It is eight thirty p.m. and the street in front of Mullen’s is greasy with rain. It is our sixth week coming to Mullen’s, and Sullivan told me he would meet me here instead of riding with me. He had things to do.
I feel like I am nine again and I want to smash his hand with a baseball bat, but this time, it’s not his fiddle that he’s leaving me for.
I consider getting back into the car and driving home. But then I would just be sitting at home waiting for him, and that has been the story of the last two weeks. And let me tell you, it’s a boring story.
The pub door shuts behind me and I hear someone thumb a lighter to a cigarette. “Bryant? Is that you?”
I turn and it’s the bodhrán player from the session, the one who had his big-ass band back in Chicago. He sucks in on the cigarette and eyes me. “I almost didn’t recognize you without your hair. Well, if anyone can pull off the shaved head, you can.”
“Thanks,” I say. I am thinking about Sullivan kissing the girl.
“It’s good job you’re here,” the bodhrán player says. “Session’s half-dead tonight, and we could use a pulse.”
“Sullivan might not be coming,” I say.
“Psh,” the bodhrán player says. “We need another fiddler like we need a hole in the head. You’re the one who rocks this place.” He stubs out his cigarette on the dirty wall beside the door.
I’m not one for fishing for compliments, but I say, “Come again?”
The bodhrán player flicks the cigarette off into the night. “You make him look good. Crying shame we didn’t have you in Chicago.” He holds the door open for me. I feel like my brain is exploding. I feel like I need to readjust the lens through which I look back on my entire life.
I follow the bodhrán player—I still don’t know anybody’s names, least of all his—and they make a place for me at the table in the back. Thank God someone says. We thought you weren’t coming.
We play so fast the notes trip over each other. We play so well the paint on the walls blisters. We are so amazing that the whole city falls quiet and listens to us, from Baltimore to Richmond. We play so wondrously that other musicians write other tunes about how great our tunes were that night.
I hope that wherever Sullivan is, he can somehow hear us, and he knows that music can sound like this without her. Without Them. He only needs me.
At Cú Chulainn’s worst, when he was in his warp spasms, his blood would start to boil. They used to put him into barrels of cold water to cool him down after he’d gone all battle-rage, and he would explode the barrels with heat until finally he achieved room temperature.
By the time I get to Sullivan’s house after the session, my blood is just about hot enough to cook a chicken. Fifteen years I’d known him and never stood him up.
I sit myself on his front step and I wait. I am still humming with the music from before. When he finally appears, emerging from the night, hands in his pockets, he doen’t seem surprised to see me.
I stand up to face him, not letting him past me on the stairs. “You want to tell me where you were?”
I can smell it on him, though—clover and spring and flowers, all of them out of season for a D.C. fall. He’s been with her.
“I’m sorry,” he says, but not in that way that means he actually is sorry. The way that means he’s sorry he has to say sorry.
“You told me to tell you when you were doing something stupid,” I say. “You’re doing something stupid.”
He stares at my hair. “I want something more,” he says.
“Then we’ll go find it.”
“Something more than that,” he says. “Something more than here.”
“And I’m telling you that what’s she’s offering is a cheat,” I say. “Short cut. Is that what you want? Or do you want to earn it yourself?”
Sullivan eyes are still fixed on my hair, or rather, the lack of it. “I’ll never get to that place without her. Without Them. I’m sorry.” And this time, I can tell that he really is sorry, because he’s made up his mind.
I feel my blood reach boiling point. Everything inside me has shifted to something else and I’m no longer the same person I was five minutes before.
I smash my fist into his face.
I hear the bones in my hand hit his cheek, like knuckles being popped. Sullivan stumbles back, holding his face. I am ready to hit him again, fueled by the memory of him kissing her. What I can see of his expression around his hand is shocked as he realizes I’m about to hit him again.
“Anne,” he says. “Anne, please.”
I haven’t heard my real name in almost a decade.
My fist slowly drops to my side. I’m aware that it’s throbbing and painful. I think I’ve broken my hand on his face.
“Anne,” he says again. “I’m sorry.” And this is a third kind of sorry.
My mind is still churning with the sound of my real name in his mouth. With the memory of one night eight years ago, a girl holding a baseball bat and a boy cradling his broken arm.
“I’ve broken my hand,” I tell him. “On your face.”
He lowers his fingers from his cheek; it’s turning purple already. “Then we’re even.”
“We’re not,” I say. “Don’t go with her, Sullivan.”
“Anne—”
“Don’t call me that,” I say. “I haven’t been Anne in a long time. Should I start calling you Patrick again?”
He looks away. He’s already changing, I see now. He needs a new name entirely. Maybe she’s already given him one.
We were punk gods of Irish music, and we were going to change the world. It was supposed to be the two of us against the world.
(I miss him, still.)
Many Happy Returns
A Generation Dead Story
BY DANIEL WATERS
I think I love him, Daddy, is what she’d said. This was what Cal was thinking about when he heard that the van had gone off the road.
There were five young people in the van, but that number had not been easy for the initial officers at the site to determine. Not at first. Some of the bodies had been thrown from the vehicle, probably when it caromed off the red oak, but possibly after, when it slid careening down the culvert and tipped over onto the passenger side. But even before there was an accurate count, many members of the Sanders volunteer fire department were crying. Cal Wilson was the Sanders town constable, and he was trying his best to keep from coming unglued, but it was difficult. He knew at least two of the teens who had been traveling in the van. He knew they’d been in there because he’d waved good-bye to them as the van had pulled out of his driveway.
It would be Christmas in two weeks.
They had to cut the van open. They peeled the roof back like the lid of a can of pudding. There were two teens still in the vehicle. Two more by the tree, one in the culvert. Everyone on scene was thinking alcohol was involved, but no one wanted to say it. The emergency personnel were gentle, as though they were lifting babies from cribs rather than bodies from a wreck.
The living wouldn’t look at each other, and as soon as vitals were checked, and found to be defunct, they would not look at the dead, either.
“Donny,” Mike Smolenski, the newest volunteer, was not much older than the kids who died in the wreck. “I think I saw this one move.”
Donny glanced over at “this one,” a girl he knew. Not well, but enough to feel and predict all the resonance her death would have. He knew many of these kids, by sight if not by name, and he knew that no matter what happened in the next couple days, this would be the accident that they would be talking about fifty years from now, the crash that would be etched into the town consciousness permanently, as though with a rusty nail. This would be like the day, twenty-seven years back, when the O’Briens’ horse barn caught fire and five horses burned to death. The only thing people talked about when they talked about that fire was the sound of the horses screaming.