“Well, duh,” Maeve said. “Why did you grab it like that?”
“Maeve, leave her alone! I know it hurts, honey,” Faye said and put her lips to the burn. Pangs, sudden and sharp, wrenched Faye’s heart. She’d released them, all the unsettled ghosts. “Let’s go put ointment on this. You’ll be okay now.” She rushed Molly inside as darkness fell and the veil thickened.
Chapter Eighteen
1987
White paint peeled away from the clapboards of the cove house in cheesy strips, and a green shutter dangled from the window frame like a rock climber. Faye used her foot to shove aside a twine-tied stack of newspapers moldering on the step. It had been one of those days—ferrying Maeve’s five-year-old, Dylan, to preschool, grocery shopping for family night in the pouring rain, picking up Molly at the high school when her ride fell through. And Faye had been trying to get her father on the phone for hours, but he hadn’t picked up. She opened the unlocked door. “Papa?” The house was quiet. “Hello?” she hollered up the stairs.
Faye knew the locals snickered at the old Irishman, his silver hair akimbo, the way he wore a battered wool coat in all but the warmest weather. She checked the hook. The coat wasn’t there. He spent most of his days on the docks now, watching boats and feeding gulls chunks of bologna out of paper cones he crafted fromThe Irish Times.
Thomas and his love affair withThe Irish Times.
He stuffed the newspaper into shoes to keep their shape, laid it in the flower garden to tamp down weeds, stuck it under rugs to prevent slipping. He used it where others used rags—to clean windows and mirrors, to change hot lightbulbs. Jean had never stood for Thomas’snewspaper hoarding and had insisted he throw out any that started to accumulate. Faye was surprised he hadn’t papered the walls with it after she died.
In the living room,The Irish Timeswas stacked like cairns, sedimentary memorials to news of bombings and riots that increasingly captured headlines in America too. Thomas’s subscription came by mail more than a week late, but he was still in the practice of reading each issue cover to cover. Even Molly had noticed that he’d been strange about his papers recently, cutting open stacks and leaving them strewn everywhere. Faye piled the few in the way, then went to the kitchen. It was a mess, even for her father.
Dishes sat dirty next to a clogged sink, mail cluttered the table. It couldn’t have been more than a week since one of them had stopped by, but the place was a disaster. Even the couch cushions were askew. Had Molly been there that weekend? Surely she would have straightened up or at least mentioned if the kitchen had been this bad. Faye made a mental note to ask. A red checkered cookbook was splayed face down on the linoleum floor. On a spindly chair pushed way back from the table sat a single envelope, yellowed and stained. Faye picked it up. It was addressed to Jean, postmarked Ireland 1947. She turned it over. There were no other markings, no return address.
Faye’s pulse quickened. She had never known of any mail to come from Ireland. She lifted the crisp flap and puffed out the envelope. It was empty. She shook the pages of the cookbook before placing it back on the shelf, rifled through the papers on the table—utility bills, grocery store circulars, newsletters from BIW. Nothing stuck out that looked almost forty years old, no letters or certificates. Envelope in hand, she climbed the stairs, calling for her father. There was no answer. She checked every room. Nothing.
His coat. Of course. She could guess where Thomas was. She tucked the envelope into her purse and went to find him.
She crossed the main road, walked up the little hill. At the top, she climbed the familiar weathered stairs and pushed open the thick doorof her father’s favorite pub. The air was skunked with spilt beer and wet planked wood, rubber and gasoline and fish in a fryer.
“Hey, Faye. You just missed him,” the bartender Lonnie said.
Faye scanned the long bar. “When did he leave?”
“Maybe five, ten minutes ago. He was loud-talking his faery tales again. I was about to call you, but then he left on his own.”
Faye huffed out a frustrated breath. “Maybe stop serving him if he gets like that.”
Lonnie raised his eyebrows, thick as woolly bears, and rolled his bloodshot eyes. “A man can drink himself dumb if he wants. That’s not my business.”
She went back down the hill, scanned the rickety boat dock. She didn’t see him at first but then spotted familiar boots sticking out, toes up, from behind a column of lobster traps. Faye ran the length of the dock. Her father was there, flat on his back, arms crossed over his chest like a corpse, eyes open and calm.
“Papa, what are you doing? Are you okay? Here, let me help you up.” She bent, tried to pull him to sitting, but he let out a gasp of pain.
“Macushla!”
Faye looked around, frantic for help. “You can’t sit up?”
When he lifted his head, Faye could see there was blood on the dock. He attempted to sing. “Your sweet voice is calling me, softly again and again. Do you know this song?” he asked. “Fiadh!Macushla!My heart. It aches.”
She took off her coat, balled it up to pillow her father’s head, then ran to the pub as fast as her feet could carry her to call for help.
Faye had gone over and over that day, and she was doing it again, all these months later, while the doctor went on about end-of-life. She didn’t want to hear it anymore. If only she’d checked the docks first instead of stopping by the house and pub. William admonished herwhen she got like this. “You’re being silly, kicking yourself. It’s good that you found him when you did. Give yourself some credit.”
Thomas had suffered six broken ribs, a laceration and contusion on the back of his head, and a concussion severe enough he had been kept in a darkened room for a week. In the hospital, he developed pneumonia, which turned to double pneumonia and a thrush infection from antibiotics. Over weeks and weeks of decline through the winter—in and out of the hospital, to the rest home for rehab and back to the hospital—Faye sat at his bedside, pushed the wheelchair, fetched the nurse, refreshed bedsheets. Thomas begged to go home. He lost weight, became dehydrated. They pumped him with fluids, but the doctors said it wasn’t enough. His organs were failing.
She held her father’s hand, cold and bruised, while the doctor whispered his doctor-speak, as if Thomas was dead already.How on earth is it April? How many nights has he spent in this hospital? Staring at these walls? Papa.
“Don’t let me die here!” Thomas pleaded, squeezing Faye’s hand with what little strength he had. “Please, Fiadh. Take me home.”
Fiadh, again. Always Fiadh.
“He should stay here,” the doctor said, “where we can monitor his pain.”
