This is when Abbey loves him most: furrowed brow, lines around his eyes, a look that says he’s been caught at something.
Shaking his head he says, “I don’t know Ab,” as if he ever knew, as if any day he might figure it out, find the equation. Dermot is fifty-five and looks his age entirely. Abbey’s twenty-six and she’s been with him almost a year. Going over to him, she takes his hand. Waits for him to look at her.
“Why didn’t you wake me?”
Dermot says nothing, lets go of her hand. Sits back down in the first pew, eyeing the clouds above. After a minute he says, “You’re already gone,” turning to her after he says it.
Back at the cottage Dermot fills the bathroom sink with warm water and starts to wash up. He rounds the corner with a towel in his hand and looks into the bedroom. She’s packing her things.
“I didn’t say you couldn’t go.” Dermot hunches over, the bedroom ceiling two inches above his head. He doesn’t want her to leave on a sour note. He wants to be in the clear.
“Yes, you did.” Abbey avoids his eyes. The entire contents of the dresser drawer shoved into her backpack; the blue knit scarf he’d given her knotted around the strap.
“Abbey, you’re just back.” Gripping her wrist now, trying to get her to stop packing. She glances down at his hand and he lets go.
They’d been through this last night. He remembers now. He’d said he wouldn’t stand for it, her leaving again.
“Whatever I said,” Dermot starts in slowly, “what I meant was that I wanted you to stay.”
Abbey closes the dresser drawer and watches the two of them in the mirror above.
“Abbey, listen.”
She looks at him, not sure if he’s asking her for something or if he’s getting ready to state something. Dermot poses everything as if it were a question, his Irish lilt an upswing at the end of every thought. Even when he says “I love you,” it sounds as if he’s asking.
“It’s just a week,” she reiterates.
Dermot walks to the bedroom door, taps the curling edge of the old carpet with his toe. “I’m too old for this.”
At the door, Flagon starts barking, her tail hitting the side of the couch. She loops round to the bedroom, knocks Dermot’s knees, goes out again into the front room, comes back. Dermot walks over to the front door with her, lifts the latch and the Border collie takes off as soon as the door is open, chasing after Mrs. McGilloway in the postal van.
“Are we over?” He asks it from the living room. Abbey pulls the drawstring on her pack, then goes out with it, sets it on the couch. She takes his face in her hands and kisses him again and again, trying to convince him that she’s coming back.
An hour later, driving towards Galway, the Mini chugs and sputters, clunks along like it’s losing power before surging forward again. Outside the window: low-rolling fields, a maze of stone fences, heavy clouds coming in. The dark hump of Inishmore barely visible across the bay. Abbey watches Dermot for a minute before turning towards the fields. When they get close to Furbo, Dermot points out the church, tells her about the exorcism, the Garda and the reporter, Father Whelan stumbling out of the building like a man who’d come through a wind storm. He tells
her about the kids playing football in the parking lot while the parents looked on. He remarks there was a good-sized crowd from Spiddal, adds, “I should have brought you down.”
Abbey looks back out the window and tries to imagine an exorcism. The priest holding the cross out in front of him, altar boys carrying holy water, a look of absolute terror on their faces. What then? Biblical verses and incense? How exactly do you stop the dead from haunting the living? How do you pinpoint that presence and say “it resides here”? For the first time in her life it occurs to Abbey that revenants might exist. Maybe the dead do come back, the way her father has been with her since the funeral. Not quite here, not quite a whirly spirit, but in her head. Knocking around.
“All right?” Dermot drops his left hand onto Abbey’s thigh.
“Yeah. Fine.”
Changing gears to pass a transport, Dermot’s knee hits the underside of the dashboard. The Mini is still giving up its grief. When they get by the truck there’s the line of the bay again, a row of new bungalows going up along the coast road, some only blocks of foundation, some nearly finished. Two-storey peach-coloured stucco buildings dot the fields. A group of similar bungalows is going up on the lot next to Dermot’s cottage. Only their foundations are done, although Bord Fáilte plans to have them ready for the tourists by the summer.
“It’s just a week.” Abbey says it once again to reassure him. “I promised I’d cover Aileen’s shifts.”
When she looks over at Dermot he is squinting at something up in the distance. He turns the windshield wipers on and lets them flap a few times each way even though it isn’t raining.
“And then I’ll get work closer to Spiddal.”
Dermot scratches the bottom of his nose with his thumb.
Being with Dermot has never been easy. But Abbey knows that’s part of what draws her to him. She’s been waylaid, which is exactly what she’d wanted. It was the Old Bailey that did it—Dermot, two hands around his pint glass, saying, “I can’t help but feel I could have done something more with my life.” Abbey’d only just met him. Angela, already sorry she’d introduced the two of them, said, “Fuck off, Dermot,” as she dropped her purse on the chair, went over to the bar. Later, she told Abbey she’d heard it all too many times before.
“As if I was on the cusp of something,” Dermot had continued, ignoring Angela. And Abbey’d tried to nudge her chair closer to Dermot’s, the back leg getting caught in the carpet so that in the end she had to stand and pick it up, lift it by the arms, place it next to his.
Eight miles outside of Galway, Dermot drives off the asphalt onto the shoulder of the road, gravel crunching under the tires. An alder tree on the far side of the shallow ditch. Hitting the brakes, Dermot brings the Mini to a full stop. Turns the ignition off. Abbey half expects him to get out and kick the tire, open the boot, root around for a wrench to beat the engine with. But part of her knows nothing’s wrong. He’s buying time. Dermot gets out of the car and stands in the open door, laying his arms over the roof, tapping his fingers on the metal. Abbey turns towards him and finds herself looking at his shirt buttons, the one above his belt gaping open. It makes her think of the photos she’s seen from his days at Trinity, how needle-thin and angular he was, his hair
dark and trimmed. Dermot kneels down to face Abbey, neck craned sideways.
“Abbey I want—” and he smooths his hands over his face as if ten years in a stone cottage without modern conveniences can be erased.
“If I had it to do over—” he starts in again, shoulders lifting a bit as if to brace himself. But he stops, looks at her directly.
“Marry me.” A statement this time, not even a question. “Marry me, Abbey.”
Abbey opens her door and then closes it. She sits still, staring at her hands. There are a hundred things she could say here but none of them make sense. She opens her mouth but no sound comes out. Forty feet away the bay laps at the stones that skirt the beach. A car goes by. Then another. Dermot straightens, stands there for a second. Then, without a word, he starts walking up the road.
Carrying On
SOME twenty minutes later, Abbey gets out of the Mini and heads towards Barna wondering if at some point she’ll see Dermot sitting or stopped on the side of the road, if he’s waiting for her to catch up to him. Or maybe he’ll be coming toward her. She adjusts her backpack straps and squints down the coast road until it veers east, inland. To her left a series of fields that slope down to the roadside, towards bent barbed-wire fences. Three cars drive by in quick succession. A few stones settle on the side of the road after the last one passes. Then nothing. Abbey bends down to tighten the laces on her boots and then stands up, starts hoofing it to town. He won’t be there up the road. He’s pissed off. Embarrassed. This is how it works with them. Dermot will carry on without her. He’ll walk up the road, double back through a field, get in the Mini and drive home. Enough cars will pass that Abbey will get a lift into Galway, or once she gets to a phone she can call Corrib Taxi. Either way, she’ll maneuver towards Dublin and Dermot will go back the way he came. It’s their old
argument. She goes to Dublin to work and every time she walks out the door he convinces himself he’ll never see her again. When she went home for her father’s funeral a week and a half ago it was worse. The look on Dermot’s face at the airport. Abbey saying it would be a good chance for her to bring back more of her things.
The truth of it is, she wants to stay. Wishes she was in the Mini heading back to the cottage with him, that at six they’d walk down the coast road to get dinner at Hughes’, that they’d spend half the evening in the pub, Abbey sitting beside Dermot, watching how he nods his head at everyone who walks in the door. That’s what Abbey’s drawn to. The sense of belonging. Of not being afraid who’ll walk in on you when you’re sitting in a room. Even if she’s just welcome by association, even if she’s riding on Dermot’s good graces, it’s something she’s never known. But Spiddal will carry on without her. People coming into Hughes will nod at Dermot, converse with him just the same. There’ll be music playing in the back room. At eight
PM
the Guinness taps will gurgle and fart on cue, and Niall will go and change the line. Old man Conneely will sit at the bar baiting anyone who dares to take the next stool. The twenty-year-olds will drink Budweiser and talk about Dublin bands or football. Towards ten someone will open the door and wedge a stone between it and the frame to let in some air. Things will seem the same.
Abbey remembers the last day she’d worked at Gabby’s Diner in Windsor, Ontario, how the bells rang above her head as she’d opened the door to leave. She’d worked there for over
five years. The staff had thrown a party for her that afternoon with cake and balloons, and had presented her with a going-away gift that consisted of an inflatable airplane pillow, a “Gabby’s Diner” t-shirt with the Windsor skyline on it, a bunch of envelopes bearing the staff’s addresses, a box of Maple Leaf cookies. Turning in the open doorway to wave, Abbey saw the new waitress they’d hired already putting on Abbey’s old apron. Mikki and Jenna were chatting her up, talking about the copper highlights in her hair. Abbey called out “bye” but the word didn’t carry over the stereo and the customer conversations.
Now, as she tromps along the road to Galway, Abbey imagines what her life would be like if she was still in Windsor. She looks at her watch. It’s nine
AM
in Ontario. The coffee rush is in full swing at Gabby’s. The muffins are selling like crazy, the bells over the door are constantly ringing.
Abbey bends over to pull a pebble out of her boot. She’s pushing her fingers down between boot and heel when a car passes. Finding the stone, she straightens up and sticks out her thumb—too late for the driver to have noticed. She looks back, hoping for someone to come along and offer her a ride. Another ten minutes at a good clip and she’ll pass through Barna. She could call a taxi from there. Or, if she keeps walking past Barna, she’ll come to the caravan park: dilapidated trailers and slick Euro caravans set up side by side in an overgrown field. There’s always a good bit of traffic heading in and out, tourists and travelers going into Galway. Maybe she can get a lift from there.
Another car comes towards her and even though Abbey’s thumb is out, poised mid-air, the blue Civic drives by without even slowing.
After two more cars race by without stopping, it occurs to Abbey that her rucksack probably makes her look too much like a tourist. Five years ago that would’ve been an asset but the locals are fed-up with tourists now, especially in Galway in the off season. Without her pack Abbey looks Irish enough—her grandparents came over from Donegal back in the forties—but as soon as she opens her mouth her flat intonation gives her away. “Hi” instead of “Hiya,” “excuse me” instead of “sorry.”
Two summers ago when Abbey was getting ready to leave Windsor, when she’d finally gathered the nerve to go, she’d gone over to break the news to her Aunt Jane. They’d argued for hours, Abbey standing in the kitchen with her back to the fridge. The accusations non-stop: “inconsiderate, childish, as-selfish-as-your-mother.” Jane had looked out the window a good seven or eight times, her disgust palpable. She said, “Your father is dying, for Christ’s sake,” as if Abbey hadn’t a clue. And that was part of it. Frank was demanding too much of Abbey, phoning her at all hours, refusing to eat, to get out of bed, to take his medication. Jane listened, pulled a cigarette out of the pack on the kitchen counter, lit it pointedly. “You can’t go,” she’d said. Then she turned her back on Abbey, stood in the archway between the kitchen and living room watching the TV while Abbey waited by the dishwasher, nervously fingering the crocheted tea cozy that lay on the end of the counter. After ten minutes Abbey pulled her coat on.
She asked Jane to look in on Frank, make sure the nurses’ aids hired by the home-care agency showed up when they were supposed to.
Jane looked over her shoulder, said, “He’s your father,” and then, “When did you start calling him Frank?” The news droned on over the silence that followed. Abbey’s hand on the door knob. “If you were my kid …” Jane said, shaking her head at that, watching Abbey open the door and go.
He Rearranges the Furniture
DERMOT is pacing. Goes from the front room to the kitchen and back again, grazing his knuckles along the arm of the brown couch as he turns. He taps his head with the flat of his hand. Why can’t he ever let things be? Back in the kitchen Flagon puts her snout into her yellow plastic bowl, knocks it once then stands there, waiting for him to feed her. He’d done the wrong thing, said it wrong, and there is no way of going back on it. He thinks about why he’d proposed, makes a mental list, linear, rational, like he’d been taught to do, as he’d shown others when he’d taught at Trinity. Count the versions of the manuscript, write down how they differ, make your notations in the following manner, be precise. There is never one version, every story can be told a hundred ways. He considers writing down “why I love her,” revising it until he has it right, leaving copies for future scholars. In six hundred years they could try to make sense of it, put the list in order. Why he first loved Abbey Gowan—her youth, attentive nature; and why he later loved her—the sex, smell of her
skin in the morning, for singing off-key in the bath; and why he finally loved her—for never admitting she thought he was full of shit, or for being naive enough not to notice. There would be a progression anyway, all notes copied in the same hand, a number of recensions filed away, the odd scrap of marginalia: she changed me / she didn’t change me / she did.