She waited for him at the edge of the canal, right near the Corkstown road, sitting on the large boulder the workers had etched their initials into, back in the day. “RK” by her side, and below it, “LK.” She traced her fingers along the letters, letting the sun beat down on her until the sounds of the dying day disappeared into the background of her worries.
The rock had soaked up the whole afternoon and was giving it back now, warm through her skirts. Below her the bank fell away in a slope of long grass gone yellow at the tips, down to the water, which sat still and brown and smelled of weed and warm mud. Dragonflies worked the reeds at the edge. Up the road, a cart was rattling home empty, and somewhere past it a dog was barking at nothing in particular.
She had to tell him the truth, she knew. Not just that she’d lost the baby, but that she would never not lose the baby, no matter how hard they tried.
She’d been told, once, a long time ago and very far from here—told it plainly, in a calm, kind voice, the way you’d tell someone the weather. Ten weeks, every time. She hadn’t believed it. She’d let herself forget it, the way you forget a bad dream by noon. And then it had been ten weeks, and it had been true, and now she sat on a warm rock with one hand pressed flat to a belly that would never hold anything for long, and it felt like there was a stone in there instead, cold, the only thing that ever would.
She had to watch his heart break, watch him rewind his life and wonder how he could have made such a critical error, and thrown his future away so completely. He’d never think it, not Rían. She knew that. But she thought it for him, over and over, and that was nearly the same.
The wind blew past, and she smelled a stew on a fire somewhere nearby, back in Corkstown. Children were laughing, ignoring their mother as she called them in for supper. The Irish—and she was Irish, too, now, wasn’t she?—they bred like rabbits. It was a point of pride. It was how they’d take over the world one day. And she had cost Rían his place in that world. Him and his ghostly descendants.
She saw him coming down the road, dusty coat over his shoulder, and she wiped the tears from her eyes, and off her cheeks. She tried to shake off the gloom she’d been wallowing in so he wouldn’t see it, wouldn’t see it coming. Would that make it better, or worse? She couldn’t decide what kind of blow would hurt him least.
He was preoccupied. He didn’t see her at all, with his gaze downcast, a ghostly pallor across his face. He looked like he’d been beaten down—not physically, but emotionally, mentally, spiritually—and was just barely dragging himself back home again. He was muttering something to himself; his lips were moving, but she couldn’t tell what it was: a prayer? a confession? or replaying a traumatic event again and again in his mind?
When he finally saw her, by chance, he stopped cold like he was afraid to come any closer. She held her breath, trying to find the expression to fit her face, but all she could do was wait…wait for him to make the first move in the game that would end their love affair forever.
His face…it shifted. The crease between his brows let go first. Then one corner of his mouth went up, and the other followed, and the whole thing kept going until it reached his eyes and crinkled them nearly shut. The sight of it broke her heart, and doubly so when he continued walking, and his steps were light, lively, and playful.
“Well then, miss,” he said, stopping just short of the boulder. “You look like you’re out waitin’ for someone.”
She couldn’t help herself, she smiled back. “Aye, I am,” she said.
“A man, I wonder?” he asked, then stage whispered: “A lover?”
She feigned scandal. “A lover?” Then she gave him a wink. “But which one?”
He laughed, kneeling down before her, taking her hands in his and kissing them. His palms were rough and hot from the day’s work, and there was dust in the creases of his knuckles. “Let me make the case that it should be me,” he said. “One, I’m dependable.”
“A good quality in a lover,” she said, like she wasn’t completely convinced. “And yet…”
“And I can make you laugh,” he said.
“The position is for a lover, not a clown.”
“Ah!” he said. “But can a clown kiss you like this?”
He leaned in and kissed her, gently at first, and then stronger, more urgently. She could taste the sweat on him, the mint leaf he chewed to keep himself cool in the summer. Every thought in her head went spinning down and away, like water through an open sluice, racing down and out where she would never—
He pulled away, giving her a devious grin. “Well?”
She rolled her eyes. “The clown has you beat.”
He let out a bellowing laugh and scooped her off the boulder, spinning her ‘round and ‘round as she wrapped her arms around him and pulled herself in for another kiss. Her skirts flew out and snapped around her ankles. The canal and the road and the line of trees went wheeling past behind his head, gold and green and gold again, and his arms were locked so tight under her she couldn’t have fallen if she’d tried.
If this is what it could be, forever, then maybe that would be enough. A blissful dizziness, hot enough to melt the ice in January. Maybe the rest of it didn’t matter, if they had each other, in moments like this—crackling intimacy so engrossing, they didn’t even care the whole world could be watching.
When he finally stopped spinning, she let her lips leave his, and smiled sweetly into his eyes. “I missed you,” she said.
“Aye, hard not to,” he said, then started to stumble, because he was well good and dizzy. “Oh dear…”
He tumbled backward, but let Maggie go just in time to land on her feet and watch her poor husband topple over and roll halfway down the slope to the canal, flattening a long track through the grass. He flopped there, melodramatically, arms wide and head back, and let out a loud sigh.
“Mrs Kelly!” he called. “Mrs Kelly, I’ve lost you!”
She laughed and made her way over to him, kneeling down beside him. “I’m right here, Mr Kelly,” she said.
“Where?” he said, voice wavering. “Oh, I’m all spun around! I can hardly see straight! Where are you?” He reached out a hand and planted it onto her face. “Ah! Is that…” he moved the hand around, feeling his way around her face, her hair, her neck, her—
“Mr Kelly!” she gasped, and swatted him. “What would the clown say?”
“Oh, who cares what he says?” he laughed, and grabbed her by the waist and rolled her further down the slope with him, until they were both covered in grass and each other, inches from the gently lapping water. The ground was cooler down there, and damp, and it smelled of crushed clover and canal mud. They lay there, tangled up, catching their breaths, her hand on him, feeling his heartbeat slow, slow, slow…
“I feel like a child,” he sighed, closing his eyes to face the setting sun.
“You act like one, too,” she said, and lay her head on his chest.
“Does it go away, do you think? This freedom? Do we have to grow out of it?”
“If we haven’t yet…” she said softly.
“My father was never like this,” he said. “I don’t think I ever saw the man smile. He only laughed with an edge to it. Like happiness was a sin. I always felt like I was failing him, when I enjoyed my life a little. When I acted reckless and carefree.”
“There’s nothing wrong with happiness,” she said.
“I hope so. I want it to be so. But what if he knew something I don’t, yet? I’m so terrified sometimes, just…”
She turned her head to look at him, but he was still facing the sun, eyes closed tight.
“What if I do it wrong?” he asked.
She reached up, put a hand to his cheek. “You won’t,” she said. “You couldn’t.”
“I never really thought about carrying his legacy,” he said. “I was so concerned with getting out, I never had a chance to ask the questions…to get the answers I’d need when I got where I was going.”
Maggie rested her head back down, watching the water in the canal ripple and wave. “They don’t really know, themselves,” she said. “It seems like they do, when you’re little, but they’re just as lost as anyone, in the end.”
She saw, somewhere in the recesses of her memory, a bottle tipped over in the lawn, the last dregs of brown settled on the bottom as her father’s fingers—loose, lazy, clumsy with it—tried to find something to hold onto. She’d heard a sound out of him, somewhere between a moan and a whimper, asking where it had all gone wrong, and how to get it back. She’d felt the pinpricks of grass on her legs as she sat there in the late summer sun, wondering how to become a grownup sooner, to fix the broken things around her.
“My mother died when I was little,” she said, and she felt him hold his breath. “My father tried to hold himself together, for me. He did all the right things, every chance he got. We stayed up late, reading books together. We only ate the foods we wanted, no matter what anyone said. We left dirty dishes everywhere. Laundry everywhere. B-bottles everywhere.”
She saw, clear as the canal before her, her father at the end of the long driveway, shoulders slumped and hair askew, checking over his shoulder one last time before taking that last step he’d been toying with for months. She remembered knowing exactly what it meant, and why he was doing it, and knowing there was nothing she could do to stop him. Not really. Not in the way that mattered.
“And when he was gone,” she said, “I found his diary in the back of a drawer in his desk. Every page—every single page—was full of questions. ‘Is she healthy?’; ‘Is she happy?’; ‘Is she falling behind?’; ‘Does she need friends?’.” Maggie felt the edge of the last pages between her fingers, from years away. “And then, over and over again: ‘Is she better off without me?’”
She felt Rían’s hand on her back, trying to comfort her without realizing those days were so far past, they didn’t hurt at all anymore. “He was a professor,” she said. “An educated man. He could talk your ear off about so many things, from so many angles, it made me fall asleep the second he got that certain tone to his voice. But I think that’s what worked against him, in the end. He thought fatherhood was something he could crack. Like it was an equation he could solve, and make things right.”
She looked back up at her husband, eyes dry and focused, and said: “We learn by doing. Sometimes we’re told in advance, and sometimes we make it up as we go. But none of us—not your father or mine—can control the outcome. All anyone can do is enjoy the time we have, and not get greedy for more.”
He put a hand to her cheek, looking into her eyes, and smiled sadly at her. “He’d be proud of who you are, Maggie darling,” he said. “Of who you’ve become.”
It took a moment for her to answer—after the flash of a smile, and downcast eyes: “I think he’d have liked you.”
He pulled her closer, for a quiet embrace.
The water lapped against the rocks nearby on its way off to Lowertown. Somewhere far away, the Irish children were busy eating their supper, and the world was as quiet as it dared to be. The frogs had started up in the reeds, a few at first and then all of them. The sun was almost tucked behind the trees to the west—darkness and mystery cast in its wake.
“What did you read?” asked Rían, after a time.
“Pardon?”
“When you were little. What did you read with your father?”
She freed herself, sitting next to him, staring down at her hands, struggling with memories she was afraid to unpack again. “I mean…there were so many—”
“Just one,” he said, propping himself on an elbow. “Your favourite book.”
She thought for a moment, trying to sort them by date, author, title…trying to find the one that—
“Oliver Twist,” she said, more like a question than a statement.
“Oliver Twist,” he echoed, frowning. “Hmm. Alright. We’ll have to find a copy somehow. I need to get reading.”
She gave him a bemused smile. “Reading?”
“I want to get a lay of the land before I go reading it to little Francis.”
Maggie felt her stomach twist, her heart ache. She started to turn away, but Rían caught her arm, held her back. “What’s wrong?” he asked, gently. “I didn’t mean to—”
“It’s not that,” she said. “It’s…” She had to find the way to tell him. Find the words that would make the pain as brief as possible. Find a way to break his heart without losing him.
Francis is dead.
Your son is gone.
I lost the baby.
I’m sorry.
“Rían…” she said, tongue caught on an impossible word. She put her hand to her belly, trying to find the courage to do what needed to be done. She opened her mouth, took a small breath, and…
He was watching her. Up on his elbow in the flattened grass, a stalk of it stuck in his hair, waiting, with his whole face open—the same face that had come down that road grey and beaten and turned to sunlight the second it found her. One sentence and she’d put that face back the way it was. Worse. She’d watch it happen, the way she’d watched a man at the end of a driveway, and know exactly what it meant, and know there was nothing she could do to take it back.
Not tonight. She couldn’t be the one to do it tonight. Just one more night of him like this. Just one.
The breath went out of her, and something else came in on the next one.
“I felt a kick,” she said, and pretended she was weeping tears of joy. Rían sat up quickly, hand on her belly, too, a smile so big and so genuine on his face, it was the most heartbreaking thing she had ever seen, worse even than the pages of that diary—and it was all her fault.