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SOON AFTER THAT, AND PERHAPS because something felt incomplete after such a near miss, Sean and Barry had wanted to go back to visit Cathal and wanted Mac to come with them. Mac had been in America the longest, fourteen years, and Sean, Barry, and Fearghal had been there almost a decade. Sean was expecting his second baby and Barry was supposed to be saving for a wedding, but they were dying to go back. “You’ll stay with Cathal?” Mac asked, and they said of course they would, where else? Coleman had returned home after Grandfather Walsh died. Eamon and Seamus worked the commonage land during the season of cutting, and Mac could imagine them grown into young men, swinging scythes back and forth in a rhythm like so many before them had done. Soon, they’d no doubt come to America too. They’d give up the clean, sibilant whisper of hay falling, and they’d exchange it for the weight of a lunch sack carried onto the 4 train. Mac would have liked to visit Honnie, who sent him a Christmas card every year. He would have liked to check on Vincent. All reports said that he was thriving, that he wanted for nothing as part of Rose’s family, but he’d have liked to see for himself. He would have liked to walk down to the water and check whether the whale’s bones were still there.

But Nuala would be there, too, looking on and listening. She’d be moving around the spaces Mac thought of as his mother’s.

In the end, Sean was laid off so he couldn’t go, and Mac confessed that he simply didn’t want to, so Barry went alone, and brought back news. The Cuan seemed smaller. The pub on the coast road had closed.

“And Cathal?” Mac asked. He couldn’t make himself ask after Nuala in any way that sounded sincere.

“The very same. Opinionated.”

THEY ALL HAD THE SAME thoughts about Cathal, the same memories, or they must, Mac reasoned. The cottage was so small, they’d all seen and heard the same things, and yet they’d discovered over the years that they didn’t remember everything the same way. Cathal had stopped drinking on the day Rian left, if what the others said was true. Mac said what he always said when this topic came up, that he’d believe it when he saw it, a comment the others usually ignored. But when Barry returned from his visit home and they got together to get all the news, Sean asked for the first time if Mac was maybe being a bit hard on the old man. Mac got his back up a little at that and reminded Sean that he’d been in England when their mother died. Sean didn’t know. Fearghal shot back that Mac had been in America when Rian left, so there were things he didn’t know either. They’d all heard Cathal still went to the pub sometimes, but only to sit on the wall outside and complain about the government. He still made poitín and sold it—money was money—but now, also tucked in his mail basket, were bottles of milk and meat wrapped in paper for the people who lived too far out, and whose children had emigrated, and would never in their lives drive a car. A person could depend on him now; he was a lifeline in a world that was changing far too fast for a rural Gaeilgeoir to keep up. He was a good citizen, a person people looked forward to seeing. But instead of giving Mac a feeling of relief, instead of giving him a sense of pride, like it seemed to give his brothers, all it did was bring to mind his mother, a baby in her arms, standing on the lane that ran by the door of their cottage, no doubt praying to glimpse her husband cycling toward home. Since leaving Montana Mac had never written home at all; there was no need since one of the others would do it. When Cathal wrote back, it was always to all of them generally.

Once, a short time before the Rian sighting in Peckham, before Barry’s visit home, they were all lying around Barry’s apartment on a Sunday, telling stories from their various weekends and waiting for Barry to fry up breakfast for them, when Thomas announced that a letter had arrived from Cathal. Since Barry had gotten the job as a super and gotten his own apartment, it had become tradition for all of them to convene at his place on Sunday mornings and have a big fry. It was late 1975 at that time; Thomas had only just arrived and they were getting to know him again as a nearly grown man. They were his brothers, but Thomas regarded the eldests—especially Sean and Mac—as near strangers because he hadn’t seen them in so long. Near strangers, and yet they had opinions about what he should do, where he should go, everything. As Barry fried eggs and bacon, Thomas held the letter and said Nuala had been unwell, had been in the hospital in Galway, but was better now, back at home.

“Thank god,” he said, and Mac looked at him. Thomas had been six years old on the day Nuala arrived. He’d been one of the babies lured by hugs.

“Did Cathal say how long she’s been back home?” Fearghal asked.

Mac felt his pulse quicken out of nowhere, his whole body alive to something he wanted to say but didn’t have the language for. He took in the scene—six Joyces in blue jeans, the sounds of New York out the window—and felt a pang almost like fear, seeing how ordinary it was, how normal it felt.

“Back at whose home?” Mac asked. “Our home, you mean. Our mother’s home.”

“Our mother’s long gone, Macdara,” Barry said, turning from the stove.

“That has nothing to do with it.”

“Nuala raised our brothers,” Sean said.

“She raised very few of our brothers. And she was cruel to Rian. You didn’t see it.”

“I saw it,” Barry said calmly. “But Rian was tough, Mac. And much tougher after you left.”

“It’s not only Rian. She—” Every muscle in Mac’s body was clenched, so he stood, walked back and forth in front of Barry’s television. Mac pulled at the collar of his shirt. “What happened to you, Noel, in that seminary? Why were you kicked out and why did Cathal pull Fearghal out too? Or don’t say it. Don’t say it. I’m only saying that whatever happened, that’s her fault, too, for making Cathal send you away in the first place.”

“For making Cathal send us?” Fearghal asked. The air in the room felt perfectly still, like no one wanted to so much as breathe until this conversation was over. “I never knew anyone on this earth who could make Cathal Joyce do anything he didn’t want to do.”

Noel, sitting on the couch next to Fearghal, looked stone-faced, shocked. Crow-haired Noel, as their mother used to say. He’d been delivered by a flock of his black-feathered people, just left at her door one day when everyone else was out and next thing he turned into a boy. Mac realized he’d gone a step too far. They’d never discussed what happened at the seminary, only that Noel, a boy who on the day his mother died loved nothing more than to steal a spoon of sugar and sprinkle it on his bread, had when he was fifteen years old done significant violence to a priest. Noel was taken away by the gardaí, spent a night in jail, and the priest was taken to the hospital. The next morning, when Cathal arrived in Limerick, he’d taken one look at Noel through the bars of the jail and demanded to be escorted to the seminary so he could take Fearghal home too. According to Fearghal, Cathal was on the warpath that day, absolutely enraged. He went into a room with the head of the school, there were raised voices, and when Cathal came out he was holding a letter stating that Noel was deemed unworthy of continuing. But there would be no criminal charges. When the three of them got home the boys silently dropped their things at the door of the cottage and then walked straight up into the hills to visit the sheep. Cathal threw the letter into the fire.

“I’ll tell you something,” Noel said that day on Barry’s couch, their breakfast burning in the pan because everyone was locked in place. Being the fifth of eleven brothers meant Noel rarely spoke up, rarely worked up the energy to talk over them. “Nuala was all right to me after that. Cathal sent us to the Tech so we could learn something about electricity and she was there waiting for the bus most evenings when we got back to the Cuan. Sometimes we weren’t even too nice to her. Right, Fearghal? Most evenings we didn’t talk to her as we walked home. She had supper to make so that must not have been easy but she let us know it was all right that we were home again.”

“Of course it was all right. It was your home.”

“You’re not listening, Mac,” Noel said.

Fearghal nodded. “It was only Rian she couldn’t get on with.”

“And Mac,” Thomas added.

Thomas once told Mac that when Fearghal and Noel came home he was so happy to have them back, but they didn’t talk to anyone except each other. Grandfather came from the island almost every day for a while. He brought smoked fish and if he passed through the village he’d bring them a sweet, like they were little boys again. One day he brought them a puppy, the runt of a litter, and told them it would make a fine sheep dog with the right training. He put Fearghal and Noel in charge. That seemed to shake them awake. They named the dog Jesse James and they worked with him every day.

“I’m only saying I don’t care to know any news about her,” Mac said. “She’s nothing to me.”

“She helped us, Mac,” Noel said, leaning forward now. “You can think of her however you like but I’m letting you know something and after this I’ll discuss it no more. Cathal wanted to write to every influential person he could think of. You know how he gets. Not just priests; I mean news people, politicians. He said it was high time the era of whispers behind hands came to an end in Ireland. He knows those two MPs through the poitín. He wanted to burn that school to the ground.”

Cathal knew before, though, Mac wanted to say. Grandfather told him, but Cathal wouldn’t listen. He knew, but he had a problem in need of solving so he convinced himself what he knew to be true simply wasn’t.

“Wouldn’t that have been the right thing?” Mac had half a mind to fly to Ireland and burn the place down that very day, even though it had been years.

“And have everyone know? And look at me funny the rest of my life? It was Nuala who stopped him, told him to think for a second. If it got printed in a paper, then that paper would live forever, in a library somewhere. My own children could look it up one day. And the children of every other boy who ever went through that school.”