“This is perfect,” I whispered. “This will fix everything.” I tried to remember a time when, every day at four o’clock, my mother had not been chased into the bedroom by her own shadow. I tried to remember weeks when I had not caught her staring at the closed front door as if she was expecting Saint Peter.
My father’s voice startled me. “At the very least,” he said, “this will be a beginning.”
My mother went out after Mass that Sunday, but we barely noticed. The minute she was out the door, we were pulling the fine linen and the fancy china from the closets, setting a table that wept with celebration. By six o’clock, the roast my father had made was wading in its own gravy; the green beans were steaming; the juice pitcher was full.
At six-thirty, I was squirming in my chair. “I’m hungry, Daddy,” I said. At seven, my father let me lie down in the living room t wÑliving roto watch TV. As I left, I saw him rest his elbows on the table and bury his face in his hands. By eight, he had removed all traces of the meal, even the ribboned package we’d set on my mother’s chair.
He brought me a plate of beef, but I was not hungry. The television was on, but I’d rolled over on the couch so that my head was buried in the pillows. “We had a present and everything,” I said when my father touched my shoulder.
“She’s at her friend’s place,” he said, and I turned to look up at him. My mother, to my knowledge, had no friends. “She just called to tell me she was sorry she couldn’t make it, and she asked me to kiss the most beautiful lass in Chicago good night for her.”
I stared at my father, who had never in my life lied to me. We both knew that the telephone had not rung all day.
My father bathed me and combed through my tangled hair and pulled a nightgown over my head. He tucked me in and sat with me until he thought I had fallen asleep.
But I stayed awake. I knew the exact moment when my mother walked through the door. I heard my father’s voice asking where the hell she had been. “It’s not like I disappeared,” my mother argued, her words angrier and louder than my father’s. “I just needed to be by myself for a little while.”
I thought there might be yelling, but instead I heard the rustle of paper as my father gave my mother her present. I listened to the paper tear, and then to the sharp gasp of my mother drawing in her breath as she read the Mother’s Day card I’d dictated to my father. This is so we won’t forget, it read. Love, Patrick. Love, Paige.
I knew even before I heard her footsteps that she was coming to me. She threw open the door of my room, and in the silhouetted light of the hall I could see her trembling. “It’s okay,” I told her, although it was not what I had wanted or planned to say. She crouched down at the foot of the bed as if she were awaiting a sentence. Unsure what to do, I just watched her for a moment. Her head was bowed, as though she was praying. I stayed perfectly still until I couldn’t do it anymore, and then I did what I wanted her to do: I put my arms around my mother and held her like I couldn’t for the life of me let go.
My father came to stand at the door. He caught my eye as I looked up over my mother’s dark, bent head. He tried to smile at me, but he couldn’t quite do it. Instead he moved closer to where I held my mother. He rested his cool hand on the back of my neck, just as Jesus did in those pictures where He was healing the crippled and the blind. He kept his hold on me, as though he really thought that might make it hurt any less.
When I was little, my father wanted me to call him Da, like every little girl in Ireland. But I had grown up American, calling him Daddy and then Dad when I got older. I wondered what my child would call Nicholas, would call me. This is what I was thinking about when I called my father-ironically, from the same underground pay phone I had first used when I got to Cambridge. The bus station was cold, deserted. “Da,” I said, on purpose, “I miss you.”
My father’s voice changed, the way it always did when he realized it was me on the phone. “Paige, lass,” he said. “Twice in one week! There must be some occasion.”
I wondered why it was so hard to say. I wondered why I hadn’t told him before. “I’m having a baby,” I said.
“A baby?” My father’s grin filled the spaces between his words. “A grandchild. Well, now, that is an occasion.”
“I’m due in May,” I said. “Right around Mother’s Day.”
My father barely skipped a beat. “That’s fittin’,” he said. He laughed, deep. “I take it you’ve known for a while,” he said, “or else I did a poor job teachin’ you the birds and the bees.”
“I’ve known,” I admitted. “I just figured-I don’t know-I’d have more time.” I had a crazy impulse to tell him everything I’d carefully hidden for years; the circumstances I sensed he knew about anyway. The words were right there at the back of my throat, so deceptively casuaclass="underline" You remember that night I left your home? I swallowed hard and forced my mind into the present. “I guess I’m still getting used to the idea myself,” I said. “Nicholas and I didn’t expect this, and, well, he’s thrilled, but I… I just need a little more time.”
Miles away, my father exhaled slowly, as if he were remembering, out of the blue, everything I hadn’t had the courage to say. “Don’t we all,” he sighed.
By the time I reached the neighborhood where Nicholas and I lived, the sun had set. I moved through the streets, quiet as a cat. I peeked into the lit windows of town houses and tried to catch the warmth and the dinnertime smell that they held. Because I misjudged my size, I slipped against a hedge and fell flush against a mailbox, which was lolling open like a blackened tongue. On the top of a pile of letters was a pink envelope with no return address. It was made out to Alexander LaRue, 20 Appleton Lane, Cambridge. The handwriting was sloped and gentle, somewhat European. Without a second thought, I looked up and down the street and tucked the letter into my coat.
I had committed a federal offense. I did not know Alexander LaRue, and I did not plan to give him back his letter. My heart pounded as I walked as quickly as possible down the block; my face flushed scarlet. What was I doing?
I flew up the porch steps and slammed the door behind me, locking both locks. I shrugged off my coat and pulled off my boots. My heart choked at the back of my throat. With trembling fingers, I slit the envelope open. There was the same sloped hand, the same spiked letters. The paper was a torn corner from a grocery bag. Dear Alexander, it read, I have been dreaming of you. Trish. That was all. I read the note over and over again, checking the edges and the back to make sure that I hadn’t missed anything. Who was Alexander? And Trish? I ran up to the bedroom and stuffed the letter into a box of maxipads in the bottom of my closet. I thought about the kinds of dreams Trish might be having. Maybe she closed her eyes and saw Alexander’s hands running over her hips, her thighs. Maybes sÑhighs. Ma she remembered their sitting on the edge of a riverbank, shoes and socks off, feet blurred in the water by a frigid rushing stream. Maybe Alexander had also been dreaming of her.
“There you are.”
I jumped when Nicholas came in. I raised my hand, and he looped his tie around my wrist and knelt on the edge of the bed to kiss me. “Barefoot and pregnant,” he said, “just the way I like ’em.”