Her Name Is Rose (5 page)

“I do.”

But did he? Did he really? It pained her to think about what he was asking. This man she'd loved for nearly three decades was dying but he was talking about life. Not his life. He was talking about life
after
him.

“I'm going now,” she said. He loosened his grip. “Rose has her French practice exam tomorrow.” Then, to make him laugh (because they all knew she was hopeless at languages), she added, “I promised I'd quiz her on grammar.” But he didn't laugh.

“I just wanted to make you smile.”

There were tears in his eyes; there were always tears in his eyes now, just on the edge of spilling.

“Iris. Please … she'll have no one. Do it for me.”

Iris held her breath.

Then he spoke the words she didn't want to hear. “Try to find her … find Hilary.”

He didn't know what he was saying. Find Hilary? It was an impossibility. They'd had one meeting with her. The three of them and a social worker. Years ago. It was crazy. Iris rose from the bed and went to the window. Pulling the curtain aside, she saw the poppies needed staking.

Iris tidied the bed tray, smoothed the blanket, poured water into a plastic cup, and straightened the pile of magazines—
The Economist, Wine Spectator
—and the novel Luke was still hoping to read,
The Third Policeman.
She couldn't think straight but she pretended calmness. He knew. He knew her inside out. When she came to kiss his forehead, he caught her arm. His voice was hoarse.

“Iris, we have to keep showing up for each other, for Rose.” He closed his eyes and fell back.

She kissed him on his forehead and let her cheek linger on the side of his face. The softness of his skin at that moment was extraordinary. As though he was already becoming transparent, already leaving the world.

She whispered, “I'm sorry. I'm so sorry this is happening.” She clenched her teeth. She didn't want to cry. They'd been all through this. The unfairness of it. The sadness. The end.

“Say you'll promise.” He held his grip on her arm.

“I'll make a phone call this week,” she'd said. Then she held his face between her hands. “I promise.”

*   *   *

Luke died a few days later on a sunny day at the end of May, two weeks before Rose's Leaving Cert exams, a month before her seventeenth birthday.

Iris had rallied as best she could. She'd coached their daughter through the exams because there was no other way. She had to take them, but she only had to pass. And somehow they'd got on. Somehow they did. Iris and Rose, with a lot of help from Tess. Then, four months later, Rose entered London's Royal Academy of Music.

The surviving pieces, after the center had been blown out their lives, fell into place, as if ordained from on high, as if in compensation. The life insurance benefits were held in trust for Rose, and after paying her rent and school fees she had a monthly stipend for living expenses.

*   *   *

Iris stayed in Ashwood. And in the unyokedness of being a widow she was adrift in the world, like a dandelion when its yellow florets have died and turned to seed, parachuting into the air, like a ruptured cloud burst. She was all over the place. No center to hold on to.

She'd never imagined a life without Luke. She hadn't prepared. And yet now here she was, a damp morning in the beginning of June standing in her kitchen with the radio playing requests, wearing her nightdress with its watering-cans-and-Wellingtons pattern Luke had given her one Christmas, and her long, wavy red hair that Luke never wanted her to cut, having to imagine the possibility of a cancer growing in her, too. What were the odds?
Nine out of ten callbacks. False-positive.
It was simply unimaginable, and yet.

Instinctively she moved her hand to her left breast, and then took it away.

“You're fine,” she said to no one listening. “You're perfectly fine. Don't go getting all dramatic. You're fine.”

She stood at the counter, looking at the poppies she'd singed and propped in the vase. When she'd come into the kitchen the next morning, the day after Dr. O'Reilly telephoned, she'd expected to see their turgid stems bare with petals fallen on the counter. But the flowers were perpendicular, just as she'd left them. Alive, erect, and vibrant still. The BBC gardener was right. The purple stamens nodded as she turned the vase around and a fine black dust whispered down the inside of the petals.

She opened her laptop and brought up the blog page on
The Banner County News
Web site. The country had gone from boom to bust and there were neither new houses nor new gardens, but there were still gardeners. Gardening doesn't stop when the economy tanks. She took a moment and then tapped the keys in a flurry.

Bird jam. Listen to the dawn chorus. To calls, whistles, trills, cackles, coos, chattering, and twittering.

Omens are everywhere. Birds are everywhere. Love is somewhere.

Anxious to lift a corner on the veil of the future, we are attracted to omens and birds. In the days of the Romans, a bird appearing at a person's right indicated fortune. A bird to the left … well, you guessed it … avoid it.

The blog seemed a lesser thing to Iris. Did anyone care? And who the hell out there was ever going to read it? Yet the blinking cursor was alive on the white template. It could
link
anywhere. Connect to perfect strangers, even. By such a thin thread she could connect with the world beyond Clare, she thought. She'd set up a Wordpress site and she owned the domain [email protected]. She could hyperlink between the two blogs now and felt a little pleased with herself. When she missed Rose and Luke the most, she could blog. The blog could be her dialogue … with somebody. Anybody. She looked out down the slope of the garden toward the trees. She watched the sudden flight of a blue tit heading for the cherry blossoms. Then she typed:

A bird flying to you is a benediction. Grab it before it flies away.

After uploading the poppy photos (the sketch she'd attempted was laying, half-finished, beside the telephone), and writing step-by-step instructions and posting, Iris went outside. Suddenly she wanted to hear the cuckoo. She walked eastward along the front of the house, along the border that was stippled with wild columbine, and turned right to face the valley. Nothing.

“Where are you?” she asked toward the treetops.

Listening for the first call of the cuckoo was a thing she and Luke used to do. In the brightening of spring they'd keep track, year on year, who would hear him first. (Luke, fourteen. Iris, eleven.)
The cuckoo comes in April.
She walked backward in case her left ear should catch him. Then she stopped and faced east. No sound.
He sings his song in May.
Sing, cuckoo.

She called:
Goo-ko, goo-ko
, willed him to fly up from the valley and sing across the top of the spruce forest.

Goo-ko, goo-ko …

Nothing.

All she could hear was Tommy Ryan's van from half a kilometer away as it stopped and started to deliver post into neighbors' boxes along the road. Still wearing her nightdress and one of Luke's shirts, her hair undone, Iris hid behind the hedge. Tommy was a kind man but she was in no humor to speak with him. He played cards most nights in Nolan's pub since his own wife had died suddenly of a heart attack at fifty-two. Now when he saw Iris he seemed to look at her like she was wearing some dark mantilla of sadness that he felt somehow obliged to take away. She wanted to say, “I'm fine. Thanks, Tommy. Really. Don't worry. And stop looking at me that way.”

As he stepped from his van, leaving the door open, she could hear the noon Angelus ringing on the radio. He opened the box and dropped in her post. Out of nowhere, Cicero, her black cat, appeared at her bare feet and started mewing. She mimed to him to shush, but Cicero paid no attention to mimes and mewed louder and Tommy called “Sibby, Sibby” outside the hedge. (Why all cats in the west of Ireland were called Sibby, she never understood.) He might have come to the gate to see then, but Iris plucked the cat up into her arms and held him tight.

“Sibby, Sibby?”

When Tommy's van passed away back down the road, Iris slipped through the gap in the hedge. Between the electricity bill and a copy of
Gardens Illustrated
was a letter from the Breast Clinic. She opened it and read:

A client's path through the symptomatic breast clinic is tailored to the individual and may not require anything more than a clinical review (especially in younger women). The medical history will be discussed and the client will be given the opportunity to ask questions regarding their symptoms and future management. A small number of clients require a biopsy. This is a minor procedure where tissue is removed from the breast using a needle under local anaesthetic. Most women experience little or no discomfort with this procedure. The center is equipped to perform a biopsy during the client's initial assessment, although occasionally biopsies are performed at a later date to facilitate accurate guidance with the mammogram. The tissue is then examined under the microscope. Most clients who have a biopsy do not have breast cancer.

It is very important that you confirm your appointment: Friday, 12 June, 10:30. Dr. Denise Browne.

She folded the letter into its envelope and put it in her back pocket and walked up the path, unable to deny it was real. This distortion thing. Swallows reveled in and out of the barn, ignoring her, and Cicero made little cackling noises. The tip of his tail shivered. The appointment was at the end of the week.

“What? Don't look at me like that,” she said. But he did. Expectant. She turned to face again the trees. The female cuckoo would be encamped high up, somewhere out there, biding her time, awaiting her moment. This was the time of year she'd drop her egg into the nest with the meadow pipit and, in the way of nature, the meadow pip mother would raise the baby cuckoo as her own. But where was the cuckoo's mate? Iris wanted to hear him. It was absurd, but she did. No sound came from the sky except a wind noising in the spruce. She made it across to the stone steps at the top of the garden and sat down, clutched her knees. She rocked back and forth. Tears streamed down her face.

*   *   *

Iris had decided not to disturb Tess's weekend. But on Monday when she rang, Tess hadn't answered, so Iris had left a voice mail: “Guess what? I have a distortion. Ring me.”

Now Iris sat in a iron garden chair with a bottle of red wine and a tumbler at the round table under the porch. She sat out in the falling night air with the garden perched on the edge of explosion of more poppies, lupines, and geraniums. A swelling greenness turned the new growth of the boxwood hedge neon, even in the darkness. The swagged layers of Mt. Fuji, the Japanese cherry, had reminded Luke, she remembered, of the bustle gowns in
Femmes au Jardin
by Monet, with its branches billowing in the wind. Cicero composed himself in a clef shape across the table and played with the pieces of cheese Iris fed him.

“One for you and one for me.”

Evening began to fall. She finished the wine and went inside and lay down on the couch.

*   *   *

A few hours later Tess woke her.

“Good evening, pet,” she said, raising her eyebrows and looking at the blue Wellies still on Iris's feet. “A little self-medicating?”

“Never hurt anyone,” Iris said somewhat sheepishly, sitting up and feeling at once a sharp ache at the base of her neck, under her left shoulder, and yes, there, dead center of her spine. “What are you doing here?”

“Got a missed call from you earlier. You sounded funny, so I thought I'd pop over.”

“Oh, right. Sorry. I must have fallen asleep. What time is it?”

“Ten.” Tess picked up the bottle on the floor. “Californian. Yum.” She smiled. “But mind yourself. Okay?”

“Yes, Dr. Tess, Medicine Woman.”

“Iris?”

“Okay. Yes. I hear you.” Iris kicked off her boots and rose crookedly from the couch. Her head was sore. The blue of the summer night sky was finally yielding to darkness.

“Tea, I think, before you tell me exactly what the doctor said.”

In the kitchen, Tess switched on the light and Iris put the kettle on. “Poppies are fab,” Tess said, looking at them and, without lifting her eyes: “So the doctor said they found—”

“A distortion.” Iris looked at her for a long moment. “What is … an ‘architectural distortion'?”

Tess came around the counter toward her. “I know it sounds very clinical and not very encouraging but—”

“No, it really doesn't.”

“—I looked it up.” Tess smiled, hesitantly at first, then laid her arm around Iris's shoulders in a robust kind of way. “It's just common medicalese, pet. An abnormal area of density. It shows up as shadows or white spots on the mammogram.” She'd brought her PC with her and now had it opened on the counter.

“Shadows
or
white spots?”

“Apparently. Fatty breast tissue can look similar to a lump.”

“Fatty!”

“Iris, seriously, that's it. An architectural distortion—”

“Can we stop calling it that!” Iris opened the cupboard and took out aspirin.

“Did you drink the whole bottle?”

Iris didn't replied. She
had
drunk more than she'd meant to. Her back was to Tess for a few moments. “Look, I got this.” She reached into the back pocket of her jeans and showed Tess the letter from the Breast Clinic. “It came today.”

Tess took the letter. “They don't waste any time.” She read it. “That's good, Iris.”

“Yeah?”

Tess nodded. “Really. The sooner, the better. Right? Doesn't mean bad news. Just … let's get on top of this.” She paused a moment before continuing, “So … Iris … the distortion … it says here … just requires a bit of further exploration by ultrasound. It's not unusual”—Tess lowered her voice and narrowed her wide eyes—“in older women.”