Stay

by Aislinn Hunter

  And when the room is cleared of all but Niall Hughes, who offers his help calmly, Dermot turns back to Deirdre, grabs her hand and says, “It’ll be alright, I know what I’m doing.” Niall leaves them to it and starts down the stairs for hot water and towels but everyone is congregated at the bottom of the steps and he becomes stuck on the third step trying to decide how best to pass through the crowd. Fitch coming back in through the door just then, Egan wagging his tail beside him, both of them looking around.

  When the lads from Maam enter the house they are laughing at a joke that was started in the driveway. But as soon as Tomás and Liam step in through the door they go quiet and so does Peter, Angus and Egg behind him. The whole village of Spiddal is crowded into the living room and lined up on the stairs as if they’re queuing for a film. Even the dog looks upstairs, waiting for something to happen.

  “What is it?” Tomás asks the crowd. To which Conneely, on the couch, replies, “Just a pause in the drinking.”

  Upstairs, Dermot slides Deirdre’s wet underwear down over her knees. One by one he lifts up her feet, looping the underwear off her ankles. He pushes her skirt up to her hips, and placing his hands on her thighs he spreads them slowly until they are as open as wings. He thinks of Sophie. He thinks of Abbey. For a brief second he closes his eyes. When he opens them he notices Deirdre’s left leg hovering just above her mother’s.

  “Right,” he says, “breathe.”

  Deirdre starts counting and in between numbers she looks at the water stains on the ceiling, some the size of bugs, some the size of her hand and she goes over them again—a cap, a tree, Doyle’s pony, a wedding cake but upside down, the bride and groom hanging by their feet, an olive, a—and then she feels it rush through her, a welt of a pain, and then it ripples and slows—a dog house, no a ship with great sails and she starts back at the first one, the one farthest away, the hand of God. At least, she thinks, that much hasn’t changed.

  All Our Wreckage

  NO matter what happens, Abbey feels she has no place in it, that the world passes her by. And even on those occasions when she is part of things, when she’s with Dermot at Hughes, or after work at Connor’s when she stays to drink with the others, there’s a part of her that’s beyond even herself, a part that’s watching the door, waiting to see who might walk into the room, take a seat beside her.

  All night as she’s been working at Connor’s, Abbey’s been thinking about her mother, about Frank—the kind of confused thinking where it’s difficult to ascertain what it is you’re getting at, what’s going on in your head. Things she hadn’t thought of in years are coming back to her, like the time Frank took her to Cedar Point when she was ten or eleven, how she lost sight of him after coming off the carousel. Or the time Frank was supposed to pick her up from band practice when she was in grade eight, how Mr. Stanley, the music teacher, had to stand with her in the parking lot waiting, eventually driving her to the apartment, leaving her with Mrs. Pasic down the hall.

  Abbey gets up from the staff table and pockets her tips. She puts the Euro bills and coins in one part of her apron and the pound coins in another. Around the corner a table of German businessmen finish off their drinks. It’s nearing last call. The kitchen’s closed, although Dan and Devin are still in there doing prep for tomorrow. Anne-Marie, the American waitress Abbey’s been working with, is standing at the bar chatting up the barmen. Over by the cutlery station Veronica, the hostess, in a skirt that’s too tight, is wiping down the menu covers with a cloth. In a half hour the place will be cleared out and Abbey can do the brass and the windows.

  “Hey-lo.” Anne-Marie waves her hand in front of Abbey’s face.

  “Hey.”

  “What happened with table twelve?”

  “Veronica comped them and they didn’t tip.”

  “Figures.” Anne-Marie is from California, a valley somewhere near San Something—Abbey can’t remember exactly. Last year, before she moved to Dublin, she’d been in the state finals for the Miss Teen USA pageant. “Are you okay?”

  “Yep.” Abbey looks at her, focuses.

  “That thing with Dan was pretty weird. I mean, like, if he came at me like that I’d kick him in the balls.” Anne-Marie shakes her head, pushes her blonde bangs to either side of her forehead; they stay there on an angle, like half-open curtains.

  “It’s no big deal.” Abbey was used to Dan’s antics. If a waitress showed up two minutes late to pick up a meal, if you missed your number lighting up on the call board, he’d give out to you. He reminded her a bit of Frank, always needing to have someone under the thumb, someone he could push around. Tonight, Dan and Abbey had argued and she facetiously asked him what prison release program he’d come from. So he came around the counter and pushed her towards the door. A hand on her shoulder. She told him to fuck off and that was that.

  After cleaning the brass railing, Abbey heads to the phone box at the back of the bar and dials the cottage. Anne-Marie and Matt the dishwasher are sitting a few feet away having their free pints, so she closes the door. The phone box smells of stale smoke and something in it reminds her of Dermot. The phone at the cottage rings six or seven times. Abbey checks her watch, notices a bit of “Brassglo” sludge on her wrist by her watchband. She looks around for something to wipe it off. It’s just past midnight and Dermot’s not home. The phone rings and rings again. Nothing. Abbey pictures Flagon at the foot of the couch lifting up her head, eying the phone. The best time to call will be in the morning. And then what? “I’ve taken a few more shifts?” “I’m not quite ready to come back?” “I’m sorting a few things out?”

  At the end of the night Abbey walks up the stairs on her way out of the restaurant, putting her coat on as she goes. Behind her, Anne-Marie, Matt, Devin and two of the junior barmen are finishing their second round of pints, the table they’re sitting at covered in near-empty glasses and full ashtrays. Other than the row of lights over that section of tables, the whole restaurant is a dark wood surface, the chairs put up on the tables, everything in its place.

  “See ya, Abbey.” Matt lifts up his arm and flails it around.

  “Bye.” Sing-songy from Anne-Marie.

  Outside the streets are wet. It’s a twenty minute walk to Ange’s and Abbey is up for the fresh air. Over at the end of Wicklow Street a few kids stand around the door of the McDonalds. A guy in his early twenties plays a guitar, the case laying open in front of him. Abbey recognizes the song: “The Sisters of Mercy.” Cohen is as popular in Ireland as he is at home. Abbey had all of his CDs back in Windsor.

  Halfway to Angela’s, Abbey’s pace falls into a rhythm, her eyes to the ground. The whole idea of moving to Ireland had been to get away, to get out from under her father’s thumb. To figure out who she was without him. And it was working. She’d started reading history books and philosophy texts she’d found at a booksale in the Quays. She realized she had an appreciation for art. And then there was Dermot, opening her up to all kinds of new ideas and ways of thinking. The world had gone technicolour and Abbey was happy to be standing in the middle of it, in awe.

  For years Frank had been saying he was dying, but the blood tests, the X-rays, all came back negative. When Abbey was twenty and thinking about going away to University—Toronto or Queen’s—Frank went on disability. He told her he’d been blacking out, that his blood pressure was through the roof. He figured it was a tumour—fifteen years of jackhammers; roadwork that jarred parts of you loose until it all balled itself up somewhere, took root. He said he’d been coughing up bits of blood. After a while he asked Abbey to move back in, short-term, to help him with the rent. The night she came home with her bags, she found him passed out on the kitchen floor. She was never sure if it was from drinking or if he was really hurt. There was a piss stain on the front of his jeans. That’s when it started: Frank would sit her down in the living room, telling her he had something to say, as if she was a recorder, as if she cared about his childhood, about how hard done by he was, had always b
een. Frank could list it on his fingers: First his mother dying after giving birth to him; then his father giving Frank to the Gowan family down the road. Just for a while, he’d said. But George Shaw never came back for his son. He walked by the house on his way to work at the dairy and never even looked up at the door. The Shaws lived ten houses away in that same small town. All those years Frank grew up in the Gowan house, guessing and guessing, but never knowing. And the Shaws never offered so much as a word, never said, yes, you’re one of us, or even “maybe.”

  At first Abbey listened to Frank because he was sick and she didn’t know what else to do. And because it was funny and sad to hear him talk about her mother. He told Abbey how he met Karen at a bar, how she walked in wearing a mini skirt and leg warmers, sat down on the bar stool, peeled them off. Frank one of ten guys all trying to get over to her first. Abbey listened because he needed her to and because she half-hoped that somewhere in the chronology of his life she might find her own answers. “I’m dying, Ab.” Frank said it over and over again for four years, practically willing the diagnosis. But, in a way, when Abbey thinks about it now, he’d been flailing his whole life. What was that poem, the one from English 220? The one about waving. No, that was it: “Not Waving, But Drowning.” His whole life was one long drowning. Abbey sat on the couch, listening to appease him. Waiting, in her own way, for him to die, so her life could begin.

  Arrivals

  DERMOT’S hand has gone white from Deirdre’s squeezing. Faherty is telling her she’s hours away yet, to take it easy. Down the road an ambulance siren wails. Dermot goes to the window, pulls back the curtain, but can’t see the street, sees instead an alder tree lifting up its leaves in the moonlight, the sloped roofs of the houses beyond. When he turns back to Deirdre she and her mother are lying side by side on the bed, Deirdre’s head propped up with a pillow, her breathing slow. The lilies he picked up off the floor are on the mattress between them. And for a second there is a sweetness to the two of them lying there—a closeness, an intimacy.

  A minute later the ambulance pulls up outside, the siren wailing one last time. Faherty goes down to wait at the door with his satchel. Dermot and Deirdre descend the stairs, her arm around his neck. The crowd of villagers who’ve been sitting in the living room watching the television and polishing off the cheese and crackers turn to look Deirdre’s way: her forehead is beaded with sweat and her left hand cups the mound of her pregnancy as if she’s trying to hold the baby in. Liam stands up to go over but Tomás grabs his arm. Dermot and Deirdre make for the door and the Spiddal crowd spills out of the house with them, into the crisp night air.

  Out on the road, Faherty and Dermot hand Deirdre over to the ambulance attendants who strap her down on the waiting gurney, putting the belts over her chest and her legs. The whale of her belly sectioned off, reminding Dermot of the magic show his parents had taken him to in Dublin, a girl in a box cut in three.

  “Right there?” asks the attendant, bright-eyed and smiling.

  His partner, a girl from Barna, goes to the far side of the stretcher and together they lift the gurney. Faherty watches them set her down inside before they close the doors.

  Deirdre McGilloway arrives at the hospital with all the pomp and flourish Ian the ambulance driver can muster. He’s radioed ahead, he’s laid on the sirens, he calls back over his shoulder, “Right there Mrs. MickG?” in an easy tone. He even fishtails the ambulance a bit when he hits a puddle before the round drive, the beams from the headlights panning the hedge before finding the red brick hospital wall again. In the back, Grainne, who is on her first week of duty after passing her paramedic exams, watches Deirdre go cock-eyed. “Are we nearly there?” she calls out. Deirdre grunts again, grips the gurney’s steel railings, banging the underside of her ring against the metal rail at the start of every contraction—clang, clang—like a tinny metronome.

  Grainne is looking around for gloves. Just when she is ready to commit herself fully to her training, thinking left drawer, no, and opening the right one instead, the one full of the hypodermic needles and blood pressure cuffs, the ambulance comes to a thudding halt and the back doors are opened. A gust of cold night air comes in.

  Ian is beside the gurney right away and as he smiles down at Deirdre, brawny and good-looking, his brown hair dyed blond, she says, “You fucker, you goddamn fucker,” and the fact that he is smiling so much, the fact that he is squeezing her hand, that his dimples are endearing irritates Deirdre enough that she says, “I’ll get you, you little git, I’ll get ya,” although she has no idea why.

  Grainne lopes alongside the gurney as they wheel Deirdre in, telling the doctor Deirdre’s stats, and the doctor, a tall woman with her hair clipped back into a messy bun, interrupts, asks, “Is she crowning?” Lights, and the smell of ammonia, wash over Deirdre and she closes her eyes, sees pins, little pins floating in the blackness with red, yellow, blue tips. Her mother used to make dresses for her and kept the pins in a cushion, a cushion that used to be one of Deirdre’s father’s socks. Her mother had stuffed it and sewn it closed with red thread. Deirdre opens her eyes, the fluorescent lights humming, flashing overhead as the gurney is rushed along; the doctor, her lab coat flapping out on one side, pushes rogue strands of hair away from her face. The gurney bursts through double grey doors. Everything is piercing and aching. The whole world hums. There’s a loud bang as the doors hit the walls on either side of the stretcher. Deirdre in her haze wondering about her mother, where she might be.

  ——

  The epidural comes as a wave of relief. It’s like Deirdre’s floating in a tank of warm water, the pain that seared a minute ago somewhere off in the distance, tugging away. A nurse with squinty eyes and penciled brows is alternating her gaze between a monitor and Deirdre’s face, her mouth moving under the green of her surgical mask. Deirdre can’t make anything out. She feels fuzzy, buoyant, imagines that if she were to look down for her toes they’d be far off, her feet out the door of the delivery room, maybe even down the hall, her legs a great elastic length and at the end of the corridor, her swollen ankles, feet, toes, the toenail polish chipped and pink. The nurse is holding her shoulder with a gloved hand. From behind the mask comes a muffled, “Push, push Mrs. McGilloway.” So polite. She adds pressure to the shoulder when Deirdre doesn’t do as she’s asked. Then, suddenly, as if Deirdre is coming up out of the water, the noise of the room comes back, the screaming, the blip blip of a monitor, the doctor calling, “Again, again, again,” and the godawful screaming over it all, a scream that Deirdre suddenly realizes is coming from her. The nurse with the penciled eyebrows raises them up so that they touch the base of her surgical cap. The doctor is right there, not more than a foot away saying, “Again,” sounding almost bored with it, pulling Deirdre apart so that she thinks maybe her legs have been severed at the hip, maybe something has gone missing. Deirdre pushes again and again, feels hands prying her open, impossibly open, as if she’s been split. Then nothing at all, only a pulsing all the way up her body, caught in her throat like a chicken bone.

  “A boy.”

  “What?”

  “A boy,” the nurse repeats, and she looks over to the doctor, who is holding a wailing baby between Deirdre’s knees, his clenched fists swinging. Deirdre can just see them, arcing up in the air.

  “What?” Deirdre says again. She can taste the salt of the sweat coming off her upper lip, trickling into her mouth.

  The nurse, pulling her mask down to her chin, says slowly and clearly, “You’ve … had … a … baby. A boy.”

  And Deirdre understands at last. Smiles up at the nurse. Says in a thick fuzzy voice, “Oh. Good. A baby. For a minute there I thought I was dying.”

  Maam Bog

  THERE comes a point when the men find the exact rhythm and things take care of themselves. The machines work and the bog co-operates. The Bord na Móna administrators come out to walk the fields and keep going for lack of any complaint. Tuesday and Wednesday morning had been like that. Tomás
and Peter were getting on again because the tractor, the spoon harrow, and the ridger were in working order. There were no more stumps or surprises. The weather was taking a turn for the better and the crumb was drying. Tomás milling the eighth field in their second set, while Liam and Peter were ridging the fifth. Yesterday was a peak day and the lads had gone home at the end of it worn down but happy that the work was coming along at last. Everyone doing their part.

  Angus stands at the far trench having a smoke. He and Egg have been moving the ridged crumb from field three over to four. The conveyor belt stuttering along. Angus enjoys the fourth field; its main feature is a rabbit warren, the only rise in the flat expanse of the bog, twenty feet long and five feet wide. The Bord had decided to leave it—there have been a slew of feel-good initiatives coming in over the past ten years to appease the conservationists. Angus eyes the warren for any sign of life. There must be a whole city of rabbits inside, though they stayed in when the machines were close. Yesterday Angus had seen a few venture out as far as the grass and sedge that grew along the trench. The crew sometimes tosses carrots around the burrow holes.

  Angus’ uncle in Roscommon had kept rabbits in a row of wire pens at the back of the farm. Before holidays the old man would walk out with the nephews, pull one of the bigger rabbits from its hutch, and with it wiggling under hand he’d take it to the barn and twist its neck. He moved quickly, holding on while the rabbit twitched. Then he’d set the body down on a wood table. A row of hooks above. Skinning a rabbit, you always start at the head. His uncle going slow. The boys watching. Tufts of downy fur let loose as he cut, wind coming in the cracked window. Angus has always thought that bog scraw was like that, like animal fur. With skill it can be taken away from the body like a cloak. Cotton grass carried away in the breeze, just like animal down. He’d worked at Maam Bog when Bord na Móna first took it over in 1982, helped dig the first trenches. Went back a few years later to take the scraw and heath off it. The sedge and deergrass lifting like a blanket, the brown muscle of peat below.