfast, instead of going straight back to bed, I walk her to the wharf, trying to solidify details of meeting up. In spite of a sudden, furious rain, the steamer she gets on leaves. I weather the shower under a wooden awning, watching the boat disappear into fog. Ignoring the rain, two broad-shouldered young men stand on a boat that rocks alongside the pier, unwinding and preparing a mass of dark net. This seems an even more remote fisherman’s life than one on the mainland coasts. The cold has me feeling vulnerable, both melancholy and euphoric. I can’t seem to make myself stop watching them.

  When the rain stops and their boat goes out, thin chickens emerge from little roosts in an empty wooden shack and peck on the wet sand.

  •

  I sleep for an hour, then wake agitated, though not sure why. As I lie there I feel almost certain that Laura won’t meet me the next day. I am nervous about hitchhiking to Sligo alone and I wonder if I might be able to splurge on a bus. I take out my money and begin to count it. My heart sinks. I have not been keeping close tabs on my spending and I have much less than I thought. I saved a fifty-pound note separately from my other money for when I get back to Dublin, thinking it would tide me over until I had a job. But maybe I can use some of it for Yeats country.

  I’ve been keeping the fifty-pound note in my journal. It’s an older note of currency, a purple bill with Celtic knot-work detail, an image of Cathleen ni Houlihan in a shawl, peering over her shoulder at the viewer, the Lakes of Killarney in the background. I have been attempting to draw her. Opening the journal, I find my drawings, but the note itself is gone. In a panic, I take everything out of my backpack and search every possible place it could be three or four times, but to no avail. What I have left might cover me for another day of traveling, but without the fifty pounds I don’t have enough for Yeats country. I’ll have to go straight back to Dublin and try to find a job. It feels like a crime against my father, being so close to Yeats country and not being able to get there.