Fishing the Sloe-Black River

SISTERS

I have come to think of our lives as the colors of that place — hers a piece of bog cotton, mine as black as the water found when men slash too deep in the soil with a shovel.

I remember when I was fifteen, cycling across those bogs in the early evenings, on my way to the dancehall in my clean, yellow socks. My sister stayed at home. I tried to avoid puddles, but there would always be a splash or two on the hem of my dress. The boys at the dancehall wore blue anoraks and watched me when I danced. Outside they leaned against my bike and smoked shared cigarettes in the night. I gave myself. One of them once left an Easter lily in the basket. Later it was men in granite-gray suits who would lean into me, heads cocked sideways like hawks, eyes closed. Sometimes I would hold my hands out beyond their shoulders and shape or carve something out of my fingers, something with eyes and a face, someone very little, within my hand, whose job it was to try to understand. Between a statue of Our Lady and a Celtic cross commemorating the dead of Ireland, my hand made out the shape of a question mark as a farm boy furrowed his way inside me.

A man with a walrus mustache gone gray at the tips took me down to the public lavatories in Castlebar. He was a sailor. He smelled of ropes and disuse and seaport harridans. There were bays and coverts, hillsides and heather. My promiscuity was my autograph. I was hourglassy, had turf-colored hair and eyes as green as wine bottles. Someone once bought me an ice-cream in Achill Island, then we chipped some amethyst out of the rock banks and climbed the radio tower. We woke up late at the edge of a cliff, with the waves lashing in from the Atlantic. There was a moon of white reflected in the water. The next day at the dinner table, my father told us that John F. Kennedy had landed a man on the moon. We knew that Kennedy was long dead — he stared at us from a picture frame on the wall — but we said nothing. It was a shame, my father said, looking at me, that the moon turned out to be a heap of ash.

My legs were stronger now, and I strolled to the dancehall, the bogs around me wet and dark. The boy with the Easter lily did it again, this time with nasturtiums stolen from outside the police station. My body continued to go out and around in all the right places. My father waited up for me, smoking Woodbines down to the quick. He told me once that he had overheard a man at his printing shop call me “a wee whore,” and I heard him weeping as I tuned in Radio Luxembourg in my room.

My older sister, Brigid, succeeded with a spectacular anorexia. After classes she would sidle off to the bog, to a large rock where she thought nobody could see her, her Bible in her pocket, her sandwiches in her hand. There she would perch like a raked robin, and bit by bit she would tear up the bread like a sacrament and throw it all around her. The rock had a history — in penal times it had been used as a meeting place for mass. I sometimes watched her from a distance. She was a house of bones, my sister, throwing her bread away. Once, out on the rock, I saw her take my father’s pliers to her fingers and slowly pluck out the nail from the middle finger of her left hand. She did it because she had heard that the Cromwellians had done it to harpists in the seventeenth century, so they could no longer pluck the cat-gut to make music. She wanted to know how it felt. Her finger bled for days. She told our father that she had caught her hand in a school door. He stayed unaware of Brigid’s condition, still caught in the oblivion caused, many years before, by the death of our mother — lifted from a cliff by a light wind while out strolling. Since that day Brigid had lived a strange sort of martyrdom. People loved her frail whiteness but never really knew what was going on under all those sweaters. She never went to the dancehall. Naturally, she wore the brown school socks that the nuns made obligatory. Her legs within them were thin as twigs. We seldom talked. I never tried. I envied her that unused body that needed so little, yet I also loved her with a bitterness that only sisters can have.

Now, two decades later, squashed in the boot of a car, huddled under a blanket, I ask myself why I am smuggling myself across the Canadian border to go back to a country that wouldn’t allow me to stay, to see a sister I never really knew in the first place.

It is dark and cramped and hollow and black in here. My knees are up against my breasts. Exhaust fumes make me cough. A cold wind whistles in. We are probably still in the countryside of Quebec. At every traffic light I hope that this is the border station leading into Maine. Perhaps when we’re finally across we can stop by a frozen lake and skim out there on the ice, Michael and I.

When I asked Michael to help smuggle me across the border he didn’t hesitate. He liked the idea of being what the Mexicans call a “coyote.” He said it goes with his Navajo blood, his forefathers believing that coyotes howled in the beginning of the universe. Knowing the reputation of my youth, he joked that I could never have believed in that legend, that I must go in for the Big Bang. In the boot of the car I shudder in the cold. I wear a blue wool hat pulled down over my ears. My body does not sandwich up the way it used to.

I met Michael on a Greyhound bus in the early seventies, not long after leaving the bogs. I had left Brigid at home with her untouched platefuls of food. At Shannon Airport my father had cradled me like his last cigarette. On the plane I realized that I was gone forever to a new country — I was tired of the knowing way women back home nodded their heads at me. I was on my way to San Francisco, wearing a string of beads. In the bus station at Port Authority I noticed Michael first for his menacing darkness; his skin looked like it had been dipped in hot molasses. And then I saw the necklace of teeth that hung on his chest. I learned later that they were the teeth of a mountain lion. He had found the lion one afternoon in the Idaho wilderness, the victim of a road kill. Michael came over and sat beside me, saying nothing, smelling faintly of woodsmoke. His face was aquiline, acned. His wrists were thick. He wore a leather waistcoat, jeans, boots. On the bus I leaned my head on his shoulder, feigning sleep. Later my hand reached over and played with the necklace of teeth. He laughed when I blew on them. I said they sounded like wind chimes, tinkling together, though they didn’t sound anything like that at all. We rattled across a huge America. I lived with him for many years, in San Francisco on Dolores Street near the Mission, the foghorn of the Golden Gate keening a lament. After the raid, in 1978, when I was gone and home in Ireland, I would never again sleep with another man.

The car shudders to a halt. My head lolls against the lid of the boot. I would rather pick my way through a pillar of stone with a pin than go through this again. There is a huge illegal trade going on with cigarettes and alcohol crossing the border. We could be stopped. Michael wanted to take me across by paddling a canoe down the Kennebec River, but I said I would rather just do it in the car. Now I wish we’d done it his way. “Up a lazy river with a robin song, it’s a lazy, lazy river we can float along, blue skies up above, everyone’s in love.” My father had sung that when Brigid and I were young.

Slowly the car pitches forward. I wonder whether we are finally there or whether this is just another traffic light along the way. We stop again and then we inch up. I ask myself what plays in Michael’s head. I was shocked when I saw him first, just three days ago, because he still looked much the same after thirteen years. I was ashamed of myself. I felt dowdy and gray. When I went to sleep on his sofabed, alone, I remembered the new creases on the backs of my thighs. Now I feel more his equal. He has cut his hair and put on a suit to lessen the risk of being caught — giving him some of the years that I have gained, or lost, I don’t know which.

A muffle of voices. I curl myself even deeper into a ball and press my face against the cold metal. If the border patrol asks to examine his luggage, I am gone again, history come full circle. But I hear the sound of a hand slapping twice on the roof of the car, a grind of gears, a jolt forward, and within moments we are in America, the country, as someone once said, that God gave to Cain. A few minutes down the road I hear Michael whoop and roar and laugh.

“Greetings,” he shouts, “from the sebaceous glands. I’m sweating like a bear. I’ll have you out of there in no time, Sheona.”

His voice sounds smothered and my toes are frozen.

On an August night in 1978 I clocked off my job as a singing waitress in a bar down on Geary Street. Wearing an old wedding dress I had bought in a pawn shop, hair let loose, yellow socks on — they were always my trademark — I got into our old Ford pickup with the purple hubcaps and drove up the coast. Michael was spending the weekend in a cabin somewhere north of Mendocino, helping bring in a crop of California’s best. Across the bridge where the hell-divers swooped, into Sausalito, around by Mount Tamalpais, where I flung a few cigarette butts to the wind for the ghosts of Jack Kerouac and John Muir, and up along the coast, the sun rose like a dirty red aspirin over the sea. I kept steady to the white lines, those on the dashboard and those on the road. The morning had cracked well when I turned up the Russian River and followed the directions Michael had written on the back of a dollar bill.

The cabin was up a drunken mountain road. Cats leaped among parts of old motorbikes, straggles of orange crates, pieces of a windmill. Tatters of wild berries hung on bushes, and sunlight streamed in shafts between the sequoias. Michael and his friends met me with guns slung down at their waists. There had been no guns in Mayo, just schoolgirl rumors of an IRA man who lived in a boghole about a mile from Brigid’s rock. They scared me, the guns. I asked Michael to tuck his away. Late that evening, when all the others had gone with a truckload of dope, I asked him if we could spend a moment together. I wanted to get away from the guns. I didn’t get away from them for long, though. Four hours later, naked on the side of a creek, I was quoting Kavanagh for some reason, my own love banks green and rampant with leaves, when I looked up beyond Michael’s shoulder at four cops, guns cocked, laughing. They forced Michael to bend over and shoved a tree branch up his anus. They tried to take me, these new hawks, and eventually they did. Four in a row. This time with my eyes closed, hands to the ground and nothing to watch me from my fingerhouse.

Five days later, taking the simple way out — a lean, young lawyer in a white fedora had begun to take an interest in my case — they deported me for not having a green card. Past the Beniano Bufano Peace statue — the mosaic face of all races — at San Francisco International, handcuffed, they escorted me to JFK on to an Aer Lingus Boeing 747. I flung my beads down the toilet.

Michael lifts me from the boot. He swirls me around in his arms, in the middle of a Maine dirt road. It is pitch black but I can almost smell the lakes and the fir trees, the clean snow that nestles upon branches. A winter Orion thrusts his sword after Taurus in the sky. “That could be a ghost,” I whisper to Michael, and he stops his dance. “I mean, the light hitting our eyes from those stars left millions of years ago. It just might be that the thing is a ghost, already imploded. A supernova.”

“The only thing I know about the stars is that they come out at night,” he says. “My grandfather sometimes sat in a chair outside our house and compared them to my grandmother’s teeth.”

I laugh and lean into him. He looks up at the sky.

“Teach me some more scientific wonders,” he says.

I babble about the notion that if we could travel faster than the speed of light we would get to a place we never really wanted to go before we even left. He looks at me quizzically, puts his fingers on my lips, walks me to the car and sits me down gently on the front seat, saying, “Your sister.”

He takes off his tie, wraps it around his head like a bandanna, feels for a moment for his gone ponytail, turns up the stereo, and we drive toward New York.

I had seen my sister one day in Dublin, outside the Dawson Lounge. I suppose her new convent clothes suited her well. Black to hide the thinness. Muttering prayers as she walked. The hair had grown thick on her hands, and her cheekbones were sculleried away in her head. I followed behind her, up around St. Stephen’s Green and on down toward the Dail. She shuffled her feet slowly, never lifting them very high off the ground. She stopped at the gate of the Dail, where a group of homeless families sat protesting their destitution, flapping their arms like hummingbirds to keep themselves warm. It was Christmas Eve. She talked with a few of them for a moment, then took out a blanket and sat down among them. I looked from the other side of the street. It shocked me to see her laugh and to watch a small girl leap into her lap. I walked away, bought a loaf of bread, and threw it to the ducks in the Green. A boy in Doc Martens glared at me and I thought of the dancehall.

“None of these coins have our birthdates on them anymore,” I say as I search in my handbag for some money for a toll booth.

“I enjoyed that back there,” he says. “Hell of a lot better than being on a scaffold. Hey, you should have seen the face of the border patrol guy. Waved me through without batting an eyelid.”

“You think we just get older and then we fade away?”

“Look, Sheona, you know the saying.”

“What saying?”

“A woman is as old as she feels.” Then he chuckles. “And a man is as old as the woman he feels.”

“Very funny.”

“I’m only kidding,” he says.

“I’m sorry, Mike. I’m just nervous.”

I lean back in the seat and watch him. In the six years of notes he sent from prison there is one I remember the most. “I wouldn’t mind dying in the desert with you, Sheona,” he had written. “We could both lick the dew off the rocks, then watch the sun and let it blind us. Dig a hole and piss in the soil. Put a tin can in the bottom of the hole. Cover it with a piece of plastic and weigh down the center with a rock. The sun’ll evaporate the piss, purify it, let it gather in droplets on the plastic, where it’ll run toward the center, then drop in the tin can, making water. After a day we can drink from each other’s bodies. And then die well. Let the buzzards come down from the thermals. I hate being away from you. I am dead already.”

The day I received that letter, I thought of quitting my secretarial job in a glass tower down by Kavanagh’s canals. I thought of going back to Mayo and striking a shovel into a boghole, seeping down into the water, breathing out the rest of my life through a hollow piece of reed grass. But I never quit my job and I never wrote back to him. The thought of that sort of death was way too beautiful.

My days in Dublin were derelict and ordinary. A flat on Appian Way near enough to Raglan Road, where my own dark hair weaved a snare. Thirteen years somehow slipped away, like they do, not even autumn foliage now, but mulched delicately into my skin. I watched unseen as a road sweeper in Temple Bar whistled like he had a bird in his throat. I began to notice cranes swinging across the skyline. Dublin had become cosmopolitan. A drug addict in a doorway on Leeson Street ferreted in his bowels for a small bag of cocaine. Young boys wore baseball hats. The canals carried fabulously colored litter. The postman asked me if I was lonely. I went to Torremolinos in 1985 and watched girls my age get knocked up in alleyways.

But I didn’t miss the men. I bought saucepans, cooked beautiful food, wrote poems near a single bar electric heater. Once I even went out with a policeman from Donegal, but when he lifted my skirt I knocked his glasses off. At work, in a ribboned blouse, I was so unhappy that I couldn’t even switch jobs. When making calls, I was always breaking my fingernails on the phone slots. I watched a harpist in the Concert Hall playing beautifully on nylon strings. In a moment of daring I tried to find my sister exactly two years to the day that I had seen her, huddled with the homeless in a Foxford blanket. “Sister Brigid,” I was told, “is spreading the word of God in Central America.” I didn’t have the nerve to ask for the address. All I knew of Central America was dogs leaner than her.

We are off the highway now, looking for a New Hampshire petrol station. The sun in the east is bleeding into the darkness. Michael refuses to fill up at the garages that lick the big interstate. He prefers a smaller town. He’s still the same man, now wearing his necklace of mountain lion teeth over an opennecked Oxford. Because I trust him, because he still believes in simpler, more honest things, I tell him about why I think Brigid is sick. I am very simple in my ideas of Central America. My information comes from newspapers. She is sick, I tell him, because she was heartbroken among the maguey plants. She is sick because there are soldiers on the outskirts of town who carry Kalashnikovs or AK-47’s, hammering the barrels through the brick kilns that make the dough rise. She is sick because she saw things that she thought belonged only in Irish history. She is sick because she saw girls bonier than her and because there was no such thing as a miracle to be found. She is sick, she is in an infirmary convent on Long Island for nuns who have or have not done their jobs. Though really, honestly, I think she is sick because she knew I was watching when she flung her bread from a rock and I never said a word.

“You’re too hard on yourself,” says Michael.

“I’ve been picking my way through a pillar of stone with a pin.”

“What does that mean?”

“Oh come on, Michael, it’s not as if we’re twenty-one any more. All those years spat away.”

“It doesn’t help to be bitter,” he says.

“Oh, and you’re not bitter?”

“I’ve learned not to think about it.”

“That’s worse than being bitter, Michael.”

“Come on,” he says, reaching across to take my hand. “You can’t change the past.”

“No we can’t,” I say. My hand is limp. “We can’t, can we?”

Embarrassed at my anger, I tell him once again, for the umpteenth time over the last three days, about how I found out where she was. I decided, only a week ago, to go back and see my father. I brought him a carton of Major because I couldn’t find Woodbines. I have no idea what stirred me to see him, except that one of the other secretaries in Dublin had talked all morning long about her pet collie dog throwing up over her favorite rug. She was actually weeping over it, more for the rug, I imagine, than for the dog. I walked out to the canal and sat watching boys diving in, breaking up the oily slime. Their recklessness astounded me. I went to Heuston station and took a train west.

He was dead, of course. The couple who had bought our old bungalow had three babies now. They said they had been with my father in a hospital in Galway when, in an oxygen tent, he asked for a nip of Bushmill’s and a smoke. The doctors had told him that he would explode and he had said, “That’s grand, give me a smoke, so.” The husband asked who I was even though he knew exactly who I was. I didn’t want him to bring out nasturtiums or Easter lilies. I told him, in front of his wife, that I was a distant cousin. In a whisper, at the gate, he told me he had heard that Brigid was sick and was living now in a convent in the “Big Apple.” He stole a furtive kiss on my cheek. I wiped it off in disgust, went home to Dublin and made phone calls until I found Michael living in Quebec, a foreman at a building site.

“Michael, I need to get back in. I can get a flight from London into Canada, no hassle.”

“I’ll pick you up at the airport in Montreal.”

“Are you married?” I asked.

“Are you kidding? Are you?”

“Are you kidding?” I laughed. “Will you take me there?”

“Yeah.”

It’s one highway, 95, all the way, a torrent of petrol stations, neon signs, motels, fast-food spires. Michael talks of a different world beyond this, where in his boredom he watched the sun fall and rise and fall again. San Quentin had taught him about looking out windows. The day he got out, in a suit two sizes too big, he learned how to cartwheel again and ended up tearing the polyester knees. He took a bus to Yosemite and got a job as a guide. He took a motorbike, a “rice burner” he called it, from California to Gallup, New Mexico, where his mother and father pissed away a monthly government check into a dry creekbed at the back of their house. Michael slept in a shed full of Thunderbird bottles, a hole in the corrugated ceiling where he watched the stars, bitterly charting their roll across the sky. He followed them east. He climbed scaffolds to build New York City high-rises. Navaho and Mohawk climbers were in big demand for that type of job and the money was good.

Then there was a girl. She brought him to Quebec. They climbed frozen waterfalls in a northern forest. The girl was long gone, but the waterfalls weren’t. Maybe, he says, when we get back to Quebec he’ll put me in a harness and spiked boots and we’ll go scaling. I finger my thighs and say perhaps.

Floods of neon rush by.

We stop in a diner and a trucker offers Michael ten dollars for the lion-tooth necklace. Michael tells him that it’s a family heirloom and then, trying to make sure that I don’t hear — me, in my red crocheted cardigan and gray skirt — the trucker offers him a bag full of pills. Michael still has that sort of face. It’s been years since I’ve been wired, and I have a faint urge to drop some pills. But Michael thanks the trucker, says that he hasn’t done speed in years and we drive away.

By late evening the next day, we snarl into the New York City traffic and head down toward the Village. Michael’s eyes are creased and tired. The car is littered with coffee cups and the smell of cigarettes lingers in our clothes. The city is much like any other to me now, a clog of people and cars. It seems appropriate that there is no room for us in the Chelsea Hotel, no more Dylan, no more Behan, no more Cohen remembering us well. Old songs flow through me as we drive away. We stay with a friend of Michael’s on Bleecker Street. I have brought two nightdresses in my suitcase. My greatest daring is that I don’t wear either of them. Michael and his friend curl on the ends of the sofa. I sleep in a bed, scared of the sheets. Four red-beaked hawks in badges grunting down from the thermals by a gentle creek in sequoia sunlight. A bouquet of boys shimmy in from the bogs in brown tweed hats and pants tucked in with silver bicycle clips. My father lights a carton of cigarettes and burns in a plastic tent. A nun runs around with dough rising up in her belly. My wrists pinned to pine needles, no light wind to carry me away. Blood running down the backs of his thighs. The talons of a robin carrying off flowers. I toss and turn in sweat that gathers in folds and it is not until Michael comes over and kisses my eyelids that I find sleep.

On the drive out to Long Island I buy a bunch of daffodils from a street vendor. He tells me that daffodils mean marriage. I tell him that they’re for a nun. He tugs at his hat. “You never know, hon,” he says, “you never know these days.”

Michael still gropes for the back of his hair as he drives, and every now and then he squeezes my forearm and says it’ll be all right. The expressway is a vomit of cars but gradually, as we move, the traffic thins out and the pace quickens. Occasional flecks of snow get tossed away by the windshield wipers. I curl into a shell and listen to the sound of what might be waves. I am older now. I have no right to be afraid. I think about plucking the petals from the flowers, one by one. We drive toward the ocean. Far off I can see gulls arguing over the waves.

The convent at Bluepoint looks like a school. There seems to be little holy about the place except for the statue of Our Lady on the front lawn, a coat of snow on her shoulders. We park the car and I ask Michael to wait. From under his shirt collar I flick out the necklace of teeth and, for the first time since I’ve seen him, kiss him flush on the lips. “Go on,” he says, “don’t be getting soppy on me now. And don’t stay too long. Those waterfalls in Quebec melt very quickly.”

He turns the radio up full blast and I walk toward the front entrance. Hold. Buckle. Swallow. The words of a poet who should have known: “What I do is me. For that I came.” I rasp my fingers along the wood but it takes a long time for the heavy door to swing open.

“Yes dear?” says the old nun. She is Irish too, her face creased into dun and purple lines.

“I’d like to see Brigid O’Dwyer.”

She looks at me, scans my face. “No visitors, I’m sorry,” she says. “Sister Brigid needs just a wee bit of peace and quiet.” She begins to close the door, smiling gently at me.

“Is mise a dhreifeur,” I stutter. I am her sister.

The door opens again and she looks at me, askance.

“Bhfuil tú cinnte?” Are you sure?

“Sea,” I laugh. “Táim cinnte.” Yes, I’m sure.

“Cad a bhfuil uait?” she asks. What do you want?

“I want to see her. Sé do thoil é. Please.”

She stares at me for a long time. “Tar isteach. Come in, girl.” She takes the daffodils and touches my cheek. “You have her eyes.”

I move into the corridor where some other old nuns gather like moss, asking questions. “She’s very sick,” says one. “She won’t be seeing anyone.” The nun who met me at the door shuffles away. There are flowers by the doorway, paintings on the walls, a smell of potpourri, a quality of whiteness flooding all the colors. I sit in a steel chair with my knees nailed together, my hands in my lap, watching their faces, hearing the somber chatter, not responding. A statue of the Madonna stares at me. I am a teenager now in a brown convent skirt. It is winter. After camogie, in the school showers, one or two of the nuns stand around and watch my classmates and me as we wash the dirt off our legs. They see bruises on my inner thigh and then they tell me about Magdalene. I ride away from the school gates. I flagrantly pedal my bicycle with my skirt up high. I see her there, on the rock, sucking her finger, making a cross of reeds, the emblem of the saint for whom she was named. My father puts some peat on the fire. That’s grand, give me a smoke, so.

“Will you join us for a cup? She’s sleeping now.” It’s the old nun who answered the door.

“Thank you, Sister.”

“You look white, dear.”

“I’ve been traveling a long time.”

Over tea and scones they begin to melt, these women. They surprise me with their cackle and their smiles. They ask of the old place. Brigid, they say. What a character. Was she always like that? The holy spirit up to the ears?

Two nuns there had spent the last few years with her. They tell me that she had been living in El Salvador in a convent outside a coffee plantation. One day recently three other nuns in the convent were shot, one of them almost fatally, so Brigid slipped out to a mountain for a few hours to pray for their health. She was found three days later, sitting on a rock. They look at me curiously when I ask about her fingernails. No, they say, her fingernails were fine. It was the lack of food that did it to her. Five campesinos had carried her down from the mountain. She was a favorite among the locals. She had always taken food to the women in the adobe houses, and the men respected her for the way she had hidden it under her clothes, so they wouldn’t be shamed by charity. She’d spent a couple of weeks in a hospital in San Salvador, on an intravenous drip, then they transported her to Long Island to recover. She had never talked of any brothers or sisters, though she had gotten letters from Ireland. She did some of the strangest things in Central America, however. She carried a pebble in her mouth. It came all the way from the Sargasso Sea. She learned how to dance. She reared four piglets behind the sacristy in the local church. She had shown people how to skin rabbits. The pebble made little chips in her teeth. She had taken to wearing some very strange colored socks.

I start to laugh.

“Everyone,” says one of the nuns with a Spanish accent, “is allowed a little bit of madness, even if you’re a nun. I don’t see what’s wrong with that.”

“No, no, no, there’s nothing wrong with it. I’m just thinking.”

“It does get cold down there, you know,” she replies.

Someone talks about the time she burned the pinto beans. The time the pigs got loose from the pen. The time the rabbit ran away from her. Another says she once dropped a piece of cake from her dress when she knelt at the altar, and one of the priests, from Wales, said that God gave his only begotten bun. But the priest was forgiven for the joke since he was not a blasphemer, just a bit of a clown. The gardener comes in, a man from Sligo, and says: “I’ve seen more fat on a butcher’s knife than I have on your sister.” I leave the scone raisins on the side of the saucer. I am still laughing.

“Can I see her?” I say, turning to the nun who opened the door for me. “I really need to see her. I have a friend waiting for me outside and I must go soon.”

The nun shuffles off to the kitchen. I wait. I think of a piece of turf and the way it holds so much history. I should have brought my sister a sod of soil. Or a rock. Or something.

An old nun, with an African accent, singing a hymn, comes out of the kitchen, carrying a piece of toast and a glass of water. She has put a dollop of jam on the side of a white plate, “for a special occasion.” She winks at me and tells me to follow her. I feel eyes on my back, then a hum of voices as we leave the dining area. She leads me up the stairs, past a statue, eerie and white, down a long clean corridor, toward a room with a picture of Archbishop Romero on the door. We stop. I hold my breath. A piece of turf. A rock. Anything.

“Go in, child.” The nun squeezes my hand. “You’re shaking.”

“Thank you,” I say. I stand at the door and open it slowly. “Brigid?” The bedclothes are crumpled as if they’ve just been tossed. “Brigid. It’s me. Sheona.”

There’s no sound, just a tiny hint of movement in the bedsheets. I walk over. Her eyes are open, but she’s not there inside them. Her hair is netted and gray. The lines on her face cut inward. Age has assaulted her cheekbones. I feel angry. I take down the picture of the Sacred Heart that is spraying red light out into the room and place it face-down on the floor. She murmurs and a little spittle comes out the side of her mouth. So she is there, after all. I look in her eyes again. This is the first time I have seen her since we were still that age. A bitterness in there now, perhaps, borne deep. “I just want some neutral ground,” I say. Then I realize that I don’t know who I’m talking to, and I put the picture back on the wall.

I sit on the bed and touch her ashtrayed hair. “Talk to me,” I say. She turns slightly. The toast is growing cold on a plate on the floor. I have no idea if she knows who I am as I feed her, but I have a feeling she does. I’m afraid to lay my hand on her for fear of snapping bones. She doesn’t want to be fed. She hisses and spits the bread out of dehydrated lips. She closes her mouth on my fingers, but it takes no effort to pry it open. Her teeth are as brittle as chalk. I lay the toast on her tongue again. Each time it gets moister and eventually it dissolves. I wash it down with some water. I try to say something but I can’t, so I sing a Hoagy Carmichael tune, but she doesn’t acknowledge it. If I tried to lift her, I think I would find a heap of dust in my hand, my own hand, which is speaking to me again, carving out a moving shape.

I want to find out who is under the bedsheets. “Talk to me.” She rolls away and turns her back to me. I stand and look around the room. It all comes down to a lump in the bed. An empty chamber pot. Some full-bloom chrysanthemums by the window. A white plate with a smear of jam. A dead archbishop on the outside, looking in.

“Just a single word,” I say. “Just give me a single word.”

Some voices float in from the white corridor. Frantic, I move to a set of drawers and a cupboard to look at the bits and pieces that go to make up Brigid now. I pull the drawers out and dump the contents on the floor. I cannot understand the mosaic. A bible. Some neatly folded blouses. Long underwear. A bundle of letters in an elastic band. Lots of hairpins. Stamps gleaned from the Book of Kells. Letters. I do not want to read them. A painting of a man sowing seeds, by a child’s hand. A photograph of our mother and father, from a long time ago, standing together by Nelson’s Pillar, him with a cigar, her with netting hanging down from her hat. A copy of a newspaper from a recent election. A Mayan doll. Lotus-legged on the floor, I am disappointed with the clutter of somebody else’s life. I haven’t found what I’m looking for.

I shuffle to the end of the bed and lift the sheets. Her feet are blue and very cold to the touch. I rub them slowly at first. I remember when we were children, very young, before all that, and we had held buttercups to each other’s chins on the edges of brown fields. I want her feet to tell me that she remembers. As I massage I think I see her lean her head sideways and smile, though I’m not sure. I don’t know why, but I want to take her feet in my mouth. I want to, but it seems obscene, so I don’t. “Up a lazy river with a robin song, it’s a lazy, lazy river, we can float along, blue skies up above, everyone’s in love, up a lazy river with me.” She mumbles when I lean over her face and kiss her. There is spittle on her chin and she is horribly ruined.

I walk to the window. Far off, in the parking lot, I can see Michael, head slumped forward on the steering wheel, sleeping. Two nuns look at him through the passenger window, curious, a cup of tea and some scones in their hands. I watch him too, wondering about the last few days. There’s an old feeling within me that’s new now. Those teeth around his neck. I want a bicycle again. Sequoia seedlings in the basket. I want to ride through a flurry of puddles to a place where a waterfall is frozen. I will stay here for now. I know that. But when she recovers, I will go to Quebec and climb.

But there is something I need first. I smile, go away from the window, lean towards Brigid, and whisper: “Where, Sister, did you put those yellow socks of mine anyway?”