My job was to escort him to each ward to see the children who couldn’t be moved, many of whom were heavily drugged and often in pain. He was so kind and gentle with them. He read them a story, not too long, and spoke for a moment with each one. As we walked from ward to ward, he asked me about myself. How long had I been a nurse? What did I like about it? When he left I was as enchanted with him as the children were.
The next day he showed up as I was going off duty. He brought a big bunch of lilacs and presented them to me, to thank me, he said, for my work with the children.
“I’m just temporary there,” I said. “It’s not my specialty at all.”
“Doesn’t matter to the children why you are there, only that you are.”
We walked together to the parking lot. He offered me a lift home, which I refused, not wanting to raise village gossip.
“Can I buy you a drink then one evening? We can drive somewhere else.”
I laughed. He knew the small-village gossip mill probably better than I.
“Yes, I would like that,” I said, surprised at myself.
I drove into Limerick in my own car and met him there that first night. We had dinner at a lovely hotel. We just talked about this and that, then we drove home separately.
The next week we did it again, but this time Daniel picked me up at the crossroads along the Limerick road from my house. When he dropped me off there afterwards he kissed me before I got out of the car. It didn’t take too long after that before we became lovers.
As I was remembering this I was aware of Eileen beside me, and though I didn’t look at her once, I felt her curiosity reach out to me like a tentacle. Not for the first time in my life I was thankful that no one could read another’s mind.
13
Daniel had finally agreed it was time to take up residence in the room next to the parlour. He had resisted it for weeks, wouldn’t even hear mention of it, despite the fact that it now took both Jude and me together to get him up and down the stairs. My day off next day tipped the balance for him. He had to either agree to a relief nurse or move down to the back room. He agreed to move. Perhaps his resistance was because it used to be Ellen’s sewing room. At least that was Jude’s theory, but when I suggested a different room to him he was no more inclined to shift himself. The room had been transformed into a comfortable place with a bed and easy chairs, a small dresser for Daniel’s personal things, and a bedspread, manly colours of wine and deep teal, that was as far from sickroom fare as it was possible to be. I was doing a last check on it, putting a water jug on the beside table and making sure the lamp was bright enough, when Iris’s voice drifted in the open window.
“Say what you need to say to him now, Jude, before it’s too late.”
“It’s already too late, I think. What am I going to do? Tell him I love him? That he was a great father? I don’t think so. We’ve come to some peace, talking in the evenings when we were here alone. I think we’re okay with each other.”
“Don’t you love him?”
Jude didn’t answer and I almost gave myself away listening in behind the curtain, I leaned so far forward not to miss her reply.
“Well, do you?” Iris asked again.
“I don’t quite know. That’s as honest as I can be. I have compassion for him now. I do. But love? As a child, I didn’t really know him. By the time I was older, I resented him too much. At least your mum took care of you, played with you and talked to you. Even if she wasn’t quite straight with you about who she was, who you were, she was there for you. You really had a bond. Daniel and I don’t. Anyway, Fran was his favourite.”
I moved the sheer curtain aside slightly to better catch a glimpse of the two of them. Iris leaned on her spade and watched as Jude pulled weeds from around a clump of oregano.
“He tries, you know, to connect with you.”
Jude gave a small laugh.
“He wants me to take over here when he’s gone. Move in and fill it with children. Sometimes I wonder if that’s what being nice to me is all about. But I’ve decided it doesn’t matter. Daniel’s dying. It isn’t hard for either of us to make the effort, really; we don’t have to keep it up forever.”
She cleared her throat, then tossed aside the small trowel she’d picked up.
“Why do you call him Daniel, not Dad or anything?”
“I started that when I was about thirteen. I was jealous because he spent so much time with his writing. He was either locked into his room writing or away doing school and hospital visits and that. He had no time for us, his own children, so I stopped calling him Father. He had some time for Fran. Likely because she didn’t seem to care much whether he gave her attention or not. Besides, calling him Daniel made me feel grown up. Sophisticated.”
Iris laughed, then turned serious again.
“Was that hard for you, knowing Fran was the favourite?” she asked.
“Not really. I adored Fran. Daniel and I wouldn’t have got on anyway. Guess I wanted a “real” family, like I read about in books. You know, a father who read to his kids, played ball and all that. He did none of it. Even when Fran went missing it took so long to convince him to search for her.”
Jude tugged viciously at a vine that had invaded the garden and didn’t quite dislodge it. Iris reached for a small gardening fork and began to dig, then dropped it and helped Jude tug at the vine.
“What happened to Fran? I know you don’t really know, but I guess I’m asking what led up to her vanishing?”
“Maybe it was Mother’s death. Fran and Daniel took that really hard. Fran especially so. She and I were back at university and things seemed to be settling a bit. We were so close. It was my first year away from home and I relied on Fran. I’m still mad at Daniel that he declared her dead. I know it’s not reasonable, but there it is.”
Iris squatted on the other side of the oregano and began to work on another piece of vine. A crow landed on the fence, its head turning this way and that as it watched them.
“That’s awful. What do you think happened to her, an accident or something?” Iris asked.
“I don’t know.” Jude tugged out a couple of small weeds and tossed them to the side. “She sent me a note saying she was going away for a few days and would see me when she got back. That’s the last anyone heard from her. It was only five months after Mother died. Twenty-two years ago. Before you were even born.”
Torn between wanting to hear their talk and not wanting to eavesdrop, I hovered by the window. They were quiet then, the only sound the scrape of stones against the spade as it sliced into the dry earth.
“She doesn’t look much like you in the photo on the mantelpiece in the drawing room.”
“No. She had a head of red hair. It was curly and wild, grew out rather than down. She is, I mean was, older than me. I was always following her around when I was little. Whatever she did, I wanted to do.”
The clock on the little table ticked the seconds off while I held my breath and waited for what would come next.
“Must have been awful for you when she disappeared. Do you think she left because she was upset about your mother’s death?” Iris asked.
“I don’t know. At the time I thought maybe she was tired of the way we both leaned on her, Daniel and I. He completely lost it when Mother died, wanted us near him all the time but we had to go back to university. Fran was like a zombie and I wanted her to be the way she always had been, cheerful and bubbly.”
I was lightheaded by the time I let my breath go.
“I wouldn’t think that’s reason enough to disappear. Or I wouldn’t have until my own mother’s death rocked me so much. I know I behaved oddly after she died, needed to get away to the hills and be alone, but I would never want to leave my family and friends altogether.”
A breeze caught the curtain, which blew in and caressed my cheek. It startled me and I
moved away from the window, straightened an imaginary wrinkle from the bedcover, then withdrew from the room.
Time they spent gardening fostered a closeness between them as they dug and weeded and talked. In no time the old kitchen garden was almost cleared of weeds and dead plants and coming alive again with herbs. One more day and the plot would be ready for planting.
Iris had weaselled her way in with Daniel too. Their afternoon poker games after lunch were pretty well established on a daily basis. He hated to lose, and there was much muttering and laughter and thigh slapping as Iris gave as good as she got in the games.
“I have time enough to rest,” he said when I suggested he was wearing himself out with Iris. “More than enough time.”
There was nothing I could say to that. And though Iris’s constant presence irked me I tried not to show it. Whether I liked it or not Iris was now part of the household. I should have been glad that her company cheered Daniel so much, but I felt that one more day of Iris and I would be a total wreck.
Not only was she wearing Daniel out, her presence was also fuelling Jude’s preoccupation with her sister’s disappearance. One day I had found Jude in the parlour going through photo albums. She had taken out all the pictures of Fran after the age of about sixteen and laid them end-to-end on the coffee table. The earlier ones she’d spread across the floor.
“Delia, come here. Look. Do you think that Fran and Iris look alike?”
I glanced at the pictures. The truth was, there was a very slight resemblance, in the shape of the forehead and curve of the cheek in a certain light, but I wasn’t about to admit that, not wanting to fuel Jude’s fantasies.
“No more than one person resembles another at any time,” I said.
“Really? Do you know, she laughs like Fran. You know the way her laugh starts with a giggle and rolls on into full laughter? Fran did that. It was almost impossible not to laugh with her. Remember I told you I thought I heard Fran’s laugh in the village one day? That was Iris.”
“Jude, your sister has been gone a long, long time. Don’t you think if she were alive she would have contacted the family? Contacted you? You were close, she’d not truly desert you.”
“It’s so hard to give up on her, though. I think I’m over it, I’ve let her go, but then... I don’t know, it seems impossible. If I only knew what happened to her it would be easier.”
She kept her eyes on a photo of Fran. I glanced at it. Fran stood in the arch of Trinity College. The sun was behind her and her hair stood out like a nimbus. She had on a green plaid coat and a silk scarf in red and green shot through with gold.
“You will drive yourself to madness if you keep this up. Losing someone is hard. I know it. But hanging on to the past will just ruin you. Fran wouldn’t want that,” I told her.
She raised her head from the photo and shrugged, one hand caressing the image she held.
“I know. But I can help Iris find her family. Maybe she will, maybe she won’t, but I can help her search. Nobody really helped me search for Fran.”
“Didn’t your father help? He must have looked for her, surely?”
“Not at first. He kept saying to wait, she’d be back any day. It took him about two weeks to even consider she was missing. She’d left me a note saying she was going away for a day or two, so when she didn’t come back within a few days no one worried about it. I knew something was wrong. If she said she would be back in a few days, then that’s what she would do.”
“The note put him off. It’s not that he didn’t care, Jude, you must know that.”
“Well, if he had spent enough time with us to know us, he’d have known she would come back when she said. Or let us know she’d changed her mind. I keep imagining her off somewhere living her life, wondering what she’s doing for a living, where she lives. So I understand Iris’s need to find family. I want to help her, you know?”
I did understand, no doubt about that. What I didn’t want was Iris rooting around in things that were none of her business. Surely she’d understand that if her mother felt the need to stay away from family all those years there was a good reason for it. Still, I suppose when she died she didn’t want her daughter to be alone.
When the end of the day came I was glad to be going out to the farm. A night and a day away from the Wolfe family would do me good. Mam and I were going to Dublin the following morning to visit Maggie. And for the first time ever I was not at all looking forward to the trip. And even less so to returning to take up my duties in the Wolfe household. On the walk home I wondered whether Jude’s help would actually result in Iris finding her family. And what else they might uncover in the process.
I slept badly that night. The conversation with Jude played over and over in my head. At 3:00 am I got up and opened the box I had in the third drawer of my dresser, buried as deeply as possible under what clothes I stored there. Not something I opened often, it held a silk scarf, slightly worn around the edges, a pair of yellow knitted baby bootees, and two folded documents. The bootees were the one and only things I had ever knit outside of school domestic economy classes. They had satin ribbon threaded through them and were unused, but had grown slightly grubby over the years. Every now and again I took them out to stroke the soft wool, to run the satin ribbon through my fingers. I didn’t do it often, and found it especially calming when a child I was caring for died or when I had nights broken badly by strange dreams.
This night I shook out the scarf. I fancied it still held a faint spicy scent of “Opium.” The gold thread and colours were still bright, the edge slightly frayed from Maggie worrying at it. I’m not sure why I kept it. Long ago I’d tried to throw it away but couldn’t. Perhaps I kept it to remind me of all that I owe to Maggie, or to remind me of all I needed to atone for in this world, but in truth I didn’t need much reminding of that. I folded it up and put it back in the box. In the morning I was startled to find that I had slept with the bootees still clasped in my hand. Never before had I not put them away before sleeping.
I lay in bed and watched the shadows from the trees outside sway in the gap of the curtains. Mam moved around in the kitchen, and her sweet low voice carried some old-fashioned tune to me. She loved a day out in Dublin after visiting Maggie. With some effort I heaved myself out of bed and headed for the bathroom.
Dark clouds skimmed over our heads and wind whipped our coattails and headscarves as we walked in to catch the bus, but the rain held off. For once the bus was almost empty and we had choice seats near the front where we could look out the big window. Mam took out her knitting and I put my head back against the headrest and watched as the trees and bushes whipped this way and that on the wind. One of the Reilly sisters sat across the aisle, and soon she and Mam started to chat about this and that. Rain began to batter the bus and my mind skittered around like a squirrel chased by a dog.
14
St. Mary’s was one of the best homes in the country for people like Maggie, and was one of the most drear places I’ve ever visited. The corridor walls were painted in two colours, cream above and green below. Insipid and heavily layered, the paint daubed on with a careless hand, except for the perfectly straight brown line that divided the two colours, doing nothing at all to help cheer the poor souls who shuffled along, feet clumsy from drugs, rarely speaking to their visitors who walked beside them.
Maggie was almost never one of the shufflers, as she was afraid of leaving her room most of the time. She could be chivvied out once in a while, and to give them their due, the nurses tried to get her to exercise, but the poor soul dug in her heels at the sill of the door and wailed long and loudly until she was allowed back into the safety of her room. Her skin had that pale, washed-out look of the incarcerated and her muscles were withered on her bones. Most days she allowed the door to remain open, but sometimes even that was too much for her. She could not bear to look out the window, so her window blinds were almost always
drawn and gave the room the murky feel of cave. Mind you, the only view was into a cemetery, so she wasn’t missing much. She had been given that room on purpose because she took no pleasure in a window at all.
Our visit started out well. I couldn’t be certain whether she recognized us or not. Up to about six months ago she had recognized me most of the time, but now it seemed more hit and miss. I didn’t mind too much, as it meant that some of her fears didn’t surface at the sight of me, so I was spared her asking about the baby or anything else that she had some vague recollection of from long ago, however mixed-up it was.
Mam fussed with Maggie’s hair, which was a rat’s nest tangle on the left side where she must have been lying on it. It had grown down almost to her shoulders.
“She needs a haircut,” Mam said. “I hate to see her like this. She looks streelish.”
She rooted around the drawer of the bedside table, found Maggie’s hairbrush and began to untangle the mess.
“Mam,” Maggie said, “No.” She pulled away and gave Mam a small push with her shoulder. Mam stopped and stared in amazement at her and then looked across at me. The hope in her eyes that maybe Maggie was improving broke my heart. Her hands twitched with the effort to leave the hair alone, to smooth it out, but she knew better than to provoke a tantrum. Maggie sidled up to Mam and stroked her face, tracing her fingers across the lines that radiated out from her eyes, exploring them with a touch that was gentle and curious. She cupped our mother’s face between her two hands and gazed into her eyes. They stayed eye to eye for a moment before Mam gently gathered Maggie to her and hugged her. Maggie snuggled into her, sighed and then abruptly nodded off. Mam and I chatted softly while Maggie dozed, all the while Mam’s worn hands moving up and down smoothing Maggie’s hair, her eyes tear-filled. I left to find a nurse to arrange a haircut for my sister and when I re-entered the room Maggie woke up.
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