Stony River. Tricia Dower
gaze and sucks in a breath. The body on the gurney is rigid, its face and neck the color of moldy bread, the mouth frozen into an O, the eyes open in surprise. The carapace of a life reborn in the Other Life.
So this is what death looks like.
She finds the frigid chair with the back of her legs, sits herself down and says, “Aye, ’tis James.” She knows that shiny black suit with the satin lapels and frayed cuffs, the theatrical red shoes. His Mad King Sweeney outfit, he called it.
He’d make his hair and eyes wild and say, “Tell me, is this a look that would sour cream?” He wanted people to think he was gone in the head so they’d stay away from him and not find out about her. “We are the gods’ hidden children,” he’d say, his voice defiant and proud.
The suit is wet in spots, as though he’s leaking. His cheeks have sunk into his face. Terrible strange flecks lodge in his moustache and beard. She studies his chest, half expecting its rise and fall, sees her child self crawl into his lap and fall asleep to his thumping heart.
Nolan says, “I’ll be right outside.” The door closes on the silent cold.
She reaches out and lightly touches a hand, bloodless on top, deep purple where it rests on the gurney. The fingers curl under as though they died scratching the earth. His skin is as alien as the chrysalis he once carried home to demonstrate life follows death as surely as morning, night. “One day I will shuck this shell,” he said that day, “and emerge on the other side fluttering and swooping among flowers so beautiful they forbid themselves to grow here.”
She wept at that, unable to imagine life without him. Being human is incomplete, he explained, disappointed she couldn’t see that. He could leave his body at will but a craving for whiskey held him back.
Until now.
She swallows a deep breath, holds and releases it, trying to channel his energy. She drinks more air, holds and releases it. She listens with ears and heart.
She’s never matched his concentration, never lifted the physical veil. Someday, he said, she’d summon the will to let the power enter her. Then she’d be ready to accept the legacy of her grandmother and great-grandmother, who taught him to call forth summer and winter on the harp he was to have played for her this day of summer sun standing.
She rises from the chair and sniffs his length. Unwashed hair, stale sweat, urine and feces: the smell of a body abandoned and a vow forsaken. He’s left her alone to care for the child. She and the lad were no longer enough to tether him to the World.
“Couldn’t you wait?” she cries out. She hugs herself to stop her arms from shoving him off the gurney and squeezes until she feels her pulse beneath her fingertips. Empties herself of tears then leans over him until her swollen eyes are level with his deflated ones.
He isn’t in there.
She whispers what he had her say each morning: “I am the same and not the same as I was before.”
“As tonight’s moon will not return tomorrow,” he’d say, “you will emerge altered after each night’s sleep, after each book you read, after each moment you experience.”
She tugs out a strand of his ginger hair for herself and removes the red shoes for Cian. Gives thanks for the hallway’s warmth and for Nolan leaning against the wall.
“Shouldn’t he be buried in those?”
“A butterfly won’t be needing shoes.”
In a small room with a narrow table and two chairs, Nolan records her answers on a Death Information Form. James Michael Haggerty: born March 3, 1907, County Meath, Ireland. Spouse Eileen Reagan Haggerty: born October 10, 1918, Milford, Massachusetts, deceased January 7, 1943, Providence, Rhode Island. Miranda knows these places only on maps but their names, along with the dates, are bound into her memory from a page in a book James kept, inscribed with his flourishes, his script more beautiful than hers despite all her practice. Providence is where James said he met Eileen. He was a visiting professor at the university for which she organized collections of scholarly books and papers.
The Form demands the deceased’s children’s names and birthdates.
“Miranda Brighid Haggerty,” she recites, “May 12, 1940, Providence, Rhode Island.” She was named after Prospero’s daughter and a Celtic goddess. Nolan writes the goddess’ name as she pronounced it—Breege. She doesn’t correct him. He waits a moment. “And Cian?”
On a mattress with James saying, “Float, float,” as Danú possessed her womb.
“Miranda will suffice.”
James catching Cian. The pulsating cord, the bloody placenta.
A tight-lipped smile. “We’ll have to talk about that eventually. Father have insurance?”
“Sure I don’t know.”
“No matter. The city will bury him.” He hands her a large, bulky brown envelope. “Some items he had with him.” James’s brown leather billfold, cracked at the fold, his playing cards and two small paper bags. Inside the billfold, the library card and a dollar bill. She’ll wait to open the small bags when Nolan isn’t watching.
She inquires about Nicholas. Nolan says he’s in a place called Quarantine. He can’t say when Miranda will see him again.
She asks, “Why did yourself come if you thought James lived alone?”
“It’s my job to doubt what others tell me.”
• • •
Daddy was home. His briefcase met the floor with a soft plunk. A hanger scraped the rod as he hung up his jacket. Linda waited for him to call out in the voice she pictured rising from a deep, black well.
“James Haggerty died yesterday. A heart attack, apparently. I stopped in at Tony’s for a new wiper and he told me.” Daddy often did that when he got home: started talking without checking if anyone was around to listen, spilling his news at once as if he’d forget if he didn’t. His shoes rattled the furnace grate as he crossed into the dining room where Linda stood behind her chair on the waxed wood floor, ravenous as usual, counting the purple fleurs-de-lis on the wallpaper to distract her mind from her stomach.
Steam rose from the green beans Mother carried out from the kitchen. “I didn’t think he was that old,” she said. She always got gussied up before Daddy came home, putting on nylons and makeup, fixing her hair. If Daddy noticed, he never let on. That evening Mother was in a full-skirted baby blue dress with a wide white belt and her usual black heels. When Linda ate at Tereza’s the week before, Mrs. Dobra had been barefoot. Her nipples showed under her scoop-necked blouse and her legs through a thin wrap-around skirt.
“Late forties, according to Tony.” Daddy took his position behind Mother’s chair, ready to hold it out. His white shirt was damp under the arms, his round face flushed from heat.
“Must’ve been the drink, then,” Mother said.
“Did he die in his house?” Linda asked.
“Hello, kiddo!” Daddy said. “I forgot to give you a hug.”
Linda stepped into the brick warmth of his open arms. He smelled of starch and underarms. “Did he die in that big house?” she said into his chest.
“No, on the Pennsy from New York. He’d gone into the city for some reason. Had bags of strange stuff in his pockets, so they say.”
Linda had ridden the fifteen miles into New York City on the train once with Mother and Daddy. She pictured the man she knew only as Crazy Haggerty on a slippery brown seat, his shoulders swaying with the train’s motion. “What kind of strange stuff?”
“I think that’s everything,” Mother said, surveying the table, leaving Linda’s words to hover in the air like dragonflies. Daddy pulled out Mother’s chair. She sat and smoothed the tablecloth, brushing away invisible crumbs. Daddy took his place opposite