Once the formal offer arrived from Indiana, I gave notice to the landlord. I bought boxes for my stuff and set a date with a moving company.
‘So, that’s it?’ Darren said.
This was in his and Emma’s apartment the week after spring break. I’d run into Emma at the library and accepted her invitation to a bottle of wine in the evening.
‘That’s it,’ I said.
Emma dandled Sky on her knee and boasted about the traffic on her newly relaunched mommy blog. Darren stroked his cheek and wondered if he should get an MBA. No one mentioned Carol. And as the evening wore on, I foresaw for the three of us a future of dwindling contact. Darren and I would exchange a few jokey emails, invitations for visits that would never come off. Then things would settle down to a card at Christmas and one on Sky’s birthday, until inevitably I forgot even about that. On my way to the train, though I wasn’t hungry, I stopped at the cruddy noodle joint by the 103rd Street dorms where — sometimes five, six nights a week — I once had eaten dinner before I had anyone to eat with. The broth was a paste of heavy stock, the vegetables limp and pallid. But the taste, as it had been then, was warmth and comfort.
The next day, I collected essays and headed towards my carrel to grade them. On the library steps, I paused a moment by the bronze Alma Mater gazing over the quad. She sat in a throne on a marble plinth with her arms spread out in welcome, her knees pressed together to balance an open book. She held a sceptre in her hand; her head was wreathed in laurels. I watched a squirrel strike a nut against a fold of the statue’s gown, and stared up at the building’s dome that rose like a hill or an island. I felt at home, as I only ever have done in places I soon would leave. But when my phone rang, I remembered two red balloons printed on a grey sky, held aloft together, chasing a speeding river.
I wasn’t Carol’s boyfriend, and I wasn’t the baby’s father, but already as I answered I was racing for the subway, certain that if necessary I could run for miles. I didn’t need directions to the hospital.
I knew the way.
Acknowledgments
Thanks are owed to the families Fox, Kelly and Firetog; Gerald Dawe, Deirdre Madden, Mary Morrissy, Brian Lynch and Lilian Foley; all at the Tyrone Guthrie Centre at Annaghmakerrig, Brendan Barrington and Lucy Luck.
I wish gratefully to acknowledge the support of the Arts Council / An Chomhairle Ealaíon.