In the dive bar on Vernon Street, Niamh sat on a stool at the counter, sipping a wine that had turned warm. The room was nearly empty, just the group of expats in the corner, playing an endless game of poker around three tables pushed together in an awkward shamrock. She knew most of the players—Mark’s sister Jean and her boyfriend Eddie, the Edinburgh lads, the warhorse cousin only allowed soda water. For a small group the noise was phenomenal, echoing off the chairs and tables, the floor that was still wet from her mop. Behind the bar, Mark poured fresh pints, a tired slump to his tall frame. When he looked up she caught his eye. He made a face that was familiar to her. ‘I know,’ it said. ‘I know.’ Leaving her drink down on the scratched wood, she watched the liquid change to green in the reflection of the backlit mirror.
On another night she might join the card game, but she didn’t have it in her to be sociable this evening, to be the carefree Irish girlfriend who loved a party, who smiled at their stories from home as if she recognised the places and people alternately lauded and reviled within. At the start she found the camaraderie unsettling; now she was used to it, the manic inclusiveness, the quick, concentrated intimacy of the expat life.
To stop herself from staring she focused on the television above the bar whose muted coverage continued to show the same looping images of vigils and fundraisers taking place across the city for the fifth anniversary of 9/11. Politicians in dark suits, crowds with placards and candles, the older footage of the smoking towers. She’d been traipsing Midtown with her resumé when it happened, trying to find a waitressing job without papers, missing her friends who had gone back to Dublin after the summer, as she was meant to do herself. They had flown home on Labour Day, leaving her with nowhere to live and a constant, gnawing incredulity at her own decision to remain behind, which was subsumed in the mad weeks and months that followed the attacks into a more general disbelief at the world, the city, at life itself.
The urgency to leave the bar returned. She rose from the stool, ducked under the hatch, tossed the dregs of her wine in the service sink and rinsed the glass. At the rush of water hitting the basin, Mark looked up from the till receipts.
‘Are you away?’ he said.
All she could do was nod.
Walking the length of the bar, he drew her in for a hug. She wrapped her arms around his wiry torso and tried to find the words. Instead she asked him how late he would be.
‘Not too late,’ he said. ‘I promise.’
There must have been something morose in the way she gathered her purse and the white envelope of tips into her bag because just as she was about to leave he said, ‘Ni, is everything all right?’
She might have told him then were it not for the roar that came from the corner of the room. Eddie began to pace around the tables, the bantam strut of a man who had gone all in.
Mark smiled. ‘Here’s trouble.’
‘Good luck,’ she said. ‘See you soon.’
*
Though it was just gone ten, the street had a lonely, late-night sheen, steam rising in bitter wisps from the manhole covers. Many businesses had closed for the anniversary and there was, for the people with no dead to mourn, a giddy sense of unearned freedom. She had a sudden memory of a snowball fight with her older siblings, when she was six or seven, in their snatch of back garden on Donore Avenue, the spectral winter trees, and a big, protective figure that had to be her father, helping to fill her sock-covered hands with icy ammunition. But she could only really see the shape of him, vague and featureless, dark hair and brows on a faded face. She had lost the habit of thinking about home; it all seemed too long ago.
Glancing up the street in the direction of the subway station, she pictured the black hole of the tunnel, the wait. Slowly, through the muggy air that still held in its shadows the remains of the day, she went instead towards Queens Boulevard, where almost instantly a cab pulled over to her outstretched hand.
Niamh gave her address to the driver, an elderly man with a turban. He edged his way into a line of traffic. She found herself asking how his night was going, in the hope he might talk to her.
‘Busy,’ he said.
She had a longing for a Dublin taxi driver who would have half his life story told before the first set of lights. As the cab trudged forward she checked her cell for new messages but there was nothing. Nothing from her mother, or either of her brothers, only the text her sister had sent a few hours before, the initial words of which were visible with their dreadful entreaty: Niamh, please call back …
The letters started to blur, the screen felt too bright, and she grew dizzy, closing the phone, then her eyes.
‘You feel sick?’ the driver said.
She opened her eyes. ‘No,’ she said. ‘I’m grand.’
‘Many people drunk,’ he said.
‘I’ll bet.’
‘Crazy day. A day to remember.’
Slow tears began to fall on her face.
‘Oh,’ he said. ‘Oh, my dear.’
She apologised, started to laugh, which made her cry more.
‘It’s just–my father.’ A short, strangled sound came out of her. ‘You see, he died.’
The driver said some words in another language that were maybe a prayer.
‘I mean,’ she said, ‘he died today.’
When they reached her apartment block the man wouldn’t take the money. She thanked him and went quickly inside before she could meet anyone else.
*
In the bedroom she turned on the juddering air unit, sat against the headboard and tried to get a hold of what she knew was true. The starkness of her sister’s voice: Emma had delivered the news efficiently, without emotion. They’d both understood it was over, the time for angry phonecalls and accusations of heartlessness had passed. Time to get real, as their father might have said, which was the nearest he came to cursing.
She wondered if he had, in the end, any sense of his life, if he had an inkling of the man he had been. He used to say that living well was simple, all you had to do was forget yourself. As a child, while her siblings watched cartoons, she followed him around the garden in all kinds of weather, cleaving to his quiet wisdom, his stillness, to the peace of the outside world.
When she was thirteen she had to write a poem for English class to a person she truly loved. She couldn’t remember it now, just the opening line with its juvenile rhyme—her father’s rusted, trusted rake—and how the poem upset her mother so much that she regretted writing it at all.
When she was seventeen her father found out he had Alzheimer’s and they would have given anything to go back to a time when their biggest problem was a poem. She had remained at home for college, tried to help her mother. Life grew colourless and hard.
On her J1, she wasn’t thinking of the future, just wanted a reprieve from the present—her mother’s complaining, the panicked grasp of her father’s hand. Without consulting anyone, she’d dropped out, moved to New York, slept on a mattress in the living room of a fourth-floor walk-up on Fulton until she found a job that didn’t require a permit. There were ways to get home, she’d heard adventurous tales of train rides from Buffalo, pretend excursions to Niagara Falls, but that was before 9/11, before they cracked down on illegals.
She knew many who took the risk and were punished. Mark’s brother Andrew went home to Scotland for their mother’s funeral last November and couldn’t get back. Might never get back. Andrew. Maisie. Orla. Peter. Seán. The waitress from Aberdeen who called herself Fifi.
*
As it neared midnight she went to call Mark, hearing at the same time the scrape of his key in the door. False, excitable voices: Jean and Eddie, yakking about baggies and lines. While she tried to contain her anger a message bleeped on her phone, from Emma, telling her not to worry about the cost of the plane ticket, they’d refund her at home.
Down the hallway the living room door banged. Mark came into the bedroom, all six foot two of him filling the space. He sat on the end of the bed.
‘I hope you don’t mind,’ he said.
She tried to avoid his eyes, the green she loved diminished by the pupils. ‘What were ye at?’
He cuffed her ankle with his hand. ‘Jean’s a bit upset. Her job is in danger again.’
‘You have to tell them to go–now.’
Mark dropped her leg in surprise. ‘What’s wrong?’
She started to cry.
‘Niamh,’ he moved towards her, ‘you’re scaring me.’
‘My sister rang. It’s my dad.’
‘Oh, baby.’
He came for her and they held each other, and for a few minutes she felt okay. Then he went to get rid of the others. Through the wall the pumping music gave way to voices. With difficulty she went out to them, grateful for the dim lighting as she accepted their condolences, these people who had never even met her father. They left in a slew of sombre farewells.
‘Niamh,’ Mark followed her into the bedroom, ‘we have to figure–’
She shook her head, pulled him down on the mattress, snuggled her back into the warmth of his body.
‘Wish I could go with you,’ he said, kissing her ear.
The uselessness of the comment annoyed her. A familiar despair. There were no other women, nothing like that, he was loyal and honest, but almost five years in she wasn’t yet as important to him as his sister, or his closest friend who had left Scotland with him. Sometimes she thought this was how it should be, and sometimes it made her feel lost inside her own life. She turned towards him, in longing or loss, unable to distinguish between them. ‘I have you,’ he said.
*
At Jamaica station the following day she almost missed her connection by waiting on the wrong platform. With seconds to go she hauled her small suitcase of black clothes onto the train. The doors bleeped and the automated message announced no more stops till JFK. As the train picked up speed, hurtling through stations with unreadable names, she remembered the drive to the airport when she left for the J1, her mother refusing to let her take the coach with the other girls. Early morning weekend Dublin, the city still asleep. Her mother had parked up, come into the terminal with her, gripped Niamh’s arm at the escalators and said, ‘Come back to us, you hear?’ She had hugged her mother tightly, told her not to worry. Stepped quickly onto the metal comb plate. The last thing she had seen from the moving stairs was the desolate figure watching her leave.
*
Outside JFK she smoked two cigarettes in the deadening midday heat, just to remember what real sun felt like, just in case. Think positive, Mark had said to her at the station, she might be lucky, some were, and if not, he knew a woman in Nova Scotia who could help for a fee.
In the departure lounge she stopped at an information booth to buy a phonecard, searched for a payphone with privacy. The phone rang twice before her mother answered with a startlingly clear hello.
Niamh forgot how to speak.
The overhead announcer issued a last call for a Delta flight to Paris.
‘Hello? Niamh, is that you?’
‘Hi, Mam.’
‘What time is it there?’
‘Gone twelve.’
‘Are you checked in?’
‘Not yet.’
‘Check in and ring me back.’
‘It’s ok, I’ve plenty of time.’
‘You’ll miss it,’ she said. ‘You’ll miss your flight.’
‘Don’t worry, Mam, I won’t.’
‘Do you have good clothes?’
She wondered if this exchange about logistics was all that either of them could bear, but then, as if her mother could read her mind from another continent, she said, ‘He’s really gone, love. Daddy is gone.’
‘I’m so sorry, Mam.’ In the chrome surface of the phonebox her reflection blurred.
‘He asked for you,’ her mother said. ‘He kept asking.’
She clutched the receiver. ‘Please, Mam.’
As the talking continued she blanked her mind in the old way, held the phone away from her ear. Eventually she heard Emma’s voice on the line, the words loose, distant, full of instructions about people she no longer knew. This much she retained: her brother had arrived from London last night and would meet her at the airport in their father’s old Fiesta.
At the check-in desk, the agent examined her passport, asked her questions she answered robotically. The conveyer belt jerked to life behind the woman’s head, the long tongue lapping the luggage. A button was pressed and the belt stilled.
‘Your waiver has expired,’ the woman said sharply.
She nodded.
‘They’ll pull you up on it, doll.’
The kindness in her voice was harder to take. Niamh studied the queue at an adjacent desk, where a family, a smiling father and mother and three young children with unbearably innocent white-blonde hair, were dressed in matching tropical shirts. When she refocused the agent was saying something about a delay, handing her a ticket, a form for immigration, waiting for her to put up her bag.
‘Is it too big to carry on?’
‘Whatever you like,’ the agent said, ‘but better off to stow. It’s a walk to the gate.’
She pretended to consider the advice, then she gathered up her bits and pieces and rolled the bag away.
*
By the time she got back to the apartment it was late afternoon, the rackety air con the only source of life. Though she had no appetite, she poured herself a glass of milk and made two slices of toast from the fake, spongy loaf that passed for bread in America.
In a daze she cleaned the kitchen, tidied the shelves, unpacked her suitcase, all the while letting herself imagine she had returned as an adult to the place where she was still a child. Taken the flight, gone to the funeral, comforted her mother. Honoured her father. As she bent to put the empty case under the bed his face came to her for a moment in such startling definition—his broad forehead and deep-set hazel eyes, the neat row of teeth when he smiled—that her own breath seemed to go in and out of her father’s mouth. Then the face, the image disappeared; just the case again on the dusty floor. With sudden exhaustion, she dragged herself up to lie on the bed, sent a message to her brother and turned off her phone. Later in the bar they all would be full of sympathy and mitigation, but here alone in the deserted apartment there was no one to protect her from what she had done.
