The Associate Dean was watching him. Dermot cleared his head. What did it matter now?
When Sophie stood forward, the light from the window crossed her face and Dermot could see that she’d been crying. It made him want to hit her. It made him want to rain his fists down over everything and everyone in that room. And he knew they took pleasure in it—Protestant administrators hanging him with the sins of his own religion. Pointing out in no uncertain terms that he had brought this upon himself. Outside the square was empty. The leaves in the courtyard turned silver-green in the wind. Dermot moved towards the door, opened it, went out. And the three people left in the room made no motion to stop him.
Loony Toons
WHEN Abbey walks out of the Spar, Sean sees her. She’s carrying two plastic bags, is heading in the direction of the cottage. He runs up behind her. Taps her on the shoulder.
“Hey.” Abbey’s happy to see him. Lifts her bags. “I’m just picking up supplies.”
“You’ve no car?” He looks around for the Mini.
“No. I can’t drive stick.”
Sean takes one of the bags, looks down at it. “Fuck. What’s in here?”
“Cantaloupes.” She laughs.
“Here.” He tries to grab the other bag but she starts walking with it. He lopes up beside her, hits himself in the shin with the cantaloupe. A light breeze coming in off the bay.
“It’s the other side of the road in Canada, right?”
“What?”
“Why you don’t drive.”
“Yeah, that too.”
Abbey smiles at him. She’s wearing an orange-and-brown flowered skirt, a short-sleeved turtleneck and army boots. Her hair’s in braids that stick out on either side of her head. Everything about her indicates she’s from somewhere else.
“Shouldn’t you be working on the fence?”
“Yeah. My mum had to run out so I was looking after Mary.”
Abbey turns and walks backwards a few steps. Turns around again. The beach on their right. A family by the rocks having a picnic. A terrier standing at the edge of their blanket waiting for scraps.
“Come here. Let me take this.” Sean tries to grab the second bag.
“I’ve got it. But the chivalry is impressive.”
Abbey starts heading down to the beach, along the grassy berm. When she gets to the sand her boots sink an inch, leave imprints. The sun is high overhead and gulls swing left and right over the bay. “It’s beautiful, isn’t it?”
Sean sneaks up behind Abbey and grabs the plastic Spar bag out of her hand. She turns around and watches him run down the beach, a lanky kid in a black t-shirt and dark jeans. When he’s fifty feet away he turns around and holds both bags up in the air. Abbey walks over to him, tries to grab the bag. “Give it back.”
“No.”
“Sean, I can carry my own bags.” She imagines this must be what it’s like to have a younger brother.
“Take it.” He holds the bag out, stands still. Down the beach the terrier trots away from the picnic blanket and a young
boy follows it. Abbey studies the outline of the apples in the bag to the left of Sean’s head. The cantaloupe to the right. Sean getting impatient. “Come on.” A stupid grin on his face.
Abbey considers kicking him, but takes a tentative swipe at his right hand instead. Misses. Behind Sean, the terrier runs up and down the sandbar, chases pebbles the boy throws into the swash. Sean starts walking backwards down the beach, in the direction of the cottage. Abbey follows and he winks at her, enjoying himself. When he stops five minutes later to look out at the water Abbey runs up behind him and throws herself onto his back, reaching her right hand around to grab one of the bags. He falls over and Abbey goes with him, landing on the canned goods and apples.
“Fuck.” Sean laughs.
“Asshole.” Abbey pulls the bag out from under her back, sand sticking to her legs. From where he’s laying Sean stretches out his hand, grabs the other bag, sits up. Holds it high in his right hand. There’s sand in his hair, on the left side of his face. Abbey’s trapped underneath his right leg. She tries to push him off her. But Sean wrestles her down. Straddles her, a hand on each of her wrists. There’s something of Dan in it, something of her father, the time he pulled her across the living room by the arm, a bruise developing below the elbow. How he saw it the next morning at breakfast and didn’t say anything. Waited for it to go away.
When Abbey doesn’t fight back, Sean gets up. Moves off her. Wet sand everywhere, along her arm, on the backs of her bare legs, up her skirt.
“Twit.” She doesn’t know what else to say.
Sean laughs, tosses a handful of sand at her legs. Her skirt stretched across the top of her thighs. A scar on the side of her calf. A white angry seam. Abbey sees him looking at it.
“Monkey bars.”
“What?”
“The jungle gym. Grade four. Marty Syred pushed me off the top.” Abbey leans sideways and looks at it. She’d hit an exposed bolt on one of the rails coming down. Her father had tried to band-aid the cut but it kept bleeding and bleeding. Finally, after an hour on the couch watching Loony Toons and pressing kleenex against her leg, he drove her to emergency for stitches.
“You’re beautiful.”
Abbey looks at Sean, realizes he’s leaning towards her. Everything is fuzzy for a second, Abbey still on the couch with Fog Horn Leg Horn prattling on and a blood-stained pile of kleenex on her lap, her dad making Kraft Dinner in the kitchen.
“Don’t say that.” She says it like she’s pissed off. Then gets up, shakes the sand out of her skirt.
“Why not?” He’s baiting her.
“How old are you?”
“Why?”
“Fifteen? Sixteen?” She picks up the bag beside her, grabs the other one out of his hand.
“Seventeen.”
“You’ll grow out of it.”
He doesn’t know what she means.
“Listen,” she snaps. But then she doesn’t know what to
say. Stands there for a second trying to line up what just happened.
Sean puts his hands in his pockets. “I didn’t mean anything.”
And that’s all that Abbey needs. She feels a wave of relief. A seventeen-year-old kid stands in front of her looking totally relaxed, staring at her like she’s gone crazy and he can’t figure out what went wrong.
“You have sand in your hair.” Abbey brushes past Sean, climbs the berm. The bag handles stretched, the cantaloupe and the apples swinging down around her ankles.
“So do you,” he volunteers, hurrying to catch up.
Another’s
WHEN Abbey gets home she finds Dermot in the garden pulling weeds. Sean nods at him, picks up the digger and the wheelbarrow, starts out towards the southeast end of the field.
“Where were ya?” Dermot brushes the dirt off his hands onto his pants, leans in and kisses Abbey. Kicks the bind weed he’s pulled farther away from the plants.
“Walking back with Sean.”
Dermot peeks inside the Spar bag, frowns. “What have you done with the food?”
“It’s called vitamin C.” She sticks out her tongue, heads into the cottage.
“I went to The Bridge House this morning.” Abbey sits down on the couch beside Dermot, hands him a slice of cantaloupe.
“And?”
“They said to come back Tuesday. See Aidan. Do you know him?”
“Aye. He bought the Big House off the German woman last year.”
“It’s just part-time. Cleaning rooms. I think they’re worried about keeping me away from the tourists, though. In case I ruin the ‘Irish’ feel of the place.”
“Just don’t open your mouth.” A bead of juice from the cantaloupe in his beard.
“How was your friend?” Abbey takes the rind out of Dermot’s hand and goes into the kitchen. Dumps it in the compost under the sink. Outside, Flagon starts barking.
“All right.” He goes to the door, pulls the latch, watches the dog trot in. “I dropped ’round NUI after, looking for Michael, but he was at Maam.”
“You went to the University? Dermot Fay stepped into an institution of higher learning?”
“He did.” Dermot goes into the kitchen, cuts another slice of cantaloupe.
“Well, how was it?”
Dermot thinks about the middle-aged secretary in the archeology department office, her frosted hair tied in a tight bun. “Mr. Fay?” She’d said it with a question mark, but not in the usual way—“Where’ve I heard that? Fay, Fay,” cataloguing, the eyes going up and left until they remember: ex-Trinity professor, gone to Spiddal to go mad. No, this was flat, uninterested. She wrote a note for Michael on a square of pink paper and promptly ignored him.
“I think,” he says, gently touching Flagon’s head with the tips of his fingers, “that maybe they don’t know me anymore.”
——
Around ten, Dermot dnd Abbey go down to Hughes. Abbey picks up their pints at the bar, happy that people are nodding at her, that old man Conneely asks after where she’s been.
“Thought you’d had it with Fay,” he says, hands wrapped around a short glass of whiskey. And when she doesn’t respond, he raises his glass. “Gives us all hope to have ya back,” knocking the knuckles of his right hand on the top of the bar. Niall appearing in front of them as if summoned. Conneely saying, “for luck” and demonstrating the knock again, “that we should all have young women to keep us.”
Tomás Sullivan and Liam Conroy come in the door first, part of the body of workmen that stumbles into Hughes every Friday night. Angus, Peter and Egg follow. The men sidle collectively up to the bar, the five of them causing a great shift in the room. Even Conneely gets off his stool to make way for them. Black pints appear in convention on the bar. Euros and coins are dropped in the wet half-moons that are left after the glasses are raised. Angus telling Niall that they’ve found a body in Maam Bog. Word spreading. Soon everyone is talking about it, crowding around the lads asking if they’d seen it, what it looked like, if they had any idea whose body it was.
“Did ya hear?” Jimmy asks Dermot, his wide mouth gaping open. He’s turned away from a group that has been squeezing him out. Dermot recognizes the girl from the beach on the chair next to Jimmy’s, touching her hair, turning around to Finn and the fellow beside him.
“Ever seen a dead body, Abbey?” Jimmy is leaning in to her, his knobby nose and pit-like eyes right in front of her face. He’s had too much to drink.
“No.”
“Never?”
“Afraid not.”
Looking at Abbey, thinking about the fact that she hadn’t seen her father’s body, Dermot wonders if maybe that’s what did her in, the not knowing. Remembers how he saw both his parents laid out on their deathbeds, how he knew in that instant they were beyond his reach. It’s the body that matters—and to some degree, the objects that come with it. Maybe that’s why he didn’t keep the house, the furniture, the black coat his father hung in the front closet. It would have been too much to carry around. He’d seen them; they were dead. And he decided everything that was theirs should pass with them. Otherwise you look to the dead all your life, in everyday objects that solicit your grief.
Coming back from the jacks around eleven, Dermot circles the room, trying to remember where he and Abbey had been sitting. All night the talk has been the body in Maam Bog. Is it the girl gone missing, the one whose name no one could remember? Is it a sacrifice like the one in Meenybradden? Or the body of whatever spirit they’d sent out of St. Brighid’s two weeks back? Conneely suggests that it’s the soap opera actress who’d been killed off in last season’s final episode.
“You don’t really watch that shite?” Niall asks Conneely, pouring another whiskey.
“I do.” Putting his hand out to take the drink. “Fine, fine stories.”
“Maybe they’ll have you on?”
“Oh, the Mrs. would never permit it.”
Dermot walks past the bar just then, looking around the room for Abbey. He puts his hand on Conneely’s shoulder. “Joe, she’s dead twenty years.”
Conneely raising his glass. “But she’s in charge just the same.”
It’s the living who haunt Dermot. Seeing Abbey over on the far side of the bar, talking to Liam Conroy—Liam Conroy who works at Maam, and who, according to Deirdre McGilloway, is her baby’s father—it occurs to Dermot that he’s assumed certain things about his own son, about Rory. Assumed he’d been a healthy baby, assumed he’d survived his childhood to become a man, skirting all those accidents and illnesses that whisk children away. When Dermot has imagined Rory, he’s always seen him walking across the bridge at the end of the field, coming across the long grass to the back of the cottage. He’s seen him as if he were whole and healthy. Now he begins to wonder, but stops himself. No, Rory would be the man Dermot had almost been, could have been. And, Dermot thinks, enough like his old man that he would never seek his father out. Or enough like Dermot that if he did, if he ever came to the door and Dermot opened it, Rory would not be there to forgive him.
“Will we head?” Dermot touches Abbey’s arm, nods at Conroy.
“Sure.” She watches Dermot study Liam’s face. “Do you know each other?”
Liam puts out his hand. “I’ve seen ya around. Liam.” He looks from Abbey to Dermot and realizes that they’re together.
“Dermot Fay.”
Liam narrows his eyes. “Were you out at Maam last week?”
“I was.”
They stand there a minute, the talk of the pub around them. Niall’s youngest daughter comes out of the back room with a parfait glass in her hand. The last of her ice cream in the bottom of it.
“Do you know Deirdre McGilloway?” Dermot asks.
Liam nods, reaches past Abbey to his pint on the bar.
“Have you seen the baby?”
“Not yet.”
“You should.” Dermot moves to walk past him. “I’d say he has your eyes.”
On the walk back to the cottage, Abbey is lightheaded and warm from drinking. Flagon had followed them in to town, had lain outside Hughes’ door when they went in. On the way home she’s full of energy, runs out along the sand to the water, barks at the crash of waves, running toward the surf as it recedes. They’re alone on the road. Only two cars have passed since the edge of the village.
“Do you believe in ghosts?” Abbey asks. She’s wanted to ask this question for days. She doesn’t look at Dermot, watches Flagon by the water.
Dermot smiles to himself in the dark, thinking she should know better. “Not the kind you’re after.”