Stay

by Aislinn Hunter

  Driving north towards home, puttering along between the stone walls that line both sides of the road, Dermot lets the BMWs and Euro sports cars whisk by him; half the drivers on mobiles or blaring music out their windows. If his own stereo was working he might enjoy some music, maybe Dylan, but all he’s got is a tangle of wires hanging down under his dashboard. When he comes to a clearing with no stone walls, just a flat field view to the bay, he pulls over to the side of the road. Sits there, looks out at the thousand colours of grey. Tries to measure the distance a particular wave covers before it rests. Five herons cross over, swooping west, the last two flying towards the water. A truck rumbles by on the road. Down the way a tugboat lolls on its tether. Dermot catalogues everything as if the inventory might have value, as if one day he will be asked to account for his time. But time itself seems malleable. Today the beach is clear and unmarked, even though yesterday a family may have been out there, the son skipping stones, throwing sand at his sister, the parents walking with a fixed distance between them. Even though that existed, there is nothing like that now; everything is washed over. It comes to him like a new idea taking shape, although he has always known it, let it sit like an ulcer in his gut: it’s who we are in this minute that matters. Now; who we are. An unmarked beach, save for the worm holes, the “s” marks that surround them, from their turning before they go in.

  The McGilloway Girl

  THE afternoon of the wake Deirdre McGilloway stands on the edge of her mother’s stoop, the shadow of her pregnancy falling over all four of the walkway steps. The baby starts to kick again.

  Helen Brennan, who taught Deirdre when she was in school, pads down the far side of the street carrying two bags of groceries in cloth sacs. Seeing Deirdre, she looks both ways down the quiet road, steps out tentatively between parked cars, comes over.

  “Sorry to hear about your mother,” she says from the sidewalk. “She was a good hen.” Deirdre smiles at her and nods, but remembers it was Brennan who’d complained to the general post master that her mother was too lackadaisical with the post. It took three days for the post to reach a Dublin doorstep on average, but Helen Brennan claimed that if a letter was mailed on a day Eileen was working, it would take four or five. This from a woman who only taught math passably, who shouldn’t have been allowed to work with kids past the fourth grade.

  “If there’s anything I can do.” Helen Brennan smiles again. Deirdre knows Brennan has never liked her much, even when she was a girl. The word, if she remembers correctly, written in tight print on her school report, was “precocious.”

  “Thanks, Mrs. Brennan.” And she smiles at her, at her nearly white hair, at the silk scarf tied around her neck, at the bags hanging down by her ankles, at her freckled hands. Mrs. Brennan’s hair is pinned into curls near her temples and it occurs to Deirdre that the woman might actually be setting her hair for this evening’s wake, that it’s something Brennan would get dressed up for. Her mother’s wake an occasion; her mother’s death a reason to go out.

  Every now and again people walk down the side road, and more often than not Deirdre recognizes their faces but can’t place them exactly. A girl with a red balloon stares at Deirdre from the opposite sidewalk as her mother drags her along by the hand. All morning trucks have come and gone, loaded with building materials for the Tele Gael set that will become a soap-opera village. Last month a sound studio went in on the secondary road. There are more power lines now than Deirdre remembers. Last night she’d stuck her head in at Hughes; people she didn’t know were there. A dog stood wait outside the door. She’s been in Dublin for five years. Even when she’d come back to visit she’d only really come to see her mum. They’d head into Galway, to the shops. Although sometimes, if Liam was around, Deirdre would hit the pubs with him after he got off work at the bog.

  The baby is kicking up a storm. Deirdre’s blood sugar is low; since the phone call three days ago she hasn’t kept much of anything down. The turkey sandwich Keating made her sits on the table, barely touched, but the fresh air, at least, is doing some good. There’s nothing to do in the house anyway. People she barely remembers came over to tidy up under Keating’s guidance. Chairs were set up in the living room. Cellophaned trays of food miraculously appeared on the buffet and the dining table. Twenty cans of beer are sitting in the sink on ice and the fridge is filled with a dozen bottles of wine. A keg of lager was dropped off by Niall and left in the utility closet. In the back room a load of laundry was started. Things Deirdre hadn’t even seen, let alone touched, were put away. Maybe all that she has left of her mother is in there, in the smell of those clothes. She should have washed them herself, not sat down in the middle of the chaos trying to swallow bites of a sandwich she had no desire to eat.

  The maternal instinct is to nest, but Deirdre McGilloway has other things on her mind. The body is coming from Galway in the next few hours to be laid out upstairs. The next time she sees her mother, the woman will be dead. Two months ago Eileen McGilloway was standing on this very porch, decidedly living. Deirdre had come home to tell her about the baby, to make sure she’d be okay with it. She was seven months along and still not sure who the father was, although there were two or three likely guesses. Her mother was angry for an hour; the clock on the mantle had never been louder. Then Eileen had picked up her keys to go into Galway and look for a stroller.

  “Come on.”

  “That’s it?”

  “Why make a fuss? It’s done.”

  ——

  What Deirdre wants now is to go home. She wants her mother to walk out of the kitchen; she wants, selfishly, for things to be as they were. It’s hard enough being single and pregnant. Even in Dublin the idea still raises eyebrows. Deirdre thought she’d have to give up her flat when she left the travel agency and went on Mother’s Allowance, that she’d have to find a room mate. But her mother had offered to make up the difference, said that they’d work it out together. And so far they had.

  Standing on the edge of the porch, one arm wrapped around the porch column, feet perched precariously close to the edge, Deirdre starts rocking. Starts swinging out over the steps, her belly a kind of ballast. She gets up a good swing. The back and forth motion is soothing. Under her weight the porch creaks and something about that makes Deirdre feel good. She swings out again and comes sharply back, her fingers slipping in increments on the column. She swings forward to where she started, almost falling. Stops. Catches her breath. Realizes she could have gone over.

  There is No Night

  THE city goes about its business. Statues cast shadows from the boulevard and the tourists look up. People cross against the light. One car honks and then another. On O’Connell Street at a queue for the bus, Abbey reads over the list in her hand: “Things for Foreigners To Do in Dublin.” A few months back Dermot made her an agenda. He itemized where to go, and in what order, and made a few notes underneath about what she should look for: the bullet holes on the front of the GPO, the Behan manuscripts in the Irish Writer’s Museum, Bryne’s, the best fish and chip shop in Ireland. Against his will Abbey’d made him add the Guinness Brewery. Last month when she worked a week at Connor’s she went to The National Museum, Phoenix Park, Kilmainham Gaol.

  Abbey’s first day back at work was busy, the lunch rush non-stop. There was a queue from the PLEASE WAIT TO BE SEATED sign to the door for most of the evening. Dan, the head chef, and a royal prick, was a bastard all night. Sometime around seven, when Abbey was late picking up a meal, he pointed a butcher knife in her direction and called her a cunt. His Northside accent combined with a general inability to fully open his mouth meant that “Ye cuntche ye” was more or less what came out. Abbey smiled back at him and said in her clear Canadian accent, “Sorry, I’m busy, but maybe some other time?”

  Tonight she’ll work the dinner rush and then stay on to sling pints on the pub side of the restaurant until one. At least now she has the afternoon off.

  When the bus pulls up, Abbey gets on and pays her far
e. She’s going to the Hugh Lane Gallery. Then she’ll head back to Angela’s and get changed for work. People head upstairs. Abbey takes a seat behind the stairwell, next to the window. O’Connell Street is bustling. A group of teenagers in track pants and dark jackets sits around a fountain on the divide. Across from them, pigeons flock to a man throwing crusts. A young girl standing outside Beshoff’s taps two plastic straws against the stone wall.

  The bus pulls out and Abbey closes her eyes for a second, pictures being back in Windsor. She remembers the Famous Players movie theatre on Ouelette Avenue at the end of the mini mall; the bars that line the strip near Riverside to draw in the drinking crowd from Detroit; the smell of yeast for twenty blocks around the brewery; how guys who worked the line at Ford and Chrysler would cruise the main street in their new cars, trying to pick girls up from the driver-side window. And there was the McDonalds on Huron Church Road, her birthday party at Chi Chi’s.

  Frank had moved Abbey to Windsor from the county when she was eight. Before that they lived in Woodslee on a quiet concession that ran between Highway 98 and the 401. Across the road there was a farm with cows. Abbey’d gone over a few times to help milk them. Most of the nearby crops were corn or hay. Towards Leamington, twenty kilometres away, there’d be tomatoes. Her father liked to look outside at the farmhouses and fields that dotted the road, say things like “no one here but us chickens.”

  Before they moved to Windsor, Abbey used to ride a school bus from the house her parents rented to St. John’s School fifteen kilometres away. In the morning she’d stand at the back window, scarf and gloves on the square bamboo table next to the door, to watch for the bus coming, small as a toy truck, down the back road. It took five minutes for the bus to get to her stop from the time she saw it crossing the old highway. Time enough to kiss her mom good-bye, to pull her lunch out of the fridge, check her bag for all her books, push open the screen door and make the trek down the driveway. From there it was across the street to the other side of the road. She stood next to the mailbox and waited. Some mornings if Abbey was running behind, her mom would watch the back road for her, sitting at the kitchen table, a mug of coffee in her hands, eventually yelling, “Bus! Abbey!” And Abbey’d have to hurry, packing books and a gym shirt into the school bag, her mom shouting “Let’s go, let’s go, let’s go,” because Frank had the car and if Abbey missed the bus she’d have to stay home from school. Her mother’s hand hitting her on the backside as she gathered her things; the radio on top forty. Abbey would run out of the house with her jean jacket pulled up on one arm, the other sleeve trailing behind. Then she’d hear the clap of the screen door behind her, her feet kicking up gravel as she ran down the length of the drive. She remembers how sometimes she ran slow, hoping the bus would whizz by her.

  There were things Abbey should have noticed; this is what she realizes now. The way everything but the bus—number 602 orange and given to backfiring—how everything but that bus and Mrs. Larevee, who drove it, was unpredictable. Sometimes there was breakfast set out, sometimes not. Even though Frank was usually up early to go to work, there were times her mother would snap at her to keep quiet, stop stomping around because Frank was still in bed. There was a whole month like that once, Abbey coming home after school to find her dad passed out on the couch, four PM, shoes kicked off on the floor, one arm thrown over his eyes. Abbey asking “Is Daddy sick?” and her mother answering, “No, he’s just sleeping.”

  Abbey can still picture her mom down to the smallest detail: t-shirts and jeans, bleached hair tied into a pony-tail, her face made up. A brown leather necklace with a yellow feather on the end of it. An arced scar in her left eyebrow. Abbey’s mom made TV dinners. Took her on trips to the beach. The three of them would go to BelleRiver on Tuesdays, to the Charcoal Pit for gyros and burgers. She paid for Abbey’s first skating lessons. She helped her pick out a kitten at the SPCA. But, for all that, she wasn’t really there.

  A year later when Max, Abbey’s cat, went missing, Abbey wanted to post notices on the board at Zehrs. She’d made an ad herself. Her mom promised to call the paper but never got around to it, was too busy doing other things. There was a constant stream of strangers trekking through the house, and late-night parties where Abbey was sent up to bed to lie there, listening for hours to the music, the sets of feet trampling up to the bathroom across the hall from her room. One night a guy called Dave walking in to Abbey’s room before finding the light switch and turning around.

  Before they moved, Frank held a family meeting. Paced around the kitchen. Abbey and her mother sat at the table.

  “The rent’s going up the first. We’ll have to find somewhere else.”

  Abbey’s mom lit a cigarette. “How about back to the city?”

  “Can’t afford it.”

  “An apartment wouldn’t cost much more than this place and you’re driving in anyway.”

  Frank looked over at Abbey and she smiled up at him.

  “She’s in a good school.” He nodded towards the upstairs hallway. “And she’s got her own room.”

  “There’s no work out here.”

  “Work out of the house.”

  “People won’t come here for a hair cut.” Abbey watched her mom exhale, cough. “And the sink’s too small.”

  “There’s Ned’s place up the road, it’s five hundred a month.”

  “It’s a fucking shack.”

  Abbey smiled at her mother’s swearing and her mother winked back. Frank ran the back of his hand over his face, rubbed his moustache back and forth. Abbey was looking at him to see what he’d say. He looked at Karen imploring her to help out. She shook her head.

  ——

  The Gallery is on the far side of Parnell Square, a banner over its doors. Abbey walks towards it thinking about the old house, about moving to the apartment that her mother picked out. About unloading the last boxes and turning to find her gone. Abbey remembers sitting on those boxes the whole night, waiting for her mom to show up, how Frank refused to start unpacking. Sometime around three AM he ordered Chinese food. Eventually he put Abbey to bed in what would be her room, gave her his sweater for a pillow. When Abbey woke up the next morning, even the cutlery had been put away. What happened to him, she wonders now. What makes a person decide to haul themselves up by the bootstraps and carry on?

  Four rows of large brick Georgian buildings make up Parnell Square. Under “Hugh Lane” Dermot had written Charlemont House / Patrick Scott retrospective / Maid Combing her Hair / There is No Night—the last underlined three times. A well-dressed couple carrying a guide to Dublin goes past Abbey, through the double doors, holding the right side open for her. She puts her hand on the door and follows them in. They drop some coins in the glass donation box. The first room is filled with stained glass; a woman wearing a walkman stands in front of a large window, her face reflecting red and yellow. In the next room, Patrick Scott’s giant orange sun. Abbey turns around a few times to take in all of his paintings. Hears the sound of her shoes on the hardwood as she leaves the room. A sculpture of a horse by Degas stands in the hall outside. Then, in the third gallery, a large canvas. Abbey walks right up to it. Finds a bench in the middle of the room and sits down. This would be the one Dermot wanted to show her: a man in the foreground with wide eyes. Dark rocks to the left and right of him. The ghost of a horse—quick white brushstrokes—standing in the field. The night sky painted a thick blue. A fixed distance between everything in the frame: the man, the horse, the sky. And behind them all, a quiet. And the dark swell of the sea.

  II

  Excavations

  A Drink at the Door

  THE muck of the bog is still on them, on their boots, in their cuffs, in the lines of their hands. Car after car, the Bord na Móna workers come down the N59 from Oughterard, tires spinning off the last of their mud. Lough Corrib to their left, a row of beech trees wagging in the wind. Behind them, the mountains appear and disappear, depending on the turn of the road. The clouds threaten rain.
Two miles out of town the cars pass rock island, old Aughnanure Castle, an empty souvenir stand. Then the fields begin, some with barbed wire, others with stone fences. A herd of sheep, their backs to the road, bare their red and blue tagged hides to the drivers. Starlings cling to the power lines. A horse and rider circle a paddock. After a while, the houses begin. Then the shops. Bait and Tackle. Larkin’s Fiddles. Ride Away Bike Repair. A sign for Doris’ Day Spa that points down a side road.

  It had been a rough afternoon at Maam, the weather constantly changing. Around three, the spoon harrow had bucked up behind the tractor. Tomás felt it, turned the engine off, stepped down from the cab to see what he’d gone over. A brown stump visible under the milled crumb. Peter and Angus shoveled it out in twenty minutes, hauled it over to the side of the field, the oak’s roots like antlers. A line of stumps along the trench. The first set of eleven fields giving them a rough go. It was a bad draw to get this kind of ground. The lads in the next unit were already milling their second set. Sometimes the “pay by results” system worked to a unit’s advantage, but this year Tomás felt sure the bog was against them. Friday the tractor had broken down and Peter was up at the main office when it happened. Didn’t answer his pager. Had most of the tools. Liam came over to give it a look but he wasn’t that good a mechanic. Two hours of work were lost, and then the rain came, so they called it a day.

  Tomás’ crew last year had been one of the best he’d ever had. Angus and Liam were on it, and a mechanic named Robbie. The fields were easy, the work went straight ahead. The Wetland Unit came and did their surveys and turned up nothing. The crew went from milling to ridging to harvesting in three-day cycles. The weekly tour of the pubs was a pleasure and the lads were easy to be with. Everything had moved along as it should.