Niamh Casey, goddess of Dublin Bay, lights a cigarette as fat flakes fall onto her neon orange beanie, onto her birthmark, somehow both otherworldly and belonging intensely to here, to this place, rooted and sure.
“What are you thinking about?” Viola asks.
“My mother,” Niamh says. “And you.”
“Sorry she’s not well.”
Niamh takes a drag. “I’m lucky I’ve had her as long as I have.”
The water in the bay is profoundly still, as though it could hardly carry a ship anywhere. Thoughts of Susan surface with the sea-foam, demanding nothing but offering nothing in return.
“You ready to see your dad, then?”
“I don’t know. I just keep thinking. I used to feel so out of place as the only girl in the house. I spent so long trying to be like him. And it fucked me up.”
Niamh nods. “I get it. But at least he was around. I used to really hate my dad.”
“Sorry.” She’s being selfish again. Look at Niamh, look at what she has been through. “You’re right.”
“No, it’s fine now. I think… I don’t know. I just hope he found happiness. In the end I had a good life, with my mammy.” She wrinkles her nose, deflecting her own sincerity. “You get the parents you get.”
They turn back toward town, doubling back over their tracks. As they cross the street, nearly home, they pass a Tesco selling inflatable sleds and Niamh gets an idea. On a slow, southbound train, they puff air into the plastic mouthpieces, other passengers looking at them strangely as they laugh loudly, the tubes ballooning in their arms.
When they arrive at Killiney Hill, the air is bracing and joyous, and all around them, children slide around on whatever they can find—lunch trays, shovels, garbage bin lids. Viola anticipates the bump, the jostle, the vertiginous drop. She is thinking of some half-fledged memory.
She wishes her mother could see this.
They climb to a good kickoff point, and the snow is still falling as they throw themselves forward and rip through the slush toward the Irish Sea.
“I missed this!” she shouts above the shrieks of happy children and the crashing wavelets and the expanse of the bay that feeds into the ocean, the cold dragging water out of her eyes.
I missed you.
Viola
no amount of Cheez-Its is too much
see you soon
In a matter of hours she is boarding. How many planes have made this journey before; planes carrying the Queen, planes carrying the Beatles, planes carrying bombs and drugs and priceless art. People running away from their lives, people running back toward them. When the wheels hit the tarmac, she can hardly believe she is here.
Tillie is picking Lola up at the airport. Tillie has done so much. There is a table of all kinds of drinks with all kinds of mixers. There are potato chips and tzatziki and guacamole, all of them emptied into little ceramic bowls of their own instead of sitting inside bags or store-bought plastic. There are one million Cheez-Its.
“Lola will be tired,” Sebastian says to his father.
“She’ll muddle through.”
His father is wandering around, inspecting the family photographs that Sebastian has hung. Sadie’s newspaper clippings and childhood images and some of their own: twins clambering on Susan’s chest, pulling at her hair. She is pulling a face, she is laughing. She is young and old and happy and miserable and exhausted and in love.
NEW TOPIC: SUSAN BLISS MEMORIAL PARTY
Posted by cutandpaste
You are all invited to join a celebration of the life
of Susan Bliss, who died fifteen years ago
on December 18, 1997. This will be an interactive,
