Stony River Read online

  “Thanks for being here,” he says to her. “Where’s Carolyn?”

  “With Mom. She’ll keep her as long as we need.”

  “Ah, she’s a peach.” Turning to Miranda, he says, “My wife, Doris.”

  Doris has tightly curled black hair and a swollen stomach under a long white shirt: a mother goddess at full moon. Her black trousers stop mid-calf. Doris captures Miranda’s free hand with her two small ones. Her smooth hands are pink against Miranda’s candle-white skin, her pursed lips painted the color of fresh blood.

  “I am so sorry for your loss,” she says.

  Panic flaps its wings inside Miranda’s chest as Nolan excuses himself to check on arrangements for viewing James’s body. She no longer wants to see a corpse. About her come and go more people than she’s ever seen. Voices from nowhere say words she can’t decipher and invisible chimes go bing-bing. She misses the slow, predictable rhythm of the house, wants to chase after Nolan and ask would he take her home. But Doris, smelling like dried wildflowers, steps even closer and shines a smile on Cian.

  “What’s your name, little guy?”

  Miranda answers for him. Cian isn’t one of the five words he can say.

  Doris mispronounces it as a single, reverent syllable: “Keen. That’s a new one on me. How old is he?”

  “One year and four months.”

  “I would have guessed younger.”

  Miranda lays a hand on Doris’s melon-hard stomach.

  Doris quicksteps back then seems to catch herself. She smiles. “Three more months.” She extracts a red tubular object from a large blue-and-white-checked cloth bag. “Say, Keen, do you like kaleidoscopes?” The lad frowns and sniffs it, puts his tongue on it. She laughs. “No, no. Look into the eyehole. Here, let me show you.” Softly, almost mouthing the words, she asks Miranda, “Can he understand?”

  “And why wouldn’t he?”

  “Well, I wasn’t sure, given his condition.”

  “There’s no want in him,” she says, just as James answered her when she wondered if the lad was like other children. James said naught about a condition.

  Doris succeeds in getting Cian to peer into the tube and hold it by himself. “Nifty, isn’t it?” She sets her bag on the floor and opens it wide. “I have more toys. Want to see?”

  “See,” Cian says. Miranda sets his bare feet on the floor. He toddles to the bag and reaches in as though he’s done it forever. He pulls out a block with the letter Y.

  Nolan returns and says to Miranda, “Whenever you’re ready.”

  Doris bends her head to touch Miranda’s: a silent benediction. “Go on,” she says, her voice as soft as dusk. “He’ll be fine with me.”

  THEIR FOOTSTEPS RESOUND as Nolan leads Miranda through double doors and down a hallway smelling like pinecones. At the end, a blue door opens to a narrow windowless room with a red floor and a yellow chair beside a gurney. Her toes in the open shoes recoil at the cold. The rest of her body shudders. All the dark was cold and strange.

  “It’s called the cooler,” Nolan says. Another word for her journal.

  They move from doorway to gurney. Tightrope walking again, a thunderous pounding in her head. She stares, unseeing, at the white tiled wall before her. Nolan says, “Jeez, they usually clean them up.” He guides her to a spot in front of the chair. Asks for “a positive eye-dee.”

  She slowly lowers her gaze and sucks in a breath. The body on the gurney is rigid, its face and neck the color of moldy bread, the mouth frozen into an O, the eyes open as in surprise. The carapace of a life reborn in the Other Life.

  So this is what death looks like.

  She finds the frigid chair with the back of her legs, sits herself down and says, “Aye, ’tis James.” She knows that shiny black suit with the satin lapels and frayed cuffs, the theatrical red shoes. His Mad King Sweeney outfit, he called it.

  He’d make his hair and eyes wild and say, “Tell me, is this a look that would sour cream?” He wanted people to think he was gone in the head so they’d stay away from him and not find out about her. “We are the gods’ hidden children,” he’d say, his voice defiant and proud.

  The suit is wet in spots, as though he’s leaking. His cheeks have sunk into his face. Terrible strange flecks lodge in his moustache and beard. She studies his chest, half-expecting its rise and fall. Sees her child self crawl into his lap and fall asleep to his thumping heart.

  Nolan says, “I’ll be right outside.” The door closes on the silent cold.

  She reaches out and lightly touches a hand, bloodless on top, deep purple where it rests on the gurney. The fingers are curled under as though they died scratching the earth. His skin is as alien as the chrysalis he once carried home to demonstrate that life follows death as surely as morning, night. “One day I will shuck this shell,” he said that day, “and emerge on the other side fluttering and swooping among flowers so beautiful they forbid themselves to grow here.”

  She wept at that, unable to imagine life without him. Being human is incomplete, he explained, disappointed she couldn’t see that. He could leave his body at will, but a craving for whiskey held him back.

  Until now.

  She swallows a deep breath, holds and releases it, trying to channel his energy. She drinks more air, holds and releases it. She listens with ears and heart.

  She never matched his concentration, never lifted the physical veil. Someday she’d summon the will to let the power enter her, he said. When she did she’d be ready to accept the legacy of her grandmother and great-grandmother, who taught him to call forth summer and winter on the harp he was to have played for her this day of Summer Sun Standing.

  She rises from the chair and sniffs the length of him. Unwashed hair, stale sweat, urine and feces: the smell of a body abandoned and a vow forsaken. He’s left her alone to care for the child; she and the lad were no longer enough to tether him to the World.

  “Could you not wait?” she cries out. She hugs herself to stop her arms from shoving him off the gurney and squeezes until she feels the pulse beneath her fingertips. She empties herself of tears then leans over him until her swollen eyes are level with his deflated ones.

  He isn’t in there.

  She whispers what he had her say each morning: “I am the same and not the same as I was before.”

  “As tonight’s moon will not return tomorrow,” he’d say, “you will emerge altered after each night’s sleep, after each book you read, after each moment you experience.”

  She tugs out a strand of his ginger hair for herself and removes the red shoes for Cian. Gives thanks for the hallway’s warmth and Nolan leaning against the wall.

  “Shouldn’t he be buried in those?”

  “A butterfly won’t be needing shoes.”

  In a small room with a narrow table and two chairs Nolan records her answers on a Death Information Form. James Michael Haggerty: born March 3, 1907, County Meath, Ireland. Spouse Eileen Reagan Haggerty: born October 10, 1918, Milford, Massachusetts, deceased January 7, 1943, Providence, Rhode Island. Miranda knows these places only on maps, but their names, along with the dates, are bound into her memory from a page in a book James kept, inscribed with his flourishes, his script more beautiful than hers despite all her practice. Providence is where James said he met Eileen. He was a visiting professor at the university for which she organized collections of scholarly books and papers.

  The Form demands the deceased’s children’s names and birthdates.

  “Miranda Brighid Haggerty,” she says, “May 12, 1940, Providence, Rhode Island.” She was named after Prospero’s daughter and a Celtic goddess. Nolan writes the goddess’s name as it’s pronounced— Breege—and she doesn’t correct him. He waits a moment. “And Cian?”

  On a mattress with James saying “Float, float” as Danú possessed her womb.

  “Miranda will suffice.”

  James catching Cian. The pulsating cord, the bloody placenta.

  A tight-lipped smile. “We’ll hav
e to talk about that eventually. Father have insurance?”

  “Sure I don’t know.”

  “No matter. The city will bury him.” He hands her a large, bulky brown envelope. “Some items he had with him.”

  Inside are James’s brown leather billfold, cracked at the fold, his playing cards and two small paper bags. Inside the billfold: the library card and a dollar bill. She’ll wait to open the bags when Nolan isn’t watching.

  She inquires about Nicholas. Nolan says he’s in a place called Quarantine. He can’t say when Miranda will see him again.

  She asks, “Why did yourself come if you thought James lived alone?”

  “It’s my job to doubt what others tell me.”

  DADDY WAS HOME. His briefcase met the floor with a soft plunk and a hanger scraped the rod as he hung up his jacket. Linda waited for him to call out in the voice she pictured rising from a deep, black well.

  “James Haggerty died yesterday. A heart attack, apparently. I stopped in at Tony’s for a new wiper and he told me.” Daddy often did that when he got home: started talking without checking if anyone was around to listen, spilling his news at once as if he’d forget if he didn’t. His shoes rattled the furnace grate as he crossed into the dining room where Linda stood behind her chair on the waxed wood floor, starving, as usual, counting the purple fleurs-de-lis on the wallpaper to distract her mind from her stomach.

  Steam rose from the green beans Mother carried out from the kitchen. “I didn’t think he was that old,” she said. She always got gussied up before Daddy came home, putting on nylons and makeup, fixing her hair. If Daddy noticed, he never let on. That evening Mother was in a full-skirted baby blue dress with a wide white belt and her usual black heels. When Linda ate at Tereza’s the week before—the Dobras had called it supper—Mrs. Dobra was barefoot. Her nipples showed under her scoop-necked blouse and her legs through a thin wraparound skirt.

  “Late forties, according to Tony.” Daddy took his position behind Mother’s chair, ready to hold it out. His white shirt was damp under the arms, his round face flushed from heat.

  “Must’ve been the drink, then,” Mother said.

  “Did he die in his house?” Linda asked.

  “Hello, kiddo!” Daddy said. “I forgot to give you a hug.”

  Linda stepped into the brick warmth of his open arms. He smelled of starch and underarms. “Did he die in that big house?” she said into his chest.

  “No, on the Pennsy from New York. He’d gone into the city for some reason. Had bags of strange stuff in his pockets, so they say.”

  Linda had ridden the fifteen miles into New York City on the train once with Mother and Daddy. She pictured the man she knew only as Crazy Haggerty sitting on a slippery brown seat, his shoulders swaying with the motion of the train. “What kind of strange stuff?”

  “I think that’s everything,” Mother said, surveying the table, leaving Linda’s words to hover in the air like dragonflies. Daddy pulled out Mother’s chair. She sat and smoothed the tablecloth, brushing away invisible crumbs. Daddy took his place opposite her and Linda hers between them. They bowed their heads.

  Daddy said, “For what we are about to receive we are truly grateful.”

  They removed the linen napkins from under their forks. Custommade pads and a white linen cloth protected the ski-legged cherry wood table Daddy had bought Mother last year for their fifteenth anniversary.

  At Tereza’s, Mrs. Dobra had taken two pans right off the stove and set them on the bare wooden table without the slightest concern about scorch marks. “Dig in,” she’d said: to canned corn and stewed tomatoes and hot dog pieces, like chopped up worms, swimming in baked beans. Eight-year-old Allen had stuck his hand in a huge bowl of potato chips. No one said grace. The table wasn’t quite big enough for five people. Tereza’s stepfather, Jimmy, straddled the chair between Allen and Linda, his thigh pressing against hers. He was slighter than Daddy but the muscles on his arms stood out more. A construction worker, Tereza had said. They moved whenever he ran out of work.

  “What kind of strange stuff?” Linda asked again.

  Mother put a thin slice of roast chicken, a small mound of mashed potatoes and a spoonful of green beans on Linda’s plate. A canned peach-half waiting in a small dish on the sideboard would be her dessert. Since Linda had inherited her father’s build, Mother said, she’d have to watch what she ate for the rest of her life. Linda’s ashblonde hair came from her mother, which was lucky, Mother said, because the gray would blend in when Linda got old and be hardly noticeable. Tereza’s black hair was “a regular rat’s nest,” according to Mother, who set Linda’s hair in tidy pincurls every Saturday night.

  “Apparently he had a child,” Daddy said, unbuttoning his cuffs. “Possibly two.” He rolled up his sleeves. “Tony had quite a bit to say about that.”

  “Really.” Linda recognized the look Mother gave Daddy as a warning. When she was younger, they’d spoken in pig Latin. Eally-ray.

  “What did you do today, Linda?” Daddy asked.

  “Hung around with Tereza.”

  “Interesting expression, that. Can you be more specific?” To Daddy, slang exposed an indolent mind and profanity a dearth of imagination. A single new word in your vocabulary, he claimed, could help you see the world differently. Each month, Linda memorized the words in Reader’s Digest ’s “It Pays to Increase Your Word Power.” Daddy might have been impressed if she’d said confabulated, but it wouldn’t have expressed the joy, the shivering bliss, of having a friend who wanted to spend the whole day with you.

  “I don’t know. We just talked and stuff.” She didn’t let on that she and Tereza had been in eyeshot of Crazy Haggerty’s spooky old house. “How old’s his child? Boy or girl?”

  “That’s not open for discussion,” Mother said.

  “Why not?”

  “Don’t argue with your mother. Did you help around the house?”

  “She peeled potatoes and set the table.”

  “Good. He had a teenaged daughter and there’s a little boy who might be hers.”

  “Roger!”

  Dinner at Tereza’s had ended badly, too, after Jimmy asked Linda if she’d ever eaten wild boar and she said no sir, and he said it tasted like polar bear and Tereza made a rude noise and said how would he know. Jimmy asked if Tereza was looking for trouble and Mrs. Dobra rushed in to explain that, after the war, before she and Jimmy met, he had worked in the North. Jimmy said he could tell his own stories. He’d waggled his fork at Tereza and said it was in Thunder Bay, Miss Smartass, that’s in Canada, in case you haven’t learnt that yet, I’m not the dumb fuck you think I am. Nobody spoke after that, just applied themselves to getting the meal over and done with, Linda pretending she hadn’t heard Jimmy’s dearth of imagination.

  After dinner, her parents sat in the backyard while Linda did the dishes, a chore she rarely objected to because it let her pick at the leftovers. Tonight it also allowed her to eavesdrop through the window over the sink, her ears on full alert to the rasp of Daddy’s match as he lit his pipe. Their voices were as faint as fly hums at first, but soon came a buzzing and a hornet-like crossness that was loud enough for Linda to pick out words.

  “He should have been shot.”

  “No point poking a stick in his dead eye, Betty.”

  “Why are you defending him?”

  “I’m not. I don’t know enough about it to blame or defend. Neither do you.”

  “A teenager with a baby and nobody knew she existed. Isn’t that enough?”

  Their voices dropped again and then tapered off. Linda wondered why “a teenager with a baby and nobody knew” meant Crazy Haggerty should have been shot. But Mother said no more. She came in and went up to bed—her modus operandi, as Nancy Drew would have said, when she was peeved. She’d have a headache tomorrow and not come down for breakfast. Linda finished the dishes, thinking about the baffling girl who’d emerged from Crazy Haggerty’s house, the child’s arms around her neck, the sway
of her hips as she stepped toward the police car. Something about her had seemed older than teenaged, something that made Linda squirm.

  Daddy stayed outside for a while, smoking his pipe. Later, Linda sat on his lap, as she did most nights when they watched TV. His lap never objected to her build.

  “BILL HAS TO CLEAN UP some paperwork,” Doris explains as she leads Miranda to a grape-green automobile longer and lower than the police car. “We’ll see him at home later.” She places Miranda’s valise on the back seat. Miranda gets to sit in the front, holding Cian on her lap. His hair smells like Doris.

  “I can’t imagine how you must be feeling,” Doris says.

  Like a tree drained of its sap. Miranda wants to be in her bed, sleeping this bizarre dream away. Even the air is drowsy.

  “If you want to talk, my ears are wide open. I don’t suppose you felt like saying much to those two galoots.” Doris waves at Nolan and Dunn as the cars part ways.

  James said every word generates its own force and every action its own unique consequences. Miranda wouldn’t be in Doris’s car if that last morning had gone differently. James built a fire on the stove and set water on to boil as he did each morning. He took the chamber pots out the back door, as usual, Nicholas in his wake. Miranda nursed Cian and bathed him in the sink, mixing cold water from a bucket and hot water from the stove. James returned, kissed Cian’s head and recited the line from Joyce he always quoted when he came upon her bathing the lad: Why, when I was a nipper every morning of my life I had a cold bath, winter and summer.

  “See how light it still is and already seven,” Doris says, her unborn babe’s chrysalis nudging the steering wheel. “The longest day of the year. We should eat outside.”

  Miranda and James usually prepared breakfast together, she stirring the porridge, he slicing the bread. They’d eat in silence, James hunched in his chair, concentrating on his food. Conversation came later in the day over tea, after her lessons or following the evening’s “reading from the gospel,” as James jokingly called it, the gospel being the sometimes tragic Ulster Cycle tales or myths of the Tuatha Dé Danann who arrived in Ireland in dark clouds that blotted out the sun for three days and nights. Sometimes he read in unfamiliar tongues, but she liked his voice in any language. It saturated her mind, crowding out her own muddled thoughts.