Her Name Is Rose (6 page)

Iris suddenly burst out laughing, startling her friend. “Oh, thank you! Now I'm fat
and
old. I wish Luke could hear this.”

She brought the teapot and cups to the table and Tess read more: “An architectural distortion is an abnormal arrangement of tissue strands of the breast, often a radial or random pattern.” Tess looked up. “
But
 … without any associated mass as the apparent cause.” She continued reading as Iris poured the tea. “There is no visible mass.” Tess read silently for a few moments.

“And?”

Tess held up her hand. “Here. Listen. The number of women in which the architectural distortion would actually represent invasive breast cancer is very low, perhaps five to seven percent. Clearly, most architectural distortions found on mammography are due to benign causes. There!” Tess sat back. “See?”

For a few moments both women sipped their tea, feeling somewhat relieved that perhaps the “distortion” was a thing of nothing, just as the doctor had said. Iris then showed Tess the sketch she was working on.

“Not bad, pet. Not bad at all. You're a constant surprise, Iris. Really. I'm in awe of you.”

“Yeah?”

“Really. No, it's good.” Tess reached across the table and squeezed Iris's hand. “You know, I'm really proud of you. What with the uncertainty of your job at the paper and now this. You're handling it so well.”

Iris got up and faced her friend and, as if rising to the occasion that all would be just fine, she stretched the back of her neck straight up and stood firm. “Anyway, it's not like I
have
cancer. Sure it's not? I'm just going back for a second mammogram and ultrasound. To be sure. End of story … maybe a biopsy.”

“Absolutely.” Tess knit her brows.

“But I can tell you for nothing, I am a
little
nervous.” She relaxed her stretch and started to clear the table.

“Don't be. Let me be nervous for you.”

Iris nodded, feeling the genuine warmth from her friend.

“And I promised Luke I'd look after you. And a promise is a promise is a promise,” Tess said.

Suddenly, Iris was looking at Tess as if she'd just seen a ghost walk past, as if it wasn't Tess who was speaking.

“Iris? What is it?”

Iris turned away. “Nothing.” She went to the sink and put the teacups in and washed them. Until that moment Iris had kept the words “promise” and “Luke” well apart from each other. Ever since that horrible afternoon toward the end when Luke had asked her to promise, she'd closeted that word, locking it away in the farthest cupboard of her mind. There had been too much to do just to get on with living. Anytime she'd revisited the moment when he'd reached across and grasped her arm and said he didn't want Rose to be alone, she thought,
She isn't alone. I'm here!
But now, hearing the word “promise” and thinking of her appointment, she felt suddenly cold, like an iceberg had melted and pulled her down in its freezing chill. Had Luke glimpsed some dark future? Had he
known
something?

A year had come and gone. And another.
He who was living is now dead
, the poet wrote. With each passing month she'd let herself forget what he'd asked and began to believe he'd only “wished” it to himself, and she'd merely overheard it. In the weeks and months after his death she hadn't thought of anything but getting through. She'd had to take care of things, figure out things, learn how to do the dozens of things Luke had always done. And she did do everything she was expected to do. Tidied up his papers. Wrote thank-you notes. Sent memorial cards with his picture. Settled with the solicitor and executor. Squared away the insurance for Rose and got her through and off to London.

And now,
what if
?

What if you were in that most delicate and tender part of your life as a gifted young musician just lifting your bow to add to the beauty of the world and suddenly not only was your father dead but your mother, too? What music would be left to you then? Luke and Iris were “only” children. Iris's parents had died within a few years of each other when she was thirty. Luke's parents, too, were both dead. His mother had a stroke and died shortly after and his father lived out the rest of his life in a nursing home in Monkstown, overlooking the sea. Luke had visited him as often as he could, even after his father no longer recognized him.

Rose was too young, too talented, too vulnerable to be parentless.

She had no one else.

“Are you all right? Pet?”

Iris determined right then and there, in the middle of the kitchen with her head pounding, her left breast with a phantomlike pain, her blue Wellies tossed on the floor in the sitting room, the poppies with their still-turgid stems, that she was going to make the promised phone call. She believed this was the right thing and
only
thing to do, she believed this more than anything. That yes, she must find out if Hilary, her daughter's birth mother, was somewhere out there.

All this and more Iris thought about as she stood frozen by the sink with Tess watching her. It had been many years ago, in the summer of '90, but Iris remembered: It'd been raining the day they met her at the Adoption Board offices. Steady gray rain falling all over Dublin. Streets gleaming. Hilary had kept her khaki raincoat on over a print skirt and white T-shirt. Her legs were bare and her loafers wet from walking. She was twenty-one or twenty-two. Iris remembers feeling sorry for her yet strangely elated that Hilary was choosing them. (That's how it happened in those days.) Hilary had her pick of five couples. She didn't say very much. She didn't mention the birth father, or why she'd decided to place her baby up for adoption in Dublin. All they knew was she was an American student doing her master's degree in Irish literature and the baby she'd given birth to just a few weeks earlier was already in the care of a foster mother. She was tall, Iris remembered. Tall and thin with dark shoulder-length hair that had a bit of curl to it. But that's all she could remember. The encounter had been too brief to remember anything else. As their meeting was coming to a close, Luke asked, “Is there anything you'd like us to do?”

“Just one thing,” she'd said. Iris looked at her. What color were her eyes? They were light. Were they blue or gray?

“Yes?” Luke said, reaching for Iris's hand.

“Her name—”

Luke and Iris looked to each other. They'd already picked out a name.

“Would you keep it?'

“Well…” Luke started, “we actually picked—”

“Her name is Rose.”

“You all right, pet?” Tess asked again and reached across the table.

Iris came back from the memory. “Yes. Yes. I'm fine.”

*   *   *

Your life can change in a moment. In a moment you're living or you're dying.
I'm afraid it's not good news.
Immediately after Tess left, Iris rang the Adoption Board in Dublin intending to explain her situation—all of it: Luke's death; her upcoming callback to the Breast Clinic; Rosie alone in London and that she was coming to up to Dublin the following morning, but a recorded voice apologized. The office was closed. What was she thinking? It was nearly midnight.

That night she tossed and turned in the too-big bed. When she came down to make herself hot milk in the small hours she saw that one poppy, but only one, had dropped its petals on the granite counter.

 

Four

The next morning was Tuesday. Feeling the particular kind of heaviness that comes with no sleep (and a little too much wine), Iris boarded the train for Dublin at Limerick Station armed only with a gardening magazine and a bottle of sparkling water and the notion that what she was doing was the only option. Dressed in what Rose called her “uniform”—smart olive green trousers with a camel-colored cardigan twin set—she'd even put on eyeliner and brought her lipstick. Where she was going she wanted to make a good impression.

After twenty minutes the train left the outskirts of Limerick city and began its passage into the deep, green middle of the country, past the silver mines, into northern Tipperary, and into rich, horse-breeding farmland. Hedgerows of whitethorn blooming squared off green fields. She thumbed through
Gardens Illustrated
and read about treatments for a new strand of boxwood blight. She learned how applying cow dung to the base of plants would give the fungus plenty to think about. It was worth a try. She jotted that down on a scrap of paper. In another article she read about an organic gardener's experiments with a homeopathic remedy called
Helix tosta,
made from crushed baked snail shells, to keep slugs at bay. Her blog readers, when she gets any, might like that.

When she arrived into Heuston Station she'd been feeling absurdly positive. The possibility of rescuing her boxwood and protecting her plants from slugs (and the birds from poison) lifted her heart. In a small thing there can be hope. She focused on the thought of saving the box hedge and for a time raked aside all the rest of it. She'd ask Tommy Ryan next time he was passing for a load of manure. Standing in the taxi queue, she imagined how much she would need for a ten-square meters. But the moment she entered the taxi and as it took her along the bus lane beside the quays heading toward O'Connell Bridge, and cars honked, she lost her sense of hope. As the taxi approached Trinity College her heart raced. The crowds along Dawson Street seemed to be racing, too, all on urgent missions of their own. Camera-laden tourists stood before the great oak doors to the college, snapping photos. Students jostled, rushing to end-of-term exams.

Iris asked the driver to let her out at the front gates. She paid, then walked slowly under the arch and out along the cobblestone path of the courtyard toward the bell tower straight ahead. She skirted its perimeter, remembering the myth that it was bad luck to walk beneath its dome. This she knew from her days as a student there. She'd planned to walk through the campus and exit right out onto Kildare Street but in choosing this path, she'd tempted fate. She knew it. Luke was everywhere, everywhere around her. His presence, like the ringing of the Trinity bell, was loud and clear and reverberated through her whole being. She nearly lost her footing on the cobbles when the clock rang noon. On a bench not far away she sat, laid her basket at her feet, and closed her eyes, feeling the vibrations of the chimes.

Iris had met Luke on a rainy afternoon when she was waiting for the 46A bus. Her first glimpse of him was walking, a long, grounded stride and sheltering under a black umbrella. He'd been heading down Pearse Street, toward the seafront to his home, he later told her. As she waited, herself umbrellaless, protecting her books from the heavy rain, a notebook slipped from her bundle onto the edge of the pavement, just as he was passing. In that instant while Iris considered how to retrieve her book without tumbling more books, Luke had stopped and snatched it up. Rainwater gathered quickly in the gutter. Years later when they told the story to Rose, Iris said Luke had bumped her accidentally on purpose, but Luke said Iris had dropped the book just as she saw him coming. “I think your mother imagined she was dropping a handkerchief.” And Rose laughed.

“Here you are,” Luke had said, shaking the book free, and, satisfied it wasn't too wet, he'd landed it gingerly onto the pile she was holding. His smile intoxicated her.

“Thank you.”

“Waiting for a bus?”

“I am. Forty-six A. Going to Ranelagh.” Iris squared her books together. “You?”

“No,” he said without moving and holding the umbrella high enough to include her. “Trinity?”

“Ah-huh.” She nodded. “First year.”

“Me, too … but not first year.” He moved closer. It looked as if he was going to wait with her. Submerged under a sudden wave of warmth Iris was caught for words. Even though she was eighteen she was not very experienced with the currency of flirting.

“A rucksack might be a wise investment,” he continued, “if you're going to be leaving home without an umbrella, that is. This is Dublin. You know the saying. We have four seasons: rain, rain, rain, rain.”

She considered his green eyes, gauging whether he had said this in good humor or good old Irish sarcasm. It was both. It was a trait she'd come to love—his self-effaced delivery of facts.

“I know. But I was rushing this morning. Lecture at nine. I overslept.”

His square face creased as he smiled. “I had company law this morning and I
should
have slept in.” The skin around his eyes was pale, thin, and freckled.

“Was it worth it?”

“What?”

“The lecture?”

“Oh. Yes…” she blurted. “‘The Wasteland.'”

He paused. Thought a moment. “
Memory and desire
 … right?”

“Yes.
Stirring dull roots with spring rain.
”

“Impressive.” He smiled.

She blushed. “Not really. It's the next line. Ask me to recite any more and you'll see I belong at the back of the class.”

Luke was from the south side of the city near Sandymount Strand, where he lived with his elderly parents on Gilford Road, one block from the Irish Sea and half a mile from the Martello Tower of Joyce's Stephen Dedalus. His parents, Agnes and Eugene Bowen, married late in life. They maintained a dental practice together. Like two bookends they supported his life, he'd always said. He later told Iris he never once took for granted the serenity of their life, nor their devotion to him. The sea air around Sandymount was like a tonic, he said, infusing tranquility into the Bowen house. It'd had been a charmed life, he knew.

When they got to know each other better, Luke showed Iris the old leather sofa in the front room where he studied every evening. His mother would bring him a cup of tea and a ham sandwich and slip quietly away. It was so much a part of the fabric of the workings of their life—mother and son—that neither needed to acknowledge her care nor his gratitude. “It just happened like clockwork,” he'd said, “like it was somehow always meant to be that way. Like it was ordained. That's what I want one day, Iris.” On Saturdays when the dental practice was busy with fathers and teenagers, Luke would bring his mother tea and biscuits at just the hour when he knew she'd be beginning to fade.