When the D train finally comes, it’s a local. He sits in a carriage alone, the seat bedecked with graffiti, and wonders if Orla, his wife, will be awake when he gets back to their flat. It’ll be nice to curl up beside her and let the morning pass. Or wake her to get her to massage the knots in his neck.
In Brighton Beach he turns the key quietly in the apartment door and tiptoes into the bedroom where Orla is sleeping, a copy of Philip Larkin’s High Windows on her chest. He picks up the book and skims through it quickly, leans over her, kisses her on the cheek.
“No day for a wedding,” he says.
* * *
Padraic had come far across an incomprehensible ocean, from a place called Leitrim, and when Dana first heard him talk she thought he must have swallowed a very tiny insect or bird that made his voice the way it was. He stood in the middle of the common room while the other counselors introduced him, Padraic Keegan is going to be our new social worker, now everybody say hello. She ran up to him, scouring her fingers through his wiry hair, fingering the side of his acne-creviced face, lifting his glasses and trying to touch his eyes until a counselor barked at her to stop. Later, alone, she wondered whether it was a cricket or a thrush or a praying mantis that Padraic had swallowed.
She was sixteen, well into the awkward throes of adolescence, and she wore dresses with patterns of furious flowers flinging themselves around her waist. Her hair was the color of burned grass. She dyed it that way so that it would flare against her black skin.
Her parents abandoned her — her father had gone out for a packet of cigarettes and never came back, her mother had taken to the little white vials. The authorities found Dana locked in a cupboard, rake-thin, blind as the mice that scuttled in nursery rhymes, while her mother sat in the corner of the room and rocked on the balls of her toes, a bouquet of crack pipes around her feet. When she saw the badges, she just shrugged. Take her, she ain’t mine no more.
Padraic pored over her files during his first week of work — she had taken swallows from bottles of Lysol, tried to hang herself with her shoelaces, defecated on a counselor’s hairbrush, shorn off another girl’s hair. At night, he would sit and read the file over and over, trying to make sense of the legion of quick signatures that cluttered the bottom of the pages. He would watch her in the common room, fingering the curtains. Once, in the back laundry room of the home, he saw her take a can of spray paint and begin to daub another girl’s clothes. He talked to her about ordinary things — how she needed to learn to fold her towel neatly, control her temper, hold a pencil properly, stop biting her nails down to the quick. Sometimes he tried to describe colors to her, but the words broke down into a meaningless frenzy. He had a heavy caseload — seven boys and three girls — but Dana took up most of his time.
“You know what your name means?” he asked her one evening when they sat down to dinner.
“Nothing but a name.”
“Well, yours is a bit different.”
“Yeah sure.”
“Okay,” he said. He moved the fork around his plate, made a loud noise with it.
“No,” she said suddenly. “Tell me.”
Late into the evening he told her about Dana, the Irish goddess who was believed to have come from North Africa in ancient times. Dana was in charge of a tribe of druids, the Tuatha de Dannan, who landed on a fair May morning and conquered the country by ousting the Firbolgs, the men with the paunchy stomachs. She had magic that could control the sea, the mist, the sun, and the very sounds and shapes of the morning. They lived in a wild country where trees ran on one another’s backs until they reached either ocean. Her tribe had made tunnels in vast mounds and built fairy forts down by the sea. They held four talismans of high power — the long sword and spear that had never been defeated, the stone of destiny, and the boiling cauldron for punishments.
“Ya mean they boiled people?”
“Eh, maybe.”
“Cool.” Dana was clanging her fork. “You ain’t shittin’ me?”
“Not a bit.”
“She a witch, like?”
“Not really. If you want, I’ll read you bits from a book,” said Padraic.
“You talk funny,” she said, chuckling.
For weeks afterward she threw questions at Padraic. How old was Dana? How did she die? Was she black? Was she blind? Did she wear colored clothes? They were questions he couldn’t answer. Sometimes she would stalk around the hallways of the home, a towel thrown around her like a shawl, bumping into the doorways and the flower stands. She listened intently to the stories that he read to her. Once, he found in her notebook a drawing of a woman with four fluid faces meshed into one another, two of them sightless, two of them mesmerized by a river of yellow hair, all of them black. Padraic was amazed that she could draw like that.
On Saturday afternoons they walked toward the park. It was an area of furtive glances, shutters heavy over shop windows, basketball courts hemmed in with chicken wire, red brick tenement houses. They sat on wooden benches between a line of birch trees, whittling away the hours. Padraic talked to her of somewhere different, someplace where her namesake had been long ago. Dana imagined thick forests, boats made from the hides of cows, valleys where drizzling rain settled heavily on long grass.
One afternoon, after signing a welter of day-release passes, he took Dana home to meet Orla. Orla, a music scholar, played the cello for an hour. Dana fell asleep on the sofa. Later they brought her down to the sea, where she recoiled in fear at the touch of the cold water. Back up on the boardwalk, they huddled together under a long blue scarf. Then they rode the giant wooden roller coaster at Coney Island, and afterward, Dana begged them again and again to bring her back to the edge of the waves, which they did, all of them shivering in the slicing wind.
“How far is Ireland?” asked Dana.
“A long swim,” he said.
“I’ll wear a big coat,” she said, bundling herself into the blue scarf.
* * *
“I hate it there now,” he says to Orla as he sits on the side of the bed. “Ya should’ve seen it this morning when they heard they couldn’t go to the wedding. Howling and lashing at the doors, they were. Charlie kicked the stereo to bits. Marcia tried to slit her friggin’ wrists. Stephanie was calling me a sperm drinker.”
“Good morning, and I love you too,” says Orla. “Ya big sperm drinker.”
Padraic laughs and tugs at his shoelaces. “Some day for a wedding, huh?”
“Ah, it’s not too bad, as far as I can see,” she says, climbing out of bed and walking over to the window to part the curtains, letting the light drone in on their tiny bedroom. “At least the sun is shining. We got married in the pissings of rain, remember?”
“Yeah, but we were normal and that was Ireland.”
“Since when was Ireland normal?”
“Listen, close the curtains, would ya, love? I want to get a few hours kip. I’m knackered.”
“Okay,” says Orla. “I’m going to practice. Don’t forget. The church at three o’clock.”
“Last place in the world I want to be.”
“You’re giving her away.”
“Exactly,” he says, placing his glasses on the bedside table and pulling the sheets around his head.
The music from Orla’s cello curls around the room and punctuates the roar of traffic outside. Padraic dozes with thoughts of Dana thundering in his head. He sees a cupboard and a little girl huddled under blankets, listening. He hears the poem that he sometimes quoted her when they walked in the park. For the world’s more full of weeping than you can understand. He sees the small hand lost in a huge gold wedding band. He remembers strolling in the park with the echoing mythology of Ireland. Come away, stolen child. Her tiny frame with the lopsided walk, the shock of hair, the eyes lost in her head, the quiet anger. The afternoon when she left the home comes back to him in a flood of colors — she had packed her green mascara, braille books with blue covers, flowery skirts, a blue Yankees hat. As she gathered up the bits and pieces, he tried to convince her that there was another way, though he couldn’t say what it was.