Over Our Heads

Are You Still There?

I first met Carol at a poetry reading in a bookstore off Lafayette, up on the balcony level, where a pair of concrete pillars framed the view of the lectern. It was a wet night; we got chatting as we stood to dry ourselves beneath a heat vent, the smells of the subway rising from her coat. She had green eyes and a laugh so loud and full I felt it in my chest. She worked, she said, for an arts foundation that endowed one of the evening’s readers — a professor from the English Department where I was working towards a doctorate, whom I wanted for my supervisor and whom I cornered by the drinks table once the reading concluded. The professor wore a blue silk scarf wound carelessly around his throat. He agreed in principle to work with me, and then I went looking again for Carol, but the only remaining sign of her on the balcony was a small wet heel-print darkening the scuffed boards. I stared at it, feeling certain that an opportunity had passed me by.

So, when we chanced to meet again a few weeks later at a party on the Upper West Side, I was determined not to let her leave my sight. I followed her from room to crowded room, into and out of awkward conversations, and, in the early hours of the morning, on to the fire escape to smoke a joint and watch the water towers, the windows, the whole city quiver and stir and grope its way towards the light. Soon, I was spending most nights in her studio apartment above a taqueria in the East Village. We talked ourselves to sleep and woke up to make love, her warm breath at my ear shuddering to rise and fall. When she caught the flu, I spent a three-day weekend bringing her soup and tea. And when a cab knocked me off my bike, she ran through the snow to my hospital bedside and refused to leave at the end of visiting hours.

‘You’ll have to drag me out of here,’ she said, eyes ferocious.

‘Oh, I get it,’ the nurse flung up her hands. ‘Y’all in love.’

When Carol’s landlord raised her rent, we decided to get a place together. I was frightened by how quickly things were moving, but excited finally to get away from graduate-student housing — an ex-project crammed with small apartments chopped into smaller ones, with door hinges stiff from countless coats of paint and hallways echoing with the lonely bleats of video games. Carol and I couldn’t afford much, but after a few weeks we found a one-bed in Carroll Gardens that her salary and my stipend could just about cover. I’d got used to living in Manhattan, and the two-train subway ride seemed to take an age. But the apartment was clean, with high ceilings and two real rooms. And the neighbourhood was safe and grown-up feeling: neat streets of four- and five-floor walk-ups with children’s bikes chained to railings. We unboxed our clothes and positioned our furniture, hung our pictures on the walls and set up the cable. On weekends, we scoured flea markets and came back with a suite of French lamps, a cut-price Moroccan rug with cigarette burns at the edges.

Before long, though, it became apparent that we had gotten in over our heads. We could no longer conceal the habits and tempers we’d managed until then to keep hidden from one another, and it turned out that we’d been over-optimistic about our finances. When a fellowship I’d been banking on failed to materialize, Carol had to call her sister for a loan. The sister was five years older, and married in New Jersey. She stared at me hard over a plate of ribs in a barbecue place near Penn Station, dabbled her fingers in a bowl of lemon water and asked Carol when she was planning to call their father. He, I’d gathered, was a dry drunk who had raised them both alone upstate and never quite forgiven either of them for leaving. Carol nodded her head, sipped a glass of water and made a promise I knew she had no intention of keeping. Right then, I wanted to take her by the hand and run with her out of the restaurant and keep running.

Over the next few months, Carol’s job had her working sixty-hour weeks, while the qualifying exams for which I was preparing kept me in the library even longer. In the mornings, we kissed each other quickly with crumbs of sleep on our faces, and at night we sprawled on the couch too burned out to do much of anything else. She seldom laughed. We made plans to spend Saturday afternoons in the park together, then got into roaring fights on Friday evenings and spent whole weekends avoiding one another. On those days, I brooded over how, in such a short space of time, I had come so completely to depend on Carol, and wondered what I would do if she ever decided to cut me out of her life.

At better moments, I fantasized aloud about taking a holiday, and Carol began to ask questions about the place where I’d grown up. I told her that we couldn’t afford transatlantic flights, but in truth my reluctance came from someplace deeper. In three years, I’d been back to Dublin only for two Christmases, and each time I’d found the city a little more unfamiliar, as though upon landing I’d been jolted from a long and restless sleep. My friends had found new partners and routines or moved away altogether, and my mother was becoming ever more the wife of a man who was not my father. I could tell, though, that the idea of the trip had become important to Carol, and I wanted to try and show her that she was important to me.

After my exams, I coaxed a travel grant from the department, promising to spend a couple of days reading manuscripts in the National Library, and Carol put in a request at work for some vacation time. We packed and took the train to JFK and flew for the first time together, Carol jittery with nerves despite an Ambien. We landed at dawn, blearily caught a cab, sailed along the motorway. On the front step of what I still thought of as Eamonn’s house, Carol gripped my hand as a shadow moved behind frosted glass.

My mother answered the door and stood for a moment to look at us. She had cut her hair into a prim old-lady style, had given up squinting and pretending and had bought glasses. She told me I looked thin, told Carol she looked exotic. In the living room, we sat to watch the morning news with Eamonn, who peered at the TV along the full length of his nose as though he were above these events but monitoring them nevertheless. When my mother entered with a clattering tray of tea, he leaped to his feet to take it from her and set it down on the coffee table. He brought her a cushion, her slippers.

‘There you are now, missus,’ he said.

My mother rolled her eyes. ‘He’s a fusser.’

Once Carol and I had unpacked, we took a trip to Marlay Park, and I tried to remain calm as I watched the hitherto separate parts of my life collide. Eamonn and I drifted ahead through the topiaried grounds and the walled garden, chatting without saying much of anything. Every now and then, I’d glance behind at my mother in faded tracksuit bottoms and mud-caked walking boots, Carol in bright leggings and white sneakers she was happy to ruin on the trails.

‘Your mother’s very nice,’ she said that night as we lay together in the guest room.

I stared at the mottled ceiling, smells of strange detergent rising from thin sheets. I reached my arm around Carol’s waist; she rolled towards me.

The following day, we went to help my mother in her allotment. Carol weeded around carrots while I raked and turned the soil and Eamonn lashed new creepers to the trellis on the dividing wall. My mother hovered between us, standing at our shoulders, pointing at our work and making vague but firm suggestions. After we had returned home and showered, Eamonn went to watch a match in the pub and Carol and I went with my mother to an Italian place by the Dodder. We ordered salads and pizzas and a bottle of wine as though we had something to celebrate. I tried to pay, but my mother insisted. We walked back to the house together, my thighs and back aching from the day’s labour. At the foot of the stairs, my mother said goodnight and hugged me far too tightly, her fingers strong on my shoulder blades as though they sought to burrow there.

I was glad to spend the next two mornings and afternoons in the quiet of the National Library. I found a few small things of interest and beefed them up in my notes to keep the department happy. The first day, Carol hung around the house but kept me updated via Gchat on how my mother insisted they bake together, then drink tea and talk for two hours about the weather in New York. The second day, she went sightseeing, and in the evening I suggested a drink at a pub in Smithfield that had been my local as an undergraduate. We took the scenic route along Dame Street, past the Castle and Christ Church, Carol half-listening as I recited history I only half-remembered. We crossed the Liffey at a point too far to the west and got lost in a labyrinth of grey- and red-brick houses. It was quiet. Our steps echoed.

‘It’d be nice,’ I said, ‘to live here some day, wouldn’t it?’

Carol looked up at me, frowning. I smiled and kissed her forehead. We came to a junction and stopped a moment to get our bearings. I looked left and right, then chose what seemed the best direction.

‘You know,’ Carol said, ‘I wouldn’t want to move.’

‘No,’ I said, scanning the street for a landmark. ‘I meant if we ever did. If we ever — you know. Some day.’

The light at last was failing. Carol crossed her arms and rubbed her hands along her elbows. Behind her was a blank wall discoloured from old rain. We cut down an alley lined with shabby flats, depots and yards with broken signs and rusted gates.

‘I feel like you’re not listening to what I’m saying,’ Carol said. ‘What I’m saying is you can’t have some day. You have to make decisions.’

We found the square and walked the cobbled way beneath gas lamps and the distillery’s chimney. Above us, two small red balloons were hurrying towards the Liffey. I watched them hold together, sliding against the dusk, and felt it within my power to reassure Carol — or to deny her.

The pub was just as I remembered it. Its taps ran with flat Australian beer and its rooms were packed and sweltering. Carol and I fell into a rash discussion about the way things were and the way things ought to be. Neither of us, it was clear, had a point or a position — just a gnawing sense of unhappiness, of dwindled expectation, which, as I spoke, I realized I’d felt for quite some time, and which, as Carol spoke, I felt begin to deepen. We left our second drinks unfinished and set off again for a taxi. I walked as fast as I could manage, Carol struggling to keep up.

The driver didn’t know the way. I sat in the middle of the back seat and leaned forward to direct him through the wreckage of a Saturday night and out through the suburbs. We made the M50, went too far and circled back, criss-crossed roads that meant nothing to me and in the end found the estate by chance. Carol stood in the street as I paid the driver, blank windows staring down at her. She looked very small and very strong, and far away from me. In our room, she took her clothes from the dresser wordlessly and packed her suitcase. When she had finished, she plopped down heavily on the edge of the bed.

‘This trip,’ she said, ‘was a mistake.’

I said nothing. I went to the bathroom, brushed my teeth with a trembling hand and stopped for a moment on the way back to listen at my mother and Eamonn’s door. I realized that I wanted them to hear us. The door was open a crack but I couldn’t see their shapes. Eamonn snored like an engine. Back in our room, I found Carol under the covers. I climbed in beside her. She knifed away and pulled the duvet with her. The draught from the window was cold on my skin. I fell asleep and woke sometime later to the sound of Carol crying, her shoulder heaving against mine.

In the morning, we kissed my mother and shook Eamonn by the hand, thanked them both for having us and promised to visit again soon. In the driveway, Carol’s face was pale, my mother’s was knowing. I loaded our cases into the boot of the taxi and looked back towards the house as we rounded the corner, fully expecting to find my mother and Eamonn standing on the step to see us on our way, my mother chewing her nails in worry, Eamonn’s heavy arm slung across her shoulder — but the door was shut.

As we rode in silence to the airport, I willed myself to make some gesture, to do something — anything — that might be the size of love. I kept willing myself as we divided for immigration, as we reconvened to wait at the gate, as we boarded and took our seats. After take-off, Carol passed out, her head against the window. Even in sleep her forehead was creased, her eyes not merely closed but clenched.

Back in Brooklyn, we circled each other for a few days until Carol had worked up her nerve.

‘I need some time to think,’ she said and called her sister to ask if she could stay with her. She stood in the hallway with a couple of bags at her feet and looked to me for a word — for punctuation, even.

And then she was gone.

I took her winter coat from the hall closet and held its lining to my nose. In the bedroom, I hugged her pillow to my chest and opened her dresser drawers. I ran my hand over the soft cotton of T-shirts and the rough nylon of gym shorts. I picked up all the little things she’d arranged on the dresser top — a framed photo of the two of us and one of herself and her sister, a perfume bottle, a porcelain saucer full of spare buttons and safety pins and lapel badges and earplugs — and put them down.

I went out drinking. At first, I haunted our old hangouts: the craft beer place where we’d spent Sundays over crosswords, the bocce place where Carol had thrown me a birthday party. But soon enough, I began to feel as though all the hipsters in those establishments were watching me — so I settled on six-packs and cigarettes in bed. I called her sometimes, knowing full well that she wouldn’t answer, just to hear the easy bounce of her voice on the answer message. After a few such calls her sister called me back. Her husband, she said, was a prosecutor. ‘And he knows where you live, motherfucker. He has a lot of friends on the force. So stop calling my sister or they’ll never find your body.’

I told Darren and Emma about the sister’s threat at the department’s welcome-back picnic. They were the first real friends I’d managed to make in New York. Their eighteen-month-old daughter, Sky, sat mewling in her stroller, her eyes blue and meaningless. We sweltered under a late August sun. Emma wore open-toed sandals and no bra.

‘What an asshole,’ Darren said, stuffing his moony face with a turkey sandwich. He was two years my senior in the programme but one behind in terms of progress towards a degree.

Emma laid her hand on my elbow. Darren watched her do it.

‘You must be heartbroken,’ she said. ‘Really, you poor, poor thing.’

‘Asshole,’ Sky said, the word a bubble on her little lips.

‘That’s a grown-up word, honey,’ Emma said and grinned at Darren as she punched his shoulder.

When I got home, I went looking for Carol’s coat but I couldn’t find it anywhere. I searched for her pillow but couldn’t find that either. It was then that I noticed the big Rothko print missing from above the bed. The dresser top was bare. I checked the bedroom closet, the kitchen and bathroom cabinets: Carol’s sweaters and cardigans, her Crock-Pot and her Cuisinart, her soft towels and her acne medication and her hair dryer — all were gone.

‘She’s moved out,’ I told Darren that Friday at the Tiger’s Tail, a sweaty, dollar-a-PBR joint on Amsterdam where our dissertation workshop met. ‘She just let herself in when she knew I’d be out and took all her stuff away.’

‘Jesus,’ he said, ‘that’s cold.’ He eyed one of the new MAs, a girl in brown-and-white wingtips, a cape and Warby Parkers. ‘So, what are you going to do for rent?’

I rubbed my hands over my cheeks, hard enough to hurt. ‘I hadn’t even thought of that.’

My father, in his will, had left me a small inheritance about which I’d never told Carol, and which I’d always thought of as my exit fund: enough money to buy a ticket home and to sustain me through a few months of looking for work. It would be enough, I imagined, to square me with the landlord until the end of the academic year — but only just.

‘Listen,’ Darren said, ‘me and you, next weekend. Let’s get out just the two of us and watch a game, okay? I’ve cleared it with ground control.’

But in the end, he couldn’t make it: Sky had a cold. I sat in the living room in my Yankees hat, an empty Sunday stretching out before me. I checked Carol’s Facebook page — she hadn’t posted since Dublin. I wondered where she was, what she was doing, if she missed me. The couch, bare of Peruvian throw or embroidered cushion, no longer felt comfortable but merely worn. The white wall beneath the empty pot rack was hatched with dark streaks grazed by saucepan lips. The corkboard above the desk — but hadn’t the cards and the concert tickets and the love notes scribbled on Post-its all been there the morning before? Hadn’t the Chinese tea set still been sitting on the window ledge, the glass candlesticks still centred on the kitchen table? I smiled — she had been back again, and might be back once more for the microwave and the TV and every other little thing of hers she missed.

I started to mix up my hours, to work from home whenever I could and to leave campus straight after class, but Carol never showed. At length I discovered that, as long as I was reading or teaching, I could go sometimes for a full hour without thinking of her. Slowly, I put a shape on the dissertation chapter I’d been drafting since the summer, got to know my students and felt some vague enthusiasm. So it came as a shock when Darren and Emma invited me over to their place in Morningside and broke the news of what they’d learned.

‘Who’s Tyler?’ I said.

‘Listen.’ Emma showed me the lines of her palms. ‘All I know is what I saw and what little she told me.’

‘And why was she telling you anything?’

‘I told you,’ Emma said, ‘we just ran into each other in the street. I had Sky with me. They were coming out of some breakfast place.’

‘Jesus,’ I said. ‘Breakfast? How long has this been going on?’

‘Really, I don’t know. It was only for a moment. I saw them before she saw me. She was embarrassed, I think. But Sky had dropped her little baby Kermit, and he — the guy —’

‘Tyler,’ I said.

‘He picked it up and I don’t think she would have introduced me or anything otherwise but —’

‘So you don’t really know anything, then,’ I said.

The baby monitor screeched. Emma leaped to her feet.

I pictured this Tyler: tall and blond, with broken-in expensive shoes and a neck full of well-groomed stubble. I saw him peering back at me everywhere from the crowds on the platforms at Times Square and started leaving earlier in the mornings to beat the rush-hour hustle. I’d arrive at the library around quarter to seven, chain-smoke on the steps until it opened and then hurry through the silent stacks towards my carrel. And there I’d stay, with the exception of class hours or trips to the vending machine, until ten or eleven at night. I sped through my second chapter at a rate of fifteen hundred words per day, lost ten pounds and grew a patchy beard and chewed all my nails to the quick. I stood before my class on a rain-lashed Monday morning, more caffeine in my veins than blood. I opened my mouth to speak but realized that I had nothing to tell them. Twenty pairs of eyes pinned me to the wall. I sat back down, assigned some busy work and dismissed them early.

My supervisor summoned me to his office on a sunless corner of the fourth floor. The lone window was set in a wall of too-often-repainted cinder block. Most of the bookshelves were overstuffed, chaotic. But the eye-level one held an orderly line of titles whose spines all bore the professor’s name.

‘Okay, look,’ he said, his suit sleeves shiny, ‘I understand that you’re going through some personal stuff right now. But let me just level with you brutally here — may I be brutal?’

‘Please,’ I said.

He tented his slender fingers. ‘No one has time for any of that, okay?’

‘Okay,’ I said.

‘Which is not to say that we’re inhuman. We are in the Humanities, after all! Just — hey — don’t bring it into work with you, okay?’

‘Okay.’

‘Okay?’ he said as I watched, behind him, the clouds begin to break apart in a sudden, clattering rainstorm.

‘Okay,’ I said.

The rain continued for a full week. It battered the windows in roaring torrents and ran like a river in the streets. I woke at night with a racking cough that left me torn and sour, and decided that the smoking really would have to stop. So, once the storm moved on, I slapped a nicotine patch to my shoulder and bought a new pair of lightweight sneakers. I was still young, I told myself; there still was time for me. At dawn, I wheezed along the promenade by the river, where Carol and I once had strolled on summer evenings. I added a hat and gloves and thermals as the days began to chill, and when the paths became clogged with soggy leaves I switched to a treadmill at the gym.

The Monday after Halloween, I cleared my third chapter. And that Thursday I presented a paper based on it to a conference at NYU. Aside from my fellow-panellists, three people forwent lunch to sit in the over-lit and under-heated conference room. Two of them looked unsure as to how they’d gotten there, but one turned out to be a minor star in my field. He took me out afterwards for coffee, and suggested that I send him something for a collection of essays he was editing. I hadn’t been able to publish anything since a handful of reviews during the first year of my MA in Dublin, so I caught a train uptown to my carrel and stayed there until I’d edited the chapter down to a submittable draft.

At one a.m., I splurged on a cab to take me home. And for the first time in a long time, I felt grateful to be in New York: to be lurching between the lights in the crush and blare of Midtown, then speeding across the bridge suspended high above the East River. The cab rolled past the no-name clothing stores of Downtown Brooklyn and hung a right at the rust-coloured arena that always reminded me of the carcass of a ship I had once seen marooned on rocks off Inisheer. We slowed on President, coasting between the lights. I paid the cabbie and climbed the stoop. Someone, two weeks before, had strung the railings with cotton cobwebs, and they remained, as did a gang of pumpkins on the lower window ledges, their features now soft with decay.

In the hallway, I smelled chicken stock wafting from an apartment whose tenants I had never seen. I climbed the stairs and turned my key. The lamp by the window was lit. A coat I recognized was strewn across the couch, a pair of shoes set neatly on the floor beside the coffee table. Once, on a beach in Clare, a wave had knocked me off my feet, dragged me across the ocean floor and pushed me back and rolled me; I had tried to breathe but there was nothing but water. That’s how I felt when Carol stepped from the kitchen.

‘I still have my key,’ she said unnecessarily, her smile an exhibit for a case already won. ‘I’ve been waiting for you.’

‘Hi,’ I said, very aware suddenly of a lightness at my fingertips. ‘You’ve come for more of your stuff?’

She stepped towards me, the fullness of her lower lip squeezed between her teeth.

‘No,’ she said. ‘I’m pregnant. I think it happened in Dublin.’

Her dark hair was shinier than I remembered it, her skin clearer. And when she bent to sit, she cupped her belly with a hand as though the gesture were the most natural thing in the world. We talked about what we’d both been doing for the past few months. I told her that I’d missed her, and she said she’d missed me too. Eventually we moved on to Tyler, who she said was just a colleague, then a friend, then a mistake. When she started to nod off, I insisted that she take the bed, and fetched the spare blanket and pillow from the hall closet to make up the couch.

In the morning, with nothing resolved, we walked to the subway together and went our separate ways. I taught my class with a new and terrified energy, and I realized suddenly how young they all were, in their baseball caps and sneakers, their heavy coats that mothers had picked out. As I packed my bag, I wished them well for the weekend. They filed out with nods or a mumbled word, but Elizabeth Jordan lingered. She was a Psych major who always sat in the corner, rarely participated in group discussion and never spoke to anyone before or after class. But she wrote uncommonly well, with empathy and poise. She smiled at me, all teeth.

‘Have a good day,’ she said. ‘I’m glad to see you’re feeling better.’

I had half-forgotten her voice, New England-y and clipped.

‘Excuse me?’ I said.

She looked towards the door. ‘No, it’s just … I was thinking that you used to look so unhappy, is all. But now you look happy. You’re happy?’

I thought about it.

‘Yes,’ I said.

She smiled again, that dour face flashing with bright dentition. And her eyes, so often careworn, seemed relieved.

The following night, Carol came over for dinner. While I prepared the food, we stood across from each other at the breakfast bar, my knife dipping into the flesh of vegetables, her hand darting to the bowl to snatch a slice of pepper or a disc of carrot.

‘It’s strange,’ I said as we ate, ‘the way things turn out. Isn’t it?’

Carol set down her cutlery and wiped her lips. ‘What do you mean?’

I shrugged. ‘We were always so careful, is all.’

‘Well, nothing’s a hundred percent.’

‘And we never even talked about —’

‘We talked about it.’

‘Yeah,’ I said, ‘for scares. But I used to think it would be the worst thing in the world, you know? We were so unprepared. Or I was. And all that stuff. But now … I’m just, I’m really glad you’re back.’

She cut and speared an asparagus stem. ‘I’m not really back yet, you know,’ she said. ‘But, do you want me to come back? And do you want to be here?’

I reached for her hand; she let me take it. And after dinner, without a word, she led me to the bedroom. We got under the covers together and lay there fully clothed. The sheets were soft and cool. Her breathing was high and quick. I woke in the night facing her. I’d always loved the way she slept, with her hands joined together beneath her head as if in prayer. I reached down to touch her stomach, expecting hardness, fullness, but she felt just as I remembered. She groaned and rolled over and I snatched my hand away, the feel of her in my fingers. On Sunday morning, after breakfast, she went to her sister’s place to collect her stuff. And every evening that week we unboxed the things she’d taken and returned them to where they belonged.

For Thanksgiving, we gussied ourselves up and brought a store-bought pumpkin pie to Darren and Emma’s place. Carol sprawled out on the living-room floor and played self-consciously with Sky’s stuffed toys and blocks. I joined Darren in the kitchen to help with the turkey and the stuffing, the cranberry sauce and the Brussels sprouts and the three different kinds of potatoes. He wore a T-shirt printed with an image of an armed Indian tribe and the legend Homeland Security, kept a bottle of gin on the draining board from which he took frequent nips. A green felt card table groaned under the weight of food. We chatted like in the old days but didn’t know what to toast. Later, when Carol passed out on the couch, and Emma pleaded with a sugar-rushing Sky to sleep, Darren and I crept downstairs to the stoop with the last of the gin. The street was quiet, the avenue dark, but every window on the block was lit.

‘This situation right here is really quite a situation,’ he said and passed the bottle. ‘You won’t believe what’s ahead of you.’

I took a swig and winced, passed the bottle back.

‘Tell me about it,’ I said.

And he did: the hysteria of night feeds and the calm of total sleep; the torture of teething and the joy of watching her grow.

‘It’s fucking agony and it’s fucking magical,’ he said. ‘Is that good for you to hear?’

I wasn’t sure.

Once classes broke, I called my mother. Eamonn answered.

‘She’s had a little spill,’ he said.

He told me about the ‘cold snap’ that had recently hit Dublin. The Council hadn’t enough grit for the roads and was importing it from the Continent. There was snow on O’Connell Street, a drift three inches thick against the walls of the GPO where Eamonn and my mother had gone together to mail their Christmas cards. On the way out, she had slipped on a patch of ice and fallen from his grasp.

‘I had her,’ he said, ‘and then I didn’t.’

She was in the Mater, with a pin in her ankle and a bedside locker stacked with get-well cards. Did I have any news I wanted him to pass along?

‘No,’ I said.

I hung up and called my mother’s mobile. She answered on my fourth attempt.

‘Hello, love,’ she said, her voice groggy.

‘I just spoke to Eamonn,’ I said. ‘Why didn’t you tell me?’

‘Ah,’ she said, ‘we didn’t want to worry you.’

She launched then into a long description of her ward: the nurses who looked too young even to be out of school; the ten-strong Polish family who visited their mother en masse and stayed all day; the old man across the aisle who, she said, ‘has good days and bad. No one ever visits, so I sit with him whenever I can.’

‘Do the doctors let you out of bed?’

‘They worry too much, those boys.’

‘Listen, Mam,’ I said, ‘I have something I need to tell you.’

I did. And as she screamed, I couldn’t help but smile.

‘I wish your father were here,’ she said through tears. ‘He would have been so happy, so proud.’

‘So do I,’ I said.

I started, again, to worry about money, about what I’d do after graduation and how I’d provide for what I’d started to think of as my family. I told my mother that we’d be staying in New York for Christmas, and although she sounded disappointed, she said she understood. I quit buying coffee in the mornings, cancelled my journal subscriptions, took extra shifts tutoring at the Writing Center and sold all my big anthologies to the student union bookstore. When Carol came home and saw the shelves empty she looked as though she might cry, looked too as though she wanted to say something. But instead she removed my glasses and kissed my eyelids.

In the New Year, I compiled dossiers of syllabus samples and student evaluations to bring to the Modern Language Association’s hiring fair. I’d managed to schedule three interviews, while Darren had arranged just one for the sake of testing the waters. We took the Amtrak to DC together and shared a room at the department’s expense. In the mornings, we dressed in thermals and parkas and trudged through the snow to see panels. In the afternoons, I changed into a sports coat and took my number in the huge and echoing interview hall at the Four Points Sheraton.

At my first two sessions, I distilled my research and plotted my timeline for finishing. The interviewers nodded with feigned or tepid interest. But at my third session, I heard myself say that my ‘wife’ was expecting our first child. Professor Dessa Greene — a young, goofy Victorianist from a medium-sized university in western Indiana — brightened and produced on her phone an image of her own son, nineteen weeks old and frog-faced, who at that moment was touring the Lincoln Memorial papoosed at his father’s chest.

‘The thing I like most about our department,’ Dessa said, ‘is that they understand the need to balance your work with your life. We’re a young faculty, and there’ll be a place for your family with us if we hire you.’

I left feeling cautious but hopeful. I called Carol but she didn’t answer. I caught the bus to Georgetown to meet Darren for burgers and beers. His own interview, he told me, had been a disaster.

‘Fucking philistines,’ he said. ‘Wouldn’t recognize subtlety of thought if it bit them in the face. This game is rigged, friend-o. We should’ve just got real jobs.’

At the next table, a group of business-school types in blazers and khakis sipped from heavy glasses of Ketel One.

‘Look at these assholes,’ Darren said. ‘They’re the guys who beat the shit out of me in school. So I beat them at school. And I stayed in school forever. And now school is almost over, and it’s back to their rules again.’

I told him about Dessa Greene.

‘The family man,’ he snorted. ‘Christ. The kid’s not even born yet and already you’re leveraging the poor little bastard. Well, good for you. That’s how the game is played. Apparently.’

Carol wouldn’t be persuaded to take things easy. She’d work, she said, for as long as she could bear it to stockpile personal days and extend her maternity leave. I rehearsed what I would say to her should the offer ever come from Indiana, tried to think of anything that might make her want to move.

We enrolled in a birthing class that met three evenings a week in a basement in Cobble Hill. The facilitator, Sarabeth — we were instructed never to use the word ‘teacher’, because ‘this kind of learning comes from within’ — padded barefoot from couple to cross-legged couple, whispering encouragements in a voice well suited to her work but even better to night-time radio. Carol breathed in sync with my count, which often was distracted and arrhythmic. ‘You’ve been a student your whole goddamn life,’ she said as I tugged her to her feet and fetched her shoes. ‘Why is it so hard for you to learn this one easy thing?’

We rented a Zipcar and drove it to a mall in Jersey, Carol gripping the wheel around her belly because I’d never gotten a licence. The mall smelled clean and sweet, like new stationery. We bought a crib and a stars-and-moons mobile to hang above it, a changing table and something called a diaper genie. The disposable or plastic items were bulky and preassembled. The wooden things were packed flat in cardboard boxes. I carried them all to the car and from the car up the stairs to the apartment. We filled what little space there was in the big hall closet and in the drawers beneath the bed.

I packed a box with my binders and took it to my carrel. I felt as though I’d fallen behind. Whenever I wasn’t working, I noticed a chill beneath my arms and in my throat. But then, one morning in late January — with three missed calls from Carol, a whole suite of furniture left to assemble, and a leafless tree branch bobbing to the beat of frozen rain outside my window — I realized that I was finished. I drank a flask of coffee and spent a night cleaning up citations. And the following morning, in a haze, I printed a manuscript copy of the dissertation and left it in my supervisor’s mailbox.

With nothing to work on, I spent long hours alone in the apartment. Letters and baby books began arriving with a Dublin postmark. I spoke more frequently with my mother, who was off her crutches and keen to plan her first visit to New York. I checked the job boards hourly for updates, bought a lock for the toilet seat and covers for the electric sockets. I hit the gym both mornings and evenings, got my mile time down to seven minutes.

For Valentine’s Day, I reserved a table at Carol’s favourite place in Gramercy. But on the night, she said she felt too tired to go out. We ordered a take-out feast from the Japanese place on Court and gorged ourselves on edamame and gyoza and teriyaki. Afterwards, we lay on the couch flicking between romantic comedies. The baby was kicking. Of course, I’d felt it before, had marvelled over it with Carol in the night. But now it was just a nuisance. She dug her shoulder under my ribs. I groaned and reached out to help her.

‘Not now,’ she said. ‘Jesus, just give me a minute? Just let me …’ She pulled a pillow out from beneath her and sighed. ‘That’s better.’

The film we had settled on took place in London. The snow was too flaky. Everyone wore turtlenecks.

‘You know,’ I said, ‘you’re always pulling away from me.’

‘What I am,’ Carol said through her teeth, ‘is seven and a half months pregnant. Have a bit of compassion, will you? I feel like a fucking boat.’

The film cut to time-lapse footage of Piccadilly Circus: the sun a fixed point on an endlessly spinning wheel; taxis scurrying through the streets like ants; our protagonist fixed at the centre of it all, unmoving. I realized that Carol was crying.

‘Shit,’ I said. ‘I’m sorry.’

She shook her head but the sobs kept coming, catching in her throat with a strangling sound and stopping her from breathing. I ran to the sink to fetch a glass of water and held it to her lips. She tried to sip but gagged and knocked the glass from my hand. It hit the floor with a thud but it didn’t break. She shook her head again, tears running down her cheeks.

‘I’m sorry,’ she said and looked at me. ‘I’m sorry. I’m so, so sorry but you need to know — you’re not the father.’

I watched her bend to pick up the glass and place it on the coffee table. I watched her take a tea towel from the counter and kneel to mop the floor.

‘What do you mean?’ I said.

‘Wait,’ she said. ‘Please wait. I really thought you were. I mean, I really hoped you might be.’

I started speaking, started shouting, but everything I said, everything I tried to persuade myself that I was feeling, was a lie. It was only much later, after Carol had passed out on the couch, tear-stained and utterly exhausted, and I stood over her, watching her, that I accepted the truth. What I had felt was not anger but shame; what I had wanted from her was not love but guilt. It rose up inside me with an undeniable clarity: I had known that I was not the baby’s father all along.

In the morning, Carol went back to her sister’s place. I phoned the department from the couch to cancel my classes, and there I lay, uncertain as to why or how I might get up again.

On the second day, she began to call me hourly. I turned off my phone.

On the third, she sent me messages on Facebook. I stopped checking my account.

She wrote long emails: I made a mistake and I wanted to tell you but you were so happy and you made me feel so happy and so safe and I was so afraid. I stopped reading them. I deleted them all. I blocked her email address.

Her sister called me.

‘Are you fucking serious?’ I said.

I wandered from room to room and began to feel a chill, a permanent empty sadness in the apartment. I unboxed the crib and spent an afternoon building it. Once I’d finished, I took a picture and listed it for free on Craigslist. I got four emails in under an hour and deleted them all. I tried to dismantle the crib again but the bolts wouldn’t budge. I tore the mattress from its stays and snapped the plywood caging, stuffed the pieces back into the box and dragged the box to the kerb.

I thought about calling my mother but I couldn’t bring myself to do it. I emailed her instead and told her what had happened. I waited for a response — and waited. Nothing came.

I called the number that had belonged to my parents when I was a kid. Someone answered, a strange voice but a familiar accent.

‘Hello,’ I said.

‘Hello?’ the voice said. ‘Hello? Who is this? Are you still there?’

I hung up.

And then I got a call from Dessa Greene wondering if I might be free to fly out for a second round of interviews. I peeled off my sweats and stepped into the shower, turned the water on cold to shock myself into feeling. I shaved and went for a haircut, trawled Expedia for flights. I’d already spent my department travel allowance for the year, so I dipped into the money I’d been putting aside for the baby.

Indiana from the air was a chequerboard of greens and browns. I headed straight from the airport to teach a class of young MAs, who asked intelligent questions and who wanted to hear my answers, and who, long after the class had ended, stayed on talking with me and with a handful of faculty members. Dessa introduced me to her husband, a lanky physicist, and their baby son. The kid had a flat nose and intelligent brown eyes whose gaze I struggled to endure, and then avoided over dinner.

I slept poorly, woke early and went out running. The campus was a small compound of poured concrete surrounded by a copse of trees, beyond which farmland stretched away for miles in all directions. But the library was big and warm: I knew that, if unchecked, I could crawl in there and use up whole years of my life. That afternoon, I attended a brunch hosted by the department chair, a young-eyed old man with hair in his ears and a drooping moustache. It was my job to impress him, though I could hardly bring myself to speak. But as I said my goodbyes and thanked him, he clapped a hand on my shoulder.

‘I read an essay of yours somewhere,’ he said. ‘Some really smart stuff, son. And Dessa thinks the world of you. And I think the world of Dessa.’ He leaned close. ‘Listen, I probably shouldn’t be telling you this until it’s gone through the appropriate channels. But I’ll want to make you an offer. And what I want, I usually get.’

‘Long may that continue,’ I said.

‘Would you be interested?’

‘I would.’

‘Good,’ he said and thrust into my hand a paper plate of macadamia-nut brownies his wife had baked. ‘Best in state.’ He winked. ‘Take some for the plane.’

I caught a cab to the airport and hustled towards security. The TSA agent squinted at my Irish passport. Yes, I was in the country legally. Yes, I was allowed to work. Sure, here were my visa documents. At length, I made it to the gate. I ordered coffee and sat drinking it and eating the brownies. My phone buzzed, at last, with a call from my mother’s number. But when I answered, it was Eamonn.

‘Listen,’ I said. ‘Just put her on the phone.’

‘I’m afraid, son,’ he said, ‘that she can’t speak to you right now. She’s too upset.’

‘She’s upset? Really, Eamonn, I’m not in the mood.’

‘I know the way it is. You’ve never wanted to know me.’

‘Christ,’ I said, ‘are you serious?’

‘But to be honest, I really don’t care. I’m not calling you to make friends. Your mother wanted someone to speak with you. And all she has is me.’ He paused, and when he resumed his voice seemed somehow to have galvanized. ‘See, you forget how long you’ve been away. You forget it’s me who’s taken care of her these years. I look after her. And you’re her son. So if you need any looking after, well …’

I laughed — I couldn’t help myself. But soon I felt close to tears. I remembered a morning long ago. The police were downstairs and I was sitting on the ground outside my parents’ bedroom calling her name, waiting to be told.

‘So, do you want to talk about the thing,’ Eamonn said, ‘or don’t you?’

‘I really don’t.’

‘Where are you?’

‘Indiana.’

‘What in blazes are you doing there?’

My departure time was nearing. The seats filled up around me. Through the window, beyond the runway, were waves of frosted cornfields.

‘To be honest, Eamonn,’ I said, ‘I really haven’t a fucking clue.’

At the first thaw, ploughs pushed the snow into heaps that sat on the corners steaming. I reread the dissertation in preparation for my defence, and as I did I was baffled by the confidence of the voice I heard speaking from its pages. I had expected to feel nervous, but on the morning I just felt embarrassed: of my own work and of myself for having to claim it; but mainly for my supervisor, who had pored over the thing for weeks, teasing it apart and testing it, and who now, unbelievably, pronounced it to be ‘excellent’. I batted away his questions easily, dismissed any lingering concerns and promised to address one or two issues in the book manuscript I would soon be under pressure to develop.

Once the formal offer arrived from Indiana, I gave notice to the landlord. I bought boxes for my stuff and set a date with a moving company.

‘So, that’s it?’ Darren said.

This was in his and Emma’s apartment the week after spring break. I’d run into Emma at the library and accepted her invitation to a bottle of wine in the evening.

‘That’s it,’ I said.

Emma dandled Sky on her knee and boasted about the traffic on her newly relaunched mommy blog. Darren stroked his cheek and wondered if he should get an MBA. No one mentioned Carol. And as the evening wore on, I foresaw for the three of us a future of dwindling contact. Darren and I would exchange a few jokey emails, invitations for visits that would never come off. Then things would settle down to a card at Christmas and one on Sky’s birthday, until inevitably I forgot even about that. On my way to the train, though I wasn’t hungry, I stopped at the cruddy noodle joint by the 103rd Street dorms where — sometimes five, six nights a week — I once had eaten dinner before I had anyone to eat with. The broth was a paste of heavy stock, the vegetables limp and pallid. But the taste, as it had been then, was warmth and comfort.

The next day, I collected essays and headed towards my carrel to grade them. On the library steps, I paused a moment by the bronze Alma Mater gazing over the quad. She sat in a throne on a marble plinth with her arms spread out in welcome, her knees pressed together to balance an open book. She held a sceptre in her hand; her head was wreathed in laurels. I watched a squirrel strike a nut against a fold of the statue’s gown, and stared up at the building’s dome that rose like a hill or an island. I felt at home, as I only ever have done in places I soon would leave. But when my phone rang, I remembered two red balloons printed on a grey sky, held aloft together, chasing a speeding river.

I wasn’t Carol’s boyfriend, and I wasn’t the baby’s father, but already as I answered I was racing for the subway, certain that if necessary I could run for miles. I didn’t need directions to the hospital.

I knew the way.