The ducks moved off into the middle of the pond. Aoife watched them and turned to him with a question on her face. He knew what it was.
‘Ducks gone,’ he said, in the tone he used to tell her that something — a yoghurt, a drink, a game — was finished. Her reaction to this tone was the same as always. She shook her head. She peered at him as though giving him one more chance to change his tune. She swung an arm towards the ground as though throwing something. The action unsteadied her. She jolted on her feet.
‘Ducks gone,’ he said again, and she began to whine. A low whine at first, a warning — there was still time to repent, it seemed to say, there was still time to get the ducks back, to set everything right with the world — but as he came towards her it rose to a wail, and as he bent to her she was howling, flailing, battling against him. Her cries spread out over the water of the pond, and the ducks lifted too, into clumsy, irritated flight, and he rocked her, and shushed her, and bundled her into the pushchair. Already the park was growing busier — other pushchairs, other parents, other howls about other heartbreaks, other eyes lighting up at the sight of other indifferent birds. On the bench where they had been sleeping, the man and woman were awake now, sitting at a distance from each other. Their hands, wrapped around new cans of cider, were the same deep red as their faces, their coats looking too heavy for the warm day it was turning out to be. They could have been in their thirties or their fifties; it was impossible to tell. Both of them had eyes of an intense, bright blue. But they did not look at him. They looked elsewhere. She to the ground. He to the sky.
*
Later, as Mark sat in front of the television, Sarah phoned to ask him to come to dinner with her and Deirdre in their house in Phibsborough the following evening.
‘Tomorrow?’
‘Yes, tomorrow. You don’t have anything else on, do you?’
‘Not that I know of.’
‘And how’s Aoife?’
‘She’s asleep upstairs. Finally.’
‘The little pet. You can bring her, needless to say.’
‘That’s all right. Eileen will watch her.’
‘Aw,’ Sarah said.
‘You wouldn’t say that if you were here with her all day.’ He smiled as he spoke, but he could hear that she was not smiling; he could hear her suck her breath in suddenly, and he knew an apology was tumbling his way.
‘Oh, of course, of course, of course you need your time to yourself. Don’t mind me. Sure we’ll see lots of Aoife. We’ll all have a day out or something soon.’
‘What should I bring? To dinner.’
‘Just yourself.’
‘No. Come on. I’ll bring wine, obviously. But do you want me to bring dessert?’
‘Bring wine, then,’ Sarah said. ‘But there’s really no need. We have plenty.’
*
Eileen worked in the space where the shelves and counters of a grocery store had once been. Fabrics were piled high on chairs, and rails held trousers and dresses and skirts waiting to be altered. Aoife reached for a small plastic lunchbox full of coloured thread and emptied it on the floor, sitting down heavily among the spools to grab at them and arrange them around herself in some unknowable order. Mark apologized for the mess, but Eileen shook her head.
‘She’s doing no harm,’ she said. ‘She’ll be fine here for the evening, and don’t you worry your head about her at all.’
Aoife did not react to his leaving, at least not that he could hear as he walked down the street. The evening was still warm, the brick of the terraces glowing a rich, baked red. Something flashed through his mind: red brick burnished on the street outside Kehoe’s that July evening the year before, but then a taxi was passing, and he was hailing it, and there was need to think of other things, the address for Sarah and Deirdre’s house, the speed with which the driver pulled away, the fact that he had forgotten, after all, to buy a bottle of wine.
The driver, thin and sickly and wearing a thick gold chain, asked him questions about his job and his holidays and how long he thought the good weather was likely to last. ‘Christ knows we deserve some kind of fucking summer,’ he said.
‘We do,’ Mark said, and for the rest of the drive they were silent. When they got to Phibsborough, Mark directed him through the narrow streets, and when the driver pulled up outside the house Sarah, in a blue summer dress, was at the front door, waving. She hugged him tight in greeting.
‘I’m so glad you’re here,’ she said, and from the tone of her voice he knew it was going to be a long night. She was already close to tears.
He considered, for a moment, asking her to pretend that everything was normal, but he knew this was something he could not do. He pulled himself out of her embrace as gently as he could and smiled. ‘I forgot the bloody wine,’ he said.
‘Oh, Mark,’ Sarah said, and she put her arms around him again, and kept them there until Deirdre came into the hall to coax her away.
*
Joanne had lived for nine days after the accident. She had come closest to consciousness just before dying. The doctors had given him reason to believe that she would survive, but on the Thursday, after he had watched her eyelids flicker for more than an hour and believed that her eyes were about to open and that they were about to hold the sight of each other clear in their minds again, something burst or blocked or broke apart in her brain stem, and in place of the beautiful, minimalist music of her pulse came the falsetto siren of its absence. He had been with her when the last signals to her brain had stalled and stumbled and bubbled away into nothingness. He had been holding her wrist firmly enough so that she could feel it, if she could feel anything, which they said she could. He had been talking to her, silently, and his mind had been not in the present, not in this actual, living moment, but in some daydream of the future, some fantasy of weather and brightness and sound, some symphony of his words and hers and the still unarticulated words of their daughter, some place far from silence. He had been with her, he had told himself over and over afterwards, but he had not: he had been somewhere else, somewhere impossible, and while he was in that elsewhere, she had stopped and turned and dissolved into an elsewhere that was beyond even his dreams.
He had stayed with her afterwards, after they had made clicks on the machines and slid tubes out of her skin and closed the plastic curtains around them and placed sorry palms on his shoulders. He had been in the present then, in the moment of its happening, and he could not escape, and when the nurse had come in a while later and whispered that Joanne’s family were in the hall, and that it would be good to let them say goodbye, he had been almost glad of the movement, of the encounter, of the onward rush.
When he walked into the house that evening, his father, standing at the kitchen table, had looked at him for a long moment, his mouth as heavy as though it were hung with a hook. Then he had turned away and faced the wall, crying, his whole body twitching like that of a young dog in its sleep.
*
Deirdre was the cook. The food was good, a vegetable lasagne and a side dish of lamb. They had not known whether Mark would prefer meat or no meat, Sarah said, and they had not liked to call him to ask, to put him on the spot. Mark began to respond that this was ridiculous, but found himself saying, instead, that it was thoughtful. ‘And they’re both delicious,’ he said. ‘Thank you.’