Grace After Henry

by Eithne Shortall

  ‘Sorry, Isabel, I missed that,’ I said, pressing my feet flat against the cool wood of the hallway floorboards as I tried to concentrate. ‘Who phoned you at six o’clock this morning?’

  ‘The driver, Grace! The driver from European Hauliers!’ I stopped looking around for clues to Andy’s presence and gave Isabel my full attention. It was difficult enough to follow as it was. ‘He did it, Grace!’ she prattled. ‘He apologised. I mean, I couldn’t understand everything he was saying, but he definitely said he was sorry. I got that bit. And I could tell he meant it. I actually felt sorry for the man. He sounded quite emotional.’

  ‘Why?’ I said, staring at the floor, trying to make something click.

  ‘Well, I don’t know, because he knew it was the right thing to do, I suppose.’

  ‘But why now?’

  ‘I don’t know, Grace,’ she said, not slowing down at all and sounding annoyed that I couldn’t just get on board with what had happened. ‘It wasn’t really a conversation. I couldn’t understand everything. He said something about “night” and “dead” and “Henry Henry Henry”’ – I knew Isabel was worked up but I still grimaced at her particularly awful, potentially racist, impersonation – ‘Something gave him a fright, I think, last night. A bad dream. If I was as isolated as him, only pigs and cows for company, I’d be easily frightened too. I think he said he saw Henry, but it was hard to follow. You know how it is when you’ve had a nightmare, even when you do have a full grasp of the English language. Whatever it was, anyway, was enough to bring his conscience around.’

  The early-morning sun formed a pool near the front door. I moved closer so I could soak up its warmth, but two steps away I stopped. There, beside the door, were the two clumps of muck that had come off Andy’s shoes when he’d removed them the night before.

  He never said where he’d been before arriving at mine close to midnight. All I knew was he’d had his landlady’s car and he was covered in dirt up to his shins.

  I stood there, between the clumps of dried mud and the pool of early-morning sun, and it started to slot together. Andy mentioning the driver’s address, how it was only a two-hour journey from Dublin. Isabel mentioning that he lived in a farmhouse, how the place was surrounded by bogs. Andy standing in my hallway, as I was now sure he had been, having recently stood in muck.

  I pictured the driver as he was at the inquest, a slight man in a short-sleeved shirt, only now he was standing at the window of a stone farmhouse, holding the curtain back as he stared out into the night in heart-stopping terror. I know I’d never been to his home but that didn’t stop me imagining, just like it had never stopped me seeing Henry’s bike spinning helplessly out of control.

  I pictured the driver at his window in the dead of night. And staring back at him, standing alone in the muddy field at the front of his house, was the same man he had run over almost four months earlier. I imagined the driver’s shock, his utter alarm that he was now being visited by a ghost, and I felt a deep well of empathy for him.

  I had believed him in court, in the end, when he said he hadn’t felt his wheel hitting Henry. I had never once blamed the driver. I never even considered it. I blamed only myself and sometimes Henry.

  ‘I’m happy for you, Isabel,’ I said, meaning it, as I wandered back into the sitting room.

  ‘Do you think he had something to do with it?’

  I stopped in the threshold between hallway and living room. ‘I think he’s gone,’ I said simply.

  There was a pause.

  ‘I know.’

  ‘I’m sorry, Isabel.’

  ‘I just liked having a bit of him still.’

  ‘Me too,’ I said.

  ‘But now he’s gone, all of him.’

  I kneeled back onto the couch. ‘Well, not quite.’

  ‘Oh yes, his spirit, and as long as we love Henry he’ll still be with us, blah-de-blah, but I mean really, Grace.’

  And then I told her. I told her about the circle of life and I had to move the phone away from my ear until she stopped shrieking. Then I had to wait for her to run upstairs and wake Conor. She put him onto me as she tried to calm down but he hadn’t said a word before she grabbed the phone back again.

  I kneeled on the couch and grinned, rolling my eyes in delight as I adjusted the proximity of the phone speaker, volume dependent. They wanted to call over, and when I said they couldn’t because I was going for a scan, Isabel wanted to come too. But I said no. She would be a wonderful grandmother and this child would be loved, but he or she would be mine. I said I’d call around that evening with a printout of the scan. Isabel kept coming up with things she could do for me in the meantime. She practically had my mortgage paid off by the time I managed to hang up.

  I folded the blanket and hung it over the arm of the couch, then I picked A Christmas Carol up from the floor. The bookmark had been moved. It was no longer where it had been for the past four months, lodged about a third of the way through. It was right at the back of the book, on the page that read ‘The End’. Had Andy gone beyond the agreed point? Surely he had just closed the thing and left as soon as I’d fallen asleep? I flicked through the last few pages to find sentences already swirling in my mind: Scrooge shouting at the young boy on the street, the prize turkey hanging in the poulterer’s, the quick synopsis of how seeing a few ghosts had been the making of him. I put my hand on the couch where Andy had last been and recalled the image I had stored away.

  Ding-dong!

  ‘You’re not dressed!’ said Aoife, tramping into the hallway. ‘You never even ran that mini-marathon, Grace. You just happened to help hand out the T-shirts. Go and put something on, will you? We need to be going in ten minutes.’ I could tell she was as excited as me.

  ‘Hi, Grace,’ said Larry, coming in behind her. ‘I’m going to be your chauffeur.’

  ‘He insisted,’ Aoife clarified.

  ‘I just know how she hates to be away from me,’ he teased, throwing an arm around her and though Aoife rolled her eyes, she didn’t move away. If anything she pushed a little closer.

  ‘Okay, two minutes,’ I said, and turned to run up the stairs.

  ‘Are we driving your mam too?’

  ‘No!’ I called down, grabbing my hairbrush from the bed. ‘She’s meeting us there.’

  I stood in my room, trying to decide what one wore to see the first image of their first child. Leggings? A dress? I grabbed a dress from the end of the bed, brushed my hair and pulled it back. I stood in front of the mirror and smiled. I kept staring at my reflection but I couldn’t lose the smile.

  ‘We are loved,’ I whispered, and with both arms wrapped around my middle, I gently squeezed.

  Then I slipped my feet into sandals and skipped down the staircase to find Aoife and Larry kissing at the foot of it.

  ‘All right, lovebirds,’ I called, skirting past them as Aoife shoved Larry away. ‘Let’s go. I have a baby to see.’

  EPILOGUE

  Iwas about 300 metres away, a whole section and a half of the cemetery between us, but there was no doubt it was him.

  ‘Shushhhh,’ I said, rocking the buggy gently though there wasn’t a sound coming from it. I had pushed the thing into the far-flung corners of the graveyard, trying to induce sleep before we went to pay Henry a visit.

  I hadn’t seen him in almost sixteen months, not since the night he came to say goodbye. I hadn’t talked about him either. Only Henry’s parents knew and no better people to ignore awkward truths. As far as I was aware he hadn’t been back in Ireland. And I doubted he was staying now. I watched him from where I stood beside a large oak and I understood. He was here to acknowledge the only thing they still shared. Even those who had known them would mark their birthday tomorrow. Only Andy, and me, knew that today was the day they had entered the world, and tomorrow was the day they were adopted.

  ‘That’s your uncle,’ I whispered, still pushing the buggy back and forth. ‘That’s your daddy’s brother.’

  Though
it did my heart good to see him, I had learnt to let ghosts remain ghosts and concentrate on the newly living. I moved back a little, obscuring myself and the buggy behind the tree.

  There was nobody else in Henry’s section, but then there wouldn’t be. Visitors were sporadic on weekdays, with the exception of the wise men. And as given to delusion as I could be, I knew I would not be seeing them here today, or tomorrow.

  Footsteps drew nearer behind me. I turned to see a woman of about fifty making her way into this neighbouring section.

  ‘Hello there,’ she said, holding up a pot plant in greeting. ‘Lovely morning.’

  ‘It is,’ I agreed.

  ‘Oh!’ she exclaimed as I turned the buggy around. ‘Would you look at that!’ She clasped her hands to her heart. This had been one of the best things about becoming a mother, the way people now looked at me as if I was proof that the world still contained wonder. ‘Does it run in the family?’ she asked. ‘Isn’t that what they say about twins?’

  I bent down to fix their matching hats. ‘They do say that, although the truth is it only counts if it’s on the mother’s side and I’m not a twin,’ I said. ‘But their father is.’

  The woman looked at me in amazement and shook her head. ‘Well isn’t that something. What a coincidence.’

  ‘There’s no such thing as coincidence,’ I replied but the woman was too busy cooing at the buggy to hear.

  ‘Like sleeping angels.’

  ‘Ha! For about another twenty minutes. I’m hoping to have them dropped off at my parents’ before they wake.’

  ‘Lucky grandparents,’ she enthused, leaning into the buggy for a closer inspection. ‘Two boys?’ she whispered, looking back up at me.

  I nodded, and she beamed at them.

  ‘Well, have a lovely day,’ she said. ‘Here’s hoping the weather holds fine.’

  ‘Hopefully,’ I agreed, thinking of Martin and how he was probably sitting in his kitchen right now worrying about whether the sun would still be shining by the time he said ‘I Do’, or whether Patsy had anything embarrassing planned for his speech. I’d have to get going soon if I wanted to drop the boys off, get home to change and make it to the forest on time. They were having an eco-wedding.

  When the woman left, I turned the buggy back around but Henry’s grave was all alone. I looked in the surrounding plots and traced my sight along the path that led to the main entrance. There he was, walking out the gates in long, easy strides with his hands pushed into his shorts pockets. Not a ghost at all but a fully-formed man. Andy kept walking, getting smaller and smaller. And I watched as he disappeared, the way normal people do.

  The End

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  A heartfelt thank you to everyone who helped me with the research for this novel, especially Susan Lohan, Louise Roseingrave, Ian Wright and Christine Monk. Thanks to Liz Parker and Juliet Mahony, agents extraordinaire, and to Sara O’Keeffe and the whole team at Corvus. I also want to acknowledge this peculiar country I call home. For better and for worse, Grace After Henry is entirely of Ireland.