Thirteen Ways of Looking

Sh'khol

It was their first Christmas in Galway together, mother and son. The cottage was hidden alongside the Atlantic, blue-windowed, slate-roofed, tucked near a grove of sycamore trees. The branches were bent inland by the wind. White spindrift blew up from the sea, landing softly on the tall hedges in the back garden.

During the day Rebecca could hear the rhythmic approach and fall of the waves against the shore. At night the sounds seemed to double.

Even in the wet chill of the December evenings, she slept with her window open, listening to the roll of the water sounding up from the low cliffs, rasping over the run of stone walls, sweeping toward the house, where it seemed to pause, hover a moment, then break.

On Christmas morning she left his present by the fireplace. Boxed and wrapped and tied with red ribbons. Tomas tore the package open, and it fell in a bundle at his feet. He had no idea what it was at first: he held it by the legs, then the waist, turned it upside down, clutched it dark against his chest.

She reached behind the tree and removed a second package: neoprene boots and a hood. Tomas stripped his shoes and shirt: he was thin, strong, pale. When he pulled off his trousers, she glanced away.

The wetsuit was liquid around him: she had bought it two sizes too big so he could grow into it. He spread his arms wide and whirled around the room: she hadn’t seen him so happy in months.

Rebecca gestured to him that they would go down to the water in a few hours.

—

THIRTEEN YEARS OLD AND THERE was already a whole history written in him. She had adopted him from Vladivostok at the age of six. On her visit to the orphanage, she had seen him crouched beneath a swing set. His hair was blond, his eyes a pellucid blue. Sores on his neck. Long, thin scars on his lower back. His gums soft and bloody. He had been born deaf, but when she called out his name he had turned quickly toward her: a sign, she was sure of it.

Shards of his story would always be a mystery to her: the early years, an ancestry she knew nothing about, a rumor that he’d been born near a rubbish dump. The possible inheritances: mercury, radiation sickness, beatings.

She was aware of what she was getting herself into, but she had been with Alan then. They stayed in a shabby hotel overlooking the Bay of Amur. Days of bribes and panic. Anxious phone calls late in the night. Long hours in the waiting room. A diagnosis of fetal alcohol syndrome gave them pause. Still, they left after six weeks, swinging Tomas between them. On the Aeroflot flight, the boy kept his head on her shoulder. At customs in Dublin, her fingers trembled over the paperwork. The stamp came down when Alan signed. She grabbed Tomas’s hand and ran him, laughing, through Arrivals: it was her forty-first birthday.

The days were good then: a three-bedroom house in Stepaside, a series of counselors, therapists, speech experts, and even her parents to help them out.

Now, seven years on, she was divorced, living out west, her parents were gone, and her task had doubled. Her savings were stretched. The bills slipped one after the other through the letter box. There were rumors that the special school in Galway might close. Still, she wasn’t given to bitterness or loud complaint. She made a living translating from Hebrew to English — wedding vows, business contracts, cultural pamphlets. There was a literary novel or two from a left-wing publisher in Tel Aviv: the pay was derisory, but she liked stepping into that otherness, and the books were a stay against indifference.

Forty-eight years old and there was still a beauty about her, an olive to her skin, a sloe to her eyes, an aquiline sweep to her nose. Her hair was dark, her body thin and supple. In the small village she fit in well, even if she stood at a sharp angle to the striking blondness of her son. She relished the Gaeltacht, the shifting weather, the hard light, the wind off the Atlantic. Bundled up against the chill, they walked along the pier, amongst the lobster pots and coiled ropes and disintegrating fishing boats. The rain slapped the windows of the shuttered shops. No tourists in winter. In the supermarket the local women often watched them: more than once Rebecca was asked if she was the bean cabhrach, a phrase she liked — the help, the nanny, the midwife.

There was a raw wedge of thrill in her love for him. The presence of the unknown. The journey out of childhood. The step into a future self.

Some days Tomas took her hand, leaned on her shoulder as they drove through the village, beyond the abandoned schoolhouse, past the whitewashed bungalows toward home. She wanted to clasp herself over him, shroud him, absorb whatever came his way. Most of all she wanted to discover what sort of man might emerge from underneath that very pale skin.

—

TOMAS WORE THE WETSUIT all Christmas morning. He lay on the floor, playing video games, his fingers fluid on the console. Over the rim of her reading glasses, Rebecca watched the gray stripe along the sleeve move. It was, she knew, a game she shouldn’t allow — tanks, ditches, killings, tracer bullets — but it was a small sacrifice for an hour of quiet.

No rage this Christmas, no battles, no tears.

At noon she gestured for him to get ready: the light would fade early. She had two wetsuits of her own in the bedroom cupboard, but she left them hanging, pulled on running shoes, an anorak, a warm scarf. At the door Tomas threw his duffle coat loose around the neoprene.

— Just a quick dip, she said in Irish.

There was no way of knowing how much of any language Tomas could understand. His signing was rudimentary, but she could tell a thing or two from the carry of his body, the shape of his shoulders, the hold of his mouth. Mostly she divined from his eyes. He was handsome in a roguish way: the eyes themselves were narrow, yes, but agile. He had no other physical symptoms of fetal alcohol, no high brow, no thin lip, no flat philtrum.

They stepped out into a shaft of light so clear and bright it seemed made of bone. Just by the low stone wall, a cloud curtained across and the light dropped gray again. A few stray raindrops stung their faces.

This was what she loved about the west of Ireland: the weather made from cinema. A squall could blow in at any time and moments later the gray would be hunted open with blue.

One of the walls down by the bottom field had been reinforced with metal pipes. It is the worst sort of masonry, against all local tradition, but the wind moved across the mouths of the hollow tubes and pierced the air with a series of accidental whistles. Tomas ran his hand over the pipes, one by one, adjusting the song of the wall. She was sure his fingers could gauge the vibrations in the metal. Small moments like these, they crept up, sliced her open.

Halfway toward the water, he broke into a Charlie Chaplin walk — twirling an imaginary walking stick as he bent forward into the gale, feet pointed sideways. He made a whooping sound as he topped a rise and caught sight of the sea. She called for him to wait: it was habit, even if his back was turned. He remained at the edge of the cliff, walking in place. Almost a perfect imitation. Where had he seen Chaplin? Some video game maybe? Some television show? There were times she thought that, despite the doctors, he might still someday crack open the impossible longings she held for him.

At the precipice, above the granite seastack, they paused. The waves hurried to shore, long scribbles of white. She tapped him on the small of his back where the wetsuit bunched. The neoprene hood framed his face. His blond hair peeked out.

— Stay where it’s shallow now. Promise me.

She scooted behind him on her hunkers. The grass was cold on her fingertips. Her feet slid forward in the mud, dropped from the small ledge into the coarse scree below. The rocks were slick with seaweed. A small crab scuttled in a dark pool.

Tomas was already knee-deep in the cove.

— Don’t go any further now, she called.

She had been a swimmer when she was a child, had competed for Dublin and Leinster both. Rows of medals in her childhood bedroom. A championship trophy from Brussels. The rumor of a scholarship to an American university: a rotator-cuff injury had cut her short.

She had taught Tomas to swim during the warmth of the summer. He knew the rules. No diving. Stay in the cove. Never get close to the base of the seastack.

Twice he looked as if he were about to round the edge of the dark rock into the deeper water: once when he saw a windsurfer, yet again when a yellow kayak went swiftly by.

She waved her arms: Just no more, love, okay?

He returned to her, fanned the low water with his fingers, splashed it high around her, both arms in his Chaplin motion.

— Stop it, please, said Rebecca softly. You’re soaking me.

He splashed her again, turned away, dove under for ten seconds, fourteen, fifteen, eighteen, came up ten yards away, spluttering for air.

— Come on, now. Please. Come in.

Tomas swam toward the seastack, the dark of his feet disappearing into the water. She watched his wetsuit ripple under the surface. A long, sleek shadow.

A flock of seabirds serried over the low waves in a taunt. Her body stiffened. She edged forward again, waited.

I have, she thought, made a terrible mistake.

She threw off her coat and dove in. The cold stunned the length of her, slipped immediately along her skin.

—

THE SECOND SHE CLIMBED from the water, she realized she had left her phone in the pocket of her jeans. She unclipped the battery, shook the water out.

Tomas lay on the sand, looking up. His blue eyes. His red face. His swollen lips. It had been easy enough to pull him from the cove. He hadn’t struggled. She swam behind him, placed her hands gently behind his shoulders, pulled him ashore. He lay there, smiling.

She whipped her wet hair sideways, turned toward the cliff. A surge of relief moved along her spine when she glanced back: he was following her.

The cottage felt so suddenly isolated: the small blue windows, the bright half-door. He stood in a puddle in the middle of the floor, his lips trembling.

Rebecca put the phone in a bag of rice to soak up the moisture, shook the bag. No backup phone. No landline. Christmas Day. Alan. He hadn’t even called. He could have tried earlier. The thought of him in Dublin now, with his new family, their tidy house, their decorations, their dramas. A simple call, she thought, it would have been so easy.

— Your father never even phoned, she said as she crossed the room.

She wondered if the words were properly understood, and if they were, did they cut to the core: your father, d’athair, abba? What rattled inside? How much could he possibly catch? The experts in Galway said that his comprehension was minimal, but they could never be sure; no one could gauge that depth.

Rebecca tugged the wetsuit zip and gently peeled back the neoprene. His skin was taut and dimpled. He laid his head on her shoulder. A soft whimper came from him.

She felt herself loosening, drew him close, the cold of his cheek against her clavicle.

— You just frightened me, love, that’s all.

When darkness fell, they sat down to dinner — turkey, potatoes, a plum pudding bought from an organic food store in Galway. As a child in Dublin, she had grown up with the ancient Hanukkah rituals. She was the first in her family to marry outside the faith, but her parents understood: there were so few Jews left in Ireland anyway. At times she thought she should rebuild the holiday routines, but little remained except the faint memory of walking the Rathgar Road at sundown, counting the menorahs in the windows. Year by year, the numbers dwindled.

Halfway through the meal they put on the party hats, pulled apart the paper crackers, unfolded the jokes that came within. A glass of port for her. A fizzy orange drink for Tomas. A box of Quality Street. They lay on the couch together, his cheek on her shoulder, a silence around them.

She cracked the spine on an old blue hardcover. Nadia Mandelstam.

Tomas clicked the remote and picked up the game stick. His fingers flitted over the buttons: the mastery of a pianist. She wondered if the parents had been gifted beyond the drunkenness, if one day they had looked out of high conservatory windows, or painted daring new canvases, or plied themselves in some poetic realm, against all the odds — sentimental, she knew, but worth the risk, hope against hope, a faint glimmer in the knit of neurons.

Christmas evening slipped away, gradations of dark outside the window.

At bedtime she read to him in Gaelic from a cycle of ancient Irish mythology. The myths were musical. His eyes fluttered. She waited. His turmoil. His anger. Night rages, the doctors called them.

She smoothed his hair, but Tomas jerked and his arm shot out. His elbow caught the side of her chin. She felt for blood. A thin smear of it appeared along her fingers. She touched her teeth with her tongue. Intact. Nothing too bad. Perhaps a bruise tomorrow. Something else to explain in the village store. Timpiste beag. A small accident, don’t worry. Ná bac leis.

She leaned over him and fixed her arms in a triangle so that he couldn’t bash his head off the wall.

Her breath moved the fringe of his hair. His skin was splotchy with small, dark acne. The onset of early adolescence. What might happen in the years to come, when the will of his body surpassed the strength of her own? How would she ever be able to hold him down? What discipline would she need, what method of restraint?

She moved closer to him, and his head dipped and touched the soft of her breast. Within a moment he was thrashing in the sheets again. His eyes opened. He ground his teeth. The look on his face: sometimes she wondered if the fear edged toward hatred.

She reached underneath the bed for a red hatbox. Inside lay a spongy black leather helmet. She lifted it out. Kilmacud Crokes Are Magic! was scrawled in silver marker along the side. Alan had worn it during his hurling days. If Tomas woke and began bashing again, it would protect him.

She lifted the back of his head and slipped it on, tucked back his hair and fastened the latch beneath his chin. Gently, she pried open his mouth and set a piece of fitted foam between his teeth so they wouldn’t crack.

Once he had bitten her finger while asleep, and she had given herself two stitches — an old trick she had learned from her mother. There was still a scar on her left forefinger: a small red scythe.

She fell asleep beside him in the single bed, woke momentarily unsure of where she was: the red digits on the alarm shining.

The phone, she thought. She must check the phone.

She went to the fridge for a bottle of white wine, stoked her bedroom fire, put Sviatoslav Richter on the stereo, settled the pillows, pulled a blanket to her chest, opened the bottle and poured. The wine sounded gently against the glass, a kindling to sleep.

—

IN THE MORNING Tomas was gone.

She rose sleepily at first, gathered the blanket tight around her neck. A reef of light broke through the bare sycamores. She turned the pillow to the cool side. She was surprised by the time. Nine o’clock. The wine still lay on her breath, the empty green bottle on the bedside table: she felt vaguely adulterous. She listened for movement. No video games, no television. A hard breeze moved through the cottage, an open window perhaps. She rose with the blanket around her. The cold floor stung her bare feet. She keyed the phone alive. It flickered an instant, beeped, fell dead again.

The living room was empty. She pushed open the door of his room, saw the hanging tongue of bedsheet and the helmet on the floor. She dropped the blanket from around her shoulders, checked under the bed, flung open the cupboard.

In the living room, the hook where the wetsuit had hung was empty.

The top half of the front door was still latched. The bottom half swung, panicky in the wind. She ducked under, wearing only her nightgown. The grass outside was brittle with frost. The cold seeped between her toes. His name was thrown back to her from among the treetops.

The sleeves of grass slapped hard against her shinbones. The wind played its tune over the pipes in the stone wall. She spied a quick movement at the edge of the cliff — a hunched figure darting down and away, bounding along the cliff. It appeared again, seconds later, as if out of the sea. A ram, the horns curled and sharp. It sped away along the fields, through a gap in the bushes.

Rebecca glanced down to the cove. No shoes on the rocks. No duffle coat. Nothing. Perhaps he had not come here at all. Good God, the wetsuit. She should never have bought it. Two sizes too big, just to save money.

She ran along the cliff, peered around the seastack. The wind blew fierce. The sea lay silver and black, an ancient, speckled mirror. Who was out there? Maybe a coast-guard boat. Or an early-morning kayaker. A fishing craft of some sort. The wind soughed off the Atlantic. Alan’s voice in her head. You bought him what? A wetsuit? Why, for crying out loud? How far might he swim? There were nets out there. He might get tangled.

— Tom-as!

Perhaps he might hear her. A ringing in his ears, maybe, a vibration of water to waken his eardrum.

She scanned the waves. Snap to. Pull yourself together for fucksake.

She could almost see herself from above as she turned back for the cottage: her nightdress, her bare feet, her hair uncoiled, the wet wind driving against her. No phone, no fucking phone. She would have to get the car. Drive to town. The Gardaí. Where was the station, anyway? Why didn’t she know? Which neighbors might be home? You bought him what? What sort of mother? How much wine did you drink? Fetal alcohol.

The wind bent the grass-blades. She stumbled forward over the low wall, into the garden, a sharp pain ripping through her ankle. At the back of the cottage the trees curtsied. The branches speckled the wall with shadows. The half-door swung on its hinges. She ducked under, into his bedroom again. Kilmacud Crokes Are Magic!

Still the phone did not work.

At the kitchen counter she keyed the computer alive. The screen flared — Tomas at six in Glendalough, blond hair, red shorts, shirtsleeves flapping as he sauntered through the grass toward the lake. She opened Skype, dialed the only number she knew by heart. Alan answered on the sixth ring. Jesus. What had she done? Was she out of her fucking mind? He would call the police, the coast guard, too, but it would take him three or four hours to drive from Dublin. Phone me when you find him. Hurry. Just find him. Fucksake, Rebecca. He hung up into a sudden, fierce silence.

When she closed Skype, the background picture of Tomas appeared once more.

She ran to her bedroom, struggled into her old wetsuit. It chafed her body, tugged across her chest, scraped hard against her neck.

A menace of clouds hung outside. She scanned the horizon. The distant islands lay humped and cetacean. Gray water, gray sky. Most likely he’d swum north. The currents were easier that way. They’d gone that direction in summer. Always close to shore. Reading the way the water flowed. Where it frothed against rocks, curved back on itself.

A small fishing boat trolled the far edge of the bay. Rebecca waved her hands — ridiculous, she knew — then scrambled down along the cliff face, her feet slipping in the moist track.

Halfway to the beach she stopped: Tomas’s tennis shoes lay there, neatly pointed toward the sea. How had she missed them earlier? She would remember this always, she knew: she turned the shoes around, as if at any moment he might step into them and return, plod up to the warm cottage.

No footprints in the sand: it was too coarse. No jacket, either. Had he left his duffle behind? Hypothermia. It could come on within minutes. She had bought the wetsuit so big. He was more likely to be exposed. Where would he stop? How long was he gone now? She had woken so late. Wine. She had drunk so much wine.

She pulled a swimming cap hard over her hair and yanked the zip tight on her wetsuit. The teeth of it were stiff.

Rebecca waded in, dove. The cold pierced her. Her arms rose and rose again. She stopped, glanced back, forced herself onward. Her shoulder ached. She saw his face at every stroke: the dark hood, his blond hair, his blue eyes.

Out past the seastack, she moved along the coast, the sound of the waves in her ears, another deafness, the blood receding from her fingers, her toes, her mind.

—

A NOVELLA HAD ARRIVED from the publisher in Tel Aviv eight months before, a beautifully written story by an Arab Israeli from Nazareth: an important piece of work, she thought.

She had begun immediately to translate it, the story of a middle-aged couple who had lost their two children. She had come upon the word sh’khol. She cast around for a word to translate it but there was no proper match. There were words, of course, for widow, widower, and orphan, but no noun, no adjective, for a parent who had lost a child. None in Irish, either. She looked in Russian, in French, in German, in other languages, too, but could find analogues only in Sanskrit, vilomah, and in Arabic, thakla, a mother, mathkool, a father. Still none in English. It had bothered her for days. She wanted to be true to the text, to identify the invisible, torn open, ripped apart, stolen. In the end she had settled upon the formal bereaved, not precise enough, she thought, no mystery in it, no music, hardly a proper translation at all, bereaved.

—

IT WAS ALMOST NOON when she was yanked in by the neck of her wetsuit. A coast-guard boat. Four men aboard. She fell to the deck, face to the slats, gasping. They carried her down to the cabin. Leaned over her. A mask. Tubes. Their faces: blurry, unfocused. Their voices. Oxygen. A hand on her brow. A finger on her wrist. The weight of water still upon her. Her teeth chattered. She tried to stand.

— Let me back, she pleaded.

The cold burned inside her. Her shoulder felt as if it had been ripped from its socket.

— Sit still now, you’ll be all right. Just don’t move.

They wrapped her in silver foil blankets, massaged her fingers and toes, slapped her twice across the cheek, gently, as if to wake her.

— Mrs. Barrington. Can you hear me?

In the blue of the skipper’s eyes she saw Tomas appear, disappear. She touched his face, but the beard bristled against her hand.

The skipper spoke to her in English first, then Irish, a sharpness to his tone. Was she sure Tomas had gone swimming? Was there any other place he might be? Had he ever done this before? What was he wearing? Did he have a phone? Did he have any friends along the coast?

She tried to stand once more, but the skipper held her back.

The wind buffeted the cabin windows, whitened the tops of the waves. A few gulls darted acrobatically above the water. Rebecca glanced at the maritime maps on the wall, enormous charts of line and color. A furnace of grief rose up in her. She peered out past the stern, the widening wake. The radio crackled: a dozen different voices.

She was making the sounds, she knew, of an animal.

The boat slowed suddenly, pulled into a slipway. A fine shiver of spray stung her face. She did not recognize the area. A lamplight was still shining in the blue daytime. A faint glow, a prospect of dark. Onlookers huddled by their cars, pointing in her direction. Beams of red and blue slashed the treetops. Rebecca felt a hand at her shoulder. The skipper escorted her along the pier. One of her blankets slipped away. She was immediately aware of her wetsuit: the tightness, the darkness, the cold. A series of whispers. She was struck by the immense stillness, the silence, not a breath of wind.

She turned, broke free and ran. Sh’khol.

When they pulled her from the water a second time, she saw a man hurrying toward her with his cell phone, watching the screen as he filmed her rising from the low, gray waves. He carried the phone like an accusation: she would, she knew, be on the Internet later that night.

— Tomas, she whispered as they put her in the car.

At home, a sedative dulled her. A policewoman sat in a corner of the room, silent, watching, a teacup and saucer in her hands. Through the large plate-glass window Rebecca could see figures wandering about, casting backward glances. One of them appeared to be scribbling in a notebook.

The Gardaí had set up in the living room. Every few moments another phone rang. Cars turned in the narrow laneway outside the cottage, their tires crunching on the gravel.

Somebody was smoking outside. She could smell a rag of it moving through the house. She rose to shut the bedroom window. Something has ended, she thought. Something has finished. She could not locate the source of the feeling.

She paused a moment and strode across the floor toward the bedroom. The policewoman uncrossed her legs but did not rise from the wicker chair. Rebecca strode out. The living room fell quiet, except for the static of a police radio. A wine bottle on the table. A discarded party hat. The scraps of their Christmas dinner heaped in the sink, swollen with dishwater.

— I want to join the search parties.

— It’s best for you to stay here.

— He can’t hear the whistles, he’s deaf.

— Best stay in the cottage, Mrs. Barrington.

She felt as if she had chewed a piece of aluminum, the pain in her head suddenly cold.

— Marcus. My name is Marcus. Rebecca Marcus.

She pushed open the door of Tomas’s room. Two plainclothes police were sifting through his cupboard drawers. On his bed was a small plastic bag marked with a series of numbers: strands of hair inside. Thin and blond. The detectives turned to her.

— I’d like to get his pajamas, she said.

— I’m sorry, Miss. We can’t let you take anything.

— His jammies, that’s all I want.

— A question. If you don’t mind.

As the detective approached, she could smell the remnants of cinnamon on him, some essence of Christmas. He struck the question sharply, like a match against her.

— How did you get that bruise?

Her hand flew to her face. She felt as if some jagged shape had been drawn up out of her, ripping the roof of her mouth.

Outside, the early dark had taken possession of everything.

— No idea, she said.

A woman alone with a boy. In a western cottage. Empty wine bottles strewn about. She looked over her shoulder: the other guards were watching from the living room. She heard the rattle of pills from the bathroom. An inventory of her medicine. Another was searching her bookshelves. The Iron Mountains. Factory Farming. Kaddish. House Beautiful. The Remains of the Day. So, she was under suspicion. She felt suddenly marooned. Rebecca drew herself to full height and walked back toward the living room.

— Ask that person outside to please stop smoking, she said.

—

HE CAME DOWN THE LANEWAY, beeping the car horn, lowered the window, beckoned the guard over: I’m the child’s father.

Alan had lost the jowls of his occasional drinking. The thinness made him severe. She tried to look for the old self that might remain, but he was clean-shaven, and there was something so deeply mannered about him, a tweed jacket, a thin tie pushed up against his neck, a crease in his slacks. He looked as if he had dressed himself in the third person.

He buried his face in Tomas’s duffle by the door, then sank theatrically to his knees, but was careful to wipe the muck when he rose and followed her to her bedroom.

The policewoman in the corner stood up, gave a nervous smile. Rebecca caught a glance at herself in the full-length mirror: swollen, disheveled. Alan paced the room.

— I’d like to be alone with my wife.

Rebecca lifted her head. Wife: it was like a word that might remain on a page, though the page itself was plunged into darkness.

Alan repositioned the wicker chair and let out a long sigh. It was plain to see that he was seeking the brief adulation of grief. He needed the loss to attach itself to him. Why hadn’t she woken? he asked. Was the door to her bedroom open or closed? Had she slept through her alarm? Had Tomas eaten any breakfast? How far could he swim? Why didn’t you get him a wetsuit that fit? Why didn’t you hide it away? Did you give him his limits? You know he needs his limits.

She thought about that ancient life in the Dublin hills, the shiny kitchen, the white machinery, the German cars in the pebbled driveway, the clipped bushes, the alarm system, the security cameras, the limits, yes, and how far the word might possibly stretch before it rebounded.

— Did he have gloves on?

— Oh, stop, please, Alan.

— I need to know.

The red lights of the clock shone. It had been twelve hours. She lay on the bed.

— No, he had no gloves on, Alan.

She could not shake the Israeli story from her head. An Arab couple had lost their children to two illnesses over the course of five years: one to pneumonia, the other to a rare blood disorder. It was a simple story — small, intimate, intense. The father worked as a crane driver in the docklands of Haifa, the mother as a secretary in a corrugated-paper firm. Their ordinary lives had been turned inside out. After the children died, the father filled a shipping container with their possessions and every day moved it, using the giant crane and the skyhooks, to a new site in the yard, carefully positioning it alongside the sea: shiny, yellow, locked.

— He feels invincible, doesn’t he?

— Oh, Jesus, Alan.

The search parties were spread out along the cliffs, their hopeless whistles in the air, her son’s name blown back by the wind. Rebecca pushed open the rear sliding doors to the balcony. The sky was shot through with red. A stray sycamore branch touched her hair. She reached up. A crushing pain split her shoulder blade: her rotator cuff.

Cigarette smoke lingered in the air. She rounded the back of the cottage. A woman. Plainclothes. The whistles still came in short, sharp bursts.

A loss had lodged itself inside her. Rebecca gestured for the cigarette, drew long and hard on the filter. It tasted foul, heavy. She had not smoked in many years.

— He’s deaf, you know, she said, blowing the smoke sideways.

A tenderness shone in the detective’s eyes. Rebecca turned back into the house, pulled on her coat, walked out the front door and down toward the cliffs.

A helicopter broke the dark horizon, hovered for a moment right above the cottage, its spotlight shining on the stone walls, until it banked sharply and continued up the coast.

She joined the searchers. They went in groups of three, linking arms. The land was potholed, hillocked, stony. Every now and then she could hear a gasp from a neighboring group when a foot rolled across a rock, or a lost lobster pot, or a piece of rubbish. The stone walls were cold to the touch. The wind ripped under a sheet of discarded plastic. Tiny tufts of dyed sheep wool shone on the barbed wire: patterns of red and blue.

Along the coast small groups zigzagged the distant beaches in the last of the light. Dozens of boats plied the waves. The bells on the ancient boats tinkled. A Galway hooker went by with its white sails unfurled. A fleet of kayaks glided close to the shore, returning home.

The moon rose red: its beauty appeared raw and offensive to her. She turned inland. Two detectives walked alongside. Rebecca felt suspended between them. Cones of pale torch beam swept through the gathering darkness.

At an abandoned home, roofless, hemmed in by an immense rhododendron bush, a call came over the radio that a wetsuit had been found, over. The male detective held a finger in the air, as if figuring the direction of the wind. No, not a wetsuit, said the voice, high alert, no, there was something moving, high alert, stand by, stand by, there was something alive, a ripple in the water, high alert, high alert, yes, it was a body, a body, they had found something, over, a body, over.

The detective turned away from her, moved into the overgrown doorway, shielded the radio, stood perfectly still in the starlight until the call clarified itself: it was a movement in the water, discard, they had seen a seal, discard the last report, only a seal, repeat, discard, over.

Rebecca knew well the legend of the selkie. She thought of Tomas zippering his way out into the water, sleek, dark, hidden.

The female detective whispered into the radio: For fucksake, be careful, we’ve got the mother here.

The word lay on her tongue now: mother, máthair, em. They went forward again, through the unbent grass, into the tunnels of their torches.

—

ALAN’S CLOTHING WAS FOLDED on the wicker chair. His knees were curled to his chest. A shallow wheeze came from the white of his throat. A note lay on her pillow: They wouldn’t let me sleep in Tomas’s room, wake me when you’re home. And then a scribbled Please.

They had called off the search until morning but she could hear the fishing boats along the coast, still blasting their horns.

Rebecca took off her shoes, set them by the bedroom fire. Only a few small embers remained, a weak red glow. The cuffs of her jeans were wet and heavy from the muck. She did not remove them.

She went to the bed and lay on top of the covers, pulled up a horsehair blanket, turned away from Alan. Gazing out the window, she waited for a bar of light to rise and part the dark. A torchlight bore past in a pale shroud. Perhaps there was news. At the cliff he had twirled the imaginary cane. Where had he learned that Chaplin shuffle? The sheer surprise of it. The unknowability. Unspooling himself along the cliff.

From the living room came the intermittent static of the radios. Almost eighteen hours now.

Rebecca pushed her face deeper into the pillow. Alan stirred underneath the sheets. His arm came across her shoulder. She lay quite still. Was he sleeping or awake? How could he sleep? His arm tightened around her. His hand moved to her hair, his fingers at her neck, his thumb at the edge of her clavicle.

That was not sleep. That was not sleep at all.

She gently pushed his arm away.

Another torch bobbed past the window. Rebecca rose from the bed. A gold-backed hairbrush lay on the dressing table. Long strands of her dark hair were tangled up inside it. She brushed only one side of her hair. The damp hem of her jeans chilled her toes and she walked toward the wicker chair, covered herself in a blanket, looked out into the early dark.

When dawn broke, she saw the door open slightly, the female detective peeping in around the frame, something warm in the eye-flicker between them.

Alan stirred, pale in the bed, and moaned something like an excuse. His pinkish face. His thinning hair. He looked brittle to her, likely to dissolve.

In the kitchen the kettle was already whistling. A row of teacups were set along the counter. The detective stepped forward and touched her arm. Rebecca’s eyes leaped to catch hers, a brief merged moment.

— I hope you don’t mind. We took the liberty. There’s no news yet.

The presence of the word yet jolted her. There would, one day, be news. Its arrival was inevitable.

— We took one of Tomas’s shirts from the wash basket.

— Why? said Rebecca.

— For the dogs, the detective said.

Rebecca wanted suddenly to hold the shirt, inhale its odor. She reached for the kettle, tried to pour through the shake in her hands. So, there would be dogs out on the headland later. Searching for her son. She glanced at her reflection in the window, saw only him. His face was double-framed now, triple-framed. Out on the headland, running, the dogs following, a ram, a hawk, a heron. She felt a lightness swell in her. A curve in the air. A dive. She gripped the hem of the counter. The slow, sleek slip of the sea. A darkening underwater. The shroud of cold. The coroner, the funeral home, the wreaths, the plot, the burial. She felt herself falter. The burst to the surface. A selkie, spluttering for air. She was guided into a chair at the table. She tried to lean forward to pour the tea. Voices vibrated around her. Her hands shook. Every outcome was unwhisperable. She had a sudden thought that there was no sugar in the house. They needed sugar for their tea. She would go to the store with Tomas later. The newsagent’s. Yes, that is where she would go. Inland along the bend of narrow road. Beyond the white bungalow. Crossing at the one traffic light. Walk with him past the butcher shop, past the sign for tours to the islands, past the turf accountant, past the shuttered hotel, the silver-kegged alleyway, into the newsagent’s on Main Street. The clink of the anchor-shaped bell. The black-and-white linoleum floor. Along the aisle. The sharp smell of paraffin. Past the paper rack set up on lobster pots, the small blue-and-orange ropes hanging down, old relics of the sea. She would walk beyond the news of his disappearance. Bread, biscuits, soup. To the shelf where the yellow packets of sugar lay. We cannot do without sugar, Tomas, second shelf down, trust me, there, good lad, get it, please, go on, reach in.

She wasn’t sure if she had said this aloud or not, but when she looked up again the female detective had brought one of Tomas’s shirts, held it out, her eyes moist. The buttons were cold to the touch: Rebecca pressed them to her cheek.

From the laneway came the sound of scraping branches. Van doors being opened and closed. She heard a high yelp, and then the scrabble of paws upon gravel.

—

SHE SPENT THAT MORNING out in the fields. Columns of sunlight filtered down over the sea. A light wind rippled the grass at the cliff edge. She wore Tomas’s shirt under her own, tight and warm.

So many searchers along the beaches. Teachers. Farmers. Schoolchildren holding hands. The boats trawling the waters had trebled.

At lunchtime, dazed with fatigue, Rebecca was brought home. A new quiet had insinuated itself into the cottage. The policemen came and went as if they had learned from long practice. They seemed to ghost into one another. It was almost as if they could slip into one another’s faces. She knew them, somehow, by the way they drank their tea. Food had arrived, with notes from neighbors. Fruit bowls. Lasagna. Tea bags and biscuits. A basket of balloons, of all things. A scribbled prayer to Saint Christopher in a child’s hand.

Alan sat down next to her on the couch. He put his hand across hers. He would, he said, do the media interviews. She would not have to worry about it.

She heard the thud of distant waves. The labored drone of a TV truck filtered down from the laneway.

A Sunday newspaper called, offering money for a photograph. Alan walked to a corner of the cottage, cupped his phone, whispered into the receiver. She thought she heard him weeping.

Pages from the Israeli novel were strewn across her desk. Scribbles in the margins. Beside the pages, Mandelstam’s memoir lay open, a quarter of the way through. Russia, she thought. She would have to tell them in Vladivostok, let them know what had happened, fill out the paperwork. The orphanage. The broken steps. The high windows. The ocher walls. The one great painting in the hallway: the Bay of Amur, summertime, a yacht on its water, water, always water. She would find the mother and father, explain that their son had disappeared swimming on the western seaboard of Ireland. A small apartment in the center of the city, a low coffee table, a full ashtray, the mother wan and withdrawn, the father portly and thuggish. My fault. I gave him a wetsuit. All my fault. Forgive me.

She wanted the day to peel itself backward, regain its early brightness, its possibility, its pour into teacups, but she was not surprised to see the dark come down.

Alan sat in the corner, curled around his phone. She almost felt a sadness for him, the whispered sweetheart, the urgent pleading and explanations with his own young children.

She totaled up the hours: forty-eight. That night, lying next to him, Rebecca allowed his arm across her waist. The simple comfort of it. She heard him murmur her name again, but she did not turn.

In the morning she rose and walked out behind the house, the dew wet against her plimsolls. The television truck hummed farther up the laneway, out of sight. She stepped across the cattle grid. The steel bars pushed hard into the soles of her feet. A muddy path led up the hill. The grass in the middle was green and untrodden. Moss lay slick on the stone wall.

A piece of torn plastic was tangled in the high hedges. She reached in and pulled it out, shoved it deep into her pocket: she had no idea why.

Water dripped from the branches of nearby trees. A few birds marked out their morning territory. She had only ever driven this part of the laneway before. It was, she knew, part of an old famine road.

Rebecca stood a while: the hum from the TV truck up the road seemed to cancel the rhythm of the sea.

She leaned into the hard slope of the road, opened the bar of the red gate, stepped over the mud. The bolt slid back perfectly into its groove. She walked the center grass up and around the second corner to where the TV truck idled against the hedges. Inside, silhouetted against a pair of sheer curtains, three figures were playing cards. The curtains moved but the figures remained static. Across the front seat a man lay slumped, sleeping.

A small group of teenagers huddled near the back of the truck, sharing a cigarette, their breath shaping clouds of white in the cold. They nudged each other as she approached.

She stopped, then, startled by the sight. Alone, casual, adrift. He sauntered in behind the group, unnoticed. A brown hunting jacket hung from his shoulders. A hooded sweatshirt underneath. His trousers were rolled up and folded over. The laces of his boots were open and the tongues wagged sideways. Steam rolled off him, as if he had been walking a long time.

His mouth was slightly open. His lip was wet with mucus. Mud and leaves in the fringes of his hair. Under his right arm he carried a dark bag. The bag fell from his arm, and he caught hold of it as he moved forward. A long, gray stripe. The wetsuit. He was carrying the wetsuit.

Sh’khol. He had not yet seen her. His body seemed to drag his shadow behind him: slow, reluctant, but sharp. She knew the word now. Shadowed.

The door of the TV truck opened behind her. Her name was called. Mrs. Barrington. She did not turn. She felt as if she were skidding in a car.

She was aware of a bustle behind her, two, three, four people piling out of the truck. The impossible utterance of his name. Tomas. Is that you? Turn this way, Tomas. A yell came from the teenagers. Look over here. They had their phones out. Tomas! Tomas! Turn this way, Tomas.

Rebecca saw a furred microphone pass before her eyes. It dipped down in front of her, and she pushed it away. A cameraman jostled her. Another shout erupted. She moved forward. Her feet slipped in the mud.

Tomas turned. She took him in her arms. A surge of joy.

She held his face. The paleness, the whites of his eyes. His was a gaze that belonged to someone else, a boy of another experience.

He passed the wetsuit to her. It was cold to the touch and dry.

—

THE NEWS WENT AHEAD of them. The cheers went up as they rounded the corner toward the garden. Alan ran along the laneway in his pajamas, stopped abruptly when he saw the television cameras, grabbed for the gap in the cotton trousers.

Rebecca shouldered Tomas through the gauntlet, her arm encircling him tightly, guiding him to the front door.

In the cottage, a swathe of light dusted the floor. The female detective stood in the center of the room. Her name badge glinted. Detective Harnon. It struck Rebecca that she could name things again: people, words, ideas. A warmth spread through the small of her back.

A smell of turf smoke came off Tomas’s clothing. It was, she later realized, one of the few clues she would ever get.

The cottage filled up behind her. She saw a photographer at the large plate-glass window. All around her the phones were ringing. The kettle whistled on the stove. A fear had tightened Tomas. She needed to get him alone. The photographer shoved his camera up against the windowpane. She spun Tomas away as the flash erupted.

Morning light stamped itself in small rectangles on the bedroom floor. Rebecca closed the window blinds. The helmet was lying on the bed. His pajamas were neatly folded and placed on a chair. She ignored the knocking at the door. He was shivering now. She held his face, kissed him. He looked away.

The door opened tentatively.

— Leave us be, please. Leave us be.

She touched the side of his cheek, then shucked the brown jacket from his shoulders. A hunting jacket. She checked the pockets. A few grains of thread. A small ball of fur. A wet matchbook. He lifted his arms. She peeled the sweatshirt up over his head. His skin was tight and dimpled.

A piece of leaf fell from his hair to the floor. She turned him around, looked at his back, his neck, his shoulder blades. He was unmarked. No cuts, no scrapes.

She looked down at Tomas’s trousers. Denims. Too large by far. A man’s denims. Fastened with an old purple belt with a gold clasp. Clothing from another era. Gaudy. Ancient.

A bolt of cold ran along her arms.

— No, she said. Please, no.

She reached for him, but he slapped her hand away. The door rattled again behind her. She turned to see Alan’s face: the stretched wire of his flesh, the small brown of his eyes.

— We need a male detective in here, she said. Now.

—

IN THE HOSPITAL IT was still bright morning and the air was motionless in the low corridors and muddy footprints lay about and the yellow walls pressed in upon them and the pungent odor of antiseptic made her go to the windows and the trees outside stood static and the seagulls cawed up over the rooftops and she stood in the prospect of the unimaginable — the tangle of rumor and evidence and fact — and she waited for the doctors as the minutes idled and the nurses passed by in the corridors and the trolleys rattled and the orderlies pushed their heavy carts and an inexhaustible current of human misery moved in and out of the waiting room every story every nuance every pulse of the city pushing up against the wired windows peering in.

—

THE WATER POURED HARD and clear. She tested its warmth against her wrist. Tomas came into the bathroom, dropped his red jumper on the floor, slid out of his khakis, stood in his white shirt, clumsily working the buttons.

She reached to help, but he stepped away, then gestured for her to leave while he climbed into the swimming togs. So, he wanted to wear shorts while she washed him? Fair enough, it was appropriate, she would let him.

The house was quiet again. Only the sound of the waves. She keyed her new phone alive. A dozen messages. She would attend to them later.

She returned to the bathroom with her hands covering her eyes.

— Ta-da! she said.

He stood there, pale and thin in front of her. The swimming shorts were far too tight. Along his slender stomach she could see a gathering of tiny, fine hairs that ran in a line from his belly button. He hopped from foot to foot and cupped his hands over the intimate outline of his body.

He had been untouched. That is what Detective Harnon had said. He was slightly dehydrated, but untouched. No abuse. No cuts. No scars. They had run all manner of tests. Later the detective had asked around the village. Nobody had come forward. There were no other clues.

They wanted him to come in for evaluation the following week. A psychologist, she said. Someone who might piece together everything that had happened, but Rebecca knew there’d never be any answers, no amount of probing could solve it, no photographs, no maps, no walks along the coastline. She would go swimming with him again, soon, down to the water. They would ease themselves into the shallows. She would watch him carefully negotiate the seastack. She would guide him away from the current. Perhaps some small insight might unravel, but she was aware that she could never finally, fully understand.

The simple grace of his return was enough. I live, I breathe, I go, I come back. Nothing else. I am here now, that is all.

Rebecca tested the water again with her fingers. She helped Tomas over the rim of the tub. Goose bumps appeared on his skin. His ribs were sharp and pale. He fell against her, stepped out. He groaned. The wet of his toes chilled her bare feet. She threw a towel around his shoulders to warm him, then guided him back toward the water. He placed both feet in the bath, and let the warmth course up through his body. He cupped his hands in front of his shorts once more. She put her hand on his shoulder and, with gentle insistence, got him to kneel.

He slid forward into the water.

— There we go, she said in Hebrew. Let me wash that mop.

She perched at the edge of the bath, took hold of his shoulder blades, ran a pumice stone over his back, massaged the shampoo into his hair. His skin was so very transparent. The air in his lungs changed the shape of his back. She applied a little conditioner to his scalp. His hair was thick and long. She would have to get it cut soon.

Tomas grunted and leaned forward, tugged at the front of his bathing shorts. His shoulders tautened against her fingers. She knew, then, what it was. He bent over to try to disguise himself against the fabric of the shorts. Rebecca stood without looking at him, handed him the soap and the sponge.

Impossible to be a child forever. A mother, always.

— You’re on your own now, she said.

She moved away, closed the door and stood outside in the corridor, listening to his stark breathing and the persistent splash of water, its rhythm sounding out against the faint percussion of the sea.