My Buried Life (18 page)

CHAPTER 28

I
t is late when I wake. The Roman blind is half up, and the brightness of morning has edged its way into the bedroom. I check my clock. Half past eight. If school isn’t closed, I’ll be late.

Outside, the garden is suffused with white. I make my way to my mother’s room and look out the front. The main road is thronged with cars, all of them stalled, going nowhere. Footprints darken the paths, inches deep. A blackbird hops across the snowy front lawn, a smudge of jet against the pillowy mass.

I dutifully check the school website. Closed, due to unforeseen weather. I ring Maude to see if she needs anything, then lay a fire and heap blankets on the couch.

Andrew, our lost boy, sat by the window in this room, and slowly allowed the pandemonium of his inner life to consume him. I suppose we shouldn’t have been surprised by his death, but we were. It shocked us to the core. My mother, of course, blamed me for it.
You knew!
she shrieked at me, when the doctor had been called and she and Maude had finally returned home from bridge.
This is your fault! You knew he was going to do this and you didn’t stop him!
Did I know? Had I known what waited for me behind the door of his room that cold day? Sometimes I imagine Andrew’s ghost is around me, a wisp, an ethereal presence upon hushed air. Insubstantial. I have questions for him, answers I still seek all these years later. What could I have done to save him? How did I fail him, our beautiful, lost boy? The density of these questions weighs on me now as the fat snowflakes swirl from the platinum sky. Jesus, yesterday there were early cherry blossoms on the wind; today, I’m piling sticks and peat to ward off a freeze.

What could I have done to stop it all? Time has accumulated like dust, and like dust it runs through my fingers whenever I try to hold it.

Then, as now, it was March, a month so cold it hardened and froze any warmth that tried to filter through the leaden clouds. A week’s worth of bad snow lay dirty in the streets, piled up and icy along the walls and in the gutters. Andrew was calm, had been for a few days. He sat by the window, his head turned to the outside world, which carried on regardless. We had come to an arrangement, Maude, my mother and I, that he would always be within our sights. We agreed that it would a discreet observation, that whichever of us was in the room with him would be engaged fully in a task other than minding Andrew in his chair by the window.

It was a long weekend, and I was compiling poems for a small poetry press that was interested in reading some of my work. My mother and Maude were playing bridge, an afternoon game, one of those competitions that go on for hours. It wasn’t until I needed to contact them that I realised I had no idea where they were even playing. Andrew had taken his meds and was quiet in his chair. A music magazine lay open on the coffee table, but he did not touch it. I read and reread my poems, then rang the editor who wanted to publish them and spent half an hour talking to him. I remember being enthralled by the possibility of a book of my work being in print. I was 16, and it gave me a foothold in a world yet to be imagined.

At some point during my conversation in the hall, Andrew went to bed. He touched his fingers to my shoulder as he passed me sitting on the bottom step. I moved to allow him by.

‘Are you okay?’ I placed my hand over the receiver, whispered to him.

He raised his hand languidly. In farewell? I won’t ever know. The phone call ended. I went up to my brother’s bedroom. He lay on his back, his breathing shallow. A water glass sat by his bedside, his bottle of pills still three-quarters full. I remember that detail, the bottle of pills, the relief I felt that they were all still there. I reached over and removed them. The hospital had warned us to keep them from him, but Andrew always managed to find them. I moved to the window and pushed the sash window down. Outside, the world was the colour of dead water, the cold freezing everything into silent submission. I left the door open and went back downstairs.

Now, of course, my question is still
why did I leave him on his own?
That was the rule, the one we had agreed upon. I know I was 16, and leaving a mentally ill person in the care of someone so young was beyond anything that could be deemed acceptable nowadays, but I wasn’t some silly teenager with no thoughts other than meeting boys and listening to music. I was a poet, for God’s sake. It had to mean something.

By late afternoon I was finished. The poems were due by the end of the week. Outside, snow had started to fall, proper snow this time, falling thickly, wrapping everything in a layer of white.

I prepared a tray and carried it up to Andrew’s room. He had turned on his side, no longer snoring. The silence in the room lay over everything, an aquarium of cold bedroom air. Burnt sage leaves littered the windowsill. That was Maude’s touch, burning dried sage to keep evil spirits away. My mother called it hocus pocus, but I suppose we would have done anything.

‘Andrew?’

Silence.

Settling the tray on the desk under the window, I stood by his bed. After all those years of living alongside Andrew, I understood his illness, knew of its intricacies and winding paths, but the unpredictability frightened me. I was alone. And I was in charge of minding my brother.

‘Andrew.’ I nudged his shoulder. He didn’t move.

His skin shone bone-white in the dull afternoon light. How pale he was. His hair, always longer than my mother liked, curled over the collar of his pyjamas.

I touched his forehead. Smooth as stone, and almost as cold.

What was wrong with him?

Gently, I cupped his face, brought it around to meet mine. His eyelids lay at half-mast. He wasn’t breathing. No pulse fluttered in his neck, or at his wrist, the places I knew to check.

‘Andrew, come on, please, come on. Wake up. Come on.’ I rubbed my finger on his cheek. It was colder than it should have been. ‘Wake up.
Wakeupwakeupwakeup.’
I shook him slightly, but there was no response. His head flopped back to the side when I took my hand away.

Something bloomed on the sheets. Something terrible and dark. Something that wet my fingers when I touched it.

The blood. Oh my God, the blood. It couldn’t be possible that one body contained that much blood. Seeping and bleeding and flowing and gushing and soaking and staining and dripping and draining. All over the bed. All over the blankets, the sheets, his body, my hands, his pyjamas, the blood, oh God, Jesus help me, the blood. His blood.
Stop the flow.

In one sweeping motion I ripped the covers off him, shrieking like something inhuman. The contents of his shelves, the tray on the desk, the books on the bedside locker, all caught in the slipstream of the whirling covers, crashed to the floor in a spinning frenzy of books, cups, paper, magazines, a blur of sound and flying liquids, and I screamed and screamed and could not stop.

And my heart broke, simply smashed into jagged splinters.

I sank among the bloodied sheets, buried myself in the clammy coldness. I lay there till evening spilled itself like ink into every corner. My brother lay on his bed, a dead king still on his throne. The appalling twilight gathered me into it, but I couldn’t move. I knew I had to do something, phone someone, but all I was able to do was stare through the dullness at the devastation in front of me.

My phone beeps. Adam.
Gr8 news! Will I bring the cappuccinos?
I smile. I text him back.
I’ll call you in a few hours.

The envelope is a cream oblong, and it drops onto the floor with a slap. My name, typed, looks up at me. The solicitor’s address is printed in the corner. A snowflake has smudged the ink of my name.

Dear Eva.
I wonder if there’s a problem with the house, with my mother’s estate.
I have been instructed by Goldberg and Co., of Lexington Avenue, New York, to inform you that there is an outstanding matter in relation to your late father’s estate.

My father died after we moved to Dublin. I didn’t know until after the fact. I don’t know his anniversary, or what he died of. He had no brothers or sisters, no relations that I knew of, and my mother refused to be drawn into conversation about him. He’s been dead for over thirty years. Why a matter about his estate now? And what estate? But most importantly, why is a firm of Manhattan lawyers writing to my mother’s solicitor? My father had probably been to Dublin a few times in his life. He most likely never even possessed a passport.

The letter reveals nothing more, except to say that my father’s executor wishes to meet with me, and would I please ring the office to make an appointment with Mr Bergin.

I leave the letter beside the phone and lie down on the couch. The snow has eased off, but the cars are still jammed in a rigid line all the way up and down the street. A red car has been abandoned outside my neighbour’s garden. A bus has broken down farther up the road. People are walking, many of them already carrying supermarket bags. Stockpiling in case of emergency. There are a few inches of snow on the ground. Hardly cause for a national crisis. New York keeps going, labouring away under feet of snow, winter after winter. Weather is not a reason to shut down there.

I am aware that I’ve settled into a rhythm of sorts here, but already I can feel the dissonance unravelling again, that sense of still being a stranger here, no matter what happens. I don’t want that for myself, don’t want to find myself in ten years’ time lurching from term to term, always longing for the holidays to give me a break. I saw it in New York, and I see it in the staffroom here. The counting of days until the next day off, the number of Mondays to get through until the next school holiday. That mindset sits well with its bedfellow, dissatisfaction. I don’t want it for myself. My apartment will be mine again in June. My hiatus from work can be extended, but I need to get back to it, do something more with myself than teach literature to schoolkids who only ever want to know what might come up on the exam paper. Even the sweetness I encounter in so many of my students here can’t disguise the complacency and downright laziness that drags so many of them down, keeps them from true success. American students, with only half the ability of some of the boys I teach here, and little of their charm, would claw over dead bodies to reach their goals. I miss that, working with decisive people, students who don’t need me to spell out every word for them, predict questions that will appear on their public exams just so they can rehearse answers. My research can’t wait forever, and my patience is wearing thin.

Slow, it’s been a slow process, but I’m becoming anxious to leave.

I venture outside only for milk and bread. The snow has eased, and according to the radio report will probably not fall again, apart from the odd flurry. It is perfect weather for sitting indoors with a bottle of whiskey, some cloves and a lemon. I force the thought from my mind. A drink would be the perfect addition to this day of freedom. In another life, I would have spent the day writing. Now, the hours are empty before me, vacated of words I could twist into cadences and rhythms. A drink would fill all the gaps. Better, then, to walk, however aimlessly.

A group of children pelt each other with snowballs. A crude snowman sits in the middle of the footpath of a small residential road off the main drag. He has stones for eyes, and as buttons, and stick arms wedged at different angles on either side of his misshapen torso. Someone has stuck a paper coffee cup on top of his head. The screams of the children echo in the quiet morning, the omnipresent racket of traffic silenced by the snow. A small child is making a snow angel on her own. I glance about for her mother, but there are no adults to be seen. One of the snowballers shouts a name.
Sophie!
I think he says. And again,
Sophie!
The child gets to her feet and immediately slips, her feet shooting up in front of her, cartoon-style, before she lands in a heap on her back. I anticipate a tantrum, or at the very least tears and injured screams, but she laughs, and her laughter is as clear as water and full of joy. Without dusting off the residue of snow that clings to her, Sophie runs, shrieking, over to where the older children are stockpiling snowballs.

I pick up a prescription for Maude, and on impulse buy her some flowers and two newspapers. I wonder what she will do if I leave.
When
I leave. I don’t allow myself to think of her on her own in that house. I don’t want to wonder about what she will do if her leg gives her trouble, or if she’s sick in the middle of the night. Plenty of old people live alone, and anyway, Maude already lives alone. She just always had my mother upstairs if she needed her. And now she has me. Except I want to leave. I walk briskly back to the house, deliberately keeping the pace up so my mind is distracted from thoughts of Maude, old and alone. It’s a chore, making sure I don’t slip on the ice underfoot, and it keeps self-reproach at bay. The sky is sallow and unmoving, and despite what the forecasters say I doubt the last of the snow has fallen. As I approach the house, a tall figure with a black beanie is leaning his back against the front door.

‘Sean!’ I fumble through my reusable shopping bag for my key.

‘Hey, I was just passing and thought I’d stop in and say goodbye.’

It is more relief than anything else that fizzes through me. He hasn’t changed his mind about me and decided he wants a relationship. He’s leaving for Australia. Sooner than I had thought. I invite him in for coffee. I even have croissants.

His shrug is fluid. ‘Sure. Why not?’

It’s not that the sex isn’t good. It is. Better than it should be, actually, but there isn’t much else to do with him. We cover ourselves with the blankets I left on the couch earlier. The fire I lit before I went out has subsided to a tangerine glow. An ember spits itself out and burns redly on the hearth. Maude’s radio filters through the floor. My book lies unopened on the armchair.

Sean twists a piece of my hair. ‘So, I’ll write.’