Hanna was already there.
She went in through the doorway and stumbled in the rocks and rubbish in the small main room, before she looked into the smaller second room and saw the dark heap that was her mother lying on the ground.
Afterwards, neither of them could remember what they had said, except that Rosaleen kept apologising and Hanna kept reassuring.
‘Oh I am sorry.’
‘Are you all right?’
‘Oh I am sorry.’
‘You’re all right. You’re all right.’
And so the two of them continued, in a kind of bliss, as Hanna opened her coat and spread it on her mother, then laid herself down beside her, drawing Rosaleen’s hands in under her own clothes to get the heat of her bare skin, rubbing along her arms and back, and they stayed like that heedless of everything that happened around them.
Outside the house Ferdy McGrath gave the cry, while inside, Rosaleen whimpered at the pain in her hands, that were burning in the heat of Hanna’s skin.
‘Oh no!’ she said.
Hanna should have been more careful, she thought later, she might have done the wrong thing entirely, but the only thing that was on her mind was to stop the rattling in her mother’s body, so she pushed Rosaleen’s legs straight with her knees and lay alongside her, lifting her shoulders to complete the embrace and pressing her close, holding tight and then tighter as she tried to still the trembling.
‘You’re all right. You’re all right.’
They stayed like that for a long time. Hanna used everything she had. She used her breath, hawing it out on Rosaleen’s neck, sighing on to her closed eyes. She did not notice Ferdy run his coat up under her mother’s legs and wrap them in it, she did not notice the others, stumbling in the litter and overgrown rubbish of the house floor, or the foil blanket that was put over them both by John Fairleigh. She noticed nothing until he cradled her mother’s head from the other side, ran a mat under her shoulders, and brought a flask of tea to her lips.
‘Good woman,’ he said. ‘Good woman.’
It was the kind of phrase their mother hated.
Hanna had the comical idea that Rosaleen would be cross, she was far from cross. She looked at John Fairleigh with unblinking eyes. The tea slopped out of her mouth, and she just kept looking, as though nothing but John Farleigh existed in the wide world.
Outside, people stood around for a while, waiting for the ambulance, wondering if it would not be better to lift her down the mountain and drive her out of there. They felt the cold. Everything took a long time. A few went back to open the gate and give directions. Another man with a head torch arrived. ‘Anyone with a car down there, can you move the car?’ And it was like a fleadh or a gymkhana for a while, with a guy in a hi-vis jacket directing cars into a field. No one went home, though they knew she was found. People sat into their cars and waited, they switched the radios on and listened to Christmas carols, broadcast from deserted studios, until — a long time later, it seemed — they saw the far distant blue light turn up the road from Ballinalackin.
‘She only went for a walk,’ Constance said to Dessie, as though objecting to all the fuss.
Dan, who had stayed by the little famine house, lingered in the doorway of the inner room and did what Rosaleen loved him doing best. He talked to her.
He said, ‘You know you left the light on inside the car?’
He said, ‘I think it’s time to hang your Ecco boots up, darling, don’t you?’
He said, ‘Honestly Rosaleen, you have no idea. Half the O’Briens are down there in the kitchen with buckets of coleslaw and left-over potato salad, and Imelda McGrath came over with real coffee, because real coffee is where the McGraths are at these days. You know what Dessie had in the boot? He had Bollinger in the boot. I kid you not. Where will it end, that’s what I say.’
He said, ‘Oh. The moon.’
Because the moon was rising in the north-east over Knockauns mountain. A sliver of a thing, the pale light lifted the landscape to his eyes, and there it was, the most beautiful road in the world, bar none. Where else would you go?
‘You know?’ he said. ‘You could be anywhere.’
He watched the slow progress of the paramedics as they wrestled the gurney over the rocks and grass: the chrome glinting and the business of it clanking as it dipped and rose.
She had never gone very far, he thought. A week in Rome. A fortnight in the Algarve. Another time, Sorrento, and The road! she said. It was taking your life in your hands. But oh! the coast was very beautiful coming down into Amalfi, she would never forget it, and the little restaurant right out over the ocean, where she had a glass of limoncello, free at the end of the meal.
Waking Up
SHE SOLD THE house anyway. This was a surprise, but it was not the biggest surprise. Rosaleen woke up in Limerick hospital on St Stephen’s Day and she looked around her, at the buff coloured walls and the handmade decorations, and she smiled.
There was no problem getting a bed, she said. She wondered at that; the things you hear on the news about people on trolleys for days.
‘They’re all home for the Christmas,’ said the nurse, who was Tamil at a guess, with a name so long she had an extra inch on her plastic tag. Rosaleen looked closely at her face and eyes.
‘So pretty,’ she said.
The nurse took no offence.
‘I feel, I don’t know how to describe it, I feel much better.’
‘That’s good.’
‘I didn’t feel well at all,’ she said. ‘But now I feel much better.’
‘Yes.’
Emmet, who was sitting in his conscientious way at her bedside, saw all this and did not quite believe it.
‘You were up a mountain,’ he said.
Rosaleen turned her head and rested her gaze on him. She looked a little puzzled and then she smiled.
‘Yes.’
‘Do you remember?’
‘Oh, I remember the mountain, all right,’ as though this was not what she was talking about at all. ‘Oh yes, the mountain.’
She was looking at him very intently.
‘You rest now, Rosaleen,’ said the nurse.
‘I mean before the mountain.’
She nestled her cheek into the hospital pillow and looked at her son.
‘Oh darling,’ she said.
Emmet did not know how to reply to her, but she did not seem to want a reply.
‘Oh darling. I am sorry.’
‘No need,’ he said.
‘I put you through it.’
‘You’re all right.’
‘I put you through the wringer.’
She closed her eyes, slowly, gazing at him all the while, and when she was asleep Emmet went down to the metal clipboard at the end of the bed.
‘What’s she on?’ he said.
‘Drip,’ said the nurse. And then, after a moment’s thought, ‘She is happy.’
And indeed, Rosaleen was happy. She continued happy for some time. Not just happy at the fuss that was made of her — the visits, the journalist spurned at the door, the priest sounding his thanks for her deliverance at morning Mass, Yea though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death — she was happy with other small things, the light as it thickened on the hospital floor, the clever controls for lifting the bed, the flowers Pat Doran the garageman brought in to her, though they were — to coin a phrase, she said — petrol station flowers.
‘What lovely colours, Pat. You shouldn’t have.’
Rosaleen was delighted to be alive. This is such an obvious thing to be, Hanna wondered why everyone was not delighted, all the time. She brought the baby in to see her, and they sat, her mother and Hugh and the puddin, as Rosaleen called him, ‘Oh the puddin!’ insisting they hoist the baby on the bed for her to hold. Rosaleen loved babies, she said, and it was, for a while, easy to believe her. She wanted to eat him, she said. Hugh took pictures on his phone and they admired them as they happened: Rosaleen thin and the baby fat in front of her, the baby putting his hand into Rosaleen’s mouth and pulling her jaw down.